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Title: The Mind in the Making
The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform
Author: James Harvey Robinson
Release Date: May, 2005 [EBook #8077]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on June 12, 2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MIND IN THE MAKING ***
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THE MIND IN THE MAKING
The Relation of Intelligence to Social Reform
By JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON
_Author of_ "PETRARCH, THE FIRST MODERN SCHOLAR"
"MEDIAEVAL AND MODERN TIMES"
"THE NEW HISTORY", ETC.
CONTENTS
I
PREFACE
1. ON THE PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME
2. THREE DISAPPOINTED METHODS OF REFORM
II
3. ON VARIOUS KINDS OF THINKING
4. RATIONALIZING
5. HOW CREATIVE THOUGHT TRANSFORMS THE WORLD
III
6. OUR ANIMAL HERITAGE. THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATION
7. OUR SAVAGE MIND
IV
8. BEGINNING OF CRITICAL THINKING
9. INFLUENCE OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
V
10. ORIGIN OF MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION
11. OUR MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE
VI
12. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
13. HOW SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE HAS THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE
VII
14. "THE SICKNESS OF AN ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY"
15. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAFETY AND SANITY
VIII
16. SOME REFLECTIONS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF REPRESSION
17. WHAT OF IT?
APPENDIX
* * * * *
I.
PREFACE
This is an essay--not a treatise--on the most important of all matters
of human concern. Although it has cost its author a great deal more
thought and labor than will be apparent, it falls, in his estimation,
far below the demands of its implacably urgent theme. Each page could
readily be expanded into a volume. It suggests but the beginning of
the beginning now being made to raise men's thinking onto a plain
which may perhaps enable them to fend off or reduce some of the
dangers which lurk on every hand.
J. H. R.
NEW SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH, NEW YORK CITY, _August, 1921._
THE MIND IN THE MAKING
1. ON THE PURPOSE OF THIS VOLUME
If some magical transformation could be produced in men's ways of
looking at themselves and their fellows, no inconsiderable part of the
evils which now afflict society would vanish away or remedy themselves
automatically. If the majority of influential persons held the opinions
and occupied the point of view that a few rather uninfluential people
now do, there would, for instance, be no likelihood of another great
war; the whole problem of "labor and capital" would be transformed and
attenuated; national arrogance, race animosity, political corruption,
and inefficiency would all be reduced below the danger point. As an old
Stoic proverb has it, men are tormented by the opinions they have of
things, rather than by the things themselves. This is eminently true of
many of our worst problems to-day. We have available knowledge and
ingenuity and material resources to make a far fairer world than that
in which we find ourselves, but various obstacles prevent our
intelligently availing ourselves of them. The object of this book is to
substantiate this proposition, to exhibit with entire frankness the
tremendous difficulties that stand in the way of such a beneficent change
of mind, and to point out as clearly as may be some of the measures to be
taken in order to overcome them.
When we contemplate the shocking derangement of human affairs which
now prevails in most civilized countries, including our own, even the
best minds are puzzled and uncertain in their attempts to grasp the
situation. The world seems to demand a moral and economic regeneration
which it is dangerous to postpone, but as yet impossible to imagine,
let alone direct. The preliminary intellectual regeneration which
would put our leaders in a position to determine and control the
course of affairs has not taken place. We have unprecedented conditions
to deal with and novel adjustments to make--there can be no doubt of that.
We also have a great stock of scientific knowledge unknown to our
grandfathers with which to operate. So novel are the conditions, so
copious the knowledge, that we must undertake the arduous task of
reconsidering a great part of the opinions about man and his relations
to his fellow-men which have been handed down to us by previous
generations who lived in far other conditions and possessed far less
information about the world and themselves. We have, however, first to
create an _unprecedented attitude of mind to cope with unprecedented
conditions, and to utilize unprecedented knowledge_ This is the
preliminary, and most difficult, step to be taken--far more difficult
than one would suspect who fails to realize that in order to take it we
must overcome inveterate natural tendencies and artificial habits of long
standing. How are we to put ourselves in a position to come to think of
things that we not only never thought of before, but are most reluctant
to question? In short, how are we to rid ourselves of our fond prejudices
and _open our minds_?
As a historical student who for a good many years has been especially
engaged in inquiring how man happens to have the ideas and convictions
about himself and human relations which now prevail, the writer has
reached the conclusion that history can at least shed a great deal of
light on our present predicaments and confusion. I do not mean by
history that conventional chronicle of remote and irrelevant events
which embittered the youthful years of many of us, but rather a study
of how man has come to be as he is and to believe as he does.
No historian has so far been able to make the whole story very plain
or popular, but a number of considerations are obvious enough, and it
ought not to be impossible some day to popularize them. I venture to
think that if certain seemingly indisputable historical facts were
generally known and accepted and permitted to play a daily part in our
thought, the world would forthwith become a very different place from
what it now is. We could then neither delude ourselves in the
simple-minded way we now do, nor could we take advantage of the
primitive ignorance of others. All our discussions of social,
industrial, and political reform would be raised to a higher plane of
insight and fruitfulness.
In one of those brilliant divagations with which Mr. H. G. Wells is
wont to enrich his novels he says:
When the intellectual history of this time comes to be written,
nothing, I think, will stand out more strikingly than the empty
gulf in quality between the superb and richly fruitful scientific
investigations that are going on, and the general thought of other
educated sections of the community. I do not mean that scientific
men are, as a whole, a class of supermen, dealing with and thinking
about everything in a way altogether better than the common run of
humanity, but in their field they think and work with an intensity,
an integrity, a breadth, boldness, patience, thoroughness, and
faithfulness--excepting only a few artists--which puts their work
out of all comparison with any other human activity.... In these
particular directions the human mind has achieved a new and higher
quality of attitude and gesture, a veracity, a self-detachment,
and self-abnegating vigor of criticism that tend to spread out and
must ultimately spread out to every other human affair.
No one who is even most superficially acquainted with the achievements
of students of nature during the past few centuries can fail to see
that their thought has been astoundingly effective in constantly adding
to our knowledge of the universe, from the hugest nebula to the tiniest
atom; moreover, this knowledge has been so applied as to well-nigh
revolutionize human affairs, and both the knowledge and its applications
appear to be no more than hopeful beginnings, with indefinite revelations
ahead, if only the same kind of thought be continued in the same patient
and scrupulous manner.
But the knowledge of man, of the springs of his conduct, of his
relation to his fellow-men singly or in groups, and the felicitous
regulation of human intercourse in the interest of harmony and
fairness, have made no such advance. Aristotle's treatises on
astronomy and physics, and his notions of "generation and decay" and
of chemical processes, have long gone by the board, but his politics
and ethics are still revered. Does this mean that his penetration in
the sciences of man exceeded so greatly his grasp of natural science,
or does it mean that the progress of mankind in the scientific
knowledge and regulation of human affairs has remained almost
stationary for over two thousand years? I think that we may safely
conclude that the latter is the case.
It has required three centuries of scientific thought and of subtle
inventions for its promotion to enable a modern chemist or physicist
to center his attention on electrons and their relation to the
mysterious nucleus of the atom, or to permit an embryologist to study
the early stirrings of the fertilized egg. As yet relatively little of
the same kind of thought has been brought to bear on human affairs.
When we compare the discussions in the United States Senate in regard
to the League of Nations with the consideration of a broken-down car
in a roadside garage the contrast is shocking. The rural mechanic
thinks scientifically; his only aim is to avail himself of his
knowledge of the nature and workings of the car, with a view to making
it run once more. The Senator, on the other hand, appears too often to
have little idea of the nature and workings of nations, and he relies
on rhetoric and appeals to vague fears and hopes or mere partisan
animosity. The scientists have been busy for a century in revolutionizing
the _practical_ relation of nations. The ocean is no longer a barrier,
as it was in Washington's day, but to all intents and purposes a smooth
avenue closely connecting, rather than safely separating, the eastern
and western continents. The Senator will nevertheless unblushingly appeal
to policies of a century back, suitable, mayhap, in their day, but now
become a warning rather than a guide. The garage man, on the contrary,
takes his mechanism as he finds it, and does not allow any mystic respect
for the earlier forms of the gas engine to interfere with the needed
adjustments.
Those who have dealt with natural phenomena, as distinguished from
purely human concerns, did not, however, quickly or easily gain
popular approbation and respect. The process of emancipating natural
science from current prejudices, both of the learned and of the
unlearned, has been long and painful, and is not wholly completed yet.
If we go back to the opening of the seventeenth century we find three
men whose business it was, above all, to present and defend common
sense in the natural sciences. The most eloquent and variedly
persuasive of these was Lord Bacon. Then there was the young Descartes
trying to shake himself loose from his training in a Jesuit seminary
by going into the Thirty Years' War, and starting his intellectual
life all over by giving up for the moment all he had been taught.
Galileo had committed an offense of a grave character by discussing in
the mother tongue the problems of physics. In his old age he was
imprisoned and sentenced to repeat the seven penitential psalms for
differing from Aristotle and Moses and the teachings of the theologians.
On hearing Galileo's fate. Descartes burned a book he had written, _On
The World_, lest he, too, get into trouble.
From that time down to the days of Huxley and John Fiske the struggle
has continued, and still continues--the Three Hundred Years' War for
intellectual freedom in dealing with natural phenomena. It has been a
conflict against ignorance, tradition, and vested interests in church
and university, with all that preposterous invective and cruel
misrepresentation which characterize the fight against new and
critical ideas. Those who cried out against scientific discoveries did
so in the name of God, of man's dignity, and of holy religion and
morality. Finally, however, it has come about that our instruction in
the natural sciences is tolerably free; although there are still large
bodies of organized religious believers who are hotly opposed to some
of the more fundamental findings of biology. Hundreds of thousands of
readers can be found for Pastor Russell's exegesis of Ezekiel and the
Apocalypse to hundreds who read Conklin's _Heredity and Environment_
or Slosson's _Creative Chemistry_. No publisher would accept a
historical textbook based on an explicit statement of the knowledge we
now have of man's animal ancestry. In general, however, our scientific
men carry on their work and report their results with little or no
effective hostility on the part of the clergy or the schools. The
social body has become tolerant of their virus.
This is not the case, however, with the social sciences. One cannot
but feel a little queasy when he uses the expression "social science",
because it seems as if we had not as yet got anywhere near a real
science of man. I mean by social science our feeble efforts to study
man, his natural equipment and impulses, and his relations to his
fellows in the light of his origin and the history of the race.
This enterprise has hitherto been opposed by a large number of
obstacles essentially more hampering and far more numerous than those
which for three hundred years hindered the advance of the natural
sciences. Human affairs are in themselves far more intricate and
perplexing than molecules and chromosomes. But this is only the more
reason for bringing to bear on human affairs that critical type of
thought and calculation for which the remunerative thought about
molecules and chromosomes has prepared the way.
I do not for a moment suggest that we can use precisely the same kind
of thinking in dealing with the quandaries of mankind that we use in
problems of chemical reaction and mechanical adjustment. Exact
scientific results, such as might be formulated in mechanics, are, of
course, out of the question. It would be unscientific to expect to
apply them. I am not advocating any particular method of treating
human affairs, but rather such a _general frame of mind, such a
critical open-minded attitude_, as has hitherto been but sparsely
developed among those who aspire to be men's guides, whether
religious, political, economic, or academic. Most human progress has
been, as Wells expresses it, a mere "muddling through". It has been
man's wont to explain and sanctify his ways, with little regard to
their fundamental and permanent expediency. An arresting example of
what this muddling may mean we have seen during these recent years in
the slaying or maiming of fifteen million of our young men, resulting
in incalculable loss, continued disorder, and bewilderment. Yet men
seem blindly driven to defend and perpetuate the conditions which
produced the last disaster.
Unless we wish to see a recurrence of this or some similar calamity,
we must, as I have already suggested, create a new and unprecedented
attitude of mind to meet the new and unprecedented conditions which
confront us. _We should proceed to the thorough reconstruction of our
mind, with a view to understanding actual human conduct and
organization_. We must examine the facts freshly, critically, and
dispassionately, and then allow our philosophy to formulate itself as
a result of this examination, instead of permitting our observations
to be distorted by archaic philosophy, political economy, and ethics.
As it is, we are taught our philosophy first, and in its light we try
to justify the facts. We must reverse this process, as did those who
began the great work in experimental science; we must first face the
facts, and patiently await the emergence of a new philosophy.
A willingness to examine the very foundations of society does not mean
a desire to encourage or engage in any hasty readjustment, but certainly
no wise or needed readjustment _can_ be made unless such an examination
is undertaken.
I come back, then, to my original point that in this examination of
existing facts history, by revealing the origin of many of our current
fundamental beliefs, will tend to free our minds so as to permit
honest thinking. Also, that the historical facts which I propose to
recall would, if permitted to play a constant part in our thinking,
automatically eliminate a very considerable portion of the gross
stupidity and blindness which characterize our present thought and
conduct in public affairs, and would contribute greatly to developing
the needed scientific attitude toward human concerns--in other words,
to _bringing the mind up to date_.
2. THREE DISAPPOINTED METHODS OF REFORM
Plans for social betterment and the cure of public ills have in the
past taken three general forms: (I) changes in the rules of the game,
(II) spiritual exhortation, and (III) education. Had all these not
largely failed, the world would not be in the plight in which it now
confessedly is.
I. Many reformers concede that they are suspicious of what they call
"ideas". They are confident that our troubles result from defective
organization, which should be remedied by more expedient legislation
and wise ordinances. Abuses should be abolished or checked by
forbidding them, or by some ingenious reordering of procedure.
Responsibility should be concentrated or dispersed. The term of office
of government officials should be lengthened or shortened; the number
of members in governing bodies should be increased or decreased; there
should be direct primaries, referendum, recall, government by
commission; powers should be shifted here and there with a hope of
meeting obvious mischances all too familiar in the past. In industry
and education administrative reform is constantly going on, with the
hope of reducing friction and increasing efficiency. The House of
Commons not long ago came to new terms with the peers. The League of
Nations has already had to adjust the functions and influence of the
Council and the Assembly, respectively.
No one will question that organization is absolutely essential in
human affairs, but reorganization, while it sometimes produces
assignable benefit, often fails to meet existing evils, and not
uncommonly engenders new and unexpected ones. Our confidence in
restriction and regimentation is exaggerated. What we usually need is
a _change of attitude_, and without this our new regulations often
leave the old situation unaltered. So long as we allow our government
to be run by politicians and business lobbies it makes little
difference how many aldermen or assemblymen we have or how long the
mayor or governor holds office. In a university the fundamental drift
of affairs cannot be greatly modified by creating a new dean, or a
university council, or by enhancing or decreasing the nominal
authority of the president or faculty. We now turn to the second
sanctified method of reform, moral uplift.
II. Those who are impatient with mere administrative reform, or who
lack faith in it, declare that what we need is brotherly love.
Thousands of pulpits admonish us to remember that we are all children
of one Heavenly Father and that we should bear one another's burdens
with fraternal patience. Capital is too selfish; Labor is bent on its
own narrow interests regardless of the risks Capital takes. We are all
dependent on one another, and a recognition of this should beget
mutual forbearance and glad co-operation. Let us forget ourselves in
others. "Little children, love one another."
The fatherhood of God has been preached by Christians for over
eighteen centuries, and the brotherhood of man by the Stoics long
before them. The doctrine has proved compatible with slavery and
serfdom, with wars blessed, and not infrequently instigated, by
religious leaders, and with industrial oppression which it requires a
brave clergyman or teacher to denounce to-day. True, we sometimes have
moments of sympathy when our fellow-creatures become objects of tender
solicitude. Some rare souls may honestly flatter themselves that they
love mankind in general, but it would surely be a very rare soul
indeed who dared profess that he loved his personal enemies--much less
the enemies of his country or institutions. We still worship a tribal
god, and the "foe" is not to be reckoned among his children. Suspicion
and hate are much more congenial to our natures than love, for very
obvious reasons in this world of rivalry and common failure. There is,
beyond doubt, a natural kindliness in mankind which will show itself
under favorable auspices. But experience would seem to teach that it
is little promoted by moral exhortation. This is the only point that
need be urged here. Whether there is another way of forwarding the
brotherhood of man will be considered in the sequel.
III. One disappointed in the effects of mere reorganization, and
distrusting the power of moral exhortation, will urge that what we
need above all is _education_. It is quite true that what we need is
education, but something so different from what now passes as such
that it needs a new name.
Education has more various aims than we usually recognize, and should
of course be judged in relation to the importance of its several
intentions, and of its success in gaining them. The arts of reading
and writing and figuring all would concede are basal in a world of
newspapers and business. Then there is technical information and the
training that prepares one to earn a livelihood in some more or less
standardized guild or profession. Both these aims are reached fairly
well by our present educational system, subject to various economies
and improvements in detail. Then there are the studies which it is
assumed contribute to general culture and to "training the mind", with
the hope of cultivating our tastes, stimulating the imagination, and
mayhap improving our reasoning powers.
This branch of education is regarded by the few as very precious and
indispensable; by the many as at best an amenity which has little
relation to the real purposes and success of life. It is highly
traditional and retrospective in the main, concerned with ancient
tongues, old and revered books, higher mathematics, somewhat archaic
philosophy and history, and the fruitless form of logic which has
until recently been prized as man's best guide in the fastnesses of
error. To these has been added in recent decades a choice of the
various branches of natural science.
The results, however, of our present scheme of liberal education are
disappointing. One who, like myself, firmly agrees with its objects
and is personally so addicted to old books, so pleased with such
knowledge as he has of the ancient and modern languages, so envious of
those who can think mathematically, and so interested in natural
science--such a person must resent the fact that those who have had a
liberal education rarely care for old books, rarely read for pleasure
any foreign language, think mathematically, love philosophy or
history, or care for the beasts, birds, plants, and rocks with any
intelligent insight, or even real curiosity. This arouses the
suspicion that our so-called "liberal education" miscarries and does
not attain its ostensible aims.
The three educational aims enumerated above have one thing in common.
They are all directed toward an enhancement of the chances of
_personal_ worldly success, or to the increase of our _personal_
culture and intellectual and literary enjoyment. Their purpose is not
primarily to fit us to play a part in social or political betterment.
But of late a fourth element has been added to the older ambitions,
namely the hope of preparing boys and girls to become intelligent
voters. This need has been forced upon us by the coming of political
democracy, which makes one person's vote exactly as good as another's.
Now education for citizenship would seem to consist in gaining a
knowledge of the actual workings of our social organization, with some
illuminating notions of its origin, together with a full realization
of its defects and their apparent sources. But here we encounter an
obstacle that is unimportant in the older types of education, but
which may prove altogether fatal to any good results in our efforts to
make better citizens. Subjects of instruction like reading and
writing, mathematics, Latin and Greek, chemistry and physics, medicine
and the law are fairly well standardized and retrospective. Doubtless
there is a good deal of internal change in method and content going
on, but this takes place unobtrusively and does not attract the
attention of outside critics. Political and social questions, on the
other hand, and matters relating to prevailing business methods, race
animosities, public elections, and governmental policy are, if they
are vital, necessarily "controversial". School boards and
superintendents, trustees and presidents of colleges and universities,
are sensitive to this fact. They eagerly deprecate in their public
manifestos any suspicion that pupils and students are being awakened
in any way to the truth that our institutions can possibly be
fundamentally defective, or that the present generation of citizens
has not conducted our affairs with exemplary success, guided by the
immutable principles of justice.
How indeed can a teacher be expected to explain to the sons and
daughters of businessmen, politicians, doctors, lawyers, and
clergymen--all pledged to the maintenance of the sources of their
livelihood--the actual nature of business enterprise as now practiced,
the prevailing methods of legislative bodies and courts, and the
conduct of foreign affairs? Think of a teacher in the public schools
recounting the more illuminating facts about the municipal government
under which he lives, with due attention to graft and jobs! So,
courses in government, political economy, sociology, and ethics
confine themselves to inoffensive generalizations, harmless details of
organization, and the commonplaces of routine morality, for only in
that way can they escape being controversial. Teachers are rarely able
or inclined to explain our social life and its presuppositions with
sufficient insight and honesty to produce any very important results.
Even if they are tempted to tell the essential facts they dare not do
so, for fear of losing their places, amid the applause of all the
righteously minded.
However we may feel on this important matter, we must all agree that
the aim of education for citizenship as now conceived is a preparation
for the same old citizenship which has so far failed to eliminate the
shocking hazards and crying injustices of our social and political
life. For we sedulously inculcate in the coming generation exactly the
same illusions and the same ill-placed confidence in existing
institutions and prevailing notions that have brought the world to the
pass in which we find it. Since we do all we can to corroborate the
beneficence of what we have, we can hardly hope to raise up a more
intelligent generation bent on achieving what we have not. We all know
this to be true; it has been forcibly impressed on our minds of late.
Most of us agree that it is right and best that it should be so; some
of us do not like to think about it at all, but a few will be glad to
spend a little time weighing certain suggestions in this volume which
may indicate a way out of this _impasse_.[1]
We have now considered briefly the three main hopes that have been
hitherto entertained of bettering things (I) by changing the rules of
the game, (II) by urging men to be good, and to love their neighbor as
themselves, and (III) by education for citizenship. It may be that
these hopes are not wholly unfounded, but it must be admitted that so
far they have been grievously disappointed. Doubtless they will
continue to be cherished on account of their assured respectability.
Mere lack of success does not discredit a method, for there are many
things that determine and perpetuate our sanctified ways of doing
things besides their success in reaching their proposed ends. Had this
not always been so, our life to-day would be far less stupidly
conducted than it is. But let us agree to assume for the moment that
the approved schemes of reform enumerated above have, to say the
least, shown themselves inadequate to meet the crisis in which
civilized society now finds itself. Have we any other hope?
Yes, there is Intelligence. That is as yet an untested hope in its
application to the regulation of human relations. It is not
discredited because it has not been tried on any large scale outside
the realm of natural science. There, everyone will confess, it has
produced marvelous results. Employed in regard to stars, rocks,
plants, and animals, and in the investigation of mechanical and
chemical processes, it has completely revolutionized men's notions of
the world in which they live, and of its inhabitants, _with the
notable exception of man himself_. These discoveries have been used to
change our habits and to supply us with everyday necessities which a
hundred years ago were not dreamed of as luxuries accessible even to
kings and millionaires.
But most of us know too little of the past to realize the penalty that
had to be paid for this application of intelligence. In order that
these discoveries should be made and ingeniously applied to the
conveniences of life, _it was necessary to discard practically all the
consecrated notions of the world and its workings which had been held
by the best and wisest and purest of mankind down to three hundred
years ago_--indeed, until much more recently. Intelligence, in a
creature of routine like man and in a universe so ill understood as
ours, must often break valiantly with the past in order to get ahead.
It would be pleasant to assume that all we had to do was to build on
well-designed foundations, firmly laid by the wisdom of the ages. But
those who have studied the history of natural science would agree that
Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes found no such foundation, but had to
begin their construction from the ground up.
The several hopes of reform mentioned above all assume that the now
generally accepted notions of righteous human conduct are not to be
questioned. Our churches and universities defend this assumption. Our
editors and lawyers and the more vocal of our business men adhere to
it. Even those who pretend to study society and its origin seem often
to believe that our present ideals and standards of property, the
state, industrial organization, the relations of the sexes, and
education are practically final and must necessarily be the basis of
any possible betterment in detail. But if this be so Intelligence has
already done its perfect work, and we can only lament that the outcome
in the way of peace, decency, and fairness, judged even by existing
standards, has been so disappointing.
There are, of course, a few here and there who suspect and even
repudiate current ideals and standards. But at present their
resentment against existing evils takes the form of more or less
dogmatic plans of reconstruction, like those of the socialists and
communists, or exhausts itself in the vague protest and faultfinding
of the average "Intellectual". Neither the socialist nor the common
run of Intellectual appears to me to be on the right track. The former
is more precise in his doctrines and confident in his prophecies than
a scientific examination of mankind and its ways would at all justify;
the other, more indefinite than he need be.
If Intelligence is to have the freedom of action necessary to
accumulate new and valuable knowledge about man's nature and
possibilities which may ultimately be applied to reforming our ways,
it must loose itself from the bonds that now confine it. The primeval
curse still holds: "Of every tree in the garden thou mayest freely
eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not
eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely
die." Few people confess that they are afraid of knowledge, but the
university presidents, ministers, and editors who most often and
publicly laud what they are wont to call "the fearless pursuit of
truth", feel compelled, in the interest of public morals and order, to
discourage any reckless indulgence in the fruit of the forbidden tree,
for the inexperienced may select an unripe apple and suffer from the
colic in consequence. "Just look at Russia!" Better always, instead of
taking the risk on what the church calls "science falsely so called",
fall back on ignorance rightly so called. No one denies that
Intelligence is the light of the world and the chief glory of man,
but, as Bertrand Russell says, we dread its indifference to
respectable opinions and what we deem the well-tried wisdom of the
ages. "It is," as he truly says, "fear that holds men back; fear that
their cherished beliefs should prove harmful, fear lest they
themselves should prove less worthy of respect than they have supposed
themselves to be. 'Should the workingman think freely about property?
What then will become of us, the rich? Should young men and women
think freely about sex? What then will become of morality? Should
soldiers think freely about war? What then will become of military
discipline?'"
This fear is natural and inevitable, but it is none the less dangerous
and discreditable. Human arrangements are no longer so foolproof as
they may once have been when the world moved far more slowly than it
now does. It should therefore be a good deed to remove or lighten any
of the various restraints on thought. I believe that there is an easy
and relatively painless way in which our respect for the past can be
lessened so that we shall no longer feel compelled to take the wisdom
of the ages as the basis of our reforms. My own confidence in what
President Butler calls "the findings of mankind" is gone, and the
process by which it was lost will become obvious as we proceed. I have
no reforms to recommend, except the liberation of Intelligence, which
is the first and most essential one. I propose to review by way of
introduction some of the new ideas which have been emerging during the
past few years in regard to our minds and their operations. Then we
shall proceed to the main theme of the book, a sketch of the manner in
which our human intelligence appears to have come about. If anyone
will follow the story with a fair degree of sympathy and patience he
may, by merely putting together well-substantiated facts, many of
which he doubtless knows in other connections, hope better to
understand the perilous quandary in which mankind is now placed and
the ways of escape that offer themselves.
NOTES.
[1] George Bernard Shaw reaches a similar conclusion when he
contemplates education in the British Isles. "We must teach
citizenship and political science at school. But must we? There is no
must about it, the hard fact being that we must not teach political
science or citizenship at school. The schoolmaster who attempted it
would soon find himself penniless in the streets without pupils, if
not in the dock pleading to a pompously worded indictment for sedition
against the exploiters. Our schools teach the morality of feudalism
corrupted by commercialism, and hold up the military conqueror, the
robber baron, and the profiteer, as models of the illustrious and
successful."--_Back to Methuselah_, xii.
* * * * *
II
Good sense is, of all things among men, the most equally distributed;
for everyone thinks himself so abundantly provided with it that those
even who are the most difficult to satisfy in everything else do not
usually desire a larger measure of this quality than they already
possess.--DESCARTES.
We see man to-day, instead of the frank and courageous recognition of
his status, the docile attention to his biological history, the
determination to let nothing stand in the way of the security and
permanence of his future, which alone can establish the safety and
happiness of the race, substituting blind confidence in his destiny,
unclouded faith in the essentially respectful attitude of the universe
toward his moral code, and a belief no less firm that his traditions
and laws and institutions necessarily contain permanent qualities of
reality.--WILLIAM TROTTER.
3. ON VARIOUS KINDS OF THINKING
The truest and most profound observations on Intelligence have in the
past been made by the poets and, in recent times, by story-writers.
They have been keen observers and recorders and reckoned freely with
the emotions and sentiments. Most philosophers, on the other hand,
have exhibited a grotesque ignorance of man's life and have built up
systems that are elaborate and imposing, but quite unrelated to actual
human affairs. They have almost consistently neglected the actual
process of thought and have set the mind off as something apart to be
studied by itself. _But no such mind, exempt from bodily processes,
animal impulses, savage traditions, infantile impressions, conventional
reactions, and traditional knowledge, ever existed_, even in the case
of the most abstract of metaphysicians. Kant entitled his great work
_A Critique of Pure Reason_. But to the modern student of mind pure
reason seems as mythical as the pure gold, transparent as glass, with
which the celestial city is paved.
Formerly philosophers thought of mind as having to do exclusively with
conscious thought. It was that within man which perceived, remembered,
judged, reasoned, understood, believed, willed. But of late it has
been shown that we are unaware of a great part of what we perceive,
remember, will, and infer; and that a great part of the thinking of
which we are aware is determined by that of which we are not conscious.
It has indeed been demonstrated that our unconscious psychic life far
outruns our conscious. This seems perfectly natural to anyone who
considers the following facts:
The sharp distinction between the mind and the body is, as we shall
find, a very ancient and spontaneous uncritical savage prepossession.
What we think of as "mind" is so intimately associated with what we
call "body" that we are coming to realize that the one cannot be
understood without the other. Every thought reverberates through the
body, and, on the other hand, alterations in our physical condition
affect our whole attitude of mind. The insufficient elimination of the
foul and decaying products of digestion may plunge us into deep
melancholy, whereas a few whiffs of nitrous monoxide may exalt us to
the seventh heaven of supernal knowledge and godlike complacency. And
vice versa, a sudden word or thought may cause our heart to jump,
check our breathing, or make our knees as water. There is a whole new
literature growing up which studies the effects of our bodily
secretions and our muscular tensions and their relation to our
emotions and our thinking.
Then there are hidden impulses and desires and secret longings of
which we can only with the greatest difficulty take account. They
influence our conscious thought in the most bewildering fashion. Many
of these unconscious influences appear to originate in our very early
years. The older philosophers seem to have forgotten that even they
were infants and children at their most impressionable age and never
could by any possibility get over it.
The term "unconscious", now so familiar to all readers of modern works
on psychology, gives offense to some adherents of the past. There
should, however, be no special mystery about it. It is not a new
animistic abstraction, but simply a collective word to include all the
physiological changes which escape our notice, all the forgotten
experiences and impressions of the past which continue to influence
our desires and reflections and conduct, even if we cannot remember
them. What we can remember at any time is indeed an infinitesimal part
of what has happened to us. We could not remember anything unless we
forgot almost everything. As Bergson says, the brain is the organ of
forgetfulness as well as of memory. Moreover, we tend, of course, to
become oblivious to things to which we are thoroughly accustomed, for
habit blinds us to their existence. So the forgotten and the habitual
make up a great part of the so-called "unconscious".
If we are ever to understand man, his conduct and reasoning, and if we
aspire to learn to guide his life and his relations with his fellows
more happily than heretofore, we cannot neglect the great discoveries
briefly noted above. We must reconcile ourselves to novel and
revolutionary conceptions of the mind, for it is clear that the older
philosophers, whose works still determine our current views, had a
very superficial notion of the subject with which they dealt. But for
our purposes, with due regard to what has just been said and to much
that has necessarily been left unsaid (and with the indulgence of
those who will at first be inclined to dissent), _we shall consider
mind chiefly as conscious knowledge and intelligence, as what we know
and our attitude toward it--our disposition to increase our
information, classify it, criticize it and apply it_.
We do not think enough about thinking, and much of our confusion is
the result of current illusions in regard to it. Let us forget for the
moment any impressions we may have derived from the philosophers, and
see what seems to happen in ourselves. The first thing that we notice
is that our thought moves with such incredible rapidity that it is
almost impossible to arrest any specimen of it long enough to have a
look at it. When we are offered a penny for our thoughts we always
find that we have recently had so many things in mind that we can
easily make a selection which will not compromise us too nakedly. On
inspection we shall find that even if we are not downright ashamed of
a great part of our spontaneous thinking it is far too intimate,
personal, ignoble or trivial to permit us to reveal more than a small
part of it. I believe this must be true of everyone. We do not, of
course, know what goes on in other people's heads. They tell us very
little and we tell them very little. The spigot of speech, rarely
fully opened, could never emit more than driblets of the ever renewed
hogshead of thought--_noch grösser wie's Heidelberger Fass_. We
find it hard to believe that other people's thoughts are as silly as
our own, but they probably are.
We all appear to ourselves to be thinking all the time during our
waking hours, and most of us are aware that we go on thinking while we
are asleep, even more foolishly than when awake. When uninterrupted by
some practical issue we are engaged in what is now known as a _reverie_.
This is our spontaneous and favorite kind of thinking. We allow our
ideas to take their own course and this course is determined by our
hopes and fears, our spontaneous desires, their fulfillment or
frustration; by our likes and dislikes, our loves and hates and
resentments. There is nothing else anything like so interesting to
ourselves as ourselves. All thought that is not more or less
laboriously controlled and directed will inevitably circle about the
beloved Ego. It is amusing and pathetic to observe this tendency in
ourselves and in others. We learn politely and generously to overlook
this truth, but if we dare to think of it, it blazes forth like the
noontide sun.
The reverie or "free association of ideas" has of late become the
subject of scientific research. While investigators are not yet agreed
on the results, or at least on the proper interpretation to be given
to them, there can be no doubt that our reveries form the chief index
to our fundamental character. They are a reflection of our nature as
modified by often hidden and forgotten experiences. We need not go
into the matter further here, for it is only necessary to observe that
the reverie is at all times a potent and in many cases an omnipotent
rival to every other kind of thinking. It doubtless influences all our
speculations in its persistent tendency to self-magnification and
self-justification, which are its chief preoccupations, but it is the
last thing to make directly or indirectly for honest increase of
knowledge.[2] Philosophers usually talk as if such thinking did not
exist or were in some way negligible. This is what makes their
speculations so unreal and often worthless. The reverie, as any of us
can see for himself, is frequently broken and interrupted by the
necessity of a second kind of thinking. We have to make practical
decisions. Shall we write a letter or no? Shall we take the subway or
a bus? Shall we have dinner at seven or half past? Shall we buy U. S.
Rubber or a Liberty Bond? Decisions are easily distinguishable from
the free flow of the reverie. Sometimes they demand a good deal of
careful pondering and the recollection of pertinent facts; often,
however, they are made impulsively. They are a more difficult and
laborious thing than the reverie, and we resent having to "make up our
mind" when we are tired, or absorbed in a congenial reverie. Weighing
a decision, it should be noted, does not necessarily add anything to
our knowledge, although we may, of course, seek further information
before making it.
4. RATIONALIZING
A third kind of thinking is stimulated when anyone questions our
belief and opinions. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds
without any resistance or heavy emotion, but if we are told that we
are wrong we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are
incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find
ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes
to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas
themselves that are dear to us, but our self-esteem, which is
threatened. We are by nature stubbornly pledged to defend our own from
attack, whether it be our person, our family, our property, or our
opinion. A United States Senator once remarked to a friend of mine
that God Almighty could not make him change his mind on our
Latin-America policy. We may surrender, but rarely confess ourselves
vanquished. In the intellectual world at least peace is without
victory.
Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished
convictions; indeed, we have a natural repugnance to so doing. We like
to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true,
and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our
assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to
them. _The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in
finding arguments for going on believing as we already do_.
I remember years ago attending a public dinner to which the Governor
of the state was bidden. The chairman explained that His Excellency
could not be present for certain "good" reasons; what the "real"
reasons were the presiding officer said he would leave us to
conjecture. This distinction between "good" and "real" reasons is one
of the most clarifying and essential in the whole realm of thought. We
can readily give what seem to us "good" reasons for being a Catholic
or a Mason, a Republican or a Democrat, an adherent or opponent of the
League of Nations. But the "real" reasons are usually on quite a
different plane. Of course the importance of this distinction is
popularly, if somewhat obscurely, recognized. The Baptist missionary
is ready enough to see that the Buddhist is not such because his
doctrines would bear careful inspection, but because he happened to be
born in a Buddhist family in Tokio. But it would be treason to his
faith to acknowledge that his own partiality for certain doctrines is
due to the fact that his mother was a member of the First Baptist
church of Oak Ridge. A savage can give all sorts of reasons for his
belief that it is dangerous to step on a man's shadow, and a newspaper
editor can advance plenty of arguments against the Bolsheviki. But
neither of them may realize why he happens to be defending his
particular opinion.
The "real" reasons for our beliefs are concealed from ourselves as
well as from others. As we grow up we simply adopt the ideas presented
to us in regard to such matters as religion, family relations,
property, business, our country, and the state. We unconsciously
absorb them from our environment. They are persistently whispered in
our ear by the group in which we happen to live. Moreover, as Mr.
Trotter has pointed out, these judgments, being the product of
suggestion and not of reasoning, have the quality of perfect
obviousness, so that to question them
... is to the believer to carry skepticism to an insane degree, and
will be met by contempt, disapproval, or condemnation, according to
the nature of the belief in question. When, therefore, we find
ourselves entertaining an opinion about the basis of which there is
a quality of feeling which tells us that to inquire into it would be
absurd, obviously unnecessary, unprofitable, undesirable, bad form,
or wicked, we may know that that opinion is a nonrational one, and
probably, therefore, founded upon inadequate evidence.[3]
Opinions, on the other hand, which are the result of experience or of
honest reasoning do not have this quality of "primary certitude". I
remember when as a youth I heard a group of business men discussing
the question of the immortality of the soul, I was outraged by the
sentiment of doubt expressed by one of the party. As I look back now I
see that I had at the time no interest in the matter, and certainly no
least argument to urge in favor of the belief in which I had been
reared. But neither my personal indifference to the issue, nor the
fact that I had previously given it no attention, served to prevent an
angry resentment when I heard _my_ ideas questioned.
This spontaneous and loyal support of our preconceptions--this process
of finding "good" reasons to justify our routine beliefs--is known to
modern psychologists as "rationalizing"--clearly only a new name for a
very ancient thing. Our "good" reasons ordinarily have no value in
promoting honest enlightenment, because, no matter how solemnly they
may be marshaled, they are at bottom the result of personal preference
or prejudice, and not of an honest desire to seek or accept new
knowledge.
In our reveries we are frequently engaged in self-justification, for
we cannot bear to think ourselves wrong, and yet have constant
illustrations of our weaknesses and mistakes. So we spend much time
finding fault with circumstances and the conduct of others, and
shifting on to them with great ingenuity the on us of our own failures
and disappointments. _Rationalizing is the self-exculpation which
occurs when we feel ourselves, or our group, accused of
misapprehension or error._
The little word _my_ is the most important one in all human affairs,
and properly to reckon with it is the beginning of wisdom. It has the
same force whether it is _my_ dinner, _my_ dog, and _my_ house,
or _my_ faith, _my_ country, and _my God_. We not only resent the
imputation that our watch is wrong, or our car shabby, but that our
conception of the canals of Mars, of the pronunciation of "Epictetus",
of the medicinal value of salicine, or the date of Sargon I, are
subject to revision.
Philosophers, scholars, and men of science exhibit a common
sensitiveness in all decisions in which their _amour propre_ is
involved. Thousands of argumentative works have been written to vent a
grudge. However stately their reasoning, it may be nothing but
rationalizing, stimulated by the most commonplace of all motives.
A history of philosophy and theology could be written in terms of
grouches, wounded pride, and aversions, and it would be far more
instructive than the usual treatments of these themes. Sometimes,
under Providence, the lowly impulse of resentment leads to great
achievements. Milton wrote his treatise on divorce as a result of his
troubles with his seventeen-year-old wife, and when he was accused of
being the leading spirit in a new sect, the Divorcers, he wrote his
noble _Areopagitica_ to prove his right to say what he thought fit,
and incidentally to establish the advantage of a free press in the
promotion of Truth.
All mankind, high and low, thinks in all the ways which have been
described. The reverie goes on all the time not only in the mind of
the mill hand and the Broadway flapper, but equally in weighty judges
and godly bishops. It has gone on in all the philosophers, scientists,
poets, and theologians that have ever lived. Aristotle's most abstruse
speculations were doubtless tempered by highly irrelevant reflections.
He is reported to have had very thin legs and small eyes, for which he
doubtless had to find excuses, and he was wont to indulge in very
conspicuous dress and rings and was accustomed to arrange his hair
carefully.[4] Diogenes the Cynic exhibited the impudence of a touchy
soul. His tub was his distinction. Tennyson in beginning his "Maud"
could not forget his chagrin over losing his patrimony years before as
the result of an unhappy investment in the Patent Decorative Carving
Company. These facts are not recalled here as a gratuitous
disparagement of the truly great, but to insure a full realization of
the tremendous competition which all really exacting thought has to
face, even in the minds of the most highly endowed mortals.
And now the astonishing and perturbing suspicion emerges that perhaps
almost all that had passed for social science, political economy,
politics, and ethics in the past may be brushed aside by future
generations as mainly rationalizing. John Dewey has already reached
this conclusion in regard to philosophy.[5] Veblen[6] and other
writers have revealed the various unperceived presuppositions of the
traditional political economy, and now comes an Italian sociologist,
Vilfredo Pareto, who, in his huge treatise on general sociology,
devotes hundreds of pages to substantiating a similar thesis affecting
all the social sciences.[7] This conclusion may be ranked by students
of a hundred years hence as one of the several great discoveries of
our age. It is by no means fully worked out, and it is so opposed to
nature that it will be very slowly accepted by the great mass of those
who consider themselves thoughtful. As a historical student I am
personally fully reconciled to this newer view. Indeed, it seems to me
inevitable that just as the various sciences of nature were, before
the opening of the seventeenth century, largely masses of
rationalizations to suit the religious sentiments of the period, so
the social sciences have continued even to our own day to be
rationalizations of uncritically accepted beliefs and customs.
_It will become apparent as we proceed that the fact that an idea is
ancient and that it has been widely received is no argument in its
favor, but should immediately suggest the necessity of carefully
testing it as a probable instance of rationalization_.
5. HOW CREATIVE THOUGHT TRANSFORMS THE WORLD
This brings us to another kind of thought which can fairly easily be
distinguished from the three kinds described above. It has not the
usual qualities of the reverie, for it does not hover about our
personal complacencies and humiliations. It is not made up of the
homely decisions forced upon us by everyday needs, when we review our
little stock of existing information, consult our conventional
preferences and obligations, and make a choice of action. It is not
the defense of our own cherished beliefs and prejudices just because
they are our own--mere plausible excuses for remaining of the same
mind. On the contrary, it is that peculiar species of thought which
leads us to _change_ our mind.
It is this kind of thought that has raised man from his pristine,
subsavage ignorance and squalor to the degree of knowledge and comfort
which he now possesses. On his capacity to continue and greatly extend
this kind of thinking depends his chance of groping his way out of the
plight in which the most highly civilized peoples of the world now
find themselves. In the past this type of thinking has been called
Reason. But so many misapprehensions have grown up around the word
that some of us have become very suspicious of it. I suggest,
therefore, that we substitute a recent name and speak of "creative
thought" rather than of Reason. _For this kind of meditation begets
knowledge, and knowledge is really creative inasmuch as it makes
things look different from what they seemed before and may indeed work
for their reconstruction_.
In certain moods some of us realize that we are observing things or
making reflections with a seeming disregard of our personal
preoccupations. We are not preening or defending ourselves; we are not
faced by the necessity of any practical decision, nor are we
apologizing for believing this or that. We are just wondering and
looking and mayhap seeing what we never perceived before.
Curiosity is as clear and definite as any of our urges. We wonder what
is in a sealed telegram or in a letter in which some one else is
absorbed, or what is being said in the telephone booth or in low
conversation. This inquisitiveness is vastly stimulated by jealousy,
suspicion, or any hint that we ourselves are directly or indirectly
involved. But there appears to be a fair amount of personal interest
in other people's affairs even when they do not concern us except as a
mystery to be unraveled or a tale to be told. The reports of a divorce
suit will have "news value" for many weeks. They constitute a story,
like a novel or play or moving picture. This is not an example of pure
curiosity, however, since we readily identify ourselves with others,
and their joys and despair then become our own.
We also take note of, or "observe", as Sherlock Holmes says, things
which have nothing to do with our personal interests and make no
personal appeal either direct or by way of sympathy. This is what
Veblen so well calls "idle curiosity". And it is usually idle enough.
Some of us when we face the line of people opposite us in a subway
train impulsively consider them in detail and engage in rapid
inferences and form theories in regard to them. On entering a room
there are those who will perceive at a glance the degree of
preciousness of the rugs, the character of the pictures, and the
personality revealed by the books. But there are many, it would seem,
who are so absorbed in their personal reverie or in some definite
purpose that they have no bright-eyed energy for idle curiosity. The
tendency to miscellaneous observation we come by honestly enough, for
we note it in many of our animal relatives.
Veblen, however, uses the term "idle curiosity" somewhat ironically,
as is his wont. It is idle only to those who fail to realize that it
may be a very rare and indispensable thing from which almost all
distinguished human achievement proceeds. Since it may lead to
systematic examination and seeking for things hitherto undiscovered.
For research is but diligent search which enjoys the high flavor of
primitive hunting. Occasionally and fitfully idle curiosity thus leads
to creative thought, which alters and broadens our own views and
aspirations and may in turn, under highly favorable circumstances,
affect the views and lives of others, even for generations to follow.
An example or two will make this unique human process clear.
Galileo was a thoughtful youth and doubtless carried on a rich and
varied reverie. He had artistic ability and might have turned out to
be a musician or painter. When he had dwelt among the monks at
Valambrosa he had been tempted to lead the life of a religious. As a
boy he busied himself with toy machines and he inherited a fondness
for mathematics. All these facts are of record. We may safely assume
also that, along with many other subjects of contemplation, the Pisan
maidens found a vivid place in his thoughts.
One day when seventeen years old he wandered into the cathedral of his
native town. In the midst of his reverie he looked up at the lamps
hanging by long chains from the high ceiling of the church. Then
something very difficult to explain occurred. He found himself no
longer thinking of the building, worshipers, or the services; of his
artistic or religious interests; of his reluctance to become a
physician as his father wished. He forgot the question of a career and
even the _graziosissime donne_. As he watched the swinging lamps he
was suddenly wondering if mayhap their oscillations, whether long or
short, did not occupy the same time. Then he tested this hypothesis by
counting his pulse, for that was the only timepiece he had with him.
This observation, however remarkable in itself, was not enough to
produce a really creative thought. Others may have noticed the same
thing and yet nothing came of it. Most of our observations have no
assignable results. Galileo may have seen that the warts on a
peasant's face formed a perfect isosceles triangle, or he may have
noticed with boyish glee that just as the officiating priest was
uttering the solemn words, _ecce agnus Dei_, a fly lit on the end of
his nose. To be really creative, ideas have to be worked up and then
"put over", so that they become a part of man's social heritage. The
highly accurate pendulum clock was one of the later results of
Galileo's discovery. He himself was led to reconsider and successfully
to refute the old notions of falling bodies. It remained for Newton to
prove that the moon was falling, and presumably all the heavenly
bodies. This quite upset all the consecrated views of the heavens as
managed by angelic engineers. The universality of the laws of
gravitation stimulated the attempt to seek other and equally important
natural laws and cast grave doubts on the miracles in which mankind
had hitherto believed. In short, those who dared to include in their
thought the discoveries of Galileo and his successors found themselves
in a new earth surrounded by new heavens.
On the 28th of October, 1831, three hundred and fifty years after
Galileo had noticed the isochronous vibrations of the lamps, creative
thought and its currency had so far increased that Faraday was
wondering what would happen if he mounted a disk of copper between the
poles of a horseshoe magnet. As the disk revolved an electric current
was produced. This would doubtless have seemed the idlest kind of an
experiment to the stanch business men of the time, who, it happened,
were just then denouncing the child-labor bills in their anxiety to
avail themselves to the full of the results of earlier idle curiosity.
But should the dynamos and motors which have come into being as the
outcome of Faraday's experiment be stopped this evening, the business
man of to-day, agitated over labor troubles, might, as he trudged home
past lines of "dead" cars, through dark streets to an unlighted house,
engage in a little creative thought of his own and perceive that he
and his laborers would have no modern factories and mines to quarrel
about had it not been for the strange practical effects of the idle
curiosity of scientists, inventors, and engineers.
The examples of creative intelligence given above belong to the realm
of modern scientific achievement, which furnishes the most striking
instances of the effects of scrupulous, objective thinking. But there
are, of course, other great realms in which the recording and
embodiment of acute observation and insight have wrought themselves
into the higher life of man. The great poets and dramatists and our
modern story-tellers have found themselves engaged in productive
reveries, noting and artistically presenting their discoveries for the
delight and instruction of those who have the ability to appreciate
them.
The process by which a fresh and original poem or drama comes into
being is doubtless analogous to that which originates and elaborates
so-called scientific discoveries; but there is clearly a temperamental
difference. The genesis and advance of painting, sculpture, and music
offer still other problems. We really as yet know shockingly little
about these matters, and indeed very few people have the least
curiosity about them.[8] Nevertheless, creative intelligence in its
various forms and activities is what makes man. Were it not for its
slow, painful, and constantly discouraged operations through the ages
man would be no more than a species of primate living on seeds, fruit,
roots, and uncooked flesh, and wandering naked through the woods and
over the plains like a chimpanzee.
The origin and progress and future promotion of civilization are ill
understood and misconceived. These should be made the chief theme of
education, but much hard work is necessary before we can reconstruct
our ideas of man and his capacities and free ourselves from
innumerable persistent misapprehensions. There have been
obstructionists in all times, not merely the lethargic masses, but
the moralists, the rationalizing theologians, and most of the
philosophers, all busily if unconsciously engaged in ratifying
existing ignorance and mistakes and discouraging creative thought.
Naturally, those who reassure us seem worthy of honor and respect.
Equally naturally those who puzzle us with disturbing criticisms and
invite us to change our ways are objects of suspicion and readily
discredited. Our personal discontent does not ordinarily extend to any
critical questioning of the general situation in which we find
ourselves. In every age the prevailing conditions of civilization have
appeared quite natural and inevitable to those who grew up in them.
The cow asks no questions as to how it happens to have a dry stall and
a supply of hay. The kitten laps its warm milk from a china saucer,
without knowing anything about porcelain; the dog nestles in the
corner of a divan with no sense of obligation to the inventors of
upholstery and the manufacturers of down pillows. So we humans accept
our breakfasts, our trains and telephones and orchestras and movies,
our national Constitution, or moral code and standards of manners,
with the simplicity and innocence of a pet rabbit. We have absolutely
inexhaustible capacities for appropriating what others do for us with
no thought of a "thank you". We do not feel called upon to make any
least contribution to the merry game ourselves. Indeed, we are usually
quite unaware that a game is being played at all.
We have now examined the various classes of thinking which we can
readily observe in ourselves and which we have plenty of reasons to
believe go on, and always have been going on, in our fellow-men. We
can sometimes get quite pure and sparkling examples of all four kinds,
but commonly they are so confused and intermingled in our reverie as
not to be readily distinguishable. The reverie is a reflection of our
longings, exultations, and complacencies, our fears, suspicions, and
disappointments. We are chiefly engaged in struggling to maintain our
self-respect and in asserting that supremacy which we all crave and
which seems to us our natural prerogative. It is not strange, but
rather quite inevitable, that our beliefs about what is true and
false, good and bad, right and wrong, should be mixed up with the
reverie and be influenced by the same considerations which determine
its character and course. We resent criticisms of our views exactly as
we do of anything else connected with ourselves. Our notions of life
and its ideals seem to us to be _our own_ and as such necessarily true
and right, to be defended at all costs.
_We very rarely consider, however, the process by which we gained our
convictions_. If we did so, we could hardly fail to see that there was
usually little ground for our confidence in them. Here and there, in
this department of knowledge or that, some one of us might make a fair
claim to have taken some trouble to get correct ideas of, let us say,
the situation in Russia, the sources of our food supply, the origin of
the Constitution, the revision of the tariff, the policy of the Holy
Roman Apostolic Church, modern business organization, trade unions,
birth control, socialism, the League of Nations, the excess-profits
tax, preparedness, advertising in its social bearings; but only a very
exceptional person would be entitled to opinions on all of even these
few matters. And yet most of us have opinions on all these, and on
many other questions of equal importance, of which we may know even
less. We feel compelled, as self-respecting persons, to take sides
when they come up for discussion. We even surprise ourselves by our
omniscience. Without taking thought we see in a flash that it is most
righteous and expedient to discourage birth control by legislative
enactment, or that one who decries intervention in Mexico is clearly
wrong, or that big advertising is essential to big business and that
big business is the pride of the land. As godlike beings why should we
not rejoice in our omniscience?
It is clear, in any case, that our convictions on important matters
are not the result of knowledge or critical thought, nor, it may be
added, are they often dictated by supposed self-interest. Most of them
are _pure prejudices_ in the proper sense of that word. We do not form
them ourselves. They are the whisperings of "the voice of the herd".
We have in the last analysis no responsibility for them and need
assume none. They are not really our own ideas, but those of others no
more well informed or inspired than ourselves, who have got them in
the same careless and humiliating manner as we. It should be our pride
to revise our ideas and not to adhere to what passes for respectable
opinion, for such opinion can frequently be shown to be not respectable
at all. We should, in view of the considerations that have been
mentioned, resent our supine credulity. As an English writer has
remarked:
"If we feared the entertaining of an unverifiable opinion with the
warmth with which we fear using the wrong implement at the dinner
table, if the thought of holding a prejudice disgusted us as does a
foul disease, then the dangers of man's suggestibility would be turned
into advantages."[9]
The purpose of this essay is to set forth briefly the way in which the
notions of the herd have been accumulated. This seems to me the best,
easiest, and least invidious educational device for cultivating a
proper distrust for the older notions on which we still continue to
rely.
The "real" reasons, which explain how it is we happen to hold a
particular belief, are chiefly historical. Our most important
opinions--those, for example, having to do with traditional,
religious, and moral convictions, property rights, patriotism,
national honor, the state, and indeed all the assumed foundations of
society--are, as I have already suggested, rarely the result of
reasoned consideration, but of unthinking absorption from the social
environment in which we live. Consequently, they have about them a
quality of "elemental certitude", and we especially resent doubt or
criticism cast upon them. So long, however, as we revere the
whisperings of the herd, we are obviously unable to examine them
dispassionately and to consider to what extent they are suited to the
novel conditions and social exigencies in which we find ourselves
to-day.
The "real" reasons for our beliefs, by making clear their origins and
history, can do much to dissipate this emotional blockade and rid us
of our prejudices and preconceptions. Once this is done and we come
critically to examine our traditional beliefs, we may well find some
of them sustained by experience and honest reasoning, while others
must be revised to meet new conditions and our more extended
knowledge. But only after we have undertaken such a critical
examination in the light of experience and modern knowledge, freed
from any feeling of "primary certitude", can we claim that the "good"
are also the "real" reasons for our opinions.
I do not flatter myself that this general show-up of man's thought
through the ages will cure myself or others of carelessness in
adopting ideas, or of unseemly heat in defending them just because we
have adopted them. But if the considerations which I propose to recall
are really incorporated into our thinking and are permitted to
establish our general outlook on human affairs, they will do much to
relieve the imaginary obligation we feel in regard to traditional
sentiments and ideals. Few of us are capable of engaging in creative
thought, but some of us can at least come to distinguish it from other
and inferior kinds of thought and accord to it the esteem that it
merits as the greatest treasure of the past and the only hope of the
future.
NOTES.
[2] The poet-clergyman, John Donne, who lived in the time of James I,
has given a beautifully honest picture of the doings of a saint's
mind: "I throw myself down in my chamber and call in and invite God
and His angels thither, and when they are there I neglect God and His
angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the
whining of a door. I talk on in the same posture of praying, eyes
lifted up, knees bowed down, as though I prayed to God, and if God or
His angels should ask me when I thought last of God in that prayer I
cannot tell. Sometimes I find that I had forgot what I was about, but
when I began to forget it I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's
pleasures, a fear of to-morrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a
noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an anything, a nothing, a
fancy, a chimera in my brain troubles me in my prayer."--Quoted by
ROBERT LYND, _The Art of Letters_, pp. 46-47.
[3] Instincts of the Herd, p. 44.
[4] Diogenes Laertius, book v.
[5] _Reconstruction in Philosophy_.
[6] _The Place of Science in Modern Civilization._
[7] _Traité de Sociologie Générale, passim._ The author's term
"_derivations_" seems to be his precise way of expressing what we have
called the "good" reasons, and his "_residus_" correspond to the
"real" reasons. He well says, _"L'homme éprouve le besoin de
raisonner, et en outre d'étendre un voile sur ses instincts et sur ses
sentiments"_--hence, rationalization. (P. 788.) His aim is to reduce
sociology to the "real" reasons. (P. 791.)
[8] Recently a re-examination of creative thought has begun as a
result of new knowledge which discredits many of the notions formerly
held about "reason". See, for example, _Creative Intelligence_, by a
group of American philosophic thinkers; John Dewey, _Essays in
Experimental Logic_ (both pretty hard books); and Veblen, _The Place
of Science in Modern Civilization_. Easier than these and very
stimulating are Dewey, _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, and Woodworth,
_Dynamic Psychology_.
[9] Trotter, _op. cit._, p. 45. The first part of this little volume
is excellent.
* * * * *
III
Nous étions déjà si vieux quand nous sommes nés.--ANATOLE FRANCE.
Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis?--ENNIUS.
Tous les homines se ressemblent si fort qu'il n'y a point de peuple
dont les sottises ne nous doivent faire trembler.--FONTENELLE.
The savage is very close to us indeed, both in his physical and
mental make-up and in the forms of his social life. Tribal society
is virtually delayed civilization, and the savages are a sort of
contemporaneous ancestry.--WILLIAM I. THOMAS.
6. OUR ANIMAL HERITAGE. THE NATURE OF CIVILIZATION
There are four historical layers underlying the minds of civilized
men--the animal mind, the child mind, the savage mind, and the
traditional civilized mind. We are all animals and never can cease to
be; we were all children at our most impressionable age and can never
get over the effects of that; our human ancestors have lived in
savagery during practically the whole existence of the race, say five
hundred thousand or a million years, and the primitive human mind is
ever with us; finally, we are all born into an elaborate civilization,
the constant pressure of which we can by no means escape.
Each of these underlying minds has its special sciences and
appropriate literatures. The new discipline of animal or comparative
psychology deals with the first; genetic and analytical psychology
with the second;[10] anthropology, ethnology, and comparative religion
with the third; and the history of philosophy, science, theology, and
literature with the fourth.
We may grow beyond these underlying minds and in the light of new
knowledge we may criticize their findings and even persuade ourselves
that we have successfully transcended them. But if we are fair with
ourselves we shall find that their hold on us is really inexorable. We
can only transcend them artificially and precariously and in certain
highly favorable conditions. Depression, anger, fear, or ordinary
irritation will speedily prove the insecurity of any structure that we
manage to rear on our fourfold foundation. Such fundamental and vital
preoccupations as religion, love, war, and the chase stir impulses
that lie far back in human history and which effectually repudiate the
cavilings of ratiocination.
In all our reveries and speculations, even the most exacting,
sophisticated, and disillusioned, we have three unsympathetic
companions sticking closer than a brother and looking on with jealous
impatience--our wild apish progenitor, a playful or peevish baby, and
a savage. We may at any moment find ourselves overtaken with a warm
sense of camaraderie for any or all of these ancient pals of ours, and
experience infinite relief in once more disporting ourselves with them
as of yore. Some of us have in addition a Greek philosopher or man of
letters in us; some a neoplatonic mystic, some a mediaeval monk, all
of whom have learned to make terms with their older playfellows.
Before retracing the way in which the mind as we now find it in
so-called intelligent people has been accumulated, we may take time to
try to see what civilization is and why man alone can become
civilized. For the mind has expanded _pari passu_ with civilization,
and without civilization there would, I venture to conjecture, have
been no human mind in the commonly accepted sense of that term.
It is now generally conceded by all who have studied the varied
evidence and have freed themselves from ancient prejudice that, if we
traced back our human lineage far enough we should come to a point
where our human ancestors had no civilization and lived a speechless,
naked, houseless, fireless, and toolless life, similar to that of the
existing primates with which we are zoologically closely connected.
This is one of the most fully substantiated of historical facts and
one which we can never neglect in our attempts to explain man as he
now is. We are all descended from the lower animals. We are
furthermore still animals with not only an animal body, but with an
animal mind. And this animal body and animal mind are the original
foundations on which even the most subtle and refined intellectual
life must perforce rest.
We are ready to classify certain of our most essential desires as
brutish--hunger and thirst, the urgence of sleep, and especially
sexual longing. We know of blind animal rage, of striking, biting,
scratching, howling, and snarling, of irrational fears and ignominious
flight. We share our senses with the higher animals, have eyes and
ears, noses and tongues much like theirs; heart, lungs, and other
viscera, and four limbs. They have brains which stand them in good
stead, although their heads are not so good as ours. But when one
speaks of the animal mind he should think of still other resemblances
between the brute and man.
All animals learn--even the most humble among them may gain something
from experience. All the higher animals exhibit curiosity under
certain circumstances, and it is this impulse which underlies all
human science.
Moreover, some of the higher animals, especially the apes and monkeys,
are much given to fumbling and groping. They are restless, easily
bored, and spontaneously experimental. They therefore make discoveries
quite unconsciously, and form new and sometimes profitable habits of
action. If, by mere fumbling, a monkey, cat, or dog happens on a way
to secure food, this remunerative line of conduct will "occur" to the
creature when he feels hungry. This is what Thorndike has named
learning by "trial and error". It might better be called "fumbling and
success", for it is the success that establishes the association. The
innate curiosity which man shares with his uncivilized zoological
relatives is the native impulse that leads to scientific and
philosophical speculation, and the original fumbling of a restless ape
has become the ordered experimental investigation of modern times. A
creature which lacked curiosity and had no tendency to fumble could
never have developed civilization and human intelligence.[l0]
But why did man alone of all the animals become civilized? The reason
is not far to seek, although it has often escaped writers[11] on the
subject. All animals gain a certain wisdom with age and experience,
but the experience of one ape does not profit another. Learning among
animals below man is _individual_, not _co-operative_ and _cumulative_.
One dog does not seem to learn from another, nor one ape from another,
in spite of the widespread misapprehension in this regard. Many
experiments have been patiently tried in recent years and it seems to
be pretty well established that the monkey learns by _monkeying_, but
that he rarely or never appears to _ape_. He does not learn by imitation,
because he does not imitate. There may be minor exceptions, but the fact
that apes never, in spite of a bodily equipment nearly human, become in
the least degree civilized, would seem to show that the accumulation of
knowledge or dexterity through imitation is impossible for them.
Man has the various sense organs of the apes and their extraordinary
power of manipulation. To these essentials he adds a brain
sufficiently more elaborate than that of the chimpanzee to enable him
to do something that the ape cannot do--namely, "see" things clearly
enough to form associations through imitation.[12]
We can imagine the manner in which man unwittingly took one of his
momentous and unprecedented first steps in civilization. Some restless
primeval savage might find himself scraping the bark off a stick with
the edge of a stone or shell and finally cutting into the wood and
bringing the thing to a point. He might then spy an animal and, quite
without reasoning, impulsively make a thrust with the stick and
discover that it pierced the creature. If he could hold these various
elements in the situation, sharpening the stick and using it, he would
have made an invention--a rude spear. A particularly acute bystander
might comprehend and imitate the process. If others did so and the
habit was established in the tribe so that it became traditional and
was transmitted to following generations, the process of civilization
would have begun--also the process of human learning, which is
noticing distinctions and analyzing situations. This simple process of
sharpening a stick would involve the "concepts", as the philosophers
say, of a tool and bark and a point and an artificial weapon. But ages
and ages were to elapse before the botanist would distinguish the
various layers which constitute the bark, or successive experimenters
come upon the idea of a bayonet to take the place of the spear.
Of late, considerable attention has been given to the question of
man's original, uneducated, animal nature; what resources has he as a
mere creature independent of any training that results from being
brought up in some sort of civilized community? The question is
difficult to formulate satisfactorily and still more difficult to
answer. But without attempting to list man's supposed natural
"instincts" we must assume that civilization is built up on his
original propensities and impulses, whatever they may be. These
probably remain nearly the same from generation to generation. The
idea formerly held that the civilization of our ancestors affects our
original nature is almost completely surrendered. _We are all born
wholly uncivilized._
If a group of infants from the "best" families of to-day could be
reared by apes they would find themselves with no civilization. How
long it would take them and their children to gain what now passes for
even a low savage culture it is impossible to say. The whole arduous
task would have to be performed anew and it might not take place at
all, unless conditions were favorable, for man is not naturally a
"progressive" animal. He shares the tendency of all other animal
tribes just to pull through and reproduce his kind.
Most of us do not stop to think of the conditions of an animal
existence. When we read the descriptions of our nature as given by
William James, McDougall, or even Thorndike, with all his reservations,
we get a rather impressive idea of our possibilities, not a picture of
uncivilized life. When we go camping we think that we are deserting
civilization, forgetting the sophisticated guides, and the pack horses
laden with the most artificial luxuries, many of which would not have
been available even a hundred years ago. We lead the simple life with
Swedish matches, Brazilian coffee, Canadian bacon, California canned
peaches, magazine rifles, jointed fishing rods, and electric
flashlights. We are elaborately clothed and can discuss Bergson's
views or D. H. Lawrence's last story. We naïvely imagine we are
returning to "primitive" conditions because we are living out of doors
or sheltered in a less solid abode than usual, and have to go to
the brook for water.
But man's original estate was, as Hobbes reflected, "poor, nasty,
brutish, and short". To live like an animal is to rely upon one's own
quite naked equipment and efforts, and not to mind getting wet or cold
or scratching one's bare legs in the underbrush. One would have to eat
his roots and seeds quite raw, and gnaw a bird as a cat does. To get
the feel of uncivilized life, let us recall how savages with the
comparatively advanced degree of culture reached by our native Indian
tribes may fall to when really hungry. In the journal of the Lewis and
Clark expedition there is an account of the killing of a deer by the
white men. Hearing of this, the Shoshones raced wildly to the spot
where the warm and bloody entrails had been thrown out
... and ran tumbling over one another like famished dogs. Each tore
away whatever part he could, and instantly began to eat it; some
had the liver, some the kidneys, and, in short, no part on which we
are accustomed to look with disgust escaped them. One of them who
had seized about nine feet of the entrails was chewing at one end,
while with his hand he was diligently clearing his way by
discharging the contents at the other.
Another striking example of simple animal procedure is given in the
same journal:
One of the women, who had been leading two of our pack horses,
halted at a rivulet about a mile behind and sent on the two horses
by a female friend. On inquiring of Cameahwait the cause of her
detention, he answered, with great apparent unconcern, that she
had just stopped to lie in, but would soon overtake us. In fact,
we were astonished to see her in about an hour's time come on with
her new-born infant, and pass us on her way to the camp, seemingly
in perfect health.
This is the simple life and it was the life of our ancestors before
civilization began. It had been the best kind of life possible in all
the preceding aeons of the world's history. Without civilization it
would be the existence to which all human beings now on the earth
would forthwith revert. It is man's starting point.[13]
But what about the mind? What was going on in the heads of our
untutored forbears? We are apt to fall into the error of supposing
that because they had human brains they must have had somewhat the
same kinds of ideas and made the same kind of judgments that we do.
Even distinguished philosophers like Descartes and Rousseau made this
mistake. This assumption will not stand inspection. To reach back in
imagination to the really primitive mind we should of course have to
deduct at the start all the knowledge and all the discriminations and
classifications that have grown up as a result of our education and
our immersion from infancy in a highly artificial environment. Then we
must recollect that our primitive ancestor had no words with which to
name and tell about things. He was speechless. His fellows knew no
more than he did. Each one learned during his lifetime according to
his capacity, but no instruction in our sense of the word was
possible. What he saw and heard was not what we should have called
seeing and hearing. He responded to situations in a blind and
impulsive manner, with no clear idea of them. In short, he must have
_thought_ much as a wolf or bear does, just as he _lived_ much like
them.
We must be on our guard against accepting the prevalent notions of
even the animal intellect. An owl may look quite as wise as a judge. A
monkey, canary, or collie has bright eyes and seems far more alert
than most of the people we see on the street car. A squirrel in the
park appears to be looking at us much as we look at him. But he cannot
be seeing the same things that we do. We can be scarcely more to him
than a vague suggestion of peanuts. And even the peanut has little of
the meaning for him that it has for us. A dog perceives a motor-car
and may be induced to ride in it, but his idea of it would not differ
from that of an ancient carryall, except, mayhap, in an appreciative
distinction between the odor of gasoline and that of the stable. Only
in times of sickness, drunkenness, or great excitement can we get some
hint in ourselves of the impulsive responses in animals free from
human sophistication and analysis.
Locke thought that we first got simple ideas and then combined them
into more complex conceptions and finally into generalizations or
abstract ideas. But this is not the way that man's knowledge arose. He
started with mere impressions of general situations, and gradually by
his ability to handle things he came upon distinctions, which in time
he made clearer by attaching names to them.
We keep repeating this process when we learn about anything. The
typewriter is at first a mere mass impression, and only gradually and
imperfectly do most of us distinguish certain of its parts; only the
men who made it are likely to realize its full complexity by noting
and assigning names to all the levers, wheels, gears, bearings,
controls, and adjustments. John Stuart Mill thought that the chief
function of the mind was making inferences. But making distinctions is
equally fundamental--seeing that there are really many things where
only one was at first apparent. This process of analysis has been
man's supreme accomplishment. This is what has made his mind grow.
The human mind has then been built up through hundreds of thousands of
years by gradual accretions and laborious accumulations. Man started
at a cultural zero and had to find out everything for himself; or
rather a very small number of peculiarly restless and adventurous
spirits did the work. The great mass of humanity has never had
anything to do with the increase of intelligence except to act as its
medium of transfusion and perpetuation. Creative intelligence is
confined to the very few, but the many can thoughtlessly avail
themselves of the more obvious achievements of those who are
exceptionally highly endowed.
Even an ape will fit himself into a civilized environment. A
chimpanzee can be taught to relish bicycles, roller skates, and
cigarettes which he could never have devised, cannot understand, and
could not reproduce. Even so with mankind. Most of us could not have
devised, do not understand, and consequently could not reproduce any
of the everyday conveniences and luxuries which surround us. Few of us
could make an electric light, or write a good novel to read by it, or
paint a picture for it to shine upon.
Professor Giddings has recently asked the question, Why has there been
any history?[14] Why, indeed, considering that the "good" and
"respectable" is usually synonymous with the ancient routine, and the
old have always been there to repress the young? Such heavy words of
approval as "venerable", "sanctified", and "revered" all suggest great
age rather than fresh discoveries. As it was in the beginning, is now
and ever shall be, is our protest against being disturbed, forced to
think or to change our habits. So history, _namely change_, has been
mainly due to a small number of "seers",--really gropers and
monkeyers--whose native curiosity outran that of their fellows and led
them to escape here and there from the sanctified blindness of their
time.
The seer is simply an example of a _variation_ biologically, such as
occurs in all species of living things, both animal and vegetable. But
the unusually large roses in our gardens, the swifter horses of the
herd, and the cleverer wolf in the pack have no means of influencing
their fellows as a result of their peculiar superiority. Their
offspring has some chance of sharing to some degree this pre-eminence,
but otherwise things will go on as before. Whereas the singular
variation represented by a St. Francis, a Dante, a Voltaire, or a
Darwin may permanently, and for ages to follow change somewhat the
character and ambitions of innumerable inferior members of the species
who could by no possibility have originated anything for themselves,
but who can, nevertheless, suffer some modification as a result of the
teachings of others. This illustrates the magical and unique workings
of culture and creative intelligence in mankind.[15]
We have no means of knowing when or where the first contribution to
civilization was made, and with it a start on the arduous building of
the mind. There is some reason to think that the men who first
transcended the animal mind were of inferior mental capacity to our
own, but even if man, emerging from his animal estate, had had on the
average quite as good a brain as those with which we are now familiar,
I suspect that the extraordinarily slow and hazardous process of
accumulating modern civilization would not have been greatly
shortened. Mankind is lethargic, easily pledged to routine, timid,
suspicious of innovation. That is his nature. He is only artificially,
partially, and very recently "progressive". He has spent almost his
whole existence as a savage hunter, and in that state of ignorance he
illustrated on a magnificent scale all the inherent weaknesses of the
human mind.
7. OUR SAVAGE MIND
Should we arrange our present beliefs and opinions on the basis of
their age, we should find that some of them were very, very old, going
back to primitive man; others were derived from the Greeks; many more
of them would prove to come directly from the Middle Ages; while
certain others in our stock were unknown until natural science began
to develop in a new form about three hundred years ago. The idea that
man has a soul or double which survives the death of the body is very
ancient indeed and is accepted by most savages. Such confidence as we
have in the liberal arts, metaphysics, and formal logic goes back to
the Greek thinkers; our religious ideas and our standards of sexual
conduct are predominantly mediaeval in their presuppositions; our
notions of electricity and disease germs are, of course, recent in
origin, the result of painful and prolonged research which involved
the rejection of a vast number of older notions sanctioned by
immemorial acceptance.
_In general, those ideas which are still almost universally accepted
in regard to man's nature, his proper conduct, and his relations to
God and his fellows are far more ancient and far less critical than
those which have to do with the movement of the stars, the
stratification of the rocks and the life of plants and animals_.
Nothing is more essential in our attempt to escape from the bondage of
consecrated ideas than to get a vivid notion of human achievement in
its proper historical perspective. In order to do this let us imagine
the whole gradual and laborious attainments of mankind compressed into
the compass of a single lifetime. Let us assume that a single
generation of men have in fifty years managed to accumulate all that
now passes for civilization. They would have to start, as all
individuals do, absolutely uncivilized, and their task would be to
recapitulate what has occupied the race for, let us guess, at least
five hundred thousand years. Each year in the life of a generation
would therefore correspond to ten thousand years in the progress of
the race.
On this scale it would require forty-nine years to reach a point of
intelligence which would enable our self-taught generation to give up
their ancient and inveterate habits of wandering hunters and settle
down here and there to till the ground, harvest their crops,
domesticate animals, and weave their rough garments. Six months later,
or half through the fiftieth year, some of them, in a particularly
favorable situation, would have invented writing and thus established
a new and wonderful means of spreading and perpetuating civilization.
Three months later another group would have carried literature, art,
and philosophy to a high degree of refinement and set standards for
the succeeding weeks. For two months our generation would have been
living under the blessings of Christianity; the printing press would
be but a fortnight old and they would not have had the steam engine
for quite a week. For two or three days they would have been hastening
about the globe in steamships and railroad trains, and only yesterday
would they have come upon the magical possibilities of electricity.
Within the last few hours they would have learned to sail in the air
and beneath the waters, and have forthwith applied their newest
discoveries to the prosecution of a magnificent war on the scale
befitting their high ideals and new resources. This is not so strange,
for only a week ago they were burning and burying alive those who
differed from the ruling party in regard to salvation, eviscerating in
public those who had new ideas of government, and hanging old women
who were accused of traffic with the devil. All of them had been no
better than vagrant savages a year before. Their fuller knowledge was
altogether too recent to have gone very deep, and they had many
institutions and many leaders dedicated to the perpetuation of outworn
notions which would otherwise have disappeared. Until recently changes
had taken place so slowly and so insensibly that only a very few
persons could be expected to realize that not a few of the beliefs
that were accepted as eternal verities were due to the inevitable
misunderstandings of a savage.
In speaking of the "savage" or "primitive mind", we are, of course,
using a very clumsy expression. We shall employ the term, nevertheless,
to indicate the characteristics of the human mind when there was as yet
no writing, no organized industry or mechanical arts, no money, no
important specialization of function except between the sexes, no
settled life in large communities. The period so described covers all
but about five or six thousand of the half million to a million years
that man has existed on the earth.
There are no chronicles to tell us the story of those long centuries.
Some inferences can be made from the increasing artfulness and variety
of the flint weapons and tools which we find. But the stone weapons
which have come down to us, even in their crudest forms (eoliths), are
very far from representing the earliest achievements of man in the
accumulation of culture. Those dim, remote cycles must have been full
of great, but inconspicuous, originators who laid the foundations of
civilization in discoveries and achievements so long taken for granted
that we do not realize that they ever had to be made at all.
Since man is descended from less highly endowed animals, there must
have been a time when the man-animal was in a state of animal
ignorance. He started with no more than an ape is able to know. He had
to learn everything for himself, as he had no one to teach him the
tricks that apes and children can be taught by sophisticated human
beings. He was necessarily self-taught, and began, as we have seen, in
a state of ignorance beyond anything we can readily conceive. He lived
naked and speechless in the woods, or wandered over the plains without
artificial shelter or any way of cooking his food. He subsisted on raw
fruit, berries, roots, insects, and such animals as he could strike
down or pick up dead. His mind must have corresponded with his brutish
state. He must at the first have learned just as his animal relatives
learn--by fumbling and by forming accidental associations. He had
impulses and such sagacity as he individually derived from experience,
but no heritage of knowledge accumulated by the group and transmitted
by education. This heritage had to be constructed on man's
potentialities.
Of mankind in this extremely primitive condition we have no traces.
There could indeed be no traces. All savages of the present day or of
whom we have any record represent a relatively highly developed
traditional culture, with elaborate languages, myths, and
well-established artificial customs, which it probably took hundreds
of thousands of years to accumulate. Man in "a state of nature" is
only a presupposition, but a presupposition which is forced upon us by
compelling evidence, conjectural and inferential though it is.
On a geological time scale we are still close to savagery, and it is
inevitable that the ideas and customs and sentiments of savagery
should have become so ingrained that they may have actually affected
man's nature by natural selection through the survival of those who
most completely adjusted themselves to the uncritical culture which
prevailed. But in any case it is certain, as many anthropologists have
pointed out, that customs, savage ideas, and primitive sentiments have
continued to form an important part of our own culture down even to
the present day. We are met thus with the necessity of reckoning with
this inveterate element in our present thought and customs. Much of
the data that we have regarding primitive man has been accumulated in
recent times, for the most part as a result of the study of simple
peoples. These differ greatly in their habits and myths, but some
salient common traits emerge which cast light on the spontaneous
workings of the human mind when unaffected by the sophistications of a
highly elaborate civilization.
At the start man had to distinguish himself from the group to which he
belonged and say, "I am I." This is not an idea given by nature.[16]
There are evidences that the earlier religious notions were not based
on individuality, but rather on the "virtue" which objects had--that
is, their potency to do things. Only later did the animistic belief in
the personalities of men, animals, and the forces of nature appear.
When man discovered his own individuality he spontaneously ascribed
the same type of individuality and purpose to animals and plants, to
the wind and the thunder.
This exhibits one of the most noxious tendencies of the mind--namely,
personification. It is one of the most virulent enemies of clear
thinking. We speak of the Spirit of the Reformation or the Spirit of
Revolt or the Spirit of Disorder and Anarchy. The papers tell us that,
"Berlin says", "London says", "Uncle Sam so decides", "John Bull is
disgruntled". Now, whether or no there are such things as spirits,
Berlin and London have no souls, and Uncle Sam is as mythical as the
great god Pan. Sometimes this regression to the savage is harmless,
but when a newspaper states that "Germany is as militaristic as ever",
on the ground that some insolent Prussian lieutenant says that German
armies will occupy Paris within five years, we have an example of
animism which in a society farther removed from savagery than ours
might be deemed a high crime and misdemeanor. Chemists and physicians
have given up talking of spirits, but in discussing social and
economic questions we are still victimized by the primitive animistic
tendencies of the mind.
The dream has had a great influence in the building up of the mind.
Our ideas, especially our religious beliefs, would have had quite
another history had men been dreamless. For it was not merely his
shadow and his reflection in the water that led man to imagine souls
and doubles, but pre-eminently the visions of the night. As his body
lay quiet in sleep he found himself wandering in distant places.
Sometimes he was visited by the dead. So it was clear that the body
had an inhabitant who was not necessarily bound to it, who could
desert it from time to time during life, and who continued to exist
and interest itself in human affairs after death.
Whole civilizations and religions and vast theological speculations
have been dominated by this savage inference. It is true that in very
recent times, since Plato, let us say, other reasons have been urged
for believing in the soul and its immortality, but the idea appears to
have got its firm footing in savage logic. It is a primitive inference,
however it may later have been revised, rationalized, and ennobled.
The taboo--the forbidden thing--of savage life is another thing very
elementary in man's make-up. He had tendencies to fall into habits and
establish inhibitions for reasons that he either did not discover or
easily forgot. These became fixed and sacred to him and any departure
from them filled him with dread. Sometimes the prohibition might have
some reasonable justification, sometimes it might seem wholly absurd
and even a great nuisance, but that made no difference in its binding
force. For example, pork was taboo among the ancient Hebrews--no one
can say why, but none of the modern justifications for abstaining from
that particular kind of meat would have counted in early Jewish times.
It is not improbable that it was the original veneration for the boar
and not an abhorrence of him that led to the prohibition.
The modern "principle" is too often only a new form of the ancient
taboo, rather than an enlightened rule of conduct. The person who
justifies himself by saying that he holds certain beliefs, or acts in
a certain manner "on principle", and yet refuses to examine the basis
and expediency of his principle, introduces into his thinking and
conduct an irrational, mystical element similar to that which
characterized savage prohibitions. Principles unintelligently urged
make a great deal of trouble in the free consideration of social
readjustment, for they are frequently as recalcitrant and obscurantist
as the primitive taboo, and are really scarcely more than an excuse
for refusing to reconsider one's convictions and conduct. The
psychological conditions lying back of both taboo and this sort of
principle are essentially the same.
We find in savage thought a sort of intensified and generalized taboo
in the classification of things as clean and unclean and in the
conceptions of the sacred. These are really expressions of profound
and persistent traits in the uncritical mind and can only be overcome
by carefully cultivated criticism. They are the result of our natural
timidity and the constant dread lest we find ourselves treading on
holy (_i. e._, dangerous) ground.[17] When they are intrenched in the
mind we cannot expect to think freely and fairly, for they effectually
stop argument. If a thing is held to be sacred it is the center of
what may be called a defense complex, and a reasonable consideration
of the merits of the case will not be tolerated. When an issue is
declared to be a "moral" one--for example, the prohibition of strong
drink--an emotional state is implied which makes reasonable compromise
and adjustment impossible; for "moral" is a word on somewhat the same
plane as "sacred", and has much the same qualities and similar effects
on thinking. In dealing with the relations of the sexes the terms
"pure" and "impure" introduce mystic and irrational moods alien to
clear analysis and reasonable readjustments. Those who have studied
the characteristics of savage life are always struck by its deadly
conservatism, its needless restraints on the freedom of the
individual, and its hopeless routine. Man, like plants and animals in
general, tends to go on from generation to generation, living as
nearly as may be the life of his forbears. Changes have to be forced
upon him by hard experience, and he is ever prone to find excuses for
slipping back into older habits, for these are likely to be simpler,
less critical, more spontaneous--more closely akin, in short, to his
animal and primitive promptings. One who prides himself to-day on his
conservatism, on the ground that man is naturally an anarchic and
disorderly creature who is held in check by the far-seeing Tory, is
almost exactly reversing the truth. Mankind is conservative by nature
and readily generates restraints on himself and obstacles to change
which have served to keep him in a state of savagery during almost his
whole existence on the earth, and which still perpetuate all sorts of
primitive barbarism in modern society. The conservative "on principle"
is therefore a most unmistakably primitive person in his attitude. His
only advance beyond the savage mood lies in the specious reasons he is
able to advance for remaining of the same mind. What we vaguely call a
"radical" is a very recent product due to altogether exceptional and
unprecedented circumstances.
NOTES.
[10] It is impossible to discuss here the results which a really
honest study of child psychology promises. The relations of the child
to his parents and elders in general and to the highly artificial
system of censorship and restraints which they impose in their own
interests on his natural impulses must surely have a permanent
influence on the notions he continues to have as an adult in regard to
his "superiors" and the institutions and _mores_ under which he is
called to live. Attempts in later life to gain intellectual freedom
can only be successful if one comes to think of the childish origin of
a great part of his "real" reasons.
[11] Clarence Day in _Our Simian World_ discusses with delightful
humor the effects of our underlying simian temperament on the conduct
of life.
[12] The word "imitation" is commonly used very loosely. The real
question is does an animal, or even man himself, tend to make
movements or sounds made by their fellow-creatures in their presence
It seems to be made out now that even monkeys are not imitative in
that sense and that man himself has no general inclination to do over
what he sees being done. Pray, if you doubt this, note how many things
you see others doing that you have no inclination to imitate! For an
admirable summary see Thorndike, E. L., _The Original Nature of Man_,
1913, pp. 108 ff.
[13] "If the earth were struck by one of Mr. Wells's comets, and if,
in consequence, every human being now alive were to lose all the
knowledge and habits which he had acquired from preceding generations
(though retaining unchanged all his own powers of invention and memory
and habituation) nine tenths of the inhabitants of London or New York
would be dead in a month, and 99 per cent of the remaining tenth would
be dead in six months. They would have no language to express their
thoughts, and no thoughts but vague reverie. They could not read
notices, or drive motors or horses. They would wander about, led by
the inarticulate cries of a few naturally dominant individuals,
drowning themselves, as thirst came on, in hundreds at the riverside
landing places, looting those shops where the smell of decaying food
attracted them, and perhaps at the end stumbling on the expedient of
cannibalism. Even in the country districts men could not invent, in
time to preserve their lives, methods of growing food, or taming
animals, or making fire, or so clothing themselves as to endure a
Northern winter."--GRAHAM WALLAS, _Our Social Heritage_, p. 16. Only
the very lowest of savages might possibly pull through if culture
should disappear.
[14] "A Theory of History", Political Science Quarterly, December,
1920. He attributes history to the adventurers.
[15] Count Korzybski in his _Manhood of Humanity_ is so impressed by
the uniqueness and undreamed possibilities of human civilization and
man's "time-binding" capacity that he declares that it is a gross and
misleading error to regard man as an animal at all. Yet he is forced
sadly to confess that man continues all too often to operate on an
animal or "space-binding" plan of life. His aim and outlook are,
however, essentially the same as those of the present writer. His
method of approach will appeal especially to those who are wont to
deal with affairs in the spirit of the mathematician and engineer. He
is quite right in thinking that man has hitherto had little conception
of his peculiar prerogatives and unlimited opportunities for
betterment.
[16] In the beginning, too, man did not know how children came about,
for it was not easy to connect a common impulsive act with the event
of birth so far removed in time. The tales told to children still are
reminiscences of the mythical explanations which our savage ancestors
advanced to explain the arrival of the infant. Consequently, all
popular theories of the origin of marriage and the family based on the
assumption of conscious paternity are outlawed.
[17] Lucretius warns the reader not to be deterred from considering
the evils wrought by religion by the fear of treading on "the unholy
grounds of reason and in the path of sin".--_De Rer. Nat_. i, 80 ff.
* * * * *
IV
Thereupon one of the Egyptian priests, who was of a very great
age, said: O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and
there was never an old man who was a Hellene. Solon in return
asked him what he meant. I mean to say, he replied, that in mind
you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you
by ancient tradition; nor any science which is hoary with age.
--PLATO'S _Timaeus_, 22 (Jowett's translation).
The truth is that we are far more likely to underrate the originality
of the Greeks than to exaggerate it, and we do not always remember the
very short time they took to lay down the lines scientific inquiry has
followed ever since.--JOHN BURNET.
8. BEGINNING OF CRITICAL THINKING
The Egyptians were the first people, so far as we know, who invented a
highly artificial method of writing, about five thousand years ago,
and began to devise new arts beyond those of their barbarous
predecessors. They developed painting and architecture, navigation,
and various ingenious industries; they worked in glass and enamels and
began the use of copper, and so introduced metal into human affairs.
But in spite of their extraordinary advance in practical,
matter-of-fact knowledge they remained very primitive in their
beliefs. The same may be said of the peoples of Mesopotamia and of the
western Asiatic nations in general--just as in our own day the
practical arts have got a long start compared with the revision of
beliefs in regard to man and the gods. The peculiar opinions of the
Egyptians do not enter directly into our intellectual heritage, but
some of the fundamental religious ideas which developed in western
Asia have, through the veneration for the Hebrew Scriptures, become
part and parcel of our ways of thinking. To the Greeks, however, we
are intellectually under heavy obligation. The literature of the
Greeks, in such fragments as escaped destruction, was destined, along
with the Hebrew Scriptures, to exercise an incalculable influence in
the formation of our modern civilized minds. These two dominating
literary heritages originated about the same time--day before
yesterday--viewed in the perspective of our race's history. Previous
to the Greek civilization books had played no great part in the
development, dissemination, and transmission of culture from
generation to generation. Now they were to become a cardinal force in
advancing and retarding the mind's expansion.
It required about a thousand years for the Greek shepherds from the
pastures of the Danube to assimilate the culture of the highly
civilized regions in which they first appeared as barbarian
destroyers. They accepted the industrial arts of the eastern
Mediterranean, adopted the Phoenician alphabet, and emulated the
Phoenician merchant. By the seventh century before our era they had
towns, colonies, and commerce, with much stimulating running hither
and thither. We get our first traces of new intellectual enterprise in
the Ionian cities, especially Miletus, and in the Italian colonies of
the Greeks. Only later did Athens become the unrivaled center in a
marvelous outflowering of the human intelligence.
It is a delicate task to summarize what we owe to the Greeks. Leaving
aside their supreme achievements in literature and art, we can
consider only very briefly the general scope and nature of their
thinking as it relates most closely to our theme.
The chief strength of the Greeks lay in their freedom from hampering
intellectual tradition. They had no venerated classics, no holy books,
no dead languages to master, no authorities to check their free
speculation. As Lord Bacon reminds us, they had no antiquity of
knowledge and no knowledge of antiquity. A modern classicist would
have been a forlorn outlander in ancient Athens, with no books in a
forgotten tongue, no obsolete inflections to impose upon reluctant
youth. He would have had to use the everyday speech of the
sandal-maker and fuller.
For a long time no technical words were invented to give aloofness and
seeming precision to philosophic and scientific discussion. Aristotle
was the first to use words incomprehensible to the average citizen. It
was in these conditions that the possibilities of human criticism
first showed themselves. The primitive notions of man, of the gods,
and of the workings of natural forces began to be overhauled on an
entirely new scale. Intelligence developed rapidly as exceptionally
bold individuals came to have their suspicions of simple, spontaneous,
and ancient ways of looking at things. Ultimately there came men who
professed to doubt everything.
As Abelard long after put it, "By doubting we come to question, and by
seeking we may come upon the truth." But man is by nature credulous.
He is victimized by first impressions, from which he can only escape
with great difficulty. He resents criticism of accepted and familiar
ideas as he resents any unwelcome disturbance of routine. So criticism
is against nature, for it conflicts with the smooth workings of our
more primitive minds, those of the child and the savage.
It should not be forgotten that the Greek people were no exception in
this matter. Anaxagoras and Aristotle were banished for thinking as
they did; Euripides was an object of abhorrence to the conservative of
his day, and Socrates was actually executed for his godless teachings.
The Greek thinkers furnish the first instance of intellectual freedom,
of the "self-detachment and self-abnegating vigor of criticism" which
is most touchingly illustrated in the honest "know-nothingism" of
Socrates. _They discovered skepticism in the higher and proper
significance of the word, and this was their supreme contribution to
human thought_.
One of the finest examples of early Greek skepticism was the discovery
of Xenophanes that man created the gods in his own image. He looked
about him, observed the current conceptions of the gods, compared
those of different peoples, and reached the conclusion that the way in
which a tribe pictured its gods was not the outcome of any knowledge
of how they really looked and whether they had black eyes or blue, but
was a reflection of the familiarly human. If the lions had gods they
would have the shape of their worshipers.
No more fundamentally shocking revelation was ever made than this, for
it shook the very foundations of religious belief. The home life on
Olympus as described in Homer was too scandalous to escape the
attention of the thoughtful, and no later Christian could have
denounced the demoralizing influence of the current religious beliefs
in hotter indignation than did Plato. To judge from the reflection of
Greek thought which we find in Lucretius and Cicero, none of the
primitive religious beliefs escaped mordant criticism.
The second great discovery of the Greek thinkers was _metaphysics_.
They did not have the name, which originated long after in quite an
absurd fashion,[18] but they reveled in the thing. Nowadays
metaphysics is revered by some as our noblest effort to reach the
highest truth, and scorned by others as the silliest of wild-goose
chases. I am inclined to rate it, like smoking, as a highly gratifying
indulgence to those who like it, and, as indulgences go, relatively
innocent. The Greeks found that the mind could carry on an absorbing
game with itself. We all engage in reveries and fantasies of a homely,
everyday type, concerned with our desires or resentments, but the
fantasy of the metaphysician busies itself with conceptions,
abstractions, distinctions, hypotheses, postulates, and logical
inferences. Having made certain postulates or hypotheses, he finds new
conclusions, which he follows in a seemingly convincing manner. This
gives him the delightful emotion of pursuing Truth, something as the
simple man pursues a maiden. Only Truth is more elusive than the
maiden and may continue to beckon her follower for long years, no
matter how gray and doddering he may become.
Let me give two examples of metaphysical reasoning.[19] We have an
idea of an omnipotent, all-good, and perfect being. We are incapable,
knowing as we do only imperfect things, of framing such an idea for
ourselves, so it must have been given us by the being himself. And
perfection must include existence, so God must exist. This was good
enough for Anselm and for Descartes, who went on to build a whole
closely concatenated philosophical system on this foundation. To them
the logic seemed irrefragable; to the modern student of comparative
religion, even to Kant, himself a metaphysician, there was nothing
whatsoever in it but an illustration of the native operations of a
mind that has made a wholly gratuitous hypothesis and is victimized by
an orderly series of spontaneous associations.
A second example of metaphysics may be found in the doctrines of the
Eleatic philosophers, who early appeared in the Greek colonies on the
coast of Italy, and thought hard about space and motion. Empty space
seemed as good as nothing, and, as nothing could not be said to exist,
space must be an illusion; and as motion implied space in which to
take place, there could be no motion. So all things were really
perfectly compact and at rest, and all our impressions of change were
the illusions of the thoughtless and the simple-minded. Since one of
the chief satisfactions of the metaphysicians is to get away from the
welter of our mutable world into a realm of assurance, this doctrine
exercised a great fascination over many minds. The Eleatic conviction
of unchanging stability received a new form in Plato's doctrine of
eternal "ideas", and later developed into the comforting conception of
the "Absolute", in which logical and world-weary souls have sought
refuge from the times of Plotinus to those of Josiah Royce.
But there was one group of Greek thinkers whose general notions of
natural operations correspond in a striking manner to the conclusions
of the most recent science. These were the Epicureans. Democritus was
in no way a modern experimental scientist, but he met the Eleatic
metaphysics with another set of speculative considerations which
happened to be nearer what is now regarded as the truth than theirs.
He rejected the Eleatic decisions against the reality of space and
motion on the ground that, since motion obviously took place, the void
must be a reality, even if the metaphysician could not conceive it. He
hit upon the notion that all things were composed of minute,
indestructible particles (or atoms) of fixed kinds. Given motion and
sufficient time, these might by fortuitous concourse make all possible
combinations. And it was one of these combinations which we call the
world as we find it. For the atoms of various shapes were inherently
capable of making up all material things, even the soul of man and the
gods themselves. There was no permanence anywhere; all was no more
than the shifting accidental and fleeting combinations of the
permanent atoms of which the cosmos was composed. This doctrine was
accepted by the noble Epicurus and his school and is delivered to us
in the immortal poem of Lucretius "On the Nature of Things".
The Epicureans believed the gods to exist because, like Anselm and
Descartes, they thought we had an innate idea of them. But the divine
beings led a life of elegant ease and took no account of man; neither
his supplications, nor his sweet-smelling sacrifices, nor his
blasphemies, ever disturbed their calm. Moreover, the human soul was
dissipated at death. So the Epicureans flattered themselves that they
had delivered man from his two chief apprehensions, the fear of the
gods and the fear of death. For, as Lucretius says, he who understands
the real nature of things will see that both are the illusions of
ignorance. Thus one school of Greek thinkers attained to a complete
rejection of religious beliefs in the name of natural science.
9. INFLUENCE OF PLATO AND ARISTOTLE
In Plato we have at once the skepticism and the metaphysics of his
contemporaries. He has had his followers down through the ages, some
of whom carried his skepticism to its utmost bounds, while others
availed themselves of his metaphysics to rear a system of arrogant
mystical dogmatism. He put his speculations in the form of dialogues
--ostensible discussions in the market place or the houses of
philosophic Athenians. The Greek word for logic is dialectic, which
really means "discussion". argumentation in the interest of fuller
analysis, with the hope of more critical conclusions. The dialogues
are the drama of his day, employed in Plato's magical hand as a
vehicle of discursive reason. Of late we have in Ibsen, Shaw, Brieux,
and Galsworthy the old expedient applied to the consideration of
social perplexities and contradictions. The dialogue is indecisive in
its outcome. It does not lend itself to dogmatic conclusions and
systematic presentation, but exposes the intricacy of all important
questions and the inevitable conflict of views, which may seem
altogether irreconcilable. We much need to encourage and elaborate
opportunities for profitable discussion to-day. We should revert to
the dialectic of the Athenian agora and make it a chosen instrument
for clarifying, co-ordinating and directing our co-operative thinking.
Plato's indecision and urbane fair-mindedness is called irony. Now
irony is seriousness without solemnity. It assumes that man is a
serio-comic animal, and that no treatment of his affairs can be
appropriate which gives him a consistency and dignity which he does
not possess. He is always a child and a savage. He is the victim of
conflicting desires and hidden yearnings. He may talk like a
sentimental idealist and act like a brute. The same person will devote
anxious years to the invention of high explosives and then give his
fortune to the promotion of peace. We devise the most exquisite
machinery for blowing our neighbors to pieces and then display our
highest skill and organization in trying to patch together such as
offer hope of being mended. Our nature forbids us to make a definite
choice between the machine gun and the Red Cross nurse. So we use the
one to keep the other busy. Human thought and conduct can only be
treated broadly and truly in a mood of tolerant irony. It belies the
logical precision of the long-faced, humorless writer on politics and
ethics, whose works rarely deal with man at all, but are a stupid form
of metaphysics.
Plato made terms with the welter of things, but sought relief in the
conception of supernal models, eternal in the heavens, after which all
things were imperfectly fashioned. He confessed that he could not bear
to accept a world which was like a leaky pot or a man running at the
nose. In short, he ascribed the highest form of existence to ideals
and abstractions. This was a new and sophisticated republication of
savage animism. It invited lesser minds than his to indulge in all
sorts of noble vagueness and impertinent jargon which continue to
curse our popular discussions of human affairs. He consecrated one of
the chief foibles of the human mind and elevated it to a religion.
Ever since his time men have discussed the import of names. Are there
such things as love, friendship, and honor, or are there only lovely
things, friendly emotions in this individual and that, deeds which we
may, according to our standards, pronounce honorable or dishonorable?
If you believe in beauty, truth, and love _as such_ you are a
Platonist. If you believe that there are only individual instances and
illustrations of various classified emotions and desires and acts, and
that abstractions are only the inevitable categories of thought, you
would in the Middle Ages have been called a "nominalist".
This matter merits a long discussion, but one can test any book or
newspaper editorial at his leisure and see whether the writer puts you
off with abstractions--Americanism, Bolshevism, public welfare,
liberty, national honor, religion, morality, good taste, rights of
man, science, reason, error--or, on the other hand, casts some light
on actual human complications. I do not mean, of course, that we can
get along without the use of abstract and general terms in our
thinking and speaking, but we should be on our constant guard against
viewing them as forces and attributing to them the vigor of
personality. Animism is, as already explained, a pitfall which is
always yawning before us and into which we are sure to plunge unless
we are ever watchful. Platonism is its most amiable and complete
disguise.
Previous to Aristotle, Greek thought had been wonderfully free and
elastic. It had not settled into compartments or assumed an
educational form which would secure its unrevised transmission from
teacher to student. It was not gathered together in systematic
treatises. Aristotle combined the supreme powers of an original and
creative thinker with the impulses of a textbook writer. He loved
order and classification. He supplied manuals of Ethics, Politics,
Logic, Psychology, Physics, Metaphysics, Economics, Poetics, Zoölogy,
Meteorology, Constitutional Law, and God only knows what not, for we
do not have by any means all the things he wrote. And he was equally
interested, and perhaps equally capable, in all the widely scattered
fields in which he labored. And some of his manuals were so
overwhelming in the conclusiveness of their reasoning, so
all-embracing in their scope, that the mediaeval universities may be
forgiven for having made them the sole basis of a liberal education
and for imposing fines on those who ventured to differ from "The
Philosopher". He seemed to know everything that could be known and to
have ordered all earthly knowledge in an inspired codification which
would stand the professors in good stead down to the day of judgment.
Aristotle combined an essentially metaphysical taste with a
preternatural power of observation in dealing with the workings of
nature. In spite of his inevitable mistakes, which became the curse of
later docile generations, no other thinker of whom we have record can
really compare with him in the distinction and variety of his
achievements. It is not his fault that posterity used his works to
hamper further progress and clarification. He is the father of book
knowledge and the grandfather of the commentator.
After two or three hundred years of talking in the market place and of
philosophic discussions prolonged until morning, such of the Greeks as
were predisposed to speculation had thought all the thoughts and
uttered all the criticisms of commonly accepted beliefs and of one
another that could by any possibility occur to those who had little
inclination to fare forth and extend their knowledge of the so-called
realities of nature by painful and specialized research and
examination. This is to me the chief reason why, except for some
advances in mathematics, astronomy, geography, and the refinements of
scholarship, the glorious period of the Greek mind is commonly and
rightfully assumed to have come to an end about the time of
Aristotle's death. Why did the Greeks not go on, as modern scientists
have gone on, with vistas of the unachieved still ahead of them?
In the first place, Greek civilization was founded on slavery and a
fixed condition of the industrial arts. The philosopher and scholar
was estopped from fumbling with those everyday processes that were
associated with the mean life of the slave and servant. Consequently
there was no one to devise the practical apparatus by which alone
profound and ever-increasing knowledge of natural operations is
possible. The mechanical inventiveness of the Greeks was slight, and
hence they never came upon the lens; they had no microscope to reveal
the minute, no telescope to attract the remote; they never devised a
mechanical timepiece, a thermometer, nor a barometer, to say nothing
of cameras and spectroscopes. Archimedes, it is reported, disdained to
make any record of his ingenious devices, for they were unworthy the
noble profession of a philosopher. Such inventions as were made were
usually either toys or of a heavy practical character. So the next
great step forward in the extension of the human mind awaited the
disappearance of slavery and the slowly dawning suspicion, and final
repudiation, of the older metaphysics, which first became marked some
three hundred years ago.
NOTES.
[18] When in the time of Cicero the long-hidden works of Aristotle
were recovered and put into the hands of Andronicus of Rhodes to edit,
he found certain fragments of highly abstruse speculation which he did
not know what to do with. So he called them "addenda to the
Physics"--_Ta meta ta physica_. These fragments, under the caption
"Metaphysica", became the most revered of Aristotle's productions, his
"First Philosophy", as the Scholastics were wont to call it.
[19] John Dewey deduces metaphysics from man's original reverie and
then shows how in time it became a solemn form of rationalizing
current habits and standards. _Reconstruction in Philosophy_, lectures
i-ii. It is certainly surprising how few philosophical writers have
ever reached other than perfectly commonplace conclusions in regard to
practical "morality".
* * * * *
V
And God made the two great lights; the greater light to rule the
day, and the lesser light to rule the night; he made the stars also.
And God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the
earth.
And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after
its kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after
its kind: and it was so.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and
let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl
of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.--Gen. i.
Ibi vacabimus et videbimus, videbimus et amabimus, amabimus et
laudabimus. Ecce quod erit in fine sine fine. Nam quis alius noster
est finis nisi pervenire ad regnum, cuius nullus est finis?--AUGUSTINE.
10. ORIGIN OF THE MEDIAEVAL CIVILIZATION
In the formation of what we may call our historical mind--namely, that
modification of our animal and primitive outlook which has been
produced by men of exceptional intellectual venturesomeness--the
Greeks played a great part. We have seen how the Greek thinkers
introduced for the first time highly subtle and critical ways of
scrutinizing old beliefs, and, how they disabused their minds of many
an ancient and naïve mistake. But our current ways of thinking are not
derived directly from the Greeks; we are separated from them by the
Roman Empire and the Middle Ages. When we think of Athens we think of
the Parthenon and its frieze, of Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates
and Plato and Aristotle, of urbanity and clarity and moderation in all
things. When we think of the Middle Ages we find ourselves in a world
of monks, martyrs, and miracles, of popes and emperors, of knights and
ladies; we remember Gregory the Great, Abélard, and Thomas Aquinas
--and very little do these reminiscences have in common with those of
Hellas.
It was indeed a different world, with quite different fundamental
presuppositions. Marvelous as were the achievements of the Greeks in
art and literature, and ingenious as they were in new and varied
combinations of ideas, they paid too little attention to the common
things of the world to devise the necessary means of penetrating its
mysteries. They failed to come upon the lynx-eyed lens, or other
instruments of modern investigation, and thus never gained a godlike
vision of the remote and the minute. Their critical thought was
consequently not grounded in experimental or applied science, and
without that the western world was unable to advance or even long
maintain their high standards of criticism.
After the Hellenes were absorbed into the vast Roman Empire critical
thought and creative intelligence--rare and precarious things at
best--began to decline, at first slowly and then with fatal rapidity
and completeness. Moreover, new and highly uncritical beliefs and
modes of thought became popular. They came from the Near East
--Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, and Asia Minor--and largely supplanted
the critical traditions of the great schools of Greek philosophy.
The Stoic and Epicurean dogmas had lost their freshness. The Greek
thinkers had all agreed in looking for salvation through intelligence
and knowledge. But eloquent leaders arose to reveal a new salvation,
and over the portal of truth they erased the word "Reason" and wrote
"Faith" in its stead; and the people listened gladly to the new
prophets, for it was necessary only _to believe_ to be saved, and
believing is far easier than thinking.
It was religious and mystical thought which, in contrast to the
secular philosophy of the Greeks and the scientific thought of our own
day, dominated the intellectual life of the Middle Ages.
Before considering this new phase through which the human mind was to
pass it is necessary to guard against a common misapprehension in the
use of the term "Middle Ages". Our historical textbooks usually
include in that period the happenings between the dissolution of the
Roman Empire and the voyages of Columbus or the opening of the
Protestant revolt. To the student of intellectual history this is
unfortunate, for the simple reason that almost all the ideas and even
institutions of the Middle Ages, such as the church and monasticism
and organized religious intolerance, really originated in the late
Roman Empire. Moreover, the intellectual revolution which has ushered
in the thought of our day did not get well under way until the
seventeenth century. So one may say that medieval thought began long
before the accepted beginning of the Middle Ages and persisted a
century or so after they are ordinarily esteemed to have come to an
end. We have to continue to employ the old expression for convenience'
sake, but from the standpoint of the history of the European mind
three periods should be distinguished, lying between ancient Greek
thought as it was flourishing in Athens, Alexandria, Rhodes, Rome, and
elsewhere at the opening of the Christian era, and the birth of modern
science some sixteen hundred years later.
The first of these is the period of the Christian Fathers, culminating
in the authoritative writings of Augustine, who died in 430. By this
time a great part of the critical Greek books had disappeared in
western Europe. As for pagan writers, one has difficulty in thinking
of a single name (except that of Lucian) later than Juvenal, who had
died nearly three hundred years before Augustine. Worldly knowledge
was reduced to pitiful compendiums on which the mediaeval students
were later to place great reliance. Scientific, literary, and
historical information was scarcely to be had. The western world, so
far as it thought at all, devoted its attention to religion and all
manner of mystical ideas, old and new. As Harnack has so well said,
the world was already intellectually bankrupt before the German
invasions and their accompanying disorders plunged it into still
deeper ignorance and mental obscurity.
The second, or "Dark Age", lasted with only slight improvement from
Augustine to Abélard, about seven hundred years. The prosperous
_villas_ disappeared; towns vanished or shriveled up; libraries were
burned or rotted away from neglect; schools were closed, to be
reopened later here and there, after Charlemagne's educational edict,
in an especially enterprising monastery or by some exceptional bishop
who did not spend his whole time in fighting.
From about the year 1100 conditions began to be more and more
favorable to the revival of intellectual ambition, a recovery of
forgotten knowledge, and a gradual accumulation of new information and
inventions unknown to the Greeks, or indeed to any previous
civilization. The main presuppositions of this third period of the
later Middle Ages go back, however, to the Roman Empire. They had been
formulated by the Church Fathers, transmitted through the Dark Age,
and were now elaborated by the professors in the newly established
universities under the influence of Aristotle's recovered works and
built up into a majestic intellectual structure known as
Scholasticism. On these mediaeval university professors--the
schoolmen--Lord Bacon long ago pronounced a judgment that may well
stand to-day. "Having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure,
and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the
cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle, their dictator), as their
persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and
knowing little history, either of nature or time [they], did out of no
great quantity of matter and infinite agitation of wit spin out unto
us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books."
Our civilization and the human mind, critical and uncritical, as we
now find it in our western world, is a direct and uninterrupted
outgrowth of the civilization and thought of the later Middle Ages.
Very gradually only did peculiarly free and audacious individual
thinkers escape from this or that mediaeval belief, until in our own
day some few have come to reject practically all the presuppositions
on which the Scholastic system was reared. But the great mass of
Christian believers, whether Catholic or Protestant, still professedly
or implicitly adhere to the assumptions of the Middle Ages, at least
in all matters in which religious or moral sanctions are concerned. It
is true that outside the Catholic clergy the term "mediaeval" is often
used in a sense of disparagement, but that should not blind us to the
fact that mediaeval presumptions, whether for better or worse, are
still common. A few of the most fundamental of these presuppositions
especially germane to our theme may be pointed out here.
11. OUR MEDIAEVAL INTELLECTUAL INHERITANCE
The Greeks and Romans had various theories of the origin of things,
all vague and admittedly conjectural. But the Christians, relying upon
the inspired account in the Bible, built their theories on information
which they believed vouchsafed to them by God himself. Their whole
conception of human history was based upon a far more fundamental and
thorough supernaturalism than we find among the Greeks and Romans. The
pagan philosophers reckoned with the gods, to be sure, but they never
assumed that man's earthly life should turn entirely on what was to
happen after death. This was in theory the sole preoccupation of the
mediaeval Christian. Life here below was but a brief, if decisive,
preliminary to the real life to come.
The mediaeval Christian was essentially more polytheistic than his
pagan predecessors, for he pictured hierarchies of good and evil
spirits who were ever aiding him to reach heaven or seducing him into
the paths of sin and error. Miracles were of common occurrence and
might be attributed either to God or the devil; the direct
intervention of both good and evil spirits played a conspicuous part
in the explanation of daily acts and motives.[20]
As a distinguished church historian has said, the God of the Middle
Ages was a God of arbitrariness--the more arbitrary the more Godlike.
By frequent interferences with the regular course of events he made
his existence clear, reassured his children of his continued
solicitude, and frustrated the plots of the Evil One. Not until the
eighteenth century did any considerable number of thinkers revolt
against this conception of the Deity and come to worship a God of
orderliness who abode by his own laws.
The mediaeval thinkers all accepted without question what Santayana
has strikingly described as the "Christian Epic". This included the
general historical conceptions of how man came about, and how, in view
of his origin and his past, he should conduct his life. The universe
had come into being in less than a week, and man had originally been
created in a state of perfection along with all other things--sun,
moon, and stars, plants and animals. After a time the first human pair
had yielded to temptation, transgressed God's commands, and been
driven from the lovely garden in which he had placed them. So sin came
into the world, and the offspring of the guilty pair were thereby
contaminated and defiled from the womb.
In time the wickedness became such on the newly created earth that God
resolved to blot out mankind, excepting only Noah's family, which was
spared to repeople the earth after the Flood, but the unity of
language that man had formerly possessed was lost. At the appointed
time, preceded by many prophetic visions among the chosen people, God
sent his Son to live the life of men on earth and become their Saviour
by submitting to death. Thereafter, with the spread of the gospel, the
struggle between the kingdom of God and that of the devil became the
supreme conflict of history. It was to culminate in the Last Judgment,
when the final separation of good and evil should take place and the
blessed should ascend into the heavens to dwell with God forever,
while the wicked sank to hell to writhe in endless torment.
This general account of man, his origin and fate, embraced in the
Christian Epic, was notable for its precision, its divine
authenticity, and the obstacles which its authority consequently
presented to any revision in the light of increasing knowledge. The
fundamental truths in regard to man were assumed to be established
once and for all. The Greek thinkers had had little in the way of
authority on which to build, and no inconsiderable number of them
frankly confessed that they did not believe that such a thing could
exist for the thoroughly sophisticated intelligence. But mediaeval
philosophy and science _were grounded wholly in authority_. The
mediaeval schoolmen turned aside from the hard path of skepticism,
long searchings and investigation of actual phenomena, and confidently
believed that they could find truth by the easy way of revelation and
the elaboration of unquestioned dogmas.
This reliance on authority is a fundamental primitive trait. We have
inherited it not only from our mediaeval forefathers, but, like them
and through them, from long generations of prehistoric men. We all
have a natural tendency to rely upon established beliefs and fixed
institutions. This is an expression of our spontaneous confidence in
everything that comes to us in an unquestioned form. As children we
are subject to authority and cannot escape the control of existing
opinion. We unconsciously absorb our ideas and views from the group in
which we happen to live. What we see about us, what we are told, and
what we read has to be received at its face value so long as there are
no conflicts to arouse skepticism.
We are tremendously suggestible. Our mechanism is much better adapted
to credulity than to questioning. All of us believe nearly all the
time. Few doubt, and only now and then. The past exercises an almost
irresistible fascination over us. As children we learn to look up to
the old, and when we grow up we do not permit our poignant realization
of elderly incapacity among our contemporaries to rouse suspicions of
Moses, Isaiah, Confucius, or Aristotle. Their sayings come to us
unquestioned; their remoteness makes inquiry into their competence
impossible. We readily assume that they had sources of information and
wisdom superior to the prophets of our own day.
During the Middle Ages reverence for authority, and for that
particular form of authority which we may call the tyranny of the
past, was dominant, but probably not more so than it had been in other
societies and ages--in ancient Egypt, in China and India. Of the great
sources of mediaeval authority, the Bible and the Church Fathers, the
Roman and Church law, and the encyclopaedic writings of Aristotle,
none continues nowadays to hold us in its old grip. Even the Bible,
although nominally unquestioned among Roman Catholics and all the more
orthodox Protestant sects, is rarely appealed to, as of old, in
parliamentary debate or in discussions of social and economic
questions. It is still a religious authority, but it no longer forms
the basis of secular decisions.
The findings of modern science have shaken the hold of the sources of
mediaeval authority, but they have done little as yet to loosen our
inveterate habit of relying on the more insidious authority of current
practice and belief. We still assume that received dogmas represent
the secure conclusions of mankind, and that current institutions
represent the approved results of much experiment in the past, which
it would be worse than futile to repeat. One solemn remembrancer will
cite as a warning the discreditable experience of the Greek cities in
democracy; another, how the decline of "morality" and the
disintegration of the family heralded the fall of Rome; another, the
constant menace of mob rule as exemplified in the Reign of Terror. But
to the student of history these alleged illustrations have little
bearing on present conditions. He is struck, moreover, with the ease
with which ancient misapprehensions are transmitted from generation to
generation and with the difficulty of launching a newer and clearer
and truer idea of anything. Bacon warns us that the multitude, "or the
wisest for the multitude's sake", is in reality "ready to give passage
rather to that which is popular and superficial than to that which is
substantial and profound; for the truth is that time seemeth to be of
the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which
is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty
and solid".
It is very painful to most minds to admit that the past does not
furnish us with reliable, permanent standards of conduct and of public
policy. We resent the imputation that things are not going, on the
whole, pretty well, and find excuses for turning our backs on
disconcerting and puzzling facts. We are full of respectable fears and
a general timidity in the face of conditions which we vaguely feel are
escaping control in spite of our best efforts to prevent any
thoroughgoing readjustment. We instinctively try to show that Mr.
Keynes must surely be wrong about the Treaty of Versailles; that Mr.
Gibbs must be perversely exaggerating the horrors of modern war; that
Mr. Hobson certainly views the industrial crisis with unjustifiable
pessimism; that "business as usual" cannot be that socially perverse
and incredibly inexpedient thing Mr. Veblen shows it to be; that Mr.
Robin's picture of Lenin can only be explained by a disguised sympathy
for Bolshevism.
Yet, even if we could assume that traditional opinion is a fairly
clear and reliable reflection of hard-earned experience, surely it
should have less weight in our day and generation than in the past.
For changes have overtaken mankind which have fundamentally altered
the conditions in which we live, and which are revolutionizing the
relations between individuals and classes and nations. Moreover, we
must remember that knowledge has widened and deepened, so that, could
any of us really catch up with the information of our own time, he
would have little temptation to indulge the mediaeval habit of
appealing to the authority of the past.
The Christian Epic did not have to rely for its perpetuation either on
its intellectual plausibility or its traditional authority. During the
Middle Ages there developed a vast and powerful religious State, the
mediaeval Church, the real successor, as Hobbes pointed out, to the
Roman Empire; and the Church with all its resources, including its
control over "the secular arm" of kings and princes, was ready to
defend the Christian beliefs against question and revision. To doubt
the teachings of the Church was the supreme crime; it was treason
against God himself, in comparison with which--to judge from mediaeval
experts on heresy--murder was a minor offense.
We do not, however, inherit our present disposition to intolerance
solely from the Middle Ages. As animals and children and savages, we
are naively and unquestioningly intolerant. All divergence from the
customary is suspicious and repugnant. It seems perverse, and readily
suggests evil intentions. Indeed, so natural and spontaneous is
intolerance that the question of freedom of speech and writing
scarcely became a real issue before the seventeenth century. We have
seen that some of the Greek thinkers were banished, or even executed,
for their new ideas. The Roman officials, as well as the populace,
pestered the early Christians, not so much for the substance of their
views as because they were puritanical, refused the routine reverence
to the gods, and prophesied the downfall of the State.
But with the firm establishment of Christianity edicts began to be
issued by the Roman emperors making orthodox Christian belief the test
of good citizenship. One who disagreed with the emperor and his
religious advisers in regard to the relation of the three members of
the Trinity was subject to prosecution. Heretical books were burned,
the houses of heretics destroyed. So, organized mediaeval religious
intolerance was, like so many other things, a heritage of the later
Roman Empire, and was duly sanctioned in both the Theodosian and
Justinian Codes. It was, however, with the Inquisition, beginning in
the thirteenth century, that the intolerance of the Middle Ages
reached its most perfect organization.
Heresy was looked upon as a contagious disease that must be checked at
all costs. It did not matter that the heretic usually led a
conspicuously blameless life, that he was arduous, did not swear, was
emaciated with fasting and refused to participate in the vain
recreations of his fellows. He was, indeed, overserious and took his
religion too hard. This offensive parading as an angel of light was
explained as the devil's camouflage. No one tried to find out what the
heretic really thought or what were the merits of his divergent
beliefs. Because he insisted on expressing his conception of God in
slightly unfamiliar terms, the heretic was often branded as an
atheist, just as to-day the Socialist is so often accused of being
opposed to all government, when the real objection to him is that he
believes in too much government. It was sufficient to classify a
suspected heretic as an Albigensian, or Waldensian, or a member of
some other heretical sect. There was no use in his trying to explain
or justify; it was enough that he diverged.
There have been various explanations of mediaeval religious
intolerance. Lecky, for example, thought that it was due to the theory
of exclusive salvation; that, since there was only one way of getting
to heaven, all should obviously be compelled to adopt it, for the
saving of their souls from eternal torment. But one finds little
solicitude for the damned in mediaeval writings. The public at large
thought hell none too bad for one who revolted against God and Holy
Church. No, the heretics were persecuted because heresy was, according
to the notions of the time, a monstrous and unutterably wicked thing,
and because their beliefs threatened the vested interests of that day.
We now realize more clearly than did Lecky that the Church was really
a State in the Middle Ages, with its own laws and courts and prisons
and regular taxation to which all were subject. It had all the
interests and all the touchiness of a State, and more. The heretic was
a traitor and a rebel. He thought that he could get along without the
pope and bishops, and that he could well spare the ministrations of
the orthodox priests and escape their exactions. He was the
"anarchist", the "Red" of his time, who was undermining established
authority, and, with the approval of all right-minded citizens, he was
treated accordingly. For the mediaeval citizen no more conceived of a
State in which the Church was not the dominating authority than we can
conceive of a society in which the present political State may have
been superseded by some other form of organization.
Yet the inconceivable has come to pass. Secular authority has
superseded in nearly all matters the old ecclesiastical regime. What
was the supreme issue of the Middle Ages--the distinction between the
religious heretic and the orthodox--is the least of public questions
now.
What, then, we may ask, has been the outcome of the old religious
persecutions, of the trials, tortures, imprisonings, burnings, and
massacres, culminating with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes?
What did the Inquisition and the censorship, both so long
unquestioned, accomplish? Did they succeed in defending the truth or
"safeguarding" society? At any rate, conformity was not established.
Nor did the Holy Roman Church maintain its monopoly, although it has
survived, purified and freed from many an ancient abuse. In most
countries of western Europe and in our own land one may now believe as
he wishes, teach such religious views as appeal to him, and join with
others who share his sympathies. "Atheism" is still a shocking charge
in many ears, but the atheist is no longer an outlaw. _It has been
demonstrated, in short, that religious dogma can be neglected in
matters of public concern and reduced to a question of private taste
and preference_.
This is an incredible revolution. But we have many reasons for
suspecting that in a much shorter time than that which has elapsed
since the Inquisition was founded, the present attempt to eliminate by
force those who contemplate a fundamental reordering of social and
economic relations will seem quite as inexpedient and hopeless as the
Inquisition's effort to defend the monopoly of the mediaeval Church.
We can learn much from the past in regard to wrong ways of dealing
with new ideas. As yet we have only old-fashioned and highly expensive
modes of meeting the inevitable changes which are bound to take place.
Repression has now and then enjoyed some temporary success, it is
true, but in the main it has failed lamentably and produced only
suffering and confusion. Much will depend on whether our purpose is to
keep things as they are or to bring about readjustments designed to
correct abuses and injustice in the present order. Do we believe, in
other words, that truth is finally established and that we have only
to defend it, or that it is still in the making? Do we believe in what
is commonly called progress, or do we think of that as belonging only
to the past? Have we, on the whole, arrived, or are we only on the
way, or mayhap just starting?
In the Middle Ages, even in the times of the Greeks and Romans, there
was little or no conception of progress as the word is now used. There
could doubtless be improvement in detail. Men could be wiser and
better or more ignorant and perverse. But the assumption was that in
general the social, economic, and religious order was fairly
standardized.
This was especially true in the Middle Ages. During these centuries
men's single objective was the assurance of heaven and escape from
hell. Life was an angry river into which men were cast. Demons were on
every hand to drag them down. The only aim could be, with God's help,
to reach the celestial shore. There was no time to consider whether
the river might be made less dangerous by concerted effort, through
the deflection of its torrents and the removal of its sharpest rocks.
No one thought that human efforts should be directed to making the lot
of humanity progressively better by intelligent reforms in the light
of advancing knowledge.
The world was a place to escape from on the best terms possible. In
our own day this mediaeval idea of a static society yields only
grudgingly, and the notion of inevitable vital change is as yet far
from assimilated. We confess it with our lips, but resist it in our
hearts. We have learned as yet to respect only one class of
fundamental innovators, those dedicated to natural science and its
applications. The social innovator is still generally suspect.
To the mediaeval theologian, man was by nature vile. We have seen
that, according to the Christian Epic, he was assoiled from birth with
the primeval sin of his first parents, and began to darken his score
with fresh offenses of his own as soon as he became intelligent enough
to do so. An elaborate mechanism was supplied by the Church for washing
away the original pollution and securing forgiveness for later sins.
Indeed, this was ostensibly its main business.
We may still well ask, Is man by nature bad? And accordingly as we
answer the question we either frame appropriate means for frustrating
his evil tendencies or, if we see some promise in him, work for his
freedom and bid him take advantage of it to make himself and others
happy. So far as I know, Charron, a friend of Montaigne, was one of
the first to say a good word for man's animal nature, and a hundred
years later the amiable Shaftesbury pointed out some honestly
gentlemanly traits in the species. To the modern student of biology
and anthropology man is neither good nor bad. There is no longer any
"mystery of evil". But the mediaeval notion of _sin_--a term heavy
with mysticism and deserving of careful scrutiny by every thoughtful
person--still confuses us.
Of man's impulses, the one which played the greatest part in mediaeval
thoughts of sin and in the monastic ordering of life was the sexual.
The presuppositions of the Middle Ages in the matter of the relations
of men and women have been carried over to our own day. As compared
with many of the ideas which we have inherited from the past, they are
of comparatively recent origin. The Greeks and Romans were, on the
whole, primitive and uncritical in their view of sex. The philosophers
do not seem to have speculated on sex, although there was evidently
some talk in Athens of women's rights. The movement is satirized by
Aristophanes, and later Plato showed a willingness in _The Republic_
to impeach the current notions of the family and women's position in
general.
But there are few traces of our ideas of sexual "purity" in the
classical writers. To the Stoic philosopher, and to other thoughtful
elderly people, sexual indulgence was deemed a low order of pleasure
and one best carefully controlled in the interests of peace of mind.
But with the incoming of Christianity an essentially new attitude
developed, which is still, consciously or unconsciously, that of most
people to-day.
St. Augustine, who had led a free life as a teacher of rhetoric in
Carthage and Rome, came in his later years to believe, as he struggled
to overcome his youthful temptations, that sexual desire was the most
devilish of man's enemies and the chief sign of his degradation. He
could imagine no such unruly urgence in man's perfect estate, when
Adam and Eve still dwelt in Paradise. But with man's fall sexual
desire appeared as the sign and seal of human debasement. This theory
is poignantly set forth in Augustine's _City of God_. He furnished
therein a philosophy for the monks, and doubtless his fourteenth book
was well thumbed by those who were wont to ponder somewhat wistfully
on one of the sins they had fled the world to escape.
Christian monasticism was spreading in western Europe in Augustine's
time, and the monkist vows included "chastity". There followed a long
struggle to force the whole priesthood to adopt a celibate life, and
this finally succeeded so far as repeated decrees of the Church could
effect it. Marriage was proper for the laity, but both the monastic
and secular clergy aspired to a superior holiness which should banish
all thoughts of fervent earthly love. Thus a highly unnatural life was
accepted by men and women of the most varied temperament and often
with slight success.
The result of Augustine's theories and of the efforts to frustrate one
of man's most vehement impulses was to give sex a conscious importance
it had never possessed before. The devil was thrust out of the door
only to come in at all the windows. In due time the Protestant sects
abolished monasteries, and the Catholic countries later followed their
example. The Protestant clergy were permitted to marry, and the old
asceticism has visibly declined. But it has done much to determine our
whole attitude toward sex, and there is no class of questions still so
difficult to discuss with full honesty or to deal with critically and
with an open mind as those relating to the intimate relations of men
and women.
No one familiar with mediaeval literature will, however, be inclined
to accuse its authors of prudishness. Nevertheless, modern
prudishness, as it prevails especially in England and the United
States--our squeamish and shamefaced reluctance to recognize and deal
frankly with the facts and problems of sex--is clearly an outgrowth of
the mediaeval attitude which looked on sexual impulse as of evil
origin and a sign of man's degradation. Modern psychologists have
shown that prudishness is not always an indication of exceptional
purity, but rather the reverse. It is often a disguise thrown over
repressed sexual interest and sexual preoccupations. It appears to be
decreasing among the better educated of the younger generation. The
study of biology, and especially of embryology, is an easy and simple
way of disintegrating the "impurity complex". "Purity" in the sense of
ignorance and suppressed curiosity is a highly dangerous state of
mind. And such purity in alliance with prudery and defensive hypocrisy
makes any honest discussion or essential readjustment of our
institutions and habits extremely difficult.
One of the greatest contrasts between mediaeval thinking and the more
critical thought of to-day lies in the general conception of man's
relation to the cosmos. To the medieval philosopher, as to the
stupidest serf of the time, the world was made for man. All the
heavenly bodies revolved about man's abode as their center. All
creatures were made to assist or to try man. God and the devil were
preoccupied with his fate, for had not God made him in his own image
for his glory, and was not the devil intent on populating his own
infernal kingdom? It was easy for those who had a poetic turn of mind
to think of nature's workings as symbols for man's edification. The
habits of the lion or the eagle yielded moral lessons or illustrated
the divine scheme of salvation. Even the written word was to be
valued, not for what it seemed to say, but for hidden allegories
depicting man's struggles against evil and cheering him on his way.
This is a perennially appealing conception of things. It corresponds
to primitive and inveterate tendencies in humanity and gratifies,
under the guise of humility, our hungering for self-importance. The
mediaeval thinker, however freely he might exercise his powers of
logical analysis in rationalizing the Christian Epic, never permitted
himself to question its general anthropocentric and mystical view of
the world. The philosophic mystic assumes the role of a docile child.
He feels that all vital truth transcends his powers of discovery. He
looks to the Infinite and Eternal Mind to reveal it to him through the
prophets of old, or in moments of ecstatic communion with the Divine
Intelligence. To the mystic all that concerns our deeper needs
transcends logic and defies analysis. In his estimate the human reason
is a feeble rushlight which can at best cast a flickering and
uncertain ray on the grosser concerns of life, but which only serves
to intensify the darkness which surrounds the hidden truth of God.
In order that modern science might develop it is clear that a wholly
new and opposed set of fundamental convictions had to be substituted
for those of the Middle Ages. Man had to cultivate another kind of
self-importance and a new and more profound humility. He had come to
believe in his capacity to discover important truth through thoughtful
examination of things about him, and he had to recognize, on the other
hand, that the world did not seem to be made for him, but that
humanity was apparently a curious incident in the universe, and its
career a recent episode in cosmic history. He had to acquire a taste
for the simplest possible and most thoroughgoing explanation of
things. His whole mood had to change and impel him to reduce
everything so far as possible to the commonplace.
This new view was inevitably fiercely attacked by the mystically
disposed. They misunderstood it and berated its adherents and accused
them of robbing man of all that was most precious in life. These, in
turn, were goaded into bitterness and denounced their opponents as
pig-headed obscurantists.
But we must, after all, come to terms in some way with the emotions
underlying mysticism. They are very dear to us, and scientific
knowledge will never form an adequate substitute for them. No one need
fear that the supply of mystery will ever give out; but a great deal
depends on our taste in mystery; that certainly needs refining. What
disturbs the so-called rationalist in the mystic's attitude is his
propensity to see mysteries where there are none and to fail to see
those that we cannot possibly escape. In declaring that one is not a
mystic, one makes no claim to be able to explain everything, nor does
he maintain that all things are explicable in scientific terms.
Indeed, no thoughtful person will be likely to boast that he can fully
explain anything. We have only to scrape the surface of our
experiences to find fundamental mystery. And how, indeed, as
descendants of an extinct race of primates, with a mind still in the
early stages of accumulation, should we be in the way of reaching
ultimate truth at any point? One may properly urge, however, that as
sharp a distinction as possible be made between fictitious mysteries
and the unavoidable ones which surround us on every side. How milk
turned sour used to be a real mystery, now partially solved since the
discovery of bacteria; how the witch flew up the chimney was a
gratuitous mystery with which we need no longer trouble ourselves. A
"live" wire would once have suggested magic; now it is at least
partially explained by the doctrine of electrons.
It is the avowed purpose of scientific thought to reduce the number of
mysteries, and its success has been marvelous, but it has by no means
done its perfect work as yet. We have carried over far too much of
mediaeval mysticism in our views of man and his duty toward himself
and others.
We must now recall the method adopted by students of the natural
sciences in breaking away from the standards and limitations of the
mediaeval philosophers and establishing new standards of their own.
They thus prepared the way for a revolution in human affairs in the
midst of which we now find ourselves. As yet their type of thinking
has not been applied on any considerable scale to the solution of
social problems. By learning to understand and appreciate the
scientific frame of mind as a historical victory won against
extraordinary odds, we may be encouraged to cultivate and popularize a
similar attitude toward the study of man himself.
NOTES.
[20] St. Ethelred, returning from a pious visit to Citeaux in the days
of Henry II, encountered a great storm when he reached the Channel. He
asked himself what _he_ had done to be thus delayed, and suddenly
thought that he had failed to _fulfill_ a promise to write a poem on
St. Cuthbert. When he had completed this, "wonderful to say, the sea
ceased to rage and became tranquil".--_Surtees Society Publications_,
i, p. 177.
* * * * *
VI
Narrabo igitur primo opera artis et naturae miranda.... ut videatur
quod omnis magica potestas sit inferior his operibus et indigna.
--ROGER BACON.
I do not endeavor either by triumphs of confutation, or pleadings
of antiquity, or assumption of authority, or even, by the veil of
obscurity, to invest these inventions of mine with any majesty....
I have not sought nor do I seek either to force or ensnare men's
judgments, but I lead them to things themselves and the concordances
of things, that they may see for themselves what they have, what
they can dispute, what they can add and contribute to the common
stock.--FRANCIS BACON (_Preface to the Great Instauration_).
12. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
At the opening of the seventeenth century a man of letters, of
sufficient genius to be suspected by some of having written the plays
of Shakespeare, directed his distinguished literary ability to the
promotion and exaltation of natural science. Lord Bacon was the chief
herald of that habit of scientific and critical thought which has
played so novel and all-important a part in the making of the modern
mind. When but twenty-two years old he was already sketching out a
work which he planned to call _Temporis Partus Maximus (The Greatest
Thing Ever)_. He felt that he had discovered why the human mind,
enmeshed in mediaeval metaphysics and indifferent to natural
phenomena, had hitherto been a stunted and ineffective thing, and how
it might be so nurtured and guided as to gain undreamed of strength
and vigor.
And never has there been a man better equipped with literary gifts to
preach a new gospel than Francis Bacon. He spent years in devising
eloquent and ingenious ways of delivering learning from the
"discredits and disgraces" of the past, and in exhorting man to
explore the realms of nature for his delight and profit. He never
wearied of trumpeting forth the glories of the new knowledge which
would come with the study of common things and the profitable uses to
which it might be put in relieving man's estate. He impeached the
mediaeval schoolmen for spinning out endless cobwebs of learning,
remarkable for their fineness, but of no substance or spirit. He urged
the learned to come out of their cells, study the creations of God,
and build upon what they discovered a new and true philosophy.
Even in his own day students of natural phenomena had begun to carry
out Bacon's general program with striking effects. While he was urging
men to cease "tumbling up and down in their own reason and conceits"
and to spell out, and so by degrees to learn to read, the volume of
God's works, Galileo had already begun the reading and had found out
that the Aristotelian physics ran counter to the facts; that a body
once in motion will continue to move forever in a straight line unless
it be stopped or deflected. Studying the sky through his newly
invented telescope, he beheld the sun spots and noted the sun's
revolution on its axis, the phases of Venus, and the satellites of
Jupiter. These discoveries seemed to confirm the ideas advanced long
before by Copernicus--the earth was not the center of the universe and
the heavens were not perfect and unchanging. He dared to discuss these
matters in the language of the people and was, as everyone knows,
condemned by the Inquisition.
This preoccupation with natural phenomena and this refusal to accept
the old, established theories until they had been verified by an
investigation of common fact was a very novel thing. It introduced a
fresh and momentous element into our intellectual heritage. We have
recalled the mysticism, supernaturalism, and intolerance of the Middle
Ages, their reliance on old books, and their indifference to everyday
fact except as a sort of allegory for the edification of the Christian
pilgrim. In the mediaeval universities the professors, or "schoolmen",
devoted themselves to the elaborate formulation of Christian doctrine
and the interpretation of Aristotle's works. It was a period of
revived Greek metaphysics, adapted to prevailing religious
presuppositions. Into this fettered world Bacon, Galileo, Descartes,
and others brought a new aspiration to promote investigation and
honest, critical thinking about everyday things.
_These founders of modern natural science realized that they would
have to begin afresh. This was a bold resolve, but not so bold as must
be that of the student of mankind to-day if he expects to free himself
from the trammels of the past_. Bacon pointed out that the old days
were not those of mature knowledge, but of youthful human ignorance.
"_These_ times are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and
not those we count ancient, _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation
backward from ourselves." In his _New Atlantis_ he pictures an ideal
State which concentrated its resources on systematic scientific
research, with a view to applying new discoveries to the betterment of
man's lot.
Descartes, who was a young man when Bacon was an old one, insisted on
the necessity, if we proposed to seek the truth, of questioning
_everything_ at least once in our lives. To all these leaders in the
development of modern science doubt, not faith, was the beginning of
wisdom. They doubted--and with good reason--what the Greeks were
supposed to have discovered; they doubted all the old books and all
the university professors' lecture notes. They did not venture to
doubt the Bible, but they eluded it in various ways. They set to work
to find out exactly what happened under certain circumstances. They
experimented individually and reported their discoveries to the
scientific academies which began to come into existence.
As one follows the deliberations of these bodies it is pathetic to
observe how little the learning of previous centuries, in spite of its
imposing claims, had to contribute to a fruitful knowledge of common
things. It required a century of hard work to establish the most
elementary facts which would now be found in a child's book. How water
and air act, how to measure time and temperature and atmospheric
pressure, had to be discovered. The microscope revealed the complexity
of organic tissues, the existence of minute creatures, vaguely called
infusoria, and the strange inhabitants of the blood, the red and white
corpuscles. The telescope put an end to the flattering assumption that
the cosmos circled around man and the little ball he lives on.
Without a certain un-Greek, practical inventive tendency which, for
reasons not easily to be discovered, first began to manifest itself in
the thirteenth century, this progress would not have been possible.
The new thinkers descended from the magisterial chair and patiently
fussed with lenses, tubes, pulleys, and wheels, thus weaning
themselves from the adoration of man's mind and understanding. They
had to devise the machinery of investigation as investigation itself
progressed.
Moreover, they did not confine themselves to the conventionally noble
and elevated subjects of speculation. They addressed themselves to
worms and ditch water in preference to metaphysical subtleties. They
agreed with Bacon that the mean and even filthy things deserve study.
All this was naturally scorned by the university professors, and the
universities consequently played little or no part in the advance of
natural science until the nineteenth century.
Nor were the moral leaders of mankind behind the intellectual in
opposing the novel tendencies. The clergy did all they could to
perpetuate the squalid belief in witchcraft, but found no place for
experimental science in their scheme of learning, and judged it
offensive to the Maker of all things. But their opposition could do no
more than hamper the new scientific impulse, which was far too potent
to be seriously checked.
So in one department of human thought--the investigation of natural
processes--majestic progress has been made since the opening of the
seventeenth century, with every promise of continued and startling
advance. The new methods employed by students of natural science have
resulted in the accumulation of a stupendous mass of information in
regard to the material structure and operation of things, and the
gradual way in which the earth and all its inhabitants have come into
being. The nature and workings of atoms and molecules are being
cleared up, and their relation to heat, light, and electricity
established. The slow processes which have brought about the mountains
and valleys, the seas and plains, have been exposed. The structure of
the elementary cell can be studied under powerful lenses; its
divisions, conjunctions, differentiation, and multiplication into the
incredibly intricate substance of plants and animals can be traced.
In short, man is now in a position, for the first time in his history,
to have some really clear and accurate notion of the world in which he
dwells and of the living creatures which surround him and with which
he must come to terms. It would seem obvious that this fresh knowledge
should enable him to direct his affairs more intelligently than his
ancestors were able to do in their ignorance. He should be in a
position to accommodate himself more and more successfully to the
exigencies of an existence which he can understand more fully than any
preceding generation, and he should aspire to deal more and more
sagaciously with himself and his fellow-men.
13. HOW SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE HAS REVOLUTIONIZED THE CONDITIONS OF LIFE
But while our information in regard to man and the world is
incalculably greater than that available a hundred, even fifty years
ago, we must frankly admit that the knowledge is still so novel, so
imperfectly assimilated, so inadequately co-ordinated, and so feebly
and ineffectively presented to the great mass of men, that its
_direct_ effects upon human impulses and reasoning and outlook are as
yet inconsiderable and disappointing. We _might_ think in terms of
molecules and atoms, but we rarely do. Few have any more knowledge of
their own bodily operations than had their grandparents. The farmer's
confidence in the phases of the moon gives way but slowly before
recent discoveries in regard to the bacteria of the soil. Few who use
the telephone, ride on electric cars, and carry a camera have even the
mildest curiosity in regard to how these things work. It is only
_indirectly_, through _invention_, that scientific knowledge touches
our lives on every hand, modifying our environment, altering our daily
habits, dislocating the anciently established order, and imposing the
burden of constant adaptation on even the most ignorant and lethargic.
Unlike a great part of man's earlier thought, modern scientific
knowledge and theory have not remained matter merely for academic
discourse and learned books, but have provoked the invention of
innumerable practical devices which surround us on every hand, and
from which we can now scarce escape by land or sea. Thus while
scientific knowledge has not greatly affected the thoughts of most of
us, its influence in the promotion of modern invention has served to
place us in a new setting or environment, the novel features of which
it would be no small task to explain to one's great-great-grandfather,
should he unexpectedly apply for up-to-date information. So even if
modern scientific _knowledge_ is as yet so imperfect and ill
understood as to make it impossible for us to apply much of it
directly and personally in our daily conduct, we nevertheless cannot
neglect the urgent effects of scientific _inventions_, for they are
constantly posing new problems of adjustment to us, and sometimes
disposing of old ones.
Let us recall a few striking examples of the astonishing way in which
what seemed in the beginning to be rather trivial inventions and
devices have, with the improvements of modern science, profoundly
altered the conditions of life.
Some centuries before the time of Bacon and Galileo four discoveries
were made which, supplemented and elaborated by later insight and
ingenuity, may be said to underlie our modern civilization. A writer
of the time of Henry II of England reports that sailors when caught in
fog or darkness were wont to touch a needle to a bit of magnetic iron.
The needle would then, it had been found, whirl around in a circle and
come to rest pointing north. On this tiny index the vast extension of
modern commerce and imperialism rests.
That lentil-shaped bits of glass would magnify objects was known
before the end of the thirteenth century, and from that little fact
have come microscopes, telescopes, spectroscopes, and cameras; and
from these in turn has come a great part of our present knowledge of
natural processes in men, animals, and plants and our comprehension of
the cosmos at large.
Gunpowder began to be used a few decades after the lens was discovered;
it and its terrible descendants have changed the whole problem of human
warfare and of the public defense.
The printing press, originally a homely scheme for saving the labor of
the copyist, has not only made modern democracy and nationality
possible, but has helped by the extension of education to undermine
the ancient foundations upon which human industry has rested from the
beginnings of civilization.
In the middle of the eighteenth century the steam engine began to
supplant the muscular power of men and animals, which had theretofore
been only feebly supplemented by windmills and water wheels. And now
we use steam and gas engines and water power to generate potent
electric currents which do their work far from the source of supply.
Mechanical ingenuity has utilized all this undreamed-of energy in
innumerable novel ways for producing old and new commodities in
tremendous quantities and distributing them with incredible rapidity
throughout the earth.
Vast factories have sprung up, with their laborious multitudes engaged
on minute contributions to the finished article; overgrown cities
sprawl over the neighboring green fields and pastures; long freight
trains of steel cars thunder across continents; monstrous masses of
wealth pile up, are reinvested, and applied to making the whole system
more and more inconceivably intricate and interdependent; and
incidentally there is hurry and worry and discontent and hazard beyond
belief for a creature who has to grasp it all and control it all with
a mind reared on that of an animal, a child, and a savage.
As if these changes were not astounding enough, now has come the
chemist who devotes himself to making not new _commodities_ (or old
ones in new ways), but new _substances_. He juggles with the atoms of
carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and the rest, and far
outruns the workings of nature. Up to date he has been able to produce
artfully over two hundred thousand compounds, for some of which
mankind formerly depended on the alchemy of animals and plants. He can
make foodstuffs out of sewage; he can entrap the nitrogen in the air
and use it to raise wheat to feed, or high explosives to slaughter,
his fellows. He no longer relies on plants and animals for dyes and
perfumes. In short, a chemical discovery may at any moment devastate
an immemorial industry and leave both capital and labor in the lurch.
The day may not be far distant when, should the chemist learn to
control the incredible interatomic energy, the steam engine will seem
as complete an anachronism as the treadmill.
The uttermost parts of the earth have been visited by Europeans, and
commerce has brought all races of the globe into close touch. We have
now to reckon with every nation under heaven, as was shown in the
World War. At the same time steam and electrical communication have
been so perfected that space has been practically annihilated as
regards speech, and in matters of transportation reduced to perhaps a
fifth. So all the peoples of the earth form economically a loose and,
as yet, scarcely acknowledged federation of man, in which the fate of
any member may affect the affairs of all the others, no matter how
remote they may be geographically.
All these unprecedented conditions have conspired to give business for
business' sake a fascination and overwhelming importance it has never
had before. We no longer make things for the sake of making them, but
for money. The chair is not made to sit on, but for profit; the soap
is no longer prepared for purposes of cleanliness, but to be sold for
profit. Practically nothing catches our eye in the way of writing that
was written for its own sake and not for money. Our magazines and
newspapers are our modern commercial travelers proclaiming the gospel
of business competition. Formerly the laboring classes worked because
they were slaves, or because they were defenseless and could not
escape from thraldom--or, mayhap, because they were natural artisans;
but now they are coming into a position where they can combine and
bargain and enter into business competition with their employers. Like
their employers, they are learning to give as little as possible for
as much as possible. This is good business; and the employer should
realize that at last he has succeeded in teaching his employees to be
strictly businesslike. When houses were built to live in, and wheat
and cattle grown to eat, these essential industries took care of
themselves. But now that profit is the motive for building houses and
raising grain, if the promised returns are greater from manufacturing
automobiles or embroidered lingerie, one is tempted to ask if there
are any longer compelling reasons for building houses or raising food?
Along with the new inventions and discoveries and our inordinately
pervasive commerce have come two other novel elements in our
environment--what we vaguely call "democracy" and "nationality". These
also are to be traced to applied science and mechanical contrivances.
The printing press has made popular education possible, and it is our
aspiration to have every boy and girl learn to read and write--an
ideal that the Western World has gone far to realize in the last
hundred years. General education, introduced first among men and then
extended to women, has made plausible the contention that all adults
should have a vote, and thereby exercise some ostensible influence in
the choice of public officials and in the direction of the policy of
the government.
Until recently the mass of the people have not been invited to turn
their attention to public affairs, which have been left in the control
of the richer classes and their representatives and agents, the
statesmen or politicians. Doubtless our crowded cities have
contributed to a growing sense of the importance of the common man,
for all must now share the street car, the public park, the water
supply, and contagious diseases.
But there is a still more fundamental discovery underlying our
democratic tendencies. This is the easily demonstrated scientific
truth that nearly all men and women, whatever their social and
economic status, may have much greater possibilities of activity and
thought and emotion than they exhibit in the particular conditions in
which they happen to be placed; that in all ranks may be found
evidence of unrealized capacity; that we are living on a far lower
scale of intelligent conduct and rational enjoyment than is necessary.
Our present notions of nationality are of very recent origin, going
back scarcely a hundred years. Formerly nations were made up of the
subjects of this or that gracious majesty and were regarded by their
God-given rulers as beasts of burden or slaves or, in more amiable
moods, as children. The same forces that have given rise to modern
democracy have made it possible for vast groups of people, such as
make up France or the United States, to be held together more
intimately than ever before by the news which reaches them daily of
the enterprises of their government and the deeds of their conspicuous
fellow-countrymen.
In this way the inhabitants of an extensive territory embracing
hundreds of thousands of square miles are brought as close together as
the people of Athens in former days. Man Is surely a gregarious animal
who dislikes solitude. He is, moreover, given to the most exaggerated
estimate of his tribe; and on these ancient foundations modern
nationality has been built up by means of the printing press, the
telegraph, and cheap postage. _So it has fallen out that just when the
world was becoming effectively cosmopolitan in its economic
interdependence, its scientific research, and its exchange of books
and art, the ancient tribal insolence has been developed on a
stupendous scale._
The manner in which man has revolutionized his environment, habits of
conduct, and purposes of life by inventions is perhaps the most
astonishing thing in human history. It is an obscure and hitherto
rather neglected subject. But it is clear enough, from the little that
has been said here, that since the Middle Ages, and especially in the
past hundred years, science has so hastened the process of change that
it becomes increasingly difficult for man's common run of thinking to
keep pace with the radical alterations in his actual practices and
conditions of living.
* * * * *
VII
Peace sitting under her olive, and
slurring the days gone by,
When the poor are hovell'd and
hustled together, each sex, like
swine,
When only the ledger lives, and
when only not all men lie;
Peace in her vineyard--yes!--but
a company forges the wine.
--TENNYSON.
Could great men thunder
As Jove himself does, Jove would
ne'er be quiet.
For every pelting, petty officer
Would use his heaven for thunder;
Nothing but thunder!
... Man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most
assured,
His glassy essence, like an angry
ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before
high heaven
As make the angels weep; who, with
our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.
--SHAKESPEARE.
14. "THE SICKNESS OF AN ACQUISITIVE SOCIETY"
It is so difficult a task to form any correct estimate of one's own
surroundings, largely on account of our very familiarity with them,
that historical students have generally evaded this responsibility.
They have often declared that it was impossible to do so
satisfactorily. And yet no one will ever know more than we about what
is going on now. Some secrets may be revealed to coming generations,
but plenty of our circumstances will be obscure to them. And it
certainly seems pusillanimous, if not hazardous, to depute to those
yet unborn the task of comprehending the conditions under which we
must live and strive. I have long believed that the only unmistakable
contribution that the historical student can make to the progress of
intelligence is to study the past with an eye constantly on the
present. For history not only furnishes us with the key to the present
by showing how our situation came about, but at the same time supplies
a basis of comparison and a point of vantage by virtue of which the
salient contrasts between our days and those of old can be detected.
Without history the essential differences are sure to escape us. Our
generation, like all preceding generations of mankind, inevitably
takes what it finds largely for granted, and the great mass of men who
argue about existing conditions assume a fundamental likeness to past
conditions as the basis of their conclusions in regard to the present
and the still unrolled future.
Such a procedure becomes more and more dangerous, for although a
continuity persists, there are more numerous, deeper and wider
reaching contrasts between the world of to-day and that of a hundred,
or even fifty, years ago, than have developed in any corresponding
lapse of time since the beginning of civilization. This is not the
place even to sketch the novelties in our knowledge and circumstances,
our problems and possibilities. No more can be done here than to
illustrate in a single field of human interest the need of an
unprecedentedly open mind in order to avail ourselves of existing
resources in grasping and manipulating the problems forced upon us.
Few people realize how novel is the almost universal preoccupation
with business which we can observe on every hand, but to which we are
already so accustomed that it easily escapes the casual observer. But
in spite of its vastness and magnificent achievements, business, based
upon mass production and speculative profits, has produced new evils
and reinforced old ones which no thoughtful person can possibly
overlook. Consequently it has become the great issue of our time, the
chief subject of discussion, to be defended or attacked according to
one's tastes, even as religion and politics formerly had their day.
Business men, whether conspicuous in manufacture, trade, or finance,
are the leading figures of our age. They exercise a dominant influence
in domestic and foreign policy; they subsidize our education and exert
an unmistakable control over it. In other ages a military or religious
caste enjoyed a similar pre-eminence. But now business directs and
equips the soldier, who is far more dependent on its support than
formerly. Most religious institutions make easy terms with business,
and, far from interfering with it or its teachings, on the whole
cordially support it. Business has its philosophy, which it holds to
be based upon the immutable traits of human nature and as identical
with morality and patriotism. It is a sensitive, intolerant
philosophy, of which something will be said in the following section.
Modern business produced a sort of paradise for the luckier of
mankind, which endured down to the war, and which many hope to see
restored in its former charm, and perhaps further beautified as the
years go on. It represents one of the most startling of human
achievements. No doubt a great part of the population worked hard and
lived in relative squalor, but even then they had many comforts
unknown to the toiling masses of previous centuries, and were
apparently fairly contented.
But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at
all exceeding the average, into the middle or upper classes, for
whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble,
conveniencies, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the
richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant
of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed,
the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he
might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his
doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure
his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any
quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble,
in their prospective fruits and advantages.... He could secure
forthwith, if he wished it, cheap and comfortable means of transit
to any country or climate without passport or other formality, could
dispatch his servant to the neighboring office of a bank for such
supply of the precious metals as might seem convenient, and could
then proceed abroad to foreign quarters, without knowledge of their
religion, language, or customs, bearing coined wealth upon his
person, and would consider himself greatly aggrieved and much
surprised at the least interference.
And most important of all, he could, before the war, regard this state
of affairs as
... normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of
further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant,
scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism,
and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies,
restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent in this
paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper,
and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary
course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which
was nearly complete in practice.[21]
This assumption of the permanence and normality of the prevailing
business system was much disturbed by the outcome of the war, but less
so, especially in this country, than might have been expected. It was
easy to argue that the terrible conflict merely interrupted the
generally beneficent course of affairs which would speedily
re-establish itself when given an opportunity. To those who see the
situation in this light, modern business has largely solved the
age-long problem of producing and distributing the material
necessities and amenities of life; and nothing remains except to
perfect the system in detail, develop its further potentialities, and
fight tooth and nail those who are led by lack of personal success or
a maudlin sympathy for the incompetent to attack and undermine it.
On the other hand, there were many before the war, not themselves
suffering conspicuously from the system, who challenged its
beneficence and permanence, in the name of justice, economy, and the
best and highest interests of mankind as a whole. Since the war many
more have come to the conclusion that business as now conducted is not
merely unfair, exceedingly wasteful, and often highly inexpedient from
a social standpoint, but that from an historical standpoint it is
"intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, and temporary"
(Keynes). It may prove to be the chief eccentricity of our age; quite
as impermanent as was the feudal and manorial system or the role of
the mediaeval Church or of monarchs by the grace of God; and destined
to undergo changes which it is now quite impossible to forecast.
In any case, economic issues are the chief and bitterest of our time.
It is in connection with them that free thinking is most difficult and
most apt to be misunderstood, for they easily become confused with the
traditional reverences and sanctities of political fidelity,
patriotism, morality, and even religion. There is something
humiliating about this situation, which subordinates all the varied
possibilities of life to its material prerequisites, much as if we
were again back in a stage of impotent savagery, scratching for roots
and looking for berries and dead animals. One of the most brilliant of
recent English economists says with truth:
The burden of our civilization is not merely, as many suppose, that
the product of industry is ill-distributed, or its conduct tyrannical,
or its operation interrupted by bitter disagreements. It is that
industry itself has come to hold a position of exclusive predominance
among human interests, which no single interest, and least of all the
provision of the material means of existence, is fit to occupy. Like
a hypochondriac who is so absorbed in the processes of his own
digestion that he goes to the grave before he has begun to live,
industrialized communities neglect the very objects for which it is
worth while to acquire riches in their feverish preoccupation with
the means by which riches can be acquired.
That obsession by economic issues is as local and transitory as it is
repulsive and disturbing. To future generations it will appear as
pitiable as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious
quarrels appears to-day; indeed, it is less rational, since the object
with which it is concerned is less important. And it is a poison which
inflames every wound and turns each trivial scratch into a malignant
ulcer.[22]
Whatever may be the merits of the conflicting views of our business
system, there can be no doubt that it is agitating all types of
thoughtful men and women. Poets, dramatists, and story writers turn
aside from their old _motifs_ to play the role of economists.
Psychologists, biologists, chemists, engineers, are as never before
striving to discover the relation between their realms of information
and the general problems of social and industrial organization. And
here is a historical student allowing the dust to collect on mediaeval
chronicles, church histories, and even seventeenth-century
rationalists, once fondly perused, in order to see if he can come to
some terms with the profit system. And why not? Are we not all
implicated? We all buy and many sell, and no one is left untouched by
a situation which can in two or three years halve our incomes, without
fault of ours. But before seeking to establish the bearing of the
previous sections of this volume on our attitude toward the puzzles of
our day, we must consider more carefully the "good reasons" commonly
urged in defense of the existing system.
15. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SAFETY AND SANITY
So far we have been mainly engaged in recalling the process by which
man has accumulated such a mind as he now has, and the effects of this
accumulation on his mode of life. Under former conditions (which are
now passing away) and in a state of ignorance about highly essential
matters (which are now being put in quite a new light) he established
certain standards and practices in his political, social, and
industrial life. His views of property, government, education, the
relations of the sexes, and various other matters he reaffirms and
perpetuates by means of schools, colleges, churches, newspapers, and
magazines, which in order to be approved and succeed must concur in
and ratify these established standards and practices and the current
notions of good and evil, right and wrong. This is what happened in
the past, and to the great majority of people this still seems to be
the only means of "safeguarding society". Before subjecting this
attitude of mind to further criticism it will be helpful to see how
those argue who fail to perceive the vicious circle involved.
The war brought with it a burst of unwonted and varied animation.
Those who had never extended their activities beyond the usual routine
of domestic and professional life suddenly found themselves
participating in a vast enterprise in which they seemed to be
broadening their knowledge and displaying undreamed of capacity for
co-operation with their fellows. Expressions of high idealism exalted
us above the petty cares of our previous existence, roused new
ambitions, and opened up an exhilarating perspective of possibility
and endeavor. It was common talk that when the foe, whose criminal
lust for power had precipitated the mighty tragedy, should be
vanquished, things would "no longer be the same". All would then agree
that war was the abomination of abominations, the world would be made
safe for right-minded democracy, and the nations would unite in
smiling emulation.
Never did bitterer disappointment follow high hopes. All the old
habits of nationalistic policy reasserted themselves at Versailles. A
frightened and bankrupt world could indeed hardly be expected to
exhibit greater intelligence than the relatively happy and orderly one
which had five years earlier allowed its sanctified traditions to drag
it over the edge of the abyss. Then there emerged from the autocracy
of the Tsars the dictatorship of the proletariat, and in Hungary and
Germany various startling attempts to revolutionize hastily and
excessively that ancient order which the Hapsburg and Hohenzollern
rulers had managed to perpetuate in spite of all modern novelties. The
real character of these movements was ill understood in our country,
but it was inevitable that with man's deep-seated animistic tendencies
they should appear as a sort of wicked demon or a deadly contagion
which might attack even our own land unless prevented by timely
measures. War had naturally produced its machinery for dealing with
dissenters, sympathizers with the enemy, and those who deprecated or
opposed war altogether; and it was the easiest thing in the world to
extend the repression to those who held exceptional or unpopular
views, like the Socialists and members of the I.W.W. It was plausible
to charge these associations with being under the guidance of
foreigners, with "pacificism" and a general tendency to disloyalty.
But suspicion went further so as to embrace members of a rather small,
thoughtful class who, while rarely socialistic, were confessedly
skeptical in regard to the general beneficence of existing
institutions, and who failed to applaud at just the right points to
suit the taste of the majority of their fellow-citizens. So the
general impression grew up that there was a sort of widespread
conspiracy to overthrow the government by violence or, at least, a
dangerous tendency to prepare the way for such a disaster, or at any
rate a culpable indifference to its possibility.
Business depression reinforced a natural reaction which had set in
with the sudden and somewhat unexpected close of the war. The unwonted
excitement brought on a national headache, and a sedative in the form
of normalcy was proffered by the Republican party and thankfully
accepted by the country at large. Under these circumstances the
philosophy of safety and sanity was formulated. It is familiar and
reassuring and puts no disagreeable task of mental and emotional
readjustment on those who accept it. Hence its inevitable popularity
and obvious soundness.
And these are its presuppositions: No nation is comparable to our own
in its wealth and promise, in its freedom and opportunity for all. It
has opened its gates to the peoples of the earth, who have flocked
across the ocean to escape the poverty and oppression of Europe. From
the scattered colonies of the pre-revolutionary period the United
States has rapidly advanced to its world ascendancy. When the European
powers had reached a hopeless stalemate after four years of war the
United States girded on the sword as the champion of liberty and
democracy and in an incredibly short time brought the conflict to a
victorious close before she had dispatched half the troops she could
easily have spared. She had not entered the conflict with any motives
of aggrandizement or of territorial extension. She felt her
self-sufficiency and could well afford proudly to refuse to join the
League of Nations on the ground that she did not wish to be involved
in European wrangles or sacrifice a tittle of her rights of
self-determination.
The prosperity of the United States is to be attributed largely to the
excellence of the Federal Constitution and the soundness of her
democratic institutions. Class privileges do not exist, or at least
are not recognized. Everyone has equal opportunity to rise in the
world unhampered by the shackles of European caste. There is perfect
freedom in matters of religious belief. Liberty of speech and of the
press is confirmed by both the Federal Constitution and the
constitutions of the various states. If people are not satisfied with
their form of government they may at any time alter it by a peaceful
exercise of the suffrage.
In no other country is morality more highly prized or stoutly
defended. Woman is held in her proper esteem and the institution of
the family everywhere recognized as fundamental. We are singularly
free from the vices which disgrace the capitals of Europe, not
excepting London.
In no other country is the schoolhouse so assuredly acknowledged to be
the corner stone of democracy and liberty. Our higher institutions of
learning are unrivaled; our public libraries numerous and accessible.
Our newspapers and magazines disseminate knowledge and rational
pleasure throughout the land.
We are an ingenious people in the realm of invention and in the
boldness of our business enterprise. We have the sturdy virtues of the
pioneer. We are an honest people, keeping our contracts and giving
fair measure. We are a tireless people in the patient attention to
business and the laudable resolve to rise in the world. Many of our
richest men began on the farm or as office boys. Success depends in
our country almost exclusively on native capacity, which is rewarded
here with a prompt and cheerful recognition which is rare in other
lands.
We are a progressive people, always ready for improvements, which
indeed we take for granted, so regularly do they make their
appearance. No alert American can visit any foreign country without
noting innumerable examples of stupid adherence to outworn and
cumbrous methods in industry, commerce, and transportation.
Of course no one is so blind as not to see that here and there evils
develop which should be remedied, either by legislation or by the
gradual advance in enlightenment. Many of them will doubtless cure
themselves. Our democracy is right at heart and you cannot fool all
the people all the time. We have not escaped our fair quota of
troubles. It would be too much to expect that we should. The
difference of opinion between the Northern and Southern states
actually led to civil war, but this only served to confirm the natural
unity of the country and prepare the way for further advance.
Protestants have sometimes dreaded a Catholic domination; the Mormons
have been a source of anxiety to timid souls. Populists and advocates
of free silver have seemed to threaten sound finance. On the other
hand, Wall Street and the trusts have led some to think that corporate
business enterprise may at times, if left unhampered, lead to
over-powerful monopolies. But the evil workings of all these things
had before the war been peaceful, if insidious. They might rouse
apprehension in the minds of far-sighted and public-spirited
observers, but there had been no general fear that any of them would
overthrow the Republic and lead to a violent destruction of society as
now constituted and mayhap to a reversion to barbarism.
The circumstances of our participation in the World War and the rise
of Bolshevism convinced many for the first time that at last society
and the Republic were actually threatened. Heretofore the socialists
of various kinds, the communists and anarchists, had attracted
relatively little attention in our country. Except for the Chicago
anarchist episode and the troubles with the I.W.W., radical reformers
had been left to go their way, hold their meetings, and publish their
newspapers and pamphlets with no great interference on the part of the
police or attention on the part of lawgivers. With the progress of the
war this situation changed; police and lawgivers began to interfere,
and government officials and self-appointed guardians of the public
weal began to denounce the "reds" and those suspected of "radical
tendencies". The report of the Lusk Committee in the state of New York
is perhaps the most imposing monument to this form of patriotic zeal.
It is not our business here to discuss the merits of Socialism or
Bolshevism either from the standpoint of their underlying theories or
their promise in practice. It is only in their effects in developing
and substantiating the philosophy of safety and sanity that they
concern us in this discussion.
Whether the report of the so-called Lusk Committee[23] has any
considerable influence or no, it well illustrates a common and
significant frame of mind and an habitual method of reasoning. The
ostensible aim of the report is:
... to give a clear, unbiased statement and history of the
purposes and objects, tactics and methods, of the various
forces now at work in the United States, and particularly
within the state of New York, which are seeking to undermine
and destroy, not only the government under which we live, but
also the very structure of American society. It also seeks to
analyze the various constructive forces which are at work
throughout the country counteracting these evil influences,
and to present the many industrial and social problems that
these constructive forces must meet and are meeting.
The plan is executed with laborious comprehensiveness, and one
unacquainted with the vast and varied range of so-called "radical"
utterances will be overwhelmed by the mass brought together. But our
aim here is to consider the attitude of mind and assumptions of the
editors and their sympathizers.
They admit the existence of "real grievances and natural demands of
the working classes for a larger share in the management and use of
the common wealth". It is these grievances and demands which the
agitators use as a basis of their machinations. Those bent on a social
revolution fall into two classes--socialists and anarchists. But while
the groups differ in detail, these details are not worth considering.
"Anyone who studies the propaganda of the various groups which we have
named will learn that the arguments employed are the same; that the
tactics advocated cannot be distinguished from one another, and that
articles, or speeches made on the question of tactics or methods by
anarchists, could, with propriety, be published in socialist, or
communist newspapers without offending the membership of these
organizations." So, fortunately for the reader, it is unnecessary to
make any distinctions between socialists, anarchists, communists, and
Bolsheviki. They all have the common purpose of overthrowing existing
society and "general strikes and sabotage are the direct means
advocated". The object is to drive business into bankruptcy by
reducing production and raising costs.[24]
But it would be a serious mistake to assume that the dangers are
confined to our industrial system. "The very first general fact that
must be driven home to Americans is that the pacifist movement in this
country, the growth and connections of which are an important part of
this report, is an absolutely integral and fundamental part of
international socialism." European socialism, from which ours is
derived, has had for one of its main purposes "the creation of an
international sentiment to supersede national patriotism and effort,
and this internationalism was based upon pacificism, in the sense that
it opposed all wars between nations and developed at the same time
class consciousness that was to culminate in relentless class warfare.
In other words, it was not really peace that was the goal, but the
abolition of the patriotic, warlike spirit of nationalities".
In view of the necessity of making head against this menace the
Criminal Anarchy statute of the State of New York was invoked, search
warrants issued, "large quantities of revolutionary, incendiary and
seditious written and printed matter were seized". After the refusal
of Governor Smith to sign them, the so-called Lusk educational bills
were repassed and signed by the Republican Governor Miller. No teacher
in the schools shall be licensed to teach who "has advocated, either
by word of mouth or in writing, a form of government other than the
government of the United States or of this state". Moreover, "No
person, firm, corporation, association, or society shall conduct,
maintain, or operate any school, institute, class, or course of
instruction in any subject without making application for and being
granted a license from the University of the State of New York [_i.
e_. the Regents]." The Regents shall have the right to send inspectors
to visit classes and schools so licensed and to revoke licenses if
they deem that an overthrow of the existing government by violence is
being taught.[25]
But the safe and sane philosophy by no means stops with the convenient
and compendious identification of socialists of all kinds, anarchists,
pacificists and internationalists, as belonging to one threatening
group united in a like-minded attempt to overthrow society as we now
know it. This class includes, it may be observed, such seemingly
distinguishable personalities as Trotzky and Miss Jane Addams, who are
assumed to be in essential harmony upon the great issue. But there are
many others who are perhaps the innocent tools of the socialists.
These include teachers, lecturers, writers, clergymen, and editors to
whom the Lusk report devotes a long section on "the spread of socialism
in educated circles". It is the purpose of this section
... to show the use made by members of the Socialist Party of America
and other extreme radicals and revolutionaries of pacifist sentiment
among people of education and culture in the United States as a
vehicle for the promotion of revolutionary socialistic propaganda.
The facts here related are important because they show that these
socialists, playing upon the pacifist sentiment in a large body of
sincere persons, were able to organize their energies and capitalize
their prestige for the spread of their doctrines. [P. 969.]
An instance of this is an article in the _New Republic_ which:
... includes more or less open attacks on Attorney-General Palmer,
Mr. Lansing, the House Immigration Committee, the New York _Times_,
Senator Fall, this Committee, etc. It also quotes the dissenting
opinions in the Abrams case of Justices Holmes and Brandeis, and
ends by making light of the danger of revolution in America: ...
This belittling of the very real danger to the institutions of this
country, as well as the attempted discrediting of any investigating
group (or individual), has become thoroughly characteristic of our
"Parlor Bolshevik" or "Intelligentsia". [P. 1103.]
So it comes about, as might indeed have been foreseen from the first,
that one finds himself, if not actually violating the criminal anarchy
statute, at least branded as a Bolshevik if he speaks slightingly of
the New York _Times_ or recalls the dissenting opinion of two judges
of the Supreme Court.
Moreover, as might have been anticipated, the issues prove to be at
bottom not so much economic as moral and religious, for "Materialism
and its formidable sons, Anarchy, Bolshevism, and Unrest, have thrown
down the gauge of battle" to all decency.
... What is of the greatest importance for churchmen to understand,
in order that they may not be led astray by specious arguments of
so-called Christian Socialists and so-called liberals and
self-styled partisans of free speech, is that socialism as a system,
as well as anarchism and all its ramifications, from high-brow
Bolshevism to the Russian Anarchist Association, are all the
declared enemies of religion and all recognized moral standards
and restraints. [P. 1124.]
We must not be misled by "false, specious idealism masquerading as
progress". The fight is one for God as well as country, in which all
forms of radicalism, materialism, and anarchy should be fiercely and
promptly stamped out.[26]
NOTES.
[21] Keynes, _The Economic Consequences of the Peace_, pp. 11-12.
[22] Tawney, R. H., _The Acquisitive Society_, pp. 183-184. The
original title of this admirable little work, a Fabian tract, was,
_The Sickness of an Acquisitive Society_, but the American publishers
evidently thought it inexpedient to stress the contention of the
author that modern society has anything fundamentally the matter with
it.
[23] _Revolutionary Radicalism, Its History, Purpose, and Tactics:
with an exposition and discussion of the steps being taken and
required to curb it, being the report of the Joint Legislative
Committee investigating seditious activities, filed April 24, 1920, in
the Senate of the state of New York._ This comprises four stout
volumes (over 4,200 pages in all) divided into two parts, dealing,
respectively, with "Revolutionary and Subversive Movements at Home and
Abroad" and "Constructive Movements and Measures in America". Albany,
1920.
[24] "While the nature of this investigation has led the committee to
lay its emphasis upon the activities of subversive organizations, it
feels that this report would not be complete if it did not state
emphatically that it believes that those persons in business and
commercial enterprise and certain owners of property who seek to take
advantage of the situation to reap inordinate gain from the public
contribute in no small part to the social unrest which affords the
radical a field of operation which otherwise would be closed to him."
(P. 10.)
[25] The general history throughout the United States of these and
similar measures, the interference with public meetings, the trials,
imprisonments, and censorship, are all set forth in Professor
Chaffee's _Freedom of Speech_, 1920.
[26] During the summer of 1921 the Vice-President of the United States
published in _The Delineator_ a series of three articles on "Enemies
of the Republic", in which he considers the question, "Are the 'reds'
stalking our college women?" He finds some indications that they are,
and warns his readers that, "Adherence to radical doctrines means the
ultimate breaking down of the old, sturdy virtues of manhood and
womanhood, the insidious destruction of character, the weakening of
the moral fiber of the individual, and the destruction of the
foundations of society." It may seem anomalous to some that the
defenders of the old, sturdy virtues should so carelessly brand honest
and thoughtful men and women, of whose opinions they can have no real
knowledge, as "enemies of the Republic"--but there is nothing whatever
anomalous in this. It has been the habit of defenders of the sturdy,
old virtues from time immemorial to be careless of others'
reputations.
* * * * *
VIII
Dans les sciences politiques, il est un ordre de vérités qui,
surtout chez les peuples libres ... ne peuvent être utiles, que
lorsqu'elles sont généralement connues et avouées. Ainsi,
l'influence du progrês de ces sciences sur la liberté, sur la
prospérité des nations, doivent en quelque sorts se mesurer sur
le nombre de ces vérités qui, par l'effet d'une instruction
élémentaire, deviennent commune à tous les esprits; ainsi les
progrès toujours croissants de cette instruction élémentaire,
liés eux mêmes aux progrès nécessaires de ces sciences, nous
répondent d'une amélioration dans les destinées de l'espèce
humaine qui peut être regardée comme indéfinie, puisqu'elle n'a
d'autres limites que celles de ces progrès mêmes.--CONDORCET.
16. SOME HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF REPRESSION
Of course the kind of reasoning and the presuppositions described in
the previous section will appeal to many readers as an illustration of
excessive and unjustifiable fear lest the present order be disturbed
--a frenzied impulse to rush to the defense of our threatened
institutions. Doubtless the Lusk report may quite properly be classed
as a mere episode in war psychology. Having armed to put down the
Germans and succeeded in so doing, the ardor of conflict does not
immediately abate, but new enemies are sought and easily discovered.
The hysteria of repression will probably subside, but it is now a
well-recognized fact that in disease, whether organic or mental, the
abnormal and excessive are but instructive exaggerations and
perversions of the usual course of things. They do not exist by
themselves, but represent the temporary and exaggerated functioning of
bodily and mental processes. The real question for us here is not
whether Senator Lusk is too fearful and too indiscriminate in his
denunciations, but whether he and his colleagues do not merely furnish
an overcharged and perhaps somewhat grotesque instance of man's
natural and impulsive way of dealing with social problems. It seems to
me that enough has already been said to lead us to suspect this.
At the outset of this volume the statement was hazarded that if only
men could come to look at things differently from the way they now
generally do, a number of our most shocking evils would either remedy
themselves or show themselves subject to gradual elimination or
hopeful reduction. Among these evils a very fundamental one is the
defensive attitude toward the criticism of our existing order and the
naïve tendency to class critics as enemies of society. It was argued
that a fuller understanding of the history of the race would
contribute to that essential freedom of mind which would welcome
criticism and permit fair judgments of its merits. Having reviewed the
arguments of those who would suppress criticism lest it lead to
violence and destruction, we may now properly recall in this
connection certain often neglected historical facts which serve to
weaken if not to discredit most of these arguments.
Man has never been able to adapt himself very perfectly to his
civilization, and there has always been a deal of injustice and
maladjustment which might conceivably have been greatly decreased by
intelligence. But now it would seem that this chronic distress has
become acute, and some careful observers express the quite honest
conviction that unless thought be raised to a far higher plane than
hitherto, some great setback to civilization is inevitable.
Yet instead of subjecting traditional ideas and rules to a
thoroughgoing reconsideration, our impulse is, as we have seen, to
hasten to justify existing and habitual notions of human conduct.
There are many who flatter themselves that by suppressing so-called
"radical" thought and its diffusion, the present system can be made to
work satisfactorily on the basis of ideas of a hundred or a hundred
thousand years ago.
While we have permitted our free thought in the natural sciences to
transform man's old world, we allow our schools and even our
universities to continue to inculcate beliefs and ideals which may or
may not have been appropriate to the past, but which are clearly
anachronisms now. For, the "social science" taught in our schools is,
it would appear, an orderly presentation of the conventional
proprieties, rather than a summons to grapple with the novel and
disconcerting facts that surround us on every side.
At the opening of the twentieth century the so-called sciences of man,
despite some progress, are, as has been pointed out, in much the same
position that the natural sciences were some centuries earlier. Hobbes
says of the scholastic philosophy that it went on one brazen leg and
one of an ass. This seems to be our plight to-day. Our scientific leg
is lusty and grows in strength daily; its fellow member--our thought
of man and his sorry estate--is capricious and halting. We have not
realized the hopes of the eighteenth-century "illumination", when
confident philosophers believed that humanity was shaking off its
ancient chains; that the clouds of superstition were lifting, and that
with the new achievements of science man would boldly and rapidly
advance toward hitherto undreamed-of concord and happiness. We can no
longer countenance the specious precision of the English classical
school of economics, whose premises have been given the lie by further
thought and experience. We have really to start anew.
The students of natural phenomena early realized the arduous path they
had to travel. They had to escape, above all things, from the past.
They perceived that they could look for no help from those whose
special business it was to philosophize and moralize in terms of the
past. They had to look for light in their own way and in the
directions from which they conjectured it might come. Their first
object was, as Bacon put it, _light_, not _fruit_. They had to learn
before they could undertake changes, and Descartes is very careful to
say that philosophic doubt was not to be carried over to daily
conduct. This should for the time being conform to accepted standards,
unenlightened as they might be.
Such should be the frame of mind of one who seeks insight into human
affairs. His subject matter is, however, far more intricate and
unmanageable than that of the natural scientist. Experiment on which
natural science has reared itself is by no means so readily applicable
in studying mankind and its problems. The student of humanity has even
more inveterate prejudices to overcome, more inherent and cultivated
weaknesses of the mind to guard against, than the student of nature.
Like the early scientists, he has a scholastic tradition to combat. He
can look for little help from the universities as now constituted. The
clergy, although less sensitive in regard to what they find in the
Bible, are still stoutly opposed, on the whole, to any thoroughgoing
criticism of the standards of morality to which they are accustomed.
Few lawyers can view their profession with any considerable degree of
detachment. Then there are the now all-potent business interests,
backed by the politicians and in general supported by the
ecclesiastical, legal, and educational classes. Many of the newspapers
and magazines are under their influence, since they are become the
business man's heralds and live off his bounty.
Business indeed has almost become our religion; it is defended by the
civil government even as the later Roman emperors and the mediaeval
princes protected the Church against attack. Socialists and communists
are the Waldensians and Albigensians of our day, heretics to be cast
out, suppressed, and deported to Russia, if not directly to hell as of
old.
The Secret Service seems inclined to play the part of a modern
Inquisition, which protects our new religion. Collected in its
innumerable files is the evidence in regard to suspected heretics who
have dared impugn "business as usual", or who have dwelt too lovingly
on peace and good will among nations. Books and pamphlets, although no
longer burned by the common hangman, are forbidden the mails by
somewhat undiscerning officials. We have a pious vocabulary of high
resentment and noble condemnation, even as they had in the Middle
Ages, and part of it is genuine, if unintelligent, as it was then.
Such are some of the obstacles which the student of human affairs must
surmount. Yet we may hope that it will become increasingly clear that
the repression of criticism (even if such criticism becomes
fault-finding and takes the form of a denunciation of existing habits
and institutions) is inexpedient and inappropriate to the situation in
which the world finds itself. Let us assume that such people as really
advocate lawlessness and disorder should be carefully watched and
checked if they promise to be a cause of violence and destruction. But
is it not possible to distinguish between them and those who question
and even arraign with some degree of heat the standardized unfairness
and maladjustments of our times?
And there is another class who cannot by any exaggeration be
considered agitators, who have by taking thought come to see that our
conditions have so altered in the past hundred years and our knowledge
so increased that the older ways of doing and viewing things are not
only unreasonable, but actually dangerous. But so greatly has the
hysteria of war unsettled the public mind that even this latter class
is subject to discreditable accusations and some degree of
interference.
We constantly hear it charged that this or that individual or group
advocates the violent overthrow of government, is not loyal to the
Constitution, or is openly or secretly working for the abolition of
private property or the family, or, in general, is supposed to be
eager to "overturn everything without having anything to put in its
place".
The historical student may well recommend that we be on our guard
against such accusations brought against groups and individuals. For
the student of history finds that it has always been the custom to
charge those who happened to be unpopular, with holding beliefs and
doing things which they neither believed nor did. Socrates was
executed for corrupting youth and infidelity to the gods; Jesus for
proposing to overthrow the government; Luther was to the officials of
his time one who taught "a loose, self-willed life, severed from all
laws and wholly brutish".
Those who questioned the popular delusions in regard to witchcraft
were declared by clergymen, professors, and judges of the seventeenth
century to be as good as atheists, who shed doubt on the devil's
existence in order to lead their godless lives without fear of future
retribution. How is it possible, in view of this inveterate habit of
mankind, to accept at its face value what the police or Department of
Justice, or self-appointed investigators, choose to report of the
teachings of people who are already condemned in their eyes?
Of course the criticism of accepted ideas is offensive and will long
remain so. After all, talk and writing are forms of conduct, and, like
all conduct, are inevitably disagreeable when they depart from the
current standards of respectable behavior. To talk as if our
established notions of religion, morality, and property, our ideas of
stealing and killing, were defective and in need of revision, is
indeed more shocking than to violate the current rules of action. For
we are accustomed to actual crimes, misdemeanors, and sins, which are
happening all the time, but we will not tolerate any suspected attempt
to palliate them in theory.
It is inevitable that new views should appear to the thoughtless to be
justifications or extenuations of evil actions and an encouragement of
violence and rebellion, and that they will accordingly be bitterly
denounced. But there is no reason why an increase of intelligence
should not put a growing number of us on our guard against this
ancient pitfall.
If we are courageously to meet and successfully to overcome the
dangers with which our civilization is threatened, it is clear that we
need _more mind_ than ever before. It is also clear that we can have
indefinitely more mind than we already have if we but honestly desire
it and avail ourselves of resources already at hand. Mind, as
previously defined, is our "conscious knowledge and intelligence, what
we know and our attitude toward it--our disposition to increase our
information, classify it, criticize it, and apply it". _It is obvious
that in this sense the mind is a matter of accumulation and that it
has been in the making ever since man took his first step in
civilization._ I have tried to suggest the manner in which man's long
history illuminates our plight and casts light on the path to be
followed. And history is beginning to take account of the knowledge of
man's nature and origin contributed by the biologist and the
anthropologist and the newer psychologists.
Few people realize the hopeful revolution that is already beginning to
influence the aims and methods of all these sciences of man. No
previous generation of thinkers has been so humble on the whole as is
that of to-day, so ready to avow their ignorance and to recognize the
tendency of each new discovery to reveal further complexities in the
problem. On the other hand, we are justified in feeling that at last
we have the chance to start afresh. We are freer than any previous age
from the various prepossessions and prejudices which we now see
hampered the so-called "free" thinking of the eighteenth century.
The standards and mood of natural science are having an increasing
influence in stimulating eager research into human nature, beliefs,
and institutions. With Bacon's recommendations of the study of common
_things_ the human mind entered a new stage of development. Now that
historic forces have brought the common _man_ to the fore, we are
submitting him to scientific study and gaining thereby that elementary
knowledge of his nature which needs to be vastly increased and spread
abroad, since it can form the only possible basis for a successful and
real democracy.
I would not have the reader infer that I overrate the place of science
or exact knowledge in the life of man. Science, which is but the most
accurate information available about the world in which we live and
the nature of ourselves and of our fellow men, is not the whole of
life; and except to a few peculiar persons it can never be the most
absorbing and vivid of our emotional satisfactions. We are poetic and
artistic and romantic and mystical. We resent the cold analysis and
reduction of life to the commonplace and well substantiated--and this
is after all is said, the aim of scientific endeavor. But we have to
adjust ourselves to a changing world in the light of constantly
accumulating knowledge. It is knowledge that has altered the world and
we must rely on knowledge and understanding to accommodate ourselves
to our new surroundings and establish peace and order and security for
the pursuit of those things that to most of us are more enticing than
science itself.[27]
No previous generation has been so perplexed as ours, but none has
ever been justified in holding higher hopes if it could but reconcile
itself to making bold and judicious use of its growing resources,
material and intellectual. _It is fear that holds us back._ And fear
is begotten of ignorance and uncertainty. And these mutually reinforce
one another, for we feebly try to condone our ignorance by our
uncertainty and to excuse our uncertainty by our ignorance.
Our hot defense of our ideas and beliefs does not indicate an
established confidence in them but often half-distrust, which we try
to hide from ourselves, just as one who suffers from bashfulness
offsets his sense of inferiority and awkwardness by rude aggression.
If, for example, religious beliefs had been really firmly established
there would have been no need of "aids to faith"; and so with our
business system to-day, our politics and international relations. We
dread to see things as they would appear if we thought of them
honestly, for it is the nature of critical thought to metamorphose our
familiar and approved world into something strange and unfamiliar. It
is undoubtedly a nervous sense of the precariousness of the existing
social system which accounts for the present strenuous opposition to a
fair and square consideration of its merits and defects.
Partisanship is our great curse. We too readily assume that everything
has two sides and that it is our duty to be on one or the other. We
must be defending or attacking something; only the lily-livered hide
their natural cowardice by asking the impudent question, What is it
all about? The heroic gird on the armor of the Lord, square their
shoulders, and establish a muscular tension which serves to dispel
doubt and begets the voluptuousness of bigotry and fanaticism.[28] In
this mood questions become issues of right and wrong, not of
expediency and inexpediency. It has been said that the worthy people
of Cambridge are able promptly to reduce the most complex social or
economic problem to a simple moral issue, and this is a wile of the
Father of Lies, to which many of us yield readily enough.
It is, however, possible for the individual to overcome the fear of
thought. Once I was afraid that men might think too much; now, I only
dread lest they will think too little and far too timidly, for I now
see that real thinking is rare and difficult and that it needs every
incentive in the face of innumerable ancient and inherent
discouragements and impediments. We must first endeavor manfully to
free our own minds and then do what we can to hearten others to free
theirs. _Toujours de l'audace!_ As members of a race that has required
from five hundred thousand to a million years to reach its present
state of enlightenment, there is little reason to think that anyone of
us is likely to cultivate intelligence too assiduously or in harmful
excess.
17. WHAT OF IT?
Our age is one of unprecedented responsibility. As Mr. Lippmann has so
well said:
Never before have we had to rely so completely on ourselves. No
guardian to think for us, no precedent to follow without question,
no lawmaker above, only ordinary men set to deal with heartbreaking
perplexity. All weakness comes to the surface. We are homeless in a
jungle of machines and untamed powers that haunt and lure the
imagination. Of course our culture is confused, our thinking
spasmodic, and our emotion out of kilter. No mariner ever enters
upon a more uncharted sea than does the average human being born
in the twentieth century. Our ancestors thought they knew their way
from birth through all eternity; we are puzzled about day after
to-morrow.... It is with emancipation that real tasks begin, and
liberty is a searching challenge, for it takes away the guardianship
of the master and the comfort of the priest. The iconoclasts did not
free us. They threw us into the water, and now we have to swim.[29]
We must look forward to ever new predicaments and adventures. _Nothing
is going to be settled in the sense in which things were once supposed
to be settled, for the simple reason that knowledge will probably
continue to increase and will inevitably alter the world with which we
have to make terms_. The only thing that might conceivably remain
somewhat stabilized is an attitude of mind and unflagging expectancy
appropriate to the terms and the rules according to which life's game
must hereafter be played. We must promote a new cohesion and
co-operation on the basis of this truth. And this means that we have
now to substitute purpose for tradition, and this is a concise
statement of the great revolution which we face.
Now, when all human institutions so slowly and laboriously evolved
are impugned, every consensus challenged, every creed flouted, as
much as and perhaps even more than by the ancient Sophists, the
call comes to us ... to explore, test, and, if necessary, reconstruct
the very bases of conviction, for all open questions are new
opportunities. Old beacon lights have shifted or gone out. Some of
the issues we lately thought to be minor have taken on cosmic
dimensions. We are all "up against" questions too big for us, so
that there is everywhere a sense of insufficiency which is too deep
to be fully deployed in the narrow field of consciousness. Hence,
there is a new discontent with old leaders, standards, criteria,
methods, and values, and a demand everywhere for new ones, a
realization that mankind must now reorient itself and take its
bearings from the eternal stars and sail no longer into the unknown
future by the dead reckonings of the past.[30]
Life, in short, has become a solemn sporting proposition--solemn
enough in its heavy responsibilities and the magnitude of the stakes
to satisfy our deepest religious longings; sporty enough to tickle the
fancy of a baseball fan or an explorer in darkest Borneo. We can play
the game or refuse to play it. At present most of human organization,
governmental, educational, social, and religious, is directed, as it
always has been, to holding things down, and to perpetuating beliefs
and policies which belong to the past and have been but too gingerly
readjusted to our new knowledge and new conditions. On the other hand,
there are various scientific associations which are bent on revising
and amplifying our knowledge and are not pledged to keeping alive any
belief or method which cannot stand the criticism which comes with
further information. The terrible fear of falling into mere
rationalizing is gradually extending from the so-called natural
sciences to psychology, anthropology, politics, and political economy.
All this is a cheering response to the new situation.
But, as has been pointed out, really honest discussion of our social,
economic, and political standards and habits readily takes on the
suspicion of heresy and infidelity. Just as the "freethinker" who, in
the eighteenth century, strove to discredit miracles in the name of an
all-wise and foreseeing God (who could not be suspected of tampering
with his own laws), was accused of being an atheist and of really
believing in no God at all; so those who would ennoble our ideals of
social organization are described as "Intellectuals" or "parlor
Bolshevists" who would overthrow society and all the achievements of
the past in order to free themselves from moral and religious
restraints and mayhap "get something for nothing". The parallel is
very exact indeed.
The Church always argued that there were no new heresies. All would,
on examination, prove to be old and discredited. So the Vice-President
of the United States has recently declared that:
Men have experimented with radical theories in great and small ways
times without number and always, always with complete failure.
They are not new; they are old. Each failure has demonstrated
anew that without effort there is no success. The race never gets
something for nothing.[31]
But is this not a complete reversal of the obvious truth? Unless we
define "radical" as that which never does succeed, how can anyone with
the most elementary notions of history fail to see that almost all the
things that we prize to-day represent revolts against tradition, and
were in their beginnings what seemed to be shocking divergences from
current beliefs and practices? What about Christianity, and
Protestantism, and constitutional government, and the rejection of old
superstitions and the acceptance of modern scientific ideas? The race
has always been getting something for nothing, for creative thought
is, as we have seen, confined to a very few. And it has been the
custom to discourage or kill those who prosecuted it too openly, not
to reward them according to their merits.
One cannot but wonder at this constantly recurring phrase "getting
something for nothing", as if it were the peculiar and perverse
ambition of disturbers of society. Except for our animal outfit,
practically all we have is handed to us gratis. Can the most
complacent reactionary flatter himself that he invented the art of
writing or the printing press, or discovered his religious, economic,
and moral convictions, or any of the devices which supply him with
meat and raiment or any of the sources of such pleasure as he may
derive from literature or the fine arts? In short, civilization is
little else than getting something for nothing. Like other vested
interests, it is "the legitimate right to something for nothing".[32]
How much execrable reasoning and how many stupid accusations would
fall away if this truth were accepted as a basis of discussion! Of
course there is no more flagrant example of a systematic endeavor to
get something for nothing than the present business system based on
profits, and absentee ownership of stocks.
Since the invention of printing, and indeed long before, those fearful
of change have attempted to check criticism by attacking books. These
were classified as orthodox or heterodox, moral or immoral,
treasonable or loyal, according to their tone. Unhappily this habit
continues and shows itself in the distinction between sound and
unsound, radical and conservative, safe and dangerous. The sensible
question to ask about a book is obviously whether it makes some
contribution to a clearer understanding of our situation by adding or
reaffirming important considerations and the inferences to be made
from these. Such books could be set off against those that were but
expressions of vague discontent or emulation, or denunciations of
things because they are as they are or are not as they are not. I have
personally little confidence in those who cry lo here or lo there. It
is premature to advocate any wide sweeping reconstruction of the
social order, although experiments and suggestions should not be
discouraged. What we need first is a change of heart and a chastened
mood which will permit an ever increasing number of people to see
things as they are, in the light of what they have been and what they
might be. The dogmatic socialist with his unhistorical assumptions of
class struggle, his exaggerated economic interpretation of history,
and his notion that labor is the sole producer of capital, is shedding
scarcely more light on the actual situation than is the Lusk Committee
and Mr. Coolidge, with their confidence in the sacredness of private
property, as they conceive it, in the perennial rightness and
inspiration of existing authority and the blessedness of the profit
system. But there are plenty of writers, to mention only a few of the
more recent ones, like Veblen, Dewey, J. A. Hobson, Tawney, Cole,
Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, Graham Wallas, who may or may not
have (or ever have had) any confidence in the presuppositions and
forecasts of socialism, whose books do make clearer to any fair-minded
reader the painful exigencies of our own times.
I often think of the economic historians of, say, two centuries hence
who may find time to dig up the vestiges of the economic literature of
to-day. We may in imagination appeal to their verdicts and in some
cases venture to forecast them. Many of our writers they will throw
aside as dominated by a desire merely to save the ill-understood
present at all costs; others as attempting to realize plans which were
already discredited in their own day. Future historians will,
nevertheless, clearly distinguish a few who, by a sort of persistent
and ardent detachment, were able to see things close at hand more
fully and truly than their fellows and endeavored to do what they
could to lead their fellows to perceive and reckon with the facts
which so deeply concerned them. Blessed be those who aspire to win
this glory. On the monument erected to Bruno on the site where he was
burned for seeing more clearly than those in authority in his days, is
the simple inscription, "Raised to Giordano Bruno by the generation
which he foresaw."
We are all purblind, but some are blinder than others who use the
various means available for sharpening their eyesight. As an onlooker
it seems to me safe to say that the lenses recommended by both the
"radicals" and their vivid opponents rather tend to increase than
diminish our natural astigmatism.
Those who agree, on the whole, at least, with the _facts_ brought
together in this essay and, on the whole, with the main _inferences_
suggested either explicitly or implicitly, will properly begin to
wonder how our educational system and aims are to be so rearranged
that coming generations may be better prepared to understand the
condition of human life and to avail themselves of its possibilities
more fully and guard against its dangers more skillfully than previous
generations. There is now widespread discontent with our present
educational methods and their elaborate futility; but it seems to me
that we are rather rarely willing to face the fundamental difficulty,
for it is obviously so very hard to overcome. _We do not dare to be
honest enough to tell boys and girls and young men and women what
would be most useful to them in an age of imperative social
reconstruction._
We have seen that the ostensible aims of education are various,[33]
and that among them is now included the avowed attempt to prepare the
young to play their part later as voting citizens. If they are to do
better than preceding generations they must be brought up differently.
They would have to be given a different general attitude toward
institutions and ideals; instead of having these represented to them
as standardized and sacred they should be taught to view them as
representing half-solved problems. But how can we ever expect to
cultivate the judgment of the young in matters of fundamental social,
economic, and political readjustment when we consider the really
dominating forces in education? But even if these restraints were
weakened or removed, the task would remain a very delicate one. Even
with teachers free and far better informed than they are, it would be
no easy thing to cultivate in the young a justifiable admiration for
the achievements and traditional ideals of mankind and at the same
time develop the requisite knowledge of the prevailing abuses,
culpable stupidity, common dishonesty, and empty political buncombe,
which too often passes for statesmanship.
But the problem has to be tackled, and it may be tackled directly or
indirectly. The direct way would be to describe as realistically as
might be the actual conditions and methods, and their workings, good
and bad. If there were better books than are now available it would be
possible for teachers tactfully to show not only how government is
supposed to run, but how it actually is run. There are plenty of
reports of investigating committees, Federal and state, which furnish
authentic information in regard to political corruption, graft, waste,
and incompetency. These have not hitherto been supposed to have
anything to do with the _science_ of government, although they are
obviously absolutely essential to an _understanding_ of it. Similar
reflections suggest themselves in the matter of business,
international relations, and race animosities. But so long as our
schools depend on appropriations made by politicians, and colleges and
universities are largely supported by business men or by the state,
and are under the control of those who are bent on preserving the
existing system from criticism, it is hard to see any hope of a kind
of education which would effectively question the conventional notions
of government and business. They cannot be discussed with sufficient
honesty to make their consideration really medicinal. We laud the
brave and outspoken and those supposed to have the courage of their
convictions--but only when these convictions are acceptable or
indifferent to us. Otherwise, honesty and frankness become mere
impudence.[34]
No doubt politics and economics could be taught, and are being taught,
better as time goes on. Neither of them are so utterly unreal and
irrelevant to human proceedings as they formerly were. There is no
reason why a teacher of political economy should not describe the
actual workings of the profit system of industry with its restraints
on production and its dependence on the engineer, and suggest the
possibility of gathering together capital from functionless absentee
stockholders on the basis of the current rate of interest rather than
speculative dividends. The actual conditions of the workers could be
described, their present precarious state, the inordinate and wasteful
prevalence of hiring and firing; the policy of the unions, and their
defensive and offensive tactics. Every youngster might be given some
glimmering notion that neither "private property" nor "capital" is the
real issue (since few question their essentiality) but rather the new
problem of supplying other than the traditional motives for industrial
enterprise--namely, the slave-like docility and hard compulsion of the
great masses of workers, on the one hand, and speculative profits, on
the other, which now dominate in our present business system. For the
existing organization is not only becoming more and more patently
wasteful, heartless, and unjust, but is beginning, for various
reasons, to break down. In short, whatever the merits of our present
ways of producing the material necessities and amenities of life, it
looks to many as if they could not succeed indefinitely, even as well
as they have in the past, without some fundamental revision.
As for political life, a good deal would be accomplished if students
could be habituated to distinguish successfully between the empty
declamations of politicians and statements of facts, between vague
party programs and concrete recommendations and proposals. They should
early learn that language is not primarily a vehicle of ideas and
information, but an emotional outlet, corresponding to various
cooings, growlings, snarls, crowings, and brayings. Their attention
could be invited to the rhetoric of the bitter-enders in the Senate or
the soothing utterances of Mr. Harding on accepting the nomination for
President:
"With a Senate advising as the Constitution contemplates, I would
hopefully approach the nations of Europe and of the earth, proposing
that understanding which makes us a willing participant in the
consecration of nations to a new relationship, to commit the moral
forces of the world, America included, to peace and international
justice, still leaving America free, independent, self-reliant, but
offering friendship to all the world. If men call for more specific
details, I remind them that moral committals are broad and
all-inclusive, and we are contemplating peoples in the concord of
humanity's advancement."
After mastering the difference between language used to express facts
and purposes and that which amounts to no more than a pious
ejaculation, a suave and deprecating gesture, or an inferential
accusation directed against the opposing party, the youth should be
instructed in the theory and practice of party fidelity and the
effects of partisanship on the conduct of our governmental affairs. In
fine, he should get some notion of the motives and methods of those
who really run our government, whether he learned anything else or
not.
These _direct_ attempts to produce a more intelligently critical and
open-minded generation are, however, likely to be far less feasible
than the _indirect_ methods. Partly because they will arouse strenuous
opposition from the self-appointed defenders of society as now
regulated, and partly because no immediate inspection of habits and
institutions is so instructive as a study of their origin and progress
and a comparison of them with other forms of social adjustment. I hope
that it has already become clear that we have great, and hitherto only
very superficially worked, resources in History, as it is now coming
to be conceived.
We are in the midst of the greatest intellectual revolution that has
ever overtaken mankind. Our whole conception of mind is undergoing a
great change. We are beginning to understand its nature, and as we
find out more, intelligence may be raised to a recognized dignity and
effectiveness which it has never enjoyed before. An encouraging
beginning has been made in the case of the natural sciences, and a
similar success may await the studies which have to do with the
critical estimate of man's complicated nature, his fundamental
impulses and resources, the needless and fatal repressions which these
have suffered through the ignorance of the past, and the discovery of
untried ways of enriching our existence and improving our relations
with our fellow men.
There[35] is a well-known passage in Goethe's "Faust" where he likens
History to the Book with Seven Seals described in Revelation, which no
one in heaven, or on the earth or under the earth, was able to open
and read therein. All sorts of guesses have been hazarded as to its
contents by Augustine, Orosius, Otto of Freising, Bossuet,
Bolingbroke, Voltaire, Herder, Hegel, and many others, but none of
them were able to break the seals, and all of them were gravely misled
by their fragmentary knowledge of the book's contents. For we now see
that the seven seals were seven great ignorances. No one knew much (1)
of man's physical nature, or (2) the workings of his thoughts and
desires, or (3) of the world in which he lives, or (4) of how he has
come about as a race, or (5) of how he develops as an individual from
a tiny egg, or (6) how deeply and permanently he is affected by the
often forgotten impressions of infancy and childhood, or (7) how his
ancestors lived for hundreds of thousands of years in the dark
ignorance of savagery.
The seals are all off now. The book at last lies open before those who
are capable of reading it, and few they be as yet; for most of us
still cling to the guesses made in regard to its contents before
anyone knew what was in it. We have become attached to the familiar
old stories which now prove to be fictions, and we find it hard to
reconcile ourselves to the many hard sayings which the book proves to
contain--its constant stress on the stupidity of "good" people; its
scorn for the respectable and normal, which it often reduces to little
more than sanctimonious routine and indolence and pious resentment at
being disturbed in one's complacent assurances. Indeed, much of its
teaching appears downright immoral according to existing standards.
One awful thing that the Book of the Past makes plain is that with our
animal heritage we are singularly oblivious to the large concerns of
life. We are keenly sensitive to little discomforts, minor
irritations, wounded vanity, and various danger signals; but our
comprehension is inherently vague and listless when it comes to
grasping intricate situations and establishing anything like a fair
perspective in life's problems and possibilities. Our imagination is
restrained by our own timidity, constantly reinforced by the warnings
of our fellows, who are always urging us to be safe and sane, by which
they mean convenient for them, predictable in our conduct and
graciously amenable to the prevailing standards.
But it is obvious that it is increasingly dangerous to yield to this
inveterate tendency, however comfortable and respectable it may seem
for the moment.
History, as H. G. Wells has so finely expressed it, is coming more and
more to be "a race between education and catastrophe. Our internal
policies and our economic and social ideas are profoundly vitiated at
present by wrong and fantastic ideas of the origin and historical
relationship of social classes. A sense of history as the common
adventure of all mankind is as necessary for peace within as it is for
peace between the nations". There can be no secure peace now but a
common peace of the whole world; no prosperity but a general
prosperity, and this for the simple reason that we are all now brought
so near together and are so pathetically and intricately
interdependent, that the old notions of noble Isolation and national
sovereignty are magnificently criminal.
In the bottom of their hearts, or the depths of their unconscious, do
not the conservatively minded realize that their whole attitude toward
the world and its betterment is based on an assumption that finds no
least support in the Great Book of the Past? Does it not make plain
that the "conservative", so far as he is consistent and lives up to
his professions, is fatally in the wrong? The so-called "radical" is
also almost always wrong, for no one can foresee the future. But he
works on a right assumption--namely, that the future has so far always
proved different from the past and that it will continue to do so.
Some of us, indeed, see that the future is tending to become more and
more rapidly and widely different from the past. The conservative
himself furnishes the only illustration of his theory, and even that
is highly inconclusive. His general frame of mind appears to remain
constant, but he finds himself defending and rejecting very different
things. The great issue may, according to the period, be a primeval
taboo, the utterances of the Delphic oracle, the Athanasian creed, the
Inquisition, the geocentric theory, monarchy by the grace of God,
witchcraft, slavery, war, capitalism, private property, or noble
isolation. All of these tend to appear to the conservative under the
aspect of eternity, but all of these things have come, many of them
have gone, and the remainder would seem to be subject to undreamed-of
modifications as time goes on. This is the teaching of the now
unsealed book.
NOTES.
[27] Mr. James Branch Cabell has in his _Beyond Life_ defended man's
romantic longings and inexorable craving to live part of the time at
least in a world far more sweetly molded to his fancy than that of
natural science and political economy. There is no reason why man
should live by bread alone. There is a time, however, for natural
science and political economy, for they should establish the
conditions in which we may rejoice in our vital lies, which will then
do no harm and bring much joy.
[28] The relation of our kinesthesia or muscular sense to fanaticism
on the one hand and freedom of mind on the other is a matter now
beginning to be studied with the promise of highly important results.
[29] _Drift and Mastery_, pp. 196-197.
[30] G. Stanley Hall, "The Message of the Zeitgeist", in _Scientific
Monthly_, August, 1921--a very wonderful and eloquent appeal by one of
our oldest and boldest truth seekers.
[31] _Delineator_, August, 1921, p. II.
[32] Adopting Mr. Veblen's definition of a vested interest which
caused some scandal in conservative circles when it was first
reported. Doubtless the seeming offensiveness of the latter part of
the definition obscured its reassuring beginning.
[33] See Section 2 above.
[34] The wise Goethe has said, _"Zieret Stärke den Mann und freies,
muthiges Wesen, O, so ziemet ihm fast tiefes Geheimniss noch mehr"_,
--Römische Elegien, xx.
[35] The closing reflections are borrowed from _The Leaflet_, issued
by the students of the New School for Social Research, established in
New York in 1919, with a view of encouraging adults to continue their
studies in the general spirit and mood which permeate this essay.
APPENDIX
SOME SUGGESTIONS IN REGARD TO READING
It may happen that among the readers of this essay there will be some
who will ask how they can most readily get a clearer idea of the
various newer ways of looking at mankind and the problems of the day.
The following list of titles is furnished with a view of doing
something to meet this demand. It is not a bibliography in the usual
sense of the term. It is confined to rather short and readily
understandable presentations appropriate to the overcrowded schedule
upon which most of us have to operate. All the writers mentioned
belong, however, to that rather small class whose opinions are worth
considering, even if one reserves the imprescriptible right not to
agree with all they say. There may well be better references than
those with which I happen to be acquainted, and others quite as
useful; but I can hardly imagine anyone, whatever his degree of
information, unless he happens to be a specialist in the particular
field, failing to gain something of value from any one of the volumes
mentioned.
For the astounding revelations in regard to the fundamental nature of
matter and the ways in which the modern chemist plays with it, see
John Mills, _Within the Atom_ (D. Van Nostrand Company), and Slosson,
_Creative Chemistry_ (The Century Company).
A general account of the evolutionary process will be found in
Crampton, _The Doctrine of Evolution_ (Columbia University Press),
chaps, i-v. For our development as an individual from the egg see
Conklin, _Heredity and Environment_ (Princeton University Press).
The general scope of modern anthropology and the influence of this
study on our notions of mankind as we now find it can be gathered from
Goldenweiser, _Early Civilization, Introduction to Anthropology_
(Knopf). This should be supplemented by the remarkable volume of
essays by Franz Boas, _The Mind of Primitive Man_ (Macmillan).
Of the more recent and easily available books relating to the
reconstruction of philosophy and the newer conceptions in regard to
mind and intelligence the following may be mentioned: Dewey,
_Reconstruction in Philosophy_ and _Human Nature and Conduct_ (Holt);
Woodworth, _Dynamic Psychology_ (Columbia University Press); _Trotter,
Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War_ (Macmillan)--especially the
first two sections, pp. 1-65; Bernard Hart, _The Psychology of
Insanity_ (Putnam), an admirable little introduction to the importance
of abnormal mental conditions in understanding our usual thoughts and
emotions; McDougall, _Social Psychology_ (J. W. Luce); Everett D.
Martin, _The Behavior of Crowds_ (Harpers); Edman, _Human Traits_
(Houghton-Mifflin). For the so-called behavioristic interpretation of
mankind, see Watson, _Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist_
(Lippincott). Haldane, _Mechanism, Life, and Personality_ (Dutton), is
a short discussion of some of the most fundamental elements in our
modern conception of life itself.
When it comes to gaining an idea of "Freudianism" and all the
overwhelming discoveries, theories, and suggestions due to those who
have busied themselves with the lasting effects of infantile and
childish experiences, of hidden desires--sexual and otherwise, of "the
Unconscious" and psychoanalysis, while there are many books, great and
small, there would be no unanimity of opinion among those somewhat
familiar with the subjects as to what should be recommended. It would
be well if everyone could read in Havelock Ellis, _The Philosophy of
Conflict_ (Houghton-Mifflin), the essay (XVIII) on Freud and his
influence. Wilfred Lay, _Man's Unconscious Conflict_ (Dodd, Mead), is
a popular exposition of psychoanalysis, and Tansley, _The New
Psychology_ (Dodd, Mead), likewise. Harvey O'Higgins, _The Secret
Springs_ (Harpers), reports, in a pleasing manner, some of the actual
medical experiences of Dr. Edward Reede of Washington. But much of
importance remains unsaid in all these little books for which one
would have to turn to Freud himself, his present and former disciples,
his enemies, and the special contributions of investigators and
practitioners in this new and essential field of psychological
research and therapy.
Turning to the existing industrial system, its nature, defects, and
recommendations for its reform, I may say that I think that relatively
little is to be derived from the common run of economic textbooks. The
following compendious volumes give an analysis of the situation and a
consideration of the proposed remedies for existing evils and
maladjustments: Veblen, _The Vested Interests and the Common Man_,
also his _The Engineers and the Price System_ (Huebsch); J. A. Hobson,
_Democracy after the War_ (Macmillan) and his more recent _Problems of
a New World_ (Macmillan); Tawney, _The Acquisitive Society_ (Harcourt,
Brace); Bertrand Russell, _Why Men Fight_ (Century) and his _Proposed
Roads to Freedom_ (Holt), in which he describes clearly the history
and aims of the various radical leaders and parties of recent times.
As for newer views and criticism of the modern state and political
life in general, in addition to Mr. Hobson's books mentioned above,
the following are of importance: Graham Wallas, _The Great Society_
(Macmillan); Harold Laski, _Authority in the Modern State_ and
_Problems of Sovereignty_ (Yale University Press); Walter Lippmann,
_Preface to Politics_ and _Drift and Mastery_ (Holt).
J. Russell Smith, _The World's Food Resources_ (Holt), is a larger and
more detailed discussion than most of those recommended above, but
contains a number of general facts and comment of first-rate
importance.
One who desires a highly thoughtful and scholarly review of the trend
of religious thought in recent times should read McGiffert, _The Rise
of Modern Religious Ideas_ (Macmillan).
End of Project Gutenberg's The Mind in the Making, by James Harvey Robinson
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