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Title: Democracy and leadership
Author: Irving Babbitt
Release date: September 24, 2026 [eBook #79644]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1924
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79644
Credits: @parchmentglow
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DEMOCRACY AND LEADERSHIP ***
DEMOCRACY AND
LEADERSHIP
BY
IRVING BABBITT
_Author of “Rousseau and Romanticism,” “The Masters of
Modern French Criticism,” “The New Laokoon,” etc._
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY IRVING BABBITT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
SECOND IMPRESSION, JANUARY, 1925
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S A.
Such legislation [against private property] may have a specious
appearance of benevolence; men readily listen to it, and are
easily induced to believe that in some wonderful manner everybody
will become everybody’s friend, especially when some one is heard
denouncing the evils now existing in states, ... which are said
to arise out of the possession of private property. These evils,
however, are due to a very different cause--the wickedness of human
nature.
Aristotle: _Politics_, 1263b, 11.
Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and
appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within,
the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal
constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be
free.
Burke: _Letter to a member of the National Assembly_.
The fundamental article of my political creed is that despotism or
unlimited sovereignty or absolute power is the same in a majority
of a popular assembly, an aristocratical council, an oligarchical
junto, and a single emperor--equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody and
in every respect diabolical.
John Adams: _Letter to Thomas Jefferson_ (13 November, 1815)
Den einzelnen Verkehrtheiten des Tags sollte man immer nur grosse
weltgeschichtliche Massen entgegensetzen.
Goethe: _Sprüche_.
PREFATORY NOTE
Parts of this book were used in a series of four lectures that I gave
at Kenyon College on the Larwill Foundation in March, 1920. I called
the series “Democracy and Imperialism.” In April, 1922, I gave four
lectures at the Leland Stanford University on the West Foundation. This
series, which I entitled “The Ethical Basis of Democracy,” contained
some of the same material as the Kenyon series, altered, however,
in form and with considerable additions. Finally, I drew on certain
chapters of the volume for a course of public lectures delivered at
the Sorbonne (March-May, 1923) under the title “Les Ecrits politiques
de J.-J. Rousseau.” I desire to thank the authorities of these
institutions for various courtesies extended to me in connection with
the giving of the lectures.
I. B.
Cambridge, Massachusetts _February, 1924_
CONTENTS
Introduction 1
I. The Types of Political Thinking 27
II. Rousseau and the Idyllic Imagination 70
III. Burke and the Moral Imagination 97
IV. Democracy and Imperialism 117
V. Europe and Asia 158
VI. True and False Liberals 186
VII. Democracy and Standards 239
Appendix A: Theories of the Will 319
Appendix B: Absolute Sovereignty 331
Bibliography 337
Index 345
INTRODUCTION
According to Mr. Lloyd George, the future will be even more exclusively
taken up than is the present with the economic problem, especially
with the relations between capital and labor. In that case, one is
tempted to reply, the future will be very superficial. When studied
with any degree of thoroughness, the economic problem will be found
to run into the political problem, the political problem in turn into
the philosophical problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be
almost indissolubly bound up at last with the religious problem. This
book is only one of a series in which I have been trying to bring out
these deeper implications of the modern movement. Though devoted to
different topics, the volumes of the series are yet bound together by
their common preoccupation with the naturalistic trend, which goes
back in some of its main aspects at least as far as the Renaissance,
but which won its decisive triumphs over tradition in the eighteenth
century. Among the men of the eighteenth century who prepared the way
for the world in which we are now living I have, here as elsewhere
in my writing, given a preëminent place to Rousseau. It is hard for
any one who has investigated the facts to deny him this preëminence,
even though one should not go so far as to say with Lord Acton that
“Rousseau produced more effect with his pen than Aristotle, or Cicero,
or Saint Augustine, or Saint Thomas Aquinas, or any other man who ever
lived.”[1] The great distinction of Rousseau in the history of thought,
if my own analysis be correct, is that he gave the wrong answers to
the right questions. It is no small distinction even to have asked the
right questions.
Rousseau has at all events suggested to me the terms in which I have
treated my present topic. He is easily first among the theorists of
radical democracy. He is also the most eminent of those who have
attacked civilization. Moreover, he has brought his advocacy of
democracy and his attack on civilization into a definite relationship
with one another. Herein he seems to go deeper than those who relate
democracy, not to the question of civilization versus barbarism,
but to the question of progress versus reaction. For why should men
progress unless it can be shown that they are progressing towards
civilization; or of what avail, again, is progress if barbarism is, as
Rousseau affirms, more felicitous? If we thought clearly enough, we
should probably dismiss as somewhat old-fashioned, as a mere survivor
of the nineteenth century, the man who puts his primary emphasis on
the contrast between the progressive and the reactionary, and turn our
attention to the more essential contrast between the civilized man and
the barbarian. The man of the nineteenth century was indeed wont to
take for granted that the type of progress he sought to promote was
a progress towards civilization. Some persons began to have doubts
on this point even before the War, others had their doubts awakened
by the War itself, and still others have been made doubtful by the
peace. An age that thought it was progressing towards a “far-off divine
event,” and turned out instead to be progressing towards Armageddon,
suffered, one cannot help surmising, from some fundamental confusion
in its notions of progress. One may be aided in detecting the nature
of this confusion by the Emersonian distinction of which I have made
considerable use in my previous writing--the distinction, namely,
between a “law for man” and a “law for thing.” The special praise that
Confucius bestowed on his favorite disciple was that he was “always
progressing and never came to a standstill.” What Confucius plainly
had in mind was progress according to the human law. What the man of
the nineteenth century meant as a rule by the term was no less plainly
material progress. He seems to have assumed, so far as he gave the
subject any thought at all, that moral progress would issue almost
automatically from material progress. In view of the duality of human
experience, the whole question is, however, vastly more complex than
the ordinary progressive has ever suspected. Progress according to the
natural law must, if it is to make for civilization, be subordinated to
some adequate end; and the natural law does not in itself supply this
end. As a result of the neglect of this truth, we have the type of man
who deems himself progressive and is yet pursuing power and speed for
their own sake, the man who does not care where he is going, as some
one has put it, provided only he can go there faster and faster.
If progress and civilization do not mean more than this, one might
be justified in sharing Rousseau’s predilection for barbarism. The
reason he gives for preferring the barbaric to the civilized state is
in itself extremely weighty: the barbaric state is, he maintains, the
more fraternal. The fraternal spirit is the fine flower, not merely
of genuine philosophy, but of genuine religion. One should be ready
to make almost any sacrifice in order to attain it. My endeavor has,
however, been to show that Rousseau’s fraternity is only a sentimental
dream. The psychic impossibility involved in this dream is obvious, one
may even say, glaring. For example, Walt Whitman, one of the chief of
Rousseau’s American followers, preaches universal brotherhood among men
each one of whom is, like himself, to “permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy”;[2] in other words, Whitman
proposes to base brotherhood, a religious virtue, on expansive appetite.
I have tried here and elsewhere to show that democratic fraternity, as
a Rousseau and a Whitman conceive it, and progress, as the utilitarian
conceives it, are, however much they may clash at certain points,
nevertheless only different aspects of the same naturalistic movement.
This movement may be defined in its totality as humanitarianism. I
ventured the assertion several years ago that something is omitted in
this movement, and that the something may turn out to be the keystone
of the arch.[2] The error that results from this central omission
assumes many forms. I choose almost at random a very crude form--the
form in which it is finally reaching the man in the street. A writer in
a widely circulated magazine, “Photoplay,” devotes several editorial
paragraphs to denouncing the people who say “don’t”; they are, he
complains, mere destroyers, the enemies of every generous creative
impulse. Only in so far as one gets rid of the don’ts does one fulfil
the saying of the Teacher, “I am come that ye shall have life, and
that ye shall have it more abundantly.” Mr. Henry Ford would no doubt
dismiss such utterances as part of the great Jewish plot to destroy
Gentile civilization. It was not, however, a Jew, but Madame de Staël
who declared that everything expansive in human nature is divine. This
notion of a divine expansiveness has a long history in the Occident
anterior to Madame de Staël, a history that in some of its phases goes
at least as far back as the Neoplatonists.
In any case the assertion that one attains to more abundant life (in
the religious sense) by getting rid of the don’ts sums up clearly,
even though in an extreme form, the side of the modern movement with
which I am taking issue. This book in particular is devoted to the
most unpopular of all tasks--a defence of the veto power. Not the
least singular feature of the singular epoch in which we are living
is that the very persons who are least willing to hear about the
veto power are likewise the persons who are most certain that they
stand for the virtues that depend upon its exercise--for example,
peace and brotherhood. As against the expansionists of every kind,
I do not hesitate to affirm that what is specifically human in man
and ultimately divine is a certain quality of will, a will that is
felt in its relation to his ordinary self as a will to refrain. The
affirmation of this quality of will is nothing new: it is implied in
the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the
members. In general, the primacy accorded to will over intellect is
Oriental. The idea of humility, the idea that man needs to defer to a
higher will, came into Europe with an Oriental religion, Christianity.
This idea has been losing ground in almost exact ratio to the decline
of Christianity. Inasmuch as the recognition of the supremacy of will
seems to me imperative in any wise view of life, I side in important
respects with the Christian against those who have in the Occident,
whether in ancient or modern times, inclined to give the first place
either to the intellect or the emotions. I differ from the Christian,
however, in that my interest in the higher will and the power of veto
it exercises over man’s expansive desires is humanistic rather than
religious. I am concerned, in other words, less with the meditation
in which true religion always culminates, than in the mediation or
observance of the law of measure that should govern man in his secular
relations. Moreover, I am for coming at my humanism in a positive and
critical rather than in a merely traditional manner. To this extent I
am with the naturalists, who have from the start been rejecting outer
authority in favor of the immediate and experimental. One should have
only respect for the man of science in so far as he deals in this
critical fashion with the natural law--and no small part of human
nature itself comes under the natural law. The error begins when an
attempt is made to extend this law to cover the whole of human nature.
This is to deny not merely outer authority, but something that is a
matter of immediate experience, the opposition, namely, of which the
individual is conscious in himself, between a law of the spirit and
a law of the members. Deny or dissimulate this opposition and the
inner life tends in the same measure to disappear. Carlyle’s contrast
between the Rousseauism of the French Revolution and true Christianity
is also the contrast between humanitarianism in general, in either its
sentimental or its utilitarian form, and any doctrine that affirms
the higher will. “Alas, no, M. Roux!” Carlyle exclaims. “A Gospel
of Brotherhood not according to any of the four old Evangelists and
calling on men to repent, and amend _each his own_ wicked existence,
that they might be saved; but a Gospel rather, as we often hint,
according to a new fifth Evangelist Jean-Jacques, calling on men to
amend _each the whole world’s_ wicked existence and be saved by making
the Constitution. A thing different and distant _toto cœlo_.”
My own objection to this substitution of social reform for self-reform
is that it involves the turning away from the more immediate to
the less immediate. In general I have sought in my attack on the
utilitarian-sentimental movement to avoid metaphysical and theological
assumptions, and to rely on psychological analysis supported by an
immense and growing body of evidence. My humanism is in this sense
not only positive and critical, but, what will be found to come to the
same thing, individualistic. Under existing conditions, the significant
struggle seems to me to be not that between the unsound individualist
and the traditionalist, nor again, as is currently assumed, that
between the unsound individualist and the altruist, but that between
the sound and the unsound individualist. To be a sound individualist,
one needs, as I take it, to retain one’s hold on the truths of the
inner life, even though breaking more or less completely with the past.
It may help to a fuller understanding of my present attempt to deal
in a fashion at once critical and humanistic with the problem of the
will in its bearing on the political problem if I say a few words
at this point about certain previous stages in my argument. In the
opening chapters of “Literature and the American College” I seek to
discriminate between the humanist and the humanitarians of either the
utilitarian or the sentimental brand. These two sides of the movement
I sometimes term the Baconian and the Rousseauistic after the names of
the men who seem to me to have prefigured them most completely in their
writings and personalities. The humanitarian is not, I pointed out,
primarily concerned, like the humanist, with the individual and his
inner life, but with the welfare and progress of mankind in the lump.
His favorite word is “service.” The current tendency to regard humanism
simply as an abbreviated and more convenient form for humanitarianism
can only be the source of the most vicious confusions.
In “The Masters of Modern French Criticism” I attempt to carry a stage
farther my defence of a critical humanism. Though the basis of the
inner life is the opposition between a lower and a higher will, the
higher will cannot, after all, act at random. It must have standards.
Formerly the standards were supplied by tradition. The man who accepted
Christian tradition, for example, was in no doubt as to the kind and
degree of discipline he needed to impose on his lower nature. He thus
achieved some measure of moral unity with himself and also with other
men who accepted the same discipline. If the individualist, on the
other hand, is to have standards, he must rely on the critical spirit
in direct ratio to the completeness of his break with the traditional
unifications of life. He is confronted at the outset with the most
difficult of philosophical problems--that of the One and the Many. For
it is obvious that standards cannot exist unless there is an element
of oneness somewhere with which to measure the infinite otherwiseness
of things. The special theme of “The Masters” is the problem of the
One and the Many and the failure of Sainte-Beuve and other eminent
French individualists to deal with it adequately and so to achieve
standards in a modern fashion. The results of the critical endeavor
of the past century may be summed up most completely, perhaps, in the
word relativity. The failure of criticism to attain to any centre of
judgment set above the shifting impressions of the individual and the
flux of phenomenal nature is a defeat for civilization itself, if it be
true, as I have tried to show, that civilization must ultimately depend
on the maintenance of standards. In “The New Laokoon” I have sought to
exhibit the anarchy that has supervened in literature and the arts with
the progressive decline of standards. Superficially, this anarchy seems
above all an anarchy of the emotions. On closer scrutiny, however,
emotional anarchy itself turns out to be only a sign of something
subtler and more dangerous--anarchy of the imagination. In “Rousseau
and Romanticism,” a book that is closely connected in argument with
“The New Laokoon,” the problem of the imagination receives special
treatment. I come here to another distinctive feature of the type of
humanism I am defending. I not only have more to say of will and less
of reason than the humanist in the Græco-Roman tradition, but I also
grant a most important rôle to imagination. If one does not, like
Diderot, dismiss as “artificial” the conflict between a natural or
expansive will and a specifically human will or will to refrain, if,
on the contrary, one insists on this conflict as a primordial fact of
consciousness, one will be led, I believe, to the further conclusion
that the outcome of this “civil war in the cave” will be determined by
the attitude of the imagination; that the imagination, in other words,
holds the balance of power between the higher and the lower nature of
man. In the light of history (one need not go any farther back than
the Great War) man’s pretence to be governed by reason in any ordinary
sense of the word seems a bad jest. The critical observer is forced
to agree with Napoleon that, not reason, but “imagination governs
mankind.” It does not follow that mankind need be governed, as it has
been very largely during the past century, by the Napoleonic quality of
imagination.
The complaint has been made that the word imagination has been used
in so many senses that it has ceased to have any meaning. My own
understanding of the term may perhaps be made clearer by a brief
historical survey. The Latin word (_imaginatio_) from which our word
is derived is itself a rendering of the Greek phantasy or fancy
(φαντασία). Fancy means literally “what appears”; in other words,
either the various impressions of sense, or else a faculty that stores
up these impressions and is therefore closely related to memory.
Greek philosophy gave a rather low rating to “fancy” or appearance
in comparison with reality, which it inclined to identify with
reason or mind. To the Stoic in particular it seemed both feasible
and imperative that reason should hold sway over all the impressions
that beat upon the gateway of the senses and make a severe selection
among them. “How easy a thing it is,” says Marcus Aurelius, “to put
away and blot out every ‘fancy’ [i.e., impression] that is disturbing
or alien, and to be at once in perfect peace.” The disparagement of
fancy in this sense is already found in Plato. He hopes to attain a
truth that is “firm and not pulled around this way and that by our
‘fancy.’”[3] A chief source of Christian humility, on the other hand,
was the conviction that man is unable by his own resources to achieve
any such truth, the conviction, above all, that mere reason cannot
prevail over the deceits of the senses. Pascal, for example, gives
to the word imagination about the same meaning that the Stoic gave
either to it or its Greek equivalent, and like the Stoic he disparages
imagination; only to this disparagement he adds the disparagement of
reason. What he opposes to an imagination that is only a “mistress of
error” and to a reason that is impotent to resist this error is the
“heart,” by which he means the illumination of the higher will in the
form of grace. This inner revelation has itself the support of outer
revelation. Here, he holds, one may find at last a firm footing of
truth and reality. He does not admit that imagination has any part
either in outer revelation or in the life of the “heart.” He has this
much at least in common with Plato that he believes it possible to
draw a firm and fast line between imagination (or mere appearance)
and reality. Strict psychology, however, scarcely warrants any such
sharp discrimination between the true and the illusory. It forces one
rather to conclude with Joubert that “illusion is an integral part of
reality.” This conclusion, however damaging it may be to mere dogma,
does not force one to forego standards. But in that case one needs to
attend to another possible meaning of the word imagination, the second
main meaning, one is tempted to say, that the word has actually had
in Occidental thought. The word in this other meaning stands less for
what one perceives, either inwardly or outwardly, than for what one
conceives. Conceit, it should be remembered, was in older English usage
not only a complimentary term, but one of the synonyms of imagination.
The process by which the term has come to have its present unfavorable
meaning of vain imagining has its adequate historical explanation
into which I need not here enter. Now to “conceive” is, in an almost
etymological sense, to gather things together, to see likenesses and
analogies and in so far to unify what were else mere heterogeneity. The
imagination, says Coleridge somewhat pedantically, is the “esemplastic”
power--the power, that is, that fashions things into one. The passages
in which Coleridge expounds this view of the imagination afford,
perhaps, the best example in English of what I have called the second
main meaning of the word. For an instance of the other main meaning we
may turn to Addison’s papers on the imagination in the “Spectator.”
Addison not only tends to reduce imagination to outer perception, but,
encouraged by the Latin rendering of the Greek “fancy,” to narrow outer
perception itself to visual perception.
If we mean by imagination not merely what we perceive, but what we
conceive, it follows inevitably that the problem of the imagination
is closely bound up with that of the One and the Many and therefore
with the problem of standards; for it is impossible, let me repeat,
to achieve standards, at least along critical lines, unless one can
discover in life somewhere an abiding unity with which to measure its
mere variety and change. Because “illusion is an integral part of
reality,” we are not justified in assuming that every unity that the
imagination may conceive must therefore be dismissed as illusory. A
somewhat paradoxical person might indeed affirm that, even though
one did not raise directly the question of reality at all, it would
still be possible to have standards; that one might measure men
accurately enough for most practical purposes simply by the quality
of their illusions--and their disillusions. However, in spite of the
fact that absolute unity and reality must ever elude us and that the
absolute in general must be dismissed as a metaphysical dream, we may
still determine on experimental grounds to what degree any particular
view of life is sanctioned or repudiated by the nature of things and
rate it accordingly as more or less real. God, according to Synesius,
communicates with man through the imagination. Unfortunately the
devil communicates with him in the same way and the test of these
communications is not, strictly speaking, in the imagination itself.
To determine the quality of our imaginings, we need to supplement the
power in man that perceives and the power that conceives with a third
power--that which discriminates. All divisions of man into powers
or faculties are, I am aware, more or less arbitrary, but, though
arbitrary, they are inevitable, if only as instruments of thought; and
the threefold division I am here employing will, I believe, be found
practically one of the most helpful.
In emphasizing the importance of the power in man that discriminates,
I mean this power, working not abstractly, but on the actual material
of experience. I may perhaps best sum up my whole point of view by
saying that the only thing that finally counts in this world is a
concentration, at once imaginative and discriminating, on the facts.
Now the facts that one may perceive and on which one may concentrate
are not only infinite in number, but of entirely different orders.
This is one reason why material progress, so far from assuring moral
progress, is, on the contrary, extremely difficult to combine with it.
This progress has been won by an almost tyrannical concentration on the
facts of the natural law. Man’s capacity for concentration is limited,
so that the price he has paid for material progress has been an
increasing inattention to facts of an entirely different order--those,
namely, of the human law. The resulting spiritual blindness has been an
invitation to Nemesis. One may have some inkling of the nature of this
Nemesis from the Great War and other similar symptoms that have been
multiplying of late in our Western societies.
It goes without saying that the partisans of “progress” have not
admitted their spiritual blindness. They have accepted as valid
substitutes for the traditional standards and the moral unity that
these standards tended to promote certain new unifications of life that
display great imagination, indeed, but an imagination that has not
been sufficiently tested from the point of view of reality. These new
schemes for unifying men flourished especially in connection with the
so-called romantic movement. It is therefore no small matter that the
leaders of this movement can be shown to have erected deliberately a
cult of the creative imagination on the ruins of discrimination. Any
one who takes seriously the creations of this type of imagination, an
imagination that is not disciplined to either the natural or the human
law, but is, in Young’s phrase, free to wander wild in its own realm
of chimeras, falls into mere conceit or vain imagining. Conceit has
always been the specifically human malady, but never, perhaps, more
so than to-day. The outstanding trait of the men of our period may
seem in retrospect to have been the facility with which they put forth
untried conceits as “ideals.” We have all grown familiar with the type
of person who is in his own conceit a lofty “idealist,” but when put to
the test has turned out to be only a disastrous dreamer.
Though man is governed by imagination, fortunately it does not follow
that he must be governed by conceit. There remains the distinction
between the mere visionary and the man of vision. This distinction
acquires its full importance only when related to the question of
leadership. A main purpose of my present argument is to show that
genuine leaders, good or bad, there will always be, and that democracy
becomes a menace to civilization when it seeks to evade this truth. The
notion in particular that a substitute for leadership may be found in
numerical majorities that are supposed to reflect the “general will” is
only a pernicious conceit. In the long run democracy will be judged,
no less than other forms of government, by the quality of its leaders,
a quality that will depend in turn on the quality of their vision.
Where there is no vision, we are told, the people perish; but where
there is sham vision, they perish even faster. The worst difficulties
of the present time arise, I am sometimes tempted to think, even less
from lack of vision than from sham vision. Otherwise stated, what
is disquieting about the time is not so much its open and avowed
materialism as what it takes to be its spirituality.
Among the visionaries who have usurped the credit that belongs only to
the man of vision, Rousseau seems to me to have been, at least in these
recent ages of the world, the most conspicuous. The Nature to which
he invites us to return is only a conceit. This conceit encourages
one to substitute for the vital control, which is the true voice of
man’s higher self, expansive emotion. Ideally this substitution is to
be marked by a triumph of the fraternal spirit. Actually, as I have
sought to prove, the outcome of yielding to a mere expansive conceit
of the emotions is not fraternity, but a decadent imperialism. I have
made a considerable use of the word imperialism in this work and in
a somewhat broader sense than is familiar to English and American
readers. My justification lies in the fact that one finds behind every
other form of imperialism the imperialism or push for power of the
individual. In this respect, at least, I am in accord with Bergson, who
declares that “imperialism is, as it were, inherent in the vital urge.
It is at the bottom of the soul of individuals as well as of the soul
of peoples.”[4] By his cult of _élan vital_ Bergson is in the direct
line of descent from Rousseau. One must note, however, an important
divergence between master and disciple that is all to the advantage of
the latter. Bergson does not hope to base on _élan vital_ a fraternity
that must be sought rather in the exercise of _frein vital_. On the
contrary, _élan vital_ is, he avows frankly, imperialistic. According
to the new Bergsonian beatitude, not the meek in spirit, but those
who have the most vigorous vital urge are to inherit the earth. It is
hard to overlook the affinity between this world-famed philosophy, as
interpreted by its author, and the vulgar admiration for “punch.”
My application of the epithet decadent to the type of imperialism that
has been promoted by the glorification of instinct from Rousseau to
Bergson calls for a word of comment. That there are various types of
imperialism, even if we use the word, not in the psychological, but
in the more familiar political sense, appears evident. For example,
the imperialism that made the Romans masters of the world is not of
the same kind as that which prevailed when they cringed beneath a
Tiberius or a Nero. Yet it is possible to trace the process by which
the older imperialism finally took on a decadent cast. The critical
moment for Rome was the moment of triumph when the leaders of the State
no longer felt the restraining influence of dangerous rivals like
Carthage. At the same time they were beginning to grow individualistic
in the sense that they were beginning to throw off the traditional
controls. As a result of all this emancipation, “men’s desires,” in
Montesquieu’s phrase, “became immense.” It has been usual to regard
as the most significant symptom of this inordinateness the growth of
luxury. “Luxury,” says Juvenal, “more cruel than the foeman’s arms,
fell upon us, and is avenging the conquered world.” A still graver
symptom, however, was the appearance of leaders who were ever more and
more ruthless in the pursuit either of their personal advantage or
that of some class or faction. The new spirit that was undermining the
Roman constitution manifested itself even less, as Cicero notes, in
acts of injustice and cruelty to the vanquished peoples than in the
rage of civil strife. It can scarcely be maintained of the Romans who
thus precipitated the decadence that they exercised to any serious
degree their _frein vital_, or will to refrain. The right opponents of
these anarchical individualists, one may venture to affirm, were not
the mere traditionalists, but the individualists who had qualified for
true leadership by setting bounds to their expansive lusts, especially
the lust of domination. Rome declined because she failed to produce
individualists of this type in sufficient numbers. Certain analogies
may be discovered between this Roman dilemma and the dilemma with which
we are now confronted in America. We, too, seem to be reaching the
acme of our power and are at the same time discarding the standards of
the past. This emancipation has been accompanied by an extraordinary
increase in luxury and self-indulgence. Persons who postpone everything
else to their “comfort” and to commercial prosperity are probably more
numerous in America to-day than they were in ancient Rome. Disturbing
as this symptom may be, it is less so than the increasing rôle played
in our national life by “blocs” with highly unethical leaders--leaders
who seek to advance the material interests of some special group at the
expense of the whole community. The actual gravity of this symptom may
perhaps be exaggerated; if it should prove, however, to be something
more than a passing phase, it portends the end of our constitutional
liberties and the rise of a decadent imperialism. The more one
ponders either the modern American or the ancient Roman situation,
the more surely will one be led from imperialism in the political, to
imperialism in the psychological sense. In other words, one will be
forced, if one wishes to get at the root of the matter, to turn from
the merely peripheral manifestations of the push for power to the inner
life of the individual.
My views as to the relation between the Rousseauistic movement and
imperialism may perhaps be still further elucidated by a comparison
with the views on the same subject of two recent European writers, the
German, Oswald Spengler, and the Frenchman, Ernest Seillière. Spengler
has developed in his chief work, “The Downfall of the Occident,” the
thesis that the Western world, especially Western European “culture,”
is now engaged in a sort of rake’s progress that starts with Rousseau
and his return to nature. The goal of this decadence, as Spengler
describes it, is not unlike what I have termed a decadent imperialism.
Moreover, we are not only on a descending curve, but it is a fatal
curve. He has actually appended to the first volume of his book a
table exhibiting the degree of degeneracy that the Occident will have
attained about the year 2000. The whole conception not only implies
a philosophy of history, but a philosophy of history that has, in my
judgment, gone mad. This conception is based in any case on an utter
denial of the quality of will in man on which I myself put supreme
emphasis. In spite therefore of certain superficial resemblances in
our respective views, Spengler and I are at the opposite poles of
human thought. My own attitude is one of extreme unfriendliness to
every possible philosophy of history (in the more technical sense of
the term), whether it be the older type found in a Saint Augustine or
a Bossuet, which tends to make of man the puppet of God, or the newer
type which tends in all its varieties to make of man the puppet of
nature. “The Downfall of the Occident” seems to me a fairly complete
repertory of the naturalistic fallacies of the nineteenth century;
it is steeped throughout in the special brand of fatalism in which
these fallacies culminate, and as a result of which the Occident is
actually threatened with “downfall.” One is justified in my opinion
in dismissing Spengler as a charlatan, even though one be forced to
add that he is a charlatan of genius. The immense sale of his books
in Germany, if it is indicative of a real influence, is a depressing
symptom.
The second writer I have mentioned, M. Seillière, merits a very
different judgment. In about a score of volumes he has been tracing
with great psychological finesse the influence of Rousseau on the
literature and life of the past century. This influence he associates
with what he calls an irrational imperialism. In short, the results
of his survey are on the negative side very similar to my own. On
the positive or constructive side, on the other hand, M. Seillière
and I diverge sharply. What he opposes to an irrational imperialism
is a rational imperialism; by which he means “the social army on the
march towards the conquest of power by the coördination of individual
efforts.”[5] In his general position, as revealed in such utterances,
he seems to me to strike back through the utilitarians to Hobbes
and ultimately, in some respects, to Machiavelli. The essential
contrast for me is not, as for M. Seillière, that between a rational
and an irrational imperialism, but between imperialism and that
quality of will in man which is, in every possible sense of the word,
anti-imperialistic. M. Seillière, again, seems as much bent on running
together Stoical and Christian ethics as I am on separating them and
insisting on their final incompatibility. Stoicism in both its ancient
and modern forms I regard, at least in its total trend, as false and
impossible; whereas I hold that at the heart of genuine Christianity
are certain truths which have already once saved Western civilization
and, judiciously employed, may save it again.
I wish also to say a few words at the outset regarding certain
possible misapprehensions of my method. The most serious of these
misapprehensions may arise if one looks either in this volume or in
the previous volumes of the series (with the partial exception of
“The Masters of Modern French Criticism”) for rounded estimates of
individuals. I have not attempted such estimates. Still less have I
attempted rounded estimates of historical epochs--for example, of
the nineteenth century. It is even less sensible, perhaps, to indict
a whole century than it is, according to Burke, to indict a whole
people. I am attacking, not the nineteenth century in general, but the
naturalistic nineteenth century and its prolongation into the twentieth
century, along with the tendencies in the previous centuries, from the
Renaissance down, that prepared the way for naturalism. My treatment
of this whole naturalistic trend has seemed, even to critics who are
not altogether unfriendly, to be negative, extreme, and one-sided.
I hope I may be pardoned if I reply briefly to each of these three
charges.
As to the charge that my treatment of naturalism is one-sided, there is
a sense, it must be admitted, in which it is not only one-sided, but
one-sided to the last degree. There is, however, a humanistic intention
even in the one-sidedness. I dwell persistently on the aspect of human
nature that the naturalists have no less persistently neglected in
the hope that the way may thus be opened for a more balanced view.
Moreover, what the naturalists have neglected is not something that is
on the fringe or outer rim of human experience, but something, on the
contrary, that is very central. The naturalistic effort during the past
century or more has resulted in an immense and bewildering peripheral
enrichment of life--in short, in what we are still glorifying under
the name of progress. I have no quarrel with this type of progress
in itself, I merely maintain that no amount of peripheral enrichment
of life can atone for any lack at the centre. Furthermore, though I
assail the naturalists for what seems to me a vital oversight, I have,
let me repeat, at least one trait in common with them--I desire to be
experimental. I seek to follow out the actual consequences of this
oversight, to deal with it, not abstractly, but in its fruits. If
certain readers have persisted in seeing in my books something that
I myself have not sought to put there, namely, rounded estimates of
individuals and historic epochs, the misapprehension has no doubt
arisen from the very abundance of my concrete illustrations.
As to the charge that I am negative, I have already said that the
element in man that has been overlooked by naturalistic psychology
is felt in relation to his ordinary self negatively. If instead
of taking the point of view of one’s ordinary self, one heeds the
admonitions of the inner monitor, the result is two of the most
positive of all things: character and happiness. This is the great
paradox of life itself. For being negative in this sense I am not in
the least apologetic. There is, however, another sense in which I may
seem negative and about this I feel somewhat differently. The type of
criticism that prevailed about the beginning of the nineteenth century
proposed to substitute the “fruitful criticism of beauties for the
barren criticism of faults.” I may be accused of reversing too sharply
this maxim even by some who admit that the proper remedy for the lax
appreciativeness of the modern movement is a criticism that displays
a tonic astringency. I am constantly calling attention to the defects
of certain eminent personalities, it may be urged, and at the same
time have little or nothing to say of their virtues. My method is even
in this respect, I believe, legitimate, provided that it be properly
understood, though I myself cannot help regretting that it should make
me appear so constantly unamiable.
The charge that I am extreme touches me even more nearly than the
charge that I am negative and one-sided; for I aim to be a humanist
and the essence of humanism is moderation. There is, however, much
confusion on the subject of moderation. A man’s moderation is measured
by his success in mediating between some sound general principle and
the infinitely various and shifting circumstances of actual life. The
man who is thus rightly mediatory attains to one of the most precious
of virtues--urbanity; though one must add that probably no virtue
has been more frequently counterfeited. When an intellectually and
spiritually indolent person has to choose between two conflicting
views he often decides to “split the difference” between them; but he
may be splitting the difference between truth and error, or between
two errors. In any case, he must dispose of the question of truth or
error before he can properly begin to mediate at all. Otherwise he will
run the risk of resembling the English statesman of whom it was said
that he never deviated from the straight and narrow path between right
and wrong. Some of the casuists whom Pascal attacked had managed to
assume a moderate attitude towards murder! One may fancy oneself urbane
when in reality one is in danger of being numbered with the immense
multitude that Dante saw in the vestibule of Hell--the multitude
of those who are equally “displeasing to God and to the enemies of
God.” To be sure, it is not always easy in any particular instance to
distinguish between the humanist and the mere Laodicean. Thus Luther
denounced Erasmus as a Laodicean, whereas to us he seems rather to have
shown real poise and urbanity in his dealings with the religious and
other extremists of his time.
At all events the differences of doctrine I debate in the following
pages are of a primary nature and so not subject to mediation. Between
the man who puts his main emphasis on the inner life of the individual
and the man who puts this emphasis on something else--for example,
the progress and service of humanity--the opposition is one of first
principles. The question I raise, therefore, is not whether one should
be a moderate humanitarian, but whether one should be a humanitarian
at all. In general I commit myself to the position that we are living
in a world that in certain important respects has gone wrong on first
principles; which will be found to be only another way of saying that
we are living in a world that has been betrayed by its leaders. On the
appearance of leaders who have recovered in some form the truths of
the inner life and repudiated the errors of naturalism may depend the
very survival of Western civilization. The truths of the inner life
may be proclaimed in various forms, religious and humanistic, and have
actually been so proclaimed in the past and justified in each case by
their fruits in life and conduct. It is because I am unable to discover
these truths in any form in the philosophies now fashionable that I
have been led to prefer to the wisdom of the age the wisdom of the ages.
CHAPTER I
THE TYPES OF POLITICAL THINKING
According to Aristotle, a government, if it is to endure, must
reflect the _ethos_ or body of moral habits and beliefs of the
governed. There is no abstract and ideal political form, as the French
Jacobins inclined to believe, that may be imposed to advantage on
all communities. If we attempt to apply the Aristotelian principle
of the necessary relation between the government of any particular
community and its ethos to the governments that have actually existed
in the past, our first impression is of an endless diversity in
political forms as in everything else. But if we penetrate beneath this
bewildering surface variety, we shall discover, as I have tried to show
elsewhere, that human experience falls, after all, into a few fairly
distinct categories. The view of life that prevails at any particular
time or among any particular people will be found, on close inspection,
to be either predominantly naturalistic, or humanistic, or religious;
and it will also be found that political forms tend to vary accordingly.
If, for example, a people is deeply religious, a government with a
more or less strongly marked theocratic element is probable. Fustel de
Coulanges has shown how closely allied the government of the ancient
city-state was at the outset with traditional religious forms, and then
how government tended to change when the hierarchy that traditional
religion had established, first of all in the family and then in the
State, was gradually undermined by individualistic and equalitarian
tendencies. The yielding of religious control to an anarchical
naturalism led in the political order to the triumph of naked force
and to the decline of ancient civilization. As Christianity prevailed
over this effete paganism, a new religious ethos gradually took shape
and, corresponding to it, arose a theocratic conception of government
that was to prevail throughout the mediæval period. During that period
Europe enjoyed, in theory and to no small extent in practice, a genuine
religious communion. The Church had succeeded in creating symbols that
in a very literal sense held sway over men’s imagination and united
them from the top to the bottom of society in the same spiritual hopes
and fears. Every one might, as Villon relates of his aged mother,
enter the great cathedral and see depicted on one hand the torments
of the damned and on the other the bliss of paradise, and, like her,
he would normally be filled by the former images with fear and by the
latter with joy and gladness. As a result of this imaginative control
exercised over all classes the Church did not need the support of
physical force: purely spiritual penalties, especially excommunication,
sufficed. Henry IV at Canossa is usually taken to typify the extreme
triumph of the theocratic idea.
The Church is no negligible factor even to-day. When Cardinal Mercier
visited America, it was reported in the press that engineers and
firemen knelt on the platform of the Pennsylvania Railway Station in
New York to receive his blessing. Here is at least some survival of
the older loyalty, a loyalty utterly different in essence that of
these same men to their unions. Still, if one compare the power of the
Church to-day with its power in the Middle Ages, one becomes aware of
a change in the ethos, not of this or that country merely, but of the
whole of the Occident. The older religious control has been giving
way for several centuries past to individualistic and centrifugal
tendencies, and the danger is now manifest that in the absence of any
new integrating element, what may triumph in our modern world, as it
finally triumphed in the ancient world, is the principle of naked force.
The theocratic conception of government always implies a divine grace
or sanction somewhere; but as to the channel through which this grace
is received important differences of opinion are possible. In the
Middle Ages, for example, some held that the only channel of grace
was the Church and so tended to subordinate the Emperor, the head
of the temporal order, to God’s vicar upon earth, the Pope. Others
maintained that the Emperor derived his sanction, not through the
Pope, but immediately from on high. This latter form of the theocratic
conception is best set forth, perhaps, in Dante’s “De Monarchia.” Dante
desires coöperation and ultimate unity of the two powers, secular and
spiritual, but without confusion.
Dante and other political theorists of the Middle Ages who accepted
the theocratic idea, but wished at the same time to keep separate the
things of God and the things of Cæsar, showed themselves in so far true
Christians. We need to remember, however, how much in the Christian
tradition itself goes back ultimately, not to Judæa, but to Greece
and Rome. There is no small element of truth in the common assertion
that Saint Augustine is the Christian Plato and Saint Thomas Aquinas
the Christian Aristotle. Yet we need to emphasize at this point certain
important differences between the Platonic and Aristotelian type of
political thinking and the type that prevailed during the mediæval
period. In a certain sense, Aristotle and Plato are in their true
spirit nearer to us than to the men of the Middle Ages. The mediæval
view of life rests on a belief in a supernatural revelation. This in
turn is made the basis of an absolute outer authority; whereas Plato
and Aristotle belong, as I have said, to an age of free critical
inquiry. They are, in short, true “moderns.” For, as I have tried to
show elsewhere, to be critical and individualistic in one’s outlook
on life and to be modern come to very much the same thing. In seeking
to make of Aristotle a prop of outer authority, Saint Thomas and
other men of the Middle Ages were therefore using Aristotle in a
very un-Aristotelian way; and the confusion continued when the men
of the Renaissance, on breaking with tradition in favor of a more
individualistic and experimental attitude, inclined to repudiate
Aristotle as the chief source of the scholastic logomachy. Bacon, for
example, practically never gets behind the scholastic Aristotle to the
real Aristotle.
Plato, then, differs from the mediæval thinkers in dealing critically
with the political problem in the “Republic” and elsewhere. He arrives,
however, at a conception that is on the whole theocratic; so that if
one looks, not to the method, but to the conclusions, one is forced
to agree in part with those who assert that the Middle Ages already
begin in Plato. Add the all-important distinction between the things
of God and the things of Cæsar and the class of Guardians in the
“Republic” would work out into something very similar to a monastic
order. It is hard, again, not to see in the Nocturnal Council and
the House of Reformation of the “Laws” a first adumbration of the
Inquisition. In general Plato’s growing sense of the dependence of
man on God foreshadows Augustine and the reign of grace. Aristotle,
on the other hand, remains the chief example in the past of a thinker
who has treated in a way at once critical and humanistic the problems
of government. Before writing his “Politics,” he had made detailed
studies of the history and constitutions of one hundred and fifty-eight
city-states, and in general rests his conclusions upon a great body of
actual political experience. One may disagree with these conclusions--I
disagree with them in essential particulars--but the method itself for
any one who aspires to be modern would seem to be impeccable. Even when
we differ from Aristotle, we should differ from him on Aristotelian
grounds. We have been enlightened concerning certain problems by an
enormous mass of experience in both the East and the West that he did
not have at his command. We have been enlightened by the Christian
experience above all and the great new principle it brought into
the Occident, namely, the separation of the temporal and spiritual
powers, and all the consequences that flow from this principle either
directly or indirectly, especially the idea of individual liberty that
ultimately rests on this distinction, and of which neither Aristotle
nor Plato has any adequate conception.
We have been enlightened since the time of Aristotle not merely by the
Christian experience; we also have more or less available an enormous
mass of experience unknown until recently to the Occident--that of the
Far East, especially India and China. Here again we find political
institutions that reflect views of life that are predominantly either
naturalistic, humanistic, or religious. Perhaps no country has ever
been more religious than India. India has always been the home of
religion, good, bad, or indifferent; and so one is not surprised to
find the theocratic view of life set forth more uncompromisingly
perhaps than in any other book of the world in the “Laws of Manu.” The
precepts of this work have probably never been applied in their full
rigor, but they have always been of great aid to the Brahmin caste in
maintaining what would seem to us a veritable spiritual tyranny. In
controlling men by an appeal to their religious hopes and fears without
any need of physical compulsion, the Brahmin caste has perhaps been
even more successful, and that down to our own day, than the Church
of mediæval Europe. It has been alleged that the Montagu Act (1919),
designed to give a greater measure of self-government to the Hindus,
would in practice simply play into the hands of the Brahmin theocracy.
Buddhism, another product of ancient India, is interesting from the
point of view of our present topic for two reasons: first, because
Buddha, even more perhaps than Plato or Socrates, worked out a positive
and critical view of life; secondly, because he displayed this
positive and critical spirit in the field of religion. His kingdom,
like that of Jesus, and unlike that of Plato, is not of this world. He
does not seek, like the Plato of the “Republic,” to achieve ideal good
in the secular order and with the aid of political institutions. Buddha
did not set out to reform society directly, but established a religious
order in which caste and other like distinctions did not exist. Later
Buddhism, especially Buddhism of the so-called Great Vehicle, is a vast
and complex movement that departs widely from the positive and critical
spirit of the founder. Lamaism, the very corrupt form of the doctrine
that prevails in Tibet, marks an extreme of theocratic interference
with the secular order. In a country like Burma, where something of the
older and more individualistic form of the faith still survives, the
distinction between spiritual and temporal is fairly well maintained.
In general the rival pretensions of Church and State have led to
less frequent and less serious political clashes in Buddhist than in
Christian lands. It is, indeed, this aspect of Christianity that more
than any other seems to justify Christ’s saying that he brought not
peace, but a sword.
India has never seen an important humanistic movement. The nearest
approach to it, perhaps, is the doctrine of the middle path that Buddha
proclaimed in the religious life itself. It is difficult to imagine
a more complete contrast in this respect than that between India and
China, which in its central tradition, of which Confucius is the chief
exponent, has always been humanistic. The bathing ghats at Benares
suggest something almost as remote from ordinary Chinese psychology
as from our own. Confucius is less concerned with the other world than
with the art of living to the best advantage in this. To live to the
best advantage in this world is, he holds, to live proportionately
and moderately; so that the Confucian tradition of the Far East has
much in common with the Aristotelian tradition of the Occident. In
one important respect, however, Confucius recalls not Aristotle, but
Christ. Though his kingdom is very much of this world, he puts emphasis
not merely on the law of measure, but also on the law of humility. He
was humble both in his “submission to the will of Heaven” and in his
attitude towards the sages of old. He aspired at most to be the channel
through which the moral experience of his race that had accumulated
through long centuries and found living embodiment in these sages
should be conveyed to the present and the future; in his own words, he
was not a creator but a transmitter. A man who looks up to the great
traditional models and imitates them, becomes worthy of imitation in
his turn. He must be thus rightly imitative if he is to be a true
leader. No one has ever insisted more than Confucius on a right example
and the imitation that it inspires as the necessary basis of civilized
society. This insistence would seem justified by the force of his
own example which has moulded, for seventy generations or more, the
ethos of about a fourth of the human race--and that with little or no
appeal to the principle of fear either in this world or the next. The
Confucian influence seems, indeed, to offer more warrant than anything
in our Occidental experience for the belief that man may after all be a
reasonable animal.
In dealing with the political problem, Confucius is inevitably led to
brush aside, as of slight account, everything except the question of
leadership. “The virtue of the leader,” he says, “is like unto wind;
that of the people like unto grass. For it is the nature of grass to
bend when the wind blows upon it.”[6] Now the true leader is the man
of character, and the ultimate root of character is humility. This
Confucian conception has such a central soundness that I shall need
to return to it later. At the same time, Confucianism, like all great
doctrines, has its characteristic weaknesses. The chief of these, we
scarcely need to be reminded, is that the present seems to be held
in a perpetual spiritual mortmain by the past. A purely traditional
humanism is always in danger of falling into a rut of pseudo-classic
formalism. Confucius himself had a deep and genuine perception of what
is specifically human in man which he defines as a principle of inner
control; this principle, however, at least if we accept as ancient
and authentic all that is in the “Li-Ki” or Book of Rites, is from
the start too much associated with outer forms and, at times, with
the rules of etiquette. Some of the prescriptions are not much more
closely related to the decorum which is at the centre of every truly
humanistic doctrine than the information, which has also been piously
handed down to us, that Confucius ate ginger at every meal, and that
he always changed countenance in a thunderstorm. We desire a spirit
that is more free, flexible, and imaginative, such as is found in
Greek humanism at its best. We are also likely to feel something more
modern and, therefore, more congenial to us in the highly untraditional
and individualistic Buddha. Still Confucius, though traditional, is
not dogmatic; he is not even systematic. His extreme reticence about
ultimate things that so irritated his translator, the Christian
dogmatist, Dr. Legge, seems, now that we are coming more and more to
appreciate the psychological method of dealing with certain problems,
a merit rather than a defect. As a result of all that is summed up
in Confucianism, China has, perhaps, in spite of all its corrupt
mandarins and officials of the past and present, planted itself more
consistently than any other country on moral ideas, and this fact is
not unrelated to its long survival. The Greeks have disappeared; for
the Greeks of to-day can be regarded only in a very qualified sense
as the descendants of the Greeks of the age of Pericles: whereas the
descendants of the Chinese of the age of Confucius are still with us to
the number of several hundred millions. Their civilization has numerous
and grave peripheral faults. At the same time, it is likely to have a
secret strength as long as the Chinese refuse to “drop their pilot,” as
long as they hold fast, in other words, in spite of pressure from the
West, to what is best in the Confucian tradition.
I have been considering thus far, in both East and West, various
religious and humanistic views of life, whether on a traditional or a
positive and critical basis, and the corresponding types of political
thinking. It remains to consider the naturalistic view of life and
its political implications. The naturalist no longer looks on man as
subject to a law of his own distinct from that of the material order--a
law, the acceptance of which leads, on the religious level, to the
miracles of otherworldliness that one finds in Christians and Buddhists
at their best, and the acceptance of which, in this world, leads to the
subduing of the ordinary self and its spontaneous impulses to the law
of measure that one finds in Confucianists and Aristotelians. The rise
of the individualistic and critical spirit and the resulting break with
the mediæval and theocratic ideal, from the Renaissance on, might have
assumed a religious or humanistic character; it has actually been in
the main naturalistic. One important outcome of this naturalistic trend
has been the growth of the national spirit. The Protestant religion
itself, if one takes a sufficiently long-range view, appears largely
as an incident in the rise of nationalism. If one wishes, however,
to study, in its purest form, the new nationalistic spirit that was
destined finally to destroy the religious unity of mediæval Europe,
one needs to turn to Machiavelli. He will probably remain the best
type in either East or West of the unflinching political naturalist.
To understand Machiavelli, one needs to study him in his relation to
traditional religion. Christianity, especially in its Pauline and
Augustinian forms, has always tended to oppose a stark supernaturalism
to a stark naturalism; so that when an austere Christian, such as
Pascal, considers man in his fallen estate, man unsupported by divine
grace, he quickly arrives at conclusions regarding the secular order
and its political problems that are, if possible, more Machiavellian
than those of Machiavelli himself. One seems to have no alternative
except to get rid of ethics in getting rid of theology. Moreover,
the Church, as an actual institution, had such a monopoly of the
higher life of man that to seek, like Machiavelli, to give the State
a basis independent of the Church was to run the risk of giving it a
basis independent of morality. Furthermore, Machiavelli was, within
certain limits, an extraordinarily shrewd observer. His views reflect
the failure of Christianity to control men’s actual deeds, either in
his own time or in the mediæval past with which he was familiar. His
intention, as he proclaims it, is “to follow up the real truth of a
matter rather than the imagination of it, ... because how one lives
is so far distant from how one ought to live, that he who neglects
what is done for what ought to be done sooner effects his ruin than
his preservation.”[7] The statesman should, therefore, be sternly
realistic. As a matter of fact, any one who neglects men’s ideals and
fine phrases and attends solely to their actual performance is always
likely to seem a bit Machiavellian. There is, for example, a strong
Machiavellian element in this sense in Thucydides.
The conclusions to which Machiavelli was led by his special type of
realism are familiar. The rules of ordinary morality may hold in the
relations between man and man, but have only a secondary place in
the relations between state and state; what prevails in these latter
relations is the law of cunning and the law of force. The ruler who
wishes to succeed should, therefore, blend harmoniously in himself the
virtues of the lion and the fox.[8] The true essence of any doctrine
is revealed finally in the kind of personality in which it becomes
incarnate. Machiavelli, as is well known, saw the perfect incarnation
of his own conception in Cæsar Borgia. He relates, in one place, the
detestable treachery by which Borgia trapped and then had strangled
several of his political enemies, and then says elsewhere: “When all
the actions of the duke are recalled, I do not know how to blame him,
but rather it appears to me, as I have said, that I ought to offer him
for imitation to all those who, by fortune or the arms of others, are
raised to government.”[9] One should mark especially the meaning that
Machiavelli attaches to the word virtue. He begins an account of the
mediæval tyrant, Castruccio Castricani, in which the main traits that
emerge are ruthlessness and cruelty, by praise of his “virtue.” The
virtue of the Machiavellian political leader plainly has very little
in common with humanistic virtue and nothing at all with religious
virtue. Christian virtue in particular has its foundation in the law of
humility. The man who takes on the yoke of this law enters, at the same
time, into a realm of free conscience; he has ceased to be subject to
any mundane state and has become a member of a heavenly commonwealth or
City of God. This divided allegiance seemed to Machiavelli a source of
weakness and effeminacy. Humility should give way to patriotic pride.
The ruler above all should have no conscience apart from the State and
its material aggrandizement. Any one who consents to become a passive
instrument in the service of any corporation, political, commercial, or
religious, to the point of practising a morality different from that
which should rule the individual, is in the Machiavellian tradition.
Machiavelli is the ancestor of the German who puts the fatherland
“over all,” and of his equivalent the one hundred per cent American,
and in general of those who are so patriotic that they are ready to
back their country right or wrong. He embodies, more completely than
any one else, what is usually defined as the realistic tradition in
European politics. Yet one cannot grant that either Machiavelli or his
spiritual descendants, the _Realpolitiker_, are thoroughgoing realists.
The Nemesis, or divine judgment, or whatever one may term it, that
sooner or later overtakes those who transgress the moral law, is not
something that one has to take on authority, either Greek or Hebraic;
it is a matter of keen observation. Without asserting that there is
no such thing as reason of state and that public and private morality
should coincide precisely at all points, nevertheless, one may affirm
that it is chimerical to set up a dual code in the Machiavellian sense,
to suppose that men can, as a rule, be ruthless in the service of
country and at the same time upright as individuals. To be merely a
naturalistic realist, to combine, that is, a clear perception of the
facts of the material order with spiritual blindness, leads practically
to imperialistic dreaming. Machiavelli relates how at the time he
was composing “The Prince” he was wont, after a day spent in petty
occupations on his small property at San Casciano, to pull off his
peasant clothes and don court attire in the evening, and then, retiring
into his study, escape from the trivialities of the present to the
imperial glories of ancient Rome. This particular land of heart’s
desire is still that of a certain number of Italians.
Perhaps the most important followers of Machiavelli, in actual
practice, have been found among the Germans from Frederick the Great
to Bismarck. For the student of political theory, on the other hand,
the most significant line of development runs rather through England.
Hobbes is possibly even more lacking in ethical perception, even more
naturalistic in his conception of human nature, than Machiavelli
himself. Strip man of the conventions that have been imposed upon him
from without, says Hobbes, and what one discovers as his essence is
“a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth
only in death.”[10] Hobbes reflects, to some extent, in his philosophy
the cynicism and disillusion that had been engendered in many by
the civil convulsions of seventeenth-century England. If one is to
retain a rose-colored view of human nature, it is not well, it should
seem, to see it at too close range in periods of great upheaval. La
Rochefoucauld, who is also in the Machiavellian tradition by his
insistence on the egoistic element even in what appear to be man’s
fairest virtues, was influenced, we are told, in no small measure by
his participation in the Fronde.
Though Hobbes is Machiavellian in his emphasis on the law of cunning
and the law of force, he is, unlike Machiavelli, not merely systematic
but metaphysical. He seeks to develop the postulates of naturalism
into a logical and closed system. The difference between the two men
is related to Pascal’s distinction between the geometrical spirit and
the spirit of finesse. Hobbes’s extreme confidence in reasoning of
the abstract or geometrical type (_la raison raisonnante_) strikes
one as rather un-English, but in other respects he belongs to the
great English utilitarian tradition, and points the way to Locke,
who is himself, in essential respects, a dogmatic rationalist. For a
striking fact about the English utilitarian is that, while professing
to appeal from mere theory to experience, he repudiates that whole
side of experience that belongs to the realm of the human law. Wishing
to be thoroughly positive and critical, he inclines to identify this
experience with the traditional forms in which it had become embedded
and so to reject it as mere myth and fable; and herein he is at one
with the traditionalists themselves who do not admit that the truths
of the human law can be disengaged from certain special forms and,
like the truths of the natural law, dealt with in a purely critical
fashion. As I have tried to show elsewhere, the positivists have
failed signally thus far to live up to their own programme. Hobbes,
for example, opposes to the dogmas and metaphysical assumptions of the
traditionalists other assumptions that are almost equally metaphysical.
One needs to consider what some of these assumptions are, for, in one
shape or other, they have pervaded most political thinking from the
time of Hobbes to our own day, even the thinking of those who at first
sight seem most opposed to him.
One may take as the first of these metaphysical assumptions the
conception of absolute and unlimited sovereignty. When anything
absolute is set up, we may know that we are running into metaphysics;
for precise observation of life does not give anything absolute. The
only thing that approaches the absolute in man is his ignorance, and
even that is not quite absolute. Hobbes’s assertion of absolute and
unlimited sovereignty recalls the mediæval notion of sovereignty with
a most important difference: it rests upon force and is in this sense
imperialistic; it does not, like the sovereignty of the Middle Ages,
have a supernatural sanction. For the mediæval sovereign, whether Pope
or Emperor, if not responsible to the people, is responsible to God,
who is, finally, the only absolute and unlimited ruler. Furthermore,
the individual in the State of Hobbes has no refuge from its despotic
control in religion, or, what amounts to the same thing, in a domain of
conscience set apart from the secular order. Hobbes subordinates the
spiritual to the temporal, and, in his dealing with the rival claims
of Church and State, is, like Machiavelli, not only unmediæval but
un-Christian.
Whence, one may inquire, does the sovereign of Hobbes derive a power
so unlimited and irresponsible as to be subversive not only of liberty
in the temporal order, but also of the “liberty wherewith Christ hath
made us free.” The reply is that the sovereign holds his unlimited
and irresponsible power, not by the grace of God, but as a result of
a contract with the people; and here emerges another metaphysical
assumption, that of the social contract, which dominated to an
extraordinary degree the political thinking of several generations.
This involves, in some form or other, the assumption of a state of
nature, in which man is isolated and unsocial, in opposition to a
state of society where men escape from their isolation on the basis
of a convention or contract. Just as Machiavelli is infinitely below
Aristotle in setting up two codes of morality, one for the State and
one for the individual, so Hobbes marks a great retrogression from
Aristotle in accepting this mythical contrast between man in society
and man as he is naturally. According to Aristotle, it is natural for
man, being as he is a political animal, to live in society. Hobbes,
also, as we have just seen, by running together the things of God
and the things of Cæsar, compromises the chief advance in political
thinking that has been made since Aristotle. As a whole, his work may
be described as an attempt to justify metaphysically what would result
practically in a violent materialism.
To the social contract, unlimited sovereignty, and the state of
nature, we need to add natural rights if we wish to complete the list
of abstract and metaphysical conceptions that have dominated so much
modern political thinking. The rights that man possesses in the “state
of nature” would not seem very valuable, since his life in this state,
as conceived by Hobbes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”;
and since, as a result of the dominance of self-love, every one is
at war with every one else (_bellum omnium contra omnes_). From the
point of view of theory, it is, however, important that man has in the
state of nature unlimited liberty, in the sense that he has unlimited
sovereignty over his own person, and can, therefore, transfer by the
social contract this unlimited sovereignty to the State. Men also
tend to be equal in the natural state, since the physically weak may,
according to Hobbes, develop a cunning that will in the conflict of
egoisms put them more or less on a level with the strong. The state
of nature according to Hobbes may, then, be defined as liberty,
equality--and war.
Natural rights and the freedom and equality that are supposed to be
based upon them become increasingly important with the tendency that
appears about the time of Hobbes to interpret more optimistically the
state of nature. The origins of this tendency are complex. Perhaps the
most important single influence was the revival of Stoical philosophy
and the Stoical views regarding _jus naturale_ and _jus gentium_ that
had been incorporated in Roman law. The underlying driving power
behind the “return to nature” from the Renaissance down was the rise
of the new astronomy and the growing triumphs of physical science.
The success of the great revolt on naturalistic lines against the
Christian and mediæval dualism was due even less perhaps to scientific
discovery, and to the type of progress that resulted, than to the
positive and critical method by which the progress and the discoveries
had been achieved, a method that was in direct conflict with the
dogmatic and uncritical affirmations of the traditionalists. In the
political theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the naturalistic and Stoical elements are combined in almost every
conceivable proportion with elements that derive from the traditional
supernaturalism. A mixture of this kind is especially evident in the
“De Jure belli et pacis” (1625) of Grotius, the father of international
law. The great nationalities, that were arising with the breakdown of
mediæval theocracy, were plainly in a state of nature as regards one
another, so that it was even more important to determine, in the case
of the nation than in the case of the individual, whether there can
prevail in the state of nature any other law than the law of cunning
and the law of force. If one is to refute Machiavelli and Hobbes,
one must show that there is some universal principle that tends to
unite men even across national frontiers, a principle that continues
to act even when their egoistic impulses are no longer controlled by
the laws of some particular state supported by its organized force.
Whether one starts with a state of nature in which men are conceived
as mere isolated units, and then imagines a contract of some kind by
which they pass from a state of nature into society, or whether one
asserts with Aristotle that man is a political animal, and that it is,
therefore, natural for him to live in society, one needs in either case
to define with some care the principle of cohesion among men. According
to the true Christian, the final counterpoise to egoism, in virtue
of which alone men may be drawn to a common centre, is submission
to the will of God, a submission that is conceived in terms of the
inner life. The attempt to find a bond of union among men in a “rule
of reason,” and the association of this rule of reason with nature,
is, strictly speaking, not Christian, but Stoical. It is as natural
for a man to serve other men, says Marcus Aurelius in his exposition
of Stoical “reason,” as it is for the eye to see. This doctrine of
service, which the Stoic deems at once rational and natural, does not
involve the inner life in the Christian sense. The final appeal is
to something outside the individual--namely, to what Cicero, a main
source of Stoical influence upon the modern world, calls the “common
utility” (_utilitas communis_). The community that one serves may
again, according to Cicero, be either one’s country or mankind at large
(_societas generis humani_). Stoical utilitarianism is in general
highly rationalistic. English utilitarianism, on the other hand (and
England is the chief source of utilitarian doctrine in modern times),
puts far greater emphasis on the principle of pleasure, and in general
on the instinctive side of man, an emphasis that is less Stoical than
Epicurean. Cumberland, for example, seeks to refute Hobbes not merely
by an appeal to right reason, but by asserting the presence in man of
an instinct to promote the common good; thus to serve the community,
says Cumberland, combining the new utilitarian conception with the
older theology, is to fulfil the will of God.
One finds, however, in writers like Cumberland only the beginnings of
the transformation in the very basis of ethics that has taken place
in connection with the great movement, partly utilitarian, partly
sentimental, that I have defined in its totality as humanitarianism.
What is singular about the representatives of this movement is that
they wish to live on the naturalistic level, and at the same time to
enjoy the benefits that the past had hoped to achieve as a result
of some humanistic or religious discipline. They have contradicted
religion by asserting in substance that man, in order to rise above
his selfish impulses, does not need conversion and the system
of supernatural sanctions on which conversion has traditionally
rested. They have also sought to refute the egoistic naturalists
of the type of Machiavelli and Hobbes, who have maintained that the
most fundamental impulse in man is the push for power. The rise of
emotional ethics may be studied, especially in the England of the early
eighteenth century, in connection with the deistic movement. The trend
of deistic moralists like Shaftesbury and Hutcheson is all towards what
we should call, nowadays, altruism and social service. With the decline
of the doctrine of total depravity, the age of theology is beginning to
give way to the age of sociology. The word beneficence gains currency
about this time. The sympathetic man, the good-natured man, the man of
feeling are emerging and are being held in ever-increasing estimation.
Those who believed in the intrinsic evil of human nature on either
theological or naturalistic grounds were still numerous and aggressive.
The divergent views concerning the goodness or badness of human nature
were combined in almost every conceivable proportion in different
individuals. They were so combined in Pope and Voltaire, for example,
as to introduce into their writings a central incoherency. A curious
attempt to combine the new expansiveness with an attack on the school
of Shaftesbury and an affirmation of the egoistic element in man
that reminds one of Hobbes and La Rochefoucauld and Machiavelli, is
found in Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees.” With the growth of the new
philosophy, man was encouraged to indulge more freely his natural
desires. At the same time, scientific discovery was making increasingly
possible the satisfaction of these desires. It was gradually developing
a vast machinery designed to minister to man’s material comfort and
convenience and destined to culminate in the industrial revolution.
Mandeville warned the English, who were entering an era of commercial
and imperialistic expansion, that this expansion, with its concomitant
growth of luxury, would, so far as the individual is concerned, be
an expansion of vice and selfishness. The Stoical notion that mere
“reason” can control the selfish passions, he refutes. The assertion of
Shaftesbury that there inheres in the natural man a “moral sense” or
will to serve, that can prevail over the will to power, or instinct of
sovereignty, as he terms it, he dismisses as “romantic and chimerical.”
He recommends ironically as a remedy a return to the Golden Age and
its diet of acorns. The true remedy, he professes to believe, is the
most austere Christianity and its renunciation of the lusts of the
flesh. The real sting of his argument, however, is in the new turn
that he gives to the Machiavellian idea of the double standard. The
multiplication of wants, which is bad, considered from the point of
view of the individual, may, if properly directed by government, make
for the greatness of the State. Private vices are public benefits:
Thus every part was full of vice.
Yet the whole mass a paradise.
. . . . . . . . . . . Luxury
Employ’d a million of the poor,
And odious pride a million more;
Envy itself and vanity,
Were ministers of industry.
Mandeville concludes:
Fools only strive
To make a great an honest hive.
In Shaftesbury and Mandeville, we see clearly revealed, for perhaps
the first time, the opposition between the romantic idealist and the
Machiavellian realist. Much of Shaftesbury’s doctrine stands in close
relation to that of the ancient Stoics, notably Marcus Aurelius and
Epictetus, so that there is truth in Mandeville’s accusation that
Shaftesbury “endeavored to establish heathen virtue on the ruins of
Christianity.” Shaftesbury, for example, does not go beyond Stoicism
when he hopes, in Mandeville’s phrase, to “govern himself by his
reason with as much ease and readiness as a good rider manages a well
taught horse by the bridle.” But Mandeville is not entirely wrong in
discovering in Shaftesbury a flattery of human nature beyond what the
Stoics or other pagan moralists ever attempted. “He imagines that
men without any trouble or violence upon themselves may be naturally
virtuous. He seems to expect and require goodness in his species as we
do a sweet taste in grapes and China oranges.” On the basis of this
natural goodness which displays itself in an instinctive affection
of man for his own species, Shaftesbury was the first “to maintain
virtue without self-denial.” The word sympathy first became current
largely as a result of its use by the Greek Stoics, but there is a
wide gap between Stoical sympathy and the incipient sentimentalism of
a Shaftesbury. So far from encouraging emotional effusion, the Stoic
aimed at “apathy,” and in his more austere moments would have us serve
men, but refrain from pitying them.[11] The moral æstheticism that is
beginning to appear in Shaftesbury, though it has no strict parallel
in classical antiquity, is Epicurean rather than Stoical. The more
advanced type of sentimentalist has, in order to display his “virtue,”
merely to palpitate deliciously.[12] As a matter of fact, the love or
sympathy on which the romantic idealist puts so much emphasis is, as I
shall try to show later, a subrational parody of Christian charity.
The moral sense of Shaftesbury and his disciple Hutcheson was developed
by Hume and Adam Smith and other exponents of emotional ethics, and is
not unrelated to the emphasis that the later utilitarians put on the
principle of pleasure. Though Mandeville denied that sympathy of the
humanitarian type can prevail over the “instinct of sovereignty,” it
is well to remember that he was himself an emotional moralist. He even
recognizes among man’s natural passions a passion of pity that may on
occasion be violent. One has only to exalt this passion of pity and,
at the same time, to take seriously Mandeville’s occasional praises
of ignorance and the simple life, to be in sight of the primitivistic
solution of the problem of luxury and of civilization itself that
Rousseau was to set forth in his two Discourses. Mandeville is on
the side of decorum, and yet he admits that decorum is not only
“artificial,” but is, as Rousseau was to say later, only the “varnish
of vice” and the “mask of hypocrisy.” He affirms that vice in general
is nowhere more predominant than where arts and sciences flourish, and
that we shall find innocence and honesty nowhere more widely diffused
than among the most illiterate, the “poor silly country people.” “Would
you banish fraud and luxury? Break down the printing-presses and burn
all the books in the Island, except those at the Universities where
they remain unmolested.”
What is being weakened by the realism of Mandeville, as well as by the
idealism of Shaftesbury, is the sense of the inner life. And by the
inner life, I mean the recognition in some form or other of a force in
man that moves in an opposite direction from the outer impressions and
expansive desires that together make up his ordinary or temperamental
self. The decisive victories of both rationalistic and emotional ethics
over the traditional dualism were won in the eighteenth century. At
the same time, we must not forget that we have to do with the final
stages of a secular process. The political reflex of this process is
the passage from a Europe that was unified in theory, and to some
extent in practice, by the Roman theocracy to a Europe made up of great
territorial nationalities governed in their relations to one another
by international law. As conceived by Grotius, international law rests
largely upon naturalistic foundations. The publication of his work was
followed in a few years by recognition of the new Europe in the Peace
of Westphalia (1648). Within the bounds of each separate nationality,
the essential aspect of this secular process is the passage from divine
right to popular right, from the sovereignty of God to the sovereignty
of the people. In the long period of transition, supernaturalist and
naturalistic views are blended in almost every possible proportion.
For example, Protestants, especially the Calvinists, and Catholics,
especially the Jesuits, borrowed naturalistic concepts such as a state
of nature, natural rights, and the social compact, but only that they
might affirm more effectively the principle of divine sovereignty, with
its theocratic implications, in the spiritual order.
Some, to be sure, saw the danger of thus making secular power seem to
receive its sanction, not from above, but from below. Thus Filmer says
in his “Patriarcha”: “Late writers have taken up too much upon trust
from the subtle schoolmen who, to be sure to thrust down the king below
the Pope, thought it the safest course to advance the people above the
king.” A doctrine that was opposed to Jesuitical encroachments of this
kind, and played an important rôle in the rise of nationalism, was
that of the divine right of kings and of passive obedience. The strict
subordination of the spiritual to the temporal power, urged by Erastus,
had been encouraged by Luther himself. And Luther’s own attitude was
related to that of mediæval theorists like Occam, who had sought to
exalt the Emperor and depress the Pope. The monarchs, however, to whom
the Lutheran inclined to give jurisdiction in matters religious (_cujus
regio, ejus religio_), were not like the Emperor universal; they ruled
by hereditary right over certain limited territories. The theocratic
state of Calvin again is related to the mediæval theory that exalted
the Pope at the expense of the Emperor; but here also there is lacking
the element of universality. Practically both the Lutheran and the
Calvinistic state tend to run together the things of God and the things
of Cæsar, and to leave the individual without any _civitas dei_ in
which he may take refuge from the secular power. There is, then, this
justification for the opinion of those who look upon Protestantism in
all its forms as only an incident in the rise of nationalism.
A defence of divine right that should receive attention as an example,
though a very imperfect one, of an important type of political
thinking, is the work of Filmer I have just mentioned: “Patriarcha,
or the Natural Power of Kings” (1680). The arguments in favor of the
patriarchal view of government have indeed never been adequately set
forth in the Occident. In spite of all that has been urged by Aristotle
and others, we must, if we go by the actual experience of mankind,
conclude that the patriarchal conception has enormous elements of
strength. It has been the normal conception of great portions of the
human race over long periods of time. Such a study as that of Fustel de
Coulanges on the Greek and Roman city-state, and its derivation from
the religion of the family, aids us to understand political and social
institutions that still survive in countries like China and Japan.
Unfortunately, Filmer does not apply an adequate psychological analysis
to the patriarchal conception and uncover its deep roots in the
actual facts of human nature. He is at once too naturalistic and too
theological. By his very sub-title, he proclaims that the patriarchal
power is “natural,” and, at the same time, he seeks by somewhat
grotesque speculations to prove that the actual power of kings is based
on their direct descent from Adam.
Filmer seems to have missed the point seriously in seeking to show that
the basis of patriarchal and royal power is natural. A more powerful
and consistent champion of divine right is Bossuet in his “Politique
tirée de l’Ecriture Sainte” (1709). He asserts, indeed, that all laws
are founded on the first of all laws, that of nature, conceived as
a law of equity and right reason. But in general he opposes to the
oncoming naturalistic tide a thoroughgoing supernaturalism. Men are
born, not free and equal, but subjects, first of all to their parents.
Parental authority itself is the image of that of God, who is the only
absolute sovereign. Parental authority serves, in turn, as a model for
that of the king. The king’s power does not depend upon the consent and
acquiescence of his people. It is independent of the Pope. But though
absolute, it is not arbitrary; for it is controlled from above. Bossuet
exalts the monarch in the secular order only to humble him in the
sight of God and to lay upon him the weight of an almost intolerable
responsibility. “Behold,” he says, “an immense people brought together
in a single person, behold this sacred, paternal, and absolute power;
behold the secret reason which governs all this body of the State. You
see the image of God in kings and gain from them the idea of royal
majesty. And so, oh kings, exercise your power boldly; for it is
divine and salutary to mankind; but exercise it with humility. It is
laid upon you from without. At bottom it leaves you weak, it leaves you
mortal, it leaves you sinful; and burdens you in God’s sight with a
heavier reckoning.” Kings, after all, he goes on to say, are but gods
of flesh and blood, of clay and dust. Earthly grandeur may separate
men for a moment, but they are all made equal at the end by the common
catastrophe of death.
This exercise of the royal office in humble subordination to God was
scarcely achieved even by a Saint Louis. As for Louis XIV, one is
tempted to say that he took to himself the first part of Bossuet’s
doctrine (_l’état c’est moi_) and overlooked the humility. Bossuet, in
asserting the immediate derivation of the royal power from God, goes
back, like other champions of divine right, to the mediæval theorists
of the Empire. But there was only one Emperor whose sway was supposed
to be universal, whereas there were a number of kings equally absolute
in their pretensions, ruling by hereditary right over great territorial
nationalities, and clashing, not merely in their secular ambitions, but
also, as a result of the Reformation, in their religion. Practically
the rulers of these nationalities were in the state of nature with
reference to one another, whatever one may conceive the state of nature
to be. Bossuet pushed his love of unity to the point of encouraging
religious persecution, as manifested, for example, in the Revocation
of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Yet his doctrine not only failed to
provide an adequate offset to a centrifugal nationalism, it seemed by
its insistence on the liberties of the French king and clergy (_les
libertés gallicanes_) to make against unity in the Church.
In asserting the Gallican liberties, Louis XIV and Bossuet were
setting themselves against the main trend of the Church since the
later Middle Ages. The fourth article of the Declaration of the French
clergy, made in 1682 and subscribed by Bossuet, declares that the
judgment of the Pope is not definitive without the consent of the
Church. But this type of limited and constitutional Catholicism had
been compromised by the breakdown of the conciliar movement. Every
significant change from that day to this has been in the direction of
greater papal centralization. The theorist of this ultramontane type
of Catholicism and the enemy of Bossuet and Louis XIV is Joseph de
Maistre. His book on the Pope (1819) looks forward to the final triumph
of the doctrine of papal infallibility in the Vatican Council (1870).
A main element in Christianity from a fairly early period is what one
may term Roman imperialistic organization. This element de Maistre
develops into a thoroughgoing papal imperialism. The supreme ruler by
divine right is the Pope. Temporal rulers, so far as they profess to
be Catholic, should recognize his hegemony. This conception of rigid
outer authority de Maistre proceeds to establish on the ruins of every
type of individualism. In contrast to Bossuet, who was in the great
central Christian tradition, so much so that one is tempted to call
him the last of the fathers of the Church, de Maistre, though a man of
admirable character, reveals in his writings little sense of the inner
life, not much more, it might be maintained, than the rationalists of
the eighteenth century whom he was assailing. The subordination of the
true Christian is based on humility and charity. The subordination at
which de Maistre aims is primarily social. The chief need of society is
order, and order, as de Maistre conceives it, must be achieved largely
by fear and repression. The ultimate support of the whole social
structure, as he tells us in a celebrated chapter, is the executioner.
He champions the agencies of the Church that are most frankly
ultramontane and anti-individualistic--the Index, the Inquisition, and
the Jesuits.
Bossuet pushes the doctrine of the divine right of kings about as far
as it will go, and no one is ever likely to go beyond de Maistre in
asserting the divine right of the Pope. The reply to the absolute and
unlimited sovereignty, whether of Pope or King, based on divine right,
was the assertion of the absolute and unlimited sovereignty of the
people, based on natural right. The doctrine of popular sovereignty is
found even in the Middle Ages, notably in Marsilius of Padua, and at
the beginning of the seventeenth century is worked out along rather
radical lines by Althusius. Practically, however, the most important
precursor of Rousseau in the development of this doctrine is Locke.
The first of his two “Treatises of Government” (1690) has lost its
interest along with the special form of the doctrine of divine right
that he sets out to refute, that of Filmer’s “Patriarcha”; the second
Treatise, however, remains a chief landmark of political thinking. To
understand this work in its derivation, one needs to go back to the
contrast between nature and convention established by the early Greek
thinkers, and to the conception of a law of nature that grew out of
this contrast, largely under Stoical influence, and became embodied
in Roman law; finally one needs to trace through the centuries the
process by which the Roman juristic conception finally became, in
writers like Locke, the doctrine of the rights of man. The doctrine of
natural rights, as maintained by Locke, looks forward to the American
Revolution, and, as modified by Rousseau, to the French Revolution.
Locke has to defend natural right not merely against the partisans of
royal prerogative, but also against Machiavellian realists like Hobbes.
For Hobbes, the state of nature is liberty, equality, and war. He
would, therefore, in the interests of peace have the individual enter
into a contract by which he renounces once and for all his liberty or
unlimited sovereignty over his own person, and enjoy equality under
a despot. For Locke, on the other hand, though he has an occasional
primitivistic touch, the state of nature is liberty, equality, and
reason. It is “a state of peace, good-will, mutual assistance, and
preservation.”[13] In fact the law of nature is identical with the will
of God[14] (or, as Pope was to say a little later, “The state of nature
was the reign of God”). Locke, indeed, so runs together the spiritual
and the temporal order that he speaks of an “appeal to heaven” when he
means an appeal to force. He recognizes, however, certain disadvantages
in the state of nature, especially in its bearing upon the safety of
private property. If property is to be fully secured, men need in
addition to the natural law a positive law to be administered by
impartial judges who require in turn the force of an organized state
to give their decisions due execution. The first aim, therefore, of
the contract by which men substitute a settled government for the
state of nature, is to secure the common good, which is taken to be
identical with the protection of property. The source of property
itself, and this is a point of extreme importance to which I shall need
to return later, is manual labor. The will of the people, conceived
as the will of the majority, is to be supreme. This will, however, is
to be expressed not directly but through the legislative, which as
the organ of the popular will is to dominate both the executive and
the judiciary. Practically, Locke’s treatise reflects the upshot of
the revolution of 1688, the transfer, namely, of the final power of
the State from the King to Parliament. The legislative is especially
vigilant in its control over the executive in all that relates to the
common interest, that is, the safety of property. (Taxation without
representation is tyranny).
Even a theorist of divine right like Bossuet admits the danger of an
uncontrolled executive. “Let us candidly confess,” he says, “that there
is no temptation equal to that of power, nor aught more difficult
than to refuse yourself anything when men grant you everything, and
think only of forestalling or even of stimulating your desires.” As
for Locke, he does not even deem it worth while to reply to those who
maintain that a ruler, though not limited by men, may be limited by his
responsibility to what is above him. For him, a king is in a state of
nature not only with reference to other kings, but with reference to
his own subjects; and being thus unrestrained he is at the same time
corrupted with flattery and armed with power. Though Locke is thus on
his guard against an uncontrolled royal will, it is hard to see that
he has taken any precautions against the opposite danger. However
moderately he himself may interpret the sovereignty of the people, it
is not easy to discover in his theory anything that will prevent this
sovereignty from developing into a new absolutism. The people exercises
not only legal control over its legislators, but has the right, if they
seem to be acting contrary to the people’s interest, to rise up against
them in insurrection. In the final analysis, the only check to the
evils of an unlimited democracy will be found to be the recognition in
some form of the aristocratic principle. Such a recognition is entirely
lacking in Locke. The very logic of natural rights runs counter to the
idea of deference and subordination, at least on any other basis than
that of force. In the state of nature, says Locke all men are equally
kings, and subject to nobody; and this equality does not suffer serious
diminution as the result of the social contract. Locke simply dodges
the political problem that seems so important to an Aristotle and a
Confucius, namely, the problem of leadership. It is characteristic of
the English that the radical and equalitarian side of Locke should be
slow to develop. The Revolution of 1688, of which he is the theorist,
gave the control of government to an oligarchy that owed its power
and prestige to the survival of the traditional subordinations. The
difficulties of the Whig position, that of carrying on government by
an aristocracy that lacks doctrinal justification, became manifest in
time. This aristocracy virtually abdicated at the time of the Reform
Bill (1832). The full results of the movement that was getting under
way in the time of Locke are becoming apparent in our own day. The
people, especially the people of the great urban centres, no longer
look up with respect to representatives who are themselves so imbued
with the utilitarian temper encouraged by Locke that they have perhaps
ceased to be worthy of respect. If the aristocratic principle continues
to give way to the equalitarian denial of the need of leadership,
parliamentary government may ultimately become impossible.
It is Locke’s aim to deal with human nature in a more empirical or
experimental way than his philosophical predecessors. At the same
time he has a strongly rationalistic side that reveals the Cartesian
influence. By their assertion of a “reason” in man that can prevail
unaided over the imagination and expansive desires, both Locke and
Descartes renew the Stoical position. The counter-assertion of Pascal
that unaided reason cannot win any such easy victory, that on the
contrary “imagination rules everything,” seems nearer to the observed
facts, and, therefore, more truly experimental. According to Locke,
imagination becomes embodied in customs and traditions that may from
the point of view of reason be dismissed as mere prejudice. By the
opposition that he thus establishes between reason and prejudice,
Locke becomes, along with Descartes, a main influence on the period of
European culture known as the Enlightenment. Although no one perhaps
did more for Locke’s French and European influence in general than
Voltaire, in the field of political theory, on the other hand, this
influence is perhaps best studied in Montesquieu.[15] Like Locke,
he stands for parliamentary control of the executive, especially in
all that relates to taxation and the initiation of money bills. He
tends, however, to separate more sharply than Locke the legislative,
the judiciary, and the executive, and to make the judiciary and the
executive more independent of the legislative, in such wise that the
different functions of government may serve as a system of checks
and balances upon one another. As is well known, it was this side of
Montesquieu that was most influential on early American political
theory. At the same time, only an unfriendly critic will see in the
framers of the American Constitution pure disciples of Montesquieu.
They possessed in a marked degree something that can scarcely be
claimed for Montesquieu--practical sagacity. Compared with the
political views of a Machiavelli those of Montesquieu have about them
an atmosphere of unreality; so much so that even the angelic Joubert
said that one might learn more of the art of government from a page
of Machiavelli than from a volume of Montesquieu. Moreover, our own
constitutional statesmen did not for the most part share Montesquieu’s
general philosophy. This philosophy as it appears in “L’Esprit des
Lois” (1748) suffers from certain inconsistencies, but on the whole it
shows, even when compared with that of Locke, a noteworthy advance in
the direction of a pure naturalism. The theological has given way still
further to the sociological point of view, so much so that Montesquieu
has been regarded by some as the founder of sociology. “He is the least
religious spirit that ever was,” says Faguet; and in truth he reveals
an almost total lack of sense of the values of the inner life. To be
genuinely religious or humanistic, one must assert whether in the form
of divine grace or of free moral choice, a power in the heart of the
individual that may lift him above physical nature. In the three main
forms of government that he recognizes--monarchical, republican, and
despotic--Montesquieu gives little weight to any such specifically
human factor. Though he does lip-service to Christianity, he leans
towards determinism and the empire of physical causes, putting special
stress, as is well known, on the relation between climate and national
character. His insistence, therefore, that laws must not be regarded
as anything absolute, but must coincide in their general spirit with
national character, is very different from the Aristotelian emphasis
on ethos. For though Aristotle recognizes the influence of climate,
he is on the whole less concerned with what nature makes of man than
with what man makes of himself. In Montesquieu’s view, even religion is
largely a matter of climate. Climate determines the parts of the world
that are to be Mohammedan or Christian,[16] and within Christianity
itself those that are to be Protestant or Catholic.[17] “Good sense”
is likewise, it would seem, a matter of climate.[18] This naturalistic
relativism implies a revolution in the very basis of ethics. As a
matter of fact, Montesquieu has the grace to warn us that he is not
using a word like virtue in the traditional meaning. “What I call
virtue in a republic,” he says, “is not a moral or Christian virtue,
it is the love of country, that is to say, the love of equality.” He
develops admirably the thesis that this republican love of equality
must not be pushed to a point where it becomes incompatible with the
necessary subordinations. The obvious reply of a Bossuet would be that
if subordination is to rest on any other principle than force, it
must imply the submission of man’s ordinary will to some higher will,
it must in other words be ultimately rooted in humility. To be sure,
Montesquieu seems at times to recognize the relation between republican
virtue and religious control. He says in a celebrated sentence: “Rome
était un vaisseau tenu par deux ancres dans la tempête--la religion et
les mœurs.” With the decay of this traditional ethos, luxury increased
and liberty declined.[19]
Montesquieu conceives in an external and formalistic fashion the honor
that is the informing principle of monarchy. It has little to do
with virtue either as he defines it or as it has been traditionally
understood. His treatment of this form of the aristocratic principle,
however faithfully it may reflect what aristocracy had actually become
in the age of Louis XV, can scarcely be said to do justice to the
implications of the maxim _noblesse oblige_. In the humanistic poise
that the gentleman (_honnête homme_) sought to combine with the cult
of honor, he discovers little more than a veneer of politeness that
dissimulates the scramble of courtiers for the royal favor.
Since laws and governments, according to Montesquieu, are relative,
and relative chiefly to physical causes, one might suppose that not
much is to be gained from human interference with the working of these
causes. As a matter of fact, there is another side of Montesquieu
that suggests that though man cannot modify himself from within along
humanistic or religious lines, he may be modified from without not
merely by climate but by institutions; and that these institutions may
be of a more or less progressive character. He displays, in short, the
usual confidence of the man of the Enlightenment in the final triumph
of reason over prejudice. His influence can be traced on those persons,
especially numerous towards the end of the eighteenth century, who
hoped to renovate society by an ingenious manipulation of political
machinery, and who had an almost unlimited faith in the efficacy of
paper constitutions.
I have just used the word progressive. As a matter of fact, the idea of
progress, which was to give its distinctive note to modern naturalism,
was just taking definite shape in the time of Montesquieu. Only the
barest beginnings of this idea can be found in the naturalism, whether
Stoic or Epicurean, of ancient Greece and Rome. The idea of progress
has its ultimate source in the first triumphs of scientific method in
the Renaissance. In its early English form, it is associated with the
Baconian influence and the founding of the Royal Society (1662), and
tends to be practical and empirical. In its early French form, it is
associated with the Cartesian influence, and tends to be more abstract
and logical. The Baconian and Cartesian currents come together in the
eighteenth century, especially in France. The result is an ever-growing
confidence in human perfectibility. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre is already
a fairly complete specimen of what one may term the professional
philanthropist. Diderot and other Encyclopædists set out deliberately
to substitute the Baconian kingdom of man for the traditional kingdom
of God. At the same time, the new doctrine did not have all that it
needed if it was to develop into what has been, for several generations
past, the true religion of the Occident--the religion of humanity.
The movement thus far had been predominantly rationalistic. Its main
achievement had been to develop, largely on Cartesian lines, the idea
of universal mechanism, and to oppose nature, conceived as a system
of constant and inflexible laws, to the providential interference
with natural law that had been asserted, in some form or other, by
the older dualists. A Christian supernaturalist like Bossuet was,
therefore, justified from his own point of view in putting at the very
centre of his defence of religion against naturalistic tendency the
idea of Providence. The substitution of the idea of law for Providence
is not in itself, from the point of view of the strict positivist, a
chimerical undertaking.[20] But in that case one would have needed,
if the truths of the inner life were to be retained, to assert two
laws--a law for man as well as a law for thing. The whole point of
the new movement, however, was that it did nothing of the kind. It
sought to bring both the natural and the human order under one law,
and then, following the lead of Descartes, to reduce this one law
to mathematical and mechanical formulæ. To be sure, in the deistic
movement, an important intermediary stage in the passage from the older
dualism to modern monistic conceptions, the idea of Providence is still
retained after a fashion. This deistic Providence, however, acts not
immediately, as in true Christianity, but mediately through the laws of
nature, which Providence was deemed, therefore, to have contrived with
a special view to man’s benefit. Hence the emphasis that most deists
put on the doctrine of final causes, and their consternation at an
event like the Lisbon earthquake which scarcely seemed to square with
their theory of a Providence that worked for man’s good through the
natural order.
The deistic movement, and indeed, as I have already said, the whole
naturalistic movement from the Renaissance down, had been thus far
predominantly rationalistic. Now it has been a constant experience
of man in all ages that mere rationalism leaves him unsatisfied. Man
craves in some sense or other of the word an enthusiasm that will
lift him out of his merely rational self. Even Voltaire, perhaps the
outstanding figure of the Enlightenment, declared that illusion is
the queen of the human heart. In the field of political thought, the
conception of the rights of man remained comparatively inert as long
as these rights were derived from a hypothetical state of nature
merely by a process of abstract reasoning. “Cold reason,” as Rousseau
declared, “has never done anything illustrious.” Rousseau had many
precursors, as appears from what I have already said about the English
background, yet it was he who more than any other one person put
behind the doctrine of the rights of man the imaginative and emotional
driving power it still lacked, and at the same time supplied the
missing elements to the religion of humanity. Among those who took
up the defence of the traditional order against Rousseau, Burke is
easily first, because he too perceived in his own way the truth that
cold reason has never done anything illustrious. He saw that the only
conservatism that counts is an imaginative conservatism. One may,
therefore, without being fanciful, regard the battle that has been
in progress in the field of political thought since the end of the
eighteenth century as being in its most significant phase a battle
between the spirit of Burke and that of Rousseau. And this opposition
between Burke and Rousseau will itself be found to turn, in the last
analysis, on the opposition between two different types of imagination.
CHAPTER II
ROUSSEAU AND THE IDYLLIC IMAGINATION
The period that extends from the Renaissance to the eighteenth
century was, as I have indicated in my first chapter, marked by the
progressive emancipation of the individual from outer authority and
the supernatural beliefs that this authority sought to impose. The
individual did not use his new liberty to work out some critical
equivalent of traditional religion; on the contrary he became
increasingly naturalistic. At the same time he often indulged in
theories of government that were at the opposite pole from those of
Machiavelli, the typical political naturalist. This is because certain
virtues were associated more and more with “nature,” virtues that the
past had deemed the hard-won fruit not merely of humanistic but of
religious discipline. If the legitimacy of this association could be
established, the Aristotelian generalization with which I started as
to the necessary relation between ethos and government would evidently
have to be abandoned. Before deserting Aristotle, however, we may do
well to consider whether some sophistry does not lurk in what came to
be the popular interpretation of the “state of nature.”
The notion of a state of nature and of a law of nature antecedent
to positive law and organized society is, as we have seen, nothing
new. It emerges in classical antiquity, especially among the Stoics,
and survives throughout the Middle Ages, largely as a result of the
infiltration of the Stoical influence into Roman law. It is reinforced
again, as I have said, by the direct return of the Renaissance to
the Stoical[21] and other ancient sources. Moreover, one may find as
early as the Church Fathers a tendency to identify the supposed state
of nature with the state of man before the Fall and then to give to
this state a communistic coloring, and at the same time to associate
with man’s lapse from innocence the rise of private property.[22]
Though the law of nature was conceived to be in its own way divine,
its authority was after all not to be compared with that of the divine
law of which one secured knowledge through revelation. As long as one
held to this positive form of God’s law, one’s assertion of a state of
nature was sure to be tempered by a lively conviction of the survival
in man of the “old Adam.” Hooker, for example, whose “Ecclesiastical
Polity” appeared in 1592, looks forward in many of his ideas about
natural law to Locke. But though asserting this law he declares:
“Laws politic, ordained for external order and regimen among men, are
never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to
be obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience to the sacred
laws of his nature; in a word, unless presuming man to be in regard
of his depraved mind, little better than a wild beast.” In the period
between Hooker and Locke, the conviction of man’s depravity undergoes
a notable diminution. Grotius already affirms that, even if there
were no God and no positive revelation, man might be guided aright in
matters political by the law of nature conceived as a law of right
reason. Along with this glorification of reason, one should note
as far back as the sixteenth century an incipient glorification of
instinct that was later to culminate, in one of its most characteristic
expressions, in the cult of the noble savage. It is only, however,
with the early eighteenth century that the glorification of instinct
takes on so distinctly emotional a cast as to affect the very basis of
ethics. Shaftesbury’s doctrine of the “moral sense” and the instinctive
goodness it implies had wide and immediate popularity. For example,
Sir John Hawkins says in his “Life of Johnson”: “His [Fielding’s]
morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections,
in contradiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that of
Lord Shaftesbury vulgarized. He was the inventor of that cant-phrase,
‘goodness of heart,’ which is every day used as a substitute for
probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog.”
Not only Shaftesbury, the optimistic naturalist, but the naturalistic
cynic, Mandeville, prepared the way, as I have already said, for the
emotional ethics of Rousseau. According to Rousseau, the state of
nature is not a state of reason. On the contrary, the man who thinks
is already highly sophisticated, or, in Rousseau’s phrase, “a depraved
animal.” According to him, man in the state of nature is isolated and
at the same time dominated by instinct. These isolated units will
not, however, as Hobbes averred, be so dominated by the instinct of
self-love as to make war on one another. Natural man has another
instinct, namely, an instinctive dislike of seeing his fellow creatures
suffer, which is alone a sufficient counterpoise to the love of self.
From the concourse and combination of these two principles--love of
self and instinctive pity--Rousseau seeks to derive all the rules of
natural right. “Even the most outrageous detractor of human virtue”
(that is, Mandeville), says Rousseau, “was forced to admit natural
pity, though he did not see that from this quality alone derive all
the social virtues--generosity, clemency, humanity, benevolence, and
friendship itself--that he seeks to deny men.” Indeed, if one considers
unsophisticated man, man subject, that is, only to the primordial
instincts of pity and love of self, one must conclude that he is “the
most virtuous who offers the least resistance to the simple impulses of
nature.” According to Schopenhauer,[23] it was the glorious achievement
of Rousseau to transform morality by thus basing it upon pity. A
result of this achievement that should be noted is the modification,
apparent in the sentence I have just quoted, in the meaning of such
words as virtue. The more, indeed, one studies the eighteenth century,
the plainer it becomes that all other modern revolutions were preceded
at about that time by a revolution in the dictionary. For a fuller
understanding of Rousseau’s recoining of the word virtue, one needs
to turn back for a moment to the “First Discourse” (1750). He there
asserts the incompatibility between virtue and the refinement and
luxury that seem to him to result necessarily from a cultivation of
the arts and sciences. In his account of the undermining of Rome and
other great states by the invasion of luxury, he uses by actual count
the word virtue forty-three times. But one is not to suppose that in
his solution of the problem of luxury that so preoccupied his age he is
really seeking to recover the virtue of a Fabricius or a Lycurgus or a
Calvin. What he opposes to luxury is rather a return to nature and the
simple life--and the simple life, as he conceives it, is to be very
simple indeed.[24] His virtue is a glorification of the instinctive
and the subrational. So that Joubert was justified from his own point
of view in saying that Rousseau had destroyed wisdom in men’s souls by
talking to them about virtue.
Though the virtue of the “First Discourse” is distinctly primitivistic,
it received an essential addition in the “Second Discourse” by being
associated with the idea of pity. The state of nature for Hobbes, as
we have seen, meant liberty, equality, and war; for Locke, liberty,
equality, and reason. On the contrary, says Rousseau, both war and
reason are the result of social sophistication. The true state of
nature is liberty, equality, and fraternal pity. By his refutation of
Hobbes, and his substitution of fraternity for reason, Rousseau gave to
naturalism the driving power it still lacked. It thus became possible
to develop it into a new evangel that seemed to culminate, like the
old Evangel, in love. This conception of love in terms of expansive
emotion is, as I have already said, a sort of parody of Christian
charity.
In the state of nature all men are, it would seem, equally capable of
pity. But in actual society the emphasis on pity leads to the setting
up of a sort of inverted hierarchy. Just as in Christianity a man’s
spiritual rank is determined by his nearness to God, which is revealed
in turn by the ardor of his charity, so in the new evangel man is to
be rated by his nearness to nature, which is revealed in turn by the
warmth of his commiseration. Now it is in the man of the plain people
that the lively native impulse is least sicklied o’er by the pale cast
of thought. “Love had he found in huts where poor men lie.” As one
ascends in the social scale, love diminishes, and as one approaches the
top, it gives way to its opposite. As for the rich, Rousseau compares
them to “ravening wolves, who having once tasted human flesh, refuse
every other food, and henceforth desire to devour only men.”
Rousseau is, as a matter of fact, busy in creating a new set of myths
that have, in their control of the human imagination, succeeded in
no small measure to the old theology. Just as in the old theology
everything hinged on man’s fall from God, so in Rousseau everything
hinges on man’s fall from nature. The first and decisive step in this
fall and the source of social evils was, according to Rousseau’s
familiar account, the invention of private property in the form
of property in land. With the invention of property, “equality
disappeared.” “Work became necessary, and the vast forests were
changed to smiling fields that had to be watered with the sweat of
men, in which slavery and wretchedness were soon seen to spring up and
grow with the crops.” Misery, in short, is the result of industry.
What evidently underlies the mythology that Rousseau is thus creating
is a new dualism. The old dualism put the conflict between good and
evil in the breast of the individual, with evil so predominant since
the Fall that it behooves man to be humble; with Rousseau this conflict
is transferred from the individual to society. That there is some
survival of the older dualism in Rousseau is beyond question; but it
is equally beyond question that the actual influence of his work has
been almost entirely associated with the new dualism. He himself saw in
this new dualism the essence of the apocalyptic vision that came to him
under the tree by the roadside on his walk to Vincennes. The guiding
principle of his writings, he says, is to show that vice and error,
strangers to man’s constitution, are introduced from without, that they
are due in short to his institutions. Now institutions mean in practice
those who administer them. A small group at the top of the artificial
hierarchy, kings and priests and capitalists, sit on the lid, as it
were, and keep man’s native goodness (as in Shelley’s “Prometheus
Unbound”) from gushing forth torrentially. The fault in any case is not
“Nature’s”;
Nature! No!
Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower
Even in its tender bud; their influence darts
Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins
Of desolate society.
Whence this strange dualism arose, “how George III and Paley and Lord
Eldon came to possess an existence independent of Nature, and acquired
the power of turning all her good purposes to nought,” is, as Leslie
Stephen remarks of Shelley, “one of those questions which we can hardly
refrain from asking.” A similar question arises regarding the dualism
of Rousseau. Most people, however, have not been inclined to subject
the myth of natural goodness to any such indiscreet scrutiny. It is not
only very flattering in itself; it seems to offer a convenient avenue
of escape from the theological nightmare. Above all it flattered those
at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Christianity at its best has
sought to make the rich man humble, whereas the inevitable effect of
the Rousseauistic evangel is to make the poor man proud, and at the
same time to make him feel that he is the victim of a conspiracy. The
establishment of society and laws made it possible to change “an adroit
usurpation into an irrevocable right, and for the profit of a few
ambitious persons subjected henceforth the whole of human kind to toil,
servitude, and wretchedness.” One need scarcely be surprised that this
and similar passages of the “Second Discourse” should still be a direct
source of inspiration to the bomb-throwing anarchist.[25] What one
hears throughout this treatise, as elsewhere in Rousseau, is the voice
of the angry and envious plebeian, who in the name of love is actually
fomenting hatred and class warfare. “What was hardest to destroy in
me,” we read in “Emile,” “was a proud misanthropy, a certain acrimony
against the rich and happy of the world as though they were so at my
expense, as though their alleged happiness had been usurped from mine.”
The crusader against social inequalities on Rousseauistic lines may
easily become not merely an enthusiast but a fanatic. This emancipation
of feeling seems at first sight the essential aspect of Rousseau’s
interpretation of nature. Instead of the rationalistic and mechanical
nature of the Cartesian, nature is spontaneity, in the sense of
an expansive and even an explosive emotionalism. “I threw reason
overboard,” says Rousseau himself, “and consulted nature, that is to
say the inner sentiment which directs my belief independently of my
reason.” But on closer examination one discovers that there is in
Rousseau something even more fundamental than his emotionalism, and
that is his special quality of imagination. In order to make this
point clear, we need to consider with some care the contrast between
the natural and the artificial that he establishes in his “Second
Discourse.” His method in reaching this contrast is similar in some
respects to that of the modern evolutionist. Instead of having us look
forward to ends, as Aristotle urges, if we are to understand man’s
nature, he would, like the evolutionist, have us grope our way back to
beginnings. The change from primitive to civilized man is presented
as a slow development with certain intermediary stages, each one of
which Rousseau supposes to have consumed “thousands of centuries.”
This portrayal of the evolution of mankind as a whole through various
stages aided, one may note in passing, the efflorescence in Germany
of numerous philosophies of history.[26] Rousseau’s nature, however,
is in one particular violently at variance with the nature of most of
the philosophers of history and with that of all the evolutionists.
Though the evolutionist is only too prone to whisk us off into some
prehistoric period where he is free to indulge in airy hypothesis,
he does not see in nature at any stage of the evolutionary process a
source of pity. By his attribution of pity to the state of nature,
Rousseau has indeed gone far to justify the sentence with which he
opens his discussion of this state in the “Second Discourse”: “Let
us begin by setting aside all the facts.” The key to Rousseau’s
nature, and also to what has passed for the ideal with innumerable
Rousseauists, is found in his declaration that, not being able to
discover men to his liking in the real world, he built up for himself
a “golden age of phantasy.”[27] His nature is in short what I have
described elsewhere as a projection of the idyllic imagination.
Faguet complains that the image Rousseau has left on the mind of the
public is that of a gentleman up in a cherry tree tossing down cherries
to two maidens below (incident of Mesdemoiselles Galley and Graffenried
in the “Confessions”). Perhaps the public is not so far wrong after
all as to Rousseau’s essential attitude. One can scarcely go through
Rousseau’s writings without being struck by the number of variants he
has given of the pastoral theme. Let no one suppose that it is a small
matter to be, like Rousseau, richly and spontaneously imaginative in
this idyllic fashion. Perhaps no human trait is more universal than the
longing for some golden age or land of heart’s desire. This longing has
not only inspired a large proportion of the art and literature of the
world, but has found its way into philosophy and religion. The idyllic
element is unmistakably present in the story of the Garden of Eden;
the Song of Solomon is described by Milton as a “divine pastoral”; the
millennial yearnings of the early Christians are not unrelated to the
same type of imagination. The Krishna of the Bhagavadgîtâ is not in the
least pastoral, but in the picture that often serves as frontispiece to
Indian editions of this poem, Krishna appears with the pastoral flute
and kine, surrounded by the _gopis_ or shepherdesses.
What concerns us here is the relation of this type of imagination to
modern political idealism. The agitator makes his chief appeal to it
when he stirs the multitude by his pictures of the felicity that is
to supervene upon the destruction of the existing social order. The
English painter, Edward Lear, relates that in the year of revolution,
1848, he was staying in a Sicilian town. He left the town for some
weeks and locked up his pictures and other things in a room, leaving
the key with the hotel-keeper. A revolution had just broken out when
he returned, and he found the waiters full of Chianti and patriotic
fervor. He ventured to ask one of them for the key of his room that
he might get his clothes. The waiter utterly refused to be led from
his dreams of a golden age to such details of daily life. “There isn’t
any longer any key or room or clothes,” he exclaimed indignantly.
“Everything is love and liberty. _O che bella rivoluzione!_”[28]
Unfortunately when the real refuses to vanish in favor of the ideal, it
is easy to persuade the simple-minded that the failure is due not to
the ideal itself, but to some conspiracy. In speaking of one of these
childlike disciples of Rousseau, Anatole France says that it was his
misfortune to have carried into the profession of cook to which fate
had condemned him an Elysian soul intended for the golden age. He had
been led to the most savage ferocity by the tenderest optimism. As
Anatole France adds, when one starts with the supposition that men are
naturally good and virtuous, one inevitably ends by wishing to kill
them all. What is remarkable about the period since the eighteenth
century is the extent to which not merely the rank and file, but
the leaders have followed the lure of the idyllic imagination. Thus
Schiller exalts the idyll to the first places in literature, and
associates it with the ideal. Elsewhere I have tried to show that the
idyll does not deserve any such rank in literature. It would seem even
more open to suspicion as a basis for political action. Lincoln writes
to his friend Speed: “I have no doubt it is the peculiar misfortune
of both you and me to dream dreams of Elysium far exceeding all that
anything earthly can realize.” Lincoln was in these Elysian yearnings,
as in other respects, very human. He was not, however, Elysian in his
actual statesmanship.
Later in this book we shall study more in detail various persons who,
unlike Lincoln, have carried over the idyllic type of “vision” into
the field of politics and economics. All that I wish to show now
is that, in the case of Rousseau himself, even his sensibility is
subject to his imagination, inasmuch as this imagination conjures up
the Arcadian state that he terms “nature,” towards which his emotions
expand so freely. But to present Rousseau merely as an idyllic and
emotional dreamer, it may be urged, is to forget that part of his
writings, the “Social Contract,” for instance, in which he shows
himself severely and coldly logical. The occasional severity of
Rousseau’s logic one may grant, but its coldness is another matter.
Starting from the premise of a fictitious state of nature, it leads
to conclusions that justify emotional revolt against everything
established, that are indeed enough to make “the very stones of Rome
to rise and mutiny.” If the subjects of a despot, for example (every
king in Europe was a despot according to the logic of the “Social
Contract”), seem to enjoy domestic tranquillity, it is merely, says
Rousseau, the tranquillity of the companions of Ulysses in the den of
the Cyclops, waiting their turn to be devoured. Rousseau’s logic has
been compared in its relation to his emotions to a henpecked husband,
who keeps up a brave outer show of independence while actually doing
his wife’s bidding. Moreover, another end is accomplished by Rousseau’s
display of logical rigor. The man at the bottom of the existing social
order is flattered by being told that he is more virtuous, more fully
possessed, in other words, of the spontaneous goodness of the state
of nature than the man at the top. But, however ready he may be to
believe that he is superior in feeling, he does not after all like
to look upon himself as incapable of thought. The multitude, says
Aristotle, cannot make distinctions. Rousseau’s logic is so contrived
as to give to the multitude at least the illusion that it _can_ make
distinctions. He owes no small part of his amazing influence to his
flattery of the popular head as well as of the popular heart. As Taine
writes in a letter to W. S. Lilly: “What gives extraordinary power to
the ideas of Rousseau is above all the simplicity of the conception. As
a matter of fact, the political reasoning that it produces is as easy
as the rule of three. How are you to prove to this man that he does not
understand, that the notion of the State is one of the most difficult
to form, that political reasoning is beyond his grasp? You would insult
him. He cannot admit even as possible a thing so preposterous: and his
self-love is sufficient to blind his good sense.”
Thus far I have been dealing with the Rousseau who has actually moved
the world--the Rousseau whose feelings fly out towards the vision
conjured up by his imagination, and whose logic is in turn pressed
into the service of his feelings. One must, however, grant that there
is alongside of this Rousseau a very different Rousseau. It is related
that when he was in Strassburg a father told him that he was educating
his son strictly on the principles of “Emile.” He replied: “So much the
worse for him.” Even if not strictly true, this anecdote has a certain
symbolical value. It is to be associated with his saying that his heart
and his head did not seem to belong to the same individual. If his
heart (to which, as I have tried to show, his logic is subservient) is
revolutionary, his head is cautious. His replies to those who sought
counsel of him, as any one who has been through his correspondence will
testify, were frequently very shrewd and sensible. As M. Lanson says,
he applies his boldest doctrines in a way to reassure conservatives and
satisfy opportunists.
The contrast between the two Rousseaus is indeed so marked as to raise
the question of his sincerity. As a preliminary to a discussion of
this point, one needs to note that a special type of sincerity which
seems to be much in request these days is itself an outcome of the
Rousseauistic movement. It seems to be assumed in certain quarters that
almost any opinion is justified provided it be held with sufficient
emotional vehemence. One cannot help reflecting that perhaps the
best examples of sincerity in this sense are to be found in insane
asylums; and that much of Rousseau’s sincerity, his conviction for
instance during his later years that he was the victim of a universal
conspiracy, was of this order. Sincerity is indeed only one of a whole
class of virtues that are often taken to be primary when they are in
fact only virtues with reference to something more fundamental. Thus
many of our “liberals” conceive that it is in itself a virtue to be
forward-looking, whereas it may be a vice, if what one is looking
forward to should turn out to be pernicious or chimerical. A similar
remark applies to those who pique themselves on their open-mindedness.
It is well to open one’s mind, but only as a preliminary to closing
it, only as a preparation, in short, for the supreme act of judgment
and selection. In much the same way, the value of sincerity can be
estimated only with reference to the previous question of truth or
error. What makes the Socratic group at Athens and the scientific
investigator to-day seem so respectable, when compared with the
emotionalist, is that they ask, first of all, not whether a man is
sincere, but whether he is right or wrong. If one is right, it is of
course important, at least in the domain of moral values, that he
should be sincerely right.
It is hard to deny Rousseau the type of emotional sincerity that I have
just been discussing--a type that in its milder form reminds one of
what would be known nowadays as the will to believe, and in its extreme
form, is not far removed from madness. At the same time, Rousseau’s
head could on occasion stand aloof and deal rather Socratically with
his heart. For example, he said to Hume who had complimented him on
the style and eloquence of his books: “To tell the truth, I am not
displeased with myself in that particular: at the same time I dread
lest my writings are good for nothing at bottom, and that all my
theories are full of extravagance.”[29]
It is not, however, the self-critical Rousseau of this passage that
need concern us, for the simple reason that it is not this Rousseau who
has moved the world. The side of Rousseau that has moved the world,
as M. Lanson continues, is the side that “exasperates and inspires
revolt ...; it is the mother of violence, the source of all that is
uncompromising. It launches the simple souls who give themselves up
to its strange virtue upon the desperate quest of the absolute, an
absolute to be realized to-day by anarchy and to-morrow by social
despotism.”[30]
Though the Rousseau who has been influential is always Rousseau the
extremist, he oscillates, as M. Lanson says, between opposite extremes.
From the unflinching individualism of the “Second Discourse,” where man
is conceived as a sort of isolated and unrelated particle, he passes
to the no less unflinching collectivism of the “Social Contract.” He
fluctuates between extremes even in his collectivistic ideal. Thus he
writes to the Marquis de Mirabeau that he does not see “any endurable
mean between the most austere democracy and the most perfect Hobbism.”
You must choose, he says, between making a man and making a citizen.
You cannot hope to make both. Hitherto, I have been speaking for the
most part of the virtue of man in the state of nature as depicted in
the “Second Discourse.” It remains to speak of the “Social Contract,”
and of the method there outlined for divesting man as completely as
possible of his natural virtue in order that he may acquire the virtue
of the citizen. In what I have to say about the “Social Contract,”
I shall confine myself to the uncompromising main argument. That
there are other elements in the “Social Contract” is beyond question.
Rousseau affirms at times that the principles of government are not
absolute but relative; that they are subject in their application to
historical circumstances and physical environment, notably climate.
But this relativistic Rousseau who reveals at times the influence of
Montesquieu is, as I have said, unimportant compared to the Rousseau
who is straining out towards the absolute and the unlimited. This
absolutism of Rousseau appears, as is well known, most strikingly in
his doctrine of popular sovereignty. This doctrine he reasons out from
first principles with almost geometrical rigor. The first effect of
this reasoning is to make all existing governments seem illegitimate.
“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The only free and
legitimate government is that founded upon a true social compact. On
this basis, it is possible to combine the advantages of organized
government with the liberty, equality, and fraternity that man enjoys,
not as the result of moral effort, but as a free gift, in the state
of nature. Only, under the social contract, these virtues no longer
reside in the individual, but in the general will. All the clauses of
the social contract “reduce themselves to one: the total alienation
of every associate with all his rights” (including his rights to
property) “to the whole community.” What guarantee is the individual
to have that the community will not abuse this unlimited control that
he has granted it over his person and property? Though the State is
for Rousseau as for Hobbes not natural but artificial, he proceeds
to develop the analogy between this artificial body and the body of
an actual person. One of the most important sources of this tendency
to set up an elaborate parallel between the individual and the State
is Plato’s “Republic.” In Plato, however, the parallel is used to
establish a severe hierarchy in the State, in much the same way that
the powers and faculties of the individual must work in due order
and subordination; whereas the informing spirit of the Rousseauistic
conception is the idea of equality. The use that Rousseau makes of the
parallel is to argue that the community cannot will the harm of any
of the individuals that compose it any more than the single person
can will the harm of one of his own members. On the side of theory,
however, Rousseau’s chief argument in favor of the disinterestedness
of the general will is that it has had transferred to it by the social
contract the spontaneous goodness that belongs to the will of the
individual in the state of nature. At this point, however, Rousseau’s
good sense intervenes. Granted that the multitude from whom the general
will emanates wishes the right thing, it does not always see it. The
people, after all, needs guidance. Hence arises the necessity of
the Lawgiver; and Rousseau goes on to imagine some person of almost
superhuman sagacity, set apart from other men, and under no suspicion
of self-seeking, who draws up an ideal code that is to direct the
general will, a code which actually enjoys credit with the people
because it seems to have religious sanction, in other words, because
the Lawgiver seems to speak not for himself, but only as a channel
of divine wisdom. One might suppose that the general will would be
limited by the Law thus imposed; that the Law would become a permanent
principle of control in the State, its higher self, as it were, in
opposition to its mere passing desires. But at bottom, Rousseau does
not want any effective check on the reaching out of his logic and
emotions towards the unlimited; and so he finally transfers to the
general will the anarchical impressionism he has asserted for the
individual. The only clear result of his speculations about the need
of a Law and a Lawgiver was to encourage the conceit of followers like
Robespierre, who felt that they had within them the making of a modern
Lycurgus. Practically the general will is lawless; it cannot bind
itself to obey its rulers, whom it regards as mere executive officers,
the people’s hired men as it were, revocable at pleasure. It cannot
bind itself to anything it has willed in the past, or obligate itself
in any way for the future. An assembly of the sovereign people should
invariably begin by voting separately on the two following questions:
“first, whether it pleases the sovereign to preserve the present form
of government; second, whether it pleases the people to leave the
administration of it to those who are now in charge.” The sovereign
people cannot be represented by a parliament, as in England. “At the
moment a State gives itself representatives it no longer exists.”
Sovereignty is absolute and indivisible. “To limit it is to destroy
it.” “The sovereign people, by the very fact that it is, is always
all that it should be.” It has often been pointed out that Rousseau
transfers to the people the doctrine that the king can do no wrong. But
he does more than that. The king, if not responsible to what is below
him, is at least responsible to what is above him--to God. But the
sovereign people is responsible to no one. It _is_ God. The contract
that it makes is with itself, like that which, according to the old
theologians, was made in the council chamber of the Trinity. “By the
mere pleasure of God,” says Jonathan Edwards, “I mean his sovereign
pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation,” etc. The
popular will is the successor of the divine will, from which everything
finally derived in the mediæval theocracy.
Rousseau’s idea of sovereignty, being as it is naturalistic, is of
course in its ultimate essence neither mediæval nor theocratic. His
idea of a contract that the people makes with itself, by which it
arrogates to itself full power, without any reciprocal obligation, is
in important respects original with Rousseau. “We are entering,” he
wrote in “Emile,” “on the era of crises and the age of revolutions.”
He not only made the prophecy, but did more than any other one man to
bring about its fulfilment. By asserting a general will that is at once
absolute and shifting, he achieved the paradox of basing government
on permanent revolution. Perhaps he is more closely related to Hobbes
than to any previous political thinker, especially if it be true,
as Sainte-Beuve says, that nothing resembles a hollow so much as a
swelling. His state of nature and his sovereignty are merely the state
of nature and the sovereignty of Hobbes reversed. In Rousseau the
people can do anything it pleases with its ruler, in Hobbes the ruler
can do anything he pleases with the people. But though the State of
Hobbes has no higher self--the very idea of a higher self is foreign
to his materialistic philosophy--it has at least a permanent self. The
contract by which the people divests itself of its power in favor of
its ruler is definitive. But Rousseau, as we have seen, will have no
such element of permanency. If he had conceived of the general will as
the permanent will of the people that might on occasion be in conflict
with its ordinary will, his distinction[31] between a disinterested
_volonté générale_ and a _volonté de tous_, which may stand for nothing
more than the egoistic wills of individuals or groups, might have a
serious meaning. As it is, this distinction melts away under close
scrutiny. It is mystical in the bad sense.
On all ordinary occasions the general will means a numerical majority
at any particular moment. An individual or a minority of individuals
has no appeal from the decision of this majority in its interpretation
of the general will. This is logical, inasmuch as the individual has
transferred to the general will the unlimited liberty that he enjoyed
in the state of nature. If any one is outvoted, he can console himself
by the reflection that he was mistaken, that what he took to be the
general will was not this will. If his private opinion had won, he
would have been doing something contrary to his true will and his true
liberty. In exercising constraint upon him, therefore, the majority
is simply “forcing him to be free.” By this device Rousseau gets rid
of the problem that has chiefly preoccupied political thinkers in
the English tradition--how, namely, to safeguard the freedom of the
individual or of minorities against a triumphant and despotic majority.
This solution of the problem involves the setting up of a new
dualism--that between the individual in his ordinary self and the
individual as a citizen and member of the sovereign people conceived
as his true self. But though the first term of this dualism, the
individual in his ordinary self, may be subject to rigid control, the
second term of the dualism, the State as embodied in the general will,
is, let me repeat, subject to no control at all. The liberty of the
general will, like that of the individual in the state of nature, can
be limited, if at all, as Rousseau says significantly, only by force.
Any one who traces the subject historically will acquire the
conviction, as I have already said, that the Christian religion founded
something of which not even a Plato or an Aristotle had any adequate
notion--personal liberty. By its separation of the things of God and
the things of Cæsar, it established a domain of free conscience, in
which the individual might take refuge from the encroachments of
the omnipotent State. It is plain that Rousseau does not propose to
leave the individual any such refuge. The last chapter of the “Social
Contract” is devoted to Civil Religion. This chapter abounds in remarks
of extraordinary shrewdness and penetration (as, for instance, where
he observes that the Crusades were not truly Christian in spirit) and
at the same time, so far as its general conclusions are concerned,
may be described in Rousseau’s own phrase as a “sea of sophisms.”
Rousseau distinguishes three types of religion: first, organized and
traditional Christianity, especially the Christianity of the Catholic
Church. This type of religion is so evidently bad as scarcely to merit
serious refutation. “All institutions that put man in contradiction
with himself are worthless.” The obvious reply of the older type of
dualist would be that man _is_ in contradiction with himself, and that
the Church merely reflects a primordial fact of human nature. One can
no more grant that institutions _per se_ are capable of any such effect
than one can admit Rousseau’s counter-assertion that, merely as a
result of institutions, all the members of a community may possess good
sense, justice, and integrity.[32]
The second religion that Rousseau recognizes is true Christianity,
a religion entirely of the heart, without rites and ceremonies, and
having much in common, as he conceives it, with the fluid emotionalism
of the sentimental deist. True Christians are like those great
cosmopolitan spirits of whom Rousseau speaks in the “Second Discourse,”
who “transcend the imaginary barriers that separate peoples, and like
the sovereign being who has created them, embrace the whole human race
in their benevolence.” The person, however, in whom natural pity has
thus blossomed into universal benevolence is not necessarily either
otherworldly or humble, and Rousseau is shrewd enough to see that the
true Christian is both. He, therefore, proceeds to attack not merely
institutional Christianity but true Christianity. It also divides man
against himself, and by giving him a celestial fatherland weakens his
allegiance to the _civitas terrena_. Rousseau brings up questions
of extraordinary complexity regarding the distinction between a
spiritual and a secular order, and the actual political results of this
distinction as worked out in Christianity, questions that for their
proper elucidation would require a volume. The main point that concerns
us here is his attack on humility, the underlying Christian virtue, on
the ground that it is incompatible with the full virtue of the citizen.
To be humble is to be submissive; so that “true Christians are meant
to be slaves.” One should, therefore, discard humility in favor of
patriotic pride, of the kind that flourished in the great days of Rome
and Sparta.
Here again in his dealings with the relations of Church and State,
Rousseau reminds us of Hobbes. “Of all Christian authors,” he himself
says, “the philosopher Hobbes is the only one who saw clearly the
evil and the remedy and ventured to propose bringing together the
two heads of the eagle,” thus subordinating everything to political
unity. But before Hobbes, Machiavelli, as I have already remarked,
had sought to discredit the idea of a separate spiritual order, and
also of Christian humility itself, so that the State might be all
in all. Quite apart from Rousseau’s admiration for Machiavelli and
from any conscious discipleship, his view of the State has more in
common with the Machiavellian view than one might at first suppose.
Machiavelli is not, of course, like Rousseau, an emotionalist, but
is, in his main trend, utilitarian. It is no accident that Francis
Bacon, the prophet of utilitarianism, should be, as Lord Acton points
out, his most distinguished English disciple. But Rousseau too has a
strongly utilitarian side. Indeed one finds in him, as in the whole of
our modern age, an endless interplay of sentimental and utilitarian
elements.
This utilitarian side of Rousseau appears in the third form of
religion he discusses in the “Social Contract.” After rejecting both
institutional Christianity and true Christianity, on the ground
that they are anti-national, he proposes as worthy of approval a
religion which, properly speaking, is not a religion at all, but a
social utility. The articles of its creed, which are determined by the
sovereign, are to be imposed not precisely as dogmas, but as promoting
sentiments of sociability. The positive dogmas of this civil creed
are, as Rousseau states them, fairly substantial (e.g., the existence
of God, the future life, the happiness of the just and the punishment
of the wicked). If any one does not believe them he may be banished
from the State, not as impious but as unsociable. “If any one, after
having recognized publicly these same dogmas, conducts himself as
though he did not believe them, let him be punished with death.” The
civil religion is to have only one negative dogma--the condemnation
of intolerance. This is directed especially against institutional
Christians, but it is hard to see how any one can escape this
condemnation who holds in matters religious to a definite standard of
right and wrong, quite apart from the omnipotent State and its supposed
utility.
Rousseau’s “civil religion” evidently looks forward to such an event
as Robespierre’s Festival of the Supreme Being. Unfortunately, it
also looks forward to the Civil Constitution of the Clergy and to
the guillotining as “fanatics” of many of the priests who refused to
forswear their allegiance to Rome. It is fair to add that the “Social
Contract” is only one source[33] of the strife between clericals
and anti-clericals that has been so prominent in France since the
Revolution as to amount at times almost to civil war. In general we
should recollect that Rousseau was less an originator of the ideas we
have been discussing than the most important single figure in a vast
movement that had been gaining head for generations. In the words of
Madame de Staël he invented nothing, but set everything on fire. Burke,
the chief antagonist of Rousseau, took serious cognizance of this
movement and of the enthusiasm it inspired only when they had begun to
translate themselves into great historical events. It was Rousseau and
all he typified that he attacked in the French Revolution.
CHAPTER III
BURKE AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION
“Everybody knows,” Burke writes of the members of the French National
Assembly, “that there is a great dispute amongst their leaders, which
of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau. In truth, they all
resemble him. His blood they transfuse into their minds and into their
manners. Him they study; him they meditate; him they turn over in all
the time they can spare from the laborious mischief of the day, or the
debauches of the night. Rousseau is their canon of holy writ; in his
life he is their canon of _Polycletus_; he is their standard figure of
perfection. To this man and this writer, as a pattern to authors and to
Frenchmen, the founderies of Paris are now running for statues, with
the kettles of their poor and the bells of their churches.”
I have presented Rousseau in his essential influence as the extremist
and foe of compromise. In contrast to Rousseau, Burke is usually and
rightly supposed to embody the spirit of moderation. Many of his
utterances on the French Revolution, however (the passage I have just
quoted may serve as a sample), are scarcely suggestive of moderation,
and towards the end he becomes positively violent. There is at least
this much to be said in justification of Burke, that in his writings
on the Revolution, he is for the most part debating first principles,
and when it comes to first principles, the issue raised is not one
of moderation, but of truth or error. Burke was no mere partisan of
the _status quo_. He was not opposed on principle to revolutions. He
is perhaps open to the charge of pushing too far his admiration for
the Revolution of 1688. His attitude towards the American Revolution
was consistently one of compromise and in many respects of sympathy.
He did not stand in any undue awe of those in authority. No one could
on occasion call them to a stricter accounting or show himself a more
disinterested champion of the victims of unjust power. He recognized
specifically the abuses of the Old Régime in France, and was ready
to admit the application to these abuses of fairly drastic remedies.
If he refused, therefore, to compromise with the French Revolution,
the reason is to be sought less in the field of politics than in
that of general philosophy, and even of religion. He saw that the
Revolution did not, like other revolutions, seek to redress certain
specific grievances, but had universal pretensions. France was to
become the “Christ of nations” and conduct a crusade for the political
regeneration of mankind. This particular mixture of the things of God
and the things of Cæsar seemed to him psychologically unsound, and in
any case subversive of the existing social order of Europe. The new
revolutionary evangel was the final outcome of the speculations that
had been going on for generations about a state of nature, natural
rights, the social contract, and abstract and unlimited sovereignty.
Burke is the chief opponent of this tendency towards what one may term
metaphysical politics, especially as embodied in the doctrine of the
rights of man. “They are so taken up with the rights of man,” he says
of the members of this school, “that they have totally forgotten his
nature.” Under cover of getting rid of prejudice they would strip man
of all the habits and concrete relationships and network of historical
circumstance in which he is actually implicated and finally leave
him shivering “in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical
abstraction.” They leave no limit to logic save despotism. In his
attack on the enemies of prejudice, by which was meant practically
everything that is traditional and prescriptive, Burke has perhaps
neglected unduly certain minor though still important distinctions,
especially the distinction between those who were for getting rid of
prejudice in the name of reason, and those who, like Rousseau, were
for getting rid of it in the name of feeling. The rationalists and
the Rousseauists were actually ready to guillotine one another in the
Revolution, an opposition prefigured in the feud between Rousseau and
various “philosophers,” notably Voltaire. Rousseau was as ready as
Burke, though on different grounds, as I shall try to show presently,
to protest against the “solid darkness of this enlightened age.”
By the dismissal as mere prejudice of the traditional forms that are in
no small measure the funded experience of any particular community, the
State loses its historical continuity, its permanent self, as it were,
that unites its present with its past and future. By an unprincipled
facility in changing the State such as is encouraged by Rousseau’s
impressionistic notion of the general will, the generations of men can
no more link with one another than the flies of a summer. They are
disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality. In point of
fact, any political philosophy, whether that of Hobbes or of Rousseau,
which starts from the supposition that men are naturally isolated
units, and achieve society only as the result of an artifice, is in its
essence violently individualistic. For this atomistic, mechanical view
of the State, Burke is usually supposed to have substituted an organic,
historical conception. Much of his actual influence, in Germany[34]
and elsewhere, has certainly been along these lines. Yet this is far
from being the whole truth about Burke. A one-sided devotion to the
organic, historical conception is itself an outcome of the naturalistic
movement. It may lead to fatalistic acquiescence in traditional forms,
and discourage, not merely abstract rationalism, but a reasonable
adjustment of these forms to shifting circumstance. It relates itself
very readily to that side of the romantic movement that exalts the
unconscious at the expense of moral choice and conscious deliberation.
Once obscure this capacity in the individual, which alone raises him
above phenomenal nature, and it will not be easy in the long run to
preserve his autonomy; he will tend, as so often in German theory, to
lose his independent will and become a mere organ of the all-powerful
State. Though Taine, again, often professes to speak as a disciple of
Burke in his attacks on the French Revolution, it is not easy to see a
true follower in a philosopher who proclaimed that “vice and virtue are
products like sugar and vitriol.”
The truth is that Burke is in no sense a collectivist, and still less,
if possible, a determinist. If he had been either, he would not
have attained to that profound perception of true liberty in which
he surpasses perhaps any other political thinker, ancient or modern.
For one who believes in personal liberty in Burke’s sense, the final
emphasis is necessarily not on the State but on the individual. His
individualism, however, is not, like that of Rousseau, naturalistic,
but humanistic and religious. Only, in getting the standards by which
the individual may hope to surpass his ordinary self, and achieve
humanism or religion, he would have him lean heavily on prescription.
Burke is anti-individualistic in that he would not set the individual
to trading on his own private stock of wit. He would have him respect
the general sense, the accumulated experience of the past that
has become embodied in the habits and usages that the superficial
rationalist would dismiss as prejudice. If the individual condemns
the general sense, and trusts unduly his private self, he will have
no model; and a man’s first need is to look up to a sound model and
imitate it. He may thus become exemplary in his turn. The principle
of homage and service to what is above one has its culmination and
final justification in fealty to God, the true sovereign and supreme
exemplar. Burke’s conception of the State may be described as a free
and flexible adaptation of genuinely Platonic and Christian elements.
“We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly, that religion is the
basis of civil society, and the source of all good and all comfort.”
“God willed the State.” (Thus to conceive the highest in terms of will
is Christian.) “He willed its connection with the source and original
archetype of all perfection.” (The language is here Platonic.)
Not merely religion but the actual church establishment is held by
Englishmen to be essential to their State, as being indeed the very
foundation of their constitution.
“Society is indeed a contract,” though the basis of the contract is
not mere utility. The State is not to be regarded as a partnership
agreement in a trade of pepper and coffee. It is not, as a contemporary
pacifist has maintained, the “pooled self-esteem” of the community, but
rather its permanent ethical self. It is, therefore, a partnership in
all science and art and in every virtue and perfection. “As the ends of
such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes
a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those
who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”
Though Burke thus uses the language of contract, it is plain that he
moves in a different world from all those, including Locke, for whom
the idea of contract meant that man has certain rights as a free gift
of nature and anterior to the performance of his duties. Talk to the
child, says Rousseau, of something that will interest him--talk to him
of his rights, and not of his duties.[35] To assert, as Burke does in
the main, that one has only concrete historical rights, acquired as the
result of the fulfilment of definite obligations, is evidently remote
from Rousseau’s assertion that a man enjoys certain abstract rights
simply because he has taken the trouble to be born. The difference
here is not merely between Burke and Rousseau, but also between Burke
and Locke. The final superficiality of Locke is that he granted man
abstract natural rights anterior to his duties, and then hoped that it
would be possible to apply this doctrine moderately. But it has been
justly said that doctrines of this kind are most effective in their
extreme logical form because it is in this form that they capture the
imagination. Now if the out-and-out radical is often highly imaginative
in the fashion that I have attributed to Rousseau, the Whigs and the
liberals who follow the Whig tradition are rather open to the suspicion
of being deficient on the side of imagination. One cannot help feeling,
for instance, that if Macaulay had been more imaginative, he would have
shown less humanitarian complacency in his essay on Bacon. Disraeli
again is said to have looked with disdain on J. S. Mill because of his
failure to perceive the rôle of the imagination in human affairs, a
lack that can scarcely be charged against Disraeli himself, whatever
one may think of the quality of his imagination.
Now Burke is the exceptional Whig, in that he is not only splendidly
imaginative, but admits the supreme rôle of the imagination rather
more explicitly than is common among either Christians or Platonists
with whom I have associated him. He saw how much of the wisdom of life
consists in an imaginative assumption of the experience of the past in
such fashion as to bring it to bear as a living force upon the present.
The very model that one looks up to and imitates is an imaginative
creation. A man’s imagination may realize in his ancestors a standard
of virtue and wisdom beyond the vulgar practice of the hour; so that
he may be enabled to rise with the example to whose imitation he has
aspired. The forms of the past and the persons who administer them
count in Burke’s eyes chiefly as imaginative symbols. In the famous
passage on Marie Antoinette one almost forgets the living and suffering
woman to see in her with Burke a gorgeous symbol of the age of chivalry
yielding to the age of “sophisters, economists, and calculators.”
There is in this sense truth in the taunt of Tom Paine that Burke
pities the plumage and forgets the dying bird. All the decent drapery
of life, Burke complains of the new philosophy, is to be rudely torn
off. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a
moral imagination, ... are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and
antiquated fashion.”
The apostles of the rights of man were, according to Burke, undermining
the two principles on which everything that was truly civilized in
the European order had for ages depended: the spirit of religion and
the spirit of a gentleman. The nobility and the clergy, who were the
custodians of these principles and of the symbols that embodied them
and ministered to the moral imagination, had received in turn the
support of the learned. Burke warns the learned that in deserting their
natural protectors for Demos, they run the risk of being “cast into the
mire and trodden under the hoofs of a swinish multitude.”
Burke is in short a frank champion of aristocracy. It is here
especially, however, that he applies flexibly his Christian-Platonic,
and humanistic principles. He combines a soundly individualistic
element with his cult of the traditional order. He does not wish any
static hierarchy. He disapproves of any tendency to deal with men in
classes and groups, a tendency that the extreme radical shares with
the extreme reactionary. He would have us estimate men, not by their
hereditary rank, but by their personal achievement. “There is,” he
says, “no qualification for government but virtue or wisdom, actual or
presumptive. Wherever they are actually found, they have in whatever
state, condition, profession or trade, the passport of Heaven to human
place and honor.” He recognizes, to be sure, that it is hard for the
manual worker to acquire such virtue and wisdom for the reason that he
lacks the necessary leisure. The ascent of rare merit from the lower to
the higher levels of society should, however, always be left open, even
though this merit be required to pass through a severe probation.
In the same fashion, Burke would admit innovations in the existing
social order only after a period of severe probation. He is no partisan
of an inert traditionalism. His true leader or natural aristocrat,
as he terms him, has, in his adjustment of the contending claims of
new and old, much of the character of the “trimmer” as Halifax has
described him. “By preserving the method of nature in the conduct of
the State, in what we improve we are never wholly new; in what we
retain, we are never wholly obsolete.” “The disposition to preserve,
and ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a
statesman.” In such utterances Burke is of course simply giving the
theory of English liberty at its best, a theory almost too familiar for
restatement. In his imaginative grasp of all that is involved in the
task of mediating between the permanent and the fluctuating element in
life, the Platonic art, as one may say, of seeing the One in the Many,
he has had few equals in the field of political thinking.
Burke is, however, in one important respect highly un-Platonic, and
that is in his attitude towards the intellect. His distrust of what we
should call nowadays the intellectual may be variously explained. It
is related in some respects to one side, the weak side, one is bound
to add, of Christianity. “A certain intemperance of intellect,” he
writes, “is the disease of the time, and the source of all its other
diseases.” He saw so clearly the dangers of this abuse that he was
led at times, as the Christian has at times been led, to look with
suspicion on intellect itself. And then he was familiar, as we are
all familiar, with persons who give no reasons at all, or the wrong
reasons, for doing the right thing, and with other persons who give
the most logical and ingenious reasons for doing the wrong thing. The
basis for right conduct is not reasoning but experience, and experience
much wider than that of the individual, the secure possession of which
can result only from the early acquisition of right habits. Then, too,
there is something specifically English in Burke’s disparagement of the
intellect. The Englishman, noting the results of the proneness of a
certain type of Frenchman to reason rigorously from false or incomplete
premises, comes to prefer his own piecemeal good sense and proclivity
for “muddling through.” As Disraeli told a foreign visitor, the country
is governed not by logic but by Parliament. In much the same way
Bagehot in the course of a comparison between the Englishman and the
Frenchman in politics, reaches the semi-humorous conclusion that “in
real sound stupidity the English are unrivalled.”
The anti-intellectual side of Burke reminds one at times of the
anti-intellectual side of Rousseau: when, for instance, he speaks
of “the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without
reflection and above it.” The resemblance is, however, only
superficial. The wisdom that Rousseau proclaimed was not _above_
reflection but _below_ it. A distinction of this kind is rather
meaningless unless supported by careful psychological analysis. Perhaps
the first contrast between the superrational and the subrational is
that between awe and wonder.[36] Rousseau is plainly an apostle of
wonder, so much so that he is probably the chief single influence
in the “renascence of wonder” that has resulted from the romantic
movement. The romantic objection to intellect is that by its precise
analysis and tracing of cause and effect, it diminishes wonder. Burke,
on the other hand, is fearful lest an indiscreet intellectual activity
may undermine awe and reverence. “We ought,” he says, “to venerate
where we are unable presently to understand.” As the best means of
securing veneration, Burke leans heavily upon habit, whereas the
romantics, from Rousseau to Walter Pater, are no less clearly hostile
to habit because it seems to lead to a stereotyped world, a world
without vividness and surprise. To lay stress on veneration meant
for Burke, at least in the secular order, to lay stress on rank and
degree; whereas the outstanding trait perhaps of the state of nature
projected by Rousseau’s imagination, in defiance of the actual facts
of primitive life so far as we know them, is that it is equalitarian.
This trait is common to his no-state and his all-state, his anarchistic
and his collectivistic Utopia. The world of the “Social Contract,” no
less than that of the “Second Discourse,” is a world without degree
and subordination; a world in which no one looks up to any one else or
expects any one to look up to him; a world in which no one (and this
seems to Rousseau very desirable) has either to command or to obey.
In his predominant emphasis on equality,[37] Rousseau speaks, to some
extent at least, not merely for himself but for France, especially the
France of the last two centuries. “Liberty,” says Mallet du Pan, “a
thing forever unintelligible to Frenchmen.”[38] Perhaps liberty has
not been intelligible in its true essence to many persons anywhere.
“The love, and even the very idea, of genuine liberty,” Burke himself
admits, “is extremely rare.” If the basis of this genuine liberty is,
as Burke affirms, an act of subordination, it is simply incompatible
with Rousseauistic equality.
The act of subordination to any earthly authority is justified only
in case this authority is looking up to something still higher; so
that genuine liberty is rooted in the virtue that also underlies
genuine Christianity. “True humility, the basis of the Christian
system, is the low, but deep and firm foundation of all real virtue.
But this, as very painful in the practice and little imposing in the
appearance,” he goes on to say of the French revolutionists, “they
have totally discarded.” They have preferred to follow Rousseau, the
great “professor and founder of the philosophy of vanity.” Rousseau
himself said that he based his position on the “noblest pride,” and
pride is, even more than vanity, the significant opposite of humility.
I have already spoken of Rousseau’s depreciation of humility in favor
of patriotic pride. The problem of pride versus humility is, of course,
not primarily political at all. It is a problem of the inner life.
Rousseau undermined humility in the individual by substituting the
doctrine of natural goodness for the older doctrine of man’s sinfulness
and fallibility. The forms and traditions, religious and political,
that Burke on the other hand defends, on the ground that they are
not arbitrary but are convenient summings up of a vast body of past
experience, give support to the imagination of the individual; the
imagination, thus drawn back as it were to an ethical centre, supplies
in turn a standard with reference to which the individual may set
bounds to the lawless expansion of his natural self (which includes his
intellect as well as his emotions). From a purely psychological point
of view, Burke’s emphasis on humility and on the imaginative symbols
that he deems necessary to secure it, reduces itself to an emphasis
on what one may term the centripetal element in liberty. Rousseau, at
least the Rousseau that has influenced the world, practically denies
the need of any such centripetal element in liberty, inasmuch as what
will emerge spontaneously on the disappearance of the traditional
controls is an expansive will to brotherhood. If one rejects like Burke
this gospel of “universal benevolence,” it is hard not to conceive
of liberty in Burke’s fashion--namely, as a nice adjustment between
the taking on of inner control and the throwing off of outer control.
“Society,” he says, “cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will
and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within,
the more there must be without.” This adjustment between inner and
outer control, which concerns primarily the individual, is thus seen
to determine at last the degree to which any community is capable of
political liberty. True statesmanship is in this sense a humanistic
mediation and not an indolent oscillation between extremes. “To make a
government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power; teach
obedience: and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It
is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to
form a _free government_--that is, to temper together these opposite
elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much
thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind.”
I have already said that Burke is very exceptional in that he is a
splendidly imaginative Whig. As a matter of fact, most of the typical
Whigs and liberals in the Whig tradition, are, like Burke, partisans
of liberty in the sense of personal liberty and of moderation. They do
not, however, give their personal liberty and moderation the same basis
of religion and humanistic control. On the contrary, they incline to
be either rationalists or emotionalists, which means practically that
they found their ethics either on the principle of utility, or else
on the new spirit of sympathy and service, or more commonly on some
compound of these main ingredients of humanitarianism. The liberty of
Burke, I have tried to show, is not only religiously grounded, but
involves in its political application a genuine humanistic mediation.
The Whig compromise, on the other hand, is only too often an attempt to
compromise between views of life, namely, the religious-humanistic and
the utilitarian-sentimental, which are in their essence incompatible.
Thus the liberalism of J. S. Mill is, compared with the liberalism of
Burke, open to the charge of being unimaginative. Furthermore, from
a strictly modern point of view, it is open to the charge of being
insufficiently critical. For the liberty Mill desires is of the kind
that will result only from the traditional spiritual controls, or from
some adequate substitute, and his philosophy, as I shall try to show
more fully later, supplies neither.
Burke can scarcely be charged with the form of superficiality
that consists in an attempt to mediate between incompatible first
principles. One may, however, feel that he failed to recognize the full
extent and gravity of the clash between the new principles and the old;
and one may also find it hard to justify the obscurantist element that
enters into his defence of his own religious and humanistic position.
One might gather from Burke that England was almost entirely made up
of Christian gentlemen ready to rally to the support of the majestic
edifice of traditional civilization, to all the decencies of life
based finally on the moral imagination, whereas the “sophisters,
economists, and calculators” who were destroying this edifice by their
substitution for the moral imagination of an abstract metaphysical
reason were almost entirely French. He does indeed refer to the English
deists, but only to dismiss them as obscure eccentrics. The English
intellectuals and radical thinkers of his own time he waves aside with
the utmost contempt, opposing to them not those who think more keenly,
but those who do not think at all. “Because half a dozen grasshoppers
under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst
thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British
oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who
make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that, of course,
they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the
little, shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome,
insects of the hour.”
In this passage we have the obscurantist Burke at his weakest. The
truth is that the little, meagre, hopping insects of the hour were
representatives of an international movement of vast scope, a movement
destined finally to prevail over the prejudice and prescription that
Burke was defending. Moreover, this movement was largely, if not indeed
primarily, of English origin. “It is from England,” says Joubert, “that
have issued forth, like fogs, the metaphysical and political ideas
which have darkened everything.” It is hard to trace the main currents
of European life and thought from the Renaissance, especially the
rise of humanitarianism in both its utilitarian and its sentimental
aspects, and not assent in large measure to the assertion of Joubert.
Burke’s conception of man and of the State with its strong tinge
of Platonic realism (in the older sense of the word) and its final
emphasis on humility, or submission to the will of God, has important
points of contact with the mediæval conception. Now, even before
Francis Bacon, men from the British Islands played an important part in
breaking down this realism. Duns Scotus discredited reason in theology
in favor of an arbitrary divine will, and so released reason for use in
the secular order. William of Occam asserted a nominalism that looks
forward to our type of realism, a realism, that is, not of the One but
of the Many, and, therefore, at the opposite pole from the mediæval
variety. Roger Bacon is significant for the future both by his interest
in the physical order and by the experimental temper that he displays
in dealing with this order.
To come to a later period, the upshot of the civil convulsions of
seventeenth-century England was to diminish imaginative allegiance to
the past. The main achievement of Cromwell himself was, as his admirer
Marvell avowed, to “ruin the great work of Time.” As loyalty to the
great traditions declined, England concentrated on the utilitarian
effort of which Francis Bacon is the prophet, and thus did more
than any other country to prepare and carry through the industrial
revolution, compared with which the French Revolution is only a
melodramatic incident.
If the Christian classical England that Burke took to be truly
representative has survived in a place like Oxford, utilitarian
England has got itself embodied in cities like Birmingham, so that
the opposition between the two Englands, an opposition that is one
of first principles, has come to be written on the very face of the
landscape. The Englishman, however, does not proceed by logical
exclusions, and is capable of maintaining in more or less friendly
juxtaposition things that are ultimately incompatible. Thus a young man
receives a religious-humanistic training at Oxford as a preparation
for helping to administer the British Empire in India, an empire
which is, in its origins, chiefly an outcome of the utilitarian and
commercially expansive England. The kind of leadership that Burke
desired, the leadership of the true gentleman, still plays no small
part in the affairs of England and of the world. The Englishman
whom he conceives to be typical, who “fears God, looks up with awe
to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates,
with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility,” is still
extant, but is considerably less typical. Above all, his psychology
is not that of the great urban masses that owe their existence to the
industrial revolution. What Birmingham stands for has been gaining
steadily on what Oxford stands for, and that even at Oxford itself.
I have said that the only effective conservatism is an imaginative
conservatism. Now it has not only become increasingly difficult to
enter imaginatively into certain traditional symbols, but in general
the imagination has been drawn away more and more from the element of
unity in things to the element of diversity. As a result of the type
of progress that has been proclaimed, everything good has come to be
associated with novelty and change, with the piling up of discovery
on discovery. Life, thus viewed, no longer involves any reverence for
some centre or oneness, but is conceived as an infinite and indefinite
expansion of wonder and curiosity. As a result of all this intoxication
with change, the world is moving, we are asked to believe, towards
some “far-off divine event.” It is at this point that the affinity
appears between the utilitarian or Baconian, and the emotional or
Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement. The far-off divine
event is, no less than Rousseau’s state of nature, a projection of
the idyllic imagination. The felicity of the divine event, like that
of the state of nature, is a felicity that can be shown to involve no
serious moral effort or self-discipline on the part of the individual.
Rousseau himself put his golden age in the past, but nothing is easier
than to be a Rousseauist, and at the same time, like the Baconian, put
one’s golden age in the future. The differences between Baconian and
Rousseauist, and they are numerous, are, compared with this underlying
similarity in the quality of their “vision,” unimportant. I remarked
at the outset that the modern political movement may be regarded in
its most significant aspect as a battle between the spirit of Rousseau
and that of Burke. Whatever the explanation, it is an indubitable fact
that this movement has been away from Burke and towards Rousseau. “The
star of Burke is manifestly fading,” Lecky was able to write a number
of years ago, “and a great part of the teaching of the ‘Contrat Social’
is passing into English politics.” Professor Vaughan, again, the editor
of the recent standard edition of Rousseau’s political writings,
remarked in his introduction, apparently without awakening any special
contradiction or surprise, that in the essentials of political wisdom
Burke is “immeasurably inferior to the man of whom he never speaks but
with scorn and loathing; to the despised theorist, the metaphysical
madman of Geneva.”
Burke will be cherished as long as any one survives in the world
who has a perception of the nature of true liberty. It is evident,
however, that if a true liberalism is to be successfully defended
under present circumstances, it will not be altogether by Burke’s
method. The battle for prejudice and prescription and a “wisdom above
reflection” has already been lost. It is no longer possible to wave
aside the modernists as the mere noisy insects of an hour, or to oppose
to an unsound activity of intellect mere stolidity and imperviousness
to thought--the great cattle chewing their cud in the shadow of the
British oak. But before coming to the question of method, we need to
consider what the triumph of Rousseau has actually meant in the history
of modern Europe, during and since the Great Revolution. A survey of
this kind will be found to involve a consideration of the two chief
political problems of the present time, the problem of democracy and
the problem of imperialism, both in themselves and in their relation to
one another.
CHAPTER IV
DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM
In our recent crusade to make the world safe for democracy it was
currently assumed that democracy is the same as liberty and the
opposite of imperialism. The teachings of history are strangely
different. Democracy in the sense of direct and unlimited democracy
is, as was pointed out long ago by Aristotle, the death of liberty; in
virtue of its tyrannical temper, it is likewise, in the broad sense
in which I have been using the term, closely akin to imperialism. Now
the distinction of Rousseau is, as we have seen, to have been the most
uncompromising of all modern theorists of direct democracy. How far
have the actual results of Rousseauism justified Aristotle rather than
those who have anticipated from the diffusion of the Rousseauistic
evangel, a paradise of liberty, equality, and fraternity? The
commanding position of Rousseau in the democratic movement is at all
events beyond question, though even here it is possible to exaggerate.
“Democracy,” says M. de Vogüé, “has only one father--Rousseau.... The
great muddy stream which is submerging us flows from the writings
and the life of Rousseau like the Rhine and the Po from the Alpine
reservoirs which feed them perpetually.”[39] It is interesting to
place alongside of this and similar passages which might be multiplied
indefinitely, passages[40] from German authorities, likewise very
numerous, to the effect that Rousseau is more than any other person
the father of their _Kultur_. Here, too, one must allow for an element
of exaggeration. Much in Germany that is often ascribed to Rousseau
may be traced to English influences, the same influences that acted on
Rousseau himself.
Passages of the kind I have just cited seem to establish a first
connection between _Kultur_, which has come to be regarded as in its
essence imperialistic, and Rousseauistic democracy. _Kultur_, when
closely scrutinized, breaks up into two main elements--on the one hand,
scientific efficiency, and on the other, a nationalistic enthusiasm
to which this efficiency is made to minister. The relationship to
Rousseauism must evidently be looked for first of all in the second of
these elements, that of nationalistic enthusiasm. One needs to recall
here a saying of Renan’s that goes back to the seventies of the last
century. “The sentiment of nationalities is not a hundred years old
in the world.”[41] Renan might have said with about equal truth that
international or cosmopolitan sentiment is likewise not a hundred years
old. Both sayings are approximately true, provided sufficient emphasis
is put on the word sentiment. One scarcely needs to repeat that the
Middle Ages were cosmopolitan, and that a chief result of Protestantism
was the development of the national idea, and that the national idea
was also promoted, though on different postulates, by Machiavelli. But
with the eighteenth century, nationalism and internationalism take on
a more emotional coloring. An underlying influence here is Rousseau’s
reinterpretation of “virtue,” a reinterpretation that is itself,
as I have tried to show, the outgrowth of a considerable previous
movement. According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but
expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication. In its unmodified
natural form, it has its basis in pity which may finally develop
into the virtue of the great cosmopolitan souls of whom he speaks in
the “Second Discourse,” who transcend national frontiers and embrace
the whole of the human race in their benevolence. We are here at the
headwaters of the sentimental internationalism of the past century. But
Rousseau, as I have already said, distinguishes sharply between the
virtue of man simply as man and the virtue of the citizen. When man
is “denatured” by entering the State, his virtue is still a sentiment
and even an intoxication, but is very far from being cosmopolitan.
Rousseau oscillates between the two types of virtue, that of the man
and that of the citizen, and can scarcely be said to have attempted a
serious mediation between them. According as he wants the one or the
other type of “virtue,” he devises different systems of education. In
“Emile,” for example, he sets out to make a man, in the “Considerations
on the Government of Poland,” a citizen. The love of country and
the love of mankind are, he declares, incompatible passions.[42]
What is Rousseau’s own choice, one may ask, as between an emotional
nationalism and an emotional internationalism? On this point no doubt
is possible. The love of country he takes to be the more beautiful
passion. The virtuous intoxication of the internationalist seems to him
pale and ineffectual compared with the virtuous intoxication of the
citizen; and herein history has certainly confirmed him. The fact that
_l’ivresse patriotique_ may make the citizens of one country ruthless
in their dealings with the citizens of other countries seems to him a
matter of small moment.[43] In his schemes for inbreeding patriotic
sentiment, he seems to be looking forward to the type of nationalism
that has actually emerged during the last century, especially perhaps
in Germany. The question of war becomes acute if Europe, and possibly
the world, is thus to be made up of states, each animated by what one
is tempted to term a frenzied nationalism, without any countervailing
principle of unity. That the new nationalism is more potent than the
new internationalism was revealed in August, 1914, when millions of
socialists, in response to the call of country, marched away to the
slaughter of their fellow socialists in other lands. That Protestant
unity has likewise proved inadequate seems sufficiently clear from the
fact that the men of the two chief Protestant countries, at the same
time that they were blowing one another to pieces with high explosives,
sought to starve one another’s women and children _en masse_.
The Papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European
civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the
push of nationalism.
Furthermore, nationalities of the kind that have grown up in modern
Europe will not, as Rousseau points out, be kept from fighting with
one another by treaties and alliances. He warns the Poles that among
the Christian nations, treaties and alliances are only scraps of
paper, though the Turks, he adds, show a little more respect for their
international obligations.
Rousseau had this order of problems forced upon his attention when he
made his “Abridgment” (1761) of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s “Project
for Perpetual Peace” (originally published in 1712-17) and wrote
his “Judgment” on the “Project” (published in 1782). The Abbé de
Saint-Pierre sought to revive the plan for a United States of Europe
(_le Grand Dessein_) that Sully attributes to Henry IV. Rousseau
shows much shrewdness in reviewing in connection with his editing of
Saint-Pierre the problem of peace and war in Europe from the Middle
Ages down. One institution, he admits, had done much in the past to
lessen political conflicts. It is undeniable, he says, that Europe owes
to Christianity above all, even to-day, the species of union that has
survived among its members. He goes on to say, anticipating Heine and
following Hobbes, that Rome, having suffered material defeat, sent her
dogmas instead of her legions into the provinces. To this spiritual
Rome, mediæval and modern Europe has owed what small equivalent it
has enjoyed of the _Pax romana_. The ultimate binding element in the
mediæval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly
representatives, notably the Pope. The latter Middle Ages and the
Renaissance saw a weakening of this principle of union and the rise of
great territorial nationalities. According to the school of Grotius,
the relations of these nationalities are to be regulated primarily
not by will in any sense, but by reason. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre,
perhaps the earliest complete French example of the professional
philanthropist, has a still more naïve confidence in reason. He saw
well enough, says Rousseau, how his schemes would work if they were
once established, but was childish (and herein he resembled other
“reformers” down to the present day) in his notions of the means for
getting them established. His fundamental error, Rousseau complains,
was in thinking that men are governed by their reason, when they are in
reality governed by their passions.[44]
For Rousseau the state of nature is not in any case a state of reason.
In his less idyllic moods, he inclines, so far as the relation of
nation to nation is concerned, to agree with Hobbes that it is a state
of war. As a remedy he seems to favor some such application of the
federative principle as a league of nations or a league to enforce
peace. He shows, however, a much more lively sense of the perils of
such schemes than some of their modern advocates. “It might do more
harm at a stroke,” he says of a league to enforce peace, “than it
could prevent for centuries.” Though approving of the “Grand Dessein”
of Henry IV, he saw that the driving power behind this scheme was
neither Christian, in the mediæval sense, nor again, humanitarian, but
imperialistic--the desire to abase Spain and the House of Austria,
and to exalt France to the hegemony of Europe. Henry IV was preparing
a war which was to end war, when his assassination took place, and
“banished forever the last hope of the world.” Rousseau foresees that
the states of Europe are destined to ruin themselves by their military
preparations. He leaves us, in short, without any adequate solution of
a problem, that of the centrifugal nationality, which he himself was
doing so much to intensify.
Though Rousseau can speak on occasion with positive contempt of
cosmopolitans, he can be shown to have exercised his main influence on
those who began by standing, both nationally and internationally, for
fraternity, a fraternity that was to be ideally combined with liberty
and equality. We need to trace briefly the imperialistic upshot of this
evangel, especially in the French Revolution, and then, turning away
from the more peripheral aspects of the relation between democracy
and imperialism, to try to get at the root of the whole matter in the
psychology of the individual.
Rousseau, we have seen, seeks to discredit not merely a particular
aristocracy, but the aristocratic principle in general. “The people,”
he says, “constitute the human race”: all that is not the people is
parasitic and “scarcely deserves to be counted were it not for the harm
it does.” Perhaps no doctrine has ever been more cunningly devised
to fill the poor man and the plebeian with self-righteous pride, and
at the same time to inflame him with hatred and suspicion of those
who enjoy any social or economic superiority. It is a curious fact,
known to all students of the period, that those who perhaps did the
most to promote Rousseauism, and in general the new philanthropy,
were the members of the privileged classes themselves. The causes
of this strange phenomenon are complex, but have been traced with
sufficient accuracy by Taine in his “Ancien Régime.” The members of
the French aristocracy, and that as far back as Richelieu and Louis
XIV, had largely ceased to perform the work of an aristocracy. They
had become drawing-room butterflies and hangers-on at court. Now the
enemy of those who have ceased to work, in some sense or other of the
word, has always been ennui; and in addition, the denizens of the
drawing-room suffered during the first half of the eighteenth century
from rationalistic dryness and an excess of artificial decorum. They
finally sought relief in a return to nature and the simple life. An
idyllic element had been present in the life of the drawing-room from
the start, as all know who have studied the influence of d’Urfé’s
“Astrée” on the Marquise de Rambouillet and her group; and this perhaps
made the way easier for another form of pastoralism. “The fops,” as
Taine phrases it, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of
sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Marie Antoinette milked her own
cows and lived the pastoral dream at the Petit Trianon. Many of the
nobles and higher clergy, won over to the new enthusiasm, took oath to
divest themselves of all the privileges of rank in favor of the new
equality which was itself to be only a preliminary to the golden dawn
of brotherhood. The advent of this brotherhood was actually celebrated
in the Federation of the Champ de Mars (1790) which was meant to
symbolize the melting of all Frenchmen together in a fraternal embrace.
Anacharsis Cloots, the “orator of humankind,” had representatives
of the different races and nations of the Earth, each appropriately
garbed, parade before the National Assembly as the symbol of a still
more universal fraternity. “Never,” says the Comte de Ségur, “were
more delightful dreams followed by a more terrible awakening.” Instead
of universal brotherhood there was a growing mania of suspicion. The
malady of Rousseau became epidemic, until, at the height of the Terror,
men were “suspect of being suspect.” The very persons who had rushed
into one another’s arms at the Federation of the Champ de Mars began to
guillotine one another. In the number of those who thus perished was
the “orator of humankind.” Among the earliest victims were the members
of the privileged classes who had been so zealous in promoting the new
philanthropy, just as the parlor socialists of our own day would be
among the first to suffer if the overturn they are preaching should
actually occur. As Chesterton says, if the social revolution takes
place, the streets will run red with the blood of philanthropists.
If one wishes to enter into the psychology of the later stages of the
Revolution, one should devote special attention to avowed disciples
of Rousseau like Robespierre. He adopts in a rather uncompromising
form Rousseau’s view of “virtue,” and so is led to set up an “ideal”
France over against the real France, and this “ideal” France is largely
a projection of what I have termed the idyllic imagination. The
opposition that he established between the virtuous and the vicious is
even less an opposition between virtuous and vicious individuals than
between whole classes of individuals. The judging of men by their
social grouping rather than by their personal merits and demerits,
that seemed to Burke so iniquitous, has, as a matter of fact, been
implicit in the logic of this movement from the French to the Russian
Revolution. Danton already says: “These priests, these nobles are not
guilty, but they must die, because they are out of place, interfere
with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future.”
Danton, so far as he was responsible for the September Massacres, made
some application of this revolutionary logic. Leaders like Robespierre
and Saint-Just, however, developed it far more than Danton into a
programme of wholesale proscription. The actual France was too rich and
populous. Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently
whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites
and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France
to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than
is commonly realized a bucolic episode.[45] It lends color to the
assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is
homicidal mania.
In theory, Robespierre is, like Rousseau, rigidly equalitarian. He
is not a real leader at all--only the people’s “hired man.” But at
critical moments, in the name of an ideal general will, of which he
professes to be only the organ, he is ready to impose tyrannically
_his_ will on the actual people. The net result of the Rousseauistic
movement is thus not to get rid of leadership, but to produce an
inferior and even insane type of leadership, and in any case leadership
of a highly imperialistic type. This triumph of force can be shown
to be the total outcome of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
Rousseauistic sense. Rousseau himself, as we have seen, would force
people to be free. The attempt to combine freedom with equality led,
and, according to Lord Acton, always will lead, to terrorism. As for
Jacobinical fraternity, it has been summed up in the phrase: “Be
my brother or I’ll kill you.” Moreover, the clash of a leader like
Robespierre is not only with enemies of the Revolution, but with other
more or less sincere revolutionary fanatics whose imaginations are
projecting different “ideals.” The sole common denominator of leaders
thus obstinate, each in the pursuit of a separate dream, is force. The
movement had repudiated the traditional controls, and so far as any new
principle of cohesion was concerned, had turned out to be violently
centrifugal. The only brotherhood the Jacobinical leaders had succeeded
in founding was, as Taine puts it, a brotherhood of Cains.
Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to
emerge from the Revolution. As early as 1790 Burke had predicted
that the Revolution would turn at last to the profit of some military
adventurer. The doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed from
the “Social Contract” had been found to encourage a sort of chronic
anarchy. Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some
kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of
discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type. In the army
it was still possible to find the orderly subordination and loyalty
to acknowledged merit that the Jacobins had, on principle, been
undermining in civil France. Bonaparte is therefore no accident. He
is the true heir and executor of the Revolution. After his grenadiers
had chased members of the Cinq-Cents through the doors and out of the
windows of the Orangerie at Saint-Cloud (18 Brumaire), and when he had
revealed himself more and more nakedly as the imperialistic superman,
it is not to be supposed that the Jacobins as a body stood aloof. What
became apparent, on the contrary, was the affinity that has always
existed between an unlimited democracy and the cult of ruthless power.
No one crawled more abjectly at the feet of Napoleon than some of
the quondam Terrorists. “On the point of becoming barons and counts,
the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity of
punishing the proletarians and of repressing popular excesses. From day
to day there was taking place the transformation of republicans into
imperialists and of the tyranny of all into the despotism of a single
man.”[46]
Chateaubriand’s disapproval of Napoleon was ineffective, one may
note in passing, because his head was not in accord with his heart.
He was in secret sympathy with Napoleon because of a likeness that
he recognized between the Napoleonic quality of imagination and his
own. The imaginations of both men were, in a sense that I have sought
to define elsewhere, romantic: they were straining, though along
very different lines, out towards the unlimited. Victor Hugo, again,
denounced Napoleon as the author of the 18 Brumaire, and at the same
time was so fascinated by him imaginatively, that he was one of the
chief artificers of the Napoleonic legend.
I have been trying to make clear the relation between Rousseauistic
democracy and imperialism in France itself. The same relationship
appears if we study the Rousseauistic movement internationally.
Perhaps no movement since the beginning of the world has led to such
an inbreeding of national sentiment of the type that in the larger
states runs over very readily into imperialistic ambition. I have said
that the Revolution almost from the start took on the character of a
universal crusade. The first principles it assumed made practically
all existing governments seem illegitimate. The various peoples were
invited to overthrow these governments, based upon usurpation, and,
having recovered their original rights, to join with France in a
glorious fraternity. What followed is almost too familiar to need
repetition. Some of the governments whose legitimacy was thus called
into question took alarm and, having entered into an alliance, invaded
France.[47] This foreign menace moved France to the first great
burst of national enthusiasm in the modern sense. The cry of the
revolutionary army--_Vive la nation_--heard by Goethe in a pause of
the cannonading of Valmy--was rightly taken by him to mark the dawn
of a new era.[48] The beginnings of the very type of warfare we have
recently been witnessing in Europe, that is, the coming together of
whole nations for mutual massacre (_la levée en masse_), go back to
this period. The new national enthusiasm supplied France with soldiers
so numerous and so spirited that she not only repelled her invaders,
but began to invade other countries in turn, theoretically on a mission
of emancipation. In the actual stress of events, however, the will to
power turned out to be stronger than the will to brotherhood, and what
had begun as a humanitarian crusade ended in Napoleon and imperialistic
aggression. This aggression awakened in turn the new national sentiment
in various countries, and did more than all other agencies combined to
prepare the way for a powerful and united Germany.[49] France ceased
to be the “Christ of nations” and became the traitor to humankind
universally denounced by the disillusioned radicals of the time,
especially after the invasion of Switzerland (1798).[50]
Any one who rejects the humanitarian theory of brotherhood runs the
risk of being accused of a lack of fraternal feeling. The obvious
reply of the person of critical and experimental temper is that, if he
rejects the theory, it is precisely because he desires brotherhood.
After an experience of the theory that has already extended over
several generations, the world would seem at times to have become a
vast seething mass of hatred and suspicion. What Carlyle wrote of the
Revolution has not ceased to be applicable: “Beneath this rose-colored
veil of universal benevolence is a dark, contentious, hell-on-earth.”
One is finally led to the conviction that the contrast between the
ideal and the real in this movement is not the ordinary contrast
between the willingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh;
that on the contrary this particular ideal of union among men actually
promotes the reality of strife that it is supposed to prevent. One
might without being too fanciful establish a sort of synchronism
between the prevalence of pacifistic schemes and the actual outbreak
of war. The propaganda of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre was followed by
the wars of Frederick the Great. The humanitarian movement of the end
of the eighteenth century, which found expression in Kant’s treatise
on Perpetual Peace, was followed and attended by twenty years of the
bloodiest fighting the world has ever known. The pacifist agitation
of the early twentieth century, that found outer expression in the
Peace Palace at The Hague, was succeeded by battle lines hundreds of
miles long. The late M. Boutroux, whom no one will accuse of being a
cynic, said to a reporter of the “Temps” in 1912 that from the amount
of peace talk abroad, he inferred that the future was likely to be
“supremely warlike and bloody.” In the matter of war and peace, as
elsewhere, the humanitarian, to be sure, has an ever-ready explanation
for all the failures of his theory to work: it would, he insists, have
worked beautifully if it had not been for this or that conspiracy.
Nothing short of the suicide of the planet would avail to convince
certain humanitarians that anything is wrong with their theory--and
even then, the last surviving humanitarian would no doubt continue to
moan “conspiracy.”
From a strictly psychological point of view, the movement we are
studying had not only produced all its characteristic fruits over a
hundred years ago, but also its two outstanding and truly significant
personalities--Rousseau and Napoleon. If there had been no Rousseau,
Napoleon is reported to have said, there would have been no Revolution,
and without the Revolution, _I_ should have been impossible. Now
Rousseau may be regarded as being more than any other one person the
humanitarian Messiah. Napoleon, for his part, may be defined, in
Hardy’s phrase, as the Christ of War. So that the humanitarian Messiah
set in motion forces that led by a process that I have attempted to
sketch in rough general outline to the rise of a Christ of War.
A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its
sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the
lot of the masses. “All institutions,” says Condorcet, for example,
“ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral
amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.” But on the
utilitarian no less than on the sentimental side of the movement, the
contrast between the ideal and the real is so flagrant as to suggest
some central omission in humanitarian psychology. If the Rousseauist
set up an ideal of universal brotherhood that led actually to universal
conscription, the utilitarian for his part has put prime emphasis on
material organization and efficiency and so, with the aid of physical
science, has gradually built up an enormous mass of interlocking
machinery which was, in theory, to serve humanity and promote the
greatest good of the greatest number, but has in practice been pressed
into the service of the will to power of individuals and social
groups and nationalities. As a result of the coming together of the
various factors I have enumerated, war has become almost inconceivably
maleficent. The chief victims have been the very masses whom both
Rousseauist and Baconian have professed themselves so eager to benefit.
The clashes between states and coalitions of states have, under
existing conditions, become clashes between Frankenstein monsters. One
should recollect that the Frankenstein monster was not, as is commonly
supposed, a soulless monster. On the contrary, as depicted by Mrs.
Shelley, he is, in the Rousseauistic sense, a beautiful soul--possibly
as a result of having learned to read from works like the “Sorrows of
Werther.”[51] He becomes ruthless only when the beauty of his soul and
his yearnings for sympathy are unappreciated by others and he is forced
back into psychic solitude. Here again the last stage of sentimentalism
is homicidal mania.
The whole Occident, and increasingly, indeed, the whole world, is now
faced with a similar problem as to the quality of the “soul” that
animates the vast mechanism of material efficiency, to the building up
of which the Occident has for several generations past been devoting
its main effort. Is this “soul” a Rousseauistic or a genuinely ethical
“soul”? One is tempted to define the civilization (or what we are
pleased to term such) that has been emerging with the decline of the
traditional controls as a mixture of altruism and high explosives. If
anything is amiss with the altruism, the results may prove to be rather
serious. The idealists affirm either that man is so lovely in his
natural self that he needs no control at all, or else that he can be
induced to exercise the necessary control with reference to the good of
his fellows. Everything hinges, in either case, on the presence in the
natural man of an element of love or will to service that is of itself
a sufficient counterpoise to the natural man’s will to power. Here is
the dividing line between egoists and altruists, and not merely in the
appeal to utility. The principle of the greatest good of the greatest
number is, as has been pointed out, asserted by Machiavelli himself.[52]
Now the facts in this debate as to the relative strength in the
natural man of the will to brotherhood and the will to power seem,
on an impartial survey, to favor the Machiavellians rather than the
“idealists.” Those who so pride themselves on being forward-looking
should have a special cult for Machiavelli. He has claims to be
regarded as the most successful of all the forward-lookers. In the
phrase of Gervinus, “he guessed the spirit of modern history.” The
last war has been correctly described as a “return of Machiavelli.”
But with the progress that science has made, and is constantly making
in “improving the mystery of murder,” so that it is already possible
apparently to destroy great cities in a few minutes from the air,
it should be evident even to the most obtuse that we cannot afford
to allow Machiavelli to return. One or two more such returns on a
large scale will, under existing conditions, mean the end of white
civilization, and possibly of the white race itself. A gross and
palpable error of the era that is just closing has been its confusion
of mechanical and material progress with moral progress. Physical
science is excellent in its own place, but when supreme moral issues
are involved, it is, as has been rightly remarked, only a multiplying
device.[53] If there is rightness at the centre, it will no doubt
multiply the rightness. If, on the other hand, there is any central
error, the peripheral repercussion, with men bound together as they
are at present, will be terrific. With the development of inventions
like the radio and the wireless telephone, the whole world is becoming,
in a very literal sense, a whispering-gallery. It is hardly necessary
to dilate on what is likely to follow if the words that are whispered
are words of hatred and suspicion. An increasing material union among
men who remain spiritually centrifugal means a return of Machiavelli,
a triumph in other words of the law of cunning and the law of force,
on a scale to which the past has seen no parallel. Superlatives are
dangerous things, but one is perhaps justified in describing the
present situation as one of unexampled gravity.
In dealing with democracy and the special type of fraternity it has
preached, as related to imperialism, I have thus far been confining
myself for the most part to the national and international phases of
this relationship. It is time to fulfil my promise, and, working in
from the periphery towards the centre, seek to get at the root of
the whole matter in the psychology of the individual. For behind all
imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind
all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
I have already made a distinction of the first importance for the study
of the question of war or peace in terms of the individual, and that
is the distinction between the traditional Christian conception of
liberty, which implies spiritual subordination, and the Rousseauistic
conception which, whether we take it in the no-state of the “Second
Discourse” or the all-state of the “Social Contract,” is resolutely
equalitarian. At the end of his “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley has
portrayed in the very spirit of the “Second Discourse” the paradise
that is to result from the abolition of the traditional subordinations
and inequalities:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree.
But on any attempt to carry out this programme, the enormous irony and
contradiction at the very heart of this movement becomes manifest. It
leads one to break down standards in the real world in favor of purely
chimerical ideals. For what actually follows the attempt to establish
equalitarian liberty, we need to turn from Shelley to Shakespeare:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.
This last line reminds one of a remark of Jeremy Taylor that, in the
absence of ethical control, “men know no good but to please a wild,
indetermined, infinite appetite.” The word infinite adds an essential
idea. Other animals have appetite, but within certain definite bounds,
whereas man is, either in the good or bad sense, the infinite animal.
Machiavelli is very metaphorical when he speaks of his prince as
combining the virtues of the lion and the fox. The lion and the fox
do not put forth their power or cunning beyond what is needed for
the satisfaction of their actual physical wants. They do not strive
to set up a vulpine or leonine empire over other animals. One cannot
truthfully say of them, as Carlyle says of his boot-black, that, if
given half the universe, they will soon be quarrelling with the owner
of the other half. To be sure, as Swift remarks,
Now and then
Beasts may degen’rate into men.
But, as a rule, the man who is infinite after the fashion of Carlyle’s
boot-black is in a fair way to become not beastly, but fiendish. As
a result of his infinitude, man is almost necessarily either better
or worse than other animals. His prime need is not, as in the case
of other animals, to satisfy certain limited physical wants, but
to keep in good conceit with himself. Now it is of the essence of
conceit, a word which, as once used, was synonymous with imagination
in general, and as now used is nearly related to the egocentric type
of imagination, to strain out towards the unlimited. This conceit is,
it is to be feared, closely associated in unregenerate man with envy
and jealousy of any one whose conceit seems to set up rival pretensions
to his own. Conceit also determines largely man’s attitude towards
the truth. Truth according to the natural law he welcomes because it
ministers to his power or comfort and in any case piques his wonder
and curiosity. Spiritual truth is less welcome because it diminishes
his conceit. Truth in this sense, as Goethe says, is less congenial to
human nature than error, because it imposes limitations, whereas error
does not. Tell the average person that some one is planning to get into
wireless communication with Mars, or to shoot a rocket at the moon, and
he is all respectful interest and attention at once. Tell him, on the
contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk
in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent,
or even actively resentful.
Man’s conceit, and the tendency towards unlimited expansion that it
gives to the impulses of the natural man, is of various types. Perhaps
as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three
lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity--the lust of knowledge,
the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. It is interesting to
study the lust of power as it has appeared in the conquerors and
great military adventurers of history. Saint-Evremond has made some
penetrating observations on this form of imperialistic psychology
in his “Dissertation on the word Vast.” The vastness that the great
dominators have displayed in their projects and ambitions is due,
as he points out, to the quality of their imaginations. The outward
straining of the imagination towards the unlimited Saint-Evremond takes
to be the weakness and not the strength of a Pyrrhus, an Alexander
and a Richelieu. It is a pity that Saint-Evremond was not able to
extend his scrutiny to a Napoleon. Napoleon plainly displayed two
entirely different types of “vision”: in dealing with the natural
order, in planning a battle, for instance, he showed himself capable
of a tremendous concentration upon the facts; but in his political
ambitions, where factors of a more purely human order came into play,
he revealed an inability to limit his imagination that was destined
sooner or later to result in disaster. The coming together of the
two kinds of vision I have just defined gives a type with which we
have become very familiar, not only in our political and military,
but in our commercial leaders--that of the efficient megalomaniac. A
surprising number of these leaders have been, in intention at least,
supermen, and little Napoleons.
Assuming that Napoleon’s imagination is of the general type that
Saint-Evremond ascribes to various great dominators of the past,
we still have to explain, if we are to understand the triumph of
the imperialistic push for power over Rousseauistic idealism, why a
Napoleon so captivates the imagination of other men; for this sort of
leader would evidently be helpless unless he had many accomplices. The
Rousseauist, I have said, breaks down traditional controls without
setting up new ones. What emerges in the many men who have as a result
lapsed to the naturalistic level is not the will to brotherhood, but
the will to power; so that in this sense the Rousseauist is actually
promoting what he is in theory seeking to prevent. For what follows we
need to make an application of Freudian psychology to a _libido_ even
more fundamental perhaps than the _libido_ with which the Freudians
themselves have thus far been chiefly concerned--namely, the _libido
dominandi_. In a naturalistic era, the average man finds himself more
or less in the state of Carlyle’s boot-black, but is at the same
time hampered on every side and kept from expanding freely along the
lines of power, and is thus diminished in his conceit of himself. He
suffers from repressed and thwarted desire. But what he is unable to
get directly, he may secure vicariously. At this point one begins to
perceive the meaning of Hardy’s description of Napoleon as the Christ
of War. The spell that Napoleon exercised was not merely over the
former Jacobins of whom Chateaubriand speaks, but over the French
masses. Let one reflect on the way these masses rallied to him on the
return from Elba, and that, too, after he had wrought them almost
incalculable evil:
Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,
Le peuple encore le révère, etc.
I have said that to look on the State of Burke with its ethical
leadership as merely “pooled self-esteem” is misleading. The phrase has
a certain relevancy, however, when applied to the State that is under
Napoleonic leadership. The intrusion of this imperialistic element is
strong not only in all secular establishments, but also in the churches
of the world, if only because these churches, however immaculate they
may be in theory, are administered by human beings. It is not easy to
overlook this element in the Papacy, even though one does not go so far
as to say roundly with Tyrrell: “Rome cares nothing for religion--only
for power.” The very divinities that men have set up often impress one
as being in a considerable measure their pooled self-esteem. “We are
glad,” as Dryden says, “to have God on our side to maul our enemies,
when we cannot do the work ourselves.” Jonathan Edwards has genuine
religious elevation; but the Jehovah in whose “fierceness” he plainly
rejoices, and who tramples sinners under his feet until their blood is
“sprinkled on his garments,” might lead some to dismiss Edwards as a
theological imperialist. A more unmistakable example is that of certain
members of the group of Fundamentalists that has recently been dividing
the Baptist denomination, who have depicted Christ in his second coming
in colors that make Nero and Caligula seem respectable. One scarcely
need dilate on the fact that Christ was in his first coming a deep
disappointment to the Jewish populace; the Messiah they had hoped for
was far nearer to Napoleon than to the Messiah they actually received.
It goes without saying that the imperialistic element I have noted
in religious beliefs, as well as in those who administer them, is not
the whole story. Above all, it is not the whole story in the case of
Christianity. Christianity has actually done much to curb the expansive
lusts of the human heart, and among its other lusts, the lust for
power. As Dante puts it, “men wandering wild in their bestiality,”
have need of a twofold control: “that of the highest Pontiff to lead
them according to revelation to eternal life, and that of the Emperor
to lead them according to the traditions of philosophy to temporal
felicity.”[54] Of course the reality never coincided exactly with
Dante’s ideal. From his tremendous diatribes against the self-seeking
rulers of his time, one might infer that Europe then was almost as
mad as it certainly is to-day. At the same time Christianity in its
mediæval form actually did secure for Europe no small degree of
spiritual unity and cohesion, and even when there was disunion, it was
not rendered infinitely maleficent, as it is now, by the concomitant
circumstance that those who were spiritually at variance were bound up
together materially.
Now I scarcely need repeat what I have said here and elsewhere that
the loss of this older European unity was due to the rise of what one
may describe, in the most general sense, as the critical spirit, which
has in turn been identical with the spirit of individualism. To be
modern has meant practically to be increasingly positive and critical,
to refuse to receive anything on an authority “anterior, exterior,
and superior” to the individual. With those who still cling to the
principle of outer authority I have no quarrel. I am not primarily
concerned with them. I am myself a thoroughgoing individualist, writing
for those who are, like myself, irrevocably committed to the modern
experiment. In fact, so far as I object to the moderns at all, it is
because they have not been sufficiently modern, or, what amounts to the
same thing, have not been sufficiently experimental. In the field of
the natural law, those who have gone in for modernity evidently satisfy
my test in no small measure. The substitution of positive observation
for what seemed to a Bacon, for instance, the apriorism and verbal
subtleties and servile leaning upon authority of the schoolmen has
actually led to the fruits anticipated. But the apostles of modernity
have not been content merely to minister to man’s power and utility.
They have also professed to have a substitute for the spiritual unity
of the older order, and here, when tried experimentally, that is,
according to their own principles, they have, I have tried to show,
failed disastrously. The results of the material success and spiritual
failure of the modern movement are before us. It is becoming obvious to
every one that the power of Occidental man has run very much ahead of
his wisdom. The outlook might be more cheerful if there were any signs
that Occidental man is seeking seriously to make up his deficiency
on the side of wisdom. On the contrary, he is reaching out almost
automatically for more and more power. If he succeeds in releasing the
stores of energy that are locked up in the atom--and this seems to be
the most recent ambition of our physicists--his final exploit may be to
blow himself off the planet. We are told that our means of destruction
are growing so terrible that no one will venture to use them--the same
argument that was heard before the War. But at the same time that
we are heaping up these means of destruction, the breakdown of the
traditional controls combined with the failure thus far to supply any
adequate substitute, is creating fools and madmen who will not hesitate
to use them.
It would sometimes seem, indeed, that what wisdom we still have is a
survival. One can at least understand the point of view of those who
decide to stand in the ancient ways and to assume towards much of what
is deemed progressive nowadays an attitude frankly reactionary. One
may even catch the point of view of the ultramontane Catholic, as set
forth by Pius IX in the eightieth article of the Syllabus (1864): “If
any one says that the Pope can and should be reconciled and make terms
with progress, with liberalism and modernist civilization, let him be
anathema.”
It is, however, possible to admit that some vital element dropped out
in the passage from the mediæval to the modern era, or, what amounts
to the same thing, from outer authority to individualism, and still
remain a modern. But in that case one should make clear that to be
a thoroughgoing modern is not such a simple matter as is sometimes
assumed. I am myself fond of insisting that man is subject not to one,
but to two laws; and that to be completely modern, one must be positive
and critical, not merely according to the natural, but also according
to the human law. Those who have piqued themselves on modernity
have thus far been for the most part persons who have been more or
less critical according to the natural law, and then have pieced
out their incomplete survey of the facts by various rationalistic
devices, or else by idyllic imagining. In the realm of the human law,
the nineteenth century, so far as it stood for a radical break with
tradition, was, on the one hand, an age of rationalism, on the other,
an age of romantic dreaming. He who has broken with traditions in
this fashion should, in my judgment, be called, not a modern but a
modernist. The term modern should be reserved for the person who is
seeking to be critical according to both the human and the natural
law. Any one who attempts such a task will find it necessary to give a
much wider meaning to the word experiment than has of late been usual:
it should be extended to cover not merely the kind of experimenting
that goes on in a laboratory, but also the experimenting with various
philosophies of life that has gone on in the remote as well as in
the near past. To be sure the man who turns nowadays to the past for
instruction is likely to be regarded as more or less a reactionary.
A more familiar type is that of the progressive who has repudiated
the past, barely tolerates the present, and is at home imaginatively
only in that vast, windy abode, the future. Yet Goethe speaks not as
a reactionary, but as a person of keenly experimental temper, when
he says that we should oppose to the “aberrations of the hour the
masses of universal history.” As a result of the toil of innumerable
investigators, these masses of universal history are becoming fairly
accessible to us from the era of the Fighting States in ancient China
(third century B.C.) to the era of the fighting states in contemporary
Europe. But one must grant that there are great, if not insurmountable
difficulties in turning to account these records of the past, and in
building up from them standards with which to judge the “aberrations
of the hour.” The obvious difficulty is the element of truth contained
in the saying that history never repeats itself. If this were the
whole truth, if history were only a whirl of unrelated happenings that
did not exhibit the workings of any central human law, one would have
a right to dismiss any attempt to judge the present in the light of
past experience with the dictum of Henry Ford or some more elegant
equivalent: “History is bunk.” But though it is true that history
never repeats itself, it is about equally true that history is always
repeating itself; and this is a part of the paradox of life itself
which does not give us here an element of oneness, and there an element
of change, but a oneness that is always changing. This implication of
unity in diversity is the scandal of reason, and philosophers have,
for the most part, ever since the Greeks, been seeking with the aid of
reason to abstract the unity from the diversity, or else, by similar
rationalizing processes, to stress the diversity at the expense of the
unity. Practically all the philosophers who now have the “cry” belong,
it is scarcely necessary to add, to the latter class. But the complete
positivist will insist that wisdom is found in mediation between the
constant and the variable factors in human experience. His objection to
the unity that the Rousseauist proposes to establish among men through
the diffusion of love and sympathy is that it is illusory. If it were
only possible to oppose to this unreal unity, a mere chimera of the
romantic imagination, some firm and fast unity, purged of illusion
with the aid of reason, and tucked away once for all into formulæ,
our problem would be very easy. The man who faces life as it actually
is, however, will not admit that it is possible thus to eliminate the
element of illusion. To recognize this element is not to be oneself an
illusionist, but on the contrary a keen observer. It is in the rôle
that they attribute to illusion that the wisdom of the great poets,
of a Shakespeare or a Sophocles, for example, is most manifest. I
have tried to show elsewhere[55] how closely related this problem of
illusion is to the problem of the imagination. The final contrast is
not between reason or judgment and mere illusion, but between the
imagination that is disciplined to what abides in the midst of the
changeful and the illusory, and the imagination that is more or less
free to wander wild in some “empire of chimeras.”
The true vision of the disciplined imagination is needful if one is
to profit by experience, a task that becomes increasingly difficult
according as the experience involved is one’s own experience or that
of one’s contemporaries or that of the near or remote past. Vision
of this type would seem to be depressingly rare, and yet without it
men run the risk, and that often when they are most filled with the
conceit of their own progressiveness, of simply “committing the oldest
sins the newest kind of ways.” Experience, we are told, keeps a hard
school, but fools will learn in no other; it is a rather wise fool,
one is sometimes inclined to think, who can learn even from his own
experience, not to speak of the experience of others.
But to return to our more immediate topic: evidently the type of vision
that can bring to bear the experience of the remoter past upon our
democratic-imperialistic era is not easy to attain, but seems very
necessary if one is to appeal to history at all. For one has to go
rather far back to find any close parallel to our present imbroglio.
Various persons have pointed out the analogy between the Great War
and its psychological background and the period of the Peloponnesian
War in Greece; and this analogy is helpful provided it be used with
sufficient caution. The period of the Peloponnesian War was, like our
own, a period of commercial and imperialistic expansion; and this
expansion was accompanied, especially at Athens, by an increasing trend
towards an equalitarian democracy.[56] Like our own age, it was an age
of “intellectuals” who were repudiating the traditional disciplines,
largely in virtue of the opposition they had established between nature
and convention. If negatively this cult of nature meant revolt against
everything prescriptive and established, positively it meant, on the
one hand, admiration for the superman, and on the other, sympathy for
the weak, though this latter element was far less marked in ancient
than in modern naturalism. It is hard to study the sophists of that
time without being reminded of our own philosophers of the flux, or, in
the phrase of Aristophanes, votaries of the God Whirl. Persons were
not lacking in ancient Athens who saw the perils of this anarchical
individualism. Some, like Aristophanes, were simply for getting back to
the “good old times,” and refused to distinguish between Socrates and
an ordinary sophist. Socrates, however, it is hardly necessary to say,
along with Plato and Aristotle and lesser disciples, was in reality
seeking to build up, in lieu of the crumbling traditional standards,
standards more in accord with the critical spirit. The Socratic
effort was on the whole a failure, especially in the political field.
The causes of this failure are complex. I will presently point out
what seem to me serious omissions in the Socratic philosophy itself:
and then, too, it may be maintained without paradox that Occidental
civilization is still suffering from the failure, even from the time of
the wily Odysseus, of the Greek character to measure up to the Greek
mind.[57] If the Hellenes could only get together, says Aristotle,
they might hold their own against the world. Unfortunately, they could
never get together. Even when a political tradition that was in its
essence identical with religion still bound together the citizens of
the various city-states, these states were largely centrifugal as
regards one another for the very reason that each state had different
gods. With the breakdown of these politico-religious traditions and
the failure to work out on Socratic or other lines some equivalent for
the spiritual controls they supplied, the citizens of each city-state
tended to become centrifugal not only with reference to the citizens
of other city-states, but with reference to one another. There followed
all the abominable incidents of class-war. At Miletus, for example,
the poor got the upper hand and forced the rich to flee from the city.
But afterwards, regretting that they had not been able to kill them,
they took their children, gathered them together in barns, and had them
trampled under the feet of oxen. The rich afterwards returned to the
city and became masters again. They took in their turn the children
of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burned them alive.[58] This
is the kind of thing of which our modern world has already had a
substantial first instalment from the French to the Russian Revolution.
The decadent Greeks, like those who are preaching a class-war in our
own day, employed many fine phrases, but the law that actually tended
to prevail was the law of force. This force was finally supplied, as
frequently happens in such cases, from without, first by Macedon and
then by Rome. On this final submission to an imperialistic autocrat,
the decadent Greek consoled himself for what would have seemed to a
Greek of the great period a deep degradation by the somewhat shabby
fiction that he was submitting, not to a man, but to a god.
Any summary of the kind I have been attempting is necessarily very
misleading. Nothing will take the place of a first-hand knowledge of
the sources, above all of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides. Any one
can convince himself of the startling relevancy to existing conditions
of Aristotle’s “Politics” in particular, especially now that we
have begun in this country to slip our constitutional moorings and
to drift towards a direct or unlimited democracy. There are passages
that are as modern as the morning newspaper, and at least a hundred
times more sensible. Rome later ran through a somewhat similar
cycle: a constitutional republic resting ultimately on religious
control gradually gave way with the weakening of this control to
an equalitarian democracy which in turn passed over with the usual
incidents of class-war into a decadent imperialism. The imperialistic
upshot of an unbridled individualism might also be illustrated from
the crumbling of the feudal system in ancient China and the resulting
era of the Fighting States to which I have already alluded. Some of
the philosophy of this time, that of Mei-ti,[59] for example, exhibits
a mingling of utilitarian and sentimental elements which is closer,
perhaps, to our contemporary humanitarianism than anything to be found
in Greece or Rome. Towards the end, when everything had been tried,
including the balance of power, universal brotherhood, and a “league
of nations,” and after the perpetration of horrors unspeakable, no
one apparently had any more illusions: the only question was which
imperialistic leader should first succeed in imposing his will on all
the others.
Evidently the outlook for our Western civilization, if it reaches
this last stage of the imperialistic cycle through which it is now
apparently running, is not cheerful, especially in view of the progress
that physical science is constantly making in “improving the mystery of
murder.” North America, and to a considerable degree, South America,
it is scarcely necessary to say, belong to the same cultural group as
the states of western Europe. All the states of this group are now
exhibiting in various forms and varying degrees the symptoms of an
unduly centrifugal individualism. The outside world, that frequently
has the last word under these circumstances, may, in view of the
present facilities of communication, be taken to include all the rest
of mankind, especially the great rival cultures of Asia. Now the more
powerful states of the cultural group I have just defined are not
only imperialistic in their attitude towards one another, but also
supremely imperialistic in their attitude towards the outlying peoples
and cultures. It is hard to see that the states that are supposed to be
democratically ruled are very different in this matter from the rest.
As early as 1790 Mirabeau warned the French enthusiasts that “free
peoples are more eager for war, and democracies more the slaves of
their passions than the most absolute autocracies.” This is true in the
obvious political sense not only in Europe, but in other parts of the
world. Republican France, for example, has been reaching out eagerly
for an African and Asiatic empire. But there is a type of imperialistic
expansion even more important, perhaps, than this obvious political
kind, and frequently leading up to it, and that is the imperialistic
expansion of the commercialist. It has been said that trade follows
the flag, but an even more significant truth is that the flag tends to
follow trade: let one consider the origins of the British Empire in
India. It is hardly necessary at this day to refute the notion held
by so many liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
trade is in itself a pacific agency. Commercial interests lead to
clashes and dangerous rivalries between European nations, not merely
in Europe itself, but in other parts of the world. Thus a chief aspect
of imperialism at the present time is the international scramble for
oil. One may read in a recent issue of a responsible French publication
that “for the success of their projects, Lord Cowdray and Lord Curzon
are capable of fomenting revolutions in Mexico, of sowing civil war in
Asia, and, in order to crush a rival, of setting fire to Europe and the
World! Their imperialism is a universal danger, but is not lacking in
grandeur.”[60] In my view the leaders of contemporary England are not
quite so Machiavellian, but the view I have just cited is widely held
in France, and scarcely leads to the confidence that is the necessary
basis of harmonious relations between France and England. This issue
of oil might even under certain circumstances lead to severe tension
between England and America.
It is becoming more and more evident that the chief problem raised
by all this imperialistic expansion is that of the relations between
Asia and the Occident. There are possibilities in the present
situation that may lead to the real world war, that between the East
and West, a war to which the recent European struggle is likely to
seem in retrospect but a faint prelude. It does not on the face of
it appear probable that Europeans can hope in the long run to enjoy
the luxury of slaughtering one another by the most recent and refined
methods of scientific efficiency and at the same time inflict their
imperialism and racial swagger on about nine hundred millions of
Asiatics; especially as Asiatics have an opportunity of observing the
imperialistic rivalries and almost incurable divisions of European
powers, not only in Europe, but on the soil of Asia itself. The
possibilities of which I have spoken may not develop in a day. But
then, as Confucius remarks, “the man who does not take far views will
have near troubles,” and it is surely time to attempt this long-range
view of our relations with the Orient, especially perhaps with the land
of Confucius himself.
Now the Asiatic problem, when considered from the political point of
view, breaks up into various minor problems. There is, for example, the
problem of the Near East which has been gravely mismanaged, largely,
it would seem, as the result of the inability of England and France to
come to a decent understanding. There is again the problem of India.
There is also the problem of the United States in its relations with
the Far East, with the possibility in the offing of a gigantic struggle
for the empire of the Pacific. One encounters here the portent of
Japan, an Asiatic power that is learning to play the imperialistic game
along the most approved Occidental lines, that is even learning to
adapt to its own uses the humanitarian-imperialistic cant of the “white
man’s burden,” and is beginning to speak of China as “Japan’s burden.”
Finally, most important of all, perhaps, there is the problem of
Russia, a country geographically astride of Europe and Asia, and
psychologically, so far as a great part of its population is concerned,
at least as Asiatic as it is European. With the extermination or
impoverishment of its upper classes, the psychic gap between Russia and
western Europe is becoming more accentuated. The Bolshevist Revolution,
which can be shown to derive in its underlying principles from the
great French Revolution, has been even more virulently imperialistic
than French Jacobinism. Russia is likely to remain for some time to
come a fertile field of imperialistic intrigue, not only on the part of
Russians, but also of Germans and Japanese, and perhaps of Turks, with
the whole Moslem world in the background. Just as certain Greeks were
ready to ally themselves with the extra-Hellenic world against other
Greeks, so Germany in her desire to get even might be tempted to join
with these extra-European forces, even though such action on her part
would amount to a betrayal of the vital interests of the cultural group
to which she herself belongs.
Considerations of this kind are, however, highly speculative at best,
even though the person who indulges in them has a competency in the
political field to which I make no claim. It is, as a matter of fact,
no part of my method to deal directly with the political problem. This
method is, in intention at least, purely psychological. When one
approaches psychologically the question of Europe versus Asia, and
takes a sufficiently long-range view, a striking fact forces itself
on one’s attention: the principle of true spiritual cohesion among
men that the Græco-Roman world was unable to supply--for the Stoical
attempt to achieve such a principle was on the whole a failure--came at
last from a faith of Oriental origin--namely, Christianity. Cardinal
Newman relates in his “Apologia” that what turned him as much as
any one thing to Catholicism was a Latin maxim which affirms that
the whole world is sound in its judgments (_Securus judicat orbis
terrarum_). Now, strictly speaking, this maxim seems less favorable to
the Catholic and his ultimate appeal to outer authority than to the
man who seeks to deal with life experimentally. If one uses the maxim
in this positive spirit, one has to insist, first of all, that the
Asiatic experience that led to the rise of Christianity is only part
of the total experience of Asia. To regard Europe and a small portion
of Asia as together constituting the _orbis terrarum_ is merely a form
of our Occidental conceit and arrogance. It is to leave out of one’s
survey the experience of about half of the human race. In this age of
universal and facile communication, it would seem especially desirable
to bring together the two halves of human experience. A chief obstacle
to the right interpretation of the experience of the Far East has been
the fact that those who have undertaken the task have suffered not only
from inadequate knowledge, but have also frequently worn theological
blinders. A more serious form of narrowness to-day is that of the man
who judges the total experience of the world, both East and West,
from the point of view of a merely mechanical progress. An estimate
of this total experience that is based on adequate knowledge, and
is at the same time free from dogmatic preoccupations of any kind,
will, I believe, flash a vivid light on the predicament into which we
have been led by our one-sided naturalism. It will aid us to a purely
psychological definition of the vital factor that has plainly tended to
drop out in the passage from mediæval to modern Europe. It will thus
help us to recover and maintain this vital factor not merely in the
form of “old prejudices and unreasoned habits”--the attempt to do so
is, I said, the weakness of the method of Burke--but in a positive and
critical form, a form, in other words, in closer accord with the modern
spirit.
CHAPTER V
EUROPE AND ASIA
Writers of books of criticism during the neo-classical period were fond
of refining on the idea of decorum; at times they developed this idea
on what one may term a continental scale and contrasted the decorous or
typical European with the decorous or typical Asiatic. Speculations of
this kind are not as fantastic as they at first sight appear. One may
not only become aware of some underlying divergence in the temper of
the Asiatic as compared with that of the European, but, to some extent,
formulate it. In speaking, however, of Asia it is even more important
than in speaking of Europe to make clear that one has in mind primarily
civilized Asia, and civilized Asia at the top of its achievement. The
hordes of barbaric or semi-barbaric Asia have not only menaced or
actually overrun Europe in the past (as they may very well do again
in the future), but have also been from remote times the scourge of
civilized Asia. In ancient Judæa the memory of these wild northern
riders lingered in the legends of Gog and Magog. The great Wall of
China is a sort of visible symbol of the separation between the two
Asias. On the one hand is the Asia of Attila and Tamerlane and Genghis
Khan; on the other, the Asia of Christ and Buddha and Confucius.
The mention of Christ and Buddha (of Confucius as a typical Asiatic
I shall have more to say presently) is hardly necessary to remind
us that it is the distinction of Asia as compared with Europe and
other parts of the world to have been the mother of religions; so
that if one were to work out a critical and experimental definition
of religion (and my method requires nothing less), one might be put
on the track of what is specifically Asiatic in the Asiatic attitude
towards life. Of course, historical Christianity is far from being
a purely Asiatic faith. It contains important elements drawn from
Greek philosophy--Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoical, Neoplatonic; also
a strong Roman element, especially what I have described as Roman
imperialistic organization, not to speak of sacramental magic and
elements drawn from the mystery cults, which are of mixed origin but
still largely Greek. What elements in Christianity may be referred back
to the Founder? We have Christ’s own authorization for dealing with
this question experimentally (“By their fruits ye shall know them”).
Now Bacon and the utilitarians have also preached a gospel of fruits,
but the fruits that Christ has in mind are plainly not of the Baconian
type. They are the fruits of the spirit, and what these fruits are,
Saint Paul has told us once for all: “Love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control.” The equivalent
of this list in its total emphasis will not be found in any European
cult or philosophy that antedates Christianity. It is possible,
however, to find the equivalent in the older religious thought of Asia.
About the middle of the third century before Christ, the Buddhist
ruler of India, Asoka, had a very similar list of virtues carved in
stone at various points throughout his vast empire: “Compassion,
liberality, truth, purity, gentleness, peace, joyousness, saintliness,
self-control.”[61] Thus Buddhism and Christianity, which often seem to
be almost hopelessly at variance when approached from the point of view
of dogma, confirm one another in this striking fashion when studied
experimentally and in their fruits.
If we wish to define religion adequately, we need perhaps to take a
further step and inquire which of the various fruits of the spirit
enumerated by Saint Paul and Asoka is most central in the truly
religious life. This central virtue seems to have been overlooked
by Matthew Arnold in a definition of religion that has at least the
merit of being experimental: “Religion is,” he says, “morality touched
by emotion.” Though religion normally leads through morality and,
at least in its earlier stages, is very much mixed up with emotion,
the final emphasis, if we are to believe the great religious leaders
themselves, is elsewhere. “My peace I give unto you,” said Christ on
his final parting with his disciples. “Come unto me, all ye that labor
and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” Buddha conceives of
the fulfilment of religion in very similar fashion: “His thought is
quiet, quiet are his word and deed, when he has obtained freedom by
true wisdom, when he has thus become a quiet man.”[62] And what is
the pathway to this peace? Dante has caught the inmost spirit of
Christianity in his reply to this question: “In his will is our peace.”
This idea that man needs to submit his ordinary self to a higher or
divine will is essential not merely to Christianity, but to all genuine
religion. Mohammed is at one here with Buddha and Christ. The very word
Islam means submission.
In India, though the same preoccupation with the will has prevailed,
the will to which man subordinates his ordinary self is often
conceived, not as a divinity that transcends him, but as his own higher
self. Buddha eliminates many things that are accounted essential in
other faiths, including Christianity, but this opposition between man’s
higher or ethical will and his natural self or expansive desires he
does not eliminate. On the contrary, more than any other religious
teacher, he plants himself on the naked psychological fact of this
opposition; so that Buddhism, in its original form, is the most
critical, or, if one prefer, the least mythological of religions.
It is important to note that much of the doctrine that has flourished
in India has not been sharply dualistic like that of Buddha or any
other genuine religious teacher, but has had a more or less marked
pantheistic leaning. This leaning appears in a number of the Hindus
who are now professing to interpret India to the outside world. For
example, Rabindranath Tagore has enjoyed no small degree of credit
as an interpreter of India, not merely in the Occident, but in the
Orient itself. He has the merit of seeing the importance of the whole
question of East versus West, and in his criticism of the West often
shows on the negative side no small degree of perspicacity. The man of
the West, he says, has specialized in power and mechanical efficiency
and so has been enabled to make himself the bully of the planet; but
it is established in the nature of things that bullies shall come to
grief. This view of the Occident has not only found adherents in China
and Japan, but something very similar to it is being muttered at the
present time by Mohammedan mullahs from Delhi to Tangiers. The facts,
it is scarcely necessary to say, are not quite so simple. The success
of the English in maintaining a hold on India is not based entirely
on mechanical efficiency and still less on philanthropy or a supposed
eagerness to assume the white man’s burden. It has been due in part to
the division among the Hindus themselves; but it is also in no small
measure a triumph of character, of the sane moral realism that has made
of the English the best ruling race, perhaps, that the world has yet
seen.
A federation of the states of Europe, Tagore goes on to say, would,
under existing circumstances, be only a federation of steam-boilers.
The remedy is to get rid of the analysis that has built up this
nightmare of mechanical efficiency and put in its place the principle
of love.[63] It is here that the affinity of Tagore appears, not with
the ancient sages of his own land, as he would have us believe, but
with our Rousseauistic dreamers. One may oppose to the effeminacy of a
Tagore or a Bergson and to all those, in either East or West, who seek
to attain “vision” at the expense of analysis, the example of Buddha
who has claims to be regarded as the ultimate Oriental. For Buddha
supreme “vision” coincided with a supreme act of analysis.[64]
I have been trying to show that at the centre of the great religious
faiths of Asiatic origin is the idea of a higher will that is felt in
its relation to man’s ordinary will or expansive desires as a power of
vital control. The recognition of this will, however conceived--whether
one say with Christ, “Thy will be done,” or with Buddha, “Self is the
lord of self; who else can be the lord?”--is the source of awe and
humility. The submission to this higher will is in its consummation
peace.
At first sight Confucius seems very unlike other great Asiatic
teachers. His interests, as I have already said, are humanistic rather
than religious. The points of contact between his doctrine and that
of Aristotle, the most important Occidental humanist, are numerous
and striking. One is tempted to say, indeed, that, if there is such
a thing as the wisdom of the ages, a central core of normal human
experience, this wisdom is, on the religious level, found in Buddha and
Christ and, on the humanistic level, in Confucius and Aristotle. These
teachers may be regarded both in themselves and in their influence
as the four outstanding figures in the spiritual history of mankind.
Not only the experience of the world since their time, but much of
its previous experience may be properly associated with them.[65] One
may note as an interesting analogy that just as Saint Thomas Aquinas
sought to combine the wisdom of Aristotle with that of Christ in his
Sum of Theology, so about the same time Chu Hsi mingled Buddhist with
Confucian elements in his great commentary.
Though Aristotle and Confucius come together in their doctrine of the
mean, one should hasten to add that in their total attitude towards
life they reveal the characteristic difference between the European
and the Asiatic temper. The interests of Aristotle were far from being
exclusively humanistic. He is supposed to have spent the happiest years
of his life on the islands about the Ægean, observing the fish and
marine life and preparing the material for the biological treatises
that won the admiration of Darwin.[66] It is perhaps not easy to
combine such a far-ranging intellectual curiosity as that of Aristotle
with the humility so emphasized by Confucius and other Oriental
teachers. Aristotle has had an influence great almost beyond reckoning,
not merely on Christian, but on Jewish and Mohammedan religious
thought; and yet one would feel something subtly incongruous in a
temple to Aristotle. One does not need to be a Confucian to feel that
a temple to Confucius would not be similarly incongruous. He was not,
like Aristotle, a master of them that _know_, but a master of them that
_will_. He was strong at the point where every man knows in the secret
of his heart that he is weak. The decorum or principle of inner control
that he would impose upon the expansive desires is plainly a quality of
will. He is no obscurantist, yet the rôle of reason in its relation to
will is, as he views it, secondary and instrumental. If we turn from
Aristotle to Socrates, whose interests were, like those of Confucius,
almost exclusively ethical, a similar contrast between the Oriental
and Occidental temper appears. The Socratic conception of virtue
encourages a primary emphasis on mind. Moreover, the Occident, having
emancipated itself from the Oriental assertion of the primacy of will
in its Christian form, has been devoting itself more and more since the
Renaissance, not to the Socratic thesis that knowledge is virtue, but
to the Baconian thesis that knowledge is power.
Few would deny that humility has decreased with the decline of
traditional religion. The very word humility, as M. Faguet remarks, may
in a not distant future be relegated to the dictionary of archaisms.
The word, so far as it survives at all, is often used incorrectly.[67]
It is sometimes employed, for example, to describe the deference that
the man of science should display towards the mystery and infinitude
of nature, or again as a synonym for the modesty or even, it may be,
meanness of spirit that a man shows in comparing himself to other
men. It is well that one should not be puffed up in one’s dealings
with either nature or other men, but humility belongs to another and,
as Pascal insists, supernatural order. The assertion of Burke that
humility thus understood is the root of all the other virtues involves
first principles and so is not subject to mediation or compromise.
It must either be accepted as true or rejected as false. If any one
accepts the assertion as true (as I myself do), the question then
arises why humility has suffered such an eclipse in the Occident. The
obvious reply is that it has been associated in the past with certain
doctrines, notably the doctrine of the Fall and that of divine grace,
and that these doctrines have tended to be undermined by the growth of
the critical spirit. The individual has refused more and more to submit
to the outer authority, whether that of Revelation or of the Church,
from which these doctrines derived their ultimate sanction; and his
humility has declined, one is tempted to say, in almost exact ratio to
his growth in self-reliance. If any one wishes to be a true modern, if
he refuses in other words to submit to authority merely as such, he
is confronted with a serious problem: it is plainly not easy to be at
once humble and self-reliant. The very doctrine of self-reliance has,
from the point of view of humility, a singularly clouded record in the
Occident, and that from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present
day. No one would ever associate humility with the Cynics who were
among the first to proclaim self-reliance (_autarkeia_). The Stoics
again favored self-reliance. According to Pascal, they were guilty
of “diabolical pride” in their first assumptions. Even though this
phrase be too strong, especially as applied to certain Stoics, e.g.,
Marcus Aurelius, it is hardly possible to cite the Stoics in general as
examples of meekness and lowliness of spirit.
If one comes to modern apostles of self-reliance, one thinks first of
all perhaps of Rousseau and his defence of the doctrine in “Emile.” As
to the degree of his humility, one should be sufficiently enlightened
by the first page of the “Confessions.” Nor can it be maintained that
Emerson, the chief American champion of self-reliance, is conspicuously
humble.[68]
If we are to grasp the problem involved in the attempt to be at
once humble and self-reliant, we need to go back to the ancient
individualism that Rousseau and Emerson in some respects revive and
seek to get at the causes of its final failure. The Stoic bases his
optimism primarily, we soon discover, not, like Rousseau, on faith
in his instincts, but on faith in reason. To _know_ the right thing
is about tantamount to doing it. Reason and will thus tend to become
identical. The Stoics themselves conceived that in this matter they
were simply following in the footsteps of Socrates. The whole question
is, as a matter of fact, closely allied to the Platonic and Socratic
identification of knowledge and virtue; and this again brings up the
great point at issue between European and Asiatic as to the relation
of intellect and will. The chief religious teachers of Asia have, I
have already said, asserted in some form or other a higher will to
which man must submit in his natural self (and in Asiatic psychology
intellect belongs to the natural self), if he is to enter the pathway
of peace. A comparison between Plato and Buddha might help to elucidate
this contrast between East and West. Buddha like Plato sought to bring
together philosophy and religion; but even so he put far less emphasis
on the rôle of mind than Plato. The list of “unthinkables” he drew up
is almost equivalent to a denial that life can in any deep sense of the
word be _known_ at all. It cannot be maintained that the mind (_mano_)
of the Buddhist coincides exactly with the Platonic mind (_nous_).
It is, nevertheless, significant that “mind” is for the Buddhist an
organ of the flux, whereas Plato exalts “mind” to the first place. It
is a less grievous error, according to Buddha, to look on one’s body
as permanent than to harbor a similar conceit about one’s “mind.” A
Buddhist might regard as the underlying error of Occidental philosophy
the tendency that goes at least as far back as Parmenides to identify
thought with being.[69] Why should so chimerical a creature as man
identify either thought or any other part of himself with being? As
Pindar says, “What are we, what are we not? Man is but the dream of a
shadow.” Pindar apparently feared lest he might flatter unduly man’s
conceit of his own permanence if he had called him even the shadow of a
dream. To suppose that one can transcend the element of impermanence,
whether in oneself or the outer world, merely through reason in any
sense of the word, is to forget that “illusion is an integral part of
reality.” The person who confides unduly in “reason” is also prone to
set up some static “absolute”; while those who seek to get rid of the
absolute in favor of flux and relativity tend at the same time to get
rid of standards. Both absolutists and relativists are guilty of an
intellectual sophistication of the facts, inasmuch as in life as it is
actually experienced, unity and multiplicity are indissolubly blended.
The Buddhist (to return to our comparison of East and West) seems at
first sight to belong with the apostles of the flux. As a matter of
fact, comparisons have been made between Buddha and Bergson on the
ground that they are both “philosophers of becoming.” We are justified
on other grounds than that of their distance in time and space in
finding the collocation of these names startling. Bergson positively
revels in change and naturalistic expansiveness and avows explicitly,
as we have seen, that his philosophy of _élan vital_ leads straight
to imperialism. Buddha for his part is at least as much concerned as
Plato with escaping from the flux and, so far from being imperialistic,
is turned, to the exclusion of everything else, towards what in his
own phrase makes for “tranquillity, knowledge, supreme wisdom, and
Nirvana.” This combination of a philosophy of the flux with religious
peace and humility is unlike anything we have seen in the Occident and
should be a warning that in dealing with Buddha we need to proceed
with extreme circumspection. One may at least form some conjecture as
to the point at which Buddha diverges from philosophers in the Western
tradition. As a thoroughgoing individualist, he is forced to grapple
with the problem of the One and the Many; if there is no principle of
unity in things with which to measure the manifoldness and change, the
individual is left without standards and so falls necessarily into an
anarchical impressionism. Now Buddha like a true Asiatic discovers this
unifying principle, not in intellect, but in will. Though he assigns
an important rôle to intellect, since he is himself highly analytical,
this rôle is after all secondary and instrumental. Any attempt to deal
with life directly in terms of the intellect involves in some form the
attempt to put the ocean in a cup. Life reveals its secret, he seems
to say, only to the man who acts; and of all forms of action the most
difficult is inner action. The first step in understanding not merely
Buddha but Christ is to see that they were both primarily men of action
in the sense in which the Asiatic in his great moments has understood
action. Buddha is for reducing theory to a minimum. The least
speculative of our Western philosophers would probably have seemed to
him still far too speculative. He has succeeded in compressing the
wisdom of the ages into a sentence: “To refrain from all evil, to
achieve the good, to purify one’s own heart, this is the teaching of
the Awakened.”[70] The Buddhist commentary is interesting: When you
repeat the words, they seem to mean nothing, but when you try to put
them into practice, you find they mean everything.
Some of the difficulties inherent in any attempt to treat the problem
of the One and the Many primarily as a problem of knowledge appear in
the Platonic theory of ideas. It is a matter of positive perception
that there is an element of oneness in all the particular objects that
belong to some class. There is, for example, an element of oneness in
all particular horses; and this oneness is in Platonic parlance the
idea or heavenly archetype of the horse. Unfortunately, if one does
not get beyond this stage, the oneness remains a mere abstraction
and finally a mere word--and human nature craves the concrete. The
attempt to deal intellectually with the relation of the unity to the
manifoldness would seem to lead to difficulties of the kind Plato has
himself set forth in the second part of his “Parmenides.” This problem
as to how to escape from mere abstraction appears in the case of the
chief idea of all--that of the good or of God which also coincides
with what is most exalted in man. The word that stands for the idea
of the good is the word par excellence, the logos. One can follow to
some extent the process by which the Greek conception of the logos was
transmitted through intermediaries like Philo Judæus to the author of
the Fourth Gospel. The specifically Asiatic element in the Christian
solution of the problem of the logos is the subordination, either
implicit or explicit, of the divine reason to the divine will. By an
act of this will, the gap between a wisdom that is abstract and general
and the individual and particular is bridged over at last; the Word
is made flesh. The human craving for the concrete is satisfied at the
essential point. The truth of the incarnation, to put the matter on
purely psychological grounds, is one that we have all experienced in a
less superlative form: the final reply to all the doubts that torment
the human heart is not some theory of conduct, however perfect, but the
man of character. Pontius Pilate spoke as a European when he inquired,
“What is truth?” On another occasion Christ gave the Asiatic reply: “I
am the way, the truth, and the life.” In this emphasis on personality
Christianity is confirmed by the most positive observation. Wherein
Christianity transcends positive observation is in its tremendous
projection of personality, divine and human, into the region of the
infinite and the eternal.
I have of course in this whole discussion been simplifying a subject
of immense difficulty and complexity at the risk of doing injustice
to Plato and the other members of the Socratic group. I am not
unaware of the almost inexhaustible store of wisdom in Plato. He
must still be one of the chief aids of those who wish to achieve
religious insight without an undue sacrifice of the critical spirit.
Yet it is difficult not to have certain doubts about the Platonic and
Socratic identification of knowledge and virtue. This identification
is not superficial precisely--men like Plato and Socrates are never
superficial. Knowledge may conceivably become so perfect that to
act contrary to it would be like putting one’s hand into the fire.
Moreover, when one has struggled out of any maze of error, it will
always seem in the retrospect that the error was due even less to a
defect of will than to ignorance. Nevertheless, the Socratic thesis
runs counter in certain respects to universal experience. Not only do
people do what they know to be wrong, but they often take a perverse
satisfaction in doing it, as Ovid,[71] anticipating the _delectatio
morosa_ of the theologians, was one of the first to point out. Our
problem, let us remind ourselves, is to be at once self-reliant and
humble. But it will not be found easy to preserve humility and at the
same time to grant, after the fashion of Greek philosophy, the primacy
to mind. All other forms of pride are as nothing compared with the
pride of intellect; and the pride of intellect itself is most manifest
in the attempt to know good and evil. So much psychological truth is,
it would seem, to be found in the myth of the Fall.
Perhaps my meaning may be best elucidated by studying the Socratic
movement in its fruits (and in this movement I include the Platonic
and in no small degree the Aristotelian influence). Since Plato worked
primarily on the religious level, one would have expected the fruits
of religion to appear in the Platonic Academy. The Academy produced a
number of distinguished intellectuals who inclined on the whole towards
scepticism. It is, of course, possible to build up faith on a sceptical
basis as Socrates himself seems to have done; but it can scarcely
be maintained that the successors of Plato in the Academy achieved
either this or any other type of faith. In any case the contrast is
striking between the Academy and the Order founded by Buddha. Any one
who studies the old records can acquire the conviction that this Order
contained many men of faith, men who brought forth the very fruits of
the spirit that have been so admirably defined by Saint Paul, and so
deserve to be regarded as saints.
The truth is that the Greeks, on their emancipation from traditional
standards, slipped rather rapidly into mere rationalism, and mere
rationalism, whether in the Stoical or Epicurean form, showed its
usual inability to control the expansive lusts of the human heart.
Stoicism sought to achieve a principle of union among men that would
have universal validity; it sought, in other words, to do the work of a
religion. It saw this universal principle in reason, and proclaimed at
the same time that to live according to reason was to live according to
nature. Man’s reason, the Stoic assumed, could prevail unaided over his
outer impressions and expansive desires. That important aspects, not
merely of the Socratic, but of the Platonic and Aristotelian teaching,
tended to be obscured in later Græco-Roman thought is beyond question.
At the same time, in assuming that right will follows upon right
knowledge, the Stoic, as I have already said, conceived that he was a
true Socratic; if herein he missed the true Socratic spirit, one is
forced to conclude that this spirit was rather easy to miss.
Stoicism was in general a paradoxical movement; it affirmed that
the material order alone is real and then put supreme emphasis on a
“virtue” that the material order does not give. In other words it
sought to attain and to some extent actually did attain on monistic
postulates the fruits that are normally associated with a genuinely
dualistic philosophy. In spite of its many merits and partial
successes, Stoicism was on the whole a failure; and the same must be
said of the whole Greek attempt to deal critically with the problem of
conduct, to work out, in other words, a sound type of individualism.
This failure of Greek philosophy was due, I have suggested, to the fact
that it is not quite adequate in its treatment of the closely allied
problems of the imagination and the higher or ethical will. Any one who
believes that “illusion is an integral part of reality,” and who also
holds with the Asiatic that, if humility is to be secured, will must
take precedence of mind, is forced to conclude that the danger of Greek
philosophy was from the start a certain obstinate intellectualism.
Christianity supplied what was lacking in Greek philosophy. It set up
doctrines that humbled reason and at the same time it created symbols
that controlled man’s imagination and through the imagination his
will. On the basis supplied by this Oriental faith, it was possible to
reconstruct European civilization after the Græco-Roman collapse and
in the midst of the havoc of the barbarian invasions. But this work of
regeneration was accomplished in no small degree at the expense of the
critical spirit. It resulted in the triumph of an authority “anterior,
exterior, and superior” to the individual. If the Greek confidence in
reason proved in some respects fallacious, there are also, it must
be admitted, dangers and difficulties in the worship of will in all
its forms. On the danger of will-worship in its Nietzschean form it
is scarcely necessary to dilate. But even the Oriental cult of the
ethical will is beset with pitfalls. The Hindu ascetic who lies on a
bed of spikes or holds his arm in the air until it withers away is
exercising will in the Oriental sense, but he can scarcely be said to
be exercising it intelligently. When the higher will again is conceived
as a divine will that has been revealed once for all in words of
literal and plenary inspiration, one has the drawbacks and difficulties
that are most manifest, perhaps, in Mohammedanism. The effect is to
force human life into a rigid and definitive mould. It is not safe to
overlook the element of flux and relativity in favor of absolute will
any more than it is to overlook it in favor of absolute reason. The
Mohammedan has his own way of forgetting that illusion is an integral
part of reality. Moreover, when will is conceived as absolute and
irresponsible and at the same time as transcendent, the individual is
made humble, indeed, but he is so far from being made self-reliant that
he is prone to fall into the Oriental form of fatalism.
We need to consider in the interests of our present subject not merely
the difficulties of the Oriental worship of will in general, but of
this worship as practised by Christians in particular--above all, the
form that appears in the doctrine of grace. Saint Augustine, it is
scarcely necessary to say, did more than any other one man to develop
the Pauline teaching on this subject; and Saint Augustine was destined,
here as elsewhere, to exercise an influence great almost beyond
reckoning on mediæval and later Christianity. Now Saint Augustine is
considered with some truth the Christian Plato. The supreme contrast
for him as for Plato is that between _fluxa et caduca_, on the one
hand, and, on the other, _certa et æterna_. A further comparison of
the two men will, however, reveal a profound shifting of emphasis
as regards the relative importance of intellect and will. Saint
Augustine’s desire, as he tells us, is to know only two things--God and
the soul. (_Deum et animam scire cupio. Nihilne plus? nihil omnino._)
God is envisaged primarily, not as mind, but as will. The soul of man
is also reduced in its essential aspect to will (_nihil aliud habeo
quam voluntatem_). The human will is, however, hopelessly alienated
from the divine will by the Fall. The gap between the two can be
traversed only by a miracle of grace, a miracle that itself depends
on the miracle of the redemption. Man not only needs the mediation of
Christ if his will is to be brought into harmony with the divine will,
but also of the Church and the Sacraments and the elaborate priestly
hierarchy that is required to administer them. So far from right will
following upon right knowledge, as Plato thought, fallen man delights
in evil for its own sake. What was so delicious upon his tongue, says
Saint Augustine in speaking of the pears that he stole when a boy, was
not the flavor of the pears themselves, but of his sin. Moreover, this
perversity of will sprang originally from the intellect and its pride:
man wished to be as a God, _knowing_ good and evil. The intellect was
thus not only put in its proper subordinate place, but brought under
positive suspicion. The way was opened for obscurantism. Man was
humbled and his will regenerated, but more or less, as I have said,
at the expense of the critical spirit. The historical explanation
of this uncritical element in Christianity is no doubt that, more
than most other doctrines, it worked its way up from the bottom of
society towards the top. At all events, men were asked to believe a
thing because it was absurd,[72] and ignorance was declared to be the
mother of devotion. The Church was enabled to carry on all the more
effectively its work of regeneration, it might be argued, from the fact
that men had ceased to be self-reliant and above all had ceased like
the Socratic Greek to rely on the intellect. “Is righteousness, then,
the daughter of ignorance?” Rousseau inquires. “Are science and virtue
incompatible?” The history of the Occident, it must be confessed,
raises some doubt on this point. The so-called Dark Ages, says Lord
Acton with some exaggeration, were spiritually full of light.[73] On
the other hand, the intellectually “enlightened” eighteenth century
was, as Burke complains, spiritually full of darkness.
The beginnings of “Enlightenment” in the eighteenth-century sense
go back to the Middle Ages themselves--at least as far back as
the thirteenth century. A significant coincidence is that between
this incipient emancipation of intellect and the founding of the
Inquisition. The real emancipation of intellect got fairly under way
with the Renaissance. Men were becoming self-reliant again and in
almost the same measure were losing humility. They were inclining once
more, like the ancient Greeks, to look on life primarily as a problem
of knowledge. Only the knowledge that they sought increasingly was not
the ethical knowledge at which Socrates aimed, but knowledge of the
natural order. Ethical knowledge seemed to have become indissolubly
associated with incomprehensible dogmas. An acute conflict was
inevitable, often in the heart of the same individual, between the old
humility and the new spirit of intellectual inquiry. Let us consider
the case of Pascal, an eminent scientific investigator and also a
religious writer at once profound and poignant. He recommends a full
application of the critical and experimental spirit to the natural
order, but in all that transcends the natural order he would have
the critical spirit abdicate before a twofold outer authority--that
of Revelation and the Church.[74] Spiritual truth he identifies
with dogmas that are most repugnant to reason--for example, infant
damnation.[75] To be sure, all the nobility of man is in reason, but
this nobility is not in itself of much avail, inasmuch as reason is the
sport and plaything of the imagination. Here, I have already noted, is
a supreme clash between Christian psychology and that of the Stoic, who
holds that it is possible for reason to triumph over the imagination.
If reason is thus the plaything of the imagination, either the Stoical
or any other form of self-reliance is vain. Man’s only hope is in
arbitrary will in the form of divine grace. To the sudden illumination
of grace Pascal gives the name “heart.” “The heart has reasons of which
the reason knows nothing.” Will in the form of grace is thus at odds
with reason which is in turn at odds with imagination; whereas, if one
is to be a sound individualist, it may be that reason and imagination
need to coöperate in the service of the power in man that I have
defined as the ethical will.
It is not to be inferred from what I have said that Pascal has ceased
to have value for the individualist. Many of the arguments that he
urges in favor of humility and against the pride of intellect are
still valid for the simple reason that they are not dogmatic, but
keenly psychological. Why should man be proud, seeing that he is, as
Pascal shows, caught between two infinites, one of smallness and one of
magnitude, and is equally unable to grasp either, so that the essence
of things eludes him and must ever elude him. If at any time he thinks
he has found a firm foundation on which to rear a tower that will reach
even to the infinite, this foundation suddenly fails him and “the earth
yawns open even to the abyss.” Lacking some such firm foundation, man
has no assurance that his knowledge is real knowledge or anything more
than a dream within a dream. But there is something still more humbling
to man than his ignorance, and that is the inability of unaided reason
to control effectively his outer impressions and expansive desires.
Surely realistic observation is here on the side of Pascal rather than
of the Stoics. Man’s peculiar blindness arises from the fact that he
does not wish to be limited in his dominant desire, whatever that
desire may be. He wishes to be free to pursue his folly, as Erasmus
would say, and finally discovers the limits established in the nature
of things by the somewhat painful process of colliding with them. This
human proclivity is so universal, and yet the punishment visited upon
it is so harsh, that one’s final impression is that of a certain
treachery in life itself. Under the circumstances one does not need to
be a Jansenist, or even perhaps a Christian, to see certain merits in
the older plan of working out one’s salvation in fear and trembling as
compared with our modern plan of “living dangerously,” or, what amounts
to the same thing, of turning away from awe and humility in favor of an
endless reaching out of wonder and curiosity. Man’s expansive conceit,
as the Greek saw, produces insolent excess (_hybris_) and this begets
blindness (_atê_) which in turn brings on Nemesis. Expansive conceit
tempered by Nemesis--this is a definition of an essential aspect of
human nature that finds considerable support in the facts of history.
Man never rushes forward so confidently, it would sometimes seem, as
when he is on the very brink of the abyss. The malady of Europe on the
eve of the Great War was not so much ignorance as blindness in the
Greek sense. A clear perception of the workings of Nemesis is what
gives distinction to the great Greek poets, even to Euripides, the
least ethical of them:
Gold and Fair-fortune, with Power the victorious
Harnessed beside them, in folly vainglorious
Hurry man to his doom:
Law he outpaceth, and lawlessness lasheth
To speed; nor his heart doth incline
To take heed to the end--lo, his car sudden-crasheth
Shattered in gloom![76]
A consideration of man’s ignorance and blindness as they are revealed
on a vast scale in the facts of history gives a positive basis to
humility. One comes to feel that the great religious teachers may be
right after all in their insistence that man needs to subordinate
himself to some higher will; above all that it is needful that his
intellect should recognize some such control. The peril that results
from intellectual unrestraint (_libido sciendi_) is perhaps the most
fundamental of all. “What must be the face-to-face antagonist,”
asks Cardinal Newman, “by which to withstand and baffle ... the
all-corroding, all-dissolving energy of the intellect?” Cardinal Newman
has at all events asked the essential question, whatever one may think
of his own solution of it. Unfortunately, in getting rid of the pride
of intellect the Christian has often tended to get rid of the intellect
itself or at least to depreciate it unduly.[77] Hence the obscurantist
vein that I have already noted in Christianity. To use the intellect to
the utmost and at the same time to keep it in its proper subordinate
place is a task that seems thus far to have been beyond the capacity of
Occidental man. The warfare between a reason that presumes unduly and
a faith that has got itself more or less identified with credulity may
turn out to be the true disease of Western culture from the Greeks to
the present day. This strife between the head and the heart has left
its marks even on the forms of language. Thus, to take a few examples,
to be a person of “strong mind” (_esprit fort_) was about equivalent
in older French usage to being an atheist; to be “blessed,” on the
other hand, was to be a “blockhead” (_benêt_, from _benedictus_). An
“innocent,” again, is an idiot, in contradistinction, no doubt, to the
person who is said to be as “bright as the devil.” The English “silly”
is the same word etymologically as the German “holy” (_selig_).
When Rousseau said that his heart and his head did not seem to belong
to the same individual, he simply introduced a new and, as I shall try
to show presently, worse form of obscurantism. In its Rousseauistic
form the conflict between head and heart has continued to our own
day. Philosophers, who are under no suspicion of being Christians,
still assume that there is a more or less complete opposition between
intellect and intuition, so that to be vital in the Bergsonian sense is
about the same as being anti-intellectual.[78]
The more significant contrast, however, still remains that between the
partisan of grace and the man who, in some form or other, asserts the
primacy of mind. It can be shown that the doctrine of grace was the
keystone of the whole edifice of European society in its mediæval form.
It is not as clear as one might wish that European civilization can
survive the collapse of this doctrine. In any case the problem for the
individualist who believes that it is not enough to be self-reliant,
but that one should also be humble, is to discover some equivalent for
grace. It is here that we may find it profitable to take into account
the total experience of Asia. While no sensible person would claim for
the Far East a general ethical superiority over the West, the Far East
has at least enjoyed a comparative immunity from that great disease of
Occidental culture--the warfare between reason and faith. Buddha and
Confucius both managed to combine humility with self-reliance and a
cultivation of the critical spirit. They may, therefore, be of help to
those who wish to restore to their lives on modern lines the element
for which Asia has stood in the past, who believe that without some
such restoration the Occident is in danger of going mad with the lust
of speed and power. In describing the element of peace as the Asiatic
element, I do not mean to set up any geographic or other fatalism.
China, for example, may under pressure from the Occident have an
industrial revolution (Hankow is already taking on the aspect of an
Oriental Pittsburgh) and this revolution is likely to be accompanied
by a more or less rapid crumbling of her traditional ethos with the
attendant danger of a lapse into sheer moral chaos. The Occident, on
the other hand, may not only reaffirm the truths of the ethical will,
but may reaffirm these truths in some appropriately modern way and
with an emphasis distinctly different from anything that has been seen
in the Orient. In dealing with this topic we can best take our point
of departure from the fact that all who profess to be modern are, in
some sense or other of the word, liberals. If there has been any vital
omission in the passage from old to new, this omission is likely to be
most visible in one’s definition of liberty. Lord Acton was planning
to begin his “History of Liberty” with a hundred such definitions. It
is not certain that any one of the hundred would exactly have met our
present requirement, which is to secure in some thoroughly critical
fashion what I have termed the centripetal element in liberty. If one
fails in this task, one ceases to be a complete modern and becomes
a mere modernist. The modernist is wont to assume that the really
important conflict is that between liberals, on the one hand, and
reactionaries, on the other; a more important conflict, however, may
turn out to be that between true and false liberals.
CHAPTER VI
TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS
The choice to which the modern man will finally be reduced, it has
been said, is that of being a Bolshevist or a Jesuit. In that case
(assuming that by Jesuit is meant the ultramontane Catholic) there
does not seem to be much room for hesitation. Ultramontane Catholicism
does not, like Bolshevism, strike at the very root of civilization.
In fact, under certain conditions that are already partly in sight,
the Catholic Church may perhaps be the only institution left in the
Occident that can be counted on to uphold civilized standards. It may
also be possible, however, to be a thoroughgoing modern and at the same
time civilized. Before considering this possibility more in detail, it
will be helpful to trace the process by which the present situation has
grown up, a situation that seems, at least superficially, to impose the
extreme choice I have just mentioned.
In tracing this process everything will be found to hinge ultimately
on the idea of liberty in its relation to the principle of control.
Under the old order, spiritual control, I have said, had its final
source and sanction in the doctrine of grace. We need, therefore, to
follow to some extent the fortunes of this doctrine as affected by the
progressive emancipation, since the Renaissance, of the individual
from outer authority and by the concomitant growth of naturalistic
tendencies. Certain groups within the Church itself, notably
the Jansenists, sought to revive, in opposition to the incipient
naturalistic movement, the doctrine of grace in its full Augustinian
rigor. This doctrine originally marked the very apex of Christian
otherworldliness, whereas, at the time of the Jansenist revival, men
were turning more and more resolutely to this world. Saint-Evremond
estimates that there were not ten men in France who could satisfy
the Jansenist test of holiness. All other Frenchmen the Jansenists
seemed to consign to outer darkness. In standing for a more moderate
interpretation of grace the Catholic Church simply showed its good
sense. What was more dubious was its tendency to substitute for the
inner dependence of man on God that the Jansenist desired, his outer
dependence on the priest. My present subject does not require me
to consider the truth of the charge that the Church, in the effort
to induce the individual to submit to its authority, dissimulated
unduly the austerity of Christian doctrine; that, in short, it gave
countenance to a casuistical relaxation, the upshot of which was,
in Bossuet’s phrase, to put “cushions under the elbows of sinners.”
All I need to point out here is that the reply of the Church to
individualistic tendencies of every kind has been an ever-increasing
papal centralization. It may be said of the ultramontane Catholic, as
of the extreme partisan of grace, though in a very different sense,
that he has simply repudiated self-reliance.
If one wishes to understand the types of individualism to which
ultramontane Catholicism is such an uncompromising answer, one
needs to study also the doctrine of grace in its relation to the
Protestant Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin, it is scarcely
necessary to say, put prime emphasis on this doctrine, though not
quite the same emphasis. Now the Reformation is, by its underlying
postulates, a critical movement; it sought to recover the authentic
Christian doctrine that seemed to it to have been perverted by the
Roman theocracy. It urged the individual to take a critical attitude
towards this theocracy, or, what amounts to the same thing, it urged
him to exercise the right of private judgment, which is only another
way of encouraging him to be self-dependent and self-reliant. But the
Protestant was involved in peculiar difficulties as soon as he set
out to be self-reliant and at the same time to defend the doctrine
of grace; for the doctrine, in the Pauline and Augustinian form that
a Luther and a Calvin sought to revive, was the very negation of
self-reliance; it was designed to make man feel his utter and helpless
dependence on the divine will. If a man is to be self-reliant, two
things, it should seem, are necessary: he must have sound standards
and must then be free to act on them. To secure the standards he needs
intellect and to act on them he needs will. Luther, for his part,
wishes to be an individualist and at the same time to follow the early
Christian obscurantists in flouting the intellect and denying the
freedom of the will. Since the “covenant of work” was abrogated by the
Fall, man’s will is in helpless bondage to sin,[79] so that God alone
is capable of any salutary working; man’s only hope, therefore, is in
the covenant of grace and the scheme of redemption. To hold any other
view is subversive of humility. Luther’s extreme hostility to work is,
of course, due also to the identification of work with the performance
of rites and ceremonies, especially in connection with penance
(_satisfactio operis_).
Luther and the other reformers had by their separation from the Church
cut themselves off more or less from the traditional symbols by which
the truths of humility and of the higher will were interpreted to the
imagination; so that, in their defence of these truths, they were
thrown back, almost in spite of themselves, on reason. Erasmus with
his fine psychological tact felt in the Reformation, almost from the
outset, an element of intellectual presumption. If the impression
that Calvin produces in his preaching of man’s utter dependence on
the divine will is not precisely that of humility, one suspects that
the explanation is that he presumes to know too much about that will.
Jonathan Edwards, again, in his anxiety to justify rationally God’s
absolute and arbitrary will, finally seems to have insinuated himself
as a fourth into the council chamber of the Trinity.
It is fair to say that the difficulty that confronted a Calvin and an
Edwards and has led to at least a partial breakdown of Protestantism
is no slight one: it must confront in some measure any one who seeks
to combine a free play of the critical spirit with the acceptance of
traditional Christianity. If one starts, as the traditional Christian
has been wont to start, with the hypothesis of an omnipotent God with
“foreknowledge absolute,” the question almost inevitably arises why
such a being has permitted evil at all. Furthermore, strict logic would
seem to impose the conclusion that this being has doomed a multitude
of his creatures to everlasting torments simply for doing what, in
the last analysis, he himself has willed.[80] In short, the critical
crux at the heart of historical Christianity is how to reconcile God’s
omnipotence and omniscience with his justice and mercy. The portion of
the world that piques itself on its modernity has simply turned its
back on this theological nightmare. Unfortunately, in getting rid of
the nightmare, it has also tended to get rid of the inner life, of the
truth, namely, that man needs in his natural self (which includes the
intellect) to look up to some higher will in awe and humility. With the
decline of the inner life, there has been a weakening of control over
the expansive lusts of the natural man--whether the lust of knowledge
or the lust of sensation or the lust of power.
In the development I have been following, the idea of work in
the spiritual sense is either very much subordinated to grace or
else is more or less identified with the performance of rites and
ceremonies.[81] We need to trace at this point the rise of a very
different doctrine of work. The last scholastics, notably Duns Scotus,
inclined to divorce religious truth from reason and to identify it with
absolute, arbitrary will and unintelligible theological mysteries.
A man like Francis Bacon takes theologians of this type at their
word and, after a more or less sincere obeisance to a spiritual truth
that is immeasurably beyond man’s grasp, he turns an intellect that
is left without other occupation to a study of the natural order. He
aims to establish upon this order a philosophy, not of vain words, but
of works and fruits. The Baconian conception of work can be followed
down through the utilitarian movement. It appears, for example, in
an extreme form in Locke’s second “Treatise of Government.” Work is
practically identified by Locke with physical effort and is made the
sole legitimate source of property. Adam Smith tends to a very similar
conception of work in its relation to property. In thus reducing the
idea of work to its lowest terms, the orthodox political economy opened
the way for political economy of the unorthodox type. Karl Marx was
especially influenced in his definition of work by Ricardo. Why should
not the man who, on the showing of the orthodox political economists
themselves, does the real work, get all the reward? Why should he turn
over such a large part of this reward to that mere idler and parasite,
the capitalist? Though the orthodox economist makes work in an unduly
restricted sense the source of wealth, he does not, to do him justice,
fall, like the Marxian, into the further fallacy of identifying work
with value. That, he insists, is largely determined by the law of
supply and demand and by competition. The extreme Marxian not only
takes a purely quantitative view of work, so much so that he tends, as
has been said, to put the work of a Raphael and that of a common sign
painter on the same level, but in evaluating the product of work he
aims to eliminate the competitive element. Recent Marxians have come to
take a somewhat less quantitative view of work, but the fallacies that
result from a total or partial suppression of competition are built
into the very foundations of socialism.
One should note at this point that in their views as to the nature of
work there is much underlying agreement between the Rousseauist and the
Baconian. Rousseau himself tends to reduce work to the lowest terms and
to identify it with manual labor. All who do not work in this outward
and visible sense are, it would seem, hangers-on and parasites and not
worthy to live.[82] The attempt to apply the utilitarian-sentimental
conception of work and at the same time to eliminate competition has
resulted in Russia in a ruthless despotism, on the one hand, and in a
degrading servitude, on the other.
A conception of work that means practically a return to barbarism
evidently suffers from some serious flaw. The man who wishes to be
at once modern and civilized will not oppose to the Baconian or
Rousseauistic one-sidedness a mere appeal to the past, but a more
accurate definition. Aristotle was, according to Bacon, the “vile
plaything of words.” As a matter of fact, the surest way to become the
vile plaything of words is, like both Bacon and Rousseau, to look on
visible and concrete objects as “real” and on words, in contrast with
these objects, as unreal. Words, especially abstract words, have such
an important relation to reality because they control the imagination
which in turn determines action and so “governs mankind.” The way to
escape from the tyranny of words is not to dismiss them as unreal in
favor of objects of sense, but to submit them to a searching Socratic
dialectic. The only way, for instance, not to be the dupe of the
general term “work” is to divide or “dichotomize” it Socratically and
so become aware of the different meanings of which it is susceptible.
The fallacies involved in a purely quantitative definition of work are
almost too gross to need refuting. As Mencius remarked long ago, it is
both proper and inevitable that the man who works with his mind should
hold sway over the man who works only with his hands. As a result of
the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed
either in invention or else in organization and management, the common
laborer may to-day enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of
the opulent only two or three generations ago. If the laborer wishes to
add to these comforts or even to keep them, he should not listen to the
agitator who seeks to stir up his envy of every form of superiority.
He should be the first to recognize that exceptional capacity should
receive exceptional rewards.
The laborer, to be sure, has a grievance: this grievance is that
those who have been set over him have concentrated so exclusively in
their mental working on the material order. The real problem is to
subordinate to some adequate end the enormous mass of machinery of
power and comfort that has been the fruit of working of the utilitarian
type; and here a specifically ethical type of working is needful. Now
this specifically ethical working has been associated traditionally
in the Occident with the doctrine of grace; for man to substitute his
work for that of God seemed to be subversive of humility. Yet thus to
emphasize God’s working led, I have tried to show, to an impossible
theological dilemma; so that men tended, in getting rid of the dilemma,
to get rid of the true work of the spirit in favor of a merely Baconian
working. The problem would seem to be to recover the truths of grace
in some individualistic form. We may be aided in this task by turning
for a moment to the Far-Eastern teacher who combined humility with the
ultimate degree of spiritual self-reliance. The word _karma_ (work)
has come to have in the Occident a sort of mystical glamour. But it
is well to remember that this word is employed by Buddha himself in
the most business-like fashion. The man who wishes, he says, to be a
carpenter must do the work of a carpenter; the man who wishes to be
a king must do the work of a king; the man who wishes to be a saint
must do the work of a saint. One simply passes, as one mounts in the
scale, from an outer to an inner working. The individual is to impose
progressively his ethical will, affirmed as an immediate fact of
consciousness, upon his outgoing desires. He is to perform this work of
the spirit with a view to his own happiness, or, what amounts to the
same thing in the eyes of the Buddhist, with a view to his own peace.
“By rousing himself,” says Buddha, “by strenuousness, by restraint and
control, the wise man may make for himself an island which no flood can
overwhelm.” The supreme contrast in this faith is always that between
the spiritually strenuous person and the spiritual idler.
Though probably no other teacher of the past has dealt with the idea
of work so thoroughly as Buddha, the Buddhist emphasis does not seem
just what we need to-day. Buddha was, like Christ, very otherworldly.
The work in which he was primarily interested was of the type that
leads to saintliness. It may show a lack of imagination on my part,
but I cannot imagine my contemporaries in the rôle of saints. Perhaps
no age was ever more lacking in otherworldliness or showed a greater
incomprehension of religion. We have converted Buddha into a sort
of heavy-eyed pessimistic dreamer, and, following Rousseau, have
sentimentalized the figure of Christ. It might be well, therefore,
for us to undertake something more within our capacity than religion.
In general, for one person who has even an inkling of the nature of
a genuinely religious working and of the strenuous peace at which
religion aims, at least a hundred persons can be found who can grasp
to some extent the type of work that has its fruition in the mediatory
or humanistic virtues. Now humanism must, like religion, rest on the
recognition, in some form or other, of the inner life, or, what amounts
to the same thing, on the opposition between a law of the spirit and a
law of the members. It must also, like religion, subordinate intellect
to the ethical will and so put its ultimate emphasis on humility. In
this matter of humility the Western humanist has something to learn, as
I have already hinted, from Confucian China.
Though religion and the best type of humanism are at one in stressing
humility, they diverge widely in their attitude towards the expansive
desires. In its pursuit of the otherworldly virtue of peace, religion
tends to renounce these desires completely, whereas humanism would
simply moderate and harmonize them with a view to living to the best
advantage in this world. As a result of his particular confusion of the
things of God and the things of Cæsar, the humanitarian would have us
set up peace as a primary good in the secular order. He hopes to secure
this peace by some form of machinery (such as a league of nations) or
else by an appeal to emotion. “Peace is my passion,” exclaimed the
expansive Thomas Jefferson. But the person who turns peace into a
passion is not entering upon the pathway of peace either within himself
or in the outer world. It is possible to show that the pacifist is not
only a materialist, but a very objectionable type of materialist. In
the name of the fairest of virtues, he is actually engaged in breaking
down ethical standards. It is a matter of common sense and everyday
experience that there can be no peace with the unrighteous and the
unrighteous always have been and are extremely numerous. As another
instance of the humanitarian confusion of values, one may cite the
assertion of Woodrow Wilson that a nation may be “too proud to fight.”
An individual may be too _humble_ to fight, but a nation that is too
proud to fight may, in a world like this, be too proud to survive as a
nation. The virtue that sums up all other virtues in the secular order
is, as every thinker worthy of the name has always seen, not peace but
justice. Now any one who deals positively with the idea of justice will
almost inevitably be led to define it: To every man according to his
works; and the adequacy of this definition will depend in turn on the
adequacy of one’s definition of work.
The humanitarians, I have pointed out, from Bacon down, are
extraordinarily superficial in their definition of work. Even when
they do not fall into the cruder quantitative fallacies, they conceive
of work in terms of the natural law and of the outer world and not in
terms of the inner life.[83] They do not take account of that form of
work which consists in the superimposition of the ethical will upon the
natural self and its expansive desires. The very notion of this form
of work has, I have said, tended to disappear with the decline of the
doctrine of grace.
If we grant, then, that what is needed just now is a revival of the
ethical will on the secular level, where it is felt as a will to
justice, rather than on the religious level, where it is felt as a will
to peace, and if we grant further that justice, positively defined,
consists in giving to every man according to his works, let us seek
to restore to the idea of work the elements that have been omitted
by the humanitarians. We may be aided in such a restoration by Greek
philosophy, even though we do not agree with the tendency of the
Socratic group to identify right reason and right will. The Platonic
definition of justice as doing one’s own work or minding one’s own
business has perhaps never been surpassed. It brings one straight back
to the truths of the inner life. Justice results when every part of a
man is performing its proper function and especially when his higher
self is performing its proper function of coördinating and controlling
the inferior parts of his nature. An echo of this Platonic conception
is found in the Senecan definition of justice: _Animus quodam modo se
habens._ Justice in the outer world must, in the last analysis, be only
a reflection of the harmony and proportionateness that have resulted in
certain individuals from the working of the spirit upon itself.
Aristotle’s view of justice has much in common with the Platonic
view. In defining justice he starts, not from society, but from the
individual who limits desires that are in themselves insatiable and
imposes upon them the law of measure. A State in which such individuals
are sufficiently numerous to set the tone is a just State. Justice,
whether retributive or distributive, must be proportionate in its
rewards and penalties, and it can be thus proportionate only by
taking account of the higher form of working. The disciplining of the
expansive desires to the law of measure which constitutes this higher
form of working must, to be effective, begin early and become habitual.
The necessary basis, therefore, of an ethical type of State is an
ethical type of education.
Aristotle makes not only justice but happiness depend on what he calls
“energizing according to virtue.” He finally carries his conception
of work from the humanistic to the religious level, from mediation
to meditation or the life of “vision,” defining God himself as pure
act. It has seemed to some that the activity the individual displays
in the life of vision is so disassociated from the activity that he
displays in his relations with his fellow men as to encourage the
ascetic excess of the Middle Ages. The altruist, indeed, would maintain
that both the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of justice,
encouraging a man as they do to put his own work before the world’s
work, are selfish and anti-social. A man should renounce self and give
himself up to sympathy and service. But there is something, we should
remind the altruist, that the world needs even more than our service,
and that is our example. “Example,” as Burke says, “is the school
of mankind; it will learn at no other.” Now a man becomes exemplary
only as the result of either a religious or a humanistic working. The
man who works religiously helps the world, one is tempted to affirm,
by the very act of renouncing it. He sets his fellow men the most
important of all examples--that of unworldliness. If Buddha has dealt
profoundly with the form of work by which one becomes exemplary on the
religious level, Confucius has shown, even more adequately, perhaps,
than Aristotle, the benefits that accrue to society and civilization
from a humanistic working. Confucius has summed up his teaching in a
sentence: Loyalty to oneself and charity towards one’s neighbor. The
altruist might accept this formula provided he were allowed to give
the first place to the charity towards one’s neighbor. But to do so is
entirely un-Confucian. The individual must first of all look up to
something higher than either himself or his neighbor in order that he
may be worthy to be looked up to in turn. Of his ideal ruler, Shun,
Confucius says: “Shun was one who did nothing, yet governed well. For
what, in effect, did he do? Religiously self-observant, he sat gravely
on his throne, and that is all.” All that Confucius means to affirm by
this passage is the superiority of inner over outer action (of which,
as we learn from other passages, his monarch was also capable). Shun
was, in short, minding his own business in the Platonic sense, and
such was the persuasiveness of his example that others were led to do
likewise; whereas, with the present trend towards “social justice,” the
time is rapidly approaching when everybody will be minding everybody
else’s business. For the conscience that is felt as a still small voice
and that is the basis of real justice, we have substituted a social
conscience that operates rather through a megaphone. The busybody, for
the first time perhaps in the history of the world, has been taken at
his own estimate of himself. We are in fact, as some one remarked,
living in the Meddle Ages; inasmuch as the meddling is itself only an
outcome of our confused definition of justice, the cynic might suggest,
as an even more correct description of the time, the Muddle Ages.
Perhaps, indeed, the meddling and the muddling are not quite so
widespread as one is at times tempted to suppose. There are probably
still a few persons left who realize the importance of minding their
own business, even though not in the full Platonic or Confucian sense.
There is probably an element of exaggeration in a recent assertion
that to the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the whole American
people had replied in an “ecstatic affirmative.” One should note in
passing the intolerable dilution of the principle of obligation that is
implied in extending to men indiscriminately what one owes to one’s own
brother. At all events, no small issues are involved in the question
whether one should start with an expansive eagerness to do something
for humanity or with loyalty to one’s self. There may be something
after all in the Confucian idea that if a man only sets himself right,
the rightness will extend to his family first of all, and finally in
widening circles to the whole community.
One’s definition of work and of justice in terms of work will be found
to be inseparably bound up with one’s definition of liberty. The only
true freedom is freedom to work. All the evidence goes to show that
there is no safety in the nature of things for the idler and that the
most perilous of all forms of idling is spiritual idling. The failure
to take account of the subtler forms of working is what vitiates
the attempts of the utilitarian to define liberty--for example, the
attempt of J. S. Mill. If a man is only careful not to injure his
fellow men, he should then, according to Mill, be free to cultivate
his idiosyncrasy. One cannot grant in the first place that any such
sharp division between the altruistic and the self-regarding elements
in human nature is possible; and even if one did grant it, one should
have to insist that the self-regarding virtues are the most important
even from the point of view of society; for it is only by the exercise
of these virtues that one becomes exemplary and so, as I have tried to
show, truly helpful to others.
If society should in its own interests encourage those who work with
their minds as compared with those who work with their hands, how much
more should it give recognition to those who are engaged in a genuinely
ethical working. It is in fact the quality of a man’s work that should
determine his place in the hierarchy that every civilized society
requires. In short, from the positive point of view, work is the only
justification of aristocracy. “By work,” says Buddha, “a man is noble,
by work he is an outcast.”[84] The principle, though sound, is not,
one must confess, altogether easy to apply. Though justice require
that every man receive according to the quantity and the quality of
his work, there is in this competition a manifest inequality from the
start. One man has an innate capacity that another cannot acquire by
any amount of effort. God, according to the Platonic myth, has mingled
lead with the nature of some and with the nature of others silver
and gold. Stress unduly the initial differences between men and one
will tend to fall into some system of caste, as Plato himself tends
to do, or else one will incline to fatalism, whether naturalistic or
predestinarian. On the other hand, deny these differences in favor of
some equalitarian theory and one runs counter to the most palpable
facts. Genuine justice seems to demand that men should be judged,
not by their intentions or their endeavors, but by their actual
performance; that in short the natural aristocrat, as Burke terms him,
should receive his due reward, whether one attribute his superiority,
with the man of science, to heredity, or, with the Christian, to grace,
or, with the Buddhist, to his past working.
One’s view of work and of the rewards that it deserves will determine
necessarily one’s attitude towards property. From the point of view
of civilization, it is of the highest moment that certain individuals
should in every community be relieved from the necessity of working
with their hands in order that they may engage in the higher forms of
working and so qualify for leadership. If the civilization is to be
genuine, it must have men of leisure in the full Aristotelian sense.
Those who in any particular community are allowed to enjoy property
that is not the fruit of their own outer and visible toil cannot,
therefore, afford to be idlers and parasites. An aristocratic or
leading class, however the aristocratic principle is conceived, must,
if it hopes in the long run to preserve its property and privileges,
be in some degree exemplary. It is only too clear that the members
of the French aristocracy of the Old Régime failed, in spite of many
honorable exceptions, to measure up to this test. Some have argued
from the revelations of recent writers like Colonel Repington and
Mrs. Asquith that the English aristocracy is also growing degenerate.
People will not consent in the long run to look up to those who are not
themselves looking up to something higher than their ordinary selves.
A leading class that has become Epicurean and self-indulgent is lost.
Above all it cannot afford to give the first place to material goods.
One may, indeed, lay down the principle that, if property as a means
to an end is the necessary basis of civilization, property as an
end in itself is materialism. In view of the natural insatiableness
of the human spirit, no example is more necessary than that of the
man who is setting limits to his desire for worldly possessions.
The only remedy for economic inequality, as Aristotle says, is “to
train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more”;[85] this remedy
is not in mechanical schemes for dividing up property; “for it is
not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be
equalized.”[86] The equalization of desire in the Aristotelian sense
requires on the part of individuals a genuinely ethical or humanistic
working. To proclaim equality on some basis that requires no such
working will result ironically. For example, this country committed
itself in the Declaration of Independence to the doctrine of natural
equality. The type of individualism that was thus encouraged has led to
monstrous inequalities and, with the decline of traditional standards,
to the rise of a raw plutocracy. A man who amasses a billion dollars
is scarcely exemplary in the Aristotelian sense, even though he then
proceeds to lay out half a billion upon philanthropy. The remedy for
such a failure of the man at the top to curb his desires does not lie,
as the agitator would have us believe, in inflaming the desires of the
man at the bottom; nor again in substituting for real justice some
phantasmagoria of social justice. As a result of such a substitution,
one will presently be turning from the punishment of the individual
offender to an attack on the institution of property itself; and a
war on capital will speedily degenerate, as it always has in the
past, into a war on thrift and industry in favor of laziness and
incompetence, and finally into schemes of confiscation that profess
to be idealistic and are in fact subversive of common honesty. Above
all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total
suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that
the ends of true justice should be fulfilled--namely, that every man
should receive according to his works. The principle of competition
is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built into the very roots of the
world;[87] there is something in the nature of things that calls for a
real victory and a real defeat. Competition is necessary to rouse man
from his native indolence; without it life loses its zest and savor.
Only, as Hesiod goes on to say, there are two types of competition--the
one that leads to bloody war and the other that is the mother of
enterprise and high achievement. He does not perhaps make as clear as
he might how one may have the sound rivalry and, at the same time,
avoid the type that degenerates into pernicious strife. But surely
the reply to this question is found in such sentences of Aristotle as
those I have just been quoting. The remedy for the evils of competition
is found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and the
successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the
underdog. The mood of unrest and insurgency is so rife to-day as to
suggest that our leaders, instead of thus controlling themselves, are
guilty of an extreme psychic unrestraint.
One should note a certain confusion on the part of the advocates of
social justice as to the nature of capital. Dr. Johnson is reported to
have said at the sale of Thrale’s brewery: “We are not here to sell a
parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond
the dreams of avarice.” The realizing of the potentiality depended, of
course, on the ability of the management, and this ability was not only
a part, but the essential part, of the capital of the brewery. It is
being assumed at present that the capital invested in our railways may
be measured by what one may term their junk value. As a result of this
and similar fallacies, both the owners and managers of the railways
have been so treated of recent years as to discourage enterprise in
this field of industry. It seems easy to convince the public that the
railways are suffering from watered stock when what they are really
suffering from is watered labor. If our apostles of service and social
justice have their way, that considerable portion of the savings of
the middle class that is now invested in the railways, either directly
or indirectly through the insurance companies and savings banks, may
undergo partial or total confiscation.
Every form of social justice, indeed, tends to confiscation and
confiscation, when practised on a large scale, undermines moral
standards and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of
cunning and the law of force. To be on one’s guard against these perils
of social justice, one needs that coöperation of keen analysis and
imagination that can alone produce genuine vision; whereas a great
number of persons are weak in analysis, and idyllic rather than ethical
in their imagining. Not being able, as a result, to get at underlying
causes, they are prone to doctor symptoms and to resort to what Burke
calls “tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities.” The
apparent good turns out to be evil in its secondary consequences, and
the apparent evil turns out to be the necessary condition of some
good. Things often change their aspect, not once but several times,
when thus traced in their ultimate effects. The ordinary laboring man,
for instance, may not be able to see that the “levy upon capital,”
for which he is urged to vote in the name of social justice, will
finally recoil upon himself. It is not yet clear that it is going to
be possible to combine universal suffrage with the degree of safety
for the institution of property that genuine justice and genuine
civilization both require. Taxation without representation was the main
grievance of the American revolutionists; but that is precisely what an
important section of the community has to submit to to-day. Can those
who tax in the name of the sovereign people be counted on to tax more
equitably than those who alleged the royal prerogative?
Among all the forms of dishonesty that assume the idealistic mask,
perhaps none is more diabolically effective in unsettling the bases of
civilized life than those that involve a tampering with the monetary
standard. If property stands for work in some sense or other of the
word, and if money is the conventional symbol of property, the ends of
justice tend to be subverted if this symbol fluctuates wildly; thrift
and foresight become meaningless; no man can be sure that he will
receive according to his works. Inflation of the currency amounts in
practice to an odious form of confiscation, whether it is supposed, as
in Germany, to promote national interests or, as in Russia, to advance
internationalism. The radical, it has been pointed out, often errs in
confounding money with property and in supposing that a division of
money would be the same as a division of actual wealth. Though money is
only a conventional token, the nature of this token is, nevertheless,
not a matter of indifference. The reason for the gold standard is
simple: gold involves in its production an amount of work equal
approximately to the work involved in producing the various commodities
for which it may be exchanged. If for any reason gold is produced more
abundantly and with less effort, or if the reverse takes place, the
monetary standard fluctuates; and this is an evil, but a trifling evil
(human nature being what it is), compared with that which results from
the substitution for gold of paper or some other medium of exchange
that when, tested in terms of work, has little intrinsic value.
The modern man is as a matter of fact being whipsawed between two
contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, he is being involved
nationally and internationally in an ever more complex network of
material relationships which rest in turn on an extraordinarily
delicate mechanism of credit and exchange. On the other hand, the
various idealistic schemes that are being put forward as a substitute
for common honesty, or, again, the schemes, whether economic or
political, that are openly imperialistic, are undermining the
confidence that is the necessary basis of credit and exchange: so that
the whole elaborate structure that has been reared by the industrial
revolution is in danger of collapse. The political economists who
promoted this revolution were, according to Carlyle, in favor of making
cash payment the sole nexus between man and man. Cash payment, however,
cannot serve as a nexus between men who are spiritually centrifugal. In
various parts of eastern Europe, men have already become so suspicious
of cash payment that they have been forced to revert in their economic
contacts to barter.
The evils I have been enumerating derive in no small degree from
the one-sided notion of work that has prevailed in the utilitarian
movement. The interests of property itself require that at least some
members of a community should work in a very different sense, that
they should limit in short their own acquisitive instincts and so
serve society by setting it a good example. It does not follow that
the best way to secure such work from a man is to urge upon him the
interests of society. Leslie Stephen, himself a utilitarian, says that
“the doctrine that each man can only care for his own happiness is
terribly plausible, and fits in admirably with individualism.” It does
indeed; so much so that the wisest way of reaching the individual may
be to point out to him, not how his conduct will affect the happiness
of others, but how it will affect his own happiness. Only in that case
one must be careful to define happiness, not like the utilitarian and
the Epicurean, in terms of pleasure, but like an Aristotle or a Buddha,
in terms of work. One may apply this method not merely to the reining
in of the acquisitive instincts, but to the control of the instinct
of sex. Sexual unrestraint has wrought and is wreaking fearful havoc
to society. The resultant diseases are, even more than alcoholism, a
menace to the future of the white race. To approach the subject from
another angle, there is an undoubted connection between a certain type
of centrifugal and self-indulgent individualism and an unduly declining
birth-rate. The French and also the Americans of native descent are,
if we are to trust statistics, in danger of withering from the earth.
Where the population is increasing, it is, we are told, at the expense
of quality. The stocks to which the past has looked for its leaders are
dying out and the inferior or even degenerate breeds are multiplying.
The humanitarian remedies for evils of this order seem especially
doubtful. Such schemes for regulating the relations of sex as have
been put forward by the believers in eugenics are likely to lead to
a tyranny at once grotesque and ineffectual. On the other hand, the
evidence is slight that the individual can be induced to control
himself on such general grounds as the good of country or the good of
humanity or the good of the white race menaced by “the rising tide
of color.” Religion may be right after all in dealing with the whole
question of sex in terms of the inner life. According to a French
moralist, man is made up in his natural self of a little vanity and
a little voluptuousness. The Christian would substitute chastity and
humility. Though the humanist would moderate rather than deny entirely
the most imperious form of the _libido sentiendi_, he agrees with the
Christian in starting with the struggle between vital impulse and
vital control. He would have the individual exercise the control not
primarily for the good of society, but for his own good. Nowhere
indeed is the opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible
than in matters of sex.
The more one considers our modern emancipation, the more it becomes
clear that it has been at the expense of what I have termed the
centripetal element in liberty; and without this centripetal element or
ethical will any genuine working of the spirit becomes impossible. How,
one may ask, have men been able to deceive themselves as to the gravity
of the error? One way in which they have deceived themselves, it may
be replied, has been to offer work according to the natural law as a
substitute for work according to the human law. As good an example as
any is that of Faust who is supposed to make up for moral delinquencies
by reclaiming marshlands from the sea. Carlyle, who professes to be a
follower of Goethe, is even more defective in his idea of work. Instead
of the Socratic “Know thyself,” he would adopt as his gospel: “Know thy
work and do it.”[88] Thus to disparage the effort at self-knowledge
because man, as Carlyle goes on to say, is in the abstract and
metaphysical sense unknowable, is simply, under existing conditions, to
discredit the inner life in favor of a mere outer working. Work when
conceived in this one-sided fashion degenerates into mere efficiency.
Carlyle, as a matter of fact, exalts not only the efficiency of the
“captain of industry” (a phrase that he apparently originated), but the
military efficiency of a Frederick the Great or even of a Dr. Francia.
In spite of his desperate efforts to prove to himself and others the
contrary, he, therefore, tends in his philosophy to be imperialistic
rather than genuinely ethical. His “hero” is at the very least a first
cousin of the Nietzschean superman; they both have an authentic descent
from the “original genius” of the eighteenth century.
A point worth considering is the position not merely of the “captain”
but of the private in the modern army of industry. It is true that,
like the rest of us, this private must find his happiness in work or
not at all. One may, however, raise the question whether he may be
expected to find his happiness in the type of efficiency that has
been developed by the industrial revolution. This efficiency has been
achieved by an endless subdivision of effort until the individual
worker has tended to become a mere cog in a gigantic machine. He works
with only an infinitesimal portion of himself. At times, indeed, he
can scarcely be said to work at all; the machine does the working and
seems to lead a less automatic life than the person who tends it. A
workman in one of Henry Ford’s factories is reported to have replied,
when asked his name, that he was “bolt No. 29.” A multitude of men are
thus mechanized in order that the captain of industry may be “vital”
and “dynamic,” or, what amounts to the same thing as the words are now
used, may live in a state of psychic unrestraint. For one may affirm
with some confidence that a man who thinks it worth while to pile up an
income said to be greater than that of J. D. Rockefeller is not engaged
in a very energetic humanistic or religious working. If the ordinary
industrial private follows the example of the “captain” and sets out
to be “vital” and “dynamic” in his turn, either in his own person or
through his unions and their leaders, the result will be chaos; for he
will thus disturb the nice adjustment of parts on which the successful
functioning of the whole mechanism depends.
I am not, indeed, affirming that the multiplication of machines is an
unmixed evil. This multiplication has made it possible for one man to
do work that would formerly have required a dozen or even a hundred
men, and so has lifted a load of drudgery from the shoulders of many
and opened up to them the opportunities of leisure. “No man,” says
Aristotle, “can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic
or laborer.” But the laborer now has opportunities such as have never
before existed to become something more. Unfortunately, as we all
know, he is not using his relief from drudgery to enjoy leisure in
the Aristotelian sense, but to seek amusements, in which he is almost
as much subordinated to machines as he is in his working moments
(automobiles, phonographs, moving pictures and the like). Perhaps the
fault is not so much in the laborer himself as in the pattern that is
being offered him by the man “higher up.”
The very unexemplary type of individualism I have been discussing can
be shown to derive not only from the utilitarian conception of life in
general, but from the political economy of the school of Adam Smith
in particular. Let the State stand aside, says Adam Smith, and give
the individual free swing (_laisser faire_). He will not abuse this
freedom, for he will be guided by an enlightened self-interest. Now the
doctrine of enlightened self-interest is not in itself superficial. It
has been held by really profound thinkers like Aristotle and Buddha.
But the self that these thinkers have in mind is not the self that
makes the pursuit of wealth its first aim, but the ethical self that
exercises control over this acquisitive self. Leave the acquisitive
self without this control and the right kind of competition will
degenerate into the wrong kind, the ruthless kind which was actually
encouraged by the Manchester School of economics and in which mill
operatives become mere “cannon-fodder” in the industrial warfare.
Nor will competition of this sort have a sufficient counterpoise in
sympathy or altruism. The efficiency of sympathy as a substitute
for the ethical will is at all events the crucial issue in this
whole movement. Everything will be found to hinge ultimately on this
point in our current gospel of “service,” a gospel in which most men
seem to believe as unquestioningly nowadays as they once did in the
Trinity. Yet the foundations of this gospel can be shown, on strictly
psychological grounds, to be highly precarious.
In the first place the idea of “service” as now understood is not
Christian. The Christian serves not man but God, and this service, as
we learn from the Prayer Book, is “perfect freedom.” Service in the
humanitarian sense has, on the other hand, important points of contact
with Stoicism. The Stoic sought, like the humanitarian, to regulate his
conduct with reference to the general welfare of mankind. Important
differences need, however, to be noted between the humanitarian and the
Stoic. The Stoic did not hold at all or held only in very rudimentary
form the doctrine of progress; he did not think of men in the mass
as moving forward almost automatically towards “a far-off divine
event.” Progress of this automatic type, when subjected to severe
psychological scrutiny, will be found to resolve itself either into
a delight in change for its own sake or a delight in change for the
sake of power and comfort. The confusion between moral and material
progress that the utilitarian has promoted can be shown to involve a
tampering with general terms similar to that which I have already noted
in speaking of Rousseau and the sentimentalists. Disraeli says that
the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between
comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an excellent
example of the illegitimate transfer of a general term from one scheme
of values to another. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be
comforted.” The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort
without any preliminary mourning.
As a result of the confusion between moral and material progress the
modern man has developed an inordinate confidence in organization and
efficiency and in general in machinery as a means for the attainment of
ethical ends. If he is told that civilization is in danger, his first
instinct is to appoint a committee to save civilization. The League of
Nations is itself only a super-committee.
Progress in the utilitarian sense is, however, an even less essential
element in the idealistic creed than sympathy. In this matter of
sympathy one must note again a difference between the Stoic and the
humanitarian. If, on the one hand, the Stoic had less confidence in
machinery than the humanitarian, he was, on the other hand, less
emotionally expansive. Interesting questions of this kind come up, as
I have already noted, in dealing with Shaftesbury and his influence.
The Stoical derivation of one whole side of Shaftesbury’s philosophy
is so manifest that some have sought to present him as a pure disciple
of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But the fact remains that the Stoics
were not sentimentalists and that Shaftesbury can be shown to be a
main source of sentimentalism in England and even more perhaps in
Germany. The right reason of the Stoics is indeed already taking on
an emotional coloring in an English precursor of Shaftesbury like
Cumberland. In their tendency to identify happiness and pleasure the
utilitarians remind us less of the Stoics than of the Epicureans. The
Epicurean “ataraxy,” however, did not any more than the Stoic “apathy”
encourage effusiveness; neither Stoic nor Epicurean was prone to “let
his feelings run in soft luxurious flow” and then call the result
“virtue.” Of Rousseau’s exaltation of impulsive pity as a sufficient
offset to egoistic impulse and the source of all the other virtues, I
have already spoken. Of almost equal importance is Hume’s assertion,
professedly on strictly psychological grounds, of an element of
sympathy in the natural man, anterior to reason and independent of
self-love. Sympathy becomes in turn the basis of Hume’s definition
of justice. The just man for Hume is not the man who minds his own
business in the Platonic sense, but the altruist.[89]
The crucial question, of course, is not whether a man in his
spontaneous and natural self will sympathize with another’s pleasure,
but whether he will sympathize with another’s pain,[90] at least to
a degree that will be an adequate counterpoise to egoistic impulse.
The confidence of the eighteenth-century moralist on this point is
already beginning to seem to us singularly naïve. Rousseau, it will be
remembered, not only attempts to rear the whole edifice of ethics on
the basis of man’s innate pitifulness, but asserts that this quality
increases in almost direct ratio as one descends in the social scale
and so gets closer to “nature.” When asked why, if the plain people
were so pitiful, they crowded eagerly to see men broken on the wheel,
he replied that pity is such a delicious emotion that they did not wish
to miss any opportunity of experiencing it! It was no doubt for this
reason that Chateaubriand’s house porter, as he narrates, regretted
Robespierre and the spectacles in the Place Louis XV, where women
mounted the guillotine who had “necks as white as chicken’s flesh.”
For a similar reason doubtless the Spanish populace frequents the
bull-ring and the ancient Roman populace flocked to the gladiatorial
arena. The truth is that the psychology of the plain people in matters
of this kind is not ethical at all, but Epicurean. It is pleasant, as
the Epicurean Lucretius pointed out some time ago, to witness another’s
dire peril of shipwreck from a safe position on the shore. In much
the same way, the misery of the world, when properly dished up in the
headlines, merely serves to give the ordinary citizen an agreeable
fillip at his breakfast table. With the help of the sensational
press, the men of to-day are indeed constantly lined up on the shore,
witnessing an endless series of shipwrecks.
The outstanding trait, in short, of a populace that is “natural” in
Rousseau’s sense is its irresponsible quest of thrills. The success of
the whole attempt to base ethics directly on the emotions has been due
in no small measure to the fact that it seemed to offer an equivalent,
not only for Christian charity, but for grace, a grace that did not,
like the old variety, involve humility and the conviction of sin;
inasmuch as the man who transgresses does so, not through any survival
of the “old Adam” in him, but because of society and its institutions.
The man who has not fallen from the grace of nature into social
sophistication is spontaneously virtuous. “Heaven’s rich instincts in
him grew,” says Lowell of a beautiful soul of this kind, “as effortless
as woodland nooks send violets up and paint them blue.” The difference
between the new and the old grace is here obvious: the old grace
involved a working, even though the recipient of it maintained that not
he but God did the working. The fact of the working was in any case
indubitable, so much so that it often imposed a severe and even ascetic
control upon the natural man. Goodness by the grace of nature, on the
other hand, does not require on the part of the recipient anything more
than a “wise passiveness.”
Another striking contrast between Christian love and grace and
the parody of these doctrines by the Rousseauist should be noted.
The love and grace of the Christian lead to sharp exclusions
and discriminations; whereas the Rousseauist tends to blur all
distinctions in pantheistic revery. Contrast the “vision” of a Dante,
for example, with its clear-cut scale of moral values from the peak
of heaven to the pit of hell with the “vision” of a Walt Whitman in
which not merely men and women, good, bad, and indifferent, but “elder,
mullein, and poke-weed” are all viewed on the same level in virtue
of what the pantheist calls love. Dante speaks of the “highest love”
that built the walls of hell. We shudder at the mediæval grimness. The
opposite and more dangerous extreme is to lavish what Bossuet calls a
“murderous pity” upon human nature and, under cover of promoting love,
to be ready to subvert justice.
An unselective love joined to a “wise passiveness” and a return to
“nature” might, indeed, be justified if, as their votaries maintain,
they tend to draw men to a common centre; but it can be shown that this
communion is achieved, not in the real world, but in dreamland. Let
us consider from this point of view the “simple life” that Rousseau
and other primitivists have proposed as a remedy for the luxury and
self-indulgence that have tended to increase with the breakdown of
traditional standards. True simplicity of life must, it would seem, be
attained by the limitation of desire; whereas the luxurious life is one
in which, as Montesquieu says, “the desires have become immense.” Now
the “nature” of the primitivist can be shown to be only a nostalgia
of the romantic imagination so that the attempt to return to it not
only expands desire instead of limiting it, but makes it infinite and
indeterminate. Rousseau speaks of that “devouring but barren fire
with which from my childhood up I have felt myself vainly consumed.”
Chateaubriand makes his René actually flee from European civilization
to the American wilderness and take an Indian bride. René speaks
for Chateaubriand himself when he writes to her: “There issue forth
from this heart flames ... which might devour creation without being
satisfied.” Chateaubriand posed as the champion of Christianity. Yet
nothing is more certain than that Christian love makes for peace and
communion, whereas nostalgic “love” of the type Chateaubriand has just
described makes for restlessness and solitude. The ironical contrast
between the ideal and the real appears even more clearly, perhaps,
in Shelley than in Chateaubriand, inasmuch as Shelley did not, like
Chateaubriand, pose as a traditionalist, but came out uncompromisingly
for the new ethics. “The great secret of morals,” he says, “is love.” A
characteristic note of his poetry, on the other hand, perhaps the most
characteristic note is that of an acute spiritual isolation.
Many of the partisans of the new liberty, a liberty based, not upon
work (in the sense of inner control), but upon “love” in the sense
of expansive emotion, were severely disillusioned by the French
Revolution. Chateaubriand is himself one of the best types of the
disillusioned Rousseauist. In his “Essay on Revolutions” he still looks
upon romantic nostalgia as the true badge of the superior spirit,
though he admits that the aspiration towards the “infinite” that it
inspires is especially prevalent in epochs of moral decline. As a
result of this nostalgia, at all events, man is never satisfied with
what he has. He shatters one political form after another from sheer
satiety and ennui. The movement of mankind is not steadily forward
in a straight line, as the apostles of perfectibility maintain, but
circular, like that of a squirrel in a cage. From the point of view of
the lover of liberty society is hopeless. “If it is political truth we
are looking for, it is easy to find. Here a despotic minister gags me
and casts me into the depths of a dungeon where I remain for twenty
years without knowing why: having escaped from the Bastille, I plunge
indignantly into democracy; an anthropophagus awaits me there at the
foot of the guillotine.” As we should say nowadays, overthrow the Czar
and the Bolshevist has you by the throat.
Is there, then, no such thing as liberty? “Yes, there is a delicious,
a celestial liberty, that of nature.” Let a man betake himself to
the “religious forest.” In very similar fashion, Coleridge, after
discovering that the French Revolution, theoretically a crusade for
universal brotherhood, was imperialistic in its essence, abandoned hope
of finding liberty among men. If a man wishes to find true liberty, he
says in substance, let him go out and listen to what the wild waves
are saying. Liberty is not to be found in any human form. But if one
“shoots his being through earth, sea, and air” and “possesses all
things with intensest love,” liberty will be revealed to him.[91]
It may be, however, that a man should look for true liberty neither
in society nor in nature, but in himself--his ethical self; and the
ethical self is experienced, not as an expansive emotion, but as an
inner control. Liberty is associated, therefore, not primarily with
“love,” but with work. “It is work,” as Buddha says, and not love,
as the Western sentimentalist would have it, “that makes the world
go round.”[92] The man who works ethically grows more at one with
himself and at the same time tends to enter into communion, not indeed
with mankind at large, but with those who are submitting to a similar
ethical discipline, and so are, in Confucian phrase, moving towards
the “universal centre.” So that even from the point of view of the
man who desires love, the great secret of morals is work. Love is the
fulfilment of the law and not, as the sentimentalist would have us
believe, a substitute for it. The psychological truth at the basis of
the Christian doctrine of charity is that men cannot come together
expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The attempt to
do so results, as we have seen in the case of a Rousseau and a Shelley,
in an extreme psychic isolation.
Rousseau says that he founded “an indomitable spirit of liberty” on an
“indolence that is beyond belief.” True liberty, it is hardly necessary
to say, cannot be founded on indolence; it is something that must be
won by high-handed struggle, a struggle that takes place primarily in
oneself and not in the outer world. Possibly the ultimate distinction
between the true and the false liberal, as I have suggested elsewhere,
is that between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer. If true
liberty is to survive, it is important that ethical idling should
not usurp the credit due only to ethical effort. This usurpation
takes place if we accept the programme of those who would substitute
expansive emotion for the activity of the higher will. In the real
world, as I have tried to show, the results of an expansion of this
kind are not fraternal but imperialistic.
The confusion between true and false liberals, between the ethically
strenuous and the ethically indolent, has also been promoted by the
doctrine of natural rights. A liberty that is asserted as an abstract
right, something anterior to the fulfilment of any definite obligation,
will always, so far as the inner life is concerned, be a lazy liberty.
From this point of view, all other “natural” rights are in a way summed
up in the title of a book written by a grandson of Karl Marx: “The
Right to Idleness.” We have heard asserted in our own time the abstract
right of whole populations to self-determination as something anterior
to their degree of moral development. To put forward a supposed right
of this kind as a part of a programme for world peace is to sink to the
ultimate depth of humanitarian self-deception.
To be sure, the dogma of natural rights, though it still controls the
popular imagination, has been disavowed by the political theorists
themselves. Unfortunately, some of these theorists, while disavowing
the dogma, have retained the underlying fallacy. For example, Mr.
Harold J. Laski says that, though we no longer believe in the rights of
man in any abstract and metaphysical sense, we still accept them as a
convenient expression of the truth that what men want corresponds in
a rough way to what they need.[93] The first and very elementary step
in any effective knowledge of human nature, a step that “liberals” of
the type of Mr. Laski have failed to take, is the discovery of the lack
of coincidence between man’s wants and his needs. What man needs, if
we are to believe the Lord’s Prayer, is bread and wisdom. What man, at
least Roman man, wanted about the time this prayer was uttered, was
bread and the circus. The gap between man’s wants and his needs has not
diminished greatly, if at all, since Roman times. Whatever we may think
of Christian theology, the Christian insight remains true that man
suffers from a divided will: he needs to follow the law of the spirit
and wants to follow the law of the members, so that he is a thoroughly
paradoxical creature, for the most part at war with his own happiness.
Our endeavor at the present time, I have said, should be to deal with
the law of the spirit positively and so be able to meet on their own
ground those who have professed to be positive and are not. Let us take
a glance from this point of view at the professional philosophers.
Hume, for example, set up as a pure positivist: he was in favor of
getting rid of all apriorism and planting himself on what Bergson calls
the “immediate data of consciousness.” Strictly speaking, indeed,
mere rationalism died with Hume. Unfortunately, Kant galvanized the
corpse. His “pure reason” does not, as the reason of Descartes and the
other great system-builders of the seventeenth century was supposed
to do, give reality, but only empty categories. In opposition to
this pure reason Kant sets up a practical reason that is led to make
certain affirmations that cannot be shown to correspond with the
“thing-in-itself.” By the divorce that is thus established between
practice and reality, the way is opened for pragmatism which, instead
of testing utility by truth, would test truth by utility; likewise for
the closely allied theory of “useful fiction” and other philosophical
vagaries of recent times.
Let us return from the insubstantial transcendence of Kant to Hume and
his claim to be purely experimental. This claim cannot be allowed for
two reasons: first, as I have already remarked, he asserts something
that cannot be experimentally established--namely, an element of
spontaneous sympathy in the natural man, strong enough to cope unaided
with egoistic impulse. Secondly, he fails to assert something that is,
nevertheless, one of the “immediate data of consciousness”--namely,
an ethical will that is felt as a power of control over the natural
man and his expansive desires. Deny this ethical will and the inner
life disappears; assert it and one may dispense with numerous other
assertions, or at least give them minor emphasis. Many other things
are true, no doubt, in addition to what one may affirm positively; and
“extra-beliefs” are in any case inevitable. It is desirable, however,
under existing circumstances, to get at humanistic or religious truth
with the minimum of metaphysical or theological complications. It is
not even clear that, in order to preserve the integrity of the inner
life, one needs to set up a world of entities, essences, or “ideas”
above the flux. Much of the loftiest spirituality of the Occident has
been associated with this Platonic idealism. On the other hand, the
early Buddhists saw in a somewhat similar doctrine in India an obstacle
rather than an aid to the achievement of the fruits of religion.
Kant, again, has from a strictly experimental point of view, gone too
far in asserting “God, freedom, immortality”; and at the same time,
from another point of view, he has not gone far enough, for the freedom
of his “categorical imperative” is primarily a freedom to do, and not,
like that of the ethical will, a freedom to refrain from doing. The
first step surely is to plant oneself on the psychological fact of an
opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members, a
living and present fact that one neglects at one’s peril in favor of
what may seem superficially more useful and agreeable. Some persons, it
may be urged, are conscious of no such opposition in themselves. Some
persons are also color-blind, and spiritual vision is subject to even
more infirmities than physical vision.
The higher will in the dualism I have been sketching has, as I
have tried to show, been very much bound up historically with the
doctrine of grace and has tended to be obscured with the decline of
this doctrine. It would be possible to go through the chief modern
philosophers one after the other from Descartes down and show that they
are least satisfactory in their treatment of the will.[94] Any one who
wishes to recover the true dualism must begin by exalting the ethical
will to the first place. Any attempt to give the primacy to “reason” in
any sense of the word will result in the loss of humility and lead to
a revival, in some form, of the Stoical error. One must in this matter
not only side with the Christian against the Stoic, but in general
with the Asiatic against the European intellectual. It does not follow
because one gives the first place to will that one is to identify it
with the absolute or, like Schopenhauer, with the “thing-in-itself”;
for this is to fall from positive psychological observation into
metaphysics; nor, because one insists that intellect is, as compared
with will, secondary, need one conclude with Wordsworth and other
romantic obscurantists that it is therefore “false.”
To give the first place to the higher will is only another way of
declaring that life is an act of faith. One may discover on positive
grounds a deep meaning in the old Christian tenet that we do not know
in order that we may believe, but we believe in order that we may know.
What follows almost inevitably when the intellect ceases to be the
servant of the higher will and sets up as an independent power is a
lapse into the metaphysical illusion--the illusion of having confined
the ocean in a cup. The most familiar form of this illusion in recent
times is that of the pure mechanist or determinist. If the determinist
is told in the words of the poet that “our wills are ours, we know not
how; our wills are ours to make them thine,” he answers in substance
that our wills are not ours and that he knows how. But his knowledge
on this point is only a conceit of knowledge. He is trying with finite
faculties to grasp factors that are at bottom infinite, or, what
amounts to the same thing, trying to subject the higher element in
human nature to the lower. The proper reply to the determinist is not
to appeal to some dogma or other, but to experience. The decisive word
here has been uttered by Dr. Johnson, who has claims to be regarded
as the most sensible person of recent times: “All theory,” he says,
“is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.” Plant
oneself firmly on this fact of experience and the way is open at one
essential point for a return to common sense. We escape at once from
the vast web of intellectual and emotional sophistry in which the
naturalistic moralists have sought to enmesh us. The answer to the
enigma of life, so far as there is any, is not for the man who sets up
some metaphysical theory, but for the man who, in some sense or other
of the word, acts. Now to act according to the ethical will is, so far
as the natural man is concerned, to pull back, limit, and select. This
supremely human act of selection the rationalistic naturalist would
turn over to physical nature. The emotional naturalist, refusing to be
mechanized along either Cartesian or Darwinian lines, emphasizes his
vital uniqueness, his spontaneous and temperamental “me,” and its right
to get itself uttered. The natural will that is thus released from
control is conceived by Nietzsche as a will to power, and this would
seem to have some relation to the facts. On the other hand, the notion
of a Rousseau or a Whitman, that “liberty” of this type is compatible
with fraternity, is very far from being experimental.
A French writer, M. Léon Daudet, has won a certain notoriety by
applying to the nineteenth century the epithet “stupid.” If the century
deserves the epithet at all, it is surely because of the aspect of it
that I have just been discussing. The determinist tends to mechanize
man and deny him genuine moral choice. The partisans of romantic
spontaneity from Rousseau to Bergson have hoped to escape from this
naturalistic fatalism by setting up some cosmic urge or _élan vital_
as a substitute for moral effort. Yet a multitude of men during the
past century, who acquiesced in either one or the other of these two
main forms of ethical passiveness, held at the same time a firm faith
in “progress.” They were drifting, to be sure, but drifting towards
a “far-off divine event,” usually conceived as a paradise of peace
and brotherhood. But if it is a question of drifting, there is only
one direction in which one can drift and that is towards barbarism.
Civilization is something that must be deliberately willed; it is
not something that gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the
unconscious. Furthermore, it is something that must be willed first
of all by the individual in his own heart. Men who have thus willed
civilization have never been any too numerous; so that civilization
always has been and, in the very nature of the case, always must remain
something precarious. In the words of Rivarol, barbarism is always as
close to the most refined civilization as rust is to the most highly
polished steel.
As a result of the denial or dissimulation of the forms of inner action
on which civilization finally depends, the naturalistic era in which
we are living has been especially rich in dubious moralists, from
the “beautiful souls” of the eighteenth century to the Freudians and
behaviorists of our own day. If the behaviorist deserves censure for
seeing only matter and material causes, the tendency that appears in
Berkeleyan idealists and, in much cruder form, in the exponents of
various brands of “new thought,” to deny matter in favor of what they
conceive to be spirit is also open to grave objection. As a result of
this denial, they tend to lose their sense of the reality of the “civil
war in the cave,” and so to fall into materialism from the other side.
The Freudian corruption of ethics illustrates interestingly another
main naturalistic fallacy. Because outer and mechanical repression of
desire may work injury, it is insinuated that the repression of desire
is bad _per se_. If one says that what is needed is not outer control
but inner control, even philosophers of some standing will reply that
inner control or the ethical will is only the brake on personality;
and that a vehicle cannot, after all, be propelled by its brake. The
metaphor, however, is utterly misleading; the ethical will is nothing
external and mechanical like a brake. The man who imposes this will
upon the outgoing desires is moving away from what is peripheral in
himself to what is central, to what is indeed at the very centre. The
humanist would not go beyond disciplining the “lusts” of the natural
man to the law of measure. However, if one goes still further and
“dies” entirely to the natural self and its impulses, what follows, if
we are to believe the great religious teachers, is not mere emptiness,
but the peace that passeth understanding.
The man who does not impose either religious or humanistic control upon
his ordinary self does not usually avow that he is a mere materialist.
The ethical problem would be comparatively simple if he did. The
egocentric individualist is, however, prone to give fine names to
his own unrestraint. As Plato says, he will call insolence breeding,
anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence; and may even go to the point
of deifying his own impulses. There are times when one must reply in
the affirmative to the question of Virgil “whether each man’s god is
but his own fell desire.” There is a sense in which one must agree with
the scoffer that an honest God is the noblest work of man. We recognize
readily that the God whom the Kaiser and many Germans worshipped
during the War was only a projection into the religious realm of their
own will to power. We are loath, however, to admit any equivalent of
this imperialistic error in the champions of democracy. And yet it is
not difficult to point out such an equivalent, for example, in the
humanitarian illusionist, Victor Hugo. Monckton Milnes relates that
when he called on Hugo at Paris, “he was shown into a large room, with
women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end
throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly and
said: ‘Quant à moi, je crois en Dieu.’ Silence followed. Then a woman
responded as if in deep meditation: ‘Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit
en Dieu.’”[95] The sublimity diminishes somewhat when one observes to
what an extent the God in whom Hugo believes reflects his ordinary self
so that he is thus enabled to worship this self on a sort of cosmic
scale. A man also frequently calls what is at bottom only an hypostasis
of his ordinary self in its dominant desire either progress or
justice. Thus Mr. Samuel Gompers complained that the New York Assembly
of 1919 did not pass a single “progressive or forward-looking act.” We
all know what this means. The far-off divine event towards which the
whole creation moves is for Mr. Gompers the domination of the laboring
class, with the understanding that the laboring class itself is to be
dominated by Mr. Gompers or his kind. As a result of the cowardice of
our politicians, this more or less divine event has at times not seemed
so far off as one might wish. The attempt to bestow the word justice on
personal or class interests is too familiar to need illustration.
We are dealing here with the most ancient and still the most successful
form of camouflage. During the War, the French did not fail to quote
a passage of Tacitus to the general effect that the Germans give fine
names to what is at bottom only their own lawlessness and love of
plunder. But there is in this trait nothing specifically German. The
barbaric Briton, the same Tacitus narrates, complained of his Roman
conquerors that “they make a desolation and call it peace.” This human
proclivity, though universal, is especially marked in periods of
individualistic emancipation. It is especially at such a period that
one needs to remind oneself with Hobbes that words are the counters
of wise men and the coin of fools, and that one is not to suppose, on
hearing a fine phrase, that it coincides necessarily with a fine thing.
We are put here on the track of the true office of the intellect in
such a period. To set out like Rousseau to be an individualist and at
the same time to disparage intellect is to enter upon the pathway of
madness. In direct ratio, indeed, to the completeness of one’s break
with the past must be the keenness of one’s discrimination. Otherwise
one runs the risk of setting up as an “ideal” and decking out with
fair phrases some unsubstantial dream--the mere ballooning out of the
imagination into the void.
The imagination must, to be sure, be supreme, but it should be an
imagination disciplined to the facts. If the imagination is not
present, the facts will not be unified; they will remain inert and
isolated. But the intellect must also be present--and by intellect I
mean the power in man that analyzes and discriminates and traces causes
and effects; for this power alone can determine whether the unity the
imagination has established among the facts is real or whether it
exists rather only in some “realm of chimeras.” The genuine man of
science is not, on the one hand, a metaphysical theorist nor, on the
other, a mere fact-grubber. His eminence is measured by the gift he
possesses for true vision in connection with some field of facts on
which he has long been fixing his attention. What may have come to him
originally in a flash of intuition he is careful to check up and test
experimentally by every means in his power; and at this stage he is not
synthetic but analytic. His success is due to the correct relation he
has established between the part of himself that perceives, the part
that conceives, and the part that discriminates.
Now the true humanist deals with his facts in a somewhat similar
fashion: only the facts on which he is fixing his attention are of an
entirely different order. His imagination is disciplined to law, but
this law is not the “law for thing.” He is tracing cause and effect,
but these causal sequences are not the ones that occur in physical
nature. Because there is in us, in Lowell’s phrase, something that
refuses to be “Benthamized,” the romantic idealist looks with suspicion
on a cause-and-effect philosophy and the keen analysis by which it
can be established; but any other than a cause-and-effect philosophy
is likely to fall into sheer unreality; inasmuch as reality means
practically the reality of law, and law in turn means that as a matter
of positive observation there is a constant association between certain
phenomena either in time or space--an association that exists quite
apart from the desires or opinions of the individual. If there is not
a human law that is thus objective, so that the person who violates it
exposes himself to certain consequences in much the same way that the
person who puts his finger into the fire exposes himself to certain
consequences, then the human law is not worth going in search of. A
sceptic of the type of Hume would affirm, indeed, that the very idea
of cause and effect is not objective but subjective, that it arises
from man’s “propensity to feign.” But even if we go to the extreme of
scepticism and look on life merely as a “dream whose shapes return,”
it remains true that these returning shapes bear a certain constant
relationship to one another; so that they are susceptible of study from
the point of view of the only problem that finally matters--the problem
of happiness or unhappiness. Of cause and effect in any abstract and
metaphysical sense, the critical humanist is willing to avow his
ignorance; just as the true man of science admits that he cannot grasp
the ultimate essence behind the phenomenal relationships he is busy in
tracing.
The foregoing analysis, if it is correct, suggests that the type of
material progress on which the Occident has been expending its main
effort for some time past, so far from promoting moral progress, is
likely rather to make against it. This type of progress has resulted
from imaginative concentration on facts of an entirely different order
from those of the moral law. The keen analytical discrimination in
the service of actual perception that gives reality--such reality as
man has access to--has become the more and more exclusive monopoly
of the man of science or of the utilitarian who has been organizing
scientific discovery into a vast machinery of material efficiency. In
the mean while, in the distinctively human realm, the imagination has
been left more or less free to roam at large. It has set up a unity,
as I remarked at the outset, that has not been sufficiently tested
from the point of view of its reality. The unity that the humanitarian
hopes to achieve among men hinges almost entirely, I have tried to
show, on the idea of “service.” Men are to be brought together, one
finds on analyzing this idea of service, by means that are either
rationalistic and mechanical or else emotional. In either case, the
humanitarian assumes that men can meet expansively and on the level of
their ordinary selves. But if this notion of union should prove to be
illusory, if men can really come together only in humble obeisance to
something set above their ordinary selves, it follows that the great
temple to humanity that has been in process of erection for several
generations past is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel; and so
we should not be surprised if it is being stricken with a confusion of
tongues.
With the progressive weakening of traditional standards, the inability
of the humanitarian to supply any adequate substitute is becoming
apparent. The whole of the Occident seems to be at an _impasse_. The
mere rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally bankrupt.
It may be that our only hope is a return to the truths of the inner
life. If we ourselves are unable to see the need of such a return, it
is perhaps because we have reached the stage of the decadent Romans
who, according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from which they
were suffering and also the remedies for those evils.
The loss of the truths of the inner life in their traditional form has
involved, I have tried to show, a profound alteration in the idea of
liberty. Liberty has come more and more to be conceived expansively,
not as a process of concentration, as a submission or adjustment to a
higher will. My whole argument thus far has been that we should seek to
recover in some critical form the centripetal element in liberty that
the modernist has allowed to drop out and so become thoroughgoing and
complete moderns. It is a matter of no small importance in any case to
be defective in one’s definition of liberty; for any defect here will
be reflected in one’s definitions of peace and justice; and the outlook
for a society which has defective notions of peace and justice cannot
be regarded as very promising.
A good deal of the confusion about liberty, as I have endeavored to
show, has been promoted by the pantheistic dreamers who have sought
a substitute for the grace of God in the grace of nature, and so
have obscured the distinction between the man for whom liberty is an
ethical working and the man who, like Rousseau, seeks to found an
indomitable spirit of liberty on an indolence that is beyond belief.
The pure traditionalist, the Catholic, for example, not only avoids a
particular confusion of this kind, but is in general relieved of the
task of defining liberty that is imposed upon the individualist. The
Church will supply him with his definition: liberty, he will be told,
is submission to the will of God; and the Church will not only supply
him with the general principle, but also give him guidance in the
innumerable “cases” that arise in the application of it. Inasmuch as
the Pope is infallible (since 1870), at least in religion and morals,
submission to the will of God tends to coincide practically, though not
of course in theory, with submission to the Pope.
Though the sound individualist must also have standards, it is plain
that he cannot get at them in this way--not, namely, by leaning on
outer authority, but rather by the coöperation of intellect and
imagination I have tried to describe. The standards he has thus
secured he will proceed to press into the service of the ethical
will. A programme of this kind, in which imagination, intellect, and
will coöperate, instead of flying asunder, as they tend to do in
Pascal, for example, is, it must be confessed, easier to outline than
to accomplish. Yet it is hard to see that our modern experiment can
be carried through safely on any other terms. If this experiment
shows signs of breaking down, the explanation is surely that it has
failed thus far to achieve adequate equivalents for the traditional
controls. Instead of setting up genuine standards and then selecting
with reference to them, the man who professes to be modern has turned
selection over to “nature” and sought to substitute for the working
of the ethical will a diffuse, unselective sympathy. This tendency to
put on sympathy a burden that it cannot bear and at the same time to
sacrifice a truly human hierarchy and scale of values to the principle
of equality has been especially marked in the democratic movement,
nowhere more so perhaps than in our American democracy. It remains,
therefore, to discuss democracy in its relation to standards. I shall
attempt in the course of this discussion to elucidate still further,
with the aid of a Socratic dialectic, my distinction between the true
and the false liberal.
CHAPTER VII
DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS
Judged by any quantitative test, the American achievement is
impressive. We have ninety per cent of the motors of the world and
control seventy-five per cent of its oil; we produce sixty per cent of
the world’s steel, seventy per cent of its copper, and eighty per cent
of its telephones and typewriters. This and similar statistical proof
of our material preëminence, which would have made a Greek apprehensive
of Nemesis, seems to inspire in many Americans an almost lyrical
complacency. They are not only quantitative in their estimates of our
present accomplishment, but even more so if possible in what they
anticipate for the future. Now that we have fifteen million automobiles
they feel, with Mr. Henry Ford, that we can have no higher ambition
than to expand this number to thirty million. Our present output of
fifty million tons of steel a year is, according to Mr. Schwab, a
mere trifle compared with our probable output of twenty years hence.
In short, an age that is already immersed in things to an unexampled
degree is merely to prepare the way for an age still more material in
its preoccupations and still more subservient to machinery. This, we
are told, is progress. To a person with a proportionate view of life it
might seem rather to be full-blown commercial insolence.
The reasons for the quantitative view of life that prevails in America
are far from being purely political. This view has resulted in a
large measure from the coming together of scientific discovery with
the opening up of a new continent. It has been possible with the aid
of science to accomplish in a hundred years what even the optimistic
Thomas Jefferson thought might take a thousand. The explanation, it has
been said, of much that is obscure to us in the Chinese may be summed
up in the words “lack of elbow-room.” We in this country, on the other
hand, have received a peculiar psychic twist from the fact that we have
had endless elbow-room. A chief danger both to ourselves and others
is that we shall continue to have a frontier psychology long after we
have ceased to have a frontier. For a frontier psychology is expansive,
and expansiveness, I have tried to show, is, at least in its political
manifestations, always imperialistic.
If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively
it is somewhat less satisfying. What must one think of a country,
asks one of our foreign critics, whose most popular orator is W. J.
Bryan, whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most widely read
novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-known evangelist is Billy
Sunday, and whose representative journalist is William Randolph Hearst?
What one must evidently think of such a country, even after allowing
liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards. Furthermore,
America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not
infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards. As an
example of the inversion of standards we may take the bricklayer who,
being able to lay two thousand bricks a day, is reduced by union rules
to laying five hundred. There is confusion of standards, again, when we
are so impressed by Mr. Henry Ford’s abilities as organizer and master
mechanic that we listen seriously to his views on money; or when,
simply because Mr. Edison has shown inventive genius along certain
lines, we receive him as an authority on education. One is reminded of
the story of the French butcher who, having need of legal aid, finally,
after looking over a number of lawyers, selected the fattest one.
The problem of standards, though not identical with the problem of
democracy, touches it at many points and is not therefore the problem
of any one country. Europeans, indeed, like to look upon the crudity
and chaotic impressionism of people who are no longer guided by
standards as something specifically American. “America,” says the
“Saturday Review,” “is the country of unbalanced minds, of provincial
policies and of hysterical Utopias.” The deference for standards has,
however, been diminished by a certain type of democracy in many other
countries besides America. The resulting vulgarity and triviality
are more or less visible in all of these countries;--for example, if
we are to believe Lord Bryce, in New Zealand. If we in America are
perhaps preëminent in lack of distinction, it is because of the very
completeness of our emancipation from the past. Goethe’s warning as
to the retarding effect of the commonplace is well known (_Was uns
alle bändigt, das Gemeine_). His explanation of what makes for the
commonplace is less familiar: “Enjoyment,” he says, “makes common.”
(_Geniessen macht gemein._) Since every man desires happiness, it
is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in
terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense
that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining
his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short,
his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing
conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words
diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most
of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated
by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas
Jefferson, remarks of himself: “I am an Epicurean.”[96] It cannot be
gainsaid that an increasing number of our young people are, in this
respect at least, good Jeffersonians. The phrase that reflects most
clearly their philosophy of life is perhaps “good time.” One might
suppose that many of them see this phrase written in great blazing
letters on the very face of the firmament. As “Punch” remarked, the
United States is not a country, but a picnic. When the element of
conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life,
what remains is the irresponsible quest of thrills. The utilitarian
and industrial side of the modern movement comes into play at this
point. Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything
(including the irresponsible quest of thrills); so that, whatever
democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define
it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama. This
definition will be found to fit many aspects of our national life
besides the moving-picture industry. The tendency to steep and saturate
ourselves in the impression of the moment without reference to any
permanent pattern of human experience is even more marked, perhaps,
in our newspapers and magazines. It was said of the inhabitants of a
certain ancient Greek city that, though they were not fools, they did
just the things that fools would do. It is hard to take a glance at
one of our news-stands without reflecting that, though we may not be
fools, we are reading just the things that fools would read. Our daily
press in particular is given over to the most childish sensationalism.
“The Americans are an excellent people,” Matthew Arnold wrote from
Boston in 1883, “but their press seems to me an awful symptom.” This
symptom was not so awful then as now; for that was before the day of
the scarehead and the comic supplement. The American reading his Sunday
paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of
the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen. Whole
forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.
One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods, whether the net
result of the movement that has been sweeping the Occident for several
generations may not be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and
whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing
in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human
species that the world has yet seen. To be sure, it may be urged that,
though we may suffer loss of distinction as a result of the democratic
drift, by way of compensation a great many average people will, in
the Jeffersonian sense at least, be made “happy.” If we are to judge
by history, however, what supervenes upon the decline of standards and
the disappearance of leaders who embody them is not some equalitarian
paradise, but inferior types of leadership. We have already been
reminded by certain developments in this country of Byron’s definition
of democracy as an “aristocracy of blackguards.” At the very moment
when we were most vociferous about making the world safe for democracy
the citizens of New York City refused to reëlect an honest man
as their mayor and put in his place a tool of Tammany, an action
followed in due course by a “crime wave”; whereupon they returned the
tool of Tammany by an increased majority. The industrial revolution
has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to
be increasingly careless of ethical standards. In the case of our
American cities, the problem of securing some degree of moral cohesion
is further complicated by the presence of numerous aliens of widely
divergent racial stocks and cultural backgrounds.[97] In addition
our population is not only about half urban, but we cannot be said,
like most other countries, to have any peasantry or yeomanry. Those
Americans who actually dwell in the country are more and more urban
in their psychology. The whole situation is so unusual as to suggest
doubts even from a purely biological point of view. “As I watch the
American nation speeding gaily, with invincible optimism down the road
to destruction,” says Professor William McDougall, an observer of the
biological type, “I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in
the history of mankind.”
We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous elements that
enter into our population will, like various instruments in an
orchestra, merely result in a richer harmony; they will, one may reply,
provided that, like an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the
outcome may be an unexampled cacophony. This question of leadership
is not primarily biological, but moral. Leaders may vary in quality
from the man who is so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right
conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the man
who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of
force, and so is, in the sense I have sought to define, imperialistic.
If democracy means simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and
selective principle in favor of some general will, based in turn on a
theory of natural rights, it may prove to be only a form of the vertigo
of the abyss. As I have tried to show in dealing with the influence
of Rousseau on the French Revolution, it will result practically,
not in equality, but in a sort of inverted aristocracy. One’s choice
may be, not between a democracy that is properly led and a democracy
that hopes to find the equivalent of standards and leadership in the
appeal to a numerical majority, that indulges in other words in a
sort of quantitative impressionism, but between a democracy that is
properly led and a decadent imperialism. One should, therefore, in the
interests of democracy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the
right man for the doctrine of the rights of man.
The opposition between traditional standards and an equalitarian
democracy based on the supposed rights of man has played an important
part in our own political history, and has meant practically the
opposition between two types of leadership. The “quality” in the older
sense of the word suffered its first decisive defeat in 1829 when
Washington was invaded by the hungry hordes of Andrew Jackson. The
imperialism latent in this type of democracy appears in the Jacksonian
maxim: “To the victors belong the spoils.” In his theory of democracy
Jackson had, of course, much in common with Thomas Jefferson. If we
go back, indeed, to the beginnings of our institutions, we find that
America stood from the start for two different views of government that
have their origin in different views of liberty and ultimately of human
nature. The view that is set forth in the Declaration of Independence
assumes that man has certain abstract rights; it has therefore
important points of contact with the French revolutionary “idealism.”
The view that inspired our Constitution, on the other hand, has much in
common with that of Burke. If the first of these political philosophies
is properly associated with Jefferson, the second has its most
distinguished representative in Washington. The Jeffersonian liberal
has faith in the goodness of the natural man, and so tends to overlook
the need of a veto power either in the individual or in the State.
The liberals of whom I have taken Washington to be the type are less
expansive in their attitude towards the natural man. Just as man has
a higher self that acts restrictively on his ordinary self, so, they
hold, the State should have a higher or permanent self, appropriately
embodied in institutions, that should set bounds to its ordinary self
as expressed by the popular will at any particular moment. The contrast
that I am establishing is, of course, that between a constitutional and
a direct democracy. There is an opposition of first principles between
those who maintain that the popular will should prevail, but only
after it has been purified of what is merely impulsive and ephemeral,
and those who maintain that this will should prevail immediately
and unrestrictedly. The American experiment in democracy has,
therefore, from the outset been ambiguous, and will remain so until
the irrepressible conflict between a Washingtonian and a Jeffersonian
liberty has been fought to a conclusion. The liberal of the type of
Washington has always been very much concerned with what one may term
the unionist aspect of liberty. This central preoccupation is summed up
in the phrase of Webster: Liberty and union, one and inseparable. The
liberty of the Jeffersonian, on the other hand, makes against ethical
union like every liberty that rests on the assertion of abstract
rights. Jefferson himself proclaimed not only human rights, but also
state rights.[98] Later the doctrine of state rights was developed with
logical rigor by Calhoun, whereas the doctrine of human rights was
carried through no less uncompromisingly by the abolitionists. The
result was two opposing camps of extremists and fire-eaters; so that
the whole question of union, instead of being settled on ethical lines,
had to be submitted to the arbitrament of force.
The man who has grasped the full import of the conflict between the
liberty of the unionist and that of the Jeffersonian has been put in
possession of the key that unlocks American history. The conflict
between the two conceptions is not, indeed, always clear-cut in
particular individuals. There is much in Jefferson himself that
contradicts what I have been saying about Jefferson. A chief business
of criticism, however, is to distinguish, in spite of peripheral
overlappings, between things that are at the centre different. For
example, to link together in a common admiration Jefferson and John
Marshall, our most eminent unionist after Washington himself, is proof
of lack of critical discrimination rather than of piety towards the
fathers. Jefferson and Marshall knew perfectly that they stood for
incompatible things,[99] and it is important that we should know it
also. “Marshall,” says John Quincy Adams in his Diary, “has cemented
the Union which the crafty and quixotic democracy of Jefferson had a
perpetual tendency to dissolve.”
By his preoccupation with the question of the union, Lincoln became
the true successor of Washington and Marshall. In making of Lincoln
the great emancipator instead of the great unionist, in spite of his
own most specific declarations on this point, we are simply creating
a Lincoln myth, as we have already created a Washington myth.[100]
We are sometimes told that the good democrat needs merely to be like
Lincoln. But to be like Lincoln one must know what Lincoln was like.
This is not only a task for the critic, but, in view of the Lincoln
myth, a more difficult task than is commonly supposed. It is especially
easy to sentimentalize Lincoln because he had a strongly marked vein of
sentimentalism. Nevertheless, in spite of the peripheral overlappings
between the democracy of Lincoln and that of Jefferson[101] or even
between that of Lincoln and Walt Whitman, one should insist on the
central difference. One has only to read, for example, the Second
Inaugural along with the “Song of Myself” if one wishes to become aware
of the gap that separates religious humility from romantic egotism. We
should be careful again, in spite of peripheral overlappings, not to
confound the democracy of Lincoln with that of Roosevelt. What we feel
at the very centre in Roosevelt is the dynamic rush of an imperialistic
personality. What we feel at the very centre in Lincoln, on the other
hand, is an element of judicial control; and in close relation to this
control a profound conception of the rôle of the courts in maintaining
free institutions. The man who has studied the real Lincoln does not
find it easy to imagine him advocating the recall of judicial decisions.
The Jeffersonian liberal is, as a rule, much more ostentatiously
fraternal than the liberal in the other tradition. Yet he is usually
inferior in human warmth and geniality to the unionist. Washington and
Marshall and Lincoln at their best combined practical sagacity with
a central benignity and unselfishness. Jefferson, on the other hand,
though perhaps our most accomplished politician, did not show himself
especially sagacious in dealing with specific emergencies. Furthermore,
it is hard to read his “Anas” and reflect on the circumstances of its
composition without concluding that what was central in his personality
was not benignity and unselfishness but vindictiveness.
Statesmen who deserve the praise I have bestowed on our unionist
leaders are, as every student of history knows, extremely rare. The
type of constitutional liberty that we owe to these men before all
others is one of the greatest blessings that has ever been vouchsafed
to any people. And yet we are in danger of losing it. The Eighteenth
Amendment is striking proof of our loss of grasp, not only on the
principles that underlie our own Constitution, but that must underlie
any constitution, as such, in opposition to mere legislative enactment.
Our present drift away from constitutional freedom can be understood
only with reference to the progressive crumbling of traditional
standards and the rise of a naturalistic philosophy that, in its
treatment of specifically human problems, has been either sentimental
or utilitarian. The significant changes in our own national
temper in particular are finally due to the fact that Protestant
Christianity, especially in the Puritanic form, has been giving way to
humanitarianism. The point is worth making because the persons who
have favored prohibition and other similar “reforms” have been attacked
as Puritans. Genuine Puritanism was, however, a religion of the inner
life. Our unionist leaders, Washington, Marshall, and Lincoln, though
not narrowly orthodox, were still religious in the traditional sense.
The struggle between good and evil, as they saw it, was still primarily
not in society, but in the individual. Their conscious dependence on a
higher or divine will could not fail to be reflected in their notion
of liberty. Jefferson, on the contrary, associated his liberty, not
with God, but with “nature.” He admired, as is well known, the liberty
of the American Indian.[102] He was for diminishing to the utmost the
rôle of government, but not for increasing the inner control that
must, according to Burke, be in strict ratio to the relaxation of
outer control. When evil actually appears, the Jeffersonian cannot
appeal to the principle of inner control; he is not willing again to
admit that the sole alternative to this type of control is force;
and so he is led into what seems at first sight a paradoxical denial
of his own principles: he has recourse to legislation. It should be
clear at all events that our present attempt to substitute social
control for self-control is Jeffersonian rather than Puritanical.
So far as we are true children of the Puritans, we may accept the
contrast established by Professor Stuart P. Sherman[103] between our
own point of view and that of the German: “The ideal of the German
is external control and ‘inner freedom’; the Government looks after
his conduct and he looks after his liberty. The ideal of the American
is external freedom and inner control; the individual looks after his
conduct and the Government looks after his liberty. Thus _Verboten_ in
Germany is pronounced by the Government and enforced by the police. In
America _Verboten_ is pronounced by public opinion and enforced by the
individual conscience. In this light it should appear that Puritanism,
our national principle of concentration, is the indispensable check
on democracy, our national principle of expansion. I use the word
Puritanism in the sense given to it by German and German-American
critics: _the inner check upon the expansion of natural impulse_.”
Professor Sherman’s contrast has been true in the past and still has
some truth--at least enough for the purposes of war-time propaganda.
But what about our main drift at present? It is plainly away from the
point of view that Professor Sherman ascribes to the Puritan[104] and
towards the point of view that he ascribes to the German. “The inner
check upon the expansion of natural impulse” is precisely the missing
element in the Jeffersonian philosophy. The Jeffersonian has therefore
been led to deal with the problem of evil, not vitally and in terms
of the inner life, but mechanically. Like the Jesuit he has fallen
from law into legalism. It has been estimated that for one _Verboten_
sign in Germany we already have a dozen in this country; only, having
set up our _Verboten_ sign, we get even by not observing it. Thus
prohibition is pronounced by the Government, largely repudiated by the
individual conscience, and enforced (very imperfectly) by the police.
The multitude[105] of laws we are passing is one of many proofs that we
are growing increasingly lawless.
There are, to be sure, peripheral overlappings between the point of
view of the Puritan and that of the humanitarian legalist. The Puritan
inclined from the start to be meddlesome, as any one who has studied
the activities of Calvin at Geneva will testify. But even here one
may ask whether the decisive arguments by which we have been induced
to submit to the meddling of the prohibitionist were not utilitarian
rather than puritanical. “Booze,” says Mr. Henry Ford, “had to go out
when modern industry and the motor car came in.” The truth may be that
we are prepared to make any sacrifice to the Moloch of efficiency,
including, apparently, that of our federal Constitution.
The persons who have been carrying on of late a campaign against the
Puritans like to look on themselves as “intellectuals.” But if the
primary function of the intellect is to make accurate distinctions, it
is plain that they do not deserve the title. For in dealing with this
whole subject they have fallen into a twofold confusion. So far as they
identify with Puritanism the defence of the principle of control in
human nature, they are simply attacking under that name the wisdom of
the ages and all its authentic representatives in both East and West.
To bestow, on the other hand, the name of Puritans on the humanitarian
legalists who are now sapping our spiritual virility is to pay them an
extravagant and undeserved compliment. Let us take as a sample of the
attacks on the Puritans that of Mr. Theodore Dreiser, culminating in
the grotesque assertion regarding the United States: “No country has
such a peculiar, such a seemingly fierce determination to make the Ten
Commandments work.” We are murdering one another at the rate of about
ten thousand a year (with very few capital convictions)[106] and are
in general showing ourselves more criminally inclined than any other
nation that is reputed to be civilized.[107] The explanation is that
we are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments, but humanitarianism
work--and it is not working. If our courts are so ineffective in
punishing crime, a chief reason is that they do not have the support of
public opinion, and this is because the public is so largely composed
of people who have set up sympathy for the underdog as a substitute for
all the other virtues, or else of people who hold that the criminal is
the product of his environment and so is not morally responsible. Here
as elsewhere there is a coöperation between those who mechanize life
and those who sentimentalize it.
The belief in moral responsibility must be based on a belief in
the possibility of an inner working of some kind with reference to
standards. The utilitarian, as I have sought to show, has put his
main emphasis on outer working. The consequence of this emphasis,
coinciding as it has with the multiplication of machines, has been the
substitution of standardization for standards. The type of efficiency
that our master commercialists pursue requires that a multitude of men
should be deprived of their specifically human attributes, and become
mere cogs in some vast machine. At the present rate even the grocer in
a remote country town will soon not be left as much initiative as is
needed to fix the price of a pound of butter.
Standardization is, however, a less serious menace to standards than
what are currently known as “ideals.” The person who breaks down
standards in the name of ideals does not seem to be impelled by base
commercial motives, but to be animated, on the contrary, by the purest
commiseration for the lowly and the oppressed. We must have the courage
to submit this humanitarian zeal to a close scrutiny. We may perhaps
best start with the familiar dictum that America is only another name
for opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To engage in a scramble for
money and material success, until the multimillionaire emerges as the
characteristic product of a country dedicated to the proposition that
all men are created equal? According to Napoleon, the French Revolution
was also only another name for opportunity (_la carrière ouverte aux
talents_). Some of our commercial supermen have evidently been making
use of their opportunity in a very Napoleonic fashion. In any case,
opportunity has meaning only with reference to some true standard.
The sentimentalist, instead of setting up some such standard by way
of protest against the wrong type of superiority, inclines rather to
bestow an unselective sympathy on those who have been left behind in
the race for economic advantage. Even when less materialistic in his
outlook, he is prone to dodge the question of justice. He does not ask
whether a man is an underdog because he has already had his opportunity
and failed to use it, whether, in short, the man that he takes to
be a victim of the social order is not rather a victim of his own
misconduct[108] or at least of his own indolence and inattention. He
thus exposes himself to the penalties visited on those who set out to
be kinder than the moral law.
At bottom the point of view of the “uplifter” is so popular because it
nourishes spiritual complacency; it enables a man to look on himself as
“up” and on some one else as “down.” But there is psychological if not
theological truth in the assertion of Jonathan Edwards that complacent
people are a “particular smoke” in God’s nostrils. A man needs to look,
not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as
to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog. The man
who thus looks up is becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn, and,
to this extent, qualifying for leadership. Leadership of this type,
one may add, may prove to be, in the long run, the only effectual
counterpoise to that of the imperialistic superman.
No amount of devotion to society and its supposed interests can take
the place of this inner obeisance of the spirit to standards. The
humanitarian would seem to be caught here in a vicious circle. If
he turns from the inner life to serve his fellow men, he becomes a
busybody. If he sets out again to become exemplary primarily with
a view to the benefit of others, he becomes a prig. Nothing will
avail short of humility. Humility, as Burke saw, is the ultimate root
of the justice that should prevail in the secular order, as well as
of the virtues that are specifically religious. The modern problem,
I have been insisting, is to secure leaders with an allegiance to
standards, now that the traditional order with which Burke associated
his standards and leadership has been so seriously shaken. Those
who have broken with the traditional beliefs have thus far shown
themselves singularly ineffective in dealing with this problem of
leadership, even when they have admitted the need of leaders at all.
The persons who have piqued themselves especially on being positive
have looked for leadership to the exponents of physical science.
Auguste Comte, for example, not only regarded men of science as the
true modern priesthood, but actually disparaged moral effort on the
part of the individual. I scarcely need to repeat here what I have
said elsewhere--that the net result of a merely scientific “progress”
is to produce efficient megalomaniacs. Physical science, excellent in
its proper place, is, when exalted out of this place, the ugliest and
most maleficent idol before which man has as yet consented to prostrate
himself. If the essence of genuine science is to face loyally all the
facts as they present themselves without dogmatic prepossessions,
one is justified in asking whether the man who forgets that physical
science is, in Tennyson’s phrase, the second, not the first, is
genuinely scientific; whether the very sharpest discrimination does
not need to be established between science and utilitarianism.
Aristotle, for example, was a true man of science; he was not a
utilitarian.[109] Francis Bacon, on the other hand, is the prophet
of the whole utilitarian movement, but one may doubt his eminence as
a man of science. Quite apart from the fact that he failed to make
important scientific discoveries, one may question the validity of the
Baconian method. His failure to do justice to deduction as part of a
sound scientific method has often been noted. A more serious defect is
his failure to recognize the rôle of the imagination, or, what amounts
to the same thing, the rôle of exceptional genius in the making of
scientific discoveries.[110]
One cannot grant that an aristocracy of scientific intellectuals or
indeed any aristocracy of intellect is what we need. This would mean
practically to encourage the _libido sciendi_ and so to put pride in
the place of humility. Still less acceptable would be an aristocracy
of artists; as the word art has come to be understood in recent times,
this would mean an aristocracy of æsthetes who would attempt to base
their selection on the _libido sentiendi_. The Nietzschean attempt,
again, to found the aristocratic and selective principle on the sheer
expansion of the will to power (_libido dominandi_) would lead in
practice to horrible violence and finally to the death of civilization.
The attempts that were made during the past century to establish a
scale of values with reference to the three main lusts of the human
heart often took on a mystical coloring. Man likes to think that he
has God as an ally of his expansive conceit, whatever this conceit
may chance to be. When, indeed, one has passed in review the various
mysticisms of the modern movement, as they are set forth, for example,
in the volumes of M. Seillière, one is reminded of the saying of
Bossuet: “True mysticism is so rare and unessential and false mysticism
is so common and dangerous that one cannot oppose it too firmly.”
If one discovers frequently a pseudo-mystical element in the claims
to leadership of the æsthetes, the supermen and the scientific
intellectuals, this element is even more visible in those who would,
in the name of democracy, dispense with leadership altogether. Thus
Walt Whitman, as we have seen, would put no check on his “spontaneous
me”; he would have every one else indulge his “idiocrasy” to the
same degree, be a “genius,” in short, in the full romantic sense
of the term. A liberty thus anarchical is to lead to equality and
fraternity. If one tells the democrat of this type that his programme
is contrary to common sense and the facts of experience, he is wont
to take refuge in mystical “vision.” One needs in effect to be very
mystical to suppose that men can come together by flying off each on
his temperamental tangent. Whitman does not admit the need of the
leader who looks up humbly to some standard and so becomes worthy to be
looked up to in turn. The only leadership he contemplates apparently
is that of the ideal democratic bard who flatters the people’s pride
and chants the divine average.[111] He represents in an extreme
form the substitution for vital control of expansive emotion under
the name of love. Pride and self-assertion, when tempered by love,
will not, he holds, endanger the principle of union.[112] The Union,
though “always swarming with blatherers, is yet,” he says, “always
sure and impregnable.” The records of the past are not reassuring as
to the maintenance of ethical union in a community that is swarming
with “blatherers.” At all events, the offset to the blatherers will be
found, not in any divine average, but in the true leader--the “still
strong man in a blatant land.” We come here to another opposition that
is one of first principles and is not therefore subject to mediation
or compromise--the opposition, namely, between the doctrine of the
saving remnant and that of the divine average. If one deals with
human nature realistically one may find here and there a person who
is worthy of respect and occasionally one who is worthy of reverence.
Any one, on the other hand, who puts his faith in the divinity of
the average is destined, if we are to trust the records of history,
to pass through disillusion to a final despair. We are reaching the
stage of disillusion in this country at the present moment. According
to the author of “Main Street,” the average is not divine but
trivial; according to the author of the “Spoon River Anthology,” it
is positively hideous. It can scarcely be gainsaid that contemporary
America offers an opening for satire. A great many people are gradually
drifting into materialism and often cherishing the conceit at the same
time that they are radiant idealists. But satire, to be worth while,
must be constructive. The opposite of the trivial is the distinguished;
and one can determine what is distinguished only with reference to
standards. To see Main Street on a background of standards would be
decidedly helpful; but standards are precisely what our so-called
realists lack. They are themselves a part of the disease that they are
attempting to define.
The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of
standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain
people. How far is this appeal to the plain people justified and how
far is it merely demagogic? There is undoubted truth in the saying that
there is somebody who knows more than anybody, and that is everybody.
Only one must allow everybody sufficient time to sift the evidence and
add that, even so, everybody does not know very much. Burke told the
electors of Bristol that he was not flattering their opinions of the
moment, but uttering the views that both they and he must have five
years thence. Even in this triumph of the sober judgment of the people
over its passing impression, the rôle of the true leader should not
be underestimated. Thus in the year 1795 the plain people of America
were eager to give the fraternal accolade to the French Jacobins.
The great and wise Washington opposed an alliance that would almost
certainly have been disastrous, and as a result he had heaped upon him
by journals like the “Aurora,” the forerunner of our modern “journals
of opinion,” epithets that, as he himself complained, would not have
been deserved by a common pickpocket. In a comparatively short time
Washington and his group were seen to be right, and those who seemed
to be the spokesmen of the plain people were seen to be wrong. It is
not clear that one can have much faith even in the sober second thought
of a community that has no enlightened minority. A Haytian statesman,
for example, might not gain much in appealing from Haytian opinion of
to-day to Haytian opinion of five years hence. The democratic idealist
does not, however, mean as a rule by an appeal to the plain people
an appeal to its sober second thought. He means rather the immediate
putting into effect of the will of a numerical majority. Like the man
in the comic song the people is supposed to “want what it wants when it
wants it.” Our American drift for a number of years has unquestionably
been towards a democracy of this radical type, as is evident from the
increasing vogue of the initiative, referendum, and recall (whether of
judges or judicial decisions) as well as from popular primaries and
the direct election of Senators. The feeling that the people should
act directly on all measures has led to the appearance in certain
States of ballots thirty feet long! Yet the notion that wisdom resides
in a popular majority at any particular moment should be the most
completely exploded of all fallacies. If the plain people at Jerusalem
had registered their will with the aid of the most improved type of
ballot box, there is no evidence that they would have preferred Christ
to Barabbas. In view of the size of the jury that condemned Socrates,
one may affirm confidently that he was the victim of a “great and
solemn referendum.” On the other hand, the plain people can be shown
to have taken a special delight in Nero. But the plain people, it
will be replied, has been educated and enlightened. The intelligence
tests applied in connection with the selective draft indicate that
the average mental age of our male voters is about fourteen.[113] The
intelligence testers are, to be sure, under some suspicion as to the
quality of their own intelligence. A more convincing proof of the low
mentality of our population is found, perhaps, in the fact that the
Hearst publications have twenty-five million readers.
“There is nothing,” says Goethe, “more odious than the majority; for it
consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating
scoundrels and subservient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge
after them without in the least knowing their own minds.” If there is
any truth in this analysis the majority in a radical democracy often
rules only in name. No movement, indeed, illustrates more clearly
than the supposedly democratic movement the way in which the will of
highly organized and resolute minorities may prevail over the will of
the inert and unorganized mass. Even though the mass does not consent
to “trudge” after the minority, it is at an increasing disadvantage
in its attempts to resist it. Physical science is on the side of the
tyrannical minority. The ordinary citizen cannot have a machine gun
by his fireside or a “tank” in his back yard. The most recent type of
revolutionary idealist, though his chief concern is still to bestow
benefit on the people, does not, to do him justice, hope to achieve
this benefit through the majority, but rather through the direct action
of organized minorities. He feels that he is justified in cramming his
nostrum down the throat of the people, if necessary by force.
The radical of this type is coming round to the doctrine of the saving
remnant and recognizing in his own way that everything finally hinges
on the quality of the leadership. His views, however, as to this
quality differ strangely from the traditional views. One must admit
that, whatever theories of leadership may have been held traditionally,
actual leadership has never been any too good. One scarcely suspects,
as John Selden remarked, “what a little foolery governs the world.”
Moreover, the folly which has prevailed at the top of society, and that
from the time of the Trojan War, has ever been faithfully reflected in
the rank and file (_Quidquid delirant reges--_). One who surveys the
past is at times tempted to acquiesce in the gloomy judgment of Dryden:
“No government has ever been or ever can be wherein time-servers and
blockheads will not be uppermost. The persons are only changed, but
the same juggling in state, the same hypocrisy in religion, the same
self-interest and mismanagement will remain forever. Blood and money
will be lavished in all ages only for the preferment of new faces with
old consciences.” One should note, however, a difference between the
bad leadership of the past and that of the modern revolutionary era.
The leaders of the past have most frequently been bad in violation of
the principles they professed, whereas it is when a Robespierre or a
Lenin sets out to apply his principles that the man who is interested
in the survival of civilization has reason to tremble.
Dryden’s passage seems to suggest that what is really needed is not
new faces with old consciences, but a transformation of conscience
itself. It is precisely such a transformation that a revolutionary
idealist like Robespierre hopes to effect. For the corrupt conscience
of the old type of aristocratic leader he would substitute a social
conscience. The popular will that is inspired by this conscience is
so immaculate, as we have seen, that it may safely be put in the
place not merely of the royal but of the divine will. I have already
tried to show that a leader who sets out to be only the organ of a
“general will” or “divine average,” that is conceived at times as
essentially reasonable and at other times as essentially fraternal,
will actually become imperialistic. It may be well at this point to
submit this democratic idealism to still further analysis with special
reference to its probable effect on our own international relations.
The tendency for some time past has been to treat international law,
not theoretically as an embodiment of reason, but positively as an
embodiment of will.[114] In that case, if international law is to
reflect any improvement in the relations between states, it must
be shown that the substitution of the popular will for the divine
will has actually tended to promote ethical union among men even
across national frontiers. If we analyze realistically the popular
will, we find that it means the will of a multitude of men who are
more and more emancipated from traditional standards and more and
more given over to what I have termed the irresponsible quest of
thrills. These thrills are, as we all know, supplied by sensational
newspapers and in international affairs involve transitions, often
disconcertingly sudden, from pacifism to jingoism. Any one who can
recollect the period immediately preceding our conflict with Spain
will be sufficiently aware of the rôle that this type of journalism
may play in precipitating war. Let us ask ourselves again whether the
chances of a clash between America and Japan are likely to diminish if
Japan becomes more democratic, if, in other words, the popular will is
substituted for the will of a small group of “elder statesmen.” Any
one who knows what the Japanese sensational press has already done to
foment suspicion against America is justified in harboring doubts on
this point.
A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely
to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic
in its practice. The idealism and the imperialism, indeed, are in
pretty direct ratio to one another. For example, to be fraternal in
Walt Whitman’s sense is to be boundlessly expansive, and a boundless
expansiveness, is, in a world like this, incompatible with peace.
Whitman imagines the United States as expanding until it absorbs
Canada and Mexico and dominates both the Atlantic and the Pacific--a
programme that would almost certainly involve us in war with the
whole world. If we go, not by what Americans feel about themselves,
but by what they have actually done, one must conclude that we have
shown ourselves thus far a consistently expansive, in other words, a
consistently imperialistic, people.[115] We have merely been expanding,
it may be replied, to our natural frontiers; but we are already in the
Philippines, and manifestly in danger of becoming involved in Asiatic
adventures. Japan, a country with fifty-seven million inhabitants
(increasing at the rate of about six hundred thousand a year), on
a group of islands not as large as the State of California, only
seventeen per cent of which is arable, has at least a plausible pretext
for reaching out beyond her natural frontiers. But for us, with our
almost limitless and still largely undeveloped resources, to risk the
horrors of war under modern conditions for anything we are likely to
gain from expanding eastward, would be an extreme example of sheer
restlessness of spirit and of an intemperate commercialism. It is a
part of our psychology that each main incident in our national history
should take on a highly idealistic coloring. For example, we were on
the verge of a conflict with Mexico a few years ago as the result of
an unwarranted meddling with her sovereignty. President Wilson at once
described the incipient struggle as a war of “service.” Cicero says
that Rome gained the mastery of the world by coming to the aid of her
allies. In the same way it may be said some day of us that, as the
result of a series of outbursts of idealism, we changed from a federal
republic to a highly centralized and bureaucratic empire. We are
willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for
ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives.
We have not as yet set up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of
Nations, but during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at
least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself
as an idealist at the same time that the foreigner looks on him as a
dollar-chaser, the explanation may be due partly to the fact that the
American judges himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner
judges him by what he does.
This is not, of course, the whole truth. Besides our tradition of
idealism there is our unionist tradition based on a sane moral
realism. “It is a maxim,” says Washington, “founded on the universal
experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted further than it
is bound by its interests; and no president, statesman or politician
will venture to depart from it.” All realistic observation confirms
Washington. Those who are inspired by his spirit believe that we should
be nationally prepared, and then that we should mind our own business.
The tendency of our idealists, on the other hand, is to be unprepared
and then to engage in more or less general meddling. A third attitude
may be distinguished that may properly be associated with Roosevelt.
The follower of Roosevelt wants preparedness, only he cannot, like
the follower of Washington, be counted on to mind his own business.
The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs
as part of his programme of world service. Unfortunately, it is more
difficult than he supposes to engage in such a programme without
getting involved in a programme of world empire. The term sentimental
imperialism may be applied to certain incidents in ancient Roman
history.[116] Some of the motives that we professed for entering the
Great War remind one curiously of the motives that men like Flamininus
professed for going to the rescue of Greece. Cicero, writing over a
century later and only a few months before his assassination by the
emissaries of the Triumvirs, said that he himself had once thought that
Rome stood for world service rather than for world empire, but that he
had been bitterly disillusioned. He proceeds to denounce Julius Cæsar,
the imperialistic leader _par excellence_, as a demon in human form who
did evil for its own sake. But Cæsar had at least the merit of seeing
that the Roman ethos was changing, that as the result of the breakdown
of religious restraint (for which Stoical “service” was not an adequate
substitute), the Romans were rapidly becoming unfit for republican
institutions.
Some persons, indeed, are inclined to go beyond particular comparisons
of this kind and develop a general parallel between decadent Rome and
modern America. Such a parallel is always very incomplete and must
be used with great caution. We need, in the first place, to define
with some precision what we mean by decadence. The term is often
used vaguely by persons who are suffering from what one may call the
illusion of the “good old times.”[117] Livy is surely a bit idyllic
when he exclaims: “Where will you now find in one man this modesty
and uprightness and loftiness of spirit that then belonged to a whole
people?” Yet if one compares the Rome of the Republic with the Rome
of the Empire one is conscious of a real decline. The Senate that had
seemed to Cineas, the adviser of Pyrrhus, an assembly of demigods,
had become by the time of Tiberius a gathering rather of cringing
sycophants. Horace was uttering only the sober truth when he proclaimed
the progressive degeneracy of the Romans of his time.[118] The most
significant symptom of this degeneracy seemed to Horace and other
shrewd observers to be the relaxation of the bonds of the family.
Are we witnessing a similar moral deliquescence in this country, and,
if so, how far has it gone? One of our foreign critics asserts that we
have already reached the “Heliogabalus stage”--which is absurd. But
at the same time it is not to be denied that the naturalistic notion
of liberty has undermined in no small measure the two chief unifying
influences of the past--the Church and the family. The decline in the
discipline of the family has been fairly recent. Persons are still
living who can remember the conditions that prevailed in the Puritan
household.[119] The process of emancipation from the older restraint
has not usually presented itself as a lapse into mere materialism.
Idealism in the current sense of that term has tended to take the place
of traditional religion. The descendants of the Puritans have gone in
for commercialism, to be sure, especially since the Civil War, but it
has been commercialism tempered by humanitarian crusading. As I have
pointed out, the humanitarian does not, like the genuine Puritan, seek
to get at evil in the heart of the individual, so that he is finally
forced to resort to outer regulation. The egoistic impulses that are
not controlled at their source tend to prevail over an ineffectual
altruism in the relations of man with man and class with class. The
special mark of materialism, which is to regard property, not as a
means to an end, but as an end in itself, is more and more visible.
The conservative nowadays is interested in conserving property for its
own sake and not, like Burke, in conserving it because it is an almost
indispensable support of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing.
As for the progressive, his preoccupation with property and what he
conceives to be its just distribution amounts to a morbid obsession.
Orderly party government will become increasingly difficult if we
continue to move in this direction, and we shall finally be menaced by
class war, if, indeed, we are not menaced by it already. Every student
of history is aware of the significance of this particular symptom
in a democracy. One may sum up what appears to be our total trend at
present by saying that we are moving through an orgy of humanitarian
legalism towards a decadent imperialism.
The important offsetting influence is our great unionist tradition.
One should not, however, underestimate the difficulties in the way
of maintaining this tradition. The idea that the State should have a
permanent or higher self that is felt as a veto power upon its ordinary
self rests ultimately upon the assertion of a similar dualism in the
individual. We have seen that this assertion has in the Occident been
inextricably bound up with certain Christian beliefs that have been
weakened by the naturalistic movement. We are brought back here to the
problem with which we have been confronted so often in the course of
the present argument, how, namely, to get modern equivalents for the
traditional beliefs, above all some fresh basis for the affirmation
of a _frein vital_ or centripetal element in liberty. What the men
of the French Revolution wanted, according to Joubert, was not
religious liberty, but irreligious liberty. In that case, the French
modernist retorts bitterly, you would have us give up revolutionary
liberty and become Jesuits. Similarly, if one points out to an
American modernist the inanity of his idealism as a substitute for the
traditional controls, he will at once accuse you of wishing to revert
to Puritanism. Strictly speaking, however, one does not need to revert
to anything. It is a part of my own method to put Confucius behind
Aristotle and Buddha behind Christ. The best, however, that even these
great teachers can do for us is to help us to discover what is already
present in ourselves.[120] From this point of view they are well-nigh
indispensable.
Let us begin, therefore, by ridding our minds of unreal alternatives.
If we in America are not content with a stodgy commercialism, it does
not follow that we need, on the one hand, to return to Puritanism, or,
on the other, to become “liberals” in the style of “The New Republic”;
nor, again, need we evolve under the guidance of Mr. H. L. Mencken
into second-rate Nietzscheans. We do need, however, if we are to gain
any hold on the present situation, to develop a little moral gravity
and intellectual seriousness. We shall then see that the strength of
the traditional doctrines, as compared with the modernist position,
is the comparative honesty with which they face the fact of evil. We
shall see that we need to restore to human nature in some critical and
experimental fashion the “old Adam” that the idealists have been so
busy eliminating. A restoration of this kind ought not to lead merely
to a lapse from naturalistic optimism into naturalistic pessimism;
nothing is easier than such a lapse and nothing at bottom is more
futile. Both attitudes are about equally fatalistic and so undermine
moral responsibility. A survey of the facts would suggest that man
is morally responsible, but that he is always trying to dodge this
responsibility; that what he suffers from, in short, is not fate in
any sense of the word, but spiritual supineness. There may be truth in
the saying that the devil’s other name is inertia. Nothing is more
curious than to trace historically the way in which some great teaching
like that of Christ or Buddha has been gradually twisted until man has
adjusted it more or less completely to his ancient indolence. Several
centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way
of Hardships; shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy
Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the
Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy
way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow,
indeed, very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended
gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it
had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill. It was
announced in the press not long ago that as a final improvement some
of the prayer mills in Thibet are to be operated by electricity. The
man who hopes to save society by turning the crank of a legislative
mill or who sets up as a “socio-religious engineer” may call himself a
Christian, but he is probably as remote from the true spirit of Jesus
as some Eastern votary of the Easy Way is from the true spirit of
Buddha.
The essence of man’s spiritual indolence, as I have already pointed
out, is that he does not wish to look up to standards and discipline
himself with reference to them. He wishes rather to expand freely along
the lines of his dominant desire. He grasps eagerly at everything that
seems to favor this desire and so tends, as the saying is, to keep him
in good conceit with himself. Disraeli discovered, we are told, that
the best way to get on with Queen Victoria was to flatter her and
not to be afraid of overdoing the flattery, but “to lay it on with a
trowel.” Demos, as was pointed out long ago, craves flattery like any
other monarch, and in his theory of popular sovereignty Rousseau has,
it must be admitted, laid this flattery on with a trowel. In general,
his notion that evil is not in man himself, but in his institutions,
has enjoyed immense popularity, not because it is true, but because it
is flattering.
Observations of the kind I have been making are likely to lay one open
to the charge of cynicism. One needs, however, to cultivate a wholesome
cynicism as the only way of avoiding the unwholesome kind--that of the
disillusioned sentimentalist. When I speak of a wholesome cynicism, I
mean that of Aristotle who says that “most men do evil when they have
an opportunity,” or that of Bossuet, expressing the moderate Christian
view, when he speaks of “the prodigious malignity of the human heart
always inclined to do evil.” There is no harm in cynicism provided
the cynic does not think of himself as viewing human nature from the
outside and from some superior pinnacle. In the sense I have just
defined, cynicism, indeed, has many points in common with religious
humility.
Let us pursue then our realistic analysis without fear of the charge
of cynicism. Man would not succumb so easily to flattery if he did not
begin by flattering himself; his self-flattery is closely related in
turn to his moral indolence. I have said that the whole of life may
be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. But man does not
want conversion, the adjustment in other words of his natural will
to some higher will, because of the moral effort it implies. In this
sense he is the everlasting trifler. But, though he wishes diversion,
he is loath at the same time to admit that he is missing the fruits of
conversion. He wills the ends, because they are plainly desirable, but
he does not will the means because they are difficult and disciplinary.
In short, he harbors incompatible desires and so listens eagerly to
those who encourage him to think that it is possible to have the good
thing without paying the appointed price.
Two main modes in which men are thus flattered may be distinguished.
First, in an age of authority and accepted standards, they are induced
to substitute for the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious
art of going through the motions. An extreme example is that of
the fashionable lady described by Boileau who (with the aid of her
spiritual director) had convinced herself that she could enjoy all
the pleasures of hell on the way to paradise. What concerns us now,
however, is not the mode of flattery that is based on exaggerated
respect for outer authority, but the other main mode that flourishes
in an age of individualism. The cushions that, according to Bossuet,
the Jesuits put under the sinner’s elbows are as nothing compared to
the cushions that the sinner puts under his own elbows when left to
himself. In a period like the present every man is his own Jesuit.[121]
Rousseau’s sycophancy of human nature proved to be particularly suited
to the requirements of the individualistic era. By his sophistry of
feeling he satisfied in a new and fetching fashion man’s permanent
desire, especially in the realm of moral values, to have his cake and
eat it too. The self-flattery that encourages the huddling together
of incompatible desires has never been pushed further than in this
movement. When one considers, for instance, the multitude of those
who have hoped to combine peace and brotherhood with a return to
nature, one is forced to conclude that an outstanding human trait is a
prodigious and pathetic gullibility.
The chief corrective of gullibility is, in an age of individualistic
emancipation, a full and free play of the critical spirit. The more
critical one becomes at such a time, the more likely one is to achieve
standards and avoid empty conceits. Now to criticize is literally to
discriminate. The student of both the natural and the human law needs
to be very discriminating; one should note, however, an important
difference between them. The discrimination of the man of science is
exercised primarily upon physical phenomena, that of the humanist
primarily upon words. “The beginning of genuine culture,” Socrates
is reported to have said, “is the scrutiny of general terms.”[122]
Socrates himself was so accomplished in this type of scrutiny that he
still deserves to be the master of those who are aiming at criticism. I
have said that the hope of civilization lies not in the divine average,
but in the saving remnant. It is plain that in an age like the present,
which is critical in every sense of the word, the remnant must be
highly Socratic.
Discrimination of the humanistic type is especially needed in the
field of political theory and practice. Confucius, when asked what
would be his first concern if the reins of government were put into
his hands, replied that his first concern would be to define his terms
and make words correspond with things. If our modern revolutionaries
have suffered disillusions of almost unparalleled severity, it is too
often because they have given their imagination to words, without
making sure that these words corresponded with things; and so they
have felt that they were bound for the promised land when they were in
reality only swimming in a sea of conceit. “The fruit of dreamy hoping
is, waking, blank despair.” The disenchantment of Hazlitt with the
French Revolution is typical of that of innumerable other “idealists.”
“The French Revolution,” he says, “was the only match that ever took
place between philosophy and experience; and, waking from the trance
of theory to the sense of reality, we hear the words _truth, reason,
virtue, liberty_ with the same indifference or contempt that the cynic,
who has married a jilt or a termagant, listens to the rhapsodies of
lovers.”
The reason that the Rousseauist often alleges for his attacks on the
analytical intellect, the necessary instrument of a Socratic dialectic,
is that it destroys unity. His disparagement of analysis may be
due, however, even less to his love of unity than to his dislike of
effort. It may be that, like Rousseau himself, he is seeking to give
to indolence the dignity of a philosophical occupation.[123] If it
is a strenuous thing to concentrate imaginatively on the facts of
the natural order, the concentration on the facts of the human order
that enables one to use one’s terms correctly is even more strenuous.
What a monstrous inequality, said Lincoln, to pay an honest laborer
seventy cents a day for digging coal and a President seventy dollars
a day for digging abstractions! The argument that Lincoln thus puts
forth ironically, a follower of Karl Marx would be capable of employing
seriously. But if the President does honest work, if he digs his
abstractions properly, instead of substituting some art of going
through the motions, he must display the utmost contention of spirit.
There have been moments in recent years when a President of this kind
would have been worth to the country many times seventy dollars a
day. Did the idealistic abstractions, one must make bold to ask, that
Mr. Woodrow Wilson poured forth so profusely when President, satisfy
the Socratic and Confucian test--did they correspond with things? The
late Mr. Walter H. Page concluded, after unusual opportunities of
observation, that Mr. Wilson was “_not_ a leader, but rather a stubborn
phrase-maker.” Fine words, according to the homely adage, butter no
parsnips. They may, however, it would seem, put a man in the White
House. Mr. Wilson, it should be remembered, was not only an ex-college
president himself, but in his main policies he had the eager support of
practically the whole corporation of college presidents. If Mr. Page’s
estimate of Mr. Wilson should prove to be correct, it would follow that
our American remnant--and college presidents should surely belong to
the remnant--is not sufficiently critical. The question is one of some
gravity, if it be true, as I said at the outset, that democracy will
in the long run have to be judged, like any other form of government,
by the quality of its leadership, and if it be true, furthermore, that
under existing conditions we must get our standards and our leadership
along Socratic rather than traditional lines. “What the Americans most
urgently require,” said Matthew Arnold, “is a steady exhibition of cool
and sane criticism.” That is precisely what they require and what they
have never had.
If we had a Socratic remnant one of its chief concerns would be to
give a civilized content to the catch-words that finally govern the
popular imagination. The sophist and the demagogue flourish in an
atmosphere of vague and inaccurate definition. With the aid of the
Socratic critic, on the other hand, Demos might have some chance of
distinguishing between its friends and its flatterers--something that
Demos has hitherto been singularly unable to do. Let one consider those
who have posed with some success as the people’s friends from Cleon of
Athens to Marat; and from Marat to William Randolph Hearst. It would
sometimes seem, indeed, that the people might do very well were it not
for its “friends.” The demagogue has been justified only too often in
his assumption that men may be led, not by their noses, but by their
ears as tenderly as asses are. The records of the past reveal that
the multitude has frequently been persuaded by a mirage of words that
the ship of state was steering a straight course for Eldorado, when
it was in reality drifting on a lee-shore; and the multitude has not
been apprized of the peril until it was within the very sound of the
breakers.
It is only too evident that we are not coping adequately with this
special problem of democracy; that we are, on the contrary, in danger
of combining the strength of giants with the critical intelligence of
children. Millions of Americans were ready not so very long ago to
hail William Jennings Bryan as a “peerless leader.” Other millions
are ready apparently to bestow a similar salute on Henry Ford--in
spite of the almost incredible exhibition he made of himself with his
“Peace Ship.” If our Socratic critics were sufficiently numerous, the
followers of such leaders would finally become conscious of something
in the air that was keen, crisp, and dangerous; they might finally be
forced to ask themselves whether the ideals with which they were being
beguiled really mean anything, or at all events anything more than
the masking in fine phrases of the desire to get one’s hand into the
other citizen’s pocket. The devil, as is well known, is a comparatively
harmless person unless he is allowed to disguise himself as an angel
of light. An unvarnished materialism is in short less to be feared
than sham spirituality. Sham spirituality is especially promoted by
the blurring of distinctions, which is itself promoted by a tampering
with general terms. A dialectical scrutiny of such terms is therefore
indispensable if one is to determine whether what a man takes to be his
idealism is merely some windy inflation of the spirit, or whether it
has support in the facts of human experience.
I have already made some application of the Socratic method to
idealism, a term that has come to be almost synonymous with
humanitarianism. I have pointed out, for instance, how the utilitarian
has corrupted the word comfort and the sentimentalist the word virtue.
The idealist may, indeed, retort that I have myself admitted that
certain elements essential to salvation are omitted in the Socratic
scheme of things, and that for these elements we need to turn from
Socrates to Christ; and he will proceed to identify the gospel of
Christ with his own gospel of sympathy and service. Humanitarian
idealism unquestionably owes much of its prestige, perhaps its
main prestige, to the fact that it has thus associated itself with
Christianity. I have sought to show, however, on strictly psychological
grounds, that humanitarian service does not involve, in either its
utilitarian or its sentimental form, the truths of the inner life
and that it cannot therefore be properly derived from Christ. The
transformation, indeed, of this great master of the inner life into a
master of “uplift” must seem to austere Christians, if there are any
left, a sort of second crucifixion. In substituting the love of man
for the love of God the humanitarian is working in a vicious circle,
for unless man has in him the equivalent of the love of God he is not
lovely. Furthermore, it is important that man should not only love but
fear the right things. The question was recently raised at Paris why
medical men were tending to usurp the influence that formerly belonged
to the clergy. The obvious reply is that men once lived in the fear of
God, whereas now they live in the fear of microbes. It is difficult to
see how one can get on humanitarian lines the equivalent of the truth
that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.
Perhaps there is no better way of dealing with the humanitarian
movement than to take one’s point of departure in certain sayings of
Jesus and at the same time so to protect them by a Socratic dialectic
as to bring out their true meaning. For the present desideratum, it may
be, is not to renounce Socrates[124] in favor of Christ, but rather to
bring Socrates to the support of Christ.
Three sayings of Jesus would seem especially relevant, if we wish to
bring out the contrast between his inspired and imaginative good sense
and humanitarianism: (1) “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s
and unto God the things that are God’s.” (2) “By their fruits ye shall
know them.” (3) One should build one’s house upon the rock.
I have already glanced at a violation of the first of these
maxims--that, namely, which has taken place in connection with the
humanitarian attempt to abolish war even at the expense of justice,
and the closely related attempt to convert the prince of peace into
a prince of pacifism. Americans often fear that the Roman Catholic
Church may use the machinery of democracy to its own ends; and in
parts of the country where Catholic voters are in the majority such
apprehensions--for example, the apprehension regarding the Catholic
domination of the schools--may not be entirely without foundation. It
was not, however, a Catholic but a Protestant who recently felt it
necessary to recall to his fellow believers that the kingdom of heaven
is within us and not at Washington. The Protestant churches seem to
be turning more and more to social service, which means that they have
been substituting for the truths of the inner life various causes and
movements and reforms and crusades. If W. J. Bryan had been born fifty
years earlier he would very likely have been a religious revivalist;
the religion of the revivalist was still in a fashion a religion of the
inner life. Bryan’s protest, however, in connection with his crusade
for free silver, against the crucifixion of the people on a cross of
gold, not only involves an unusually mawkish mixture of the things of
God and the things of Cæsar, but might have led to political action
that, so far from being religious, would have been subversive of common
honesty.
One should face frankly the question whether the crusading spirit
is in any of its manifestations genuinely Christian. The missionary
spirit, the purely spiritual appeal from man to man, is unquestionably
Christian. By the crusading spirit I mean, on the other hand, the
attempt to achieve spiritual ends collectively through the machinery
of the secular order. If one takes a long-range view, the question is
one that should be of special interest to Frenchmen, for France has
been more than any other country the crusading nation. It has been
said that the religious crusading of the Middle Ages in which France
played the leading part showed that Europe was already sloughing off
genuine Christianity. The contrast is striking in any case between
the Christianity of this period and that of the first centuries. The
more or less legendary account of the Theban Legion that was ready
to fight bravely for the Emperor when he kept within the temporal
domain, but allowed itself to be martyred to the last man unresistingly
rather than worship him as a God, reflects accurately enough the
attitude of the early Christian. The ruthless massacre that marked
the first entrance of the crusaders into Jerusalem (15 July, 1099)
is sufficient proof that they did not maintain any such distinction
between the spiritual and the temporal order.[125] It seems hardly
necessary to ask which of the two, the crusader or the member of the
Theban Legion, was nearer in spirit to the Founder. By his confusion of
the things of God with the things of Cæsar the crusader was in danger
of substituting a will to power for the will to peace that is at the
heart of genuine Christianity.[126] The emergence of the will to power
is even more obvious in the humanitarian crusader, as I attempted to
show in my study of the Rousseauistic side of the French Revolution.
The revolutionary formula, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” is in
itself only a portentous patter of words.[127] These words may, no
doubt, be so defined both separately and in their relation to one
another as to have a genuinely religious meaning. Understood in the
fashion of Rousseau, that is, as summing up the supposed results of a
return to “nature,” they encouraged one of the most virulent forms of
imperialism. The French themselves are growing more and more doubtful
about the “idealistic” side of their Revolution (it goes without saying
that the Revolution had other sides). They are growing more realistic
in temper.[128] The great problem for them as for all of us is, that,
on being disillusioned regarding this type of idealism, they should not
become merely Machiavellian realists.
At all events, France can no longer be looked upon as the crusading
nation. It is becoming the dangerous privilege of the United States to
display more of the crusading temper than any other country in both its
domestic and its foreign policies. Yet if one may properly question the
religious crusading of which the French were once so fond (_Gesta Dei
per Francos_), how much more properly may one question the activities
of our “uplifters” (_Gesta humanitatis per Americanos_). We are being
deprived gradually of our liberties on the ground that the sacrifice
is necessary to the good of society. If we attend carefully to the
psychology of the persons who manifest such an eagerness to serve
us, we shall find that they are even more eager to control us. What
one discovers, for example, under the altruistic professions of the
leaders of a typical organization for humanitarian crusading, like the
Anti-Saloon League, is a growing will to power and even an incipient
terrorism. Let one consider again Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who, more than
any other recent American, sought to extend our idealism beyond our
national frontiers. In the pursuit of his scheme for world service, he
was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and
to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power. If we refused to
take his humanitarian crusading seriously we were warned that we should
“break the heart of the world.” If the tough old world had ever had a
heart in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago. The
truth is that this language, at once abstract and sentimental, reveals
a temper at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman. He
was inflexible and uncompromising in the defence of his “ideal,” the
League of Nations, which, as a corrective of the push for power on the
national scale, is under the suspicion of being only a humanitarian
chimera. At the same time he was only too ready to yield to the push
for power of the labor unions (Adamson Act), a form of the instinct
of domination so full of menace to free institutions that, rather
than submit to it, a genuine statesman would have died in his tracks.
One may contrast profitably the way in which Mr. Wilson faced this
issue with the way in which Grover Cleveland, perhaps the last of our
Presidents who was unmistakably in our great tradition, faced the issue
of free silver.
The particular confusion of the things of God and the things of Cæsar
promoted by Mr. Wilson and the other “idealists” needs to have brought
to bear on it the second of the sayings of Jesus that I have cited
(“By their fruits ye shall know them”). The idealists so plainly fail
to meet the test of fruits that they are taking refuge more and more,
especially since the war, in their good intentions. The cynic might,
indeed, complain that they already have hell paved at least twice over
with their good intentions. We can no more grant that good intentions
are enough in dealing with men than we can grant that they suffice a
chemist who is handling high explosives. Under certain conditions,
human nature itself may become one of the highest of high explosives.
Above all, no person in a position of political responsibility can
afford to let any “ideal” come between him and a keen inspection of
the facts. It is only too evident that this true vision was found
before the war in imperialists of the type of Lord Roberts rather
than in liberals of the type of Asquith and Grey. It does not follow
that the realism that one should oppose to the “idealists” need be
of a merely imperialistic type; it may be a complete moral realism.
The moral realist will not allow himself to be whisked off into any
cloud-cuckoo-land in the name of the ideal. He will pay no more
attention to the fine phrases in which an ideal of this kind is
clothed than he would to the whistling of the wind around a corner.
The idealist will, therefore, denounce him as “hard.” His hardness
is in any case quite unlike that of the Machiavellian realist. If
the moral realist seems hard to the idealist, this is because of his
refusal to shift, in the name of sympathy or social justice or on any
other ground, the struggle between good and evil from the individual
to society. If we restore the moral struggle to the individual, we
are brought back at once to the assertion in some form or other of the
truths of the inner life. The question that may properly be raised
at present is not whether this or that cause or movement or reform
is breaking down, but whether humanitarian crusading in general as a
substitute for the inner life is not breaking down. The failure of
humanitarianism might be even more manifest than it is were it not for
the survival--and that even in the humanitarians themselves--of habits
that derive from an entirely different view of life. The ethos of a
community does not disappear in a day, even when the convictions that
sustain it have been undermined. This slow decline of an ethos adds to
the difficulty of judging any particular doctrine by its fruits. These
fruits are often slow to appear. For example, no one has been more
successful in breaking down American educational tradition in favor
of humanitarian conceptions than President Eliot, who is himself an
unusually fine product of the Puritan discipline.[129] He has owed his
great influence largely to the fact that many men are sensitive to a
dignified and impressive personality, whereas very few men are capable
of weighing the ultimate tendencies of ideas. One might have more
confidence in the elective system if it could be counted on to produce
President Eliots.
Though the traditional habits survive the traditional beliefs, they
do not survive them indefinitely. With the progressive weakening, not
merely of the Puritan ethos, but of the Christian ethos of the Occident
in general, it may become harder and harder to justify humanitarianism
experimentally. This movement has from Bacon’s time stood for fruits
and, in all that concerns man’s power and material comfort and utility,
it has as a matter of fact been superlatively fruitful. But it has also
professed to give the fruits of the spirit--for example, peace and
brotherhood--and here its failure is so conspicuous as to lead one to
suspect some basic unsoundness.
At this point the third saying of Jesus that I have quoted comes into
play--the saying as to the importance of building on the rock. The
storm has come and it is not clear that our modern house is thus firmly
established. The impression one has is rather that of an immense and
glittering superstructure on insecure foundations.
The basis on which the whole structure of the new ethics has been
reared is, as we have seen, the assumption that the significant
struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society.
If we wish once more to build securely, we may have to recover in some
form the idea of “the civil war in the cave.” If one admits this “war,”
one may admit at the same time the need of the work of the spirit, if
one is to bring forth the fruits of the spirit. If one denies this
war, one transfers the work to the outer world or substitutes for it
a sympathy that involves neither an inner nor an outer working. A
main problem of ethics, according to Cicero, is to prevent a divorce
between the honorable (_honestum_) and the useful (_utile_). If these
terms are not sophisticated, he says, the honorable and the useful
will be found to be identical. But such a sophistication has taken
place as a result of the emphasis on an outer rather than on an inner
working about which I have already had so much to say in this volume.
The fruitful has thus come to be identified with the useful and finally
(in a narrow and doctrinal sense) with the utilitarian. The whole
problem has assumed a gravity that it did not have in the time of
Cicero because of the way in which we have got ourselves implicated, by
our one-sided pursuit of utility, in an immense mass of interlocking
machinery.
One needs, however, if one is to recover a firm basis for the spiritual
life, to get behind even the word work. The sophistication of this
word would not have been possible had it not been for the previous
sophistication of the word nature. This word should receive the first
attention of any one who is seeking to defend on Socratic lines either
humanistic or religious truth. Apply a sufficiently penetrating
dialectic to the word nature, one is sometimes tempted to think, and
the sophist will be put out of action at the start. The juggling with
this word can be traced from the ancient Greek who said that the
distinction between the honorable and the shameful has no root in
nature, but is merely a matter of convention, to Renan who said that
“nature does not care for chastity.” This juggling has always been
the main source of an unsound individualism. The contrast between the
natural and the artificial that has flourished since the eighteenth
century and underlies the romantic movement is especially inadmissible.
“Art,” as Burke says, “is man’s nature.” I have already referred to
Diderot’s dismissal of the opposition between a law of the spirit and a
law of the members as “artificial,” and have said that the proper reply
to such sophistry is not to take refuge in theology, but to insist
upon this opposition as one of the “immediate data of consciousness”;
that we shall thus get experimentally the basis we require if we are
to do the work of the spirit and bring forth its fruits. A confusion
like that of Diderot is so serious that the defining of the one word
“nature” would justify a dialectical battle along Socratic lines the
like of which has never been seen in the history of the world. When it
was over, the field of conflict would be covered thick with dead and
dying reputations; for there can be no doubt that many of the leaders
of the present time have fallen into the naturalistic error.
On one’s definition of work, which itself depends on one’s definition
of nature, will depend in turn one’s definition of liberty. One is
free to work and not to idle. Only when liberty is properly defined
according not merely to the degree, but to the quality of one’s
working, is it possible to achieve a sound definition of justice (To
every man according to his works). One’s definition of justice again
will be found to involve one’s definition of peace in the secular
order: for men can live at peace with one another only in so far as
they are just. As for religious peace, it is not subject to definition.
In the scriptural phrase, it passeth understanding.
Above all, if one is to achieve a sound philosophy of will, there must
be no blurring of the distinction between the spiritually inert and
the spiritually energetic. The point is one that should be of special
interest to Americans. The European has tended in his typical moments,
and that from the time of the Greeks, to be an intellectual. There are
signs, on the other hand, that if America ever achieves a philosophy of
its own, it will be rather a philosophy of will. We have been called
the “people of action.” Under the circumstances it is a matter of some
moment both for ourselves and for the rest of the world whether we are
to be strenuous in a completely human or in a merely Rooseveltian sense.
One may grant, indeed, that in a world like this the Rooseveltian
imperialist is a safer guide than the Jeffersonian or Wilsonian
“idealist.” But there is no reason why one should accept either horn of
this dilemma. The most effective way of dealing with the Jeffersonian
idealism is to submit to a Socratic dialectic the theory of natural
rights that underlies it. This theory rests on the sophistical contrast
between the natural and the artificial of which I have just spoken,
a contrast that encourages a total or partial suppression of the
true dualism of the spirit and of the special quality of working it
involves. With this weakening of the inner life it becomes possible
to assert a lazy or, what amounts to the same thing, an anarchical
liberty. For true liberty is not liberty to do as one likes, but
liberty to adjust oneself, in some sense of that word, to law. “The
Abbé Coigniard,” says Anatole France, “would not have signed a line
of the declaration of the rights of man because of the excessive and
unjust discrimination it establishes between man and the gorilla.”
The true objection to the declaration of the rights of man is the
exact opposite of the one stated by M. France: it does not establish
a sufficiently wide gap between man and the gorilla. This gap can be
maintained only if one insists that genuine liberty is the reward of
ethical effort; it tends to disappear if one presents liberty as a free
gift of “nature.”
It may, indeed, be urged that the theory of natural rights, though
false, may yet be justified as a “useful fiction,” that it has often
shown itself an effective weapon of attack on the iniquities of the
existing social order. One may doubt, however, the utility of the
fiction, for what it tends to oppose to the existing order is not
a better order but anarchy. No doubt the established order of any
particular time and place that the partisan of “rights” would dismiss
as conventional and artificial is, compared with true and perfect
order, only a shadow; but such as it is, it cannot be lightly abandoned
in favor of some “ideal” that, when critically examined, may turn out
to be only a mirage on the brink of a precipice. The “unwritten laws of
heaven”[130] of which the great humanist Sophocles speaks are felt in
their relation to the written law, not as a right, but as a stricter
obligation.
The tendency of the doctrine of natural rights to weaken the sense
of obligation, and so to undermine genuine liberty, may be studied in
connection with its influence on the common law which has prevailed
among the English-speaking peoples. The spirit of this law at its
best is that of a wholesome moral realism. Under the influence of the
school of rights the equity that is often in conflict with strict law
was more or less identified with a supposed law of “nature.”[131]
This identification encouraged an unsound individualism. The proper
remedy for an unsound individualism is a sound individualism, an
individualism that starts, not from rights, but from duties. The actual
reply to the unrestraint of the individual has been another doctrine
of rights, the rights of society, which are sometimes conceived almost
as metaphysically as the older doctrine of the rights of man. The
representatives of this school of legal thinking tend to identify
equity with the principle of social utility. Judges have already
appeared who have so solicited the strict letter of the law in favor of
what they deemed to be socially expedient as to fall into a veritable
confusion of the legislative and judicial functions. Unfortunately
those who represent society at any particular moment and who are
supposed to overflow with a will to service will be found by the
realistic observer (in so far at least as they are mere humanitarian
crusaders in whom there is no survival of the traditional controls)
to be developing, under cover of their altruism, a will to power. On
the pretext of social utility they are ready to deprive the individual
of every last scrap and vestige of his freedom and finally to subject
him to despotic outer control. No one, as Americans of the present day
are only too well aware, is more reckless in his attacks on personal
liberty than the apostle of “service.” He is prone in his furtherance
of his schemes of “uplift” not only to ascribe unlimited sovereignty to
society as against the individual, but to look on himself as endowed
with a major portion of it, to develop a temper, in short, that is
plainly tyrannical.
We seem, indeed, to be witnessing in a different form the emergency
faced by the early Christians. The time may come again, if indeed
it has not come already, when men will be justified in asserting
true freedom, even, it may be, at the cost of their lives, against
the monstrous encroachments of the materialistic state.[132] The
collectivistic ideal suffers, often in an exaggerated form, from the
underlying error of _laisser faire_ against which it is so largely
a protest. It does not reveal an adequate sense of the nature of
obligation and of the special type of effort it imposes. As a result
of its shallowness in dealing with the idea of work, it is in danger
of substituting for real justice the phantasmagoria of social justice.
Some of the inequalities that the collectivist attacks are no doubt the
result of the unethical competition promoted by _laisser faire_. But
the remedy for these inequalities is surely not the pursuit of such
chimeras as social or economic equality, at the risk of sacrificing the
one form of equality that is valuable--equality before the law.
Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty;
for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards,
the right subordination, in other words, of man’s ordinary will to a
higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality
and humility. Historically humility has been secured more or less at
the expense of the intellect. I have myself been trying to show that
it is possible to defend humility, and in general the truths of the
inner life, by a critical method and in this sense to put Socrates
in the service of Christ. The question of method is, in any case,
all-important if one is to heal the feud between the head and the heart
that has subsisted in the Occident in various forms from Græco-Roman
times. Intellect, though finally subordinate to will, is indispensable
in direct ratio to the completeness of one’s break with traditional
standards. It is then needed to test from the point of view of reality
the unity achieved by the imagination and so to supply new standards
with reference to which the higher will may exercise its power of veto
on the impulses and expansive desires. When will and intellect and
imagination have been brought into right relation with one another,
one arrives at last at the problem of the emotions, to which the
Rousseauist, in his misplaced thirst of immediacy, gives the first
place. To have standards means practically to select and reject; and
this again means that one must discipline one’s feelings or affections,
to use the older word, to some ethical centre. If the discipline is to
be effective, so that a man will like and dislike the right things, it
is as a rule necessary that it should become a matter of habit, and
that almost from infancy. One cannot wait until the child has reached
the so-called age of reason, until, in short, he is in a position to
do his own selecting, for in the mean while he may have become the
victim of bad habits. This is the true prison house that is in danger
of closing on the growing boy. Habit must, therefore, as Aristotle
says, precede reason. Certain other ideas closely connected with the
idea of habit, need to receive attention at this point. The ethos of a
community is derived in fact, as it is etymologically, from habit. If a
community is to transmit certain habits to its young, it must normally
come to some kind of agreement as to what habits are desirable; it
must in the literal meaning of that word achieve a convention. Here
is a chief difference between the true and the false liberal. It has
been said of our modernists that they have only one convention and
that is that there shall be no more conventions. An individualism that
is thus purely temperamental is incompatible with the survival of
civilization. What is civilized in most people is precisely that part
of them which is conventional. It is, to be sure, difficult to have a
convention without falling into mere conventionalism, two things that
the modernist confounds; but then everything that is worth while is
difficult.
The combining of convention with a due respect for the liberty of the
individual involves, it must be admitted, adjustments of the utmost
delicacy. Two extremes are about equally undesirable: first, the
convention may be so rigid and minute as to leave little scope for the
initiative of the individual. This formalistic extreme was reached, if
Occidental opinion be correct, in the China of the past, and also in
the older French convention that Rousseau attacked. At the opposite
pole is the person who is spontaneous after the fashion encouraged by
Rousseau and who, in getting rid of conventions, has also got rid of
standards and abandoned himself to the mere flux of his impressions.
The problem of standards would be simple if all we had to do was to
oppose to this anarchical “liberty” a sound set of general principles.
But so far as actual conduct is concerned, life resolves itself into a
series of particular emergencies, and it is not always easy to bridge
the gap between these emergencies or concrete cases and the general
principle. It has been held in the Occident, at least from the time of
Aristotle, and in the Orient, at least from the time of Confucius, that
one should be guided in one’s application of the general principle by
the law of measure. The person who thus mediates successfully seems,
in the phrase of Pascal, to combine in himself opposite virtues and to
occupy all the space between them. As a general principle, for example,
courage is excellent, but unless it be tempered in the concrete
instance by prudence, it will degenerate into rashness. According to
Bossuet, “Good maxims pushed to an extreme are utterly ruinous.” (_Les
bonnes maximes outrées perdent tout._) But who is to decide what is the
moderate and what the extreme application of a good maxim? The casuist
or legalist would not only lay down the general principle, but try to
deal exhaustively with all the cases that may arise in the application
of it, in such wise as to deprive the individual, so far as possible,
of his autonomy. The cases are, however, inexhaustible, inasmuch as
life is, in Bergson’s phrase, a perpetual gushing forth of novelties.
A Jesuitical casebook or the equivalent is after all a clumsy
substitute for the living intuition of the individual in determining
the right balance to strike between the abiding principle and the novel
emergency. While insisting, therefore, on the need of a convention, one
should strive to hold this convention flexibly, imaginatively, and, as
it were, progressively. Without a convention of some kind it is hard
to see how the experience of the past can be brought to bear on the
present. The unconventional person is assuming that either he or his
age is so unique that all this past experience has become obsolete.
This very illusion has, to be sure, been fostered in many by the rapid
advance of the physical sciences.
So much experience has accumulated in both the East and the West that
it should seem possible for those who are seeking to maintain standards
and to fight an anarchical impressionism, to come together, not only
as to their general principles, but as to the main cases that arise in
the application of them. This convention, if it is to be effective,
must, as I have already suggested, be transmitted in the form of habits
to the young. This is only another way of saying that the civilization
of a community and ultimately the government of which it is capable
is closely related to the type of education on which it has agreed.
(One should include in education the discipline that children receive
in the family). “The best laws,” says Aristotle, “will be of no avail
unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of
the constitution.”[133] Aristotle complains that this great principle
was being violated in his time. Is it being observed in ours? It
will be interesting in any case to make a specific application of
the Aristotelian dictum to our American education in its relation
to American government. Assuming that what we wish to preserve is a
federal and constitutional democracy, are we training up a class of
leaders whose ethos is in intimate accord with this type of government?
The older type of American college reflected faithfully enough the
convention of its time. The classical element in its curriculum was
appropriately subordinated to the religious element, inasmuch as
the leadership at which it aimed was to be lodged primarily in the
clergy. It would have been possible to interpret more vitally our
older educational convention, to give it the broadening it certainly
needed and to adapt it to changed conditions. The new education (I am
speaking, of course, of the main trend) can scarcely be said to have
developed in this fashion from the old. It suggests rather a radical
break with our traditional ethos. The old education was, in intention
at least, a training for wisdom and character. The new education
has been summed up by President Eliot in the phrase: training for
service and power. We are all coming together more and more in this
idea of service. But, though service is supplying us in a way with
a convention, it is not, in either the humanistic or the religious
sense, supplying us with standards. In the current sense of the word
it tends rather to undermine standards, if it be true, as I have tried
to show, that it involves an assumption hard to justify on strictly
psychological grounds--the assumption that men can come together
expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The older
education was based on the belief that men need to be disciplined to
some ethical centre. The sentimental humanitarian opposes to a definite
curriculum which aims at some such humanistic or religious discipline
the right of the individual to develop freely his bent or temperamental
proclivity. The standard or common measure is compromised by the
assertion of this supposed right, and in about the same measure the
effort and spirit of emulation that the standard stimulates disappears.
The very word curriculum implies a running together. Under the new
educational dispensation, students, instead of running together,
tend to lounge separately. Interest is transferred from the classroom
to the athletic field, where there is a standard of a kind and, with
reference to this standard, something that human nature craves--real
victory or real defeat. The sentimentalist also plays into the hands
of the utilitarian, who likewise sets up a standard with reference to
which one may strive and achieve success or failure. Anything that thus
has a definite aim tends to prevail over anything that, like a college
of liberal arts under the elective system, is comparatively aimless.
One cannot admit the argument sometimes heard that, because the older
education had a definite end, it was therefore vocational in the same
sense as the schools of business administration, for example, that have
been developing so portentously of late in our educational centres.
The older education aimed to produce leaders and, as it perceived, the
basis of leadership is not commercial or industrial efficiency, but
wisdom. Those who have been substituting the cult of efficiency for the
older liberal training are, of course, profuse in their professions of
service either to country or to mankind at large. The question I have
been raising throughout this volume, however, is whether anything so
purely expansive as service, in the humanitarian sense, can supply an
adequate counterpoise to the pursuit of unethical power, whether the
proper counterpoise is not to be sought rather in the cultivation of
the principle of vital control, first of all in the individual and
finally in the State.
I have said that one’s attitude towards the principle of control will
determine one’s definition of liberty, and that the Jeffersonians
inclining, as they did, to the new myth of man’s natural goodness,
looked askance, not merely at the traditional restraints, but at
everything that interfered with a purely expansive freedom. Jefferson
himself saw to some extent the implications of his general position
for education in particular. He is, for example, one of the authentic
precursors of the elective system.[134] The education that the
Jeffersonian liberty has tended to supplant set up a standard that
limited the supposed right of the individual to self-expression as well
as the inbreeding of special aptitudes in the interests of efficiency;
it was not, in short, either sentimental or utilitarian. There is a
real relation between the older educational standard that thus acted
restrictively on the mere temperament of the individual and the older
political standard embodied in institutions like the Constitution,
Senate, and Supreme Court, that serve as a check on the ordinary or
impulsive will of the people. It follows from all I have said that the
new education does not meet the Aristotelian requirement: it is not in
intimate correspondence with our form of government. If the veto power
disappears from our education there is no reason to anticipate that it
will long survive in the State. The spirit of the leaders will not be
that which should preside over a constitutional democracy.
The best of our elder statesmen, though they opposed a standard to
the mere flux of popular impulse and made sure that the standard
was appropriately embodied in institutions, did not associate their
standard with any theory of the absolute. Herein they showed their
sagacity. One cannot separate too carefully the cause of standards
from that of the absolute. Standards are a matter of observation
and common sense, the absolute is only a metaphysical conceit. In
political thinking this conceit has led to various theories of
unlimited sovereignty. Judged by their fruits all these theories are,
according to John Adams, “equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in
every respect diabolical.” They can be shown, at all events, to be
hard to reconcile with a proper respect for personal liberty.[135]
It is a fortunate circumstance that the very word sovereignty does
not occur in our Constitution. The men who made this Constitution
were for granting a certain limited power here and another limited
power somewhere else, and absolute power nowhere. The best scheme of
government they conceived to be a system of checks and balances. They
did not, however, look on the partial powers they bestowed as being on
the same level. They were aware that true liberty requires a hierarchy
and a subordination, that there must be something central in a state to
which final appeal may be made in case of conflict. The complaint has,
indeed, been made that they left certain ambiguities in the articles of
union that had finally to be clarified on the battle-field. If they had
been more explicit, however, it is not probable that they would have
been able to establish a union at all. They were confronted with the
difficult task of gaining recognition for the centripetal element in
government in the face of the most centrifugal doctrine the world has
ever known--the doctrine that encourages men to put their rights before
their duties.
John Marshall deserves special praise for the clearness with which he
saw that the final centre of control in the type of government that
was being founded, if control was to have an ethical basis and not be
another name for force, must be vested in the judiciary, particularly
in the Supreme Court. This court, especially in its most important
function, that of interpreting the Constitution, must, he perceived,
embody more than any other institution the higher or permanent self of
the State. With a sound and independent judiciary, above all with a
sound and independent supreme bench, liberty and democracy may after
all be able to coexist. Many people are aware that personal liberty
and the security of private property, which is almost inseparable
from it, are closely bound up with the fortunes of the Supreme Court.
Their ideas are, however, often vague as to the nature of the menace
that overhangs our highest tribunal. We are familiar with the rant of
Gompers and his kind against the courts; we also know what to expect
from the radical press. We are not surprised, for example, when a
socialistic periodical, published at Girard, Kansas, devotes a special
issue of five million copies to an assault on the federal judiciary.
A menace that is perhaps more serious than this open hostility may
be defined as a sort of “boring from within.” This phrase seems to
fit the professors in our law schools who are departing from the
traditional standards of the law in favor of “social justice.” Social
justice, it is well to remind these “forward-looking” professors, means
in practice class justice, class justice means class war and class war,
if we are to go by all the experience of the past and present, means
hell.
The inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to undermine the
moral responsibility of the individual and at the same time to obscure
the need of standards and leadership may be made clearer if we consider
for a moment the problem of government with the utmost degree of
realism. Thus considered, government is power. Whether the power is to
be ethical or unethical, whether in other words it is subordinated to
true justice, must depend finally on the quality of will displayed by
the men who administer it. For what counts practically is not justice
in the abstract, but the just man. The just man is he whose various
capacities (including the intellect) are acting in right relation to
one another under the hegemony of the higher will. We are brought
back here to the problem of the remnant. Those who strive for the
inner proportion that is reflected in the outer world as justice have
always been few. The remark of Aristotle that “most men would rather
live in a disorderly than in a sober manner” remains true, at least
in the subtler psychic sense. Though one agree with Aristotle as to
the ethical unsoundness of the majority, it does not follow that
the ethical State is impossible. Human nature, and this is its most
encouraging trait, is sensitive to a right example. It is hard, indeed,
to set bounds to the persuasiveness of a right example, provided only
it be right enough. The ethical State is possible in which an important
minority is ethically energetic and is thus becoming at once just and
exemplary. Such a minority will also tend to solve the problem of
union. The soul of the unjust man is, according to Aristotle, torn by
every manner of faction.[136] The just man, on the contrary, is he who,
as the result of his moral choices based on due deliberation, choices
in which he is moved primarily by a regard for his own happiness,
has quelled the unruly impulses of his lower nature and so attained
to some degree of unity with himself. At the same time he will find
that he is moving towards a common centre with others who have been
carrying through a similar task of self-conquest. A State that is
controlled by men who have become just as the result of minding their
own business in the Platonic sense will be a just State that will
also mind its own business; it will be of service to other States,
not by meddling in their affairs on either commercial or “idealistic”
grounds, but by setting them a good example. A State of this kind may
hope to find a basis of understanding with any other State that is also
ethically controlled. The hope of coöperation with a State that has an
unethical leadership is chimerical. The value of political thinking is
therefore in direct ratio to its adequacy in dealing with the problem
of leadership. The unit to which all things must finally be referred
is not the State or humanity or any other abstraction, but the man of
character. Compared with this ultimate human reality, every other
reality is only a shadow in the mist.[137]
It follows from what I have said that ethical union, whether in the
single man or among different men or on the national or international
scale, is attainable so far as it is attainable at all, not by
expansive emotion nor by any form of machinery or organization (in
the current sense of the word), but only by the pathway of the inner
life. Some persons will remain spiritually anarchical in spite of
educational opportunity, others will acquire at least the rudiments of
ethical discipline, whereas still others, a small minority, if we are
to judge by past experience, will show themselves capable of the more
difficult stages of self-conquest that will fit them for leadership.
Our traditional education with all its defects did something to produce
leaders of this ethical type, whereas the utilitarian-sentimental
education which has been tending to supplant it is, as I have been
trying to show, lacking in the essentials of the inner life and so is
not likely to produce either religious or humanistic leaders. Most
Americans of the present day will, indeed, feel that they have refuted
sufficiently all that I have said, if they simply utter the word
“service.” One may suspect, however, that the popularity of the gospel
of service is due to the fact that it is flattering to unregenerate
human nature. It is pleasant to think that one may dispense with awe
and reverence and the inner obeisance of the spirit to standards,
provided one be eager to do something for humanity. “The highest
worship of God,” as Benjamin Franklin assures us blandly, “is service
to man.” If it can be shown experimentally--and a certain amount of
evidence on this point has accumulated since the time of Franklin--that
service in this sense is not enough to chain up the naked lusts of the
human heart, one must conclude that the supreme exemplar of American
shrewdness and practicality did not, in the utterance I have just
cited, show himself sufficiently shrewd and practical. The gospel of
service is at all events going to receive a thorough trial, if nowhere
else, then in America. We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian
crusaders. The present reign of legalism is the most palpable outcome
of this crusading. It is growing only too evident, however, that the
drift towards license is being accelerated rather than arrested by the
multiplication of laws. If we do not develop a sounder type of vision
than that of our “uplifters” and “forward-lookers,” the history of
free institutions in this country is likely to be short, and, on the
whole, discreditable. Surely the first step is to perceive that the
alternative to a constitutional liberty is not a legalistic millennium,
but a triumph of anarchy followed by a triumph of force. The time
may come, with the growth of a false liberalism, when a predominant
element in our population, having grown more and more impatient of
the ballot box and representative government, of constitutional
limitations and judicial control, will display a growing eagerness for
“direct action.” This is the propitious moment for the imperialistic
leader. Though the triumph of any type of imperialistic leader is
a disaster, especially in a country like our own that has known the
blessings of liberty under the law, nevertheless there is a choice
even here. Circumstances may arise when we may esteem ourselves
fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may
be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin. Such
an emergency is not to be anticipated, however, unless we drift even
further than we have thus far from the principles that underlie our
unionist tradition. The maintenance of this tradition is indissolubly
bound up with the maintenance of standards. The democratic contention
that everybody should have a chance is excellent provided it mean that
everybody is to have a chance to measure up to high standards. If the
democratic extension of opportunity is, on the other hand, made a
pretext for lowering standards, democracy is, in so far, incompatible
with civilization. One might be more confident of the outcome of the
struggle between a true and a false liberalism that has been under way
since the founding of the Republic, if the problem of standards was
being dealt with more adequately in our education, above all in our
higher education. The tendency here, however, is, as I have noted,
to discard standards in favor of “ideals”; and ideals, as currently
understood, recognize very imperfectly, if at all, that man needs to
be disciplined to a law of his own, distinct from the law of physical
nature. One might view this idealistic development with more equanimity
if one were convinced with Professor John Dewey that the growing child
exudes spontaneously a will to service.[138] If we look, however, on
this form of spontaneity as a romantic myth, we shall be forced to
conclude that we have been permitting Professor Dewey and his kind to
have an influence on our education that amounts in the aggregate to
a national calamity; that with the progress of ideals of this kind
our higher education in particular is, from the point of view of a
genuinely liberal training, in danger of becoming a vast whir of
machinery in the void; finally, that, in the interest of our experiment
in free institutions, we need educational leaders who will have less
to say of service and more to say of culture and civilization, and who
will so use these words as to show that they have some inkling of their
true meaning.
This book has been written to no purpose unless I have made plain that
the problem of standards and leadership is by no means merely American.
The American situation can be understood only with reference to the
larger background--the slow yielding in the whole of the Occident
of traditional standards, humanistic and religious, to naturalism.
I have defined in its main aspects the movement that has supervened
upon this emancipation from the past as Baconian, Rousseauistic,
and Machiavellian; in other words, as utilitarian, sentimental, and
imperialistic. The individualist should, however, make a better use of
his liberty; the less traditional he becomes, the more he should strive
to get at standards positively and critically. The result of such
a striving would, I have tried to show, be a movement that might be
best defined as Socratic, Aristotelian, and Christian, that would, in
short, put prime emphasis in its different stages on definition, habit,
and humility. What has actually been witnessed in the Occident, as a
result of the failure to work out critical equivalents of traditional
standards, has been a series of violent oscillations between a
humanitarian idealism and a Machiavellian realism. Humanitarian
idealism is still firmly entrenched in this country, especially in
academic circles, where it seems to be held more confidently, one
is almost tempted to say more smugly, with each succeeding year.
Europeans, on the other hand, have suffered certain essential
disillusions. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to believe
that the idealists have discovered any effective counterpoise to the
push for power. “We are much beholden,” says Bacon, “to Machiavel and
others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do.” The gap
between what men do and what they ought to do is turning out to be even
wider under the humanitarian dispensation than under that of mediæval
Christianity.
Yet the Machiavellian solution is in itself impossible. If the
Occident does not get beyond this type of realism, it will simply
reënact all the pagan stupidities and hasten once more to the pagan
doom. Moreover, the latter stages of the naturalistic dissolution
of civilization with which we are menaced are, thanks to scientific
“progress,” likely to be marked by incidents of almost inconceivable
horror. The danger of power without wisdom, of a constantly increasing
material organization combined with an ever-growing spiritual anarchy,
is already so manifest that unless there is a serious search for a
remedy we may conclude that the instinct for self-preservation that is
supposed to inhere in mankind is a myth. Surely the first step will
be to put in his proper subordinate place the man of science with his
poison gases[139] and high explosives, and that without a particle
of obscurantism. The tendency of physical science to bring the whole
of human nature under a single law can be shown to be at the bottom
of some of the most dangerous fallacies of the present time--for
example, the socialistic dream of “scientific” politics. “Thus the
whole of society,” says Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, “its organization, its
institutions, its activities, is brought within the sway of natural
law, not merely on its descriptive and historical side, but on its
experimental side, and administration and legislation become arts
pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his laboratory.”[140]
The man of science is flattered in the conceit of his own importance
by this inordinate exaltation of the “law for thing.” Yet he should,
in the interest of science itself, reject the whole point of view
as pseudo-scientific; for science needs the support of civilization
and the chief force that is now making against civilization is, next
perhaps to emotional unrestraint, pseudo-science.
Mr. MacDonald and his kind almost invariably look upon themselves
as “idealists.” This should serve to remind us that the terms
idealism and realism as now employed, however much they may clash
superficially, have at least this much in common: they are both rooted
in a naturalistic philosophy. Any one who transcends this philosophy
ceases in about the same measure to be either a humanitarian idealist
or a Machiavellian realist. He becomes aware of a quality of will
that distinguishes man from physical nature and is yet natural in the
sense that it is a matter of immediate perception and not of outer
authority. I have said that the neglect of this quality of will by
both utilitarians and sentimentalists has encouraged a sophistical
definition of liberty; that this type of liberty has owed its appeal
to its flattery of spiritual indolence, perhaps the most fundamental
human trait that is open to direct observation. Any one who has once
perceived this trait in himself and others, and followed it out in even
a few of its almost innumerable ramifications, will be in no danger
of overlooking the old Adam after the fashion of the “idealists.” The
insistence on the putting aside of spiritual indolence and the exercise
of the higher will is found in every genuinely spiritual doctrine,
above all in genuine Christianity. Traditionally the Christian has
associated his liberty and his faith in a higher will with grace.
“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” I myself have been
trying to come at this necessary truth, not in terms of grace, but in
terms of work, and that on the humanistic rather than on the religious
level. I am not so arrogant as to deny the validity of other ways of
affirming the higher will, or to dismiss as obsolete the traditional
forms through which this will has been interpreted to the imagination.
I am attempting a contribution, I cannot remind the reader too often,
to a specific problem--to the distinction, namely, between a sound and
an unsound individualism. My argument should appeal primarily, so far
as it appeals to any one, to those who, as a result of having broken
with the traditional forms on grounds insufficiently critical, are in
danger of losing the truths of the higher will entirely; who are mere
modernists at a time when there is a supreme need of thoroughgoing and
complete moderns.
THE END
APPENDIX A
THEORIES OF THE WILL
I append with some hesitation a few notes on the more technical aspects
of a question the proper treatment of which would require a volume.
The whole problem of the will is inextricably bound up with that of
dualism. The true dualism I take to be the contrast in man between
two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (_élan vital_) and
the other as vital control (_frein vital_). The crucial point would
seem to be the proper place of intellect in its relation to the higher
will. It is hard, on the one hand, to be reasonable without becoming
rationalistic, and, on the other, to have faith without falling into
credulity. The Christian form of the difficulty grew up in connection
with the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law
of the members; if the law of the spirit is to exercise its control
effectually, it needs, according to the Christian, a greater or
lesser degree of divine coöperation. So that if one wishes to get at
a Christian’s views of man’s will the best method is frequently to
ascertain his views of God’s will.
One of the first to proclaim the superiority of the divine will
over the divine mind was Origen. The most important of Christian
voluntarists is, however, Saint Augustine. He asserts the primacy of
will in both man and God and on psychological as well as on theological
grounds. One of the arguments that he employs was influential on later
voluntarists like Duns Scotus.[141] Will, says Augustine, reveals
itself above all in the act of attention or concentration; it therefore
takes precedence of intellect because it selects the field of facts or
order of perceptions to which the intellect attends and of which it
acquires knowledge.[142]
With the influence of Aristotle from the latter part of the twelfth
century on, there was a tendency to revert to Greek intellectualism and
to reverse the Augustinian position in regard to will. Saint Thomas
Aquinas, for example, not only grants a superior dignity to man’s
intellect as compared with his will,[143] but holds that the divine
will is subordinate to the divine wisdom. It is hardly necessary to
add that Saint Thomas is far from being a pure rationalist: man’s
intellect, though superior to his will, is infinitely transcended by
the divine will.
To be sure the working of God’s will as it had been affirmed
traditionally with the support of Revelation had been felt from the
outset, especially in connection with the more extreme forms of the
doctrine of grace, to be a stumbling block to man’s reason. The central
preoccupation of the scholastic philosophy may indeed be said to have
been the reconciliation of faith in this sense with reason.[144] This
great effort culminated in Saint Thomas in whose system reason and
faith seem to coöperate harmoniously. Theological truth, he maintained,
though beyond reason, is not contrary to it.
The outstanding trait of the later scholasticism is the tendency of
reason and faith once more to separate and to appear as irreconcilable.
The “realist,” Duns Scotus, develops the thesis that “will is superior
to intellect”[145] (_Voluntas est superior intellectu_) in both man
and God. The nominalist, William of Occam, affirms in a still more
uncompromising fashion that God’s will is absolute and arbitrary. God
does not will a thing because it is just, but it is just because he
wills it. Theology may not hope to find support in reason. It must be
accepted on the authority of Revelation and the Church.
This last stage of scholasticism is the point of departure for various
movements that seem at first sight to have very little in common--for
example, Lutheranism and Jansenism as well as the philosophies of
Bacon and Descartes. The Jansenist and Lutheran exalt God’s will at
the expense of reason by an extreme interpretation of grace. Descartes
and Bacon, on the other hand, are interested, though in very different
ways, in the use that may be made of reason in the natural order. They
continue to pay more or less sincere homage to religion conceived as
indissolubly bound up with incomprehensible theological mysteries. It
is especially important to ascertain Descartes’s conception of the will
in view of his position as the father of modern philosophy. We need to
discriminate sharply between his conceptions of man’s will and God’s
will. God’s will he holds to be absolute and arbitrary and to this
extent he reminds us of Duns Scotus.[146] His ultimate temper, however,
is not that of the Christian voluntarist, inasmuch as he is interested
above all in working out a mechanical law for phenomenal nature. His
attitude towards God’s will is to be explained in two ways: first by
his extreme caution, not to say timidity; with the fate of Galileo
fresh in mind he was almost morbidly apprehensive of becoming embroiled
with the theologians. He was moved in the second place, according to M.
Gilson,[147] by the desire to get rid of final causes in the interest
of his own mechanistic hypothesis.
According to Descartes himself what he meant by his _Cogito
ergo sum_ was that one should start from the immediate data of
consciousness.[148] Practically he relegates the higher will to God (as
understood by the theologians) and gives the first place among these
data to mind or reason. He proceeds to set up a sharp dualism between
mind and matter conceived as separate substances. As for man’s will, it
is according to Descartes in itself infinite and to that extent reminds
us of the divine will.[149] On closer scrutiny, however, this infinite
liberty of the will turns out to be only a liberty to err. The will
escapes from error only in so far as it is determined by reason.[150]
In his tendency thus to make right will depend upon right reason, as
well as in his practical ethics,[151] Descartes reminds us strongly of
the Stoics.
By “reason,” it is scarcely necessary to add, Descartes means logical
and mathematical reason. The only ideas that should determine the will
and that one can follow without danger of error are clear and distinct
ideas. No tendency is more marked in the Cartesian system than to
conceive as it were mathematically of the truth and reality of both the
human and the natural order. An extreme example of the same tendency
is the geometrical form that Spinoza gives to his “Ethics.” Descartes
would make of God himself a “clear” idea and demonstrate him in almost
geometrical fashion.[152] He thus contradicts the universal experience
of mankind which is that the truths on which the inner life depends are
not clear in the logical or any other sense. These truths are rather a
matter of elusive intuition.
Perhaps the first person to assert intuition against the abstract
reasoning of Descartes was Pascal. A whole order of truths, to employ
Pascal’s own distinction, can be attained, not by _l’esprit de
géométrie_, but only by _l’esprit de finesse_. To the rationalistic
God of Descartes he opposes _Dieu sensible au cœur_. “Heart” means
practically “grace,” and grace Pascal associates with what was rapidly
becoming an impossible theology. What is conspicuous indeed in the
whole transition from the mediæval to the modern period is the failure
to disengage the truths of the higher will from theology and to deal
with them experimentally as “immediate data of consciousness.” On the
contrary, as the result of the endless disputes of Jansenists with
Jesuits, of Catholics with Protestants, and of the various Protestant
sects with one another, these truths became involved in a mass of
almost incredible theological subtleties. The final reply to these
subtleties was Voltaire. Especially significant is his article “Grâce”
in the “Dictionnaire philosophique,” the third section of which
concludes as follows: “Ah! supralapsaires, infralapsaires, gratuits,
suffisants, efficaciens, jansénistes, molinistes, devenez enfin hommes
et ne troublez plus la terre pour des sottises si absurdes et si
abominables.”
With the virtual substitution by Descartes of “reason” for what is
truly transcendent in man, namely the higher will, the genuine dualism
is compromised and the way opened for monistic developments. The
tendency towards a rationalistic pantheism is manifest in Spinoza who
reveals in many respects the Cartesian influence. Spinoza inclines to
get rid of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter by denying to
mind any superiority of substance.[153] Man is in nature not as one
empire in another empire but as a part in a whole. Man must adjust his
will to the divine will, to be sure, but God is declared to be the
same as “nature.” When one has made an identification of this kind,
it will not be possible by any number of subsidiary distinctions--for
example, by setting up a sort of dualism in the cosmic process itself
in the form of a _natura naturans_ and a _natura naturata_--to maintain
a sound doctrine of the will and to avoid pantheistic confusion. The
God or “nature” to which Spinoza would have man conform his will is
closely related to reason of a distinctly Cartesian type; so that to
adjust one’s will to God or nature is equivalent to adjusting it to
reason. Reason and will are indeed for Spinoza identical.[154] Here as
elsewhere Spinoza revives more completely perhaps than any other modern
philosopher of the first rank the Stoical position.
Quite apart from Spinoza the followers of Descartes[155] tended to
suppress the dualism between mind and matter in favor of universal
mechanism. Descartes himself had seen in animals only automata; the
temptation proved irresistible to look on man in the same way.[156] A
parallel tendency was that of the English empiricists and utilitarians
to deny that mind is transcendent, to assert that there is “nothing
in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.” At the
same time they fail to recognize a quality of will in man that
sets him above the natural order and so incline strongly towards a
naturalistic determinism. The denial of the freedom of the will is
especially complete in Hobbes and Hume.[157] Philosophy in its main
trend from Descartes to Hume seemed to exalt analysis at the expense
of synthesis and to be ready to sacrifice spontaneity to mechanism.
Of the world as envisaged by Hume in particular one might say with
Mephistopheles: “Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band!” Among those who
sought to restore unity and freedom to philosophy, the most important
is Immanuel Kant. In the matter of the will, he asserts that in the
“noumenal” realm, the realm of the “thing-in-itself,” man is perfectly
free; as a phenomenon among other phenomena, on the contrary, man
is, he admits, as thoroughly determined as Hume had maintained. The
question arises as to the value of this purely “noumenal” liberty in
the actual emergencies of life. Huxley remarks apropos of this Kantian
conception of the will: “Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient
in the sense of humor; or they would surely abstain from advancing
propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are
disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare shams, naked but not
ashamed.”[158] The professional metaphysician often betrays an even
more serious lack than that of a sense of humor--a lack, namely, of
common sense. This lack appears in Huxley’s own attitude towards the
will when compared, let us say, with that of Dr. Johnson.
Kant’s views regarding the “categorical imperative,” as expounded in
his “Critique of Practical Reason,” seem especially open to objection
from the point of view of common sense. The categorical imperative
is conceived as something a priori, not as based on experience. It
is not a living intuition of a will that is set above the cosmic
process (which includes a man’s natural self) and that acts upon
this cosmic process restrictively and selectively. It is rather a
rigid metaphysical abstraction that operates without reference to the
happiness of the individual[159] or the special circumstances to which
he needs to adjust himself.[160] Moreover, it is, as I have pointed
out (p. 226), a will to act and not a will to refrain from acting. One
may therefore raise the question whether it can be counted on to quell
effectually the expansive “lusts” of the natural man--for example, the
lust of domination. As an expression of cosmic reason, the categorical
imperative reminds one of the reason-will of the Stoics. The reason,
however, that the Stoic took as his guiding principle (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν)
was conceived as one with reality; whereas the conclusions of the
“Critique of Pure Reason,” so far as the relation between reason and
reality is concerned, are largely sceptical. Kant therefore asks us
to make certain important affirmations, not as necessarily true in
themselves, but as postulates of the practical reason. He thus prepares
the way for the _Philosophie des Als Ob_ of Vaihinger. According to
Vaihinger, you do not will a thing because it is true; you merely act
_as if_ it were true on the ground that it is a “useful fiction.”[161]
The “As-if” philosophy, again, is akin to the point of view of the
pragmatist. The pragmatist does not conceive of truth as something that
already exists: he makes his truth as he goes along, in other words he
takes that to be true which seems useful or agreeable to his ordinary
self. He thus tends to eliminate both the high impersonal standard and
the ethical will that, with reference to this standard, opposes bounds
to the expansive desires.
Though the philosophy of Kant supplies the freedom and the synthetic
element that were absent from a philosophy like that of Hume, it
supplies them in an abstract and rationalistic way. It does not
satisfy the craving for immediacy. Those who felt this craving
sought to gratify it by basing ethics on the emotions. Kant’s
“Critique of Practical Reason” suggests that the ultimate reality,
the “thing-in-itself,” is very closely related to will. Schopenhauer
actually pushes on to the identification of reality and will. Only
the will that he sets up is very different from the categorical
imperative.[162] It is a cosmic will conceived as a will to live and
at the same time as the source of evil. Schopenhauer does not oppose to
this cosmic _nisus_ a higher will that may control it and even renounce
it; if he had he might have achieved a true dualism. Instead he affirms
expressly that the will, as he understands it, should include only that
which is common to man and beast.[163] He hopes to get the equivalent
of a true dualism by a recourse to the benevolent theory of ethics,
especially, as we have seen (p. 73), to Rousseau’s doctrine of natural
pity. At the same time Schopenhauer inclines on occasion to see in
actual nature not pity but ruthless struggle, thus anticipating Darwin.
Nietzsche follows Schopenhauer in according the primacy to will but
denies natural pity and affirms that the will that is fundamental in
man is the will to power. He is thus related, on the one hand, to
Hobbes and the Machiavellians, and, on the other, to the evolutionists.
One should note that those who gratify their thirst for immediacy by
basing ethics on instinct or impulse, whether they conceive of the
resulting “will” as a will to brotherhood or a will to power, agree
in denying that the element of inhibition is primary or vital; they
dismiss everything that interferes with the free expansion of “will” as
artificial or conventional. Moreover, the attempt to recover the unity
and spontaneity of instinct usually involves another dualism--that
between a man’s “heart” (in the sense of his impulsive and emotional
self) and his “head” (in the sense of his analytical intellect) which
destroys unity and leads him to see things, as Wordsworth phrases it,
“in disconnection dead and spiritless.”
The difficulties in the way of maintaining the benevolent theory
of ethics have increased in direct measure as the nature “red in
tooth and claw” of the evolutionist has been substituted for the
idyllic nature of Rousseau. These difficulties may be illustrated
from Huxley’s attempt to deal with the problem of the will. In his
“Evolution and Ethics” (Romanes Lecture, 1893) he develops the thesis
that civilization and the cosmic process are sharply at variance with
one another. A man should therefore in the interests of society seek
to rise superior to this process. The lecture ends with an eloquent
exhortation to effort and struggle along these anti-cosmic lines.
At the same time Huxley denies that man has a will that transcends
the cosmic process and moves in an opposite direction from it. He
adopts unreservedly the determinism of Hume.[164] He proclaims that
“man, physical, intellectual and moral, is as much a part of nature,
as purely a part of the cosmic process as the humblest weed.”[165]
In that case, if one is to avoid the Nietzschean conclusion, it
would seem necessary to affirm like Rousseau and the sentimentalists
some principle of benevolence in Nature herself. On the contrary,
Huxley declares in the most uncompromising fashion that Nature is
ruthless.[166] When one confronts with one another passages of the kind
I have been citing it is hard to avoid the conclusion reached by Mr. P.
E. More[167] that Huxley is in his main trend a naturalistic sophist.
Recent philosophers like Bergson and James and Croce cannot be said
to differ essentially in their dealings with the will from the older
partisans of a subrational unity and spontaneity as a mode of escape
from mechanism. Bergson exalts a type of “intuition” that involves a
more or less complete turning away from the analytical intellect on the
ground that it leads to the setting up of a “block universe”; at the
same time he eliminates the will to refrain (_frein vital_) in favor of
_élan vital_. He differs however from many of his romantic forbears,
as I have already remarked (p. 17), by associating _élan vital_ not
with a will to brotherhood but with a will to power. Signor Piccoli
points out that Croce’s view of the will has much in common with that
of Bergson.[168] Croce is not, however, so frankly imperialistic.
James, again, though he felt himself in intimate accord with the ideas
of Bergson, is nearer to the older romantic psychology. Consider,
for example, his essay “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” Men
are not most human, it would seem, in their moments of strenuous
effort with reference to a human law that they possess in common; on
the contrary, they are most themselves in the reveries of their idle
and irresponsible moments:[169] they should at least try to enter
sympathetically into one another’s romantic dreams. In general the
difficulty of discovering any basis for a genuine ethical communion
among men becomes acute if one seeks, like James and Bergson, to prove
freedom and spontaneity by the “gushing forth” of novelty in the cosmic
process.[170] It is hard to see how men can come together in their
differences. Moreover, Nature herself may be active in producing the
vital variations that the intellect can neither foresee nor formulate,
but the man in whom the “creative” evolution is taking place is not
active; from a truly human point of view, he remains both passive and
purposeless. In the popular summing up of this whole philosophical
trend, he does not know where he is going but merely that he is on the
way. He may be sure in any case that, as a result of his failure to put
forth a specifically human quality of will, he is not on the way to
peace or brotherhood.
I have already said something about two contemporary doctrines,
psycho-analysis and behaviorism, that, at least as popularly
interpreted, tend to break down the principle of control in human
nature, and to that extent to disintegrate civilization. It may be
well to add a word about behaviorism. Man is an animal among other
animals, and in so far is subject to laboratory methods. When, however,
one attempts to base a complete explanation of conduct on such
methods,[171] when, on the pretext that one must be “objective,” one
refuses to discriminate qualitatively between the behavior of a man
and that of a frog, the result is naturalism gone mad. The behaviorist
is not only pushing the mechanistic view of life to a point where he
denies certain “immediate data of consciousness” but, in his eagerness
to reduce everything to stimuli and physical reactions, he is in a fair
way to eliminate consciousness itself. If, as Dr. Johnson says, all
experience bears witness to the freedom of the will, one must conclude
that the extreme behaviorist is turning his back on something that is
highly experimental in favor of a theory.
In general, this very inadequate review of theories of the will held
by the professional philosophers seems to confirm the wider survey I
have attempted in the body of this volume. If the older treatment of
the will led to a theological nightmare, the more recent treatment
has only too often resulted in a metaphysical bewilderment. There has
been a failure, on the whole, to assert in a positive and critical
form certain truths of the inner life that were compromised by the
interminable wranglings of the religious sects about God’s will and its
mode of operation.
APPENDIX B
ABSOLUTE SOVEREIGNTY
By their distrust of absolutism combined with their respect for
standards and the discipline in the State that only standards can give,
our liberals of the unionist type are, as I have remarked (p. 246),
close to the English political tradition of which the best exponent is
Burke. Much of the Englishman’s concern for personal liberty, it has
been maintained, is merely an aspect of his humorousness (in the older
sense of the word), of his dislike of conformity and regimentation; and
so is in a way a denial of standards. But this is not the whole truth.
English statesmen at their best have attained to some conception of
the liberty that is at the heart of genuine Christianity and have been
more successful than the statesmen of any other country in making this
conception politically effective.
The lover of personal liberty is inclined to esteem it a fortunate
circumstance that the common law never gave way in England, as it
did in various European countries, to Roman law. I am not competent
to discuss so vast a subject as the influence of Roman law on the
mediæval and modern world, nor does my present subject require it. It
is enough for my purpose to point out that the conception of liberty
found in Roman law, even at its best, is very inferior to the Christian
conception; it reflects unduly Stoic rationalism and, like all Greek
and Roman political philosophy, is ready to sacrifice in a quite
unwarranted measure the individual to the State. At its worst Roman
law does not deserve to be called Roman at all but Byzantine. One
should note the origin assigned in Roman law to the idea of _plenitudo
potestatis_ or unlimited sovereignty, an idea that can be shown to
have had a considerable influence on the absolutists of the late
mediæval and early modern period. By the _lex regia_, we read in the
“Digest,”[172] the Roman people made over its unbounded power to the
emperor. The reasons for this renunciation are worth pondering. At the
instigation of its demagogues, the Roman people had refused to limit
itself and had at the same time tended towards the type of equality
that is won at the expense of quality and the due subordination
to standards that quality always requires. So far as our modern
democracies are pursuing a merely quantitative equality, their fate
would seem to be foreshadowed by this Roman development. The moment
comes, sooner or later, when the concentration of power in the hands of
one man is felt as a relief from the irresponsible tyranny of the mob.
This is at all events the process by which a radical democracy passes
over normally into what I have termed a decadent imperialism.
The genuinely mediæval conception of sovereignty is very different
from the conception I have been associating with the _lex regia_ and
Roman law. For the Christian, sovereignty does not derive from the
people as in Roman law but from God, who is conceived primarily not
as reason but as will. The whole tendency of the doctrine of grace
is to make this will seem absolute and irresponsible, a sort of
supernatural _bon plaisir_. I have already said something about the
historical justification of the doctrine of grace; one may maintain
without exaggeration that it saved Western civilization. By historical
justification I do not mean that the doctrine is to be regarded as a
“useful fiction”; the saving element in it is its truth--its emphasis
on the higher will. At the same time I have hinted at the difficulties
that the doctrine offers to the individualist. The acceptance of the
maxim that man is the measure of all things--and all individualists
must accept the maxim in some form[173]--is fatal to every absolute
whether of will or reason. Absolute and unlimited will in the
religious sense has often run over into a will to power, even when
the rulers who asserted it have professed to do so only as the humble
recipients of the grace of a divine sovereign. The tendency of a belief
in the arbitrary sovereignty of God to result imperialistically may be
illustrated not only from the history of royalty by divine right but
also from that of the papacy.
In my first chapter I attempted to trace the transition through
an intermediary period of rationalism from the mediæval belief in
absolute will to another form of the same belief,--the transition, in
short, from the sovereignty of God to the sovereignty of the people.
The superiority of the person who conceives of the political problem
in terms of will in any sense of the word is that he is taking his
stand for something vital and primary, something compared with which
reason will finally prove to be only secondary and instrumental. It
is interesting to consider from this point of view the rationalistic
absolute of Hegel. According to Hegel the Idea, after various
incomplete historical manifestations, finally found its perfect
incarnation in the Prussian State. The absolute reason that is supposed
to animate this State has shown itself in practice, most persons would
agree, the servant of the will to power.
The rival claims of reason and will may also be studied interestingly
in connection with international law. This whole subject is now under
the suspicion of being chimerical. If this suspicion should prove to
be justified, the explanation is either that international law has
given a primacy to reason that does not belong to it or else has been
unduly superficial in its treatment of will. The representatives of the
so-called positive school of international law have tended to confine
themselves to recording the unfolding wills of various sovereign
states in their relations with one another. If this record is to
deserve the name of law at all, it should surely be distinguishable
from mere force, from the will to power of some state or league of
states at any particular international crisis. At this point one
perceives that the fortunes of international law are closely bound
up with the new doctrine of will that has tended to take the place
of the mediæval dependence on the divine will as well as of the
later reign of rationalism. The question as to the quality of will
that the sovereign people is likely to display is subordinate to the
question as to the truth or falsity of Rousseau’s underlying dogma
of natural goodness. The tendency of this dogma is to discredit both
inner and outer control. With the disappearance of control, popular
will becomes only another name for popular impulse. I have already
concluded that what manifests itself in a people that has reached
this stage of naturalistic expansion is not a will to brotherhood
but a will to power. One must admit the imperialistic elements that
insinuated themselves into the humanistic and religious traditions of
the Occident, especially in connection with theories of absolute and
unlimited sovereignty. Yet these traditions were after all in some
measure genuine and so did something to set bounds to the _libido
dominandi_. For at the heart of genuine religion is a will to peace
and at the heart of genuine humanism is a will to justice; whereas, if
my analysis be correct, radical democracy and imperialism are in their
essence identical.
I have already said something about the other side of the modern
movement in its relation to theories of sovereignty (p. 296 f.).[174]
The utilitarian is tending to conceive of the State in a more and
more absolute fashion. He feels that its power should suffer no
restriction when it is seeking to promote what is socially useful, the
greatest good of the greatest number. The underlying fallacy of the
utilitarian, I have said, is that he conceives of the “greatest good”
and of happiness in general in terms of pleasure or else in terms of a
merely outer working. Society is bound to protect itself against the
unrestraint of the individual, but if it is not to push this necessary
assertion of its authority to an oppressive extreme, it needs to take
cognizance not only of outer working but also of the inner working
that is the final source of a sound individualism. To do so is not
to become abstract but on the contrary to turn from sociological
theorizing to positive psychological observation.
This brief survey of theories of absolute sovereignty would seem to
confirm the passage of John Adams that serves as one of the epigraphs
of this volume. From the _lex regia_ to the utilitarian-sentimental
movement these theories have been associated with a series of
theological and metaphysical conceits that have, in their ultimate
implications, been subversive of personal liberty.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I have included in this bibliography the more important works mentioned
in the body of this volume; also a few others that, for one reason or
another, seem especially relevant to the topics I have discussed.
Acton, Lord:
_Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone._ 1904.
_The History of Freedom and Other Essays._ 1907.
Althusius, J.:
_Politica methodice digesta._ 1603.
Aristotle:
_Nicomachean Ethics._ Tr. by D. P. Chase. 1847. (Reprint in
Everyman’s Library.)
_Politics._ Tr. by B. Jowett. 1905.
Arnim, H. von:
_Die politischen Theorien des Altertums._ 1910.
Atger, F.:
_Essai sur l’histoire des doctrines du contrat social._ 1906.
Augustine, Saint:
_De Civitate Dei._ Ed. E. Hoffman. 2 vols. 1898. Tr. by M. Dods.
1897.
Barker, E.:
_Political Thought in England from Herbert Spencer to the Present
Day._ 1915.
_Greek Political Theory._ 1918.
Beveridge, A. J.:
_The Life of John Marshall._ 4 vols. 1916.
Mr. Beveridge brings out interestingly the irreconcilable
opposition between Marshall and Jefferson. He should, however, at
some point in his work have discriminated sharply between the
unionist and the nationalist of imperialistic leanings. Marshall is
very far from being a precursor of Roosevelt.
Bossuet, J. B.:
_Politique tirée de l’écriture sainte._ 1709.
Bourgeois, E.:
_Manuel historique de politique étrangère._ 3 vols. 4^e éd. 1909.
Burke, E.:
_Works._ 8 vols. (Bohn Library.) 1854-61.
_Reflections on the Revolution in France._ 1790.
_Letter to a Member of the National Assembly._ 1791.
Bury, J. B.:
_The Idea of Progress._ 1921.
Carlyle, R. W., and A. J.:
_A History of Mediæval Political Theory._ 4 vols. 1903-22.
Chateaubriand, F. R. de:
_Essai historique, politique et moral sur les Révolutions._ 1797.
_Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe_ (1848). Ed. E. Biré. 6 vols. 1898-1901.
Confucius:
_The Sayings of Confucius_ (Analects). Tr. by L. Giles. 1907.
_The Conduct of Life._ Tr. by Ku Hung Ming. 1906.
This is the Confucian treatise usually entitled _The Doctrine of
the Mean_. A still more literal rendering of the two Chinese words
that make up the title, if we accept Mr. Ku Hung Ming’s explanation
of them, would be the “universal norm” or “centre.”
Cumberland, R.:
_De Legibus naturæ._ 1672.
Dante Alighieri:
_De Monarchia._ About 1310. Ed. Moore. 1904. Tr. by P. H. Wicksteed
in Temple Classics.
Dedieu, J.:
_Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France._ 1909.
Diels, H.:
_Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker._ 2 vols. (in 3). 2d ed. 1906-10.
Dunning, W. A.:
_A History of Political Theories._ 3 vols. 1902-20.
Ferguson, W. F.:
_Greek Imperialism._ 1913.
Fester, R.:
_Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie._ 1890.
Figgis, J. N.:
_Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius._ 1907. 2d ed.
1916.
An excellent treatment of the all-important period of transition
from a theocratic Europe to a Europe of great territorial
nationalities.
_The Divine Right of Kings._ 1914.
Filmer, R.:
_Patriarcha; or The Natural Power of Kings._ 1680. (Reprinted
together with Locke’s _Treatises of Government_ in Morley’s
Universal Library.)
Frank, T.:
_Roman Imperialism._ 1914.
Fustel de Coulanges, N. D.:
_La Cité antique._ 1864. 16th ed. 1898. Tr. by W. Small. 1874.
It is difficult to exhibit the relation between ethos and political
forms without seeming, and perhaps without being, too systematic.
_La Cité antique_ has been criticized severely from this point of
view. C. Bémont, however, goes too far when he asserts (article on
Fustel in the 11th edition of _Encyclopædia Britannica_) that it
“has been largely superseded”; on the contrary, it is, in certain
important respects, a work of almost definitive excellence.
Gierke, O.:
_Political Theories of the Middle Age._ Tr. and ed. by F. W.
Maitland. 1900.
_Johannes Althusius._ 1880. 3d ed. 1913.
A valuable repertory of information on such topics as natural
rights and the social contract. Gierke probably exaggerates,
however, the influence of Althusius on Rousseau who mentions him
only once (end of 6^e _Lettre écrite de la Montagne_).
Gomperz, T.:
_Griechische Denker._ 2d ed. 3 vols. 1903-09. Tr. by L. Magnus and
G. G. Berry. 1901-12.
Gooch, G. P.:
_Germany and the French Revolution._ 1920.
Grotius, H.:
_De Jure belli et pacis._ 1625. Tr. by Whewell. 3 vols. 1853.
Hearnshaw, F. J. C. (editor):
_The Social and Political Ideas of some Great Mediæval Thinkers._
1923.
In one of the articles of this volume Eileen Power points out
that Pierre Du Bois, a lawyer in the service of Philippe le Bel,
formulated a plan of European peace that anticipated in some
respects the Grand Dessein of Sully. This plan, like that of Sully,
would have resulted practically in the French domination of Europe.
Hobbes, T.:
_Leviathan._ 1651. Ed. W. G. Pogson Smith. 1909.
Hooker, R.:
_Ecclesiastical Polity._ 1592. (Reprint in Everyman’s Library.)
Hume, D.:
_A Treatise of Human Nature._ 1739-40. (Reprint in Everyman’s
Library.)
Janet, P.:
_Histoire de la science politique._ 2 vols. 1858. 4th ed. 1913.
Jefferson, T.:
_Works._ 10 vols. Ed. P. L. Ford. 1892-99.
Laski, H. J.:
_Political Thought from Locke to Bentham._ 1920.
Lecky, W. E. H.:
_Democracy and Liberty._ 2 vols. 1896.
Locke, J.:
_Two Treatises of Government._ 1690. (Reprint in Morley’s Universal
Library.)
Louter, J. de:
_Le Droit international positif._ 1920.
MacDonald, J. R.:
_The Socialist Movement._ 1911.
Machiavelli, N.:
_Del modo tenuto dal duca Valentino nell’ ammazzare Vitellozzo
Vitelli_, etc. 1502.
_Il Principe._ 1513.
_Vita di Castruccio Castricani._ 1520.
Translations of all three pieces appear in the same volume of
Everyman’s Library.
Maine, Sir H. J. S.:
_Ancient Law._ 1861. (Reprint in Everyman’s Library.) See
especially ch. IV, “The Modern History of the Law of Nature.”
Maistre, J. de:
_Du Pape._ 1819.
_Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg._ 1821.
The “Premier entretien” contains the celebrated “Portrait du
bourreau.”
Mandeville, B.:
_The Fable of the Bees._ 1714. (_The Grumbling Hive_, the verses
that form the nucleus of this volume, appeared originally in 1705).
5th ed., 2 vols. 1728-29.
Marsilius of Padua:
_Defensor Pacis._ 1324. Text in Goldast, _Monarchia S. Imperii
Romani_.
Merriam, C. E.:
_American Political Theories._ 1903. New ed. 1920.
Michel, H.:
_L’Idée de l’état._ 1896.
Mill, J. S.:
_On Liberty._ 1859. (Reprinted together with the essays on
_Utilitarianism_ and _Representative Government_ in Everyman’s
Library.)
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat de la Brède, Baron de:
_De l’Esprit des Lois._ 1748.
Oliver, F. S.:
_Alexander Hamilton; an Essay on American Union._ 1907.
Pascal, B.:
_Pensées et opuscules._ Ed. L. Brunschvicg. 1917.
Plato:
_Works._ Tr. by B. Jowett. 5 vols. 3d ed. 1892.
Pound, R.:
_The Spirit of the Common Law._ 1921.
_An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law._ 1922.
Powers, H. H.:
_America among the Nations._ 1917.
Renan, E.:
_La Réforme intellectuelle et morale._ 1871.
Ritchie, D. G.:
_Natural Rights._ 1894. 3d ed. 1916.
The notion of natural rights is, according to Ritchie, chimerical
and leads to an unsound individualism. What he opposes to this
unsoundness is not a sound individualism but social expediency,
which is itself, in virtue of the doctrine of evolution, constantly
changing. A useful feature of this book is the appendix which
contains the more important eighteenth-century declarations of
rights in France and America.
Rousseau, J.-J.:
_Œuvres complètes._ 13 vols. (Hachette.)
There is no good complete edition.
_The Political Writings._ 2 vols. Ed. C. E. Vaughan. 1915.
Vaughan has done good work on the text. In his introductory
material, on the other hand, he develops ideas--for example, the
idea that Rousseau is politically a true Platonist--which will not
bear serious scrutiny.
Saint-Pierre, Abbé de:
_Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe._ 1712-17.
Schopenhauer, A.:
_Grundlage der Moral._ 1840. Tr. by A. B. Bullock. 2d ed. 1915.
Seillière, E.:
_L’Impérialisme démocratique._ 1907.
_Le Mal romantique._ 1908.
_Introduction à la philosophie de l’impérialisme._ 1911.
_Le Péril mystique dans l’inspiration des démocraties modernes._
1918.
_Balzac et la morale romantique._ 1922.
_Vers le socialisme rationnel._ 1923.
M. Seillière intends this last volume as a summary of his whole
point of view. Among the expositions of his philosophy that have
been published by others the best is that by R. Gillouin: _Une
nouvelle philosophie de l’histoire moderne_ (1921). See also _La
Pensée d’Ernest Seillière_, twelve studies by contemporary French
writers. 1923 (Bibliography at the end). M. Seillière has been
criticized for giving an undue extension to the term imperialism.
A more legitimate objection is that to his use of the word
“mysticism.” On this latter point see Henri Bremond: _Histoire
littéraire du sentiment religieux en France_, vol. IV (1920), p.
566 n.
Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of:
_Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions and Times._ 1711. 2d
ed. 1714. Ed. J. M. Robertson. 1900.
_The Life, unpublished Letters and Philosophical Regimen._ Ed. B.
Rand. 1900.
Smith, A.:
_The Theory of Moral Sentiments._ 1761. 6th ed. with critical and
biographical memoir by Dugald Stewart, 1790. (Reprint in Bohn’s
Library.)
_The Wealth of Nations._ 1776. (Reprint in Everyman’s Library.)
Spengler, O.:
_Der Untergang des Abendlandes._ 2 vols. 1919-22.
Stephen, Fitzjames:
_Liberty, Equality, Fraternity._ 2d ed. 1874.
Tagore, Rabindranath:
_Nationalism._ 1917.
Tröltsch, E.:
_Augustin, die christliche Antike und die Mittelalter._ 1915.
Viallate, A.:
_L’Impérialisme économique et les relations internationales pendant
le dernier demi-siècle (1870-1920)._ 1923.
Whitman, W.:
_Leaves of Grass._ 1855.
_Democratic Vistas._ 1871.
Zanta, L.:
_La Renaissance du stoïcisme au XVI^e Siècle._ 1914.
INDEX OF NAMES
Acton, Lord, 2, 94, 127, 178, 184, 298 n.
Adams, Henry, 231 n., 252 n.
Adams, Herbert B., 305 n.
Adams, John, 306, 335.
Adams, John Quincy, 248.
Addison, 13.
Alexander, 139.
Anselm, Saint, 118 n.
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 2, 30, 164, 320.
Aristophanes, 148, 149.
Aristotle, 2, 27, 30, 31, 32, 35 n., 44, 46, 54, 61, 64, 70, 78, 83,
92, 117, 149, 150, 152 n., 163, 164, 165, 192, 199, 204, 205,
209, 213, 214, 258, 273, 276, 299, 301, 302, 308, 309, 320.
Arnold, Matthew, 160, 243, 281.
Asoka, 159, 160.
Asquith, 289.
Asquith, Mrs., 203.
Attila, 158.
Augustine, Saint, 2, 21, 30, 31, 176, 319.
Austin, John, 334 n.
Bacon, Francis, 30, 94, 103, 113, 143, 159, 190, 192, 197, 259, 314,
321.
Bacon, Roger, 113.
Bagehot, W., 106.
Balzac, Honoré de, 17 n., 21 n.
Barabbas, 264.
Barker, Ernest, 286 n.
Bentham, 224 n., 296 n.
Bergson, Henri, 17, 18, 162, 169, 183 n., 224, 229, 301, 328, 329.
Bernard, Saint, 108 n., 178 n.
Bismarck, 41.
Blair, Dr., 85 n.
Bodley, J. E. C., 287 n.
Boerhaave, 324 n.
Boileau, 277.
Bordes, 74 n.
Borgia, Cæsar, 39.
Bossuet, 21, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 67, 187, 219, 260, 276, 277, 301.
Bourgeois, E., 130 n.
Boutroux, E., 131.
Brownell, W. C., 167 n.
Bryan, W. J., 240, 282, 285.
Bryce, Lord, 241.
Buddha, 32, 33, 36, 67 n., 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169, 170,
173, 184, 194, 195, 199, 202, 209, 214, 222, 273, 275.
Burke, 22, 69, 96, 97-116, 126, 128, 141, 157, 166, 178, 199, 202,
207, 221 n., 246, 251, 258, 262, 272, 293, 331.
Byron, Lord, 244.
Cæsar, 29, 31, 44, 54, 92, 98, 196, 270, 284, 285, 286, 288.
Calhoun, J., 247.
Caligula, 141.
Calkins, Mary W., 330 n.
Calvin, 54, 74, 188, 189, 190 n., 253.
Carlyle, 7, 131, 137, 138, 140, 209, 211.
Castricani, Castruccio, 39.
Chaplin, Charlie, 240.
Chateaubriand, 126 n., 128, 140, 217, 220.
Chavannes, E., 163 n.
Chesterton, G. K., 125.
Christ (Jesus), 33, 34, 98, 130, 132, 140, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163,
164, 170, 172, 177, 195, 264, 269, 273, 275, 283, 284, 289,
291, 298.
Chu Hsi, 164.
Chuquet, A., 130 n.
Cicero, 2, 19, 47, 149 n., 268, 270, 291, 292.
Cimon, 148 n.
Cineas, 271.
Cleon, 281.
Cleveland, Grover, 288.
Cloots, Anacharsis, 124.
Coleridge, 13, 130 n., 221.
Comte, Auguste, 258.
Condorcet, 132.
Confucius, 3, 33, 34, 35, 36, 61, 154, 158, 163, 164, 165, 184, 199,
200, 273, 277 n., 279, 301, 310 n.
Cowdray, Lord, 153.
Ford, Henry, 5, 146, 212, 239, 241, 253, 282.
Forke, Alfred, 151 n.
Fosdick, Raymond B., 255 n.
Fouillée, A., 327 n.
France, Anatole, 81, 294, 295.
Francia, Dr., 211.
Frank, Tenney, 270 n.
Franklin, Benjamin, 311.
Frederick the Great, 41, 131, 211.
Fustel de Coulanges, 27, 54, 253 n.
Croce, B., 328.
Cromwell, 113.
Cumberland, R., 47, 216.
Curzon, Lord, 153.
Galileo, 321.
Galley, Mademoiselle, 79.
Genghis Khan, 158.
George III, 77.
Gervinus, 135.
Dante, 25, 29, 142, 161, 219.
Danton, 126.
Darwin, 164, 327.
Daudet, Léon, 228.
Dedieu, J., 63 n.
Descartes, 62, 68, 224, 226, 319 n., 321, 322, 323, 324, 327 n.
Dewey, John, 312, 313.
Diderot, 10, 67, 293.
Diels, H., 168 n.
Disraeli, 103, 106, 215, 275.
Dreiser, Theodore, 254.
Dryden, 141, 265, 266.
Duns Scotus, 113, 190, 319, 320, 321.
Geulincx, 324 n.
Gilson, E., 320 n., 321.
Gladstone, Mary, 2 n.
Goethe, 130, 138, 145, 211, 241, 264.
Gompers, Samuel, 232, 307.
Gomperz, 51 n.
Gooch, G. P., 130 n.
Graffenried, Mademoiselle, 79.
Grey, Viscount, 289.
Grotius, 45, 52, 71, 122.
Halifax, 105.
Hamilton, Alexander, 248 n.
Hardy, Thomas, 132, 140.
Hawkins, Sir John, 72.
Edison, 241.
Edwards, Jonathan, 89, 141, 189, 257, 290 n.
Eldon, Lord, 77.
Eliot, Charles W., 290, 303.
Emerson, R. W., 167.
Epictetus, 50, 216, 278 n.
Erasmus, 25, 180, 189.
Erastus, 53.
Euripides, 181.
Hay, John, 249 n.
Hazlitt, W., 279.
Hearnshaw, F. J. C., 71 n.
Hearst, Wm. Randolph, 240, 264, 281.
Hegel, 333.
Heine, H., 121.
Heliogabalus, 271.
Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 28.
Henry IV (of France), 121, 122.
Fabricius, 74.
Faguet, E., 64, 108 n., 165.
Fester, Richard, 79 n.
Fielding, 72.
Filmer, R., 53, 54, 58.
Flamininus, 270.
Hesiod, 205.
Hildebrand, 178 n.
Hobbes, 22, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 59, 72, 74, 87, 90, 94,
100, 121, 122, 232, 324, 327.
Hooker, R., 71.
Horace, 271.
Hugo, Victor, 129, 231.
Hume, D., 51, 85, 165 n., 216, 224, 225, 234, 324, 325 n., 326, 328.
Hutcheson, F., 48, 51.
Huxley, 325, 326 n., 328.
Jackson, Andrew, 246.
Jacobi, 325 n.
James, Wm., 328, 329.
Jefferson, Thomas, 196, 240, 242, 246, 247, 248, 249, 251, 305.
Jhering, 296 n.
Johnson, Samuel, 72, 206, 228, 325, 330.
Joubert, 12, 63, 74, 112, 113, 273, 279 n.
Judas, 190 n.
Juvenal, 18.
Kahl, Wilhelm, 319 n., 321 n.
Kant, I., 131, 224, 225, 226, 324, 325, 326.
Krishna, 80.
La Mettrie, 324 n.
Lanson, G., 84, 85, 86.
La Rochefoucauld, 41, 48.
Laski, Harold J., 223, 224.
Lear, Edward, 80.
Lecky, 115.
Legge, Dr., 36.
Lenin, 266, 312.
Leonidas, 108 n.
Lilly, W. S., 83.
Lincoln, A., 81, 248, 249, 250, 251, 280.
Livy, 236, 271.
Lloyd George, D., 1.
Locke, J., 42, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 71, 74, 102, 103, 191, 224 n.,
324.
Louis XIV, 56, 57, 124.
Louis XV, 65.
Louis, Saint, 56.
Louter, J. de, 266 n.
Lowell, James R., 218, 234.
Lucretius, 217.
Luther, 25, 53, 188, 189.
Lycurgus, 74, 89.
Macaulay, 103.
MacDonald, J. Ramsay, 315.
McDougall, Wm., 245.
Machiavelli, 22, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 48, 63, 70, 94, 119,
134, 135, 137, 314.
Maistre, Joseph de, 57, 58.
Malesherbes, 79 n.
Mallet du Pan, 108.
Mandeville, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 65 n., 72, 73.
Manu, 32.
Marat, 281.
Marcus Aurelius, 11, 46, 50, 167, 216.
Marie Antoinette, 104, 124.
Marshall, John, 248, 250, 251, 307.
Marsilius of Padua, 58.
Marvell, 113.
Marx, Karl, 191, 223, 280.
Masson, P. M., 95 n.
Mei-ti, 151.
Melancthon, 190 n.
Mencius, 151 n., 193.
Mencken, H. L., 274.
Mercier, Cardinal, 28.
Méricourt, Mlle. Théroigne de, 126 n.
Michel Angelo, 108 n.
Mill, J. S., 103, 111, 201, 286 n., 324 n.
Milnes, Monckton, 231.
Milton, 80.
Mirabeau, Marquis de, 86, 152.
Mohammed, 161.
Montaigne, 274 n.
Montesquieu, 18, 63, 64, 65, 66, 87, 219.
More, P. E., 328.
Murry, J. Middleton, 135 n.
Mussolini, 312.
Napoleon, 10, 128, 129, 130, 132, 139, 140, 141, 256.
Nero, 18, 141, 264.
Newman, Cardinal, 156, 182.
Nicolay, 249 n.
Nietzsche, 228, 327.
Occam, William of, 113, 321.
Oliver, F. S., 248 n.
Origen, 319.
Ovid, 172.
Page, Walter H., 280.
Paine, Tom, 104.
Paley, 77.
Palmer, George H., 272 n.
Papini, 284 n.
Pascal, 12, 25, 37, 42, 62, 166, 167, 179, 180, 237, 274 n., 301, 322.
Pater, Walter, 107.
Paul, Saint, 159, 160, 173, 190 n.
Pericles, 36, 148 n.
Philo Judæus, 171.
Piccoli, R., 328.
Pindar, 168.
Pius IX, 144.
Plato, 11, 12, 30, 31, 32, 33, 51 n., 87, 92, 149, 150, 168, 169,
171, 172, 173, 176, 177, 202, 231.
Pontius Pilate, 172.
Pope, A., 48, 58.
Pound, Roscoe, 296 n.
Powers, H. H., 268 n.
Proal, L., 77 n.
Proudhon, 108 n.
Pyrrhus, 139, 271.
Rambouillet, Marquise de, 124.
Raphael, 191.
Rehberg, 100 n.
Renan, E., 118, 130 n., 292.
Repington, Colonel, 203.
Richelieu, 124, 139.
Rickaby, Joseph, 324 n.
Rivarol, 229.
Roberts, Lord, 289.
Robespierre, 89, 95, 125, 126, 127, 217, 266.
Rockefeller, J. D., 212.
Roosevelt, Theodore, 249, 269.
Rousseau, 1, 2, 4, 17, 18, 20, 21, 51 n., 52, 58, 59, 69, 70-96, 97,
99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 109, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121,
122, 123, 125, 127, 132, 167, 178, 183, 192, 195, 215, 216,
217, 218, 219, 222, 228, 229, 232, 237, 245, 276, 277, 279,
287, 300, 327, 328, 334.
Sainte-Beuve, 9, 90.
Saint-Evremond, 139, 187.
Saint-Just, 126.
Saint-Pierre, Abbé de, 67, 121, 122, 131.
Sanson, 126 n.
Savigny, 100 n.
Schiller, 81, 325 n., 329 n.
Schopenhauer, 73, 227, 326, 327.
Schwab, 239.
Ségur, Comte de, 125.
Seillière, E., 17 n., 20, 21, 22, 260.
Selden, John, 265.
Seneca, 50 n., 71 n.
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 72, 216, 325 n.
Shakespeare, 137, 147.
Shelley, P. B., 76, 77, 136, 137, 220, 222.
Shelley, Mrs., 133.
Sherman, Stuart P., 251, 252.
Shun, 200.
Smith, Adam, 51, 191, 213.
Smith, Vincent A., 160 n.
Socrates, 32, 149, 165, 167, 172, 173, 179, 264, 278, 283, 284, 298.
Solomon, 80.
Sophocles, 147, 295.
Speed, 81.
Spengler, Oswald, 20, 21.
Spinoza, 322, 323, 324.
Staël, Mme. de, 5, 96.
Stephen, Fitzjames, 286 n.
Stephen, Leslie, 209.
Sully, 121.
Sunday, Rev. William A., 240.
Swift, Jonathan, 137.
Synesius, 14.
Tacitus, 232.
Tagore, Rabindranath, 161, 162.
Taine, H., 83, 100, 124, 127.
Tamerlane, 158.
Taylor, Jeremy, 137.
Tennyson, 81 n., 258.
Tertullian, 177 n.
Thompson, D. W., 164 n.
Thrale, 206.
Thucydides, 38, 150.
Tiberius, 18, 271.
Ticknor, George, 305 n.
Tyrrell, 141.
d’Urfé, H., 124.
Vaihinger, 326.
Vaughan, C. E., 115, 119 n., 122 n.
Victoria, Queen, 276.
Villon, 28.
Virgil, 231.
Vogüé, Vicomte M. de, 117.
Voltaire, 48, 63, 68, 99, 323.
Ward, Wilfrid, 81 n.
Washington, George, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, 263, 269, 270.
Watson, J. B., 330 n.
Way, A. S., 181 n.
Webster, D., 247.
Weems, “Parson,” 249 n.
Whitman, Walt, 4, 219, 228, 249, 260, 267, 268.
Wicksteed, P. H., 320 n.
Wilson, Woodrow, 196, 268, 280, 288.
Wordsworth, Wm., 227, 327.
Wright, Harold Bell, 240.
Wulf, M. de, 320 n.
Young, E., 15.
Zanta, L., 71 n.
FOOTNOTES
[1] See _Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone_, p. xii.
[2] See _The Masters of Modern French Criticism_ (1912), p. 188.
[3] _Cratylus_, 386 E. It goes without saying that no philosopher
affords better examples of the higher uses of the imagination (in the
extended sense that we have come to give to the word) than Plato. As
for the Platonic theory of the imagination in this extended sense, it
is not altogether easy to grasp, even after every allowance has been
made for changes in terminology.
[4] See Bergson’s introductory note to _Balzac et la morale
romantique_, par E. Seillière.
[5] _Balzac et la morale romantique_, p. 42.
[6] Cf. Aristotle, _Politics_, 1273a: “Whenever the chiefs of the state
deem anything honorable, the other citizens are sure to follow their
example.”
[7] _The Prince_, ch. XV.
[8] _The Prince_, ch. XIX.
[9] _Ibid._, ch. VII.
[10] _Leviathan_, Part I, ch. IX.
[11] See Seneca, _de Clem._, II, 4-6.
[12] The following passage from Rousseau (_Emile_, Livre IV) may serve
as a sample of the fully developed emotional ethics of which the
beginnings are found in Shaftesbury: “Cet enthousiasme de la vertu,
quel rapport a-t-il avec notre intérêt privé?... Otez de nos cœurs cet
amour du beau, vous ôtez tout le charme de la vie. Celui dont les viles
passions ont étouffé dans son âme étroite ces sentiments délicieux;
celui qui, à force de se concentrer au dedans de lui, vient à bout de
n’aimer que lui-même, n’a plus de transports, son cœur glacé ne palpite
plus de joie, un doux attendrissement n’humecte jamais ses yeux, il
ne jouit plus de rien.” This type of “enthusiasm” assumes at times a
Platonic coloring, as in _Nouvelle Héloise_, Pt. II, Lettre XI. Plato,
however, as Gomperz points out (_Griechische Denker_, II, p. 411),
“would have utterly despised the sentimentalism of Rousseau.”
[13] Book II, ch. III.
[14] _Ibid._, ch. XI.
[15] See J. Dedieu: _Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en
France_.
[16] _Esprit des Lois_, liv. XXIV, ch. 26.
[17] _Ibid._, ch. 5.
[18] _Ibid._, liv. XIV, ch. 3.
[19] Yet in another chapter--and this is a good sample of his
inconsistency--he adopts Mandeville’s arguments in favor of luxury.
(_Ibid._, liv. XIX, ch. 9.)
[20] Buddha, for example, bestowed his final homage not upon Providence
in the Christian sense, but upon the Law (“Dhamma”), a law, one
scarcely need add, quite distinct from that of physical nature.
[21] See L. Zanta, _La Renaissance du stoïcisme au xvi^e siècle_.
[22] The Stoical influence can be traced here also. See Seneca,
_Epistles_, XIV, 2. Cf. also _The Social and Political Ideas of Some
Great Mediæval Thinkers_ (edited by F. J. C. Hearnshaw), pp. 43 ff.
[23] _Grundlage der Moral_, ‡ 19, 9.
[24] See, for example, _Dernière Réponse à M. Bordes_: “Qu’ils paissent
même, s’il le faut: j’aime encore mieux voir les hommes brouter l’herbe
dans les champs que s’entre-dévorer dans les villes ... Osera-t-on
prendre le parti de l’instinct contre la raison? C’est précisément ce
que je demande.”
[25] For the testimony of a French magistrate on this point, see L.
Proal: “L’Anarchisme au xviii^e siècle,” _Revue philosophique_, vol.
82, pp. 135-60, 202-42.
[26] See Richard Fester: _Rousseau und die deutsche
Geschichtsphilosophie_.
[27] _Lettre à M. de Malesherbes_, 26 janvier, 1762.
[28] This story was a favorite of Tennyson’s. I abridge it from Wilfrid
Ward, _Problems and Persons_, pp. 204-05.
[29] Letter of Hume to Dr. Blair, 25 March, 1766. This letter was
written, it will be noticed, while Hume was still on friendly terms
with Rousseau.
[30] _Annales de la Société Jean-Jacques Rousseau_, VIII, p. 31.
[31] Strictly enforced this distinction makes party government
impossible. It also points the way to the decision reached by the
States General in 1789 that the deputies should vote individually and
not as members of an order, a decision that meant practically the
triumph of the Third Estate over the clergy and nobility.
[32] _Contrat Social_, liv. IV, ch. III.
[33] Cf. P.-M. Masson, _La Religion de J.-J. Rousseau_, III, ch. V.
[34] On Rehberg, Savigny, etc.
[35] _Emile_, liv. II.
[36] Cf. _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 49 f.
[37] It would not be easy to find in an English author of anything
like the same intellectual distinction the equivalent of the following
passage from Proudhon (_Œuvres_, II, p. 91): “L’enthousiasme qui nous
possède, l’enthousiasme de l’égalité, ... est une ivresse plus forte
que le vin, plus pénétrante que l’amour: passion ou fureur divine que
le délire des Léonidas, des Saint Bernard et des Michel-Ange n’égala
jamais.”
[38] Cf. E. Faguet, _Politiques et moralistes_, vol. I, p. 117: “Il est
à peu près impossible à un Français d’être libéral, et le libéralisme
n’est pas français.” See also _ibid._, III, p. 95.
[39] _Introduction à l’Iconographie de J.-J. Rousseau_, I, pp. vii-viii.
[40] I have cited some of these passages in _Rousseau and Romanticism_,
p. 194 n.
[41] _Réforme intellectuelle et morale_, p. 194.
[42] See _Political Writings_ (Vaughan), II, p. 172.
[43] See the opening paragraphs of _Emile_ (“Tout patriote est dur aux
étrangers,” etc.).
[44] _Political Writings_ (Vaughan), I, p. 392 n.
[45] Cf. Chateaubriand, _Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe_, II, pp. 12-14:
“Tandis que la tragédie rougissait les rues, la bergerie florissait au
théâtre; il n’était question que d’innocents pasteurs et de virginales
pastourelles: champs, ruisseaux, prairies, moutons, colombes, âge d’or
sous le chaume, revivaient aux soupirs du pipeau devant les roucoulants
Tircis et les naïves tricoteuses qui sortaient du spectacle de la
guillotine. Si Sanson en avait eu le temps, il aurait joué le rôle
de Colin, et Mademoiselle Théroigne de Méricourt celui de Babet. Les
Conventionnels se piquaient d’être les plus bénins des hommes: bons
pères, bons fils, bons maris, ils menaient promener les petits enfants;
ils leur servaient de nourrices; ils pleuraient de tendresse à leurs
simples jeux; ils prenaient doucement dans leurs bras ces petits
agneaux, afin de leur montrer le _dada_ des charrettes qui conduisaient
les victimes au supplice. Ils chantaient la nature, la paix, la pitié,
la bienfaisance, la candeur, les vertus domestiques; ces béats de
philanthropie faisaient couper le cou à leurs voisins avec une extrême
sensibilité, pour le plus grand bonheur de l’espèce humaine.”
[46] Chateaubriand. _Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe_, II, p. 243.
[47] Both monarchists and revolutionary idealists had of course other
motives in addition to those they professed. For this whole period, see
E. Bourgeois, _Manuel historique de politique étrangère_, II, pp. 1-184.
[48] According to M. Chuquet, the remark of Goethe to which I refer
dates from 1820 and not from the evening of the battle (20 Sep., 1792).
See article in _Revue hebdomadaire_, 18 Déc., 1915.
[49] “La Révolution française fut le fait générateur de l’idée de
l’unité allemande.” Renan, _Réforme intellectuelle et morale_, p. 130.
[50] See Coleridge’s _France: an Ode_. For corresponding German
developments, see G. P. Gooch, _Germany and the French Revolution_,
_passim_.
[51] See _Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus_, ch. 15.
[52] See _Mandragola_, Act 3, Scene 4. The application of the principle
in this particular passage is, however, ironical.
[53] This point has been well made by Mr. J. Middleton Murry in
his essay on _The Nature of Civilization (The Evolution of an
Intellectual_, p. 168).
[54] _De Monarchia_, III, ch. XVI.
[55] See Introduction to _Rousseau and Romanticism_.
[56] The typical democratic-imperialistic statesman of this age
is Pericles. For a sense of the dangers of the policy of Athenian
expansion and also of the importance of union among the Greeks, one has
to turn to conservatives of the type of Cimon.
[57] Cicero, whom no one will accuse of being an enemy of the Greeks,
has a passage on this subject that may be regarded as definitive. See
his _Oratio pro L. Valerio Flacco_, IV.
[58] See Athenaeus, XII, 26.
[59] A German translation of Mei-ti (with a laudatory introduction) has
recently been published by Alfred Forke. It should be noted that _jên_,
the virtue on which the Confucian puts his final emphasis, though
usually rendered by “benevolence” or some such term, is something very
different from altruism. This should be plain from the uncompromising
hostility of Mencius to Mei-ti. The exaltation of _jên_ is simply the
Confucian way of affirming that love is the fulfilment of the law.
Inasmuch as _jên_ manifests itself on the humanistic rather than on
the religious level, the nearest Western equivalent is probably the
treatment of friendship by Aristotle in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ (Books
VIII-IX).
[60] See _La Vie des peuples_, Tome VII, p. 195.
[61] The question arises as to the influence of the older religion
on Christianity. Much has been asserted on this subject and little
or nothing proved. All we know positively is that Asoka sent out
missionaries to Syria, Egypt, Cyrene, Macedonia and Epirus. As to the
results of this missionary effort we are not informed. A translation of
the different inscriptions will be found in _Asoka_ by Vincent A. Smith
(2nd ed., 1909).
[62] _Dhammapada_, v. 96.
[63] See his book on _Nationalism_, _passim_.
[64] The tracing of the so-called “chain of dependent origination.”
[65] Of Confucius, for example, the late Professor Chavannes of the
Collège de France says: “He was, as it were, five hundred years
before our era, the national conscience which gave precision and
corroboration to the profound ideas of which the classic books of
remote antiquity reveal to us the first outlines.... He went about
proclaiming the necessity of conforming to the moral idea that China
had slowly conceived in the course of the centuries; the men of his
time refused to obey him because they found it too difficult to give
up their comforts or their interests; they felt, nevertheless, that
his voice had a more than human authority; they were moved and stirred
to the depths of their being when they were touched by the potent
spirit coming from the distant past which summoned up in them the
truths glimpsed by their fathers.” _Quelques Idées morales des Chinois_
(lecture originally given at the Sorbonne and published in _Bulletin de
la Société autour du Monde_, Janvier-Mai, 1918, pp. 47 ff.).
[66] See article on Aristotle by D. W. Thompson in _The Legacy of
Greece, p_. 144.
[67] Hume has a discussion of humility in animals! (_Treatise of Human
Nature_, Book II, Part I, Sect. xii.)
[68] Mr. Brownell goes so far as to say that it would be impossible to
have less humility than Emerson (_American Prose Masters_, p. 176).
[69] See Diels, _Fragmente der Vorsokratiker_, I, p. 117.
[70] Eight words in the Pali original. See _Dhammapada_, v. 186.
[71] “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor.” “Nitimur in vetitum
semper, cupimusque negata.”
[72] The phrase _Credo quia absurdum_ does not actually occur in the
famous fifth chapter of Tertullian’s _De Carne Christi_, but sums up
correctly the total sense of the chapter.
[73] “Then followed the ages which are not unjustly called the Dark
Ages, in which were laid the foundations of all the happiness that has
been since enjoyed, and of all the greatness that has been achieved
by men.... It was not an age of conspicuous saints, but sanctity was
at no time so general. The holy men of the first centuries shine with
an intense brilliancy from the midst of the surrounding corruption.
Legions of saints--individually for the most part obscure, because
of the atmosphere of light around them--throng the five illiterate
centuries, from the close of the great dogmatic controversies to the
rise of a new theology and the commencement of new interests with
Hildebrand, Anselm, and Bernard.” (_History of Freedom_, p. 200.)
[74] See his _Fragment d’un Traité du vide_.
[75] _Pensées_, 434.
[76] _The Madness of Hercules_, 744 ff., translated by A. S. Way.
[77] One may illustrate from Cardinal Newman himself: “What is
intellect itself,” he asks, “but a fruit of the Fall, not found in
paradise or in heaven, more than in little children, and at the utmost
but tolerated by the Church, and only not incompatible with the
regenerate mind?... Reason is God’s gift, and so are passions.... Eve
was tempted to follow passion and reason, and she fell.” (_Parochial
and Plain Sermons_, V, p. 112.)
[78] “L’intelligence est caractérisée par une incompréhension naturelle
de la Vie.” (Bergson, _Evolution créatrice_, p. 179.)
[79] See Luther’s _De servo arbitrio_ (1526).
[80] “Dieu non seulement a prévu la chute du premier homme et en elle
la ruine de toute sa postérité, mais il l’a ainsi voulu.” (Calvin,
_Inst. chrét._, liv. III, ch. XXIII, par. 7.) Melancthon declares
in his _Commentary on Epistle to Romans_ (1525) that “God works all
things.... He is the author of the treason of Judas as well as of the
conversion of Paul.”
[81] The Church was supposed to be able to work efficaciously in this
sense because of the grace that had been delegated to it.
[82] “Un rentier que l’Etat paie pour ne rien faire ne diffère guère à
mes yeux d’un brigand qui vit aux dépens des passants,” etc., _Emile_,
Livre III.
[83] The writer of some verses in an Ohio newspaper, after complaining
of the failure of the millennium to arrive in spite of the efforts of
“many scores of dreamers, poets, orators and schemers,” concludes as
follows:
And so I hold it is not treason
To advance a simple reason
For the sorry lack of progress we decry.
It is this: instead of working
On himself, each man is shirking,
And trying to reform some other guy.
The author of this doggerel is nearer to the wisdom of the ages than
some of our college presidents.
[84] _Sutta-Nipâta_, v. 135.
[85] _Politics_, 1267b.
[86] _Ibid._, 1266b.
[87] See beginning of _Works and Days_.
[88] _Past and Present_, ch. XI (beginning).
[89] Justice is, according to Hume, an “artificial” virtue; its
immediate source is an enlightened self-interest. Its ultimate source,
like that of all the other virtues, is “an extensive sympathy with
mankind.”
[90] “Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.”
[91] See _France: an Ode_ (1798), Part V. The beginnings of this part
of the poem is pure Burke:
The Sensual and the Dark rebel in vain,
Slaves by their own compulsion! etc.
After striking this Burkian note, Coleridge proceeds to fall into sheer
pantheistic bewilderment.
[92] _Sutta-Nipâta_, v. 654.
[93] _Political Thought from Locke to Bentham_, p. 270.
[94] See Appendix A.
[95] I take the anecdote from _The Education of Henry Adams_, p. 143.
[96] _Works_ (Ford ed.), X, p. 143.
[97] For example, 41 per cent of the residents of New York City are
actually foreign-born; if we add those whose father or mother or both
were born abroad, the more or less foreign element in its population
amounts to 80 per cent.
[98] He drafted, for example, the so-called Kentucky Resolutions
(November, 1799).
[99] A similar opposition existed, of course, between Jefferson and
Alexander Hamilton. The _Life of Hamilton_, by F. S. Oliver, is to be
commended for the clearness of the insight it displays into the nature
of this opposition.
[100] A specially influential book in the creation of this myth was the
_Life of Washington_ (1800), by “Parson” Weems.
[101] Lincoln actually defended himself against the charge of having
spoken disparagingly of Jefferson. See _Works_ (Nicolay and Hay ed.),
VI, p. 60.
[102] See _Works_ (Ford ed.), III, p. 195.
[103] _American and Allied Ideals_ (War Information Series, No. 12), p.
9.
[104] Strange things have been happening to the Puritan conscience of
late even in the most authentic descendants of the Puritans. Thus Henry
Adams inserts in a hymn to the Virgin a hymn to the dynamo. The whole
conception has little relation to mediæval Christianity and none at
all to Puritanism. It is, however, closely related to the tendency of
the nineteenth century to see in a sympathy that is emancipated from
justice the proper corrective of a power that is pursued without regard
to the law of measure.
[105] It is estimated that 62,014 statutes were passed by our national
and state legislatures in the period 1909-13. Some of these laws--for
example, those regulating finger-bowls and the length of sheets in
hotels--remind one of the minute prescriptions indulged in by the
ancient city-states at their worst. Cf. Fustel de Coulanges, _La Cité
antique_, p. 266: “L’Etat exerçait sa tyrannie jusque dans les plus
petites choses; à Locres, la loi défendait aux hommes de boire du vin
pur; à Rome, à Milet, à Marseille, elle le défendait aux femmes. Il
était ordinaire que le costume fût fixé invariablement par les lois de
chaque cité; la législation de Sparte réglait la coiffure des femmes,
et celle d’Athènes leur interdisait d’emporter en voyage plus de trois
robes. A Rhodes la loi défendait de se raser la barbe; à Byzance,
elle punissait d’une amende celui qui possédait chez soi un rasoir; à
Sparte, au contraire, elle exigeait qu’on se rasât la moustache.”
[106] In 1885 there were 1808 homicides in the United States with 108
executions; in 1910, 8,975 homicides with 104 executions.
[107] “In 1918 Chicago had 22 robberies for every one robbery in London
and 14 robberies for every one robbery in England and Wales.... Cities
like St. Louis and Detroit, in their statistics of robbery and assault
with intent to rob, frequently show annual totals varying from three
times to five times greater than the number of such crimes reported
for the whole of Great Britain. Liverpool is about one and a third
times larger than Cleveland, and yet in 1919 Cleveland reported 31
robberies for every one reported in Liverpool.” (Raymond B. Fosdick,
_Crime in America and the Police_, 1920, p. 18.) Mr. Fosdick ascribes
our imperfect administration of justice to our legalism (p. 48) and our
sentimentalism (p. 44).
[108] “This is a chain of galley-slaves,” cried Sancho, “who are going
to the galleys.”... “Be it how it may,” replied Don Quixote, “these
people, since they are being taken, go by force and not of their own
will.... Here comes in the exercise of my office, to redress outrages
and to succor and aid the afflicted.” “Let your worship reflect,” said
Sancho, “that justice, which is the King’s self, does no violence
or wrong to such people, but chastises them in punishment of their
crimes.” (_Don Quixote_, Part I, ch. XXII.)
[109] “To be always seeking after the useful does not become free and
exalted souls” (_Politics_, 1338b.)
[110] To suppose, as Bacon did, not only that nature is exhaustible,
but that it may be exhausted by the accumulated observations of a
number of essentially commonplace specialists is to be wrong at the
centre. Cf. _Novum Organum_, Book I, Aphorism CXXII: “My way of
discovering sciences goes far to level men’s wits, and leaves but
little to individual excellence.”
[111] “The American demands a poetry ... that will place in the van and
hold up at all hazards the banner of the divine pride of man in himself
(the radical foundation of the new religion). Long enough have the
People been listening to poems in which common humanity, deferential,
bends low, humiliated, acknowledging superiors. But America listens to
no such poem. Erect, inflated, and fully self-esteeming be the chant;
and then America will listen with pleased ears.” (_Democratic Vistas._)
[112] “... the American Soul, with equal hemispheres, one Love, one
Dilation or Pride.”
[113] For a tabulation of these tests see vol. XV of the _Memoirs of
the National Academy of Sciences_.
[114] In _Le Droit international public positif_ (1920), I, pp. 77
ff., J. de Louter has traced historically the opposition between those
who base international law on “jus naturale,” conceived as universal
reason, and those who incline rather to see in it an expression of will
(“jus voluntarium”).
[115] This consistent imperialism has been traced by H. H. Powers in
his volume: _America among the Nations_.
[116] See Tenney Frank’s _Roman Imperialism_, especially ch. VIII
(“Sentimental Politics”).
[117] As the rural philosopher remarked: “Things ain’t what they used
to be--in fact they never was.”
[118]
Ætas parentum peior avis tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem.
_Carminum_, Lib. III, 6.
[119] Professor G. H. Palmer has written from his own memories an
article on “The Puritan Home.” (_Atlantic Monthly_, November, 1921.)
[120] Cf. Pascal, _Pensées_, 64: “Ce n’est pas dans Montaigne, mais
dans moi que je trouve tout ce que j’y vois.”
[121] Cf. Confucius: “Alas! I have never met a man who could see his
own faults and arraign himself at the bar of his own conscience.”
[122] See Epictetus, _Dissert._ I, 17.
[123] Cf. Joubert on the writings of Rousseau: “La paresse y prend
l’attitude d’une occupation philosophique.”
[124] In his _Life of Christ_ Papini not only attacks Socrates
specifically, but bases his whole point of view on an abdication of the
critical spirit.
[125] “It was an easier thing to consecrate the fighting instinct than
to curb it.... [The crusader] might butcher all day till he waded
ankle deep in blood and then at nightfall kneel sobbing for very joy
at the altar of the Sepulchre--for was he not red from the winepress
of the Lord? One can readily understand the popularity of the Crusades
when one reflects that they permitted men to get to the other world
by fighting hard on earth and allowed them to gain the fruits of
asceticism by the way of hedonism.” (Article on “Crusades,” by Ernest
Barker, in eleventh edition of _Encyclopædia Britannica_.)
[126] The predominance of the imperialistic over the religious motif is
especially conspicuous in the fourth Crusade (1202-04).
[127] Fitzjames Stephen has submitted this formula to a drastic
analysis in _Liberty, Equality, Fraternity_. This book contains also a
refutation of Mill’s essay on _Liberty_.
[128] This tendency was noted by various observers even before the war,
for example, by J. E. C. Bodley in his essay _The Decay of Idealism in
France_ (1912).
[129] If one wishes to measure the wideness of the gap between
President Eliot’s doctrine and that of the Puritans, let him read
together Jonathan Edwards’s sermon on “A divine and supernatural
Light,” a bit of quintessential Puritanism, and “Five American
Contributions to Civilization.”
[130] The passage of the _Antigone_ (vv. 450 ff.) needs to be
associated with the passage of the _Œdipus_ (vv. 863 ff.): “... laws
that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the
father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall
oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them and
groweth not old.”
[131] See ch. IV (“The Rights of Man”) in _The Spirit of the Common
Law_ (1921), by Roscoe Pound. Professor Pound is in sympathy with the
second tendency to which I refer--the tendency towards what he terms
the “socialization of justice.” His point of view is closely related
to that of the German Jhering, who may himself be defined as a sort of
collectivistic Bentham.
[132] “Individuals and families, associations and dependencies were so
much material that the sovereign power consumed for its own purposes.
What the slave was in the hands of his master, the citizen was in the
hands of the community. The most sacred obligations vanished before the
public advantage. The passengers existed for the sake of the ship. By
their disregard for private interests, and for the moral welfare and
improvement of the people, both Greece and Rome destroyed the vital
elements on which the prosperity of nations rests, and perished by the
decay of families and the depopulation of the country. They survive
not in their institutions but in their ideas, and by their ideas,
especially on the art of government, they are--
The dead, but sceptred sovereigns who still rule
Our spirits from their urns.
To them, indeed, may be tracked nearly all the errors that are
undermining political society--communism, utilitarianism, the confusion
between tyranny and authority, and between lawlessness and freedom.”
(Lord Acton: _History of Freedom and Other Essays_, p. 17.)
[133] _Politics_, 1310a. Cf. also _ibid._, 1337a.
[134] See Herbert B. Adams: _Thomas Jefferson and the University of
Virginia_ (1888), especially ch. IX (“The University of Virginia and
Harvard College”). Cf. also letter of Jefferson to George Ticknor, 16
July, 1823. Superficially, Jefferson was friendly to classical study;
his underlying philosophical tendency (of which his encyclopædic
inclusiveness and encouragement of specialization are only symptoms)
was unfavorable to it.
[135] See Appendix B.
[136] _Eth. Nic._, 1166b.
[137] Cf. Confucius: “The moral man, by living a life of simple truth
and earnestness, alone can help to bring peace and order in the world.”
“When the men are there, good government will flourish, but when the
men are gone, good government decays and becomes extinct.”
[138] See his _Moral Principles in Education_, p. 22: “The child is
born with a _natural_ desire to give out, to do, to _serve_.” (My
italics.)
[139] The statement has been made by those who should be in a position
to know that poison gases have recently been invented at least a
thousand times more deadly than any employed during the war.
[140] _The Socialist Movement_, p. 90.
[141] The work of Wilhelm Kahl, _Die Lehre vom Primat des Willens
bei Augustinus, Duns Scotus und Descartes_, is a useful repertory of
material for the whole subject.
[142] See his _De Trinitate_ for this and other subtle psychological
observations on the will.
[143] P. H. Wicksteed has collected passages from Saint Thomas in
illustration of the relation between intellect and will in his
_Reactions between Dogma and Philosophy_, pp. 582-620.
[144] For this struggle between faith and reason during the scholastic
period see _La Philosophie au moyen âge_, par E. Gilson (the point of
view is on the whole that of a scientific intellectual); also _History
of Mediæval Philosophy_, by M. de Wulf (the point of view is Catholic).
[145] According to M. Gilson (_op. cit._, II, pp. 83-84), “Duns Scot
revendique les droits du Dieu chrétien et les défend instinctivement
contre la contamination de la pensée hellénique.” In view of Arabian
influence on Duns Scotus, one may perhaps go further and say that in
his treatment of the will an Asiatic is arrayed against a European
psychology.
[146] M. Gilson, however, disagrees with Kahl as to the nearness of
Descartes’s conception of the divine will to that of Duns Scotus. See
his work, _La Doctrine cartésienne de la liberté et la théologie_, pp.
128-49.
[147] _Op. cit._, ch. III; also p. 210.
[148] _Principes de la philosophie_, Livre I, 9.
[149] _Méditations métaphysiques_, IV (_Du vrai et du faux_).
[150] _Ibid._
[151] See especially his _Lettres à la princesse Elisabeth_.
[152] “... par conséquent il est pour le moins aussi certain que Dieu
... est ou existe, qu’aucune démonstration de géométrie le saurait
être.” (_Discours de la Méthode._)
[153] See _Ethics_, II, Prop. 7, scholium.
[154] “Voluntas et intellectus unum et idem sunt.” (_Ethics_, II, Prop.
49, corollary). In _Ethics_, III, Prop. 9, scholium, a different view
of the will appears; it is there identified with impulse, possibly, as
has been conjectured, under the influence of Hobbes.
[155] I am dealing with the main influence. Certain Cartesians
like Geulincx developed in connection with the doctrine known as
“Occasionalism” a sense of man’s dependence on the divine will that
reminds one of mediæval humility.
[156] La Mettrie, a disciple of the Cartesian Boerhaave, published
_L’Homme-machine_ in 1747.
[157] See _Free Will and Four English Philosophers_ (Hobbes, Locke,
Hume and Mill), by the Reverend Joseph Rickaby, S. J. Father Rickaby
is of course a traditionalist, but makes remarks (see, for example,
p. 205) that are decidedly perspicacious even from a strictly
psychological point of view.
[158] See his _Hume_, ch. X (end).
[159] Schiller wrote satirically of the categorical imperative from
this point of view in his poem _Die Philosophen_ (v. 35 ff.). Elsewhere
(_Werke_, Goedeke Ed., X, p. 101) he opposes to what seems to him the
“Draconian” severity of the Kantian reason, the point of view of the
“beautiful soul.” Kant himself tended at the outset to base ethics
on feeling. About 1770, however, he repudiated Shaftesbury and his
followers on the ground that they were guilty of Epicureanism.
[160] Jacobi has this aspect of the categorical imperative in mind
when he exclaims: “Yes, I am that atheist and godless man who will lie
as dying Desdemona lied; will lie and deceive as Pylades did when he
feigned to be Orestes, will murder as Timoleon did, etc.”
[161] Cf. p. 225. See also _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 370 n., where
I touch on the philosophy of Vaihinger in its relation to the problem
of the imagination.
[162] For Schopenhauer’s attack on the categorical imperative see the
first nine sections of his _Grundlage der moral_. The reconciliation
of liberty with necessity that Huxley ridicules seems to Schopenhauer,
however, to be, along with his “transcendental æsthetics,” Kant’s most
distinguished achievement.
[163] _Neue Paralipomena._ Fouillée seems to have missed the point
seriously when he affirms (_Descartes_, p. 198) that in giving the
primacy to will Schopenhauer continues Descartes. So far as Descartes’s
emphasis on the divine will is genuine, it is a survival of Christian
voluntarism.
[164] See _Hume_, ch. X.
[165] _Works_ (Eversley Ed., IX, p. 11).
[166] _Works_ (Appleton Ed., IX, p. 200).
[167] _Shelburne Essays_, VIII, p. 193 ff.
[168] _Benedetto Croce_, p. 198.
[169] “The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions,
because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of
magically irresponsible spell.” The point of view is related to that of
Schiller when he says (_Werke_, Goedeke Ed., X, p. 327): “Der Mensch
ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.”
[170] For attempts of James to prove free will in this way see _A
Pluralistic Universe_, p. 391 n.; also _Some Problems of Philosophy_,
p. 145.
[171] For an attempt of this kind see J. B. Watson: _Psychology from
the Standpoint of a Behaviorist_ (1919). For a discussion of the whole
tendency see Mary W. Calkins: _The Truly Psychological Behaviorism_
(_Psychological Review_, vol. 28, p. 1-18).
[172] Book I, 4.1; see also _Institutes_, Book I, 2.6. So far as it
refers to one specific transaction, the _lex regia_ is of course a
juristic fiction. The concentration of power in the hands of the
emperor was more gradual.
[173] I have discussed the various meanings that this maxim may have in
the last chapter of _The Masters of Modern French Criticism_.
[174] Perhaps the best known attempt to base a theory of sovereignty on
utility and social expediency is that of John Austin in his _Province
of Jurisprudence Determined_ (1832; 2nd ed., 1861). See especially ch.
VI.
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