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Title: A preface to morals
Author: Walter Lippmann
Release date: October 9, 2025 [eBook #77019]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: The Macmillan Company, 1929
Credits: Sean/IB@DP
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PREFACE TO MORALS ***
WALTER LIPPMANN
A
PREFACE
TO
MORALS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXIX
Copyright, 1929.
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published May, 1929.
_First printing_
_All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form._
_Printed in the United States of America by_
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PART I
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Problem of Unbelief 3
1. Whirl is King 3
2. False Prophecies 5
3. Sorties and Retreats 10
4. Deep Dissolution 14
II. God in the Modern World 21
1. Imago Dei 21
2. An Indefinite God 23
3. God in More Senses Than One 25
4. The Protest of the Fundamentalists 30
5. In Man’s Image 35
III. The Loss of Certainty 37
1. Ways of Reading the Bible 37
2. Modernism: Immortality as an Example 40
3. What Modernism Leaves Out 48
IV. The Acids of Modernity 51
1. The Kingly Pattern 51
2. Landmarks 56
3. Barren Ground 61
4. Sophisticated Violence 63
5. Rulers 65
V. The Breakdown of Authority 68
1. God’s Government 68
2. The Doctrine of the Keys 71
3. The Logic of Toleration 74
4. A Working Compromise 76
5. The Effect of Patriotism 78
6. The Dissolution of a Sovereignty 82
VI. Lost Provinces 84
1. Business 84
2. The Family 88
3. Art 94
a. The Disappearance of Religious Painting 94
b. The Loss of a Heritage 96
c. The Artist Formerly 98
d. The Artist as a Prophet 101
e. Art for Art’s Sake 104
f. The Burden of Originality 106
VII. The Drama of Destiny 112
1. The Soul in the Modern World 112
2. The Great Scenario 115
3. Earmarks of Truth 118
4. On Reconciling Religion and Science 121
5. Gospels of Science 125
6. The Deeper Conflict 131
7. Theocracy and Humanism 133
PART II
THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM
Introduction 143
VIII. Golden Memories 145
IX. The Insight of Humanism 152
1. The Two Approaches to Life 152
2. Freedom and Restraint 153
3. The Ascetic Principle 158
4. Oscillation between Two Principles 164
5. The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties 166
6. The Matrix of Humanism 171
7. The Career of the Soul 175
8. The Passage into Maturity 183
9. The Function of High Religion 191
X. High Religion and the Modern World 194
1. Popular Religion and the Great Teachers 194
2. The Aristocratic Principle 197
3. The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation 200
4. The Stone Which the Builders Rejected 203
PART III
THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY
XI. The Cure of Souls 213
1. The Problem of Evil 213
2. Superstition and Self-Consciousness 217
3. Virtue 221
4. From Clue to Practice 226
XII. The Business of the Great Society 232
1. The Invention of Invention 232
2. The Creative Principle in Modernity 235
3. Naive Capitalism 241
4. The Credo of Old-Style Business 244
5. Old-Style Reform and Revolution 247
6. The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct 252
7. Ideals 257
XIII. Government in the Great Society 260
1. Loyalty 260
2. The Evolution of Loyalty 263
3. Pluralism 267
4. Live and Let Live 269
5. Government in the People 272
6. Politicians and Statesmen 279
XIV. Love in the Great Society 284
1. The External Control of Sexual Conduct 284
2. Birth Control 288
3. The Logic of Birth Control 293
4. The Use of Convention 299
5. The New Hedonism 301
6. Marriage and Affinity 307
7. The Schooling of Desire 311
XV. The Moralist in an Unbelieving World 314
1. The Declaration of Ideals 314
2. The Choice of a Way 320
3. The Religion of the Spirit 326
Appendix: Acknowledgments and Notes 331
Index 339
PART I [p001]
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER
_“Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”_
Aristophanes.
A PREFACE TO MORALS [p003]
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF UNBELIEF
1. _Whirl is King_
Among those who no longer believe in the religion of their fathers,
some are proudly defiant, and many are indifferent. But there are also
a few, perhaps an increasing number, who feel that there is a vacancy
in their lives. This inquiry deals with their problem. It is not
intended to disturb the serenity of those who are unshaken in the faith
they hold, and it is not concerned with those who are still exhilarated
by their escape from some stale orthodoxy. It is concerned with those
who are perplexed by the consequences of their own irreligion. It deals
with the problem of unbelief, not as believers are accustomed to deal
with it, in the spirit of men confidently calling the lost sheep back
into the fold, but as unbelievers themselves must, I think, face the
problem if they face it candidly and without presumption.
When such men put their feelings into words they are likely to say
that, having lost their faith, they have lost the certainty that their
lives are significant, and that it matters what they do with their
lives. If they deal with young people they are likely to say that
they know of no compelling reason which certifies the moral code they
adhere to, and that, therefore, their own preferences, when tested by
the ruthless curiosity of their children, seem to have no [p004] sure
foundation of any kind. They are likely to point to the world about
them, and to ask whether the modern man possesses any criterion by
which he can measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any
standard he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon
that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created
so much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern
civilization.
These are, perhaps, merely the rationalizations of the modern man’s
discontent. At the heart of it there are likely to be moments of blank
misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a
part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many
things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure they are
worth doing. He has been much preoccupied; but he is no longer sure he
knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of pleasures;
and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to
believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing,
or, in fact, that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs
to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, and that even in
the best of lives the thrills are few and far between. He begins more
or less consciously to seek satisfactions, because he is no longer
satisfied, and all the while he realizes that the pursuit of happiness
was always a most unhappy quest. In the later stages of his woe he not
only loses his appetite, but becomes excessively miserable trying to
recover it. And then, surveying the flux of events and the giddiness
of his own soul, he comes to feel that Aristophanes must have been
thinking of him when he declared that “Whirl is King, having driven out
Zeus.” [p005]
2. _False Prophecies_
The modern age has been rich both in prophecies that men would at
last inherit the kingdoms of this world, and in complaints at the
kind of world they inherited. Thus Petrarch, who was an early victim
of modernity, came to feel that he would “have preferred to be born
in any other period” than his own; he tells us that he sought an
escape by imagining that he lived in some other age. The Nineteenth
Century, which begat us, was forever blowing the trumpets of freedom
and providing asylums in which its most sensitive children could
take refuge. Wordsworth fled from mankind to rejoice in nature.
Chateaubriand fled from man to rejoice in savages. Byron fled to an
imaginary Greece, and William Morris to the Middle Ages. A few tried
an imaginary India. A few an equally imaginary China. Many fled to
Bohemia, to Utopia, to the Golden West, and to the Latin Quarter, and
some, like James Thomson, to hell where they were
gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.
They had all been disappointed by the failure of a great prophecy. The
theme of this prophecy had been that man is a beautiful soul who in the
course of history had somehow become enslaved by
Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
and they believed with Shelley that when “the loathsome mask has
fallen,” man, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself,
would then be “free from guilt or [p006] pain.” This was the orthodox
liberalism to which men turned when they had lost the religion of their
fathers. But the promises of liberalism have not been fulfilled. We are
living in the midst of that vast dissolution of ancient habits which
the emancipators believed would restore our birthright of happiness. We
know now that they did not see very clearly beyond the evils against
which they were rebelling. It is evident to us that their prophecies
were pleasant fantasies which concealed the greater difficulties that
confront men, when having won the freedom to do what they wish—that
wish, as Byron said:
which ages have not yet subdued
In man—to have no master save his mood,
they are full of contrary moods and do not know what they wish to do.
We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that “a man’s
worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.”
The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the
brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and
have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves
from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the
intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring
liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are
world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with
pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot
be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at
last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made
the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are. [p007]
These are the prisoners who have been released. They ought to be very
happy. They ought to be serene and composed. They are free to make
their own lives. There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, priests,
princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. Yet the result
is not so good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide
open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun. They
find it nerve-wracking. “My sensibility,” said Flaubert, “is sharper
than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois,
an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.”
They must find their own courage for battle and their own consolation
in defeat. They complain, like Renan after he had broken with the
Church, that the enchanted circle which embraced the whole of life is
broken, and that they are left with a feeling of emptiness “like that
which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love affair.” Where is
my _home_? cried Nietzsche: “For it do I ask and seek, and have sought,
but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O
eternal in vain.”
To more placid temperaments the pangs of freedom are no doubt less
acute. It is possible for multitudes in time of peace and security
to exist agreeably—somewhat incoherently, perhaps, but without
convulsions—to dream a little and not unpleasantly, to have only now
and then a nightmare, and only occasionally a rude awakening. It is
possible to drift along not too discontentedly, somewhat nervously,
somewhat anxiously, somewhat confusedly, hoping for the best, and
believing in nothing very much. It is possible to be a passable
citizen. But it is not possible to be wholly at peace. For serenity of
soul requires [p008] some better organization of life than a man can
attain by pursuing his casual ambitions, satisfying his hungers, and
for the rest accepting destiny as an idiot’s tale in which one dumb
sensation succeeds another to no known end. And it is not possible
for him to be wholly alive. For that depends upon his sense of being
completely engaged with the world, with all his passions and all the
faculties in rich harmonies with one other, and in deep rhythm with the
nature of things.
These are the gifts of a vital religion which can bring the whole of
a man into adjustment with the whole of his relevant experience. Our
forefathers had such a religion. They quarrelled a good deal about the
details, but they had no doubt that there was an order in the universe
which justified their lives because they were a part of it. The acids
of modernity have dissolved that order for many of us, and there are
some in consequence who think that the needs which religion fulfilled
have also been dissolved. But however self-sufficient the eugenic
and perfectly educated man of the distant future may be, our present
experience is that the needs remain. In failing to meet them, it is
plain that we have succeeded only in substituting trivial illusions
for majestic faiths. For while the modern emancipated man may wonder
how anyone ever believed that in this universe of stars and atoms and
multitudinous life, there is a drama in progress of which the principal
event was enacted in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, it is not
really a stranger fable than many which he so readily accepts. He does
not believe the words of the Gospel but he believes the best advertised
notion. The older fable may be incredible to-day, but when it [p009]
was credible it bound together the whole of experience upon a stately
and dignified theme. The modern man has ceased to believe in it but he
has not ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him. It
is no wonder that his impulse is to turn back from his freedom, and to
find someone who says he knows the truth and can tell him what to do,
to find the shrine of some new god, of any cult however newfangled,
where he can kneel and be comforted, put on manacles to keep his hands
from trembling, ensconce himself in some citadel where it is safe and
warm.
For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be
credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at
rest nowhere. There is no theory of the meaning and value of events
which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to
accept the events. There is no moral authority to which he must turn
now, but there is coercion in opinions, fashions and fads. There is
for him no inevitable purpose in the universe, but there are elaborate
necessities, physical, political, economic. He does not feel himself
to be an actor in a great and dramatic destiny, but he is subject to
the massive powers of our civilization, forced to adopt their pace,
bound to their routine, entangled in their conflicts. He can believe
what he chooses about this civilization. He cannot, however, escape
the compulsion of modern events. They compel his body and his senses
as ruthlessly as ever did king or priest. They do not compel his mind.
They have all the force of natural events, but not their majesty, all
the tyrannical power of ancient institutions, but none of their moral
certainty. Events are there, and they overpower [p010] him. But they
do not convince him that they have that dignity which inheres in that
which is necessary and in the nature of things.
In the old order the compulsions were often painful, but there was
sense in the pain that was inflicted by the will of an all-knowing
God. In the new order the compulsions are painful and, as it were,
accidental, unnecessary, wanton, and full of mockery. The modern man
does not make his peace with them. For in effect he has replaced
natural piety with a grudging endurance of a series of unsanctified
compulsions. When he believed that the unfolding of events was a
manifestation of the will of God, he could say: Thy will be done.... In
His will is our peace. But when he believes that events are determined
by the votes of a majority, the orders of his bosses, the opinions of
his neighbors, the laws of supply and demand, and the decisions of
quite selfish men, he yields because he has to yield. He is conquered
but unconvinced.
3. _Sorties and Retreats_
It might seem as if, in all this, men were merely going through once
again what they have often gone through before. This is not the
first age in which the orthodox religion has been in conflict with
the science of the day. Plato was born into such an age. For two
centuries the philosophers of Greece had been critical of Homer and
of the popular gods, and when Socrates faced his accusers, his answer
to the accusation of heresy must certainly have sounded unresponsive.
“I do believe,” he said, “that there are gods, and in a higher sense
than that in which [p011] my accusers believe in them.” That is all
very well. But to believe in a “higher sense” is also to believe in a
different sense.
There is nothing new in the fact that men have ceased to believe in the
religion of their fathers. In the history of Catholic Christianity,
there has always existed a tradition, extending from the authors of the
Fourth Gospel through Origen to the neo-Platonists of modern times,
which rejects the popular idea of God as a power acting upon events,
and of immortality as everlasting life, and translates the popular
theology into a symbolic statement of a purely spiritual experience.
In every civilized age there have been educated and discerning men who
could not accept literally and simply the traditions of the ancient
faith. We are told that during the Periclean Age “among educated men
everything was in dispute: political sanctions, literary values, moral
standards, religious convictions, even the possibility of reaching any
truth about anything.” When the educated classes of the Roman world
accepted Christianity they had ceased to believe in the pagan gods,
and were much too critical to accept the primitive Hebraic theories of
the creation, the redemption, and the Messianic Kingdom which were so
central in the popular religion. They had to do what Socrates had done;
they had to take the popular theology in a “higher” and therefore in a
different sense before they could use it. Indeed, it is so unusual to
find an age of active-minded men in which the most highly educated are
genuinely orthodox in the popular sense, that the Thirteenth Century,
the age of Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas, when this phenomenon is
reputed to have occurred, is regarded [p012] as a unique and wonderful
period in the history of the world. It is not at all unlikely that
there never was such an age in the history of civilized men.
And yet, the position of modern men who have broken with the religion
of their fathers is in certain profound ways different from that of
other men in other ages. This is the first age, I think, in the history
of mankind when the circumstances of life have conspired with the
intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative
belief incredible to large masses of men. The dissolution of the
old modes of thought has gone so far, and is so cumulative in its
effect, that the modern man is not able to sink back after a period
of prophesying into a new but stable orthodoxy. The irreligion of
the modern world is radical to a degree for which there is, I think,
no counterpart. For always in the past it has been possible for new
conventions to crystallize, and for men to find rest and surcease of
effort in accepting them.
We often assume, therefore, that a period of dissolution will
necessarily be followed by one of conformity, that the heterodoxy of
one age will become the orthodoxy of the next, and that when this
orthodoxy decays a new period of prophesying will begin. Thus we say
that by the time of Hosea and Isaiah the religion of the Jews had
become a system of rules for transacting business with Jehovah. The
Prophets then revivified it by thundering against the conventional
belief that religion was mere burnt offering and sacrifice. A few
centuries passed and the religion based on the Law and the Prophets
had in its turn become a set of mechanical rites manipulated by the
Scribes and the Pharisees. As against this system Jesus and Paul
[p013] preached a religion of grace, and against the “letter” of
the synagogues the “spirit” of Christ. But the inner light which can
perceive the spirit is rare, and so shortly after the death of Paul,
the teaching gradually ceased to appeal to direct inspiration in the
minds of the believers and became a body of dogma, a “sacred deposit”
of the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” In the succeeding
ages there appeared again many prophets who thought they had within
them the revealing spirit. Though some of the prophets were burnt,
much of the prophesying was absorbed into the canon. In Luther this
sense of revelation appeared once more in a most confident form. He
rejected the authority not only of the Pope and the clergy, but even of
the Bible itself, except where in his opinion the Bible confirmed his
faith. But in the establishment of a Lutheran Church the old difficulty
reappeared: the inner light which had burned so fiercely in Luther
did not burn brightly or steadily in all Lutherans, and so the right
of private judgment, even in Luther’s restricted use of the term, led
to all kinds of heresies and abominations. Very soon there came to be
an authoritative teaching backed by the power of the police. And in
Calvinism the revolt of the Reformation became stabilized to the last
degree. “Everything,” said Calvin, “pertaining to the perfect rule of
a good life the Lord has so comprehended in His law that there remains
nothing for man to add to that summary.”
Men fully as intelligent as the most emancipated among us once believed
that, and I have no doubt that the successors of Mr. Darrow and Mr.
Mencken would come to believe something very much like it if conditions
permitted them to obey the instinct to retreat from the chaos [p014]
of modernity into order and certainty. It is all very well to talk
about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few
heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for
any extended period of their lives. Most men, after a little freedom,
have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy
of effort which it brings. “If, outside of Christ, you wish by your
own thoughts to know your relation to God, you will break your neck.
Thunder strikes him who examines.” Thus spoke Martin Luther, and there
is every reason to suppose that the German people thought he was
talking the plainest commonsense. “He who is gifted with the heavenly
knowledge of faith,” said the Council of Trent, “is free from an
inquisitive curiosity.” These words are rasping to our modern ears, but
there is no occasion to doubt that the men who uttered them had made
a shrewd appraisal of average human nature. The record of experience
is one of sorties and retreats. The search for moral guidance which
shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the
acknowledgment of some new authority.
4. _Deep Dissolution_
This same tendency manifests itself in the midst of our modern
uneasiness. We have had a profusion of new cults, of revivals, and of
essays in reconstruction. But there is reason for thinking that a new
crystallization of an enduring and popular religion is unlikely in the
modern world. For analogy drawn from the experience of the past is
misleading.
When Luther, for example, rebelled against the authority [p015] of
the Church, he did not suppose the way of life for the ordinary man
would be radically altered. Luther supposed that men would continue
to behave much as they had learned to behave under the Catholic
discipline. The individual for whom he claimed the right of private
judgment was one whose prejudgments had been well fixed in a Catholic
society. The authority of the Pope was to be destroyed and certain
evils abolished, but there was to remain that feeling for objective
moral certainties which Catholicism had nurtured. When the Anabaptists
carried the practice of his theory beyond this point, Luther denounced
them violently. For what he believed in was Protestantism for good
Catholics. The reformers of the Eighteenth Century made a similar
assumption. They really believed in democracy for men who had an
aristocratic training. Jefferson, for example, had an instinctive fear
of the urban rabble, that most democratic part of the population. The
society of free men which he dreamed about was composed of those who
had the discipline, the standards of honor and the taste, without the
privileges or the corruptions, that are to be found in a society of
well-bred country gentlemen.
The more recent rebels frequently betray a somewhat similar inability
to imagine the consequences of their own victories. For the smashing of
idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible
for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not
be many idols left to smash. Yet that future is beginning to be our
present, and it might be said that men are conscious of what modernity
means insofar as they realize that they are confronted not so much with
the [p016] necessity of promoting rebellion as of dealing with the
consequences of it. The Nineteenth Century, roughly speaking the time
between Voltaire and Mencken, was an age of terrific indictments and
of feeble solutions. The Marxian indictment of capitalism is a case
in point. The Nietzschean transvaluation of values is another; it is
magnificent, but who can say, after he has shot his arrow of longing
to the other shore, whether he will find Caesar Borgia, Henry Ford, or
Isadora Duncan? Who knows, having read Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair
Lewis, what kind of world will be left when all the boobs and yokels
have crawled back in their holes and have died of shame?
The rebel, while he is making his attack, is not likely to feel the
need to answer such questions. For he moves in an unreal environment,
one might almost say a parasitic environment. He goes forth to destroy
Caesar, Mammon, George F. Babbitt, and Mrs. Grundy. As he wrestles
with these demons, he leans upon them. By inversion they offer him
much the same kind of support which the conformer enjoys. They provide
him with an objective which enables him to know exactly what he thinks
he wants to do. His energies are focussed by his indignation. He does
not suffer from emptiness, doubt, and division of soul. These are the
maladies which come later when the struggle is over. While the rebel is
in conflict with the established nuisances he has an aim in life which
absorbs all his passions. He has his own sense of righteousness and his
own feeling of communion with a grand purpose. For in attacking idols
there is a kind of piety, in overthrowing tyrants a kind of loyalty,
in ridiculing stupidities [p017] an imitation of wisdom. In the heat
of battle the rebel is exalted by a whole-hearted tension which is
easily mistaken for a taste of the freedom that is to come. He is
under the spell of an illusion. For what comes after the struggle is
not the exaltation of freedom but a letting down of the tension that
belongs solely to the struggle itself. The happiness of the rebel is as
transient as the iconoclasm which produced it. When he has slain the
dragon and rescued the beautiful maiden, there is usually nothing left
for him to do but write his memoirs and dream of a time when the world
was young.
What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity
since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their
rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents,
but their disillusionment with their own rebellion. It is common for
young men and women to rebel, but that they should rebel sadly and
without faith in their own rebellion, that they should distrust the
new freedom no less than the old certainties—that is something of a
novelty. As Mr. Canby once said, at the age of seven they saw through
their parents and characterized them in a phrase. At fourteen they saw
through education and dodged it. At eighteen they saw through morality
and stepped over it. At twenty they lost respect for their home towns,
and at twenty-one they discovered that our social system is ridiculous.
At twenty-three the autobiography ends because the author has run
through society to date and does not know what to do next. For, as Mr.
Canby might have added, the idea of reforming that society makes no
appeal to them. They have seen through all that. They cannot adopt any
of [p018] the synthetic religions of the Nineteenth Century. They have
seen through all of them.
They have seen through the religion of nature to which the early
romantics turned for consolation. They have heard too much about
the brutality of natural selection to feel, as Wordsworth did, that
pleasant landscapes are divine. They have seen through the religion
of beauty because, for one thing, they are too much oppressed by the
ugliness of Main Street. They cannot take refuge in an ivory tower
because the modern apartment house, with a radio loudspeaker on the
floor above and on the floor below and just across the courtyard,
will not permit it. They cannot, like Mazzini, make a religion of
patriotism, because they have just been demobilized. They cannot make
a religion of science like the post-Darwinians because they do not
understand modern science. They never learned enough mathematics and
physics. They do not like Bernard Shaw’s religion of creative evolution
because they have read enough to know that Mr. Shaw’s biology is
literary and evangelical. As for the religion of progress, that is
pre-empted by George F. Babbitt and the Rotary Club, and the religion
of humanity is utterly unacceptable to those who have to ride in the
subways during the rush hour.
Yet the current attempts to modernize religious creeds are inspired
by the hope that somehow it will be possible to construct a form of
belief which will fit into this vacuum. It is evident that life soon
becomes distracted and tiresome if it is not illuminated by communion
with what William James called “a wider self through which saving
experiences come.” The eager search for new religions, [p019] the
hasty adherence to cults, and the urgent appeals for a reconciliation
between religion and science are confessions that to the modern man
his activity seems to have no place in any rational order. His life
seems mere restlessness and compulsion, rather than conduct lighted by
luminous beliefs. He is possessed by a great deal of excitement amidst
which, as Mr. Santayana once remarked, he redoubles his effort when he
has forgotten his aim.
For in the modern age, at first imperceptibly with the rise of the
towns, and then catastrophically since the mechanical revolution, there
have gone into dissolution not only the current orthodoxy, but the
social order and the ways of living which supported it. Thus rebellion
and emancipation have come to mean something far more drastic than
they have ever meant before. The earlier rebels summoned men from one
allegiance to another, but the feeling for certainty in religion and
for decorum in society persisted. In the modern world it is this very
feeling of certainty itself which is dissolving. It is dissolving not
merely for an educated minority but for everyone who comes within the
orbit of modernity.
Yet there remain the wants which orthodoxy of some sort satisfies. The
natural man, when he is released from restraints, and has no substitute
for them, is at sixes and sevens with himself and the world. For in the
free play of his uninhibited instincts he does not find any natural
substitute for those accumulated convictions which, however badly
they did it, nevertheless organized his soul, economized his effort,
consoled him, and gave him dignity in his own eyes because he was part
of some greater whole. The acids of modernity are so powerful that they
do not [p020] tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as
a new orthodoxy into which men can retreat. And so the modern world
is haunted by a realization, which it becomes constantly less easy to
ignore, that it is impossible to reconstruct an enduring orthodoxy, and
impossible to live well without the satisfactions which an orthodoxy
would provide.
CHAPTER II [p021]
GOD IN THE MODERN WORLD
1. _Imago Dei_
By the dissolution of their ancestral ways men have been deprived of
their sense of certainty as to why they were born, why they must work,
whom they must love, what they must honor, where they may turn in
sorrow and defeat. They have left to them the ancient codes and the
modern criticism of these codes, guesses, intuitions, inconclusive
experiments, possibilities, probabilities, hypotheses. Below the level
of reason, they may have unconscious prejudice, they may speak with a
loud cocksureness, they may act with fanaticism. But there is gone that
ineffable certainty which once made God and His Plan seem as real as
the lamppost.
I do not mean that modern men have ceased to believe in God. I do
mean that they no longer believe in him simply and literally. I mean
that they have defined and refined their ideas of him until they can
no longer honestly say that he exists, as they would say that their
neighbor exists. Search the writings of liberal churchmen, and when
you come to the crucial passages which are intended to express their
belief in God, you will find, I think, that at just this point their
uncertainty is most evident.
The Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick has written an essay, called “How
Shall We Think of God?”, which illustrates [p022] the difficulty.
He begins by saying that “believing in God without considering how
one shall picture him is deplorably unsatisfactory.” Yet the old ways
of picturing him are no longer credible. We cannot think of him as
seated upon a throne, while around him are angels playing on harps
and singing hymns. “God as a king on high—our fathers, living under
monarchy, rejoiced in that image and found it meaningful. His throne,
his crown, his scepter, his seraphic retinue, his laws, rewards, and
punishments—how dominant that picture was and how persistent is the
continuance of it in our hymns and prayers! It was always partly
poetry, but it had a prose background: there really had been at first a
celestial land above the clouds where God reigned and where his throne
was in the heavens.”
Having said that this picture is antiquated, Dr. Fosdick goes on to
state that “the religious man must have imaginations of God, if God
is to be real to him.” He must “picture his dealing with the Divine
in terms of personal relationship.” But how? “The place where man
vitally finds God ... is within his own experience of goodness, truth,
and beauty, and the truest images of God are therefore to be found in
man’s spiritual life.” I should be the last to deny that a man may,
if he chooses, think of God as the source of all that seems to him
worthy in human experience. But certainly this is not the God of the
ancient faith. This is not God the Father, the Lawgiver, the Judge.
This is a highly sophisticated idea of God, employed by a modern man
who would like to say, but cannot say with certainty, that there exists
a personal God to whom men must accommodate themselves. [p023]
2. _An Indefinite God_
It may be that clear and unambiguous statements are not now possible in
our intellectual climate. But at least we should not forget that the
religions which have dominated human history have been founded on what
the faithful felt were undeniable facts. These facts were mysterious
only in the sense that they were uncommon, like an eclipse of the sun,
but not in the sense that they were beyond human experience. No doubt
there are passages in the Scriptures written by highly cultivated men
in which the Divine nature is called mysterious and unknowable. But
these passages are not the rock upon which the popular churches are
founded. No one, I think, has truly observed the religious life of
simple people without understanding how plain, how literal, how natural
they take their supernatural personages to be.
The popular gods are not indefinite and unknowable. They have a
definite history and their favorite haunts, and they have often been
seen. They walk on earth, they might appear to anyone, they are
angered, they are pleased, they weep and they rejoice, they eat and
they may fall in love. The modern man uses the word ‘supernatural’
to describe something that seems to him not quite so credible as
the things he calls natural. This is not the supernaturalism of the
devout. They do not distinguish two planes of reality and two orders of
certainty. For them Jesus Christ was born of a Virgin and was raised
from the dead as literally as Napoleon was Emperor of the French and
returned from Elba.
This is the kind of certainty one no longer finds in the [p024]
utterances of modern men. I might cite, for example, a typically modern
assertion about the existence of God, made by Mr. W. C. Brownell, a
critic who could not be reproached with insensitiveness to the value of
traditional beliefs. He wrote that “the influence of the Holy Spirit,
exquisitely called the Comforter, is a matter of actual experience,
as solid a reality as that of electro-magnetism.” I do not suppose
that Mr. Brownell meant to admit the least possible doubt. But he was
a modern man, and surreptitiously doubt invaded his certainty. For
electro-magnetism is not an absolutely solid reality to a layman’s
mind. It has a questionable reality. I suspect that is why Mr.
Brownell chose this metaphor; it would have seemed a little too blunt
to his modern intelligence to say that his faith was founded not on
electro-magnetism, but as men once believed, on a rock.
The attempts to reconstruct religious creeds are beset by the
modern man’s inability to convince himself that the constitution of
the universe includes facts which in our skeptical jargon we call
supernatural. Yet as William James once said, “religion, in her fullest
exercise of function, is not a mere illumination of facts already
elsewhere given, not a mere passion, like love, which views things in
a rosier light.... It is something more, namely, a postulator of new
_facts_ as well.” James himself was strongly disposed toward what he so
candidly described as “overbeliefs”; he had sympathy with the beliefs
of others which was as large and charitable as any man’s can be. There
was no trace of the intellectual snob in William James; he was in the
other camp from those thin argumentative rationalists who find so much
satisfaction [p025] in disproving what other men hold sacred. James
loved cranks and naifs and sought them out for the wisdom they might
have. But withal he was a modern man who lived toward the climax of the
revolutionary period. He had the Will to Believe, he argued eloquently
for the Right to Believe. But he did not wholly believe. The utmost
that he could honestly believe was something which he confessed would
“appear a sorry underbelief” to some of his readers. “Who knows,” he
said, “whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their
own poor overbeliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more
effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?” Who knows? And on that
question mark he paused and could say no more.
3. _God in More Senses Than One_
But even if there was some uncertainty as to the existence of the God
whom William James described, he was at least the kind of God with whom
human beings could commune. If they could jump the initial doubt they
found themselves in an exciting world where they might live for a God
who, like themselves, had work to do. James wrote the passage I have
quoted in 1902. A quarter of a century later Alfred North Whitehead
came to Harvard to deliver the Lowell Lectures. He undertook to define
God for modern men.
Mr. Whitehead, like William James, is a compassionate man and on the
side of the angels. But his is a wholly modernized mind in full command
of all the conceptual instruments of scientific logic. By contrast with
the austerity of Mr. Whitehead’s thinking, James, with his [p026]
chivalrous offer of fealty to God, seems like one of the last of the
great romantics. There is a God in Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy, and a
very necessary God at that. Unhappily, I am not enough of a logician
to say that I am quite sure I understand what it means to say that
“God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality.”
There have been moments when I imagined I had caught the meaning of
this, but there have been more moments when I knew that I had not. I
have never doubted, however, that the concept had meaning, and that I
missed it because it was too deep for me. Why then, it may be asked, do
I presume to discuss it? My answer is that a conception of God, which
is incomprehensible to all who are not highly trained logicians, is a
possible God for logicians alone. It is not presumptuous to say of Mr.
Whitehead’s God what he himself says of Aristotle’s God: that it does
“not lead him very far toward the production of a God available for
religious purposes.”
For while this God may satisfy a metaphysical need in the thinker, he
does not satisfy the passions of the believer. This God does not govern
the world like a king nor watch over his children like a father. He
offers them no purposes to which they can consecrate themselves; he
exhibits no image of holiness they can imitate. He does not chastise
them in sin nor console them in sorrow. He is a principle with which
to explain the facts, if you can understand the explanation. He is
not himself a personality who deals with the facts. For the purposes
of religion he is no God at all; his universe remains stonily unaware
of man. Nothing has happened by accepting [p027] Mr. Whitehead’s
definition which changes the inexorable character of that destiny which
Bertrand Russell depicted when he wrote that
we see, surrounding the narrow raft illumined by the flickering
light of human comradeship, the dark ocean on whose rolling waves
we toss for a brief hour; from the great night without, a chill
blast breaks in upon our refuge; all the loneliness of humanity
amid hostile forces is concentrated upon the individual soul, which
must struggle alone, with what of courage it can command, against
the whole weight of a universe that cares nothing for its hopes and
fears.
It is a nice question whether the use of God’s name is not misleading
when it is applied by modernists to ideas so remote from the God men
have worshiped. Plainly the modernist churchman does not believe in the
God of Genesis who walked in the garden in the cool of the evening and
called to Adam and his wife who had hidden themselves behind a tree;
nor in the God of Exodus who appeared to Moses and Aaron and seventy of
the Elders of Israel, standing with his feet upon a paved walk as if it
were a sapphire stone; nor even in the God of the fifty-third chapter
of Isaiah who in his compassion for the sheep who have gone astray,
having turned everyone to his own way, laid on the Man of Sorrows the
iniquity of us all.
This, as Kirsopp Lake says, is the God of most, if not all, the
writings in the Bible. Yet “however much our inherited sentiments may
shrink from the admission, the scientists are to-day almost unanimous
in saying that the universe as they see it contains no evidence
of the existence [p028] of any anthropomorphic God whatever. The
experimentalist (_i.e._, modernist) wholly agrees that this is so.
Nevertheless he refuses as a rule, and I think rightly—to abandon the
use of the word ‘God.’” In justification of this refusal to abandon the
word ‘God,’ although he has abandoned the accepted meaning of the word,
Dr. Lake appeals to a tradition which reaches back at least to Origen
who, as a Christian neo-platonist, used the word ‘God’ to mean, not the
King and Father of creation, but the sum of all ideal values. It was
this redefinition of the word ‘God,’ he says, which “made Christianity
possible for the educated man of the third century.” It is this same
redefinition which still makes Christianity possible for educated
churchmen like Dr. Lake and Dean Inge.
Dr. Lake admits that although this attractive bypath of tradition
“is intellectually adorned by many princes of thought and lords of
language” it is “ecclesiastically not free from reproach.” He avows
another reason for his use of the word ‘God’ which, if not more
compelling, is certainly more worldly. “Atheist” has meant since Roman
times an enemy of society; it gives a wholly false impression of the
real state of mind of those who adhere to the platonic tradition. They
have been wholly without the defiance which “atheism” connotes; on
the contrary they have been a few individuals in each age who lived
peaceably within the shelter of the church, worshiping a somewhat
different God inwardly and in their own way, and often helping to
refresh the more mundane spirit of the popular church. The term
“agnostic” is almost as unavailable. It was invented to describe a
tolerant unbelief in the anthropomorphic God. In popular usage it has
come [p029] to mean about the same thing as atheist, for the instinct
of the common man is sound in these matters. He feels that those who
claim to be open-minded about God have for all practical purposes
ceased to believe in him. The agnostic’s reply that he would gladly
believe if the evidence would confirm it, does not alter the fact that
he does not now believe. And so Dr. Lake concludes that the modernist
must use the word ‘God’ in his own sense, “endeavoring partly to
preserve Origen’s meaning of the word, and partly shrinking from any
other policy as open to misconstruction.”
I confess that the notion of adopting a policy about God somehow shocks
me as intruding a rather worldly consideration which would seem to be
wholly out of place. But this feeling is, I am sure, an injustice to
Dr. Lake who is plainly and certainly not a worldling. He is moved, no
doubt, by the conviction that in letting ‘God’ mean one thing to the
mass of the devout and another to the educated minority, the loss of
intellectual precision is more than compensated by the preservation
of a community of feeling. This is not mere expediency. It may be the
part of wisdom, which is profounder than mere reasoning, to wish that
intellectual distinctions shall not divide men too sharply.
But if it is wisdom, it is an aristocratic wisdom. And in Dean Inge’s
writings this is frankly avowed. “The strength of Christianity,”
he says, “is in transforming the lives of individuals—of a small
minority, certainly, as Christ clearly predicted, but a large number
in the aggregate. To rescue a little flock, here and there, from
materialism, selfishness, and hatred, is the task of the [p030] Church
of Christ in all ages alike, and there is no likelihood that it will
ever be otherwise.”
But in other ages, one thing was otherwise. And in this one thing
lies the radical peculiarity of the modern difficulty. In other ages
there was no acknowledged distinction between the ultimate beliefs of
the educated and the uneducated. There were differences in learning,
in religious genius, in the closeness of a chosen few to God and his
angels. Inwardly there were even radical differences of meaning. But
critical analysis had not made them overt and evident, and the common
assumption was that there was one God for all, for the peasant who saw
him dimly and could approach him only through his patron saint, and for
the holy man who had seen God and talked with him face to face. It has
remained for churchmen of our era to distinguish two or more different
Gods, and openly to say that they are different. This may be a triumph
of candor and of intelligence. But this very consciousness of what they
are doing, these very honest admissions that the God of Dean Inge, for
example, is only in name the God of millions of other protestants—that
is an admission, when they understand it, which makes faith difficult
for modern men.
4. _The Protest of the Fundamentalists_
Fundamentalism is a protest against all these definitions and
attenuations which the modern man finds it necessary to make. It is
avowedly a reaction within the Protestant communions against what
the President of the World’s Christian Fundamentalist Association
rather accurately described as “that weasel method of sucking the
meaning [p031] out of words, and then presenting the empty shells in
an attempt to palm them off as giving the Christian faith a new and
another interpretation.” In actual practice this movement has become
entangled with all sorts of bizarre and barbarous agitations, with the
Ku Klux Klan, with fanatical prohibition, with the “anti-evolution
laws,” and with much persecution and intolerance. This in itself
is significant. For it shows that the central truth, which the
fundamentalists have grasped, no longer appeals to the best brains
and the good sense of a modern community, and that the movement is
recruited largely from the isolated, the inexperienced, and the
uneducated.
Into the politics of the heated controversy between modernists and
fundamentalists I do not propose here to enter. That it is not merely
a dispute in the realm of the spirit is made evident by the President
of the Fundamentalist Association when he avers that “nothing” holds
modernists and fundamentalists together except “the billions of dollars
invested. Nine out of ten of these dollars, if not ninety-nine out of
every hundred of them, spent to construct the great denominational
universities, colleges, schools of second grade, theological
seminaries, great denominational mission stations, the multiplied
hospitals that bear denominational names, the immense publication
societies and the expensive societies were given by fundamentalists
and filched by modernists. It took hundreds of years to collect this
money and construct these institutions. It has taken only a quarter of
a century for the liberal bandits to capture them....”
Not all the fundamentalist argument, however, is pitched at this
level. There is also a reasoned case against [p032] the modernists.
Fortunately this case has been stated in a little book called
_Christianity and Liberalism_ by a man who is both a scholar and a
gentleman. The author is Professor J. Gresham Machen of the Princeton
Theological Seminary. It is an admirable book. For its acumen, for its
saliency, and for its wit this cool and stringent defense of orthodox
Protestantism is, I think, the best popular argument produced by either
side in the current controversy. We shall do well to listen to Dr.
Machen.
Modernism, he says, “is altogether in the imperative mood,” while
the traditional religion “begins with a triumphant indicative.” I
do not see how one can deny the force of this generalization. “From
the beginning Christianity was certainly a way of life. _But how was
the life to be produced?_ Not by appealing to the human will, but by
telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event.”
Dr. Machen insists, rightly I think, that the historic influence of
Christianity on the mass of men has depended upon their belief that
an historic drama was enacted in Palestine nineteen hundred years
ago during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius. The veracity of that
story was fundamental to the Christian Church. For while all the
ideal values may remain if you impugn the historic record set forth
in the Gospels, these ideal values are not certified to the common
man as inherent in the very nature of things. Once they are deprived
of their root in historic fact, their poetry, their symbolism, their
ethical significance depend for their sanction upon the temperament
and experience of the individual believer. There is gone that deep,
compulsive, organic faith in an external fact which is the essence of
religion for all but [p033] that very small minority who can live
within themselves in mystical communion or by the power of their
understanding. For the great mass of men, if the history of religions
is to be trusted, religious experience depends upon a complete belief
in the concrete existence, one might almost say the materialization,
of their God. The fundamentalist goes to the very heart of the matter,
therefore, when he insists that you have destroyed the popular
foundations of religion if you make your gospel a symbolic record of
experience, and reject it as an actual record of events.
The liberals have yet to answer Dr. Machen when he says that “the
Christian movement at its inception was not just a way of life in the
modern sense, but a way of life founded upon a message. It was based,
not upon mere feeling, not upon a mere program of work, but on an
account of facts.” It was based on the story of the birth, the life,
the ministry, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That
story set forth the facts which certify the Christian experience.
Modernism, which in varying degree casts doubt upon the truth of that
story, may therefore be defined as an attempt to preserve selected
parts of the experience after the facts which inspired it have been
rejected. The orthodox believer may be mistaken as to the facts in
which he believes. But he is not mistaken in thinking that you cannot,
for the mass of men, have a faith of which the only foundation is
their need and desire to believe. The historic churches, without any
important exceptions, I think, have founded faith on clear statements
about matters of fact, historic events, or physical manifestations.
They have never been content [p034] with a symbolism which the
believer knew was merely symbolic. Only the sophisticated in their
private meditations and in esoteric writing have found satisfaction in
symbolism as such.
Complete as was Dr. Machen’s victory over the Protestant liberals,
he did not long remain in possession of the field. There is a deeper
fundamentalism than his, and it is based on a longer continuous
experience. This is the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church. From
a priest of that church, Father Riggs, has come the most searching
criticism of Dr. Machen’s case. Writing in the _Commonweal_ Father
Riggs points out that “the fundamentalists are well-nigh powerless.
They are estopped, so to speak, from stemming the ravaging waters
of agnosticism because they cannot, while remaining loyal to the
(Protestant) reformers ... set limits to destructive criticism of the
Bible without making an un-Protestant appeal to tradition.” Father
Riggs, in other words, is asking the Protestant fundamentalists, like
Dr. Machen, how they can be certain that they know these _facts_ upon
which they assert that the Christian religion is founded.
They must reply that they know them from reading the Bible. The
reply is, however, unsatisfying. For obviously there are many ways
of reading the Bible, and therefore the Protestant who demands the
right of private judgment can never know with absolute certainty that
his reading is the correct one. His position in a skeptical age is,
therefore, as Father Riggs points out, a weak one, because a private
judgment is, after all, only a private judgment. The history of
Protestantism shows that the exercise of private judgment as to the
meaning of Scripture [p035] leads not to universal and undeniable
dogma, but to schism within schism and heresy within heresy. From
the point of view, then, of the oldest fundamentalism of the western
world the error of the modernists is that they deny the facts on which
religious faith reposes; the error of the orthodox Protestants is
that although they affirm the facts, they reject all authority which
can verify them; the virtue of the Catholic system is that along with
a dogmatic affirmation of the central facts, it provides a living
authority in the Church which can ascertain and demonstrate and verify
these facts.
5. _In Man’s Image_
The long record of clerical opposition to certain kinds of scientific
inquiry has a touch of dignity when it is realized that at the core of
that opposition there is a very profound understanding of the religious
needs of ordinary men. For once you weaken the belief that the central
facts taught by the churches are facts in the most literal and absolute
sense, the disintegration of the popular religion begins. We may
confidently declare that Mr. Santayana is speaking not as a student of
human nature, but as a cultivated unbeliever, when he writes that “the
idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation
of truth and life is simply an impossible idea.” The idea is
impossible, no doubt, for the children of the great emancipation. But
because it is impossible, religion itself, in the traditional popular
meaning of the term, has become impossible for them.
If it is true that man creates God in his own image, it is no less true
that for religious devotion he must remain [p036] unconscious of that
fact. Once he knows that he has created the image of God, the reality
of it vanishes like last night’s dream. It may be that to anyone who is
impregnated with the modern spirit it is almost self-evident that the
truths of religion are truths of human experience. But this knowledge
does not tolerate an abiding and absorbing faith. For when the truths
of religion have lost their connection with a superhuman order, the
cord of their life is cut. What remains is a somewhat archaic, a
somewhat questionable, although a very touching, quaint medley of
poetry, rhetoric, fable, exhortation, and insight into human travail.
When Mr. Santayana says that “matters of religion should never be
matters of controversy” because “we never argue with a lover about
his taste, nor condemn him, if we are just, for knowing so human a
passion,” he expresses an ultimate unbelief.
For what would be the plight of a lover, if we told him that his
passion was charming?—though, of course, there might be no such lady
as the one he loved.
CHAPTER III [p037]
THE LOSS OF CERTAINTY
1. _Ways of Reading the Bible_
It is important to an understanding of this matter that we should not
confuse the modern practice of redefining God with the ancient use of
allegory.
From the earliest days the words of the Bible have been embroidered
with luxuriant and often fantastic meanings. In Leviticus it says,
for example, that the meal offering may be baked in an oven, fried in
a pan, or toasted on a plate. This passage, says Origen, proves that
Scripture must have three meanings. It came to have any number of
meanings. Thus St. Augustine explained that Eden meant the life of the
blessed, and its four rivers the four virtues; farther on in the same
chapter he declares that Eden is the Church, and that its four rivers
are the four Gospels.
In the same manner Wyclif in a later age preached a sermon explaining
the parable of the Good Samaritan. The man who went down from Jerusalem
to Jericho represents Adam and Eve; the robbers are the fiends of hell;
the priest and Levite who went by on the other side are the patriarchs,
saints, and prophets who failed to bring salvation; the Good Samaritan
is Jesus; the wine which he pours into his wounds is sharp words to
prick men from sin, and the oil is hope.... Savonarola, we are [p038]
told, preached during the whole of Lent, 1492, taking as his text
Noah’s Ark and “giving each day a different interpretation of the ten
planks of which the Ark was composed.”
By this method of interpretation the devout adapted the Bible to
their own uses, smoothing away its contradictions and explaining
away passages, like the command in Genesis to kill uncircumcised
children, which, read literally, would have seemed to them barbarous
and immoral. We must be careful, however, not to misunderstand this
method of thought. When they said that the beautiful woman in the Song
of Solomon was the Church, they were not conscious, as we are, that
this is a figure of speech. There had not entered into their habits of
thought the kind of analytical precision in which one thing can mean
only one thing. It is no contradiction to say that the allegory was
taken literally; certainly there was no sense of unreality about it,
as there is for us. “These and similar allegorical interpretations may
be suitably put ...” says St. Augustine, speaking here to the educated
minority, “without giving offense to anyone, while yet we believe the
strict truth of the history confirmed by its circumstantial narrative
of facts.”
But at last men became too analytical and too self-conscious to accept
the naive use of allegory. They realized that allegory was a loose
method of interpretation which lent itself easily to the citing of
scripture in order to justify heresy. If the ten planks in Noah’s Ark
could mean a different set of truths on each day in Lent, there was
no telling what they might come to mean in the end. It was clear,
therefore, that allegory was dangerous [p039] and might, as Luther
said, “degenerate into a mere monkey game”; it was wanton, like “a sort
of beautiful harlot who proves herself spiritually seductive to idle
men.”
This danger was a result of the general loosening of organic
faith which was already evident in Luther’s day. To men who had
the unconscious certainties about God and his universe, allegory
was a perfectly safe method of interpreting the Bible because all
the interpretations, however fantastic, were inspired by the same
pre-judgments and tended therefore to confirm the same convictions. The
allegories of simple men are like many-colored flowers in one garden,
growing from the same soil, watered by the same rains, turning their
faces toward the same sun. But as men became emancipated from their
ancestral way of life, their convictions about God and destiny and
human morality changed. Then the method of allegory ceased to be the
merely exuberant expression of the same ancient truths, and became a
confusing method of rationalizing all kinds of new experiments. It
promoted heresy because men had become heretical, where once, while men
were devout, it had only embroidered their devotions.
“To allegorize is to juggle with Scripture,” said Luther. The
Protestant Reformers could not tolerate that. For they lived in an
age when faith was already disintegrating, and they had themselves
destroyed the authority of an infallible source of religion. “We must,”
wrote Calvin, “entirely reject the allegories of Origen, and of others
like him, which Satan, with the deepest subtlety, has endeavored to
introduce into the Church, for the [p040] purpose of rendering the
doctrine of Scripture ambiguous and destitute of all certainty and
firmness.”
The insistence of the Reformers on a literal interpretation of the
Bible had, as Dr. Fosdick points out, two unforeseen results. It led
to the so-called Higher Criticism which in substance is nothing but a
scientific attempt to find out what the Bible did mean literally to
those who wrote it. And this in turn made it practically impossible for
modern men to believe all that the Bible literally says. When they read
the Bible as allegory they found in it unending confirmation of what
they already believed. But when they read it literally, as history, as
astronomy, and biology, and as a code of laws, it contradicted at many
crucial points the practical working convictions of their daily lives.
“The consequence is,” says Dr. Fosdick, “that we face the Biblical
world made historically vivid over against the modern world presently
experienced, and we cannot use the old method (_i.e._ allegory) of
accommodating one to the other.”
2. _Modernism: Immortality as an Example_
This predicament forced modern churchmen to seek what Dr. Fosdick calls
“a new solution.” They could not believe that the Bible was taken down,
as John Donne put it, by “the Secretaries of the Holy Ghost.” Yet they
believed, as every sane man does, that the Bible contains wisdom which
bears deeply upon the conduct of human life. Their problem was to find
a way of picking and choosing passages in the Scriptures, and then of
interpreting those which were chosen in such a way as to make them
credible to modern men. They had to find some [p041] way of setting
aside the story that God made Eve out of Adam’s rib, that God commanded
the massacre of whole populations, and that he enjoyed the slaughter of
animals at the sacrifice; but they had at the same time to find a way
of preserving for the use of modern men the lessons of the ministry of
Jesus and the promise of life everlasting.
The method they employ is based on a theory. It is a theory that the
Bible contains “abiding messages” placed in a “transient setting.” The
Bible, for example, is full of stories about devils and angels. Now,
modern men do not believe in devils and angels. These are “categories”
which they have outgrown. But what the devils and angels stood for
are evils and blessings which modern men still encounter. We have,
therefore, only to “decode” the Bible, and where it speaks of devils
to see temptations, sin, disease, pain, and suffering, which have a
psychic origin; where it speaks of angels to remember that sense of
unseen friendliness which may help us at a crisis in our lives. The old
wine is still good, but it needs to be put in new bottles. “The modern
preacher’s responsibility is thus to decode the abiding meanings of
Scripture from outgrown phraseology.”
This is not so difficult a thing to do for the devils and the angels.
But a little reflection will show, I think, that in dealing with
the major themes of religion, the solution is not so easy. The real
difficulty appears when Dr. Fosdick attempts to decode the biblical
promise of immortal life.
He begins by rejecting completely the resurrection of the flesh and
any kind of immortality which is imagined as the survival of the
physical person. Yet he believes [p042] in “the persistence of
personality through death.” For he maintains that without this belief
the final victory of death would signify “the triumphant irrationality
of existence”; not to believe in immortality is to submit to “mental
confusion.” Speaking quite frankly, however, he cannot easily imagine
“a completely disembodied existence.” Yet it is obviously not easy to
imagine the persistence of personality through death once you have made
up your mind not to imagine a concrete heaven inhabited by well-defined
persons.
Modern churchmen, like Dean Inge for example, who have faced the
difficulty more boldly than Dr. Fosdick does, arrive at an intelligible
explanation of what they mean by immortality. But they mean something
which is not only very difficult to understand, but extremely difficult
for most men to enjoy when they have understood it. They inject
intelligible meaning into the word “eternal” by employing it in a sense
which is wholly different from that which the common man employs.
By immortality he means life that goes on age after age without
stopping. But the modern churchmen who have really clarified their
minds are platonists. They apply the word “eternal” to that which is
independent of time and existence. Between the two conceptions there
is the profoundest difference, for in the commonsense of the worldling
existence is so precious that he wishes it to continue for ever and
ever. But to the platonist existence, or embodiment, is transient,
accidental, irrational; only that is permanent which is timeless.
Commonsense demands that if we are immortal we should meet our friend
again later and continue our friendship; the platonist [p043] loves
the memory of his friend after death as he loved an ideal image of him
during his life. In communing with his memories and his ideals he knows
himself to be in touch with eternal things. For not even the gods, says
Homer, can undo the past; no accident of mortality can destroy anything
which can be represented in the mind. Heroes die, but that such heroic
deeds were done is a chapter forever, as Mr. Santayana says, in any
complete history of the universe. The thinker dies, but his thoughts
are beyond the reach of destruction. Men are mortal; but ideas are
immortal.
I do not know whether I have known how to state clearly what is meant
by this platonic view to which, in varying degrees of clarity, all
emancipated minds turn when they talk of immortality. But, at least, it
is clear that it is a conception which calls for a radically different
adjustment to life than that to which the worldling is accustomed. He
desires objects to love, goods and successes that are perishable, and
he wishes them not to perish. Before he can enter the platonic world,
before he can even attain to a hint of its meaning, he must abandon the
very desires of which his hope of immortality is the expression. He
must detach himself from his wish to acquire and possess objects that
die; he must learn what it means to possess things not by holding them,
but by understanding them, and to enjoy them as objects of reflection.
He must not only cease to desire immortality as he conceives it, but
the material embodiment of things as well. Then only, when he has
renounced his love of existence, can he begin to love the forms of
existence, and to live among imperishable ideas. [p044] Then, and in
this sense only, does he enter into eternal life.
The ordinary man, when he hears this doctrine expounded, is almost
certain to say with the Indian sage: “the worship of the Impersonal
laid no hold upon my heart.” His heart is set on the enjoyment of
worldly goods, and the doctrine, for all but a few exceptional spirits,
requires a radical change of heart. It is forbidding except to the few
in whom “the intellect (is) passionate and the passions cold.” For it
demands a conversion of their natural desire to possess tangible things
into a passion to understand intangible and abstract things. This
philosophy is ascetic, unworldly, and profoundly disinterested.
Now it can be argued that this is precisely what the Gospels teach as
to the meaning of salvation. Excellent authority can be cited from the
Gospel of John and the Epistles of St. Paul to justify this form of
the Christian tradition: “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom
of God” ... “the things that are seen are temporal, but the things
that are not seen are eternal” ... “I see another law in my members,
warring against the law of my mind.” It can hardly be denied, as Dean
Inge says, that “we are able to carry back to the fountain-head that
Christian tradition” which may quite accurately be described as the
religion of the spirit. But mixed with it in the Scripture, there is
the other tradition, the popular tradition which may be called the
religion of commonsense. Out of this latter have grown the institutions
of the church and the faith of the mass of men. The religion of the
spirit has been reserved for a few, “a succession [p045] of lives
which have been sheltered rather than inspired by the machinery and
statecraft of a mighty institution,” and while the few who lived the
life of the spirit have undoubtedly done much to inspire the popular
religion with new insight, they have been, on the whole, a group apart.
Yet those who belonged to these two distinct traditions did use the
same churches and the same symbolism. There was an even deeper bond of
unity between them. Both believed that renunciation and self-discipline
are the way of salvation—in the religion of the spirit as the way to
enter now into love of eternal things; in the religion of commonsense
as a rather heavy price paid to God in return for everlasting happiness
after death. It may be argued, therefore, by churchmen like Dr.
Fosdick, that the “abiding message” of the Bible about immortality is
that men must renounce the world in order to win eternity. That some
men mean by eternity a kind of perpetual motion and others a kind of
abstraction is merely a difference in their habits of thought, and does
not impair the validity or the importance of the central experience. If
they will renounce their worldly passions, they will find what the idea
of eternity has to give, no matter what they imagine it to mean.
But although Dr. Fosdick implies that this solves the difficulty, it
can be shown, I believe, that it does not. What he has succeeded in
doing is to disentangle from the Bible a meaning for immortality which
has a noble tradition behind it and is at the same time intellectually
possible for a modern man. But the history of religion ought to put
us on guard against assuming too easily [p046] that a statement of
the purest truth is in itself capable of affecting the lives of any
considerable number of people. Dean Inge, who is a very much more
clear-headed churchman, says quite frankly that “a religion succeeds,
not because it is true, but because it suits the worshippers.” Merely
to tell men, however fervently, that they may conquer mortality by
renouncing the flesh, will not go far toward persuading many of them
to renounce the flesh. There must be, as there has been in all the
historic religions, something more than a statement of the moral law.
There must be a psychological machinery for enforcing the moral law.
For those who are suited to the religion of the spirit no machinery is
needed. But for the mass of men who are not naturally suited to it,
a machinery which compels this conversion is indispensable. Jesus in
his time, and Gautama Buddha before him, taught a moral law which was
addressed to those who could receive it. They were not many. Buddhism
and Christianity became world religions centuries after the death of
their founders, and only when there had been added to the central
message a great organized method of teaching it.
The essence of such an organization is the title to say with apostolic
certainty that the message is true. Churchmen, like Dr. Fosdick, can
make no such claim about their message. They reject revelation. They
reject the authority of any church to speak directly for God. They
reject the literal inspiration of the Bible. They reject altogether
many parts of the Bible as not only uninspired, but false and
misleading. They do not believe in God as a lawgiver, judge, father,
and spectator of human life. [p047] When they say that this or that
message in the Bible is “permanently valid,” they mean only that in
their judgment, according to their reading of human experience, it is
a well-tested truth. To say this is not merely to deny that the Bible
is authoritative in astronomy and biology; it is to deny equally that
it is authoritative as to what is good and bad for men. The Bible thus
becomes no more than a revered collection of hypotheses which each man
may reject or accept in the light of his own knowledge.
The lessons may still be true. But they are robbed of their certainty.
Each man is thrown back upon his own resources; he is denied the
support which all popular religion offers him, the conviction that
outside himself there is a power on which he can and must lean for
guidance. In the ancient faith a man said: “I believe this on the
authority of an all-wise God.” In the new faith he is in effect
compelled to say: “I have examined the alleged pronouncements of an
all-knowing God; some of them are obviously untrue, some are rather
repulsive, others, however, if they are properly restated, I find to be
exceedingly good.”
Something quite fundamental is left out of the modernist creeds. At
least something which has hitherto been quite fundamental is left
out. That something is the most abiding of all the experiences of
religion, namely, the conviction that the religion comes from God.
Suppose it were true, which it plainly is not, that Dr. Fosdick by his
process of selection and decoding has retained “precisely the thing
at which the Bible was driving.” Still he would be without the thing
on which popular religion [p048] has been founded. For the Bible to
our ancestors was not simply, as he implies, a book of wisdom. It was
a book of wisdom backed by the power of God himself. That is not an
inconsiderable difference. It is all the difference there is between a
pious resolution and a moral law.
The Bible, as men formerly accepted it, contained wisdom _certified_
by the powers that govern the universe. It did not merely contain many
well-tested truths, similar in kind to those which are to be found in
Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, and Bernard Shaw. It contained truths
which could not be doubted because they had been spoken by God through
his prophets and his Son. They could not be wrong. But once it is
allowed that each man may select from the Bible as he sees fit, judging
each passage by his own notions of what is “abiding,” you have stripped
the Scriptures of their authority to command men’s confidence and to
compel their obedience. The Scriptures may still inspire respect. But
they are disarmed.
3. _What Modernism Leaves Out_
Many reasons have been adduced to explain why people do not go to
church as much as they once did. Surely the most important reason is
that they are not so certain that they are going to meet God when they
go to church. If they had that certainty they would go. If they really
believed that they were being watched by a Supreme Being who is more
powerful than all the kings of earth put together, if they really
believed that not only their actions but their secret thoughts were
known and would be remembered by the creator and ultimate judge of the
[p049] universe, there would be no complaint whatever about church
attendance. The most worldly would be in the front pews, and preachers
would not have to resort so often to their rather desperate expedients
to attract an audience. If the conviction were there that the creed
professed was invincibly true, the modern congregation would not come
to church, as they usually do to-day, to hear the preacher and to
listen to the music. They would come to worship God.
Religious professions will not work when they rest merely on a kind of
passive assent; or on intricate reasoning, or on fierce exhortation, or
on a good-natured conspiracy to be vague and highflown. A man cannot
cheat about faith. Either he has it in the marrow of his bones, or in
a crisis, when he is distracted and in sorrow, there is no conviction
there to support him. Without complete certainty religion does not
offer genuine consolation. It is without the strength to compensate
our weakness. Nor can it sanction the rules of morality. Ethical codes
cannot lay claim to unhesitating obedience when they are based upon the
opinions of a majority, or on the notions of wise men, or on estimates
of what is socially useful, or on an appeal to patriotism. For they
depend then on the force which happens to range itself behind them at a
particular time; or on their convenience for a moment. They are felt to
be the outcome of human, and therefore quite fallible, decisions. They
are no necessary part of the government of the universe. They were not
given by God to Moses on Sinai. They are not the commandments of God
speaking through his Infallible Church.
A human morality has no such sanction as a divine. [p050] The
sanction of a divine morality is the certainty of the believer that it
originated with God. But if he has once come to think that the rule of
conduct has a purely human, local, and temporal origin, its sanction is
gone. His obedience is transformed, as ours has been by knowledge of
that sort, from conviction to conformity or calculated expediency.
Without certainty there can be no profound sense that a man’s own
purpose has become part of the purpose of the whole creation. It
is necessary to believe in a God who is active in the world before
a man can feel himself to be, as St. Paul said, “a fellow laborer”
with God. Yet this sense of partnership with a Person who transcends
the individual’s own life, his own ego, and his own capacities, is
fundamental in all popular religion. It underlies all the other
elements of religion. For in the certainty that he is enlisted with
God, man finds not only comfort in defeat, not only an ideal of
holiness which persuades him to renounce his immediate desires, but an
ecstatic mobilizing of all his scattered energies in one triumphant
sense of his own infinite importance.
CHAPTER IV [p051]
THE ACIDS OF MODERNITY
1. _The Kingly Pattern_
What I have said thus far can be reduced to the statement that it is
difficult for modern men to conceive a God whom they can worship. Yet
it would be a crude misunderstanding of religious experience to assume
that it depends upon a clear conception of God. In truly religious
men the experience of God is much more intensely convincing than any
definition of his nature which they can put into words. They do not
insist on understanding that which they believe, for their belief
gives them a consciousness of divinity which transcends any conviction
they could reach by the understanding. They are not oppressed by the
conflict between reason and faith because the testimony of faith
is irresistible. It may become so irresistible that any attempt to
understand is finally held, as it was by John Chrysostom, to be an
impertinence.
St. Chrysostom, who is described by the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ as the
most prominent doctor of the Greek Church and the greatest preacher
ever heard in a Christian pulpit, is a striking example of how in
other ages a man who was both learned and devout was able to surmount
the intellectual difficulties which to-day cause so much trouble for
modernists and fundamentalists alike. Chrysostom was born at Antioch
in the middle of the Fourth Century and grew up in a time when the
intellectual [p052] foundations of Christianity were intensely
disputed. The Catholic theology had not yet emerged victoriously, and
Antioch was the theatre of fierce struggles between Pagans, Manichæans,
Gnostics, Arians, Jews, and others. These struggles turned in
considerable measure upon just such attempts to define and comprehend
God as now confuse the teaching of the Protestant Church. Among the
sectarians there were some who claimed that it was possible “to know
God exactly” and it was against them that Chrysostom preached that
“he insults God who seeks to apprehend His essential being.” For “the
difference between the being of God and the being of man is of such a
kind that no word can express it and no thought can appraise it.... He
dwells, says St. Paul, in an unapproachable light.” Even the angels in
heaven are stupefied by the glory and majesty of God: “Tell me,” he
says, “wherefore do they cover their faces and hide them with their
wings? Why but that they cannot endure the dazzling radiance and its
rays that pour from the Throne?”
Here in language so eloquent that the author became known as
Chrysostom, “the golden-mouthed,” we have the doctrine that “a
comprehended God is no God,” that “God is incomprehensible because He
is blessed and blessed because He is incomprehensible.” But if we look
more closely at what Chrysostom actually says, it is apparent that he
has a much clearer idea of God than he knows. He conceives of God as
the creator, the ruler, and the judge of the universe. When he says
that God is incomprehensible he means that it is impossible for a human
being to imagine what it would be like to be God. But [p053] that does
not prevent Chrysostom from knowing what it is like to be the creature
of the incomprehensible God. He is very definitely on his knees before
the throne of a divine king whose radiance is so dazzling that he
cannot look his Lord in the face.
There is thus a very solid intellectual conception embedded in the
faith of this great teacher who staked everything on the assertion that
it is impossible to conceive God. The conception is there but it has
not been isolated and realized. It is unconsciously assumed. We find
the same thing in Luther when he said: “I venture to put my trust in
the one God alone, the invisible and incomprehensible, who hath created
Heaven and Earth and is alone above all creatures.” For in spite of
the fact that Luther calls God incomprehensible, he is able to make a
number of extremely important statements about him. He is able to say
that God is the only God, that he created the earth, that there is a
heaven, that God created heaven, and that God alone is above all his
creatures. To know that much about God is to comprehend the function of
God if not his nature.
Now if we examine the religious difficulty of modern men, we find,
I think, that they do not lack the sense of mystery, of majesty, of
terror, and of wonder which overwhelm Chrysostom and Luther. The
emotional disposition is there. But it is somehow inhibited from
possessing them utterly. The will to believe is checked by something
in their experience which Chrysostom did not have. That something is
the sense that the testimony of faith is not wholly credible, that the
feeling of sanctity is no assurance of the existence of sacred powers,
that awe and [p054] wonder and terror in the breast of the believer
are not guarantees that there exist real objects that are awful and
wonderful. The modern man is not incapable of faith, but he has within
him a contrary passion, as instinctive and often as intense as faith,
which makes incredible the testimony of his faith.
It is that contrary passion, and not the thin argumentation of atheists
and agnostics, which lies, I think, at the root of what churchmen call
modern irreligion. It is that passion which they must understand if
they are ever to understand the modern religious difficulty. For just
as men could surmount any intellectual difficulty when their passion to
believe was whole-hearted, so to-day, when the passion to disbelieve
is so strong, they are unable to believe no matter how perfectly their
theological dilemmas are resolved.
We must ask ourselves, then, what there is in modern men which makes
the testimony of faith seem more or less incredible to them. We have
seen in the citations from Chrysostom and Luther that the testimony of
faith really contains a large number of unconscious statements of fact
about the universe and how it is governed. It is these statements of
fact which we are no longer able to assume unconsciously, and having
become conscious of them they are rather incredible. But why are they
no longer unconsciously assumed and why are they incredible? The answer
is, I think, that they have ceased to be consistent with our normal
experience in ordinary affairs.
The faith of Chrysostom and Luther is entangled with, and supported
upon, the assumption that the universe [p055] was created and is
governed by a father and king. They had projected upon the universe
an imaginary picture which reflected their own daily experience of
government among men. These pictures of how the universe is governed
change with men’s political experience. Thus it would not have been
easy for an Asiatic people to imagine the divine government in any
other way but as a despotism, and Yahveh, as he appears in many
famous portraits in the Old Testament, is very evidently an Oriental
monarch inclined to be somewhat moody and very vain. He governs as he
chooses, constrained by no law, and often without mercy, justice, or
righteousness. The God of mediæval Christianity, on the other hand,
is more like a great feudal lord, supreme and yet bound by covenants
to treat his vassals on earth according to a well-established system
of reciprocal rights and duties. The God of the Enlightenment in the
Eighteenth Century is a constitutional monarch who reigns but does not
govern. And the God of Modernism, who is variously pictured as the
_élan vital_ within the evolutionary process, or as the sum total of
the laws of nature, is really a kind of constitutionalism deified.
Provided that the picture is so consistent with experience that it
is taken utterly for granted, it will serve as a background for the
religious experience. But when daily experience for one reason or
another provides no credible analogy by which men can imagine that
the universe is governed by a supernatural king and father, then the
disposition to believe, however strong it may be at the roots, is like
a vine that reaches out and can find nothing solid upon which to grow.
It cannot support [p056] itself. If faith is to flourish, there must
be a conception of how the universe is governed to support it.
It is these supporting conceptions—the unconscious assumption that
we are related to God as creatures to creator, as vassals to a king,
as children to a father—that the acids of modernity have eaten away.
The modern man’s daily experience of modernity makes instinctively
incredible to him these unconscious ideas which are at the core of the
great traditional and popular religions. He does not wantonly reject
belief, as so many churchmen assert. His predicament is much more
serious. With the best will in the world, he finds himself not quite
believing.
In the last four hundred years many influences have conspired to make
incredible the idea that the universe is governed by a kingly person.
An account of all of these influences would be a history of the growth
of modern civilization. I am attempting nothing so comprehensive or
so ambitious. I should like merely to note certain aspects of that
revolutionary change which, as Lord Acton says, came “unheralded”
and “founded a new order of things ... sapping the ancient reign of
continuity.” For that new order of things has made it impossible for
us to believe, as plainly and literally as our forefathers did, that
the universe is a monarchy administered on this planet through divinely
commissioned, and, therefore, unimpeachably authoritative ministers.
2. _Landmarks_
In a famous passage at the beginning of _Heretics_, Mr. Chesterton
says that “nothing more strangely indicates the enormous and silent
evil of modern society than [p057] the extraordinary use which is
made nowadays of the word ‘orthodox.’ In former days the heretic was
proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdom of the world and the
police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. All the
tortures born out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he
was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He
says with a conscious laugh, ‘I suppose I am very heretical,’ and looks
around for applause. The word ‘heresy’ not only means no longer being
wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous.”
Mr. Chesterton goes on to explain that this change of attitude has come
about because “people care less for whether they are philosophically
right than they used to care.” It may be so. But if they cared as much
or more, it would not help them. To be orthodox is to believe in the
right doctrines and to follow the ancient rules of living deduced from
a divine revelation. The modern man finds that the doctrines do not fit
what he believes to be true, and that the rules do not show him how
to conduct his life. For he is confronted at every turn with radical
novelties about which his inherited dogma teaches him something which
is plainly unworkable, or, as is even more often the case, teaches him
nothing at all.
In the old world there were, of course, novelties, too. But the pace
of change was so slow that it did not seem to cause radical change.
There was ample time to make subtle and necessary revisions of the
fundamental assumptions of right and wrong without seeming to challenge
the distinction between right and wrong. Looking back at it in long
perspective we can see now that there was [p058] a constant evolution
of the Christian faith from the Apostles to the later councils of the
Church. But in relation to the life of any individual the change was so
slow that men could honestly believe that the Catholicism of Hildebrand
was identical with the Christianity of Paul. Men had few means of
reconstructing the past, and few ways of knowing how great was the
variety of belief at any one time within the frontiers of Christendom.
Within their horizon, change came too slowly to seem like change,
because only that seems to move which moves rather fast.
For that reason the large changes which took place were not vividly
realized. The small, quick changes, of which men were conscious, could
therefore easily be made to seem, especially since men were not too
exact and observant, as inevitable deductions from unchanging premises.
Even in the great arguments over the nature of Christ, the rights of
Church and Empire, the meaning of grace and transubstantiation, both
sides appealed in theory to the same premises. Each side asserted that
it was following the true revelation. And since ordinary men for the
most part never heard the other side, except from their own priests and
doctors, they had no reason for doubting that the side on which they
happened to find themselves was absolutely right. They did not have to
choose between competing creeds; they had merely to defend their creed,
which was the true one, against the enemies of God. And so if they were
disturbed by the quarrel, they were not disturbed much by doubt.
The grand adjustments were taken for granted, and within that framework
men could make the minor adjustments patiently and elaborately, letting
them become [p059] habitual and well-worn. This, perhaps, is the
secret of the charm that an old civilization has for us to-day. We
feel that here is a way of life which men have had time to refine and
to embellish. The modern man in a progressive community has neither
the time nor the energy for this delightful superficiality. He is
too busy solving fundamental problems. He is so free to question his
premises that he is no longer free to work out his conclusions. His
philosophy of life is like the skyscraper; it is nine-tenths structure.
So much effort has gone into constructing it, and making it fit to
bear the strains, it is so new and yet it will so soon be out of
date, that nobody is much interested in the character of it. But a
mediæval cathedral, like the mediæval philosophy, was built slowly over
generations and was to last forever; it is decorated inside and out,
where it can be seen and where it cannot be seen, from the crypt to the
roof.
The modern man is an emigrant who lives in a revolutionary society and
inherits a protestant tradition. He must be guided by his conscience.
But when he searches his conscience, he finds no fixed point outside of
it by which he can take his bearings. He does not really believe that
there is such a point, because he himself has moved about too fast to
fix any point long enough in his mind. For the sense of authority is
not established by argument. It is acquired by deep familiarity and
indurated association. The ancient authorities were blended with the
ancient landmarks, with fields and vineyards and patriarchal trees,
with ancient houses and chests full of heirlooms, with churchyards
near at hand and their ancestral graves, with old men who remembered
wise sayings they [p060] had heard from wise old men. In that kind of
setting it is natural to believe that the great truths are known and
the big questions settled, and to feel that the dead themselves are
still alive and are watching over the ancient faith.
But when creeds have to be proved to the doubting they are already
blighted; arguments are for the unbelievers and the wavering, for
those who have never had, and for those who have lost these primordial
attachments. Faith is not a formula which is agreed to if the weight
of evidence favors it. It is a posture of man’s whole being which
predisposes him to assimilate, not merely to believe, his creed.
When the posture is native to him, in tune with the rhythm of his
surroundings, his faith is not dependent upon intellectual assent. It
is a serene and whole-hearted absorption, like that of the infant to
its mother, in the great powers outside which govern his world. When
that union of feeling is no longer there, as it is not there for a
large part of our talkative fundamentalist sects, we may be sure that
corrosive doubting has begun. The unlovely quality of much modern
religiosity is due to these doubts. So much of its belief is synthetic.
It is forced, made, insisted upon, because it is no longer simple and
inevitable. The angry absurdities which the fundamentalists propound
against “evolution” are not often due to their confidence in the
inspiration of the Bible. They are due to lack of confidence, to doubt
resisted like an annoying tune which a man cannot shake out of his
head. For if the militant fundamentalists were utterly sure they are
right, they would exhibit some of that composure which the truly devout
display. Did they [p061] really trust their God, they would trust
laws, politicians, and policemen less. But because their whole field of
consciousness is trembling with uncertainties they are in a state of
fret and fuss; and their preaching is frousy, like the seductions of an
old coquette.
3. _Barren Ground_
The American people, more than any other people, is composed of
individuals who have lost association with their old landmarks. They
have crossed an ocean, they have spread themselves across a new
continent. The American who still lives in his grandfather’s house
feels almost as if he were living in a museum. There are few Americans
who have not moved at least once since their childhood, and even if
they have staid where they were born, the old landmarks themselves
have been carted away to make room for progress. That, perhaps, is one
reason why we have so much more Americanism than love of America. It
takes time to learn to love the new gas station which stands where the
wild honeysuckle grew. Moreover, the great majority of Americans have
risen in the world. They have moved out of their class, lifting the
old folks along with them perhaps, so that together they may sit by
the steam pipes, and listen to the crooning of the radio. But more and
more of them have moved not only out of their class, but out of their
culture; and then they leave the old folks behind, and the continuity
of life is broken. For faith grows well only as it is passed on from
parents to their children amidst surroundings that bear witness,
because nothing changes radically, to a deep permanence in the order of
the world. It is true, [p062] no doubt, that in this great physical
and psychic migration some of the old household gods are carefully
packed up and put with the rest of the luggage, and then unpacked and
set up on new altars in new places. But what can be taken along is at
best no more than the tree which is above the ground. The roots remain
in the soil where first they grew.
The sidewalks of a city would in any case be a stony soil in which to
transplant religion. Throughout history, as Spengler points out, the
large city has bred heresies, new cults, and irreligion. Now when we
speak of modern civilization we mean a civilization dominated by the
culture of the great metropolitan centers. Our own civilization in
America is perhaps the most completely urbanized of all. For even the
American farmers, though they live in the country, tend to be suburban
rather than rural. I am aware of how dominating a role the population
outside the great cities plays in American life. Yet it is in the
large cities that the tempo of our civilization is determined, and the
tendency of mechanical inventions as well as economic policy is to
create an irresistible suction of the country towards the city.
The deep and abiding traditions of religion belong to the countryside.
For it is there that man earns his daily bread by submitting to
superhuman forces whose behavior he can only partially control. There
is not much he can do when he has ploughed the ground and planted his
seed except to wait hopefully for sun and rain from the sky. He is
obviously part of a scheme that is greater than himself, subject to
elements that transcend his powers and surpass his understanding. The
city is an acid that dissolves [p063] this piety. How different it is
from an ancient vineyard where men cultivate what their fathers have
planted. In a modern city it is not easy to maintain that “reverent
attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his life by
that attachment.” It is not natural to form reverent attachments to an
apartment on a two-year lease, and an imitation mahogany desk on the
thirty-second floor of an office building. In such an environment piety
becomes absurd, a butt for the facetious, and the pious man looks like
a picturesque yokel or a stuffy fool.
Yet without piety, without a patriotism of family and place, without
an almost plant-like implication in unchangeable surroundings, there
can be no disposition to believe in an external order of things. The
omnipotence of God means something to men who submit daily to the
cycles of the weather and the mysterious power of nature. But the city
man puts his faith in furnaces to keep out the cold, is proudly aware
of what bad sewage his ancestors endured, and of how ignorantly they
believed that God, who made Adam at 9 A.M. on October 23 in the year
4004 B.C., was concerned with the behavior of Adam’s children.
4. _Sophisticated Violence_
Much effort goes into finding substitutes for this radical loss of
association. There is the Americanization movement, for example,
which in some of its public manifestations has as much resemblance to
patriotism as the rape of the Sabine women had to the love of Dante
for Beatrice. There is the vociferous nationalism of the [p064]
hundred percenters which is always most eloquent when it is about to
be most rowdy. There are the anxious outcries of the sectarians who
in their efforts to revive the religion of their fathers show the
utmost contempt for the aspirations of their sons. There is Mr. Henry
Ford hastily collecting American antiques before his cars destroy
the whole culture which produced them. There is Mr. Lothrop Stoddard
looking every man in the eye to see whether it is Nordic blue. There
are a thousand and one patently artificial, sometimes earnest, often
fantastic fundamentalist agitations. They are all attempts to impose
quickly by one kind of sophisticated violence or another a posture of
faith which can be genuine only when it belongs to the unquestioned
memories of the soul. They are a shrill insistence that men ought to
feel that which no man can feel who does not already feel it in the
marrow of his bones.
Novelties crowd the consciousness of modern men. The machinery of
intelligence, the press, the radio, the moving picture, have enormously
multiplied the number of unseen events and strange people and queer
doings with which he has to be concerned. They compel him to pay
attention to facts that are detached from their backgrounds, their
causes and their consequences, and are only half known because they are
not seen or touched or actually heard. These experiences come to him
having no beginning, no middle, and no end, mere flashes of publicity
playing fitfully upon a dark tangle of circumstances. I pick up a
newspaper at the start of the day and I am depressed and rejoiced to
learn that: anthracite miners have struck in Pennsylvania; that a price
boost [p065] plot is charged; that Mr. Ziegfeld has imported a blonde
from England who weighs 112 pounds and has pretty legs; that the Pope,
on the other hand, has refused to receive women in low-necked dress and
with their arms bare; that airplanes are flying to Hawaii; and that the
Mayor says that the would-be Mayor is a liar....
Now in an ordered universe there ought to be place for all human
experiences. But it is not strange that the modern newspaper reader
finds it increasingly difficult to believe that through it all there is
order, permanence, and connecting principle. Such experience as comes
to him from the outside is a dissonance composed of a thousand noises.
And amidst these noises he has for inner guidance only a conscience
which consists, as he half suspects, of the confused echoes of earlier
tunes.
5. _Rulers_
He cannot look to his betters for guidance. The American social system
is migratory, revolutionary, and protestant. It provides no recognized
leaders and no clear standards of conduct. No one is recognized as the
interpreter of morals and the arbiter of taste. There is no social
hierarchy, there is no acknowledged ruling class, no well-known system
of rights and duties, no code of manners. There are smart sets, first
families, and successful people, to whom a good deal of deference is
paid and a certain tribute of imitation. But these leaders have no real
authority in morals or in matters of taste because they themselves have
few standards that are not the fashions of a season. They exercise,
therefore, an almost autocratic power over deportment at the country
club. [p066] But what they believe about God, salvation, or the
destiny of America nobody knows, not even they themselves.
There have been perhaps three ruling classes in America, the Puritan
merchants, the Knickerbocker gentry, and the Cavalier planters of
the South. Each presided for a few generations over an ordered
civilization. But the New Englanders uprooted themselves and went west,
and those who have been left behind are marooned in a flood of aliens.
The Knickerbocker squirearchy dissolved in the commercial greatness of
New York, and the southern aristocracy was overthrown and ruined by a
social revolution which culminated in the Civil War. They have left no
successors, and unless and until American society becomes stabilized
once more somewhere for a few generations, they are not likely to have
any successors.
Our rulers to-day consist of random collections of successful men and
their wives. They are to be found in the inner circles of banks and
corporations, in the best clubs, in the dominant cliques of trade
unions, among the political churchmen, the higher manipulating bosses,
the leading professional Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Irish,
Germans, Jews, and the grand panjandrums of the secret societies.
They give orders. They have to be consulted. They can more or less
effectively speak for, and lead some part of, the population. But none
of them is seated on a certain throne, and all of them are forever
concerned as to how they may keep from being toppled off. They do not
know how they happen to be where they are, although they often explain
what are the secrets of success. They have been educated to achieve
success; few of them have been educated to exercise power. Nor [p067]
do they count with any confidence upon retaining their power, nor of
handing it on to their sons. They live, therefore, from day to day, and
they govern by ear. Their impromptu statements of policy may be obeyed,
but nobody seriously regards them as having authority.
CHAPTER V [p068]
THE BREAKDOWN OF AUTHORITY
1. _God’s Government_
The dissolution of the ancestral order is still under way, and much
of our current controversy is between those who hope to stay the
dissolution and those who would like to hasten it. The prime fact about
modernity, as it presents itself to us, is that it not merely denies
the central ideas of our forefathers but dissolves the disposition to
believe in them. The ancestral tradition still lives in many corners of
the world. But it no longer represents for us, as it did for Dante and
for St. Thomas Aquinas seven hundred years ago, the triumphant wisdom
of the age. A child born in a modern city may still learn to use the
images of the theological drama, but more or less consciously he is
made to feel that in using them he is not speaking of things that are
literally and exactly true.
Its dogma, as Mr. Santayana once said, is insensibly understood to
be nothing but myth, its miracles nothing but legend, its sacraments
mere symbols, its bible pure literature, its liturgy just poetry, its
hierarchy an administrative convenience, its ethics an historical
accident, and its whole function simply to lend a warm mystical aureole
to human culture and ignorance. The modern man does not take his
religion as a real account of the constitution, the government, the
history, and the actual destiny of the [p069] universe. With rare
exceptions his ancestors did. They believed that all their activities
on this earth had a sequel in other activities hereafter, and that
they themselves in their own persons would be alive through all the
stretches of infinite time to experience this fulfilment. The sense of
actuality has gone out of this tremendous conception of life; only the
echoes of it persist, and in our memories they create a world apart
from the world in which we do our work, a noble world perhaps in which
it is refreshing to dwell now and then, and in anxiety to take refuge.
But the spaces between the stars are so great; the earth is now so
small a planet in the skies; man is so close, as St. Francis said, to
his brother the ass, that in the daylight he does not believe that a
great cosmic story is being unfolded of which his every thought and act
is a significant part. The universe may have a conscious purpose, but
he does not believe he knows just what it is; humanity may be acting
out a divine drama, but he is not certain that he knows the plot.
There has gone out of modern life a working conviction that we are
living under the dominion of one supreme ideal, the attainment of
eternal happiness by obedience to God’s will on earth. This conviction
found its most perfect expression in the period which begins with St.
Augustine’s _City of God_ and culminates in the _Divine Comedy_ of
Dante. But the underlying intuitions are to be found in nearly all
popular religion; they are the creature’s feeling of dependence upon
his creator, a sense that his destiny is fixed by a being greater than
himself. At the bottom of it there is a conviction that the universe
is governed by superhuman persons, that the daily visible [p070]
life of the world is constitutionally subject to the laws and the
will of an invisible government. What the thinkers of the Middle Ages
did was to work out in elaborate detail and in grandiose style the
constitutional system under which supernatural government operates. It
is not fanciful, and I hope not irreverent, to suggest that the great
debates about the nature of the Trinity and the Godhead were attempts
to work out a theory of divine sovereignty; that the debates about
election and predestination and grace are attempts to work out a theory
of citizenship in a divine society. The essential idea which dominates
the whole speculation is man’s relation to a heavenly king.
As this idea was finally worked out by the legists and canonists and
scholastics
every ordering of a human community must appear as a component part
of that ordering of the world which exists because God exists,
and every earthly group must appear as an organic member of that
_Civitas Dei_, that God-State, which comprehends the heavens and
the earth. Then, on the other hand, the eternal and other-worldly
aim and object of every individual man must, in a directer or an
indirecter fashion, determine the aim and object of every group
into which he enters.
But as there must, of necessity, be connection between the various
groups, and as all of them must be connected with the divinely
ordered Universe, we come by the further notion of a divinely
instituted Harmony which pervades the Universal Whole and every
part thereof. To every Being is assigned its place in that whole,
and to every link between Beings corresponds a divine decree....
There is no need to suppose that everyone in the Middle Ages
understood the theory, as Gierke describes it here, [p071] in all its
architectural grandeur. Nevertheless, the theory is implicit in the
feeling of simple men. It is the logical elaboration of the fundamental
belief that the God who governs the world is no mere abstraction made
up of hazy nouns and a vague adoration, but that, as Henry Adams says,
he is the feudal seigneur to whom Roland, when he was dying, could
proffer “his right-hand glove” as a last act of homage, such as he
might have made to Charlemagne, and could pray:
O God the Father who has never lied,
Who raised up Saint Lazarus from death,
And Daniel from the lions saved,
Save my soul from all the perils
For the sins that in my life I did!
2. _The Doctrine of the Keys_
The theory of divine government has always presented some difficulties
to human reason, as we can see even in St. Augustine, who never clearly
made up his mind whether the City of God was the actual church presided
over by the Bishop of Rome or whether it was an ideal and invisible
congregation of the saved. But we may be sure that to plainer minds it
was necessary to believe that God governs mankind through the agency
of the visible church. The unsophisticated man may not be realistic,
but he is literal; he would be quite incapable, we may be sure, of
understanding what St. Thomas meant when he asked “why should not the
same sacred letter ... contain several senses founded on the literal?”
He would accept all the senses but he would accept them all literally.
And taking them literally he would have to believe that [p072] if God
governs the world, he governs it, not in some obscure meaning of the
term, but that he actually governs it, as a king who is mightier than
Charlemagne, but not essentially unlike Charlemagne.
The disposition to believe in the rule of God depended, therefore, upon
the capacity to believe in a visible church upon earth which holds its
commission from God. In some form or another all simple people look
to a priestly caste who make visible the divine power. Without some
such actualization the human imagination falters and becomes vagrant.
The Catholic Church by its splendor and its power and its universality
during the Middle Ages must have made easily credible the conception
of God the Ruler. It was a government exercising jurisdiction over
the known world, powerful enough to depose princes, and at its head
was the Pope who could prove by the evidence of scripture that he was
the successor to Peter and was the Vice-gerent of God. To ask whether
this grandiose claim was in fact true is, from the point of view of
this argument, to miss the point. It was believed to be true in the
Middle Ages. Because it was believed, the Church flourished. Because
the Church flourished, it was ever so much easier to be certain that
the claim was true. When men said that God ruled the world, they had
evidence as convincing as we have when we say that the President is
head of the United States Government; they were convinced because they
came into daily contact with God’s appointees administering God’s laws.
It is this concrete sense of divine government which modern men have
lost, and it may well be that this is where the Reformation has
exercised its most revolutionary [p073] effect. What Luther did was
to destroy the pretensions not only of the Roman Catholic Church, but
of any church and of any priestly class to administer God’s government
on earth. The Protestant reformers may not have intended to destroy
as deeply as they did; the theocracies established by Calvin and Knox
imply as much. But, nevertheless, when Luther succeeded in defying the
Holy See by rejecting its claim that it was the exclusive agent of God,
he made it impossible for any other church to set up the same claim and
sustain it for any length of time.
Now Christ says that not alone in the Church is there forgiveness
of sins, but that where two or three are gathered together in His
name, they shall have the right and the liberty to proclaim and
promise to each other comfort and the forgiveness of sins.... We
are not only kings and the freest of all men, but also priests
forever, a dignity far higher than kingship, because by that
priesthood we are worthy to appear before God, to pray for others,
and to teach one another mutually the things which are of God.
This denial of the special function of the priesthood did not, of
course, originate with Luther. Its historical antecedents go back to
the primitive Christians; there is quotable authority for it in St.
Augustine. It was anticipated by Wyclif and Huss and by many of the
mystics of the Middle Ages. But Luther, possibly because the times were
ripe for it, translated the denial of the authority of the priesthood
into a political revolution which divided Christendom. When the
Reformation was an accomplished fact, men looked out upon the world
and no longer saw a single Catholic Apostolic Church as the visible
embodiment of God’s government. A large part of [p074] mankind, and
that an economically and politically powerful part, no longer believed
that Christ gave to Simon Peter and his successors at the Roman See the
Keys of the Kingdom of Heaven with the promise that “whatsoever thou
shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt
loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.”
3. _The Logic of Toleration_
As a result of the great religious wars the governing classes were
forced to realize that unless they consented to the policy of
toleration they would be ruined. There is no reason to suppose that
except among a few idealists toleration has ever been much admired
as a principle. It was originally, and in large measure it still is,
nothing but a practical necessity. For in its interior life no church
can wholly admit that its rivals may provide an equally good vehicle of
salvation.
Martin Luther certainly had none of the modern notion that one church
is about as good as the next. To be sure he appealed to the right
of private judgment, but he made it plain nevertheless that in his
opinion “pagans or Turks or Jews or fake Christians” would “remain
under eternal wrath and an everlasting damnation.” John Calvin let
it be known in no uncertain tone that he did not wish any new sects
in Geneva. Milton, writing his beautiful essay on liberty, drew the
line at Papists. And in our own day the _Catholic Encyclopedia_ says
in the course of an eloquent argument for practical civic toleration
that “as the true God can tolerate no strange gods, the true Church
of Christ can tolerate no strange churches beside herself, [p075]
or, what amounts to the same, she can recognize none as theoretically
justified.” This is the ancient dogma that outside the church there is
no salvation—_extra ecclesiam nulla salus_. Like many another dogma
of the Roman church, it is not even in theory absolutely unbending.
Thus it appears from the allocution of Pope Pius IX, _Singulari quadam_
(1854), that “those who are ignorant of the true religion, if their
ignorance is invincible (which means, if they have never had a chance
to know the true religion) are not, in this matter, guilty of any fault
in the sight of God.”
As a consequence of the modern theory of religious freedom the
churches find themselves in an anomalous position. Inwardly, to
their communicants, they continue to assert that they possess the
only complete version of the truth. But outwardly, in their civic
relations with other churches and with the civil power, they preach
and practice toleration. The separation of church and state involves
more than a mere logical difficulty for the churchman. It involves a
deep psychological difficulty for the members of the congregation.
As communicants they are expected to believe without reservation
that their church is the only true means of salvation; otherwise the
multitude of separate sects would be meaningless. But as citizens
they are expected to maintain a neutral indifference to the claims of
all the sects, and to resist encroachments by any one sect upon the
religious practices of the others. This is the best compromise which
human wisdom has as yet devised, but it has one inevitable consequence
which the superficial advocates of toleration often overlook. It is
difficult to remain warmly convinced that the authority [p076] of any
one sect is divine, when as a matter of daily experience all sects have
to be treated alike.
The human soul is not so divided in compartments that a man can be
indifferent in one part of his soul and firmly believing in another.
The existence of rival sects, the visible demonstration that none has
a monopoly, the habit of neutrality, cannot but dispose men against an
unquestioning acceptance of the authority of one sect. So many faiths,
so many loyalties, are offered to the modern man that at last none
seems to him wholly inevitable and fixed in the order of the universe.
The existence of many churches in one community weakens the foundation
of all of them. And that is why every church in the heyday of its power
proclaims itself to be catholic and intolerant.
But when there are many churches in the same community, none can make
wholly good the claim that it is catholic. None has that power to
discipline the individual which a universal church exercises. For, as
Dr. Figgis puts it, when many churches are tolerated, “excommunication
has ceased to be tyrannical by becoming futile.”
4. _A Working Compromise_
If the rival churches were not compelled to tolerate each other, they
could not, consistently with their own teaching, accept the prevailing
theory of the public school. Under that theory the schools are silent
about matters of faith, and teachers are supposed to be neutral on the
issues of history and science which bear upon religion. The churches
permit this because they cannot agree on the dogma they would wish to
have taught. The Catholics would rather have no dogma in the schools
than [p077] Protestant dogma; the fundamentalists would rather have
none than have modernist. This situation is held to be a good one. But
that is only because all the alternatives are so much worse. No church
can sincerely subscribe to the theory that questions of faith do not
enter into the education of children.
Wherever churches are rich enough to establish their own schools, or
powerful enough to control the public school, they make short work
of the “godless” school. Either they establish religious schools of
their own, as the Catholics and Lutherans have done, or they impose
their views on the public schools as the fundamentalists have done
wherever they have the necessary voting strength. The last fight of
Mr. Bryan’s life was made on behalf of the theory that if a majority
of voters in Tennessee were fundamentalists then they had the right
to make public education in Tennessee fundamentalist too. One of the
standing grievances of the Catholic Church in America is that Catholics
are taxed to support schools to which they cannot conscientiously send
their children.
As a matter of fact non-sectarianism is a useful political phrase
rather than an accurate description of what goes on in the schools. If
there is teaching of science, that teaching is by implication almost
always agnostic. The fundamentalists point this out, and they are quite
right. The teaching of history, under a so-called non-sectarian policy,
is usually, in this country, a rather diluted Protestant version of
history. The Catholics are quite right when they point this out.
Occasionally, it may be, a teacher of science appears who has managed
to assimilate his science to his theology; now and then a Catholic
history teacher [p078] will depart from the standard textbooks to give
the Catholic version of disputed events during the last few hundred
years. But the chief effect of the non-sectarian policy is to weaken
sectarian attachment, to wean the child from the faith of his fathers
by making him feel that patriotism somehow demands that he shall not
press his convictions too far, that commonsense and good fellowship
mean that he must not be too absolute. The leaders of the churches
are aware of this peril. Every once in a while they make an effort
to combat it. Committees composed of parsons, priests, and rabbis
appear before the school boards and petition that a non-sectarian
God be worshipped and the non-controversial passages of the Bible be
read. They always agree that the present godless system of education
diminishes the sanctions of morality and the attendance at their
respective churches. But they disagree when they try to agree on the
nature of a neutral God, and they have been known to dispute fiercely
about a non-controversial text of the Ten Commandments. So, if the
sects are evenly balanced, the practical sense of the community turns
in the end against the reform.
5. _The Effect of Patriotism_
Modern governments are not merely neutral as between rival churches.
They draw to themselves much of the loyalty which once was given to the
churches. In fact it has been said with some truth that patriotism has
many of the characteristics of an authoritative religion. Certainly
it is true that during the last few hundred years there has been
transferred to government a considerable [p079] part of the devotion
which once sustained the churches.
In the older world the priest was a divinely commissioned agent and
the prince a divinely tolerated power. But by the Sixteenth Century
Melanchthon, a friend of Luther’s, had denied that the church could
make laws binding the conscience. Only the prince, he said, could do
that. Out of this view developed the much misunderstood but essentially
modern doctrine of the divine right of kings. In its original historic
setting this doctrine was a way of asserting that the civil authority,
embodied in the king, derived its power not from the Pope, as God’s
viceroy on earth, but by direct appointment from God himself. The
divine right of kings was a declaration of independence as against
the authority of the church. This heresy was challenged not only by
the Pope, but by the Presbyterians as well. And it was to combat
the Presbyterian preachers who insisted on trying to dictate to the
government that King James I wrote his _True Law of Free Monarchy_,
asserting the whole doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
In the Religious Peace of Augsburg an even more destructive blow was
struck at the ancient claim of the church that it is a universal power.
It was agreed that the citizen of a state must adopt the religion of
his king. _Cuius regio ejus religio._ This was not religious liberty as
we understand it, but it was a supreme assertion of the civil power.
Where once the church had administered religion for the multitude, and
had exercised the right to depose an heretical king, it now became
the prerogative [p080] of the king to determine the religious duties
of his subjects. The way was open for the modern absolute state, a
conception which would have been entirely incomprehensible to men who
lived in the ages of faith.
We must here avoid using words ambiguously. When I speak of the
absolute state, I do not refer to the constitutional arrangement of
powers within the state. It is of no importance in this connection
whether the absolute power of the state is exercised by a king,
a landed aristocracy, bankers and manufacturers, professional
politicians, soldiers, or a random majority of voters. It does not
matter whether the right to govern is hereditary or obtained with the
consent of the governed. A state is absolute in the sense which I
have in mind when it claims the right to a monopoly of all the force
within the community, to make war, to make peace, to conscript life,
to tax, to establish and disestablish property, to define crime, to
punish disobedience, to control education, to supervise the family,
to regulate personal habits, and to censor opinions. The modern state
claims all these powers, and in the matter of theory there is no real
difference in the size of the claim between communists, fascists, and
democrats. There are lingering traces in the American constitutional
system of the older theory that there are inalienable rights which
government may not absorb. But these rights are really not inalienable
because they can be taken away by constitutional amendment. There
is no theoretical limit upon the power of the ultimate majorities
which create civil government. There are only practical limits. They
are restrained by inertia, and by prudence, even by good will. But
ultimately [p081] and theoretically they claim absolute authority as
against all foreign states, as against all churches, associations, and
persons within their jurisdiction.
The victory of the civil power was not achieved everywhere at the same
time. Spasmodically, with occasional setbacks, but in the long run
irresistibly, the state has attained supremacy. In the feudal age the
monarch was at no time sovereign. The Pope was the universal lawgiver,
not only in what we should call matters of faith, but in matters
of business and politics as well. As late as the beginning of the
Seventeenth Century, Pope Paul V insisted that the Doge of the Venetian
Republic had no right to arrest a canon of the church on the charge of
flagrant immorality. When, nevertheless, the canon was arrested, the
Pope laid Venice under an interdict and excommunicated the Doge and the
Senate. But the Venetian Government answered that it was founded on
Divine Right; its title to govern did not come from the church. In the
end the Pope gave way, and “the reign of the Pope,” says Dr. Figgis,
“as King of Kings was over.”
It was as a result of the loss of its civil power that the Roman Church
evolved the modern doctrine of infallibility. This claim, as Dr. Figgis
points out, is not the culmination but the (implicit) surrender of
the notions embodied in the famous papal bull, _Unam Sanctam_. The
Pope could no longer claim the political sovereignty of the world; he
then asserted supreme rights as the religious teacher of the Catholic
communion. “The Pope, from being the Lord of Lords, has become the
Doctor of Doctors. From being the mother of states, the Curia [p082]
has become the authoritative organ of a teaching society.”
6. _The Dissolution of a Sovereignty_
Thus there has gradually been dissolving the conception that the
government of human affairs is a subordinate part of a divine
government presided over by God the King. In place of one church which
is sovereign over all men, there are now many rival churches, rival
states, voluntary associations, and detached individuals. God is no
longer believed to be a universal king in the full meaning of the
word king, and religious obedience is no longer the central loyalty
from which all other obligations are derived. Religion has become
for most modern men one phase in a varied experience; it no longer
regulates their civic duties, their economic activities, their family
life, and their opinions. It has ceased to have universal dominion,
and is now held to be supreme only within its own domain. But there
is much uncertainty as to what that domain is. In actual affairs,
the religious obligations of modern men are often weaker than their
social interests and generally weaker than the fiercer claims of
patriotism. The conduct of the churches and of churchmen during the
War demonstrated that fact overwhelmingly. They submitted willingly or
unwillingly to the overwhelming force of the civil power. Against this
force many men claim the right of revolution, or at least the right of
passive resistance and conscientious objection. Sometimes they base
their claims upon a religious precept which they hold sacred. But even
in their disobedience to Caesar they are forced to acknowledge that
loyalty in the modern world is complex, that it has become [p083]
divided and uncertain, and that the age of faith which was absolute
is gone for them. However reverent they may be when they are in their
churches, they no longer feel wholly assured when they listen to the
teaching that these are the words of the ministers of a heavenly king.
CHAPTER VI [p084]
LOST PROVINCES
1. _Business_
In any scheme of things where the churches, as agents of God, assert
the right to speak with authority about the conduct of life they should
be able to lay down rules about the way business shall be carried on.
The churches once did just that. In some degree they still attempt to
do it. But the attempts have grown feebler and feebler. In the last
six hundred years the churches have fought a losing battle against the
emancipation of business from religious control.
The early Christian writers looked upon business as a peril to the
soul. Although the church was in itself, among other things, a large
business corporation, they did not countenance business enterprise.
Money-making they called avarice and money-lending usury, just as they
spoke of lust when they meant sexual desire. They had sound reasons of
their own for this attitude. They knew from observation, perhaps even
from introspection, that the desire for riches is so strong a passion
that men possessed by it will devote only their odd moments to God. The
objection to a business career was like the objection to fornication;
it diverted the energies of the soul.
There were, no doubt, worldly reasons as well which account for the
long resistance of the mediæval Church [p085] to what we now regard
as the highest form of capitalistic endeavor. The Church belonged to
the feudal system. The Pope and his bishops were in fact great feudal
lords. They thrived best in a social order where men lived upon the
land. They had a premonition that the rise of capitalism, with its
large cities, its financiers, merchants, and proletarian workers, was
bound to weaken the secular authority of the church and to dissolve the
influence of religion in men’s lives. They failed in their resistance,
but surely one can hardly say that their vision was not prophetic.
The drastic legislation of the church against business was enacted
in the early days of capitalism; it was inspired, like the English
corn laws and many another agrarian measure, by a determination to
preserve a landed order of society. Thus in discussing whether money
might properly be loaned out at interest Pope Innocent IV argued that
if this were permitted “men would not give thought to the cultivation
of their land, except when they could do naught else ... even if they
could get land to cultivate, they would not be able to get the beasts
and implements for cultivating it, since the poor themselves would not
have them, and the rich, both for the sake of profit and security,
would put their money into usury rather than into smaller and more
risky investments.” The argument is the same as that which the American
farmer makes when he complains that the bankers in Wall Street prefer
to lend money to business men and to speculators rather than to farmers.
But the solid reasons which once inspired the church’s opposition to
business do not concern us here. The opposition was unsuccessful, the
reasons were forgotten, and [p086] the old pronouncements against
usury were looked upon as quaint and unworldly. For the new economic
order which displaced feudalism, the Catholic Church, at least, had no
program. It did not adapt itself readily to the spirit of commercial
enterprise which captured the active minds of Northern Europe. The
Protestant churches did adapt themselves and contrived to preach a
gospel which encouraged, where Roman Catholicism had discouraged, the
enterprising business man. They preached the divine duty of labor. “At
the day of doom,” said John Bunyan, “men shall be judged according to
their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you Believe? But, were you
Doers, or Talkers only?” As this preaching became more concrete, to
be a doer meant to do work and make money. Baxter in his _Christian
Directory_ wrote that “if God show you a way in which you may lawfully
get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any
other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross
one of the ends of your calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.”
Richard Steele in _The Tradesman’s Calling_ pointed out that the
virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence, moderation, sobriety, and
thrift—are the very qualities which are most needed for commercial
success. For “godly wisdom ... comes in and puts due bounds” to his
expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below than
at all above his income.”
However edifying such doctrine may have been, it was clearly an
abandonment of the right, once so eloquently asserted by the church,
that it had the authority to regulate business in the interest of man’s
spiritual welfare. That right is still sometimes asserted. Sermons are
still [p087] preached about business ethics; there are programs of
Christian socialism and Christian capitalism. Churchmen still interest
themselves, often very effectively, to reform some flagrant industrial
abuse like the sweating of women and children. But the modern efforts
to moralize business and to subordinate profit-seeking to humane ends
are radically different from those of the mediæval church. They are
admittedly experimental—that is to say, debatable—since they do not
derive their authority from revelation. And they are presented as an
appeal to reason, to conscience, to generosity, not as the commandments
of God. The Council of Vienna in 1312 declared that any ruler or
magistrate who sanctioned usury and compelled debtors to observe
usurious contracts would be excommunicated; all laws which sanctioned
money-lending at interest were to be repealed within three months. The
churches do not speak in that tone of voice to-day.
Thus if an organization like the Federal Council of Churches of Christ
is distressed by, let us say, the labor policy of a great corporation,
it inquires courteously of the president’s secretary whether it would
not be possible for him to confer with a delegation about the matter.
If the churchmen are granted an interview, which is never altogether
certain, they have to argue with the business man on secular grounds.
Were they to say that the eight-hour day was the will of God, he
would conclude they were cranks, he would surreptitiously press the
buzzer under his desk, and in a few moments his secretary would appear
summoning him to an important board meeting. They have to argue with
him, if they are to obtain a hearing, about the effect on health,
efficiency, turnover, [p088] and other such matters which are worked
up for them by economists. As churchmen they have kindly impulses, but
there is no longer a body of doctrine in the churches which enables
them to speak with authority.
The emancipation of business from religious control is perhaps even
more threatening to the authority of the churches than the rivalry of
sects or the rise of the civil power. Business is a daily occupation;
government meets the eye of the ordinary men only now and then. That
the main interest in the waking life of most people should be carried
on wholly separated from the faith they profess means that the churches
have lost one of the great provinces of the human soul. The sponsors
of the Broadway Temple in New York City put the matter in a thoroughly
modern, even if it was a rather coarse, way when they proclaimed a
campaign to sell bonds as “a five percent investment in your Fellow
Man’s Salvation—Broadway Temple is to be a combination of Church and
Skyscraper, Religion and Revenue, Salvation and 5 Percent—and the 5
percent is based on ethical Christian grounds.” The five percent, they
hastened to add, was also based on a gilt-edged real-estate mortgage;
the salvation, however, was, we may suppose, a speculative profit.
2. _The Family_
The family is the inner citadel of religious authority and there the
churches have taken their most determined stand. Long after they had
abandoned politics to Caesar and business to Mammon, they continued
to insist upon their authority to fix the ideal of sexual relations.
But here, too, the dissolution of their authority has proceeded
[p089] inexorably. They have lost their exclusive right to preside
over marriages. They have not been able to maintain the dogma that
marriage is indissoluble. They are not able to prevent the remarriage
of divorced persons. Although in many jurisdictions fornication and
adultery are still crimes, there is no longer any serious attempt to
enforce the statutes. The churches have failed in their insistence that
sexual intercourse by married persons is a sin unless it is validated
by the willingness to beget a child. Except to the poorest and most
ignorant the means of preventing conception are available to all. There
is no longer any compulsion to regard the sexual life as within the
jurisdiction of the commissioners of the Lord.
Religious teachers knew long ago what modern psychologists have
somewhat excitedly rediscovered: that there is a very intimate
connection between the sexual life and the religious life. Only men
living in a time when religion has lost so much of its inward vitality
could be shocked at this simple truth, for the churches, when their
inspiration was fresh, have always known it. That is why they have
laid such tremendous emphasis upon the religious control of sexual
experience, have extolled chastity, have preached continence after
marriage except where parenthood was in view, have inveighed against
fornication, adultery, divorce, and all unprocreative indulgence, have
insisted that marriages be celebrated within the communion, have upheld
the parental authority over children. They were not prudish. That is
a state of mind which marks the decay of vigorous determination to
control the sexual life. The early teachers did not avert their eyes.
They did not mince their words. For they knew what they were doing.
[p090]
Men like St. Paul and St. Augustine knew in the most direct way what
sexual desire can do to distract the religious life; how if it is not
sternly regulated, and if it is allowed to run wild, it intoxicates
the whole personality to the exclusion of spiritual interests. They
knew, too, although perhaps not quite so explicitly, that these same
passions, if they are repressed and redirected, may come forth as
an ecstasy of religious devotion. They were not reformers. They did
not think of progress. They did not suppose that the animal in man
could somehow be refined until it was no longer animal. When Paul
spoke of the law of his members warring against the law of his mind,
and bringing him into captivity to the law of sin, he had made a
realistic observation which any candid person can verify out of his own
experience. There was no vague finical nonsense about this war of the
members against the inward man seeking delight in the law of God.
If the sexual impulse were not deeply related to the religious life,
the preoccupation of churchmen with it throughout the ages would be
absurd. They have not been preoccupied in any comparable degree with
the other physiological functions of the body. They have concerned
themselves somewhat with eating and drinking, for gluttony and
drunkenness can also distract men from religion. But hunger and thirst
are minor passions, far more easily satisfied than lust, and in no way
so pervasive and imperious. The world, the flesh, and the devil may
usually be taken to mean sexual desire. Around it, then, the churches
have built up a ritual, to dominate it lest they be dominated by it.
Tenaciously and with good reason they have fought against surrendering
their authority. [p091]
With equally great insight they have kept the closest possible
association with family life especially during the childhood of
the offspring. Here again they anticipated by many long ages the
discoveries of modern psychologists. They have always known that it is
in the earliest years, before puberty, that tradition is transmitted.
Much is learned after puberty, but in childhood education is more than
mere learning. There education is the growth of the disposition, the
fixing of the prejudices to which all later experience is cumulative.
In childhood men acquire the forms of their seeing, the prototypes of
their feeling, the style of their character. There presumably the very
pattern of authority itself is implanted by habit, fitted to the model
presented by the child’s parents. There the assumption is fixed that
there are wiser and stronger beings whom, in the nature of things, one
must obey. There the need to obey is fixed. There the whole drift of
experience is such as to make credible the idea that above the child
there is the father, above the father a king and the wise men, above
them all a heavenly Father and King.
It is plain that any change which disturbs the constitution of the home
will tend profoundly to alter the child’s sense of what he may expect
the constitution of the universe to be. There are many disturbing
changes of which none is more important surely than the emancipation
of women. The God of popular religion has usually been an elderly
male. There have been some female divinities worshipped in different
parts of the world as there have been matriarchal societies. But by
and large the imagination of men has conceived God as a father. They
have magnified to a cosmic scale what they [p092] had seen at home.
It was the male who created the child. It was his seed that the mother
cherished in her womb. It was the male who provided for the needs of
the family, even if the woman did the hard work. It was the male who
fended off enemies. It was the male who laid down the law. It was
the name of the male parent which was preserved and passed on from
generation to generation. Everything conspired to fix the belief that
the true order of life was a hierarchy with a man at the apex.
This general notion becomes less and less credible as women assert
themselves. The child of the modern household is soon made to see that
there are at least two persons who can give him orders, and that they
do not always give him the same ones. This does not educate him to
believe that there is one certain guide to conduct in the universe.
There are likely to be two guides to conduct in his universe, as women
insist that they are independent personalities with minds of their
own. This insistence, moreover, tends rather to disarrange the notion
that the father is the creator of the child. An observant youngster,
especially in these days of frank talk about sex, soon becomes aware of
the fact that the role of the male in procreation is a relatively minor
one. But most disturbing of all is the very modern household in which
the woman earns her own living. For here the child is deprived of the
opportunity, which is so conducive to belief in authority, of seeing
daily that even his mother is dependent upon a greater person for the
good things in life.
Although women, by and large, are by no means able to earn as much
money as men, the fact which counts is that they can earn enough to
support themselves. They [p093] may not actually support themselves.
But the knowledge that they could, as it becomes an accepted idea in
society, has revolutionary consequences. In former times the woman was
dependent upon her husband for bed, board, shelter, and clothing. Her
whole existence was determined by her mating; her sexual experience was
an integral part of her livelihood and her social position. But once it
had become established that a woman could live without a husband, the
intimate connection between her sex and her career began to dissolve.
The invention of dependable methods of preventing conception has
carried this dissolution much further. Birth control has separated the
sexual act from the whole series of social consequences which were
once probable if not inevitable. For with the discovery that children
need be born only when they are wanted, the sexual experience has
become increasingly a personal and private affair. It was once an
institutional affair—for the woman. For the man, from time immemorial,
there have been two sorts of sexual experience—one which had no public
consequences, and one which entailed the responsibilities of a family.
The effect of the modern changes, particularly of woman’s economic
independence and of birth control, is to equalize the freedom and the
obligations of men and women.
That the sexual life has become separated from parenthood and that
therefore it is no longer subject to external regulation, is evident.
While the desires of men and women for each other were links in a chain
which included the family and the household and children, authority,
and by that token religious authority, could hope to fix the sexual
[p094] ideal. When the chain broke, and love had no consequences
which were not too subtle for the outsider to measure, the ideal of
love was fixed not by the church in the name of God, but by prudence,
convention, the prevailing rules of hygiene, by taste, circumstances,
and personal sensibility.
3. _Art_
_(a) The Disappearance of Religious Painting_
To walk through a museum of Western European art is to behold a
peculiarly vivid record of how the great themes of popular religion
have ceased to inspire the imagination of modern men. One can visualize
there the whole story of the dissolution of the ancestral order and
of our present bewilderment. One can see how toward the close of
the Fifteenth Century the great themes illustrating the reign of a
heavenly king and of the drama of man’s salvation had ceased to be
naively believed; how at the close of the next century which witnessed
the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the beginnings of modern
science, the growth of cities, and the rise of capitalism, religious
painting ceased to be the concern of the best painters; and finally
how in the last hundred years painters have illustrated by feverish
experimentation the modern man’s effort to find an adequate substitute
for the organizing principle of the religion which he has lost.
It has been said by way of explanation that painters must sell their
work, and they must, therefore, paint what the rich and powerful
will buy. Thus it is pointed out that in the Middle Ages they worked
under the patronage of the Church; in the Renaissance their patrons
were paganized [p095] princes and popes, and artists made pictures
which, even when the theme was religious, were no longer Christian in
spirit. Later in the north of Europe the bourgeoisie acquired money and
station, and the Dutch painters did their portraits, and made faithful
representations of their kitchens and their parlors. A little later
French painters at the Court of Versailles made pictures for courtiers,
and in our time John Sargent painted the wives of millionaires. To say
all this is to say that the ruling classes in the modern world are no
longer interested in pictures which illustrate or are inspired by the
religion they profess.
This attempt at an explanation in terms of supply and demand may or
may not be sound for the ordinary run of painters. It leaves out of
account, however, those very painters who are the most significant
and interesting. It leaves out of account the painters who, by heroic
refusal to supply the existing market, deserve universal respect, and
in many cases have won an ultimate public vindication. These men do not
fit into the theory of supply and demand, for they endured poverty and
derision in order to paint what they most wanted to paint. They are not
of the tribe, which Mr. Walter Pach calls Ananias, who betray the truth
that is in them. But for that truth they did not draw upon the themes
nor the sense of life which almost all of them must have been taught
when they were children. They did not paint religious pictures. They
painted landscapes, streets, interiors, still life, heads, persons,
nudes. Whatever else they perceived and tried to express, they did
not see their objects in the perspective of human destiny and divine
government. There is no reason, then, to say that religious painting,
even in the [p096] broadest sense of the term, has disappeared because
there is no effective demand for it. Obviously it has disappeared
because the will to produce it has disappeared.
_(b) The Loss of a Heritage_
In setting the religious tradition aside as something with which they
are not concerned when they are at work, artists are merely behaving
like modern men. It is plain that the religious tradition has become
progressively less relevant to anyone who as painter or sculptor is
engaged in making images. This is a direct result of that increasing
sophistication of religious thought which was signalized in Europe
by the iconoclasm of the Protestant reformers and the puritanism of
the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Before the acids of modernity had
begun to dissolve the organic reality of the ancient faith, there was
no difficulty about picturing God the Father as a patriarch and the
Virgin Mary as a young blonde Tuscan mother. There was no disposition
to disbelieve, and so the imagination was at once nourished by a great
heritage of ideas and yet free to elaborate it. But when the authority
of the old beliefs was challenged, a great literature of controversy
and definition was let loose upon the world. And from the point of
view of the artist the chief effect of this effort to argue and to
state exactly, to defend and to rebut, was to substitute concepts for
pictorial ideas. When the nature of God became a matter of definition,
it was obviously crude and illiterate to represent him as a benign
old man. Thus the more the theologians refined the dogmas of their
religion the more impossible they made it for painters to express its
significance. No painter who ever lived could [p097] make a picture
which expressed the religion of the Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick. There
is nothing there which the visual imagination can use.
Painters have, therefore, a rather better reason than most men for
having turned their backs upon the religious tradition. They can say
with a clear conscience that the contemporary churches have removed
from that tradition those very qualities which once made it an
inexhaustible source of artistic inspiration. They need only point to
modern religious writing in their own support: at its best it has the
qualities of an impassioned argument and more often it is intolerably
flat and vague because in our intellectual climate skepticism dissolves
the concreteness of the imagery and leaves behind sonorous adjectives
and opaque nouns.
The full effects of this separation of the artist from the ancient
traditions of Christendom have been felt only in the last two or three
generations. It is no doubt true that the modern disbelief had its
beginnings many generations ago, perhaps in the Fifteenth Century, but
the momentum of the ancient faith was so great that it took a long
time, even after corrosive doubt had started, before its influence came
to an end. The artists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries may
not have been devout, but they lived in a society in which the forms of
the old order, the hierarchy of classes, the sense of authority, and
the general fund of ideas about human destiny, still had vast prestige.
But in the Nineteenth Century that old order was almost completely
dissolved and the prestige of its ideas destroyed. The artist of the
last two or three generations has confronted the world without any
accepted understanding [p098] of human life. He has had to improvise
his own understanding of life. That is a new thing in the experience of
artists.
_(c) The Artist Formerly_
In 787 the Second Council of Nicæa laid down the rule which for nearly
five hundred years was binding upon the artists of Christendom:
The substance of religious scenes is not left to the initiative
of the artists: it derives from the principles laid down by the
Catholic Church and religious tradition.... His art alone belongs
to the painter, its organization and arrangement belong to the
clergy.
This was a reasonable rule, since the Church and not the individual was
held to be the guardian of those sacred truths upon which depended the
salvation of souls and the safety of society. The notion had occurred
to nobody that the artist was divinely inspired and knew more than
the doctors of the church. Therefore, the artist was given careful
specifications as to what he was to represent.
Thus when the Church of St. Urban of Troyes decided to order a set of
tapestries illustrating the story of St. Valerian and of his wife, St.
Cecilia, a learned priest was deputed to draw up the contract for the
artist. In it he wrote among other specifications that: “there shall be
portrayed a place and a tabernacle in the manner of a beautiful room,
in which there shall be St. Cecilia, humbly on her knees with her hands
joined, praying to God. And beside her shall be Valerian expressing
great admiration and watching an angel which, being above their heads,
should be holding two crowns made of lilies and of roses, [p099] which
he will be placing the one on the head of St. Cecilia and the other on
the head of Valerian, her husband....”
The rest, one might suppose, was left to the artist’s imagination.
But it was not. Having been given his subject matter and his theme,
he was bound further by strict conventions as to how sacred subjects
were to be depicted. Jesus on the Cross had to be shown with his mother
on the right and St. John on the left. The centurion pierced his left
side. His nimbus contained a cross, as the mark of divinity, whereas
the saints had the nimbus without a cross. Only God, the angels,
Jesus Christ, and the Apostles could be represented with bare feet;
it was heretical to depict the Virgin or the Saints with bare feet.
The purpose of these conventions was to help the spectator identify
the figures in the picture. Thus St. Peter was given a short beard
and a tonsure; St. Paul was bald and had a long beard. It is possible
that these conventions, which were immensely intricate, were actually
codified in manuals which were passed on from master to apprentice in
the workshops.
As a general rule the ecclesiastics who drew up specifications did not
invent the themes. Thus the learned priest who drafted the contract for
the tapestry of St. Cecilia drew his material from the encyclopedia
of Vincent de Beauvais. This was a compendium of universal knowledge
covering the whole of history from Creation to the Last Judgment. It
was a source book to which any man could turn in order to find the
truth he happened to need. It contained all of human knowledge and the
answer to all human problems. By the Thirteenth Century there were a
number of these encyclopedias, of which the greatest was [p100] the
_Summa_ of St. Thomas Aquinas. From these books churchmen took the
themes which they employed their artists to embellish. The artist
himself had no concern as to what he would paint, nor even as to how
he would paint it. That was given, and his energies could be employed
without the travail of intellectual invention, upon the task of
expressing a clear conception in well-established forms.
It must not be supposed, of course, that either doctrines, lore, or
symbolism were uniformly standardized and exactly enforced. In an age
of faith, contradictions and discrepancies are not evident; they are
merely variations on the same theme. Thus, while it may be true that
enthusiastic mediævalists like M. Mâle have exaggerated the order
and symmetry of the mediæval tradition, they are right, surely, on
the main point, which is that the organic character of the popular
religion provided a consensus of feeling about human destiny which,
in conjunction with the resources of the popular lore, sustained and
organized the imagination of mediæval artists. Because religious faith
was simple and genuine, it could absorb and master almost anything.
Thus the clergy ruled the artists with a relatively light hand, and
they were not disturbed if, in illuminating the pages of a Book of
Hours, the artist adorned the margins with a picture of Bacchus or the
love of Pyramus and Thisbe.
It was only when the clergy had been made self-conscious by the
controversies which raged around the Reformation that they began in any
strict and literally-minded modern sense to enforce the rule laid down
at Nicæa in 787. At the Council of Trent in 1563 the great liberty of
the artist within the Christian tradition came to an end: [p101]
The Holy Council forbids the placing in a church of any image
which calls to mind an erroneous dogma which might mislead the
simple-minded. It desires that all impurity be avoided, that
provocative qualities be not given to images. In order to insure
respect for its decisions, the Holy Council forbids anyone to place
or to have placed anywhere, and even in churches which are not open
to the public, any unusual image unless the bishop has approved it.
In theory this decree at Trent is not far removed from the decree at
Nicæa nearly one thousand years earlier. But in fact it is a whole
world removed from it. For the dogmas at Nicæa rested upon naive faith
and the dogmas at Trent rested upon definition. The outcome showed the
difference, for within a generation Catholic scholars made a critical
survey of the lore which mediæval art had employed, and on grounds of
taste, doctrine, and the like, condemned the greater part of it. After
that, as M. Mâle says, there might still be artists who were Christians
but there was no longer a Christian art.
_(d) The Artist as Prophet_
Whether the necessity of creating his own tradition is a good or a bad
thing for the artist, there can be no doubt that it is a novel thing
and a burdensome one. Artists have responded to it by proclaiming one
of two theories: they have said that the artist, being a genius, was a
prophet; when they did not say that, they said that religion, morality,
and philosophy were irrelevant, and that art should be practiced for
art’s sake. Both theories are obviously attempts to find some personal
substitute for those traditions upon which artists in all other ages
have been dependent. [p102]
The theory of the artist as prophet has this serious defect: there
is practically no evidence to support it. Why should there be? What
connection is there between the capacity to make beautiful objects and
the capacity to discover truth? Surely experience shows that it is
something of a marvel when a great artist appears who, like Leonardo
or Goethe, is also an original and important thinker. Indeed, it is
reasonable to ask whether the analysis and abstraction which thinking
involves are not radically different psychological processes from
the painter’s passionate appreciation of the appearance of things.
Certainly to think as physicists think is to strip objects of all
their secondary characters, not alone of their emotional significance,
but of their color, their texture, their fragrance, and even of their
superficial forms. The world as we know it through our senses has
completely disappeared before the physicist begins to think about
it. And in its place there is a collection of concepts which have no
pictorial value whatsoever. These concepts are by definition incapable
of being visualized, and when as a concession to human weakness, his
own or his pupil’s, the scientist constructs a mechanical model to
illustrate an idea, this model is at best a crude analogy, and in no
real sense the portrait of that idea.
Thus when Shelley made Earth say:
I spin beneath my pyramid of night,
Which points into the heavens ...
he borrowed an image from astronomy. But this image, which is, I think,
superb poetry, radically alters the original scientific idea, for
it introduces into a realm of purely [p103] physical relations the
notion of a gigantic spectator with a vastly magnified human eye. There
are, no doubt, many other concepts in science which, if poets knew
more science, would lend themselves to translation into equally noble
images. But these images would not state the scientific truth.
The current belief that artists are prophets is an inheritance from
the time when science had no critical method of its own, and poets,
being reflective persons, had at least as good a chance as anyone
else of stumbling upon truths which were subsequently verified. It is
due in some measure also to the human tendency to remember the happy
guesses of poets and to forget their unhappy ones, a tendency which
has gone far to sustain the reputations of fortune-tellers, oracles,
and stockbrokers. But above all, the reputation of the artist as one
who must have wisdom is sustained by a rather genial fallacy: he finds
expression for the feelings of the spectator, and the spectator rather
quickly assumes that the artist has found an explanation for the world.
Yet unless I am greatly mistaken the modern painter has ceased not
only to depict any theory of destiny but has ceased to express any
important human mood in the presence of destiny. One goes to a museum
and comes out feeling that one has beheld an odd assortment of nude
bodies, copper kettles, oranges, tomatoes, and zinnias, babies, street
corners, apple trees, bathing beaches, bankers, and fashionable ladies.
I do not say that this person or that may not find a picture immensely
significant to him. But the general impression for anyone, I think, is
of a chaos of anecdotes, perceptions, fantasies, and little [p104]
commentaries, which may be all very well in their way, but are not
sustaining and could readily be dispensed with.
The conclusive answer to the romantic theory of the artist as prophet
is a visit to a collection of modern paintings.
_(e) Art for Art’s Sake_
This brings us to the other theory, which is that art has nothing to do
with prophecy, wisdom, and the meaning of life, but has to do only with
art. This theory must command an altogether different kind of respect
than the sentimental theory of the artist as prophet. This indeed is
the theory which most artists now hold. “I am convinced,” says Mr. R.
H. Wilenski in his book _The Modern Movement in Art_, “that all the
most intelligent artists of Western Europe in recent centuries have
been tormented by this search for a justification of their work and a
criterion of its value; and that almost all such artists have attempted
to solve the problem by some consciously-held idea of art; or in other
words that in place of art justified by service to a religion they have
sought to evolve an art justified by service to an idea of art itself.”
The instinct of artists in this matter is, I think, much sounder than
the rationalizations which they have constructed. As working artists
they do not think of themselves as seers, philosophers, or moralists.
They do not wish to be judged as thinkers, but as painters, and they
are justifiably impatient with the Philistines who are interested
primarily in the subject matter and its human significance. The painter
knows quite well that in the [p105] broadly human sense he has no
special qualifications as story-teller or wise man. What he is driving
at, therefore, in his expression of contempt for the subject matter of
art is the wish that he might again be in the position of the mediæval
artist who did not have to concern himself _as artist_ with the
significance of his themes. The intuition behind the theory of art for
art’s sake is the artist’s wish to be free of a responsibility which
he has never before had put upon him. The peculiar circumstances of
modernity have thrust upon him, much against his will and regardless of
his aptitudes, the intolerably heavy burden of doing for himself what
in other ages was done for him by tradition and authority.
The philosophy which he has invented is an attempt to prove that
no philosophy is necessary. Carried to its conclusion, this theory
eventuates in the belief that painting must become an arrangement of
forms and colors which have no human connotation whatsoever for the
artist or the spectator. These arrangements represent nothing in the
real world. They signify nothing. They are an esthetic artifice in the
same sense that the more esoteric geometries are logical artifices.
This much can at least be said of them: they are a consistent effort
to practice the arts in a world where there is no human tradition upon
which the representative arts can draw.
This absolute estheticism is not, however, art without philosophy. Some
sort of philosophy is implied in all human activity. The artist who
says that it is delightful above all other things to realize the pure
form of objects, regardless of whether this object is a saint, a lovely
woman, or a dish of fruit, has made a very important [p106] statement
about life. He has said that the ordinary meanings which men attach
to objects are of no consequence, that their order of moral values is
ultimately a delusion, that all facts are equally good and equally bad,
and that to contemplate anything, it does not matter what, under the
aspect of its esthetic form, is to realize all that the artist can give.
This, too, is a philosophy and a very radical philosophy at that. It
is in fact just the philosophy which men were bound to construct for
themselves in an age when the traditional theory of the purpose of life
had lost its meaning for them. For they are saying that experience
has no meaning beyond that which each man can find in the intense
realization of each passing moment. He must fail, they would feel, if
he attempts to connect these passing moments into a coherent story
of his whole experience, let alone the whole experience of the human
race. For experience has no underlying significance, man himself has
no station in the universe, and the universe has no plan which is more
than a drift of circumstances, illuminated here and there by flashes of
self-consciousness.
_(f) The Burden of Originality_
As a matter of fact this doctrine is merely the esthetic version of the
rather crude mechanistic materialism which our grandfathers thought
was the final conclusion of science. The connection is made evident in
the famous “_Conclusions_” to “_The Renaissance_” which Walter Pater
wrote in 1868, and then omitted from the second edition because “it
might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it
might fall.” In this [p107] essay there was the startling, though
it is now hackneyed, assertion that “to burn always with this hard,
gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life,” and
that “of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the
love of art for art’s sake, has most; for art comes to you professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they
pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.” What is never quoted, and
is apparently forgotten, is the reasoning by which Pater arrived at
the conclusion that momentary ecstasy is the end and aim of life. It
is, if we turn back a few pages, that scientific analysis has reduced
everything to a mere swarm of whirling atoms, upon which consciousness
discerns impressions that are “unstable, flickering, inconsistent.” It
was out of this misunderstanding of the nature of scientific concepts
that Pater developed his theory of art for the moment’s sake.
I dwell upon this only in order to show that what appeared to be an
estheticism divorced from all human concern was really a somewhat
casual by-product of a fashionable misunderstanding at the time
Pater was writing. We should find that to-day equally far-reaching
conclusions are arrived at by half-understood popularizations of
Bergson or Freud. I venture to believe that any theory of art is
inevitably implicated in some philosophy of life, and that the only
question is whether the artist is conscious or unconscious of the
theory he is acting upon. For unless the artist deals with purely
logical essences, provided he observes and perceives anything in
the outer world, no matter how he represents it or symbolizes it or
comments upon it, there must be implicit in it some attitude [p108]
toward the meaning of existence. If his conclusion is that human
existence has no meaning, that, too, is an attitude toward the meaning
of existence. The mediæval artist worked on much less tangled premises.
He painted pictures which illustrated the great hopes and fears of
Christendom. But he did not himself attempt to formulate those hopes
and fears. He accepted them more or less ready made, understanding
them and believing in them because, as a child of his age, they were
his hopes and fears. But because they existed and were there for
him to work upon, he could put his whole energy into realizing them
passionately. The modern artist would like to have the same freedom
from preoccupation, but he cannot have it. He has first to decide what
it is that he shall passionately realize.
In effect the mediæval artist was reproducing a story that had often
been told before. But the modern artist has to undergo a whole
preliminary labor of inventing, creating, formulating, for which there
was almost no counterpart in the life of a mediæval artist. The modern
artist has to be original. That is to say, he has to seize experience,
pick it over, and drag from it his theme. It is a very exhausting task,
as anyone can testify who has tried it.
That surely is why we hear so much of the storm and stress in the soul
of a modern artist. The craftsman does not go through agonies over the
choice of words, images, and rhythms. The agony of the modern artist
lies in the effort to give birth to the idea, to bring some intuition
of order out of the chaos of experience, to create the idea with which
his art can deal. We assume, [p109] quite falsely I think, that this
act of ‘creation’ is an inherent part of the artist’s task. But if we
refrain from using words loosely, and reserve the word creation to
mean the finding of the original intuition and idea, then creation is
plainly not a necessary part of the artist’s equipment. Creation is
an obligation which the artist has had thrust upon him as a result of
the dissolution of the great accepted themes. He is compelled to be
creative because his world is chaotic.
This labor of creation has no connection with his gifts as a painter.
There is no more reason why a painter should be able to extemporize
a satisfactory interpretation of life than that he should be able to
govern a city or write a treatise on chemistry. Giotto surely was as
profoundly original a painter as the world is likely to see; it has
been said of him by Mr. Berenson, who has full title to speak, that he
had “a thoroughgoing sense for the significant in the visible world.”
But with all his genius, what would have been Giotto’s plight if,
in addition to exercising his sense of the significant, he had had
to create for himself all his standards of significance? For Giotto
those standards existed in the Catholic Christianity of the Thirteenth
Century, and it was by the measure of these standards, within the
framework of a great accepted tradition, that he followed his own
personal sense of the significant. But the modern artist, though he had
Giotto’s gifts, would not have Giotto’s freedom to use them. A very
large part of his energies, consciously or unconsciously, would have
to be spent in devising some sort of substitute for the traditional
view of life which Giotto took for granted. For there is no longer an
accepted view of [p110] life organized in stories which all men know
and understand.
There is instead a profusion of creeds and philosophies, fads and
intellectual experiments among which the modern painter, like every
other modern man, finds himself trying to choose a philosophy of
life. Everybody is somewhat dithered by these choices: the business
of being a Shavian one year, a Nietzschean the next, a Bergsonian
the third, then of being a patriot for the duration of the war, and
after that a Freudian, is not conducive to the serene exercise of a
painter’s talents. For these various philosophies which the artist
picks up here and there, or by which he is oftener than not picked
up and carried along, are immensely in dispute. They are not clear.
They are rather personal and somewhat accidental visions of the world.
They are essentially unpictorial because they originate in science and
are incompleted, abstracted teachings for the meaning of things. As a
result the art in which they are implicit is often uninteresting, and
usually unintelligible, to those who do not happen to belong to the
same cult.
The painter can hardly expect to invent for himself a view of life
which will bring order out of the chaos of modernity. Yet he is
compelled to try, for he is engaged in setting down a vision of the
world, and every vision of the world implies some sort of philosophy.
The effects of the modern emancipation are more clearly evident in the
history of painting during the last hundred years than in almost any
other activity, because in the galleries hang in frames the successive
attempts of men, who are deeply immersed in the modern scene, to set
down their [p111] statements about life. Mr. Wilenski, who is an
astute and well-informed critic, has estimated that during the last
hundred years in Paris a new movement in painting has been inaugurated
every ten years. That would correspond fairly accurately to the birth
and death of new philosophies in the advanced and most emancipated
circles.
What was happening to painting is precisely what has happened to all
the other separated activities of men. Each activity has its own ideal,
indeed a succession of ideals, for with the dissolution of the supreme
ideal of service to God, there is no ideal which unites them all, and
sets them in order. Each ideal is supreme within a sphere of its own.
There is no point of reference outside which can determine the relative
value of competing ideals. The modern man desires health, he desires
money, he desires power, beauty, love, truth, but which he shall desire
the most since he cannot pursue them all to their logical conclusions,
he no longer has any means of deciding. His impulses are no longer
parts of one attitude toward life; his ideals are no longer in a
hierarchy under one lordly ideal. They have become differentiated. They
are free and they are incommensurable.
The religious synthesis has dissolved. The modern man no longer holds a
belief about the universe which sustains a pervasive emotion about his
destiny; he no longer believes genuinely in any idea which organizes
his interests within the framework of a cosmic order.
CHAPTER VII [p112]
THE DRAMA OF DESTINY
1. _The Soul in the Modern World_
The effect of modernity, then, is to specialize and thus to intensify
our separated activities. Once all things were phases of a single
destiny: the church, the state, the family, the school were means to
the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the
rules of morality, the themes of art, and the teachings of science
were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applying the
laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In the
modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving
its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of
separate interests each sovereign within its own realm. We do not put
shrines in our workshops, and we think it unseemly to talk business
in the vestibule of a church. We dislike politics in the pulpit and
preaching from politicians. We do not look upon our scholars as priests
or upon our priests as learned men. We do not expect science to sustain
theology, nor religion to dominate art. On the contrary we insist with
much fervor on the separation of church and state, of religion and
science, of politics and historical research, of morality and art, of
business and love. This separation of activities has its counterpart
in a separation of selves; the life of a modern man is not so much
the [p113] history of a single soul; it is rather a play of many
characters within a single body.
That may be why the modern autobiographical novel usually runs to two
volumes; the author requires more space to explain how his various
personalities came to be what they were at each little crisis of
adolescence and of middle age than St. Augustine, St. Thomas à Kempis,
and St. Francis put together needed in order to describe their whole
destiny in this world and the next. No doubt we are rather long-winded
and tiresome about the complexities of our souls. But from the
knowledge that we are complex there is no escape.
The modern man is unable any longer to think of himself as a single
personality approaching an everlasting judgment. He is one man to-day
and another to-morrow, one person here and another there. He does not
feel he knows himself. He is sure that no one else knows him at all.
His motives are intricate, and not wholly what they seem. He is moved
by impulses which he feels but cannot describe. There are dark depths
in his nature which no one has ever explored. There are splendors which
are unreleased. He has become greatly interested in his moods. The
precise nuances of his likes and dislikes have become very important.
There is no telling just what he is or what he may become, but there
is a certain breathless interest in having one of his selves watch and
comment upon the mischief and the frustrations of his other selves.
The problems of his character have become dissociated from any feeling
that they involve his immortal destiny. They have become dissociated
from the feeling that they deeply matter. From the feeling that [p114]
they are deeply his own. From the feeling that there is any personality
to own them. There they are: his inferiority complex and mine, your
sadistic impulse and Tom Jones’s, Anna’s father fixation, and little
Willie’s pyromania.
The thoroughly modern man has really ceased to believe that there is
an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites. The
word ‘soul’ has become a figure of speech, which he uses loosely,
sometimes to mean his tenderer aspirations, sometimes to mean the
whole collection of his impulses, sometimes, when he is in a hurry,
to mean nothing at all. It is certainly not the fashion any longer to
think of the soul as a little lord ruling the turbulent rabble of his
carnal passions; the constitutional form in popular psychology to-day
is republican. Each impulse may invoke the Bill of Rights, and have
its way if the others will let it. As Bertrand Russell has put it: “A
single desire is no better and no worse, considered in isolation, than
any other; but a group of desires is better than another group if all
of the first group can be satisfied, while in the second group some are
inconsistent with others,” but since, unhappily as is usually the case,
desires are extremely inconsistent, the uttermost that the modern man
can say is that the victory must go to the strongest desires. Morality
thus becomes a traffic code designed to keep as many desires as
possible moving together without too many violent collisions. When men
insist that morality is more than that, they are quickly denounced, in
general correctly, as Meddlesome Matties, as enemies of human liberty,
or as schemers trying to get the better of their fellow men. Morality,
conceived as a discipline [p115] to fit men for heaven, is resented;
morality, conceived as a discipline for happiness, is understood by
very few. The objective moral certitudes have dissolved, and in the
liberal philosophy there is nothing to take their place.
2. _The Great Scenario_
The modern world is like a stage on which a stupendous play has just
been presented. Many who were in the audience are still spellbound,
and as they pass out into the street, the scenario of the drama still
seems to them the very clue and plan of life. In the prologue the earth
was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
Then at the command of God the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, its
plants and its animals, then man, and after him woman, were created.
And in the epilogue the blessed were living in the New Jerusalem, a
city of pure gold like clear glass, with walls laid on foundations of
precious stones. Between the darkness that preceded creation and the
glory of this heavenly city which had no need of the sun, a plot was
unfolded which constitutes the history of mankind. In the beginning man
was perfect. But the devil tempted him to eat the forbidden fruit, and
as a punishment God banished him from paradise, and laid upon him and
his descendants the curse of labor and of death.
But in meting out this punishment, God in his mercy promised ultimately
to redeem the children of Adam. From among them he chose one tribe who
were to be the custodians of this promise. And then in due time he
sent his Son, born of a Virgin, to teach the gospel of salvation, and
to expiate the sin of Adam upon a cross. [p116] Those who believed
in this gospel and followed its commandments, would at the final day
of reckoning enter into the heavenly Jerusalem; the rest would be
consigned to the devil and his everlasting torments.
Into this marvelous story the whole of human history and of human
knowledge could be fitted, and only in accordance with it could they
be understood. This was the key to existence, the answer to doubt,
the solace for pain, and the guarantee of happiness. But to many who
were in the audience it is now evident that they have seen a play, a
magnificent play, one of the most sublime ever created by the human
imagination, but nevertheless a play, and not a literal account of
human destiny. They know it was a play. They have lingered long enough
to see the scene shifters at work. The painted drop is half rolled
up; some of the turrets of the celestial city can still be seen, and
part of the choir of angels. But behind them, plainly visible, are the
struts and gears which held in place what under a gentler light looked
like the boundaries of the universe. They are only human fears and
human hopes, and bits of antique science and half-forgotten history,
and symbols here and there of experiences through which some in each
generation pass.
Conceivably men might once again imagine another drama which was as
great as the epic of the Christian Bible. But like _Paradise Lost_
or _Faust_, it would remain a work of the imagination. While the
intellectual climate in which we live is what it is, while we continue
to be as conscious as we are of how our own minds work, we could not
again accept naively such a gorgeous fable of our destiny. Yet only
five hundred years ago the whole [p117] of Christendom believed that
this story was literally and objectively true. God was not another
name for the evolutionary process, or for the sum total of the laws of
nature, or for a compendium of all noble things, as he is in modernist
accounts of him; he was the ruler of the universe, an omnipotent,
magical King, who felt, who thought, who remembered and issued his
commands. And because there was such a God, whose plan was clearly
revealed in all its essentials, human life had a definite meaning,
morality had a certain foundation, men felt themselves to be living
within the framework of a universe which they called divine because it
corresponded with their deepest desires.
If we ask ourselves why it is impossible for us to sum up the meaning
of existence in a great personal drama, we have to begin by remembering
that every great story of this kind must assume that the universe
is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as
the promptings of the human heart. Otherwise it would not greatly
interest us. A story, however plausible, about beings who had no human
qualities, a plot which unfolded itself as utterly indifferent to our
own personal fate, would not serve as a substitute for the Christian
epic. This is the trouble with the so-called religion of creative
evolution: even if it is true, which is far from certain, it is so
profoundly indifferent to our individual fate, that it leaves most men
cold. For there are very few who are so mystical as to be able to sink
themselves wholly in the hidden purposes of an unconscious natural
force. This, too, as the Catholic Church has always insisted, is the
trouble with pantheistic religion, for if everything is [p118] divine,
then nothing is peculiarly divine, and all the distinctions of good and
evil are meaningless.
The story must not only assume that human ideals inspire the whole
creation, but it must contain guarantees that this is so. There must
be no doubt about it. Science must confirm the moral assumptions; the
highest and most certain available knowledge must clinch the conviction
that the story unfolded is the secret of life.
3. _Earmarks of Truth_
Religious teachers who were close to the people have always understood
that they must perform wonders if they were to make their God
convincing and their own title to speak for him valid. The writer of
Exodus, for example, was quite clear in his mind about this:
And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me,
nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not
appeared unto thee.
And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he
said, A rod.
And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground,
and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.
And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by
the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a
rod in his hand:
That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared
unto thee.
Even in the wildest flights of his fancy the common man is almost
always primarily interested in the prosaic consequences. If he believes
in fairies he is not likely [p119] to imagine them as spirits
inhabiting a world apart, but as little people who do things which
affect his own affairs. The common man is an unconscious pragmatist:
he believes because he is satisfied that his beliefs change the course
of events. He would not be inspired to worship a god who merely
contemplates the universe, or a god who created it once, and then
rested, while its destiny unfolds itself inexorably. To the plain
people religion is not disinterested speculation but a very practical
matter. It is concerned with their well-being in this world and in an
equally concrete world hereafter. They have wanted to know the will of
God because they had to know it if they were to put themselves right
with the king of creation.
Those who professed to know God’s will had to demonstrate that they
knew it. This was the function of miracles. They were tangible evidence
that the religious teacher had a true commission. “Then those men, when
they had seen the miracle (of the loaves and the fishes) that Jesus
did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the
world.” When Jesus raised the dead man at the gate of the city of Nain,
“there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great
prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people.”
The most authoritative Catholic theologians teach that miracles “are
not wrought to show the internal truth of the doctrines, but only to
give _manifest_ reasons why we should accept the doctrines.” They are
“essentially an appeal to knowledge,” demonstrations, one might almost
say divine experiments, by which men are enabled to know the glory and
the providence of God. [p120]
The Catholic apologists maintain that God can be known by the exercise
of reason, but the miracle helps, as it were, to clinch the conviction.
The persistent attachment of the Catholic Church to miracles is
significant. It has a longer unbroken experience with human nature than
any other institution in the western world. It has adapted itself to
many circumstances, and under the profession of an unalterable creed it
has abandoned and then added much. But it has never ceased to insist
upon the need of a physical manifestation of the divine power. For with
an unerring instinct for realities, Catholic churchmen have understood
that there is a residuum of prosaic, matter-of-factness, of a need to
touch and to see, which verbal proofs can never quite satisfy. They
have resolutely responded to that need. They have not preached God
merely by praising him; they have brought God near to men by revealing
him to the senses, as one who is great enough and good enough and
sufficiently interested in them to heal the sick and to make the floods
recede.
But to-day scientists are ever so much superior to churchmen at this
kind of demonstration. The miracles which are recounted from the pulpit
were, after all, few and far between. There are even theologians who
teach that miracles ceased with the death of the Apostles. But the
miracles of science seem to be inexhaustible. It is not surprising,
then, that men of science should have acquired much of the intellectual
authority which churchmen once exercised. Scientists do not, of course,
speak of their discoveries as miracles. But to the common man they have
much the same character as miracles. They are [p121] wonderful, they
are inexplicable, they are manifestations of a great power over the
forces of nature.
It cannot be said, I think, that the people at large, even the
moderately educated minority, understand the difference between
scientific method and revelation, or that they have decided upon
reflection to trust science. There is at least as much mystery in
science for the common man as there ever was in religion; in a sense
there is more mystery, for the logic of science is still altogether
beyond his understanding, whereas the logic of revelation is the logic
of his own feelings. But if men at large do not understand the method
of science, they can appreciate some of its more tangible results.
And these results are so impressive that scientific men are often
embarrassed by the unbounded popular expectations which they have so
unintentionally aroused.
Their authority in the realm of knowledge has become virtually
irresistible. And so when scientists teach one theory and the Bible
another, the scientists invariably carry the greater conviction.
4. _On Reconciling Religion and Science_
The conflicts between scientists and churchmen are sometimes ascribed
to a misunderstanding on both sides. But when we examine the proposals
for peace, it is plain, I think, that they are in effect proposals
for a truce. There is, for example, the suggestion first put out, I
believe, in the Seventeenth Century that God made the universe like
a clock, and that having started it running he will let it alone
till it runs down. By this ingenious metaphor, which can neither be
proved nor disproved, [p122] it was possible to reconcile for a time
the scientific notion of natural law with the older notion of God as
creator and as judge. The religious conception was held to be true for
the beginning of the world and for the end, the scientific conception
was true in between. Later, when the theatre of the difficulty was
transferred from physics and astronomy to biology and history, a
variation was propounded. God, it was said, created the world and
governs it; the way he creates and governs is the way described by
scientists as ‘evolution.’
Attempts at reconciliations like these are based on a theory that it
is feasible somewhere in the field of knowledge to draw a line and
say that on one side the methods of science shall prevail, on the
other the methods of traditional religion. It is acknowledged that
where experiment and observation are possible, the field belongs to
the scientists; but it is argued that there is a vast field of great
interest to mankind which is beyond the reach of practical scientific
inquiry, and that here, touching questions like the ultimate destiny
of man, the purpose of life, and immortality, the older method of
revelation, inspired and verified by intuition, is still reliable.
In any truce of this sort there is bound to be aggression from both
sides. For it is a working policy rather than an inwardly accepted
conviction. Scientists cannot really believe that there are fields of
possible knowledge which they can never enter. They are bound to enter
all fields and to explore everything. And even if they fail, they
cannot believe that other scientists must always fail. Their essays,
moreover, create disturbance and doubt which orthodox churchmen are
forced to resent. For in [p123] any division of authority, there must
be some ultimate authority to settle questions of jurisdiction. Shall
scientists determine what belongs to science, or shall churchmen? The
question is insoluble as long as both claim that they have the right to
expound the nature of existence.
And so while the policy of toleration may be temporarily workable, it
is inherently unstable. Therefore, among men who are at once devoted
to the method of science and sensitive to the human need of religion,
the hope has arisen that something better can be worked out than a
purely diplomatic division of the mind into spheres of influence. Mr.
Whitehead, for example, in his book called _Science and the Modern
World_, argues “there are wider truths and finer perspectives within
which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science
will be found.” He illustrates what he means in this fashion. Galileo
said the earth moves and the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said the
earth is fixed and the sun moves; the Newtonian astronomers said that
both the sun and the earth move. “But now we say that any one of these
three statements is equally true, provided you have fixed your sense of
‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement adopted. At
the date of Galileo’s controversy with the Inquisition, Galileo’s way
of stating the facts was beyond question the fruitful procedure for the
sake of scientific research. But at that time the concepts of relative
motion were in nobody’s mind; so that the statements were made in
ignorance of the qualifications required for the more perfect truth....
All sides had got hold of important truths.... [p124] But with the
knowledge of those times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.”
This is reconciliation through a higher synthesis. But I cannot help
feeling that the scientist has here produced the synthesis, and that
the churchmen have merely provided one of the ideas which are to be
synthesized. Mr. Whitehead argues in effect that a subtler science
would confirm many ideas that were once taken on faith. But he holds
unswervingly to the belief of the scientist that his method contains
the criterion of truth. In his illustration the reconciliation between
Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Newtonian physicists is reached if
all three parties accept “the modern concept of relative motion.”
But the modern concept of relative motion was reached by scientific
thought, and not by apostolic revelation. To Mr. Whitehead, therefore,
the ultimate arbiter is science, and what he means by reconciliation is
a scientific view of the universe sufficiently wide and sufficiently
subtle to justify many of the important, but hitherto unverified,
claims of traditional religion. Mr. Whitehead, it happens, is an
Englishman as well as a great logician, and it is difficult to resist
the suspicion that he conceives the church of the future as enjoying
the dignities of an Indian Maharajah, with a resident scientist behind
the altar.
A reconciliation of this kind may soften the conflict for a while.
But it cannot for long disguise the fact that it is based on a denial
of the premises of faith. If the method of science has the last word,
then revelation is reduced from a means of arriving at absolute
certainty to a flash of insight which can be trusted if and when it
is verified by science. Under such terms of peace, the religious
[p125] experiences of mankind become merely one of the instruments of
knowledge, like the microscope and the binomial theorem, usable now
and then, but subject to correction, and provisional. They no longer
yield complete, ultimate, invincible truths. They yield an hypothesis.
But the religious life of most men has not, until this day at least,
been founded upon hypotheses which, when accurately stated, included a
coefficient of probable error.
5. _Gospels of Science_
Because its prestige is so great, science has been acclaimed as a new
revelation. Cults have attached themselves to scientific hypotheses
as fortune-tellers to a circus. A whole series of pseudo-religions
have been hastily constructed upon such dogmas as the laws of
nature, mechanism, Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian evolution, and
psychoanalysis. Each of these cults has had its own Decalogue of
Science founded at last, it was said, upon certain knowledge.
These cults are an attempt to fit the working theories of science to
the ordinary man’s desire for personal salvation. They do violence
to the integrity of scientific thought and they cannot satisfy the
layman’s need to believe. For the essence of the scientific method is
a determination to investigate phenomena without conceding anything to
naive human prejudices. Therefore, genuine men of science shrink from
the attempts of poets, prophets, and popular lecturers to translate
the current scientific theory into the broad and passionate dogmas
of popular faith. As a matter of common honesty they know that no
theory has the kind of absolute verity which [p126] popular faith
would attribute to it. As a matter of prudence they fear these popular
cults, knowing quite well that freedom of inquiry is endangered when
men become passionately loyal to an idea, and stake their personal
pride and hope of happiness upon its vindication. In the light of human
experience, men of science have learned what happens when investigators
are not free to discard any theory without breaking some dear old
lady’s heart. Their theories are not the kind of revelation which the
old lady is seeking, and their beliefs are relative and provisional to
a degree which must seem utterly alien and bewildering to her.
Here, for example, is the conclusion of some lectures by one of the
greatest living astronomers. I have italicized the words which the dear
old lady would not be likely to hear in a sermon:
I have dealt mainly with two salient points—the problem of the
source of a star’s energy, and the change of mass which must
occur if there is any evolution of faint stars from bright stars.
I have shown how these _appear_ to meet in the _hypothesis_ of
the annihilation of matter. I _do not hold this as a secure
conclusion_. I _hesitate even to advocate it as probable_, because
there are many details which seem to me to throw _considerable
doubt_ on it, and I have formed a strong impression that there
must be _some essential point which has not yet been grasped_.
I _simply_ tell it you as the _clue_ which at the moment we are
_trying_ to follow up—_not knowing whether it is false scent or
true_. I should have liked to have closed these lectures by leading
up to some great climax. But perhaps it is more in accordance with
the true conditions of scientific progress that they should _fizzle
out_ with a glimpse of the _obscurity_ which marks the frontiers of
present knowledge. I do not apologize for the [p127] _lameness_ of
the conclusion, _for it is not a conclusion_. I _wish I could feel
confident that it is even a beginning_.
This great climax, to which Dr. Eddington was unable to lead up, is
what the layman is looking for. We know quite well what the nature
of that great climax would be: it would be a statement of fact which
related the destiny of each individual to the destiny of the universe.
That is the kind of truth which is found in revelation. It is the kind
of truth which men would like to find in science. But it is the kind of
truth which science does not afford. The difficulty is deeper than the
provisional character of scientific hypothesis; it is not due merely to
the inability of the scientist to say that his conclusion is absolutely
secure. The layman in search of a dogma upon which to organize his
destiny might be willing to grant that the conclusions of science
to-day are as yet provisional. What he tends to misunderstand is that
even if the conclusions were guaranteed by all investigators now and
for all time to come, those conclusions would still fail to provide him
with a conception of the world of which the great climax was a prophecy
of the fate of creation in terms of his hopes and fears.
The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection
of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that
the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the
preferences of the human heart. The science of Aristotle and of the
Schoolmen, on the other hand, was a truly popular science. It was in
its inspiration the instinctive science of the unscientific man. “They
read into the cause and goal of the universe,” as Dr. Randall has said,
“that which alone [p128] justifies it for man, its service of the
good.” They provided a conception of the universe which was available
for the religious needs of ordinary men, and in the _Divine Comedy_ we
can see the supreme example of what science must be like if it is to
satisfy the human need to believe. The purpose of the whole poem, said
Dante himself, “is to remove those who are living in this life from the
state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness.”
Mediæval science, which follows the logic of human desire, was such
that Dante could without violence either to its substance or its spirit
say at the summit of Paradise:
To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and
will were rolled—even as a wheel that moveth equally—by the Love
that moves the sun and the other stars.
This is the great climax which men instinctively expect: the ability
to say with perfect assurance that when the truth is fully evident it
will be seen that their desire and will are rolled by the love that
moves the sun and the other stars. They hope not only to find the will
of God in the universe but to know that his will is fundamentally like
their own. Only if they could believe that on the basis of scientific
investigation would they really feel that science had ‘explained’ the
world.
Explanation, in this sense, cannot come from modern science because
it is not in this sense that modern science attempts to explain the
universe. It is wholly misleading to say, for example, that the
scientific picture of the world is mechanical. All that can properly
be said is that many scientists have found it satisfying to think
about the universe as if it were built on a mechanical model. “If
I [p129] can make a mechanical model,” said Lord Kelvin, “I can
understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way
through, I cannot understand it.” But what does the scientist mean by
“understanding it”? He means, says Professor Bridgman, that he has
“reduced a situation to elements with which we are so familiar that we
accept them as a matter of course, so that our curiosity rests.” Modern
men are familiar with machines. They can take them apart and put them
together, so that even though we should all be a little flustered if
we had to tell just what we mean by a machine, our curiosity tends to
be satisfied if we hear that the phenomenon, say, of electricity or of
human behavior, is like a machine.
The place at which curiosity rests is not a fixed point called ‘the
truth.’ The unscientific man, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages,
really means by the truth an explanation of the universe in terms of
human desire. What modern science means by the truth has been stated
most clearly perhaps by the late Charles S. Peirce when he said
that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all
those who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object
represented in this opinion is the real.” When we say that something
has been ‘explained’ by science, we really mean only that our own
curiosity is satisfied. Another man, whose mind was more critical,
who commanded a greater field of experience, might not be satisfied
at all. Thus “the savage is satisfied by explaining the thunderstorm
as the capricious act of an angry God.... (But) even if the physicist
believed in the existence of the angry god, he would not be satisfied
with this explanation of the thunderstorm [p130] because he is not so
well acquainted with angry gods as to be able to predict when anger
is followed by a storm. He would have to know why the god had become
angry, and why making a thunderstorm eased his ire.” But even carrying
the explanation to this point would not be carrying it to its limit.
For there is no formal limit. The next scientist might wish to know
what a god was and what anger is. And when he had been told what their
elements are, the next man might be dissatisfied until he had found the
elements of these elements.
The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no
further than to say that he is so well satisfied with this analogy that
he is through with searching any further. That is his business, as long
as he does not insist that he has reached a clear and ultimate picture
of the universe. For obviously he has not. A machine is something in
which the parts push and pull each other. But why are they pushing and
pulling, and how do _they_ work? Do they push and pull because of the
action of the electrons in their orbits within the atoms? If that is
true, then how does an electron work? Is it, too, a machine? Or is it
something quite different from a machine? Shall we attempt to explain
machines electrically, or shall we attempt to explain electricity
mechanically?
It becomes plain, therefore, that scientific explanation is altogether
unlike the explanations to which the common man is accustomed. It does
not yield a certain picture of anything which can be taken naively as
a representation of reality. And therefore the philosophies which have
grown up about science, like mechanism or [p131] creative evolution,
are in no way guaranteed by science as the account of creation in
Genesis is guaranteed by the authority of Scripture. They are nothing
but provisional dramatizations which are soon dissolved by the progress
of science itself.
That is why nothing is so dead as the scientific religion of yesterday.
It is far more completely dead than any revealed religion, because the
revealed religion, whatever may be the defects of its cosmology or its
history, has some human experience at its core which we can recognize
and to which we may respond. But a religion like scientific materialism
has nothing in it, except the pretension that it is a true account of
the world. Once that pretension is exploded, it is wholly valueless as
a religion. It has become a collection of discarded concepts.
6. _The Deeper Conflict_
It follows from the very nature of scientific explanation, then, that
it cannot give men such a clue to a plan of existence as they find
in popular religion. For that plan must suppose that existence is
explained in terms of human destiny. Now conceivably existence might
again be explained, as it was in the Middle Ages, as the drama of human
destiny. It does not seem probable to us; yet we cannot say that it
is impossible. But even if science worked out such an explanation, it
would still be radically different from the explanations which popular
religion employs.
For if it were honestly stated, it would be necessary to say first,
that it is tentative, and subject to disproof by further experiment;
second, that it is relative, in that [p132] the same facts seen from
some other point and with some other purpose in mind could be explained
quite differently; third, that it is not a picture of the world, as
God would see it, and as all men must see it, but that it is simply
one among many possible creations of the mind into which most of the
data of experience can be fitted. When the scientist had finished
setting down his qualifications, the essence of the matter as a simple,
devout man sees it, would have evaporated. Certainty, as the devout
desire it, would be gone; verity, as they understand it, would be gone;
objectivity, as they imagine it, would be gone. What would remain
would be a highly abstracted, logical fiction, suited to disinterested
inquiry, but utterly unsuited to be the vehicle of his salvation.
The difficulty of reconciling popular religion with science is far
deeper than that of reconciling Genesis with Darwin, or any statement
of fact in the Bible with any discovery by scientists. It is the
difficulty of reconciling the human desire for a certain kind of
universe with a method of explaining the world which is absolutely
neutral in its intention. One can by twisting language sufficiently
“reconcile” Genesis with “evolution.” But what no one can do is to
guarantee that science will not destroy the doctrine of evolution the
day after it has been triumphantly proved that Genesis is compatible
with the theory of evolution. As a matter of fact, just that has
happened. The Darwinian theory, which theologians are busily accepting,
is so greatly modified already by science that some of it is almost as
obsolete as the Babylonian myth in Genesis. The reconciliation which
theologians are attempting is an impossible one, because one of the
[p133] factors which has to be reconciled—namely, the scientific
theory, changes so rapidly that the layman is never sure at any one
moment what the theory is which he has to reconcile with religious
dogma.
Yet the purpose of these attempts at reconciliation is evident enough.
It is to find a solid foundation for human ideals in the facts of
existence. Authority based on revelation once provided that foundation.
It gave an account of how the world began, of how it is governed, and
of how it will end, which made pain and joy, hope and fear, desire and
the denial of desire the central motives in the cosmic drama. This
account no longer satisfies our curiosity as to the nature of things;
the authority which certifies it no longer commands our complete
allegiance. The prestige, which once adhered to those who spoke by
revelation, has passed to scientists. But science, though it is the
most reliable method of knowledge we now possess, does not provide
an account of the world in which human destiny is the central theme.
Therefore, science, though it has displaced revelation, is not a
substitute for it. It yields a radically different kind of knowledge.
It explains the facts. But it does not pretend to justify the ways of
God to man. It enables us to realize some of our hopes. But it offers
no guarantees that they can be fulfilled.
7. _Theocracy and Humanism_
There is a revolution here in the realm of the spirit. We may describe
it briefly by saying that whereas men once felt they were living under
the eye of an all-powerful spectator, to-day they are watched only by
their neighbors [p134] and their own consciences. A few, perhaps, act
as if posterity were aware of them; the great number feel themselves
accountable only to their own consciences or to the opinion of the
society in which they live. Once men believed that they would be judged
at the throne of God. They believed that he saw not only their deeds
but their motives; there was no hole deep enough into which a man could
crawl to hide himself from the sight of God; there was no mood, however
fleeting, which escaped his notice.
The moral problem for each man, therefore, was to make his will conform
to the will of God. There were differences of opinion as to how this
could be done. There were differing conceptions of the nature of God,
and of what he most desired. But there was no difference of opinion on
the main point that it was imperative to obey him. Whether they thought
they could serve God best by burnt offerings or a contrite heart, by
slaying the infidel or by loving their neighbors, by vows of poverty or
by the magnificence of their altars, they never doubted that the chief
duty of man, and his ultimate chance of happiness, was to discover and
then to cultivate a right relationship to a supreme being.
This was the major premise upon which all human choices hinged. There
followed from it certain necessary conclusions. In determining what was
a right relationship to God, the test of rightness lay in a revelation
of the putative experience of God and not in the actual experience of
His creatures. It was God alone, therefore, who really understood the
reasons for righteousness and its nature. “The procedure of Divine
Justice,” said [p135] Calvin, “is too high to be scanned by human
measure or comprehended by the feebleness of human intellect.” That was
good which man understood was good in the eyes of God, regardless of
how it seemed to men.
Thus the distinction between good and evil, including not only all
rules of personal conduct but the whole arrangement of rights and
duties in society, were laws established not by the consent of the
governed, but by a king in heaven. They were his commandments. By
obedience men could obtain happiness. But they obtained it not because
virtue is the cause of happiness but because God rewarded with
happiness those who obeyed his commandments. Men did not really know
why God preferred certain kinds of conduct; they merely professed to
know what kind of conduct he preferred. They could not really ask
themselves what the difference was between good and evil. That was a
secret locked in the nature of a being whose choices were ultimately
inscrutable. The only question was what he willed. Even Job had to be
content without fathoming his reasons.
The moral commandments based upon divine authority were, in the nature
of things, rather broad generalizations. Obviously there could not be
special revelation as to the unique aspects of each human difficulty.
The divine law, like our ordinary human law, was addressed to typical
rather than to individual cases. Nevertheless, for much the greater
part of recorded history men have accepted such law without questioning
its validity. They could not have done so if the rules of morality had
not, at least in some rough way, worked. It is not difficult to see
why they worked. They were broad rules of conduct imposed [p136] upon
people living close to the soil, upon people, therefore, whose ways of
living changed little in the course of generations. The same situations
were so nearly and so often repeated that a typical solution would on
the whole be satisfactory.
These typical solutions, such as we find in the Mosaic law or the
code of Hammurabi, were no doubt the deposits of custom. They had,
therefore, become perfected in practice, and were solidly based upon
human experience. In the society in which they originated, there was
nothing arbitrary or alien about them. When, therefore, the lawgiver
carried these immemorial usages up with him on to Sinai, and brought
them down again graven on tablets of stone, the rationality of the
revelation was self-evident. It appeared to be arbitrary only when a
radical change in the way of life dissolved the premises and the usages
upon which the authoritative code was established.
That dissolution has proceeded to great lengths within the centuries
which we call modern. The crisis was reached, it seems, during the
Eighteenth Century, and in the teaching of Immanuel Kant it was made
manifest to the educated classes of the western world. Kant argued
in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ that the existence of God cannot be
demonstrated. He then insisted that without belief in God, freedom, and
immortality, there was no valid and true morality. So he insisted that
God must exist to justify morality. This highly sophisticated doctrine
marks the end of simple theism in modern thought. For Kant’s proof of
the existence of God was nothing but a plea that God ought to exist,
and the whole temper [p137] of the modern intellect is to deny that
what ought to be true necessarily is true.
Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have
to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation
of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of
righteousness wholly within human experience. The difference between
good and evil must be a difference which men themselves recognize and
understand. Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the
intelligible consequence of it. It follows, too, that virtue cannot be
commanded; it must be willed out of personal conviction and desire.
Such a morality may properly be called humanism, for it is centered not
in superhuman but in human nature. When men can no longer be theists,
they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. They must live
by the premise that whatever is righteous is inherently desirable
because experience will demonstrate its desirability. They must live,
therefore, in the belief that the duty of man is not to make his
will conform to the will of God but to the surest knowledge of the
conditions of human happiness.
It is evident that a morality of humanism presents far greater
difficulties than a morality premised on theism. For one thing, it
is put immediately to a much severer test. When Kant, for example,
argued that theism was necessary to morality, his chief reason was that
since the good man is often defeated on earth, he must be permitted to
believe in a superhuman power which is “able to connect happiness and
morality in exact harmony with each other.” Humanism is not provided
with such [p138] reserves of moral credit; it cannot claim all
eternity in which its promises may be fulfilled. Unless its wisdom in
any sphere of life is demonstrated within a reasonable time in actual
experience, there is nothing to commend it.
A morality of humanism labors under even greater difficulties.
It appears in a complex and changing society; it is an attitude
toward life to which rational men necessarily turn whenever their
circumstances have rendered a theistic view incredible. It is just
because the simpler rules no longer work that the subtler choices
of humanism present themselves. These choices have to be made under
conditions, like those which prevail in modern urban societies, where
the extreme complexity of rapidly changing human relations makes it
very difficult to foresee all the consequences of any moral decision.
The men who must make their decisions are skeptical by habit and
unsettled amidst the novelties of their surroundings.
The teachers of a theistic morality, when the audience is devout, have
only to fortify the impression that the rules of conduct are certified
by God the invisible King. The ethical problem for the common man is
to recognize the well-known credentials of his teachers. In practice
he has merely to decide whether the priest, the prince, and the
elders, are what they claim to be. When he has done that, there are no
radical questions to be asked. But the teachers of humanism have no
credentials. Their teaching is not certified. They have to prove their
case by the test of mundane experience. They speak with no authority,
which can be scrutinized once and for all, and then forever accepted.
They can proclaim no rule of conduct with certainty, for they have no
inherent personal [p139] authority and they cannot be altogether sure
they are right. They cannot command. They cannot truly exhort. They
can only inquire, infer, and persuade. They have only human insight
to guide them and those to whom they speak must in the end themselves
accept the full responsibility for the consequences of any advice they
choose to accept.
Yet with all its difficulties, it is to a morality of humanism that men
must turn when the ancient order of things dissolves. When they find
that they no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed
from heaven, there is anarchy in their souls until by conscious effort
they find ways of governing themselves.
PART II [p141]
THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM
_The stone which the builders rejected,
The same is become the head of the corner?_
Luke XX, 17.
INTRODUCTION [p143]
The upshot of the discussion to this point is that modernity destroys
the disposition to believe that behind the visible world of physical
objects and human institutions there is a supernatural kingdom from
which ultimately all laws, all judgments, all rewards, all punishments,
and all compensations are derived. To those who believe that this
kingdom exists the modern spirit is nothing less than treason to God.
The popular religion rests on the belief that the kingdom is an
objective fact, as certain, as definite, and as real, in spite of
its invisibility, as the British Empire; it holds that this faith
is justified by overwhelming evidence supplied by revelation,
unimpeachable testimony, and incontrovertible signs. To the modern
spirit, on the other hand, the belief in this kingdom must necessarily
seem a grandiose fiction projected by human needs and desires. The
humanistic view is that the popular faith does not prove the existence
of its objects, but only the presence of a desire that such objects
should exist. The popular religion, in short, rests on a theory which,
if true, is an extension of physics and of history; the humanistic view
rests on human psychology and an interpretation of human experience.
It follows, then, that in exploring the modern problem it is necessary
consciously and clearly to make a choice between these diametrically
opposite points of view. The [p144] choice is fundamental and
exclusive, and it determines all the conclusions which follow. For
obviously to one who believes that the world is a theocracy, the
problem is how to bring the strayed and rebellious masses of mankind
back to their obedience, how to restore the lost provinces of God the
invisible King. But to one who takes the humanistic view the problem is
how mankind, deprived of the great fictions, is to come to terms with
the needs which created those fictions.
In this book I take the humanistic view because, in the kind of world I
happen to live in, I can do no other.
CHAPTER VIII [p145]
GOLDEN MEMORIES
It will be granted, I suppose, that there would be no need for
certainty about the plan and government of the universe if, as a
matter of course, all our desires were regularly fulfilled. In a world
where no man desired what he could not have, there would be no need to
regulate human conduct and therefore no need for morality. In a world
where each man could have what he desired, there would be no need for
consolation and for reassuring guarantees that justice, mercy, and love
will ultimately prevail. In a world where there was perfect adjustment
between human desires and their environment, there would be no problem
of evil: we should not know the meaning of sin, sorrow, crime, fear,
frustration, pain, and emptiness. We do not live in such a well-ordered
world. But we can imagine it by making either of two assumptions:
that we have ceased to desire anything which causes evil, or that
omnipotence fulfills all our desires. The first of these assumptions
leads to the Nirvana of the Buddhists, where all craving has ceased and
there is perfect peace. The second leads to the heaven of all popular
religions, to some paradise like that of Mohammed perhaps where, as Mr.
Santayana says, men may “sit in well-watered gardens, clad in green
silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like
glance of some young girl, all innocence and fire.” [p146]
Among educated men it has always been difficult to imagine a heaven
of fulfilled desires. For since no two persons have exactly the
same desires, one man’s imagination of heaven may not suit another
man’s. In general, the attempts which have been made to picture the
Christian heaven reflect the temperaments of highly contemplative
spirits, and it is customary nowadays to say that this heaven would
be a most uninteresting place. No doubt it would be to those who are
not contemplative. But the objectors have missed the main point, which
is that no one is supposed to pass through the pearly gates who is
not suited to dwell in Paradise. That is what St. Peter is there for,
to see that the unfit do not enter; the other places, Purgatory and
the Inferno, are available to those spirits who could not be happy in
Heaven. There are, by definition, no uncongenial spirits in Heaven.
There were once, but Satan and his followers were thrown out headlong,
and they now live in places which are suited to their temperaments. A
devout man may quite properly, therefore, advise those who do not think
they would enjoy Heaven to go to Hell.
The attempt to imagine a heaven is an attempt to conceive a world in
which the disorders of human desire no longer exist. Now it is in their
prayers that men have sought to come to terms with their disorders, and
their prayers reveal most concretely how much the hunger for certainty
and for help is a hunger for the fulfillment of desire. For prayer,
says Father Wynne, is “the expression of our desires to God whether
for ourselves or for others.” In the higher reaches of religion “the
expression is not intended to instruct or direct God what to do, but to
[p147] appeal to His goodness for the things we need; and the appeal
is necessary, not because He is ignorant of our needs or sentiments,
but to give definite form to our desires, to concentrate our whole
attention on what we have to recommend to Him, to help us appreciate
our close personal relation with Him.” But in order to know what to
pray for, we need grace, that is to say, God Himself must teach us what
to ask Him for. We can be sure that we should pray for salvation, but
in particular we need guidance from God “to know the special means that
will most help us in any particular need.” But besides the spiritual
objects of prayer “we are to ask also for temporal things, our daily
bread and all that it implies, health, strength, and other worldly or
temporal goods ...”; we are to pray also for escape from evils, “the
penalty of our sins, the dangers of temptation, and every manner of
physical or spiritual affliction.”
There has, however, always been a logical difficulty about offering
petitions to an all-wise and all-powerful Providence. Thus in the
_Dialogue of Dives and Pauper_, which was published in 1493, the
question is put: “Why pray we to God with oure mouth sithe he knowyth
alle oure thoughte, all our desire, al our wyl and what us nedeth?”
To this question the only answer which was not evasive came from the
mystics who led a life of contemplation. Prayer, they said, is not mere
petition; it is communion with God. It is not because prayer gives a
man what he wants, but because it “ones the soul to God,” that it is
rational and necessary. This, too, is the conception of prayer held by
a liberal pastor like Dr. Fosdick who looks with scorn upon “clamorous
petition to an [p148] anthropomorphic God” and says that “true prayer
... is to assimilate ... (the) spirit which is God (that) ... surrounds
our lives.” The same idea, stated in somewhat more precise language,
is set down by Mr. Santayana when he says that “in rational prayer the
soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare:
it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself
to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives.”
But, of course, this is not the way the common man through the ages
has conceived prayer. In fact he must have prayed before he had any
clear conception of what a prayer is or of whom it is addressed to.
Thus we are told that in Arcadia the girls invoked Hera by the title of
“Hera the Girl,” the married women prayed to “Hera the Married One,”
and the widows prayed to “Hera the Widow.” Sometimes the prayer is a
spontaneous expression of sorrow or of delight, a lyrical cry which
has no ulterior purpose and is addressed to no one. Sometimes prayer
is a magical formula which compels the deity to listen and to obey.
The subject is both complicated and obscure. But this much at least is
clear: along with elements which can be described only as spontaneous
and lyrical, with traces of magic, and at times with a purely
disinterested desire to commune with God, simple people have looked
upon prayer as “an instrument for applying God’s illimitable power to
daily life.”
Popular discussion of prayer has often been extremely practical: “How
can prayer be made most efficient? Is it by ordinary Masses or by other
offices? Is it by the elaboration or the multiplication of services?”
Lady Alice [p149] West who died in 1395 ordered 4400 Masses “in the
most haste that it may be do, withynne xiiii nyght next after my
deces.” Thomas Walwayn who died in 1415 left orders for 10,000 Masses
“with oute pompe whyche may not profyt myn soule.” John Plot, however,
wished his Masses said “with solempne seruise that ys for to sayn
wyth Belle Ryngyng.” There was debate as to whether prayers were most
effective if said in Rome or in the Holy Land ... by certain priests
rather than by others ... by the friars rather than by the priests ...
whether there were more potent prayers than the _Pater_ ... whether
prayers should be addressed to the Father, the Son, or to St. Mary
... whether St. Mary could be approached best through her mother, St.
Anne....
It is not necessary to dogmatize by saying that prayer is magic, or
soliloquy, or communion, or petition for this and that, in order to
see that it is the expression of a human need. The quality of the need
varies. It may be anything from a desire for rain to a desire for
friendship with unseen spirits, but always it illustrates the saying
that “all men stand in need of God.”
If we ask ourselves what we mean by ‘need,’ we must answer, I suppose,
that the resources of our own natures and the power we are able to
exercise over events are insufficient to satisfy the cravings of our
natures. We must eat, but we cannot be sure that drought will not
destroy the crops. We are beset by enemies, and we are not sure we
can conquer them. We are threatened by earthquake, storm, and disease
against which we cannot wholly protect ourselves. We become deeply
attached to other persons. But they must die and we must die, and we
cannot stay [p150] the doom. In brief, we find ourselves in a world in
which our hopes are defeated.
Somehow we are so constituted that we demand the impossible. There is
in us somewhere an intimation that we ought not to be defeated. But
where did this intimation come from? How is it that we are not born
satisfied with our mortality, content with our fate? Why is it that the
normal fate of man seems to us abnormal? What is there in the back of
our heads which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it
ought to be?
The biologist might answer, I suppose, that this craving for a
different kind of world is simply our own consciousness of that blind
push of natural forces which create the variations on which natural
selection works to produce the survival of the fittest. Nature, he
might say, is wholly indifferent to the outcries of the individual;
this vast process of which each of us is so insignificant a part,
keeps going because there is in all the parts a superabundant urging
to go on. There is no human economy in it and no human order. Man, for
example, has far more sexual desire than is needed for the rational
propagation of the species. But there is no rational plan in nature. It
works here, and everywhere, on the principle that by having too much
there will surely be enough; the seeds which do not germinate, the
seedlings which perish, the desires which are left over, are no concern
of nature’s. For nature has no concern. There is no concern except that
which we ourselves feel, and that is a mere flicker on the stream of
time, and will soon go out.
While there is no way of gainsaying that this explanation is true,
it is true only if we look at life from the particular point of view
which the biologist adopts. If, however, [p151] we look inwardly
upon ourselves, instead of surveying our species from the outside, we
find, I think, that this sense that the world ought not to be what it
is seems to originate in a kind of dim memory that it once was what
we feel it ought to be. Indeed, so vivid is this memory that for ages
men took it to be an account of historical events; in absolute good
faith they constituted for themselves the picture of a Golden Age which
existed before evil came into the world. Hope was, therefore, a kind
of memory; the ideal was to achieve something which had been lost. The
memory of an age of innocence has haunted the whole of mankind. It has
been a light behind their present experience which cast shadows upon
it, and made it seem insubstantial and not inevitable. Before this
life, there had been another which was happier. And so they reasoned
that what once was possible must somehow be possible again. Having once
known the good, it was unbelievable that evil should be final.
Even after criticism has dissolved the beautiful legends in which it
was embodied, this memory of a Golden Age persists. It persists as an
intimation of our own inward experience, and like an uneasy spirit it
intrudes itself upon our most realistic efforts to accept the world
as we find it. For it takes many shapes, which sometimes deceive us,
appearing then not as the memory of a happiness we have lost, but as
the anticipation of utopia to come.
It is an intimation that man is entitled to live in the land of heart’s
desire. It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all
inquiry into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether
man can achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he
must first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.
CHAPTER IX [p152]
THE INSIGHT OF HUMANISM
1. _The Two Approaches to Life_
The land of heart’s desire is a place in which no man desires what he
cannot have and each man can have what he desires. There have been
great differences of opinion among men as to how they could best enter
this happy land.
If they thought their natural impulses were by way of being lecherous,
greedy, and cruel, they have accepted some form of the classical and
Christian doctrine that man must subdue his naive impulses, and by
reason, grace, or renunciation, transform his will. If they thought
that man was naturally innocent and good, they have accepted some one
of the many variants of liberalism, and concerned themselves not with
the reform of desire but with the provision of opportunities for its
fulfilment.
There are differences of emphasis among liberals, but they all accept
the same premise, which is that if only external circumstances are
favorable the internal life of man will adjust itself successfully.
So completely does this theory of human nature dominate the field of
contemporary thought that modern men are rarely reminded, and then only
by those whom it is the fashion to ignore, that they are challenging
the testimony not merely of their maiden aunts, but of all the greatest
teachers of wisdom. [p153] Yet if the modern man is an optimist on
the subject of his impulses, the reason is to be found less in his own
self-confidence than in his distrust of men and in his intoxication
over things.
Owing to the dissolution of the ancestral order he has learned to
distrust those who exercise authority. Owing to the progress of science
he has acquired an unbounded confidence in his capacity to create
desirable objects. He is so rebellious and so constructive that he has
still to ask himself whether the free and naive pursuit of desirable
objects can really produce a desirable world. Yet in all the books of
wisdom that is the question which confronts him. There it is written in
many languages and in the idiom of many different cultures that if man
is to find happiness, he must reconstruct not merely his world, but,
first of all, himself.
Is this wisdom dead and done with, or has it a bearing upon the deep
uneasiness of the modern man? The answer depends upon what we must
conceive to be the nature of man.
2. _Freedom and Restraint_
It is significant that fashions in human nature are continually
changing. There are, as it were, two extremes: at the one is the belief
that our naive passions are evil, at the other that they are good,
and between these two poles, the prevailing opinion oscillates. One
might suppose that somewhere, perhaps near the center, there would be
a point which was the truth, and that on that point men would reach
an agreement. But experience shows that there is no agreement, and
that there is no known point [p154] where the two views are perfectly
balanced. The fact is that the prevailing view is invariably a rebound
from the excesses of the other, and one can understand it only by
knowing what it is a reaction from.
It is impossible, for example, to do justice to Rousseau and
the romantics without understanding the dead classicism, the
conventionalities, and the tyrannies of the Eighteenth Century. It is
equally impossible to do justice to the Eighteenth Century without
understanding the licentiousness of the High Renaissance and the
political disorders resulting from the Reformation. These in their turn
become intelligible only when we have understood the later consequences
of the mediæval view of life. No particular view endures. When human
nature is wholly distrusted and severely repressed, sooner or later it
asserts itself and bursts its bonds; and when it is naively trusted, it
produces so much disorder and corruption that men once again idealize
order and restraint.
We happen to be living in an age when there is a severe reaction
against the distrust and repression practiced by those whom it is
customary to describe as Puritans. It is, in fact, a reaction against a
degenerate form of Puritanism which manifested itself as a disposition
to be prim, prudish, and pedantic. For latter-day Puritanism had become
a rather second-rate notion that less obvious things are more noble
than grosser ones and that spirituality is the pursuit of rarefied
sensations. It had embraced the idea that a man had advanced in the
realm of the spirit in proportion to his concern with abstractions, and
cults of grimly spiritual persons devoted themselves to the worship of
sonorous generalities. All this associated itself [p155] with a rather
preposterous idealism which insisted that maidens should be wan and
easily frightened, that draperies and decorations should conceal the
essential forms of objects, and that the good life had something to do
with expurgated speech, with pale colors, and shadows and silhouettes,
with the thin music of harps and soprano voices, with fig leaves and
a general conspiracy to tell lies to children, with philosophies that
denied the reality of evil, and with all manner of affectation and
self-deception.
Yet in these many attempts to grow wings and take off from the things
that are of the earth earthy, it is impossible not to recognize a
resemblance, somewhat in the nature of a caricature, to the teaching of
the sages. There is no doubt that in one form or another, Socrates and
Buddha, Jesus and St. Paul, Plotinus and Spinoza, taught that the good
life is impossible without asceticism, that without renunciation of
many of the ordinary appetites, no man can really live well. Prejudice
against the human body and a tendency to be disgusted with its habits,
a contempt for the ordinary concerns of daily experience is to be
found in all of them, and it is not surprising that men, living in an
age of moral confusion like that associated with the name of the good
Queen Victoria, should have come to believe that if only they covered
up their passions they had conquered them. It was a rather ludicrous
mistake as the satirists of the anti-Victorian era have so copiously
pointed out. But at least there was a dim recognition in this cult of
the genteel that the good life does involve some kind of conquest of
the carnal passions.
That conception of the good life has become so repulsive [p156] to the
present generation that it is almost incapable of understanding and
appreciating the original insight of which the works of Dr. Bowdler and
Mrs. Grundy are a caricature. Yet it is a fact, and a most arresting
one, that in all the great religions, and in all the great moral
philosophies from Aristotle to Bernard Shaw, it is taught that one of
the conditions of happiness is to renounce some of the satisfactions
which men normally crave. This tradition as to what constitutes the
wisdom of life is supported by testimony from so many independent
sources that it cannot be dismissed lightly. With minor variations it
is a common theme in the teaching of an Athenian aristocrat like Plato,
an Indian nobleman like Buddha, and a humble Jew like Spinoza; in
fact, wherever men have thought at all carefully about the problem of
evil and of what constitutes a good life, they have concluded that an
essential element in any human philosophy is renunciation. They cannot
all have been so foolish as Anthony Comstock. They must have had some
insight into experience which led them to that conclusion.
If asceticism in all its forms were as stupid and cruel as it is now
the fashion to think it is, then the traditions of saintliness and
of heroism are monstrously misleading. For in the legends of heroes,
of sages, of explorers, inventors and discoverers, of pioneers and
patriots, there is almost invariably this same underlying theme of
sacrifice and unworldliness. They are poor. They live dangerously. By
ordinary standards they are extremely uncomfortable. They give up ease,
property, pleasure, pride, place, and power to attain things which are
transcendent and rare. They live for ends which seem to yield them
[p157] no profit, and they are ready to die, if need be, for that
which the dead can no longer enjoy. And yet, though there is nothing
in our current morality to justify their unworldliness, we continue to
admire them greatly.
In saying all this I am not trying to clinch an argument by appealing
to great names. There is much in the teaching of all the spiritual
leaders of the past which is wholly obsolete to-day, and there is no
compulsive authority in any part of their teaching. They may have been
as mistaken in their insight into the human soul as they usually were
in their notions of physics and history. To say, then, that there is
an ascetic element in all the great philosophies of the past is not
proof that there must be one in modern philosophy. But it creates a
presumption, I think, which cannot be ignored, for we must remember
that the least perishable part of the literature and thought of the
past is that which deals with human nature. Scientific method and
historical scholarship have enormously increased our competence in
the whole field of physics and history. But for an understanding of
human nature we are still very largely dependent, as they were, upon
introspection, general observation, and intuition. There has been no
revolutionary advance here since the hellenic philosophers. That is why
Aristotle’s ethics is still as fresh for anyone who accustoms himself
to the idiom as Nietzsche, or Freud, or Bertrand Russell, whereas
Aristotle’s physics, his biology, or his zoology is of interest only to
antiquarians.
It is, then, as an insight into human nature, and not as a rule
authoritatively imposed or highly sanctioned by the prestige of great
men, that I propose now to inquire what meaning there is for us in the
fact that men in the [p158] past have so persistently associated the
good life with some form of ascetic discipline and renunciation. The
modern world, as it has emancipated itself from its ancestral regime,
has assumed almost as a matter of course that the human passions, if
thoroughly liberated from all tyrannies and distortions, would by their
fulfilment achieve happiness. All those who teach asceticism, deny
this major premise of modernity, and the result is that the prevailing
philosophy is at odds on the most fundamental of all issues with the
wisdom of the past.
3. _The Ascetic Principle_
The average man to-day, when he hears the word asceticism, is likely
to think of St. Simeon Stylites who sat on top of a pillar, of hermits
living in caves, of hair-shirts, of long fasts, chastity, strange
vigils, and even of tattooing, self-mutilation, and flagellation. Or
if he does not think of such examples, which the modern man regards as
pathological and for the psychiatrist to explain, the word asceticism
may connote some such attitude of mind as Herbert Asbury has recorded
in the biography of his kinsman, Bishop Asbury, the founder of American
Methodism, of whom a friend, who knew him well, wrote: “I never saw
him indulge in even innocent pleasantry. His was the solemnity of an
apostle; it was so interwoven with his conduct that he could not put
off the gravity of the bishop either in the parlour or the dining-room.
He was a rigid enemy to ease; hence the pleasures of study and the
charms of recreation he alike sacrificed to the more sublime work
of saving souls.... He knew nothing about pleasing the flesh at the
expense of duty; flesh [p159] and blood were enemies with whom he
never took counsel.”
If asceticism meant only this sort of thing, it might be interesting
only as a curiosity. But apart from the asceticism of primitive peoples
and of the pathological, there is a sane and civilized asceticism which
presents a quite different face. There is, for example, the argument of
Socrates in the _Phædo_ that the body is a nuisance to a philosopher in
search of truth. It is, he says, “a source of endless trouble to us by
reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases
which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills
us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and
endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power
of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions?
Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned
by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in
the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have
no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we
are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is
always breaking in upon us, causing us turmoil and confusion in our
inquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the
truth.”
Plato, in pursuing the argument in this particular dialogue, concludes
that because the body is such a nuisance the only pure philosopher is
a dead one. It is, perhaps, a logical conclusion. But in other places,
particularly in the _Republic_, Plato described a system of education
which he thought would produce philosophers: the neophytes [p160]
were put through a stern discipline of hard living and gymnastics and
learning, were compelled to live in tents, to own nothing which they
could call their own, and to cut themselves off from all family ties.
When the description of this regime provokes Adeimantus to remark
that “you are not making the men of this class particularly happy,”
Socrates is made to reply that while it is not his object to make any
class particularly happy, yet it would not surprise him if in the given
circumstances even this class were very happy. When we look further
for his meaning, we find it to be that the guardians are trained by
their ascetic discipline to abandon all private aims and to find their
happiness in an appreciation of a perfectly ordered commonwealth. If
we understand this we shall, I believe, understand what civilized
asceticism means. We shall have come back to the original meaning of
the word itself, which is derived from the Greek ἀσκέω, “I practice,”
and “embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling place or
palæstra, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their
bodies.” An ascetic in the original meaning of the term is an athlete;
and it was in this spirit that the early Christians trained themselves
deliberately as “athletes of Christ” to bear without flinching the
tortures of their martyrdom.
When asceticism is irrational, it is a form of totemism or fetich
worship and derives from a belief that certain things are tabu or
that evil spirits can be placated by human suffering. Or without any
coherent belief whatsoever asceticism may be merely a perversion
arising out of that ambivalence of the human passions which often makes
pain, inflicted on others or self-inflicted, an exquisite [p161]
pleasure. But when asceticism is rational, it is a discipline of the
mind and body to fit men for the service of an ideal. Its purpose
is to harden and to purify, to suppress contrary passions, and thus
to intensify the passion for the ideal. “I chastise my body,” said
St. Paul, “and bring it into subjection.” The Church, especially in
the earlier centuries, was compelled to fight continually against
irrational asceticism, and as late as the Middle Ages, the Inquisition
pursued sects which regarded marriage as the “greater adultery” and
practiced self-emasculation. The rational view was the view of St.
Jerome: “Be on your guard when you begin to mortify your body by
abstinence and fasting, lest you imagine yourself to be perfect and a
saint; for perfection does not consist in this virtue. It is only a
help; a disposition; a means, though a fitting one, for the attainment
of true perfection.”
Now when St. Paul said that he had to bring his body into subjection,
when Aristotle defined the barbarians’ ideal as “the living as one
likes,” when Plato made Socrates say that the soul is infected by
the body, when Buddha preached the extinction of all craving, when
Spinoza wrote that because we rejoice in virtue we are able to
control our lusts, they accepted a view of human nature which is
quite diametrically opposed to one which has had wide currency in our
civilization since the Renaissance.
This contrary view was undoubtedly provoked by the evils which came
from the attempt to put the ascetic principle extensively into
practice. Rabelais is by all odds the most convincing of the moderns
who revolted, for [p162] Rabelais not only talked about the natural
man but actually knew him and delighted in him. Thus when Villers
writes to Madame de Staël that in her work “primitive, incorruptible,
naive, passionate nature” is “in conflict with the barriers and
shackles of conventional life,” we feel, I think, that neither Villers
nor the lady would really have cared very much for primitive nature in
all its naivete. The natural man that they were talking about lived
in Arcady and his passions were as violent as those of a lapdog;
throughout the romantic movement, with rare exceptions, the talk about
passion and impulse and instinct has this air of unreality and of
neurotic confusion. There is not in it, as there is in Rabelais, for
example, an honest gusto for the passions that are to be liberated
from the restraints imposed by that “rabble of squint-minded fellows,
dissembling and counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites,
pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks, and other such sects of
men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world.”
Rabelais advised his readers that if they desired to become good
Pantagruelists, “that is to say, to live in peace, joy, health, making
yourself always merry—never trust those men that always peep out
through a little hole.” And in establishing the Abbey of Theleme,
Gargantua furnished it magnificently and barred the gates against
bigots, hypocrites, dissemblers, attorneys, barristers, usurers,
drunkards, and cannibals; he invited in all noble blades and brisk
and handsome people, faithful expounders of the Scripture, and lovely
ladies, proper, fair, and mirthful. “Their life,” he says, “was spent
not in laws, statutes, or rules, but at their own free will and
pleasure. [p163] They rose from bed when they thought good, drank,
ate, worked, slept, when the desire came to them. None did awaken them,
none constrained them either to drink or eat, nor to do any other
thing: for so had Gargantua established it. The Rule of their order had
but one clause: _Do What Thou Wilt._”
But there was a catch in this rule. Not only had drunkards and
cannibals been excluded in the first place, but Rabelais assures us
that those who were admitted, because they were “free, well born, well
educated, and accustomed to good company, have by nature an instinct
and spur which prompts them to virtuous acts and withdraws them from
vice. This they call honor.” And in another passage Rabelais limits the
propensities of the natural man even more radically when he speaks of
“a certain gaiety of spirit _cured_ in contempt of chance and fortune.”
There is always a catch in any doctrine of the natural goodness of man.
For mere passive obedience to impulse as it comes and goes, without
effort to check it or direct it, ends in something like Alfred de
Musset’s Rolla, of whom it was said:
It was not Rolla who ruled his life,
It was his passions; he let them go
As a drowsy shepherd watches the water flow.
So even Dora Russell at the crisis of her assault upon the Christian
tradition advises us to “live by instinct _and_ intelligence,” which
must mean, if it means anything, that intelligence is to be in some
respects the master as well as the servant of instinct. That this is
what Mrs. Russell means is abundantly plain by her fury at capitalists,
imperialists, [p164] conservatives, and churchmen, whose instincts
lead them to do things of which she does not approve. For like her
distinguished husband she trusts those impulses which are creative and
beneficent, and distrusts those which are possessive and destructive.
That is to say, like every other moralist, she trusts those parts of
human nature which she trusts.
4. _Oscillation between Two Principles_
These cycles of action and reaction are disastrous to the establishment
of a stable humanism. A theocratic culture depends upon an assured
view of the way in which God governs the universe, and as long as
that view suits the typical needs of a society made stable by custom,
the theocratic culture is stable. But humanism arises in complex
and changing societies, and if it is to have any power to make life
coherent and orderly, it must hold an assured view of how man can
govern himself. If he oscillates aimlessly between the belief that he
must distrust his impulses and the belief that he may naively obey
them, it is impossible for him to fix any point of reference for
the development of his moral code, his educational plans, his human
relationships, his politics, and his personal ideals.
It is not hard to see, I think, why he oscillates in this fashion
between trust and distrust. He cannot obey every impulse, for he has
conflicting impulses within himself. There are also his neighbors with
their impulses. They cannot all be satisfied, for the very simple
reason that the sum of their demands far outruns the available supply
of satisfactions. There is not room enough, there are not objects
[p165] enough in the world to fulfill all human desires. Desires are,
for all practical purposes, unlimited and insatiable, and therefore any
ethics which does not recognize the necessity of putting restraint upon
naive desire is inherently absurd. On the other hand, it is impossible
to distrust every impulse, for the only conclusion then is to commit
suicide. Buddha did, to be sure, teach that craving was the source
of all misery, and that it must be wholly extinguished. But it is
evident from an examination of what he actually advised his disciples
to renounce, that while they were to be poor, chaste, unworldly, and
incurious about the nature of things, they were to be rewarded with
the highest of all satisfactions, and were to be “like the broad
earth, unvexed; like the pillar of the city gate, unmoved; like a
pellucid lake, unruffled.” For Nirvana meant, as Rhys Davids says, the
extinction of a sinful, grasping condition of mind.
Confronted by two opposed views of human nature, neither of which can
be taken unreservedly, moralists have had to pick and choose, deciding
how much or how little they would trust the different impulses. But
there is no measure by which they could decide how much of an impulse
is virtuous, how much more is intemperate, and how much more than
that is utterly sinful. The attempts to regulate the sexual impulse
illustrate the difficulty. Shall the moralist call the complete
absence of all conscious sexual desire virtue? Then he disobeys the
commandment to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Shall
he then limit virtuous desire to that which is felt for a lawful
mate? That implies that man and woman must mate with the first person
for whom they feel any sexual desire. [p166] But this cannot always
be arranged. The first person may be otherwise engaged. It becomes
necessary then to permit a certain amount of promiscuous, though
unfulfilled, sexual desire in the process of sexual selection. And
then having somehow gotten past that difficulty, and with two persons
safely mated, a whole new series of problems arise out of the question
of how far sexual satisfaction depends for its virtue upon its being
the successful means to, or more subtly still, the intended means
to, procreation. I shall not pursue the matter further. The attempt
to measure the degree in which impulse is to be permitted to express
itself is obviously full of difficulties.
The moral problem remains utterly insoluble as long as men regard it as
an attempt to separate their good impulses from their bad ones, and to
decide how much their good impulses are to be encouraged. Morality, if
it is not fixed by custom and authority, becomes a mere matter of taste
determined by the idiosyncrasies of the moralist.
5. _The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties_
Aristotle faced this fundamental difficulty of humanism in the
_Ethics_. He had expounded the theory that happiness is due to virtue,
and that virtue is a mean between two extremes. There must, he said, be
neither defect nor excess of any quality. We must, in brief, go so far
but no further in obedience to our impulses. Thus between rashness and
cowardice the mean is courage; between prodigality and niggardliness
it is liberality; between incontinence and total abstinence it is
temperateness; between ostentation and meanness it is magnificence;
between empty boasting and little-mindedness it is magnanimity; between
[p167] flattery and moroseness it is friendliness; between bashfulness
and impudence it is modesty; between arrogance and false modesty, it is
truthfulness.
So runs the Aristotelian catalogue, and probably no code ever described
so well the ideal of a gentleman. But having laid down his general
precepts, Aristotle, unlike most moralists, faced the difficulty of
applying them. He recognized that it is one thing to accept the theory
of a golden mean, and quite another to know where that mean lies. “For
in each case it is difficult to find the mean ... thus it is easy, and
in every man’s power to be angry, and to give and spend money; but to
determine the person to whom, and the quantity, and the time, and the
motive, and the manner, is no longer in every man’s power, nor is it
easy; therefore excellence is rare, and praiseworthy and honorable.”
For while the mean between excess and defect is excellent, “it is easy
to miss a mark, but difficult to hit it.”
If we look at the matter more closely in order to find out why moral
codes are, as Aristotle says, so hit and miss, we must, I think, come
to the conclusion that there is an undetected fallacy in most moral
thinking which renders moral insight abortive. It is that fallacy which
I now propose to examine.
A moral code like Aristotle’s, which we may fairly regard as the
rational prototype of all humanistic codes, consists of an inventory
of good and bad appetites and of good and bad satisfactions. All
conventional moralizing, which does not rest on the sheer fiat of
public opinion, custom, or God, assumes the existence of some such
inventory of permissible desires and permissible fulfilments. But what
[p168] does the making of such inventories mean? It means that good
and evil are believed to be objective qualities of the natural world
like weight, dimension, and motion, that certain desires are inherently
good, certain others are inherently bad, and that the same is true
of the different objects of desire. But this is nothing but what is
known as the pathetic fallacy. For surely each desire and each object
as such, taken separately without relation to anything else, is as
innocent and as neutral as the forces that move the planets.
The categories of good and evil would not apply if there were no
sentient being to experience good and evil. In such a world no object
would be any better or any worse than any other object; nobody talks
about good and bad electrons. All electrons are morally alike because
no sentient being can tell them apart. Nor would the categories of
good and evil apply to a world in which each impulse was in a vacuum
of its own. In such a world all our impulses would be like our
digestive tracts on a day when we do not know we have a stomach. If
our impulses did not impinge upon each other and upon objects there
would be no problem of good and evil. Therefore the quality of good
and evil lies not in impulses as such, nor in objects as such, but in
the relationship between impulses and objects. Therefore the making of
inventories is fundamentally misleading.
There is another fallacy which is closely associated with this one.
We make lists of our impulses. A standard list which is much used
comprises the following: flight, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity,
self-abasement, self-assertion, parental, reproductive, gregarious,
acquisitive, constructive. [p169] Whether this is a good list or not
is neither here nor there. Through the ages men have been making such
lists in the fond belief that they were analyzing the human character.
No doubt these terms describe something; we all recognize that these
words are the names of impulses that move us. But if we consider them
further, we must also recognize that these impulses do not move all
persons the same way, nor any one person the same way at all times in
his life and under all circumstances.
It is hardly necessary, I am sure, to labor the point very much. There
is the instinct to be curious: it disposes one man to measure the
diameter of Betelgeuse when he is forty years old; when he was a child
it disposed him to find out whether he could hang up a cat by its
tail; that curious child’s companion in the experiment on the cat was
disposed, when he grew up, to take much trouble in finding out how much
income tax his neighbor paid and whether his employer was faithful to
his wife. The parental instinct of one man is to launch his child on
the world as an independent human being; in another man the instinct
manifests itself as a determination to have children who will depend
upon him and cater to him all his days long. So when we make lists of
our impulses we really do not know enough about them to pass judgment.
For desires are complex, and their greatest complexity lies in the fact
that they change.
The objects of desire are no less complex. Take, for example, a jade
goddess. To a Chinese coolie it is an object with mysterious powers, a
part of the mechanism which governs the universe. But the jade goddess
is now in a Fifth Avenue shop window, and a policeman on his beat
[p170] sees it. It is a green stone figure to him. The dealer inside
knows that it is rare and is worth a thousand dollars. The collector
could enjoy it immensely if he possessed it. The connoisseur finds
intricate pleasure in it as a work of art and an elaborate interest in
it as a memento of a whole culture. The objects of desire, then, are
not simple things. We help to create them. We say that this man desires
that woman. But what, in fact, does he desire? A few moments of ecstasy
from her body, something which a thousand women could give him equally
well, or an intimate union with so much of her whole being that for
that very reason she is unique to him? The quality of his passion and
the character of his mistress will depend in a very large degree on how
much of her being he takes into account. It depends also, I hasten to
add, on how much there is to take into account.
At any moment in our lives we desire only those objects which we are
then capable of desiring and in the way we are then capable of desiring
them. But our desires do not remain fixed from the cradle to the grave.
They change. And as they change the desirability of objects about us
changes too. It is impossible, then, to make lists of good and evil
desires and of good and evil objects. For good and evil are qualities
in the relationship between variable desires and variable objects of
desire.
The attempt to construct moral codes on the basis of an inventory
is an attempt to understand something which is always in process of
change by treating it as a still life and taking snapshots of it. That
is what moralists have almost always attempted to do. They have tried
to capture the essence of a changing thing in a collection [p171] of
fixed concepts. It cannot be done. The reality of human nature is bound
to elude us if we look only at a momentary cross-section of it. To
understand it, therefore, for the purposes of moralizing, we have to
revise our intellectual apparatus, and learn to look upon each moment
of behavior not as the manifestation of certain fixed elements in human
nature, but as a stage in the evolution of human nature. We grow up,
mature, and decline; being endowed with memory and the capacity to form
habits, our conduct is cumulative. We drag our past along with us and
it pushes us on. We do not make a new approach to each new experience.
We approach new experiences with the expectations and habits developed
by previous experience, and under the impact of novelty these
expectations and habits become modified.
6. _The Matrix of Humanism_
The conception of human nature as developing behavior is, of course,
accepted by all modern psychologists. If they study the child they are
bound to consider him as potentially an adult. If they study the adult
they are bound to regard him as originally a child. Abnormal psychology
makes sense only insofar as it can be understood as an abnormal
development of the personality, regardless of whether that abnormality
is traceable to pre-natal variations, to organic disease, or to
functional disturbance. Folk psychology, whether or not one accepts the
interesting but speculative hypothesis that there is a parallel between
the development of the individual and the development of the race, is
another mode of investigating the evolution of behavior. The concept
of development [p172] is thoroughly established in psychology as the
major clue to the understanding of human nature.
The moralist, since he is concerned with human nature, is compelled
to employ this concept. But he employs it somewhat differently than
the scientist. Being a moralist, he is interested in understanding the
principles of behavior in order that he may understand the principles
of right behavior. The psychologist, as such, is interested in the
development of behavior, regardless of whether that development leads
to misery or to happiness. He studies the various processes no matter
where they lead. For in science the concept of development implies
no judgment as to whether there is a good or a bad development. The
development of an idiot and of a genius are on the same footing, and
are theoretically of equal interest. But to the moralist the study of
development is focussed on the effort to discover those processes of
development which can be made to produce right relationships between
the individual and his environment, and by a right relationship he is
bound to mean one in which there is an harmonious adjustment between
desires and the objects of desire. How often, and how nearly, it
is possible for human beings to approximate such perfection is an
unanswerable question. The proof of that pudding lies in the eating
of it, and it is not the function of the moralist under humanism to
guarantee the outcome. His function is to point out as clearly as it is
possible to do so the path which presumably leads toward the good life.
In describing that path he is bound to depend upon the best available
insight into the processes by which good and bad adjustments are made.
In the present state of [p173] our knowledge this means that he must
rely to a very large degree upon his own intuitions, commonsense, and
sense of life. Great progress has been made in scientific psychology
within the last generation, enough progress, I think, to supplement
in important ways our own unanalyzed and intuitive wisdom about life.
But it would be idle to suppose that the science of psychology is
in a stage where it can be used as a substitute for experienced and
penetrating imaginative insight. We can be confident that on the whole
a good meteorologist can tell us more about the weather than even the
most weather-wise old sea captain. But we cannot have that kind of
confidence in even the best of psychologists. Indeed, an acquaintance
with psychologists will, I think, compel anyone to admit that, if they
are good psychologists, they are almost certain to possess a gift
of insight which is unaccounted for by their technical apparatus.
Doubtless it is true that in all the sciences the difference between
a good scientist and a poor one comes down at last, after all the
technical and theoretical procedure has been learned, to some sort of
residual flair for the realities of that subject. But in the study
of human nature that residual flair, which seems to be composed of
intuition, commonsense, and unconsciously deposited experience, plays a
much greater role than it does in the more advanced sciences.
The uses of psychology to the moralist are, therefore, in confirming
and correcting, in broadening and organizing, his insight into human
nature. He is confronted, of course, with a great deal of confusion.
There is, to begin with, no agreed terminology, and therefore it is
often almost impossible to know whether two psychologists [p174]
using the same word mean the same thing. Anyone who has stumbled about
amidst words like instinct, impulse, consciousness, the unconscious,
will know how confusing it all is. Psychologists are still using a
literary language in which the connotations of words tend to overwhelm
their precise signification. To make the confusion greater there is
the elaborate system-making, the headstrong generalizing, and the
fierce dogmatism which have produced the psychological sects. But all
of this is characteristic of a young science, and if that is borne in
mind, there is nothing disconcerting about it. The Eighteenth Century
in dealing with the Newtonian physics, and the Nineteenth in dealing
with the Darwinian biology, went through a hullabaloo similar to
that which we are now going through in connection with behaviorism,
psychoanalysis, and the so-called _gestalt-theorie_. Our only concern
here is to ask whether underneath all the controversy there is not some
trustworthy common ground on which the moralist can stand.
I have already said that there was common ground in the concept of
development. We can go further than that, however, and say, I think,
that with the help of psychology we are in position now to construct
reliable and useful pictures, which confirm and correct our own
intuitive understanding, of the infantile and of the mature approach
to experience. We can, as it were, fix these two poles and regard the
history of each soul as the history of its progress from infantilism
to maturity. We are by no means able as yet to describe all the phases
of development between these two poles; we know that progress is
often temporarily interrupted, often completely [p175] arrested, and
sometimes turned into a rout. But insofar as we are able to realize
clearly what a fully matured character is like, the word progress has
a meaning because we know what we mean by the goal of moral effort.
That goal is maturity. If we knew all the stages in the development to
maturity, and how to control them, we should have an adequate science
of education, we could deal successfully with functional disorders, we
should have a very great mastery of the art of life. For the problems
of education are at bottom problems in how to lead the child from one
stage of development to another until at last he becomes an harmonious
and autonomous personality; the functional disorders of the character
are problems in the fixations and repressions on the path to maturity;
the art of living is to pass gracefully from youth to old age, and, at
last, as Montaigne said, to learn to die.
It is this progress which we have to understand and imaginatively to
conceive. For in conceiving it we conceive the matrix of humanism. In
this conception is to be found, I believe, the substitute for that
conception of divine government which gives shape and form to the
theocratic culture. To replace the conception of man as the subject of
a heavenly king, which dominates the whole ancestral order of life,
humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual
from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity.
7. _The Career of the Soul_
If our scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate, we could
achieve in the humanistic culture that which all theologies have tried
to achieve: we could found [p176] our morality on tested truths.
They would be truths about the development of human nature, and not,
as in the popular religions, truth of physics and of history. But
our knowledge of human nature is inadequate, and therefore, like the
teachers of popular religion, we have in place of exact knowledge
to invent imaginative fictions in the hope that the progress of
science will confirm and correct, but will not utterly contradict,
our hypotheses. We can claim no more than this: for our understanding
of human nature we are compelled to use our insight and the best
available psychological science of our age, exactly as Dante, for his
understanding of the divine constitution of the universe, had to use
the accepted astronomy of his day. If our psychology turns out to be
wrong, the only difference will be that we shall have to discard an
hypothesis whereas our forefathers had to discard a revealed dogma.
The sketch which I am about to make of the progress from infancy to
maturity is to be taken, then, not as tested scientific truth, but as
an imaginative construction. It will be, if you like, a modern fable
which symbolizes rather than describes, as the primitive legends of the
sun god symbolized, rather than described, the observed facts. Because
it is an imaginative construction, the same meaning might be expressed
in other ways and with many variations of detail. But though the
fiction itself is of no consequence, the meaning it conveys is of the
highest consequence, and it is confirmed, as I shall attempt to show,
not only by ordinary insight but by the deepest wisdom of the greatest
teachers.
Freud, in a famous paper, has described the passage [p177] from
infancy to maturity as a transition from the dominion of momentary
pleasure and pain to the dominion of reality. This theory is not
peculiar to psychoanalysis in any of its several schools, and it does
not depend upon the controverted points of doctrine. It is, in fact,
more or less of a commonplace in psychological thought. I am employing
it here because a distinguished colleague of Freud’s, Dr. S. Ferenczi
of Budapest, has made an attempt to indicate the chief stages in the
development between these two poles of experience. It is a most useful
bit of speculation, and while I believe it could be duplicated in terms
either of behaviorism or of the _gestalt-theorie_, I do not happen to
have come across any portrait of the idea which is as vivid as Dr.
Ferenczi’s.
The first stage of human development, says Ferenczi, takes place in
the womb where the embryo lives as a parasite of the mother’s body.
An outer world exists for it only in a very restricted degree; all it
needs for protection, warmth, and nourishment is assured by the mother.
Because everything is there which is necessary for the satisfaction
of the instincts, Ferenczi calls this the Period of Unconditional
Omnipotence.
It is, therefore, rather disagreeable and perhaps terrifying to be
born, for with the detachment from the mother and the “rude disturbance
of the wish-less tranquillity he had enjoyed in the womb,” the trouble
of living begins, and evokes feelings which might perhaps be described
as a longing to recover the perfect pre-natal adjustment. Nurses
instinctively recognize this longing, says Ferenczi, and as soon as
the infant expresses his discomfort by struggling and crying, they
deliberately create a situation [p178] which resembles as closely
as possible the one he has just left. They lay him down by the warm
body of the mother, or wrap him up in soft, warm coverings, shield his
eyes from the light and his ears from noise. The illusion is more or
less complete, for, of course, the infant is unaware of the activities
of the nurse. For all he knows “his wishes are realized simply by
imagining the satisfaction of them.” Ferenczi calls this the Period of
Magical-Hallucinatory Omnipotence.
But this period does not last very long, since the nurse is unable
to anticipate every desire that the growing infant feels. “The
hallucinatory representation of the wish-fulfilment soon proves
inadequate to bring about any longer a real wish-fulfilment.” So the
infant has to give signals, and the more complicated his wishes become
the more signals he has to give. He begins to use a gesture-language,
and if there is a willing nurse always at hand without too many
new-fangled notions, the child gets what he wants for the mere trouble
of expressing his wants. Ferenczi calls this the Period of Omnipotence
by the Help of Magic Gestures.
But as time goes on and as the number of his wants increase these
gestures lose some of their magic. The number of the conditions
increase to which he has to submit. “The outstretched hand must often
be drawn back empty.... Indeed, an invincible hostile power may
forcibly oppose itself to this gesture and compel the hand to resume
its former position.” At this point his sense of reality begins; the
sense, that is to say, of something outside himself which does not
submit to his wishes. “Till now the ‘all-powerful’ being has been
able [p179] to feel himself one with the world that obliged him
and followed his every nod, but gradually there appears a painful
discordance in his experiences.” Because all experiences are no longer
incorporated in the ego, Ferenczi calls this the Projection Phase.
But though the child has now begun to discern the existence of reality,
his sense of that reality is still quite imperfect. At first, perhaps,
he regards this outer world, though it opposes his wishes, as having
qualities like his own. Ferenczi calls this the Animistic Period.
The child then begins to talk and to substitute for gestures actual
statements of what he desires. Provided he lives in a household bent on
fulfilling his wants as soon as possible, he retains to a very great
degree the illusion that his wishes are sovereign. Ferenczi calls this
the Period of Magic Thoughts and Magic Words.
Finally, if he matures successfully, he passes into the last period
where he is no longer under the domination of the pleasure-principle:
the feeling of omnipotence gives way to the full appreciation of the
force of circumstances. Now unfortunately neither Freud nor Ferenczi,
nor, so far as I know, any other psychoanalyst, devotes much attention
to this last phase of maturity in which the sense of reality has become
perfected. They are preoccupied with pathology; that is to say, with
the problems which arise out of a failure to attain this last stage in
which the adult makes a complete adjustment with his world because his
wishes are matured to accept the conditions which reality imposes.
Yet it is this last stage which plainly constitutes the goal of moral
effect, for here alone the adult once again [p180] recovers that
harmony between himself and his environment which he lost in that
period of infancy when he first discovered that his wishes were no
longer sovereign. It is the memory of that earliest harmony which he
carries with him all his days. This is his memory of a golden age,
his intimation, as Wordsworth says, of immortality. But insofar as he
expects by an infantile philosophy to recover that heaven which lay
about him in his infancy, he is doomed to disappointment. In the womb,
and for a few years of his childhood, happiness was the gratification
of his naive desires. His family arranged the world to suit his wishes.
But as he grows up, and begins to be an independent personality, this
providence ministering to his wishes disappears. He can then no longer
hope that the world will be adjusted to his wishes, and he is compelled
by a long and difficult process of learning and training to adjust his
wishes to the world. If he succeeds he is mature. If he is mature, he
is once again harmonious with the nature of things. He has virtue. And
he is happy.
The process of maturing consists then of a revision of his desires
in the light of an understanding of reality. When he is completely
infantile there is nothing in the world but his wishes. Therefore, he
does not need and does not have an understanding of the outer world.
It exists for him merely as gratification or denial. But as he begins
to learn that the universe is not composed of his wishes, he begins to
see his wishes in a context and in perspective. He begins to acquire
a sense of space and to learn how much there is beyond his reach,
until at last he realizes how small a figure he is on this earth, and
how small a part of the universe is the solar system of which [p181]
ours is one of the smaller planets. He has learned a lot from the
days when he put out his hand and reached for the moon. He begins,
also, to acquire a sense of time and to realize that the moment in
which he feels the intense desire to seize something is an instant
in a lifetime, an infinitesimal point in the history of the race. He
acquires a sense of birth and decay and death, a knowledge that that
which he craves, his craving itself, and he himself who feels that
craving, did not have this craving yesterday and will no longer have
it to-morrow. He acquires a sense of cause and effect, a knowledge,
that is to say, that the sequences of events are not to be interrupted
by his preferences. He begins to discern the existence of other beings
beside himself, and to understand that they too have their preferences
and their wishes, that these wishes are often contrary to his own,
and that there is not room enough in the world, nor are there things
enough, to gratify all the wishes of everybody.
Thus to learn the lessons of experience is to undergo a transvaluation
of the values we bring with us from the womb and to transmute our
naive impulses. The breakdown of the infantile adjustment in which
providential powers ministered to every wish compels us either to flee
from reality or to understand it. And by understanding it we create new
objects of desire. For when we know a good deal about a thing, know how
it originated, how it is likely to behave, what it is made of, and what
is its place amidst other things, we are dealing with something quite
different from the simple object naively apprehended.
The understanding creates a new environment. The more subtle and
discriminating, the more informed and [p182] sympathetic the
understanding is, the more complex and yet ordered do the things
about us become. To most of us, as Mr. Santayana once said, music is
a pleasant noise which produces a drowsy revery relieved by nervous
thrills. But the trained musician hears what we do not hear at all; he
hears the form, the structure, the pattern, and the significance of an
ideal world. A naturalist out of doors perceives a whole universe of
related life which the rest of us do not even see. A world which is
ordinarily unseen has become visible through the understanding. When
the mind has fetched it out of the flux of dumb sensations, defined
it and fixed it, this unseen world becomes more real than the dumb
sensations it supplants. When the understanding is at work, it is as if
circumstance had ceased to mutter strange sounds and had begun to speak
our language. When experience is understood, it is no longer what it is
wholly to the infant, very largely to youth, and in great measure to
most men, a succession of desirable objects at which they instinctively
grasp, interspersed with undesirable ones from which they instinctively
shrink. If objects are seen in their context, in the light of their
origin and destiny, with sympathy for their own logic and their own
purposes, they become interesting in themselves, and are no longer
blind stimuli to pleasant and unpleasant sensations.
For when our desires come into contact with the world created by
the understanding, their character is altered. They are confronted
by a much more complex stimulus which evokes a much more complex
response. Instead of the naive and imperious lust of our infantile
natures which is to seize, to have and to hold, our lusts are offset
[p183] by other lusts and a balance between them is set up. That is
to say, they are made rational by the ordered variety with which the
understanding confronts them. We learn that there are more things in
heaven and earth than we dreamed of in our immature philosophy, that
there are many choices and that none is absolute, that beyond the
mountains, as the Chinese say, there are people also. The obviously
pleasant or unpleasant thus becomes less obviously what we felt it
was before our knowledge of it became complicated by anticipation and
memory. The immediately desirable seems not quite so desirable and the
undesirable less intolerable. Delight is perhaps not so intense nor
pain so poignant as youth and the romantics would have them. They are
absorbed into a larger experience in which the rewards are a sustained
and more even enjoyment, and serenity in the presence of inescapable
evil. In place of a world, where like children we are ministered to
by a solicitous mother, the understanding introduces us into a world
where delight is reserved for those who can appreciate the meaning and
purpose of things outside ourselves, and can make these meanings and
purposes their own.
8. _The Passage into Maturity_
The critical phase of human experience, then, is the passage from
childhood to maturity; the critical question is whether childish
habits and expectations are to persist or to be transformed. We grow
older. But it is by no means certain that we shall grow up. The human
character is a complicated thing, and its elements do not necessarily
march in step. It is possible to be a sage in some [p184] things and
a child in others, to be at once precocious and retarded, to be shrewd
and foolish, serene and irritable. For some parts of our personalities
may well be more mature than others; not infrequently we participate in
the enterprises of an adult with the mood and manners of a child.
The successful passage into maturity depends, therefore, on a breaking
up and reconstruction of those habits which were appropriate only to
our earliest experience.
In a certain larger sense this is the essence of education. For unless
a man has acquired the character of an adult, he is a lost soul no
matter how good his technical equipment. The world unhappily contains
many such lost souls. They are often in high places, men trained
to manipulate the machinery of civilization, but utterly incapable
of handling their own purposes in any civilized fashion. For their
purposes are merely the relics of an infancy when their wishes were
law, and they knew neither necessity nor change.
When a childish disposition is carried over into an adult environment
the result is a radically false valuation of that environment. The
symptoms are fairly evident. They may appear as a disposition to feel
that everything which happens to a man has an intentional relation to
himself; life becomes a kind of conspiracy to make him happy or to make
him miserable. In either case it is thought to be deeply concerned with
his destiny. The childish pattern appears also as a deep sense that
life owes him something, that somehow it is the duty of the universe to
look after him, and to listen sharply when he speaks to it. The notion
that the universe is full of [p185] purposes utterly unknown to him,
utterly indifferent to him, is as outrageous to one who is imperfectly
matured as would be the conduct of a mother who forgot to give a hungry
child its lunch. The childish pattern appears also as a disposition to
believe that he may reach out for anything in sight and take it, and
that having gotten it nobody must ever under any circumstances take
it away. Death and decay are, therefore, almost an insult, a kind of
mischief in the nature of things, which ought not to be there, and
would not be there, if everything only behaved as good little boys
believe it should. There is indeed authority for the belief that we
are all being punished for the naughtiness of our first grandmother;
that work and trouble and death would not really be there to plague us
but for her unhappy transgression; that by rights we ought to live in
paradise and have everything we want for ever and ever.
Here, too, is the source of that common complaint of the world-weary
that they are tired of their pleasures. They have what they yearned
for; yet having it they are depressed at finding that they do not care.
Their inability to enjoy what they can have is the obverse of the
desire to possess the unattainable: both are due to carrying over the
expectations of youth into adult life. They find themselves in a world
unlike the world of their youth; they themselves are no longer youths.
But they retain the criteria of youth, and with them measure the world
and their own deserts.
Here, too, is the origin of the apparent paradox that as men grow older
they grow wiser but sadder. It is not a paradox at all if we remember
that this wisdom which [p186] makes them sadder is, after all, an
incompleted wisdom. They have grown wiser as to the character of the
world, wiser too about their own powers, but they remain naive as to
what they may expect of the world and themselves. The expectations
which they formed in their youth persist as deeply ingrained habits
to worry them in their maturity. They are only partially matured;
they have become only partially wise. They have acquired skill and
information, but the parts of them which are adult are embedded in
other parts of their natures which are childish. For men do not
necessarily mature altogether and in unison; they learn to do this
and that more easily than they learn what to like and what to reject.
Intelligence is often more completely educated than desire; our outward
behavior has an appearance of being grown up which our inner vanities
and hopes, our dim but powerful cravings, often belie. In a word, we
learn the arts and the sciences long before we learn philosophy.
If we ask ourselves what is this wisdom which experience forces upon
us, the answer must be that we discover the world is differently
constituted than we had supposed it to be. It is not that we learn more
about its physical elements, or its geography, or the variety of its
inhabitants, or the ways in which human society is governed. Knowledge
of this sort can be taught to a child without in any fundamental way
disturbing his childishness. In fact, all of us are aware that we once
knew a great many things which we have since forgotten. The essential
discovery of maturity has little if anything to do with information
about the names, the locations, and the sequences of facts; it is the
acquiring of a different sense [p187] of life, a different kind of
intuition about the nature of things.
A boy can take you into the open at night and show you the stars;
he might tell you no end of things about them, conceivably all that
an astronomer could teach. But until and unless he feels the vast
indifference of the universe to his own fate, and has placed himself
in the perspective of cold and illimitable space, he has not looked
maturely at the heavens. Until he has felt this, and unless he can
endure this, he remains a child, and in his childishness he will
resent the heavens when they are not accommodating. He will demand
sunshine when he wishes to play, and rain when the ground is dry, and
he will look upon storms as anger directed at him, and the thunder as a
personal threat.
The discovery that our wishes have little or no authority in the world
brings with it experience of the necessity that is in the nature of
things. The lesson of this experience is one from which we shrink and
to which few ever wholly accommodate themselves. The world of the child
is a kind of enchanted island. The labor that went into procuring his
food, his clothes, his toys, is wholly invisible at first. His earliest
expectations are, therefore, that somehow the Lord will provide. Only
gradually does the truth come home to him how much effort it costs to
satisfy his wants. It takes even longer for him to understand that not
only does he not get what he wants by asking for it but he cannot be
sure to get what he wants by working for it. It is not easy to accept
the knowledge that desire, that prayer, that effort can be and often
are frustrated, that in the nature of things [p188] there is much
fumbling, trial and error, deadlock and defeat.
The sense of evil is acquired late; by many persons it is never
acquired at all. Children suffer, and childhood is by no means so
unreservedly happy as some make it out to be. But childish suffering
is not inherently tragic. It is not stamped with the irrevocability
which the adult feels to be part of the essence of evil. Evil for the
child is something which can be explained away, made up for, done away
with. Pretentious philosophies have been built on this fancy purporting
somehow to absorb the evil of the world in an all-embracing goodness,
as a child’s tears are dried by its mother’s kisses. The discovery that
there is evil which is as genuine as goodness, that there is ugliness
and violence which are no less real than joy and love, is one of those
discoveries that the adult is forced somehow to accept in his valuation
of experience.
And then there is the knowledge, which only experience can give, that
everything changes and that everything comes to an end. It is possible
to tell a child about mortality, but to realize it he must live long
enough to experience it. This knowledge does not come from words; it
comes in feeling, in the feeling that he himself is older, in the
death of kin and friends, in seeing well-known objects wear out, in
discarding old things, in awakening to the sense that there is a whole
new generation in the world which looks upon him as old. There is an
intimation of immortality in our youth because we have not yet had
experience of mortality. The persons and the things which surround us
seem eternal because [p189] we have known them too briefly to realize
that they change. We have seen neither their beginning nor their end.
In the last analysis we have no right to say that the world of youth is
an illusion. For the child it is a true picture of the world in that
it corresponds to, and is justified in, his experience. If he did not
have to grow older, it would be quite sufficient because nothing in his
experience would contradict it. Our sense of life as we mature is quite
different, but there is no reason to think that it has any absolute
finality. Perhaps if we lived several hundred years we should acquire
a wholly different sense of life, compared with which all our adult
philosophy would seem quite callow.
The child’s sense of life can be called an illusion only if it is
carried over into manhood, for then it ceases to fit his experience and
to be justified by events. The habits formed in a childish environment
become progressively unworkable and contradictory as the youth is
thrust out from the protection of his family into an adult environment.
Then the infantile conviction that his wants will somehow be met
collides with the fact that he must provide for himself. The world
begins to seem out of joint. The child’s notion that things are to be
had for the asking becomes a vast confusion in which words are treated
as laws, and rhetoric as action. The childish belief that each of us is
the center of an adoring and solicitous universe becomes the source of
endless disappointments because we cannot reconcile what we feel is due
us with what we must resign ourselves to. The sense of the unreality of
evil, which our earliest experience seemed to justify, [p190] becomes
a deep preference for not knowing the truth, an habitual desire to
think of the world as we should prefer it to be; out of this rebellion
against truth, out of this determination that the facts shall conform
to our wishes, are born all manner of bigotry and uncharitableness.
The child’s sense that things do not end, that they are there forever,
becomes, once it is carried over into maturity, a vain and anxious
effort to possess things forever. The incapacity to realize that
the objects of desire will last only a little while makes us put an
extravagant value upon them, and to care for them, not as they are and
for what they can actually give us, but for what we foolishly insist
they ought to be and ought always to give us.
The child’s philosophy rests upon the assumption that the world outside
is in gear with his own appetites. For this reason an adult with a
childish character will ascribe an authority to his appetites which may
easily land him in fanaticism or frustration, in a crazy indulgence
or a miserable starvation. And to the environment he will ascribe a
willingness to conform to him, a capacity to be owned by him, which
land him in all sorts of delusions of grandeur. Only the extreme
cases are in the asylums. The world is full of semi-adult persons who
secretly nurse the notion that they are, or that by rights they ought
to be, Don Juan, Crœsus, Napoleon, or the Messiah.
They have brought with them the notion that they are still as
intimately attached to nature and to society as the child is to its
household. The adult has to break this attachment to persons and
things. His world does not permit him to remain fused with it, but
compels him to stand away from things. For things no longer obey
[p191] his wishes. And therefore he cannot let his wishes become
too deeply involved in things. He can no longer count on possessing
whatever he may happen to want. And therefore he must learn to want
what he can possess. He can no longer hold forever the things at which
he grasps; for they change, and slip away. And therefore he must
learn to hold on to things which do not slip away and change, to hold
on to things not by grasping them, but by understanding them and by
remembering them. Then he is wholly an adult. Then he has conquered
mortality in the only way mortal men can conquer it. For he has ceased
to expect anything of the world which it cannot give, and he has
learned to love it under the only aspect in which it is eternal.
9. _The Function of High Religion_
In the light of this conception of maturity as the ultimate phase
in the development of the human personality, we are, I think, in
a position to understand the riddle which we set ourselves at the
beginning of this chapter. I asked what significance there was for us
in the fact that men have so persistently associated the good life
with some form of ascetic discipline and renunciation. The answer is
that asceticism is an effort to overcome immaturity. When men do not
outgrow their childish desires, they seek to repress them. The ascetic
discipline, if it is successful, is a form of education; if it is
unsuccessful, it is an agonized conflict due to an imperfect education
or an incapacity to grow up. By the same token, moral regulations
imposed on others, insofar as they are at all rational, and not methods
of exploitation or expressions of jealousy, are attempts to curb the
social disorders [p192] which result from the activities of grown-up
children.
It follows that asceticisms and moralities are at best means to an
end; they are more or less inadequate substitutes for the educational
process and the natural growth of wisdom. They are often confused
with virtue, but they are not virtue. For virtue is the quality of
mature desire, and when desire is mature the tortures of renunciations
and of prohibitions have ceased to be necessary. “Blessedness,” says
Spinoza, “is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself; nor should
we rejoice in it for that we restrain our lusts, but, on the contrary,
because we rejoice therein we can restrain our lusts.” The mature
character may be attained by growth and experience and insight, or by
ascetic discipline, or by that process of being reborn which is called
conversion; when it is attained, the moral problem of whether to yield
to impulse or to check it, and how much to check it and how much to
yield, has disappeared. A mature desire is innocent. This, I think, is
the final teaching of the great sages. “To him who has finished the
Path, and passed beyond sorrow, who has freed himself on all sides,
and thrown away every fetter, there is no more fever of grief,” says a
Buddhist writer.
The Master said,
“At fifteen I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm.
“At forty, I had no doubts.
“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without
transgressing what was right.”
[p193] To be able, as Confucius indicates, to follow what the heart
desires without coming into collision with the stubborn facts of life
is the privilege of the utterly innocent and of the utterly wise. It is
the privilege of the infant and of the sage who stand at the two poles
of experience; of the infant because the world ministers to his heart’s
desire and of the sage because he has learned what to desire. Perhaps
this is what Jesus meant when he told his followers that they must
become like little children.
If this is what he meant, and if this is what Buddha, Confucius, and
Spinoza meant, then we have here the clue to the function of high
religion in human affairs. I venture, at least, to suggest that the
function of high religion is to reveal to men the quality of mature
experience, that high religion is a prophecy and an anticipation of
what life is like when desire is in perfect harmony with reality. It
announces the discovery that men can enter into the realm of the spirit
when they have outgrown all childishness.
CHAPTER X [p194]
HIGH RELIGION AND THE MODERN WORLD
1. _Popular Religion and the Great Teachers_
In popular thought it is taken for granted that to be religious is to
accept in some form or other the theocratic view that God governs the
universe. If that assumption is correct then the orthodox who inveigh
against the godlessness of contemporary thought and the militant
atheists who rejoice in this godlessness are both right when they
insist that religion is disappearing. Insofar as religion is identical
with a belief in theocracy, it has indeed lost much of its reality for
modern men.
There is little doubt, I think, that popular religion has been
always and everywhere theocratic in principle. If, then, we are to
define as religion that which the overwhelming majority of mankind
have cherished, it would be necessary to concede at once that the
dissolution of the belief in a supernatural government of human affairs
is a dissolution of religion itself. But if that is conceded, then it
is necessary to concede also that many whom the world recognizes as
its greatest religious teachers were not themselves religious men. For
it could be demonstrated, I think, that in the central intuition of
Aristotle, of the author of the Fourth Gospel, of Buddha, of Spinoza,
to name only originating minds, the theocratic principle is irrelevant.
No one of these teachers held the belief, [p195] which is at the
heart of theocratic religion, that the relationship between God and
man is somehow analogous with that of a king to his subjects, that
the relationship is in any sense a transaction between personalities
involving, however subtly, a quid pro quo, that God’s will and the
human will are interacting forces.
In place of the popular conception of religion as a matter of
commandments and obedience, reward and punishment, in a word, as a
form of government, these great teachers placed their emphasis upon
the conversion, the education, and the discipline of the human will.
Such beliefs as they had about God were not in the nature of oaths of
allegiance to a superior; their concern was not to placate the will of
God but to alter the will of man. This alteration of the human will
they conceived as good not because God commands it, but because it
is intrinsically good for man, because by the test of experience it
yields happiness, serenity, whole-heartedness. Belief is not, as it is
in popular religion, an act which by creating a claim upon divinity
insures man’s salvation; the force of belief, as Mr. Whitehead has put
it, is in “cleansing the inward parts.” Thus religion becomes “the art
and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the
man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.”
The difference between religion conceived as the art and theory of
the internal life of man and religion conceived as cosmic government
is the great difference between the religion of these great sages and
the religion of the multitude. Though in matters of this kind the
distinction is not always absolutely clear in every case, [p196] on
the whole it cannot be disputed, I believe, that the difference is real
and of fundamental importance. If we observe popular religions as they
are administered by ecclesiastical establishments, it is overwhelmingly
plain that their main appeal rests upon the belief that through their
offices the devout are able to obtain eternal salvation, and even
earthly favors, from an invisible king. But if we observe truly, I
think, we shall see also that side by side with the popular religion,
sometimes in open conflict with it, sometimes in outward conformity
with it, there is generally to be found in cultivated communities a
minority to whom religion is primarily a reconditioning of their own
souls. They may be mystics like Eckhart, they may be platonists like
Origen or Dean Inge, they may be protestants like St. Augustine and
Luther in certain phases of their thought, they may be humanists like
Erasmus and Montaigne; as of Confucius, it may be said of them that
“the subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary
things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.” They may
be inside the churches or outside them, but in intention, in the inner
meaning of their religion, they are wholly at variance with the popular
creeds. For in one form or another they reject the idea of attaining
salvation by placating God; in one form or another they regard
salvation as a condition of the soul which is reached only by some kind
of self-discipline.
It must be obvious that religion, conceived in this way, “as the art
and theory of the internal life of man,” is not dissolved by what I
have been calling the acids of modernity. It is the popular religion
which is dissolved. [p197] But just because this vast dissolution is
destroying the disposition to believe in a theocratic government of
the universe, just because men no longer find it wholly credible that
their affairs are subject to the ordinances of a heavenly king, just
because they no longer vividly believe in an invisible power which
regulates their lives, judges them, and sustains them, their only hope
of salvation lies in a religion which provides an internal discipline.
The real effect of modernity upon religion, therefore, is to make the
religion which was once the possession of an aristocracy of the spirit
the only possible kind of religion for all modern men.
2. _The Aristocratic Principle_
To those who want salvation cheap, and most men do, there is very
little comfort to be had out of the great teachers. Spinoza might have
been speaking for all of them when he said:
If the way which I have pointed out ... seems exceedingly hard, it
may nevertheless be discovered. Needs must it be hard, since it is
so seldom found. How would it be possible, if salvation were ready
to our hand, and could without great labor be found, that it should
be by almost all men neglected? But all things excellent are as
difficult as they are rare.
But why, we may ask, is salvation by almost all men neglected? The
answer is that they do not desire that which they have never learned to
desire. “One cannot,” as Voltaire said, “desire that which one does not
know.” Can a man love good wine when he has drunk nothing but ginger
beer? Did we have naturally and instinctively [p198] a taste for
that which constitutes the happiness of the saved, we should already
be saved, and their happiness would be ours. We lack the taste, which
is, I suppose, another way of saying what the theologians meant when
they spoke of original sin. To be saved, in the sense which the sages
had in mind, is by conversion, education, and self-discipline to have
achieved a certain quality and harmony of the passions. Then the good
life is possible. But although men have often heard this said, and have
read about it, unless in some measure they already desire it, the whole
teaching remains mere words and abstractions which are high, cold,
and remote. As long as they feel that the way to happiness is through
a will other than their own, and that somehow events can in this
fashion be made to yield to their unregenerate wishes, in this world or
another, the wisdom of the sages will not touch their hearts, and the
way which is pointed out will be neglected.
Wisdom will seem inhuman. In a sense it is inhuman, for it is so
uncommon. Those who have it speak a strange language, of which the
words perhaps have a familiar sound, but the meaning is too high and
abstract; their delights are strange delights, and unfathomable, like
a passion which we have never known. And if we encounter them in their
lives or in their writings, they seem to us a mixture of grandeur
and queerness. For they are at once more deeply at home in the world
than the transients who make up most of mankind; yet, because of the
quality of their passions, they are not wholly of the world as the
worldling understands it. But unless the worldling is entirely without
the capacity to transcend himself, he is [p199] bound in such an
encounter to catch a glimpse now and then of an experience where there
is a serenity he himself has never known, a peace that passes his
understanding, an ecstasy exquisite and without regret, and happiness
so clarified that it seems like brilliant and kindly light.
Yet no teacher has ever appeared in the world who was wise enough
to know how to teach his wisdom to all mankind. In fact, the great
teachers have attempted nothing so utopian. They were quite well aware
how difficult for most men is wisdom, and they have confessed frankly
that the perfect life was for a select few. It is arguable, in fact,
that the very idea of teaching the highest wisdom to all men is the
recent notion of a humanitarian and romantically democratic age, and
that it is quite foreign to the thought of the greatest teachers.
Gautama Buddha, for example, abolished caste within the religious
order which he founded, and declared that the path to Nirvana was open
to the lowest outcast as well as to the proudest Brahman. But it was
necessary to enter the order and submit to its stringent discipline.
It is obvious that Buddha never believed that very many could or would
do that. Jesus, whom we are accustomed to think of as wholly catholic
in his sympathies, spoke the bitter words: “Give not what is holy to
the dogs and cast not your pearls before swine.” In Mohammedanism that
which is mystical is esoteric: “all those emotions are meant only for
a small number of chosen ones ... even some of the noblest minds in
Islam restrict true religious life to an aristocracy, and accept the
ignorance of the multitude as an irremediable evil.”
There is an aristocratic principle in all the religions [p200] which
have attained wide acceptance. It is significant that Jesus was content
to leave the governance of the mass of men to Caesar, and that he
created no organization during his lifetime beyond the appointment
of the Apostles. It is significant, because it shows how much more
he was concerned with the few who could be saved than with arranging
the affairs of the mass of mankind. Plato, who was a more systematic
teacher than either Jesus or Buddha, did work out an elaborate social
order which took account not only of the philosophers, but of all the
citizens of the state. But in that very attempt he rested upon the
premise that most men will not attain the good life, and that for
them it is necessary to institute the laws. “The worthy disciples of
philosophy will be but a small remnant,” he said, “... the guardian ...
must be required to take the longer circuit, and toil at learning as
well as at gymnastics, or he will never reach the highest knowledge of
all which is his proper calling.”
Perhaps because they looked upon the attempts as hopeless, perhaps
because they did not know how to go about it, perhaps because they
were so wise, the greatest teachers have never offered their full
wisdom to the multitude. Like Mr. Valiant-for-truth in _The Pilgrim’s
Progress_ they said: “My sword I give to him that shall succeed me in
my pilgrimage, and my courage and skill to him that can get it.”
3. _The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation_
But because the teaching of the sages was incomprehensible, the
multitude, impressed but also bewildered, ignored them as teachers and
worshipped them as gods. [p201] In their wisdom the people were not
interested, but in the legends of their power, which rumor created,
there was something understandable. And thus, the religions which have
been organized around the names of great spiritual teachers have been
popular in proportion, one might almost say, to the degree in which the
original insight into the necessity for conversion and self-discipline
has been reduced to a system of commands and promises which the common
man can understand.
For popular religion is suited to the capacities of the unconverted.
The adherents of a popular religion necessarily include an enormous
number of people who are too young, or too feeble, too dull or too
violent, too unstable or too incurious, to have any comprehension
whatsoever of anything but the simplest scheme of rewards and
punishments. An organized religion cannot neglect them if it has any
pretensions to being universal. The great ecclesiastical establishments
have often sheltered spiritual lives, and drawn new vitality from
them. But fundamentally the great churches are secular institutions;
they are governments preoccupied inevitably with the regulation of
the unregenerate appetites of mankind. In their scriptures there is
to be found the teaching that true salvation depends upon internal
reform of desire. But since this reform is so very difficult, in
practice the churches have devoted themselves not so much to making
real conversions, as to governing the dispositions of the unconverted
multitude.
They are immensely engaged by the task of administering their moral
codes, persuading their congregations with promises, and threatening
them with punishments [p202] if they do not keep their childish
lusts within bounds. The fact that they use rewards and punishments,
and appeal even to Caesar, is evidence enough that they are dealing
with the unconverted. The fact that they invoke authority is in
itself evidence that they are speaking to the naive. The fact that
they pretend to have certain knowledge about the constitution of the
universe is evidence that they are interested in those who are not wise
enough to understand the limitations of knowledge. For to the few who
are converted, goodness is pleasant, and needs no sanctions. It needs
no authority, for it has been verified by experience. But when men have
to be coerced into goodness, it is plain that they do not care for it.
Now although the great teachers saw clearly enough the difference
between the popular religion and their own insight, they were under
no great compulsion to try and overcome it. They accepted the fact
that the true religion was esoteric and for the few. They saw that it
demanded the re-education of desire, but they had no systematic and
tested knowledge of how new habits can be formed. Invincible as was
their insight into the principle of happiness, they were compelled
to depend upon introspection, and to generalize from a limited
observation. They understood that the good life was in some degree an
acquired disposition; they were aware that it is not easily or naively
acquired.
For those who somehow had the disposition, the teachers instituted
stern disciplines which were really primitive experiments in the
re-education of desire. But there was no very urgent practical need
which impelled them to search for ways of making disciplines more
[p203] widely available. Those who submitted to them were in general
individuals who were already out of the ordinary. The mass of mankind
lived solidly within the framework of custom and the psychological
compulsions of theocracy. There was no pressing reason, as there is
to-day, now that this ancestral order is dissolved, why anyone should
seek to formulate a mode of life by which ordinary men, thrown upon
their own resources, can find their way without supernatural rules,
commands, punishments, and compensations. In the past there were a
few men here and there who had somehow, for reasons which we do not
understand, outgrown the ancestral society in which they lived. But the
society itself remained. It sheltered them. And it ruled the many.
The peculiarity of our modern situation is that multitudes, instead of
a few, are compelled to make radical and original adjustments. These
multitudes, though they have lost the ancient certainties, have not
outgrown the needs to which they ministered. They need to believe,
but they cannot. They need to be commanded, but they cannot find a
commander. They need support, and there is none. Their situation is
adult, but their dispositions are not. The religion of the spirit would
suit their needs, but it would seem to be beyond their powers.
4. _The Stone Which the Builders Rejected_
The way of life which I have called high religion has in all ages
seemed so unapproachably high that it has been reserved for a voluntary
aristocracy of the spirit. It has, in fact, been looked upon not only
as a kind of splendid idiosyncrasy of a few men here and there, but
[p204] as incompatible, in essence, with the practical conditions
under which life is lived. It is for these reasons, no doubt, that
the practice of high religion has almost invariably been associated
either with a solitary asceticism or with a specially organized life in
monastic establishments. High religion has been regarded as something
separate from the main concerns of mankind.
It is not difficult to see why this was so if we realize that the
insight into the value of disinterestedness, which is the core of high
religion, was not a sudden discovery nor a complete one, anywhere or
any time. Like all other things associated with evolutionary man, this
insight must have had very crude beginnings; it would be possible
to show, I think, that there have been many tentative and partial
perceptions of it which, under the clarifying power of men of genius,
have at times become coherent. When we remember that we are dealing
with an insight into the qualities of a matured personality, there is
no reason to suppose that the full significance of this insight has
ever been completely exhausted. It seems far more likely that the sages
demonstrated the existence of the realm of the spirit, but that it
still remains to be thoroughly explored.
If that is true then the attempt to live by these partial insights
must necessarily have presented inordinate practical difficulties.
Pythagoras, for example, seems to have grasped the idea that the
disinterested study of mathematics and music was cleansing to the
passions and also that in order to be disinterested it was necessary
to have purity of mind. So when he established his society in Southern
Italy he evidently attempted to combine the [p205] serious pursuit
of science with an ascetic discipline. But the pursuit of science was
too much for the mass of the faithful who assumed that “to follow
Pythagoras meant to go barefoot and to abstain from animal flesh and
beans.” And this in turn was too much for the dignity of the learned
who proceeded to dissociate themselves from the disciplinary aspect of
the Pythagorean teaching. It is a fair conclusion, I think, that the
breakdown of this early experiment must have been due fundamentally to
the fact that Pythagoras could not have known any tested method either
of equipping his followers to appreciate science or anything beside a
crude asceticism as a means of moral discipline. If this is true, then
the reason for the failure lay in the fact that though the original
insight was marvelously good, it was not implemented with the necessary
technical knowledge for applying it. Only a few, we may suppose, who
were already by the accidents of nature and nurture suited to the
Pythagorean ideal, can ever have successfully applied it.
In the Christian pursuit of the higher religious life the practical
difficulties presented themselves in a different way. In its beginning
Christianity was a sect of obscure men and women who were out of
touch with the intellectual interests of the Roman world. They were
persecuted aliens both in Palestine and elsewhere, and they came to
the conclusion that the Roman Empire and all its concerns was the
Kingdom of Satan. This, together with the widespread belief in the
Second Coming of Christ, dissociated the Christian life at the outset
from the life of the world. Later on, when Christianity became the
official religion of the Empire, and the Church a great [p206] secular
institution which concerned itself with government and property and
diplomacy and war, those who wished to live as nearly as possible
according to the original meaning of the Gospels were quite evidently
compelled to withdraw and live a separated life. “If any man love the
world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the
world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride
of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world
passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God
abideth forever.”
Although for some centuries the monasteries were the centers of what
learning there was, the impressions left by monasticism on mankind
seems to have been that the highest type of religious life is not
disinterested in human affairs, but uninterested; that it requires not
merely the renunciation of worldly desires, but of the world itself.
The insight was imperfect, and therefore as an example to mankind the
practice was abortive and confusing. Yet only an uncomprehending person
can fail to see that the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience
proceeded from a profound, if partial, understanding of human nature
and its most perfect harmony. Plainly all manner of disorder both in
society and in the individual result from greed, uncontrollable sexual
desire, arrogance, and imperiousness. That was so plain to the early
Christians, and on the other hand it was so little plain how those
powerful passions could be civilized, that the monastics in effect gave
up and attempted to excise them entirely from their natures. In this
they did not succeed.
Had they known any way of curing the fever of human [p207] passion
except by attempting to excise it, the insight of high religion would
have had some practicable meaning for those who did not withdraw from
the world. But no way was known, and therefore the practice of high
religion had to mean separation from human society and violence to
human nature. But why was there no other way known of overcoming the
chaos of the passions? Was it because there is no other way? If that
were so then the world is as hopeless as the early Christians thought
it was; indeed it is more hopeless because it does not show any signs,
as they believed, of coming to an end. Was it because the early
Christian Fathers were not wise enough to discover a way? It is always
a good rule, I think, to discard any idea based on the premise that the
best minds of another age were congenitally inferior to our own. My
conviction is that necessity is the mother of discovery and invention,
and that the reason why the insight of high religion and the methods
of practicing it were so imperfectly developed, is that there was no
practical necessity for developing them.
The mass of men lived in an ancestral order which was regulated by
custom and authority, and made endurable by usage and compensatory
consolations. The organic quality of that society into which they
fitted took care of their passions; those who had outgrown such a
society, or were so constituted that they did not fit it, were the
exceptions. From them came the insight of high religion; for them a
separated life was a possible solution of their personal problems.
There was nothing in the nature of things to compel men to work out a
way of life, I won’t say for all men, but at least for many men, by
which [p208] they could govern their own natures. Behind any such
effort there would almost certainly have to be an urgent need. For the
inertia of the human race is immense.
It is my thesis that because the acids of modernity have dissolved
the adjustments of the ancestral order, there exists to-day on a
scale never before experienced by mankind and of an urgency without a
parallel, the need for that philosophy of life of which the insight
of high religion is a prophecy. For it is immature and unregenerate
desire which creates the disorders and the frustrations that confound
us. The preoccupation of the popular religion has been to find a way of
governing these disorders and of compensating for their frustrations.
The preoccupation of high religion is with the regeneration of the
passions that create the disorders and the frustrations. Insofar as
modernity has dissolved the power of the popular religion to govern
and to compensate, the need for a high religion which regenerates
becomes imperative, and what was once a kind of spiritual luxury of the
few has, under modern conditions, become an urgent necessity of the
many. The insight of high religion which has hitherto indicated a kind
of bypath into rare experiences is now a trail which the leaders of
mankind are compelled to take.
There is implied in this a radical displacement in the field of morals.
The main interest of the practical moralist in the past has been to
interpret, administer, and enforce a moral code. He knew what was
right. The populace acknowledged that he knew what was right. His
task was to persuade and compel them to do what was right. There was
a tacit assumption, which was [p209] quite correct, that very often
the populace and even the moralist himself would much rather have done
what was wrong. Very often they did it. Then they were punished in
this world or in the next. But to-day the moralist finds himself in
a different position. He is no longer absolutely sure that he knows
what is right. The populace, even if it respects him, is disinclined
to believe that a thing is right simply because he says it is. The
populace continues very frequently to prefer what was once regarded
as wrong. It no longer knows whether it is right or wrong, and of
course it gives itself the benefit of the doubt. The result is that
there no longer exists a moral code which the moralist can interpret,
administer, and enforce. The effect of that is moral anarchy within
and without. Since there is no principle under modern conditions which
authorizes the re-establishment of a moral code, the moralist, unless
he revises his premises, becomes entirely ineffectual. To revise his
premises can, under the circumstances, mean only one thing: that he
occupies himself with the problem of how to encourage that growth
into maturity, that outgrowing of naive desire, that cultivation of
disinterestedness, which render passion innocent and an authoritative
morality unnecessary.
The novelty of all this lies in the fact that the guardians of morality
among the people are compelled at last to take seriously what the
teachers of wisdom have taught. The insight of high religion may
be said, then, to be a discovery in the field of human experience
comparable with those prophetic conceptions in the natural sciences
which, after being looked upon for long periods as a [p210] curiosity,
are at last, because circumstances are ripe, seen to be the clue
to otherwise insoluble perplexities. The concept of evolution was
discovered by sheer insight innumerable times before the time of
Darwin. Not much came of it until the rapid evolution of human affairs
after the industrial revolution had somehow brought this neglected
insight into focus with men’s interests. There are many conceptions in
the science of the Greeks which are true intimations of what modern
physicists have found. But an insight of this sort comes into its own
only when circumstances conspire to make it inevitably appropriate.
It is my contention that in the field of morals circumstances are
producing a somewhat analogous condition: that the insight of the sages
into the value of disinterestedness has become the clue to otherwise
insoluble perplexities.
PART III [p211]
THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY
_Where is the way where light dwelleth?_
Job 38:19.
CHAPTER XI [p213]
THE CURE OF SOULS
1. _The Problem of Evil_
The greatest of all perplexities in theology has been to reconcile the
infinite goodness of God with his omnipotence. Nothing puts a greater
strain upon the faith of the common man than the existence of utterly
irrational suffering in the universe, and the problem which tormented
Job still troubles every devout and thoughtful man who beholds the
monstrous injustices of nature. If there were no pain in the world
except that which was felt by responsible beings who had knowingly
transgressed some law of conduct, there would, of course, be no problem
of evil. Pain would be nothing but a rational punishment. But the pain
which is suffered by those who according to all human standards are
innocent, by children and by animals, for example, cannot be fitted
into any rational theory of reward and punishment. It never has been.
The classic attempts to solve the problem of evil invariably falsify
the premises. This falsification may for a time satisfy the inquirer,
but it does not settle the problem. That is why the problem is forever
presenting itself again.
The solutions which have been proposed neglect one or the other of the
attributes of God: tacitly or otherwise either his infinite power or
his infinite love is denied. [p214] In the Old Testament, at least
in the older parts of it, the power of God is exalted at the expense
of his goodness. For it is simply impossible by any human standard
and within any intelligible meaning of the words to regard Yahveh as
wholly good. His cruelty is notorious and his capriciousness is that
of an Oriental despot. It is admitted, I believe, by all but the most
literally-minded of the fundamentalists that there are innumerable
incidents in the Old Testament which have to be expurgated if the Bible
is to be used as a source book of conduct for impressionable children.
Now for the ancient Hebrews who conceived God in their fashion, the
problem of evil did not exist because it had not occurred to them that
a ruler should be just and good as well as great and powerful.
As men came to believe that God must be just, beneficent, and loving,
the problem soon presented itself. And in the Book of Job, which is
supposed to date from the Fifth or Fourth Century B.C., we have a
poignant effort to solve it. Job’s conclusion is that the goodness of
Jehovah is among the “things too wonderful for me.” He accepts the
judgments of God, and acknowledges their goodness by attributing to God
a kind of goodness which is unlike the human conception of goodness.
He holds fast to the premise that God is omnipotent—“I know that thou
canst do all things”—and the other premise that God is beneficent
he redefines. Job’s mind was satisfied, and it is reported that he
prospered greatly thereafter. What had really happened was that Job
gave up the attempt to prove that God was like Job, that the world was
as Job wished it to be, and so piously and with his mind at [p215]
rest he made the best of things, and went about his affairs.
In Job the solution is reached by claiming that what seems evil to
us would really be recognized as goodness if our minds were not so
limited. To the naive this is no solution at all, for it depends
upon using the word ‘good’ in two senses; actually it was a perfect
solution, for Job had resigned himself to the fact that God and the
universe in which he was manifest are not controlled by human desires.
Those who refused to accept this solution involved themselves in
intricate theorizing. Some of them argued that evil is an illusion.
This theory has been widely held, though it is rather difficult to
see how, if evil is an illusion, good is not also an illusion. The
one seems as vividly real as the other. It has also been argued by
some that evil is not important. This, of course, does not solve the
theoretical problem. In fact it ignores the problem and is really
a piece of advice as to how men ought to conduct themselves in the
presence of God. Many have argued, also, that evil exists in the world
to test human character, that by bearing it and conquering it men prove
their worth. There is a core of truth in this observation as there is
in the theory that many things are not so bad as they seem. But it does
not explain why a good and all powerful Deity chose to make men go
through a school of suffering to achieve goodness, when he might have
created them good in the first place.
These theoretical difficulties have furnished the material for endless
debate. I shall not pursue the matter in all its intricacies, but I
venture to point out that what is attempted in all these solutions is
ultimately to make plain [p216] why the ruler of the universe does
not order things as we should order them if we had his power. Once
we confess, as Job finally did, that the plan of the universe is not
what we naively wish it would be, there is no problem of evil. For the
whole difficulty arises because of our desire to impute to the universe
itself, or to the god who rules it, purposes like our own; failing to
find them, we are disappointed, and are plunged into elaborate and
interminable debate.
The final insight of Job, though it seems to be consistent with the
orthodox popular religion, is really wholly inconsistent with the
inwardness of popular religion. The God of the Book of Job does not
minister to human desires, and the story of Job is really the story
of a man’s renunciation of the belief in such a God. It is the story
of how a man learned to accept life maturely. The God whose ways Job
finally acknowledges is no longer a projection of Job’s desires. He is
like the God of Spinoza who cannot be cajoled into returning the love
of his worshipper. He is, in short, the God of an impersonal reality.
Whether God is conceived as a creator of that reality, who administers
it inexorably, or whether he is identified with reality and is
conceived as the sum total of its laws, or whether, as in the language
of modern science, the name of God is not employed at all, is a matter
of metaphysical taste. The great divide lies between those who think
their wishes are of more than human significance and those who do
not. For these latter the problem of evil does not arise out of the
difficulty of reconciling the existence of evil with their assumptions.
They do not assume that reality must conform to human desire. The
[p217] problem for them is wholly practical. It is the problem of how
to remove evil and of how to bear the evil which cannot be removed.
Thus from the attempt to explain the ways of God in the world as it now
is, nature and human nature being what they are, the center of interest
is shifted to an attempt to discover ways of equipping man to conquer
evil. This displacement has in fact taken place in the modern world.
In their actual practice men do not try to account for evil in order
that they may accept it; they do not deny evil in order that they may
not have to account for it; they explain it in order that they may deal
with it.
2. _Superstition and Self-Consciousness_
This change of attitude toward evil is not, as at first perhaps it
may seem, merely a new way of talking about the same thing. It alters
radically the nature of evil itself. For evil is not a quality of
things as such. It is a quality of our relation to them. A dissonance
in music is unpleasant only to a musical ear. Pain is an evil only if
someone suffers, and there are those to whom pain is pleasure and most
men’s evil their good. For things are neutral and evil is a certain way
of experiencing them.
To realize this is to destroy the awfulness of evil. I use the word
‘awful’ in its exact sense, and I mean that in abandoning the notion
that evil has to be reconciled with a theory of how the world is
governed, we rob it of universal significance. We deflate it. The
psychological consequences are enormous, for a very great part of all
human suffering lies not in the pain itself, but in the [p218] anxiety
contributed by the meaning which we attach to it. Lucretius understood
this quite well, and in his superb argument against the fear of death
he reasoned that death has no terror because nothing can be terrible to
those who no longer exist. Before we were born, he says, “we felt no
distress when the Poeni from all sides came together to do battle....
For he whom evil is to befall, must in his own person exist at the
very time it comes, if the misery and suffering are haply to have any
place at all.” St. Thomas defines superstition as the vice of excess
in religion, and in this sense of the word it may be said that the
effect of the modern approach is to take evils out of the context of
superstition.
They cease to be signs and portents symbolizing the whole of human
destiny and become specific and distinguishable situations which have
to be dealt with. The effect of this is not only to limit drastically
the meaning, and therefore the dreadfulness, of any evil, but to
substitute for a general sense of evil an analytical estimate of
particular evils. They are then seen to be of long duration and of
short, preventable, curable, or inevitable. As long as all evils are
believed somehow to fit into a divine, if mysterious, plan, the effort
to eradicate them must seem on the whole futile, and even impious.
The history of medical progress offers innumerable instances of how
men have resisted the introduction of sanitary measures because they
dreaded to interfere with the providence of God. It is still felt, I
believe, in many quarters, even in medical circles, that to mitigate
the labor pains in childbirth is to blaspheme against the commandment
that in pain children shall be brought forth. An aura of dread [p219]
surrounds evil as long as evil situations remain entangled with a
theory of divine government.
The realization that evil exists only because we feel it to be
painful helps us not only to dissociate it from this aura of dread
but to dissociate ourselves from our own feelings about it. This is a
momentous achievement in the inner life of man. To be able to observe
our own feelings as if they were objective facts, to detach ourselves
from our own fears, hates, and lusts, to examine them, name them,
identify them, understand their origin, and finally to judge them, is
somehow to rob them of their imperiousness. They are no longer the same
feelings. They no longer dominate the whole field of consciousness.
They seem no longer to command the whole energy of our being. By
becoming conscious of them we in some fashion or other destroy their
concentration and diffuse their energy into other channels. We cease to
be possessed by one passion; contrary passions retain their vitality,
and an equilibrium tends to establish itself.
Just what the psychological mechanism of all this is I do not pretend
to say. It is something to which psychologists are giving increasing
attention. But since Hellenic times the phenomenon which I have been
describing has been well known. It was undoubtedly what the Sophists
meant by the injunction: know thyself. It was in large measure to
achieve control through detachment that Socrates elaborated his
dialectic, for the Socratic dialectic is an instrument for making men
self-conscious, and therefore the masters of their motives. Spinoza
grasped this principle with great clarity. “An emotion,” he says,
“which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we [p220] form a
clear and distinct idea of it.” He goes on to say that “insofar as the
mind understands all things as necessary, it has more power over the
emotions, or is less passive to them.”
The more recent discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis are an
elaboration of this principle. They are based on the discovery of
Freud and Breuer at the close of the last century that a catharsis of
emotion is often obtained if the patient can be made to recall, and
thus to relive by describing it, the emotional situation which troubles
him. The release of the psychic poison is known technically as an
abreaction. Where the new psychology supplements the insights of the
Sophists, of Socrates, and Spinoza, is in the demonstration that there
are powerful passions affecting our lives of which it is impossible by
ordinary effort of memory “to form a clear and distinct idea.” They are
said to be unconscious, or more accurately, I suppose, they are out
of the reach of the normal consciousness. Freud and his school have
invented an elaborate technic by which the analyst is able frequently
to help the patient thread his way back through a chain of associations
to the buried passion and fetch it into consciousness.
The special technic of psychoanalysis can be tested only by scientific
experience. The therapeutic claims made by psychoanalysts, and their
theories of the functional disorders, lie outside the realm of this
discussion. But the essential principle is not a technical matter.
Anyone can confirm it out of his own experience. It has been discovered
and rediscovered by shrewd observers of human nature for at least
two thousand years. To become detached from one’s passions and to
understand them consciously [p221] is to render them disinterested. A
disinterested mind is harmonious with itself and with reality.
This is the principle by which a humanistic culture becomes bearable.
If the principle of a theocratic culture is dependence, obedience,
conformity in the presence of a superhuman power which administers
reality, the principle of humanism is detachment, understanding, and
disinterestedness in the presence of reality itself.
3. _Virtue_
It can be shown, I think, that those qualities which civilized men,
regardless of their theologies and their allegiances, have agreed to
call virtues, have disinterestedness as their inner principle. I am not
talking now about the eccentric virtues which at some time or other
have been held in great esteem. I am not talking about the virtue of
not playing cards, or of not drinking wine, or of not eating beef, or
of not eating pork, or of not admitting that women have legs. These
little virtues are historical accidents which may or may not once
have had a rational origin. I am talking about the central virtues
which are esteemed by every civilized people. I am talking about such
virtues as courage, honor, faithfulness, veracity, justice, temperance,
magnanimity, and love.
They would not be called virtues and held in high esteem if there were
no difficulty about them. There are innumerable dispositions which are
essential to living that no one takes the trouble to praise. Thus it is
not accounted a virtue if a man eats when he is hungry or goes to bed
when he is ill. He can be depended upon to take care of his immediate
wants. It is only those actions which [p222] he cannot be depended
upon to do, and yet are highly desirable, that men call virtuous. They
recognize that a premium has to be put upon certain qualities if men
are to make the effort which is required to transcend their ordinary
impulses. The premium consists in describing these desirable and rarer
qualities as virtues. For virtue is that kind of conduct which is
esteemed by God, or public opinion, or that less immediate part of a
man’s personality which he calls his conscience.
To transcend the ordinary impulses is, therefore, the common element in
all virtue. Courage, for example, is the willingness to face situations
from which it would be more or less natural to run away. No one thinks
it is courageous to run risks unwittingly. The drunken driver of an
automobile, the boy playing with a stick of dynamite, the man drinking
water which he does not know is polluted, all take risks as great as
those of the most renowned heroes. But the fact that they do not know
the risks, and do not, therefore, have to conquer the fear they would
feel if they did know them, robs their conduct of all courage. The
test is not the uselessness or even the undesirability of their acts.
It is useless to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. But it is brave,
assuming the performer to be in his right mind. It is a wicked thing
to assassinate a king. But if it is not done from ambush, it is brave,
however wicked and however useless.
Because courage consists in transcending normal fears, the highest kind
of courage is cold courage; that is to say, courage in which the danger
has been fully realized and there is no emotional excitement to conceal
the danger. The world instantly recognized this in Colonel Lindbergh’s
[p223] flight to Paris. He flew alone; he was not an impetuous fool,
but a man of the utmost sobriety of judgment. He had no companion to
keep his courage screwed up; he knew exactly what he was doing, yet
apparently he did not realize the rewards which were in store for him.
The world understood that here was somebody who was altogether braver
than the average sensual man. For Colonel Lindbergh did not merely
conquer the Atlantic Ocean; he conquered those things in himself which
the rest of us would have found unconquerable.
The cold courage of a man like Noguchi who, though in failing health,
went into one of the unhealthiest parts of Africa to study a deadly
disease, could come only from a nature which was overwhelmingly
interested in objects outside itself. Noguchi must have known exactly
how dangerous it was for him to go to Africa, and exactly how horrible
was the disease to which he exposed himself. To have gone anyway is
really to have cared for science in a way which very few care for
anything so remote and impersonal. But even courage like Lindbergh’s
and Noguchi’s is more comprehensible than the kind of courage which
anonymous men have displayed. I am thinking of the four soldiers at
the Walter Reed Hospital who let themselves be used for the study
of typhoid fever. They did not even have Lindbergh’s interest in
performing a great feat or Noguchi’s interest in science to buoy them
up and carry them past the point where they might have faltered. Their
courage was as near to absolute courage as it is possible to imagine,
and I who think this cannot even recall their names.
To understand the inwardness of courage would be, I [p224] think, to
have understood almost all the other important virtues. It is “not only
the chiefest virtue and most dignifies the haver,” but it embodies
the principle of all virtue, which is to transcend the immediacy of
desire and to live for ends which are transpersonal. Virtuous action
is conduct which responds to situations that are more extensive,
more complicated, and take longer to reach their fulfillment, than
the situations to which we instinctively respond. An infant knows
neither vice nor virtue because it can respond only to what touches it
immediately. A man has virtue insofar as he can respond to a larger
situation.
He has honor if he holds himself to an ideal of conduct though it is
inconvenient, unprofitable, or dangerous to do so. He has veracity
if he says and believes what he thinks is true though it would be
easier to deceive others or himself. He is just if he acknowledges the
interests of all concerned in a transaction and not merely his own
apparent interest. He is temperate if, in the presence of temptation,
he can still prefer Philip sober to Philip drunk. He is magnanimous if,
as Aristotle says, he cares “more for truth than for opinion,” speaks
and acts openly, will not live at the will of another, except it be a
friend, does not recollect injuries, does not care that he should be
praised or that others should be blamed, does not complain or ask for
help in unavoidable or trifling calamities. For such a man, as the word
‘magnanimous’ itself implies, is “conversant with great matters.”
A man who has these virtues has somehow overcome the inertia of his
impulses. Their disposition is to respond to the immediate situation,
and not merely to the situation [p225] at the moment, but to the most
obvious fragment of it, and not only to the most obvious fragment,
but to that aspect which promises instant pleasure or pain. To have
virtue is to respond to larger situations and to longer stretches of
time and without much interest in their immediate result in convenience
and pleasure. It is to overcome the impulses of immaturity, to
detach one’s self from the objects that preoccupy it and from one’s
own preoccupations. There are many virtues in the catalogues of
the moralists, and they have many different names. But they have a
common principle, which is detachment from that which is apparently
pleasant or unpleasant, and they have a common quality, which is
disinterestedness, and they spring from a common source, which is
maturity of character.
Few men, if any, possess virtue in all its varieties because few men
are wholly matured to the core of their being. We are for the most part
like fruit which is partly ripened: there is sourness and sweetness in
our natures. This may be due to the casualness of our upbringing; it
may be due to unknown congenital causes; it may be due to functional
and organic disease, to partial inferiorities of mind and body. But
it is due also to the fact that we can give our full attention only
to a few phases of our experience. With the equipment at our disposal
we are forced to specialize and to neglect very much. Hence the
mature scientist with petty ambitions and ignoble timidities. Hence
the realistic statesman who is a peevish husband. Hence the man who
manages his affairs in masterly fashion and bungles every personal
relationship when he is away from his office. Hence the loyal friend
who is a [p226] crooked politician, the kind father who is a merciless
employer, the champion of mankind who is an intolerable companion.
If any of these could carry over into all their relationships the
qualities which have made them distinguished in some, they would be
wholly adult and wholly good. It would not be necessary to imagine the
ideal character, for he would already exist.
It is out of these practical virtues that our conception of virtue has
been formed. We may be sure that no quality is likely to have become
esteemed as a virtue which did not somewhere and sometime produce
at least the appearance of happiness. The virtues are grounded in
experience; they are not idle suggestions inadvertently adopted because
somebody took it into his head one fine day to proclaim a new ideal.
There are, to be sure, certain residual and obsolete virtues which
no longer correspond to anything in our own experience and now seem
utterly arbitrary and capricious. But the cardinal virtues correspond
to an experience so long and so nearly universal among men of our
civilization, that when they are understood they are seen to contain a
deposited wisdom of the race.
4. _From Clue to Practice_
The wisdom deposited in our moral ideals is heavily obscured at the
present time. We continue to use the language of morality, having no
other which we can use. But the words are so hackneyed that their
meanings are concealed, and it is very hard, especially for young
people, to realize that virtue is really good and really relevant.
[p227] Morality has become so stereotyped, so thin and verbal, so
encrusted with pious fraud, it has been so much monopolized by the
tender-minded and the sentimental, and made so odious by the outcries
of foolish men and sour old women, that our generation has almost
forgotten that virtue was not invented in Sunday schools but derives
originally from a profound realization of the character of human life.
This sense of unreality is, I believe, due directly to the widespread
loss of genuine belief in the premises of popular religion. Virtue is
a product of human experience: men acquired their knowledge of the
value of courage, honor, temperance, veracity, faithfulness, and love,
because these qualities were necessary to their survival and to the
attainment of happiness. But this human justification of virtue does
not carry conviction to the immature, and would not of itself break up
the inertia of their naive impulses. Therefore, virtue which derives
from human insight has to be imposed on the immature by authority;
what was obtained on Sinai was not the revelation of the moral law but
divine authority to teach it.
Now the very thing which made moral wisdom convincing to our ancestors
makes it unconvincing to modern men. We do not live in a patriarchal
society. We do not live in a world which disposes us to a belief
in theocratic government. And therefore insofar as moral wisdom is
entangled with the premises of theocracy it is unreal to us. The
very thing which gave authority to moral insight for our forefathers
obscures moral insight for us. They lived in the kind of world which
disposed them to practice [p228] virtue if it came to them as a divine
commandment. A thoroughly modernized young man to-day distrusts moral
wisdom precisely because it is commanded.
It is often said that this distrust is merely an aspect of the normal
rebellion of youth. I do not believe it. This distrust is due to a
much more fundamental cause. It is due not to a rebellion against
authority but to an unbelief in it. This unbelief is the result of
that dissolution of the ancient order out of which modern civilization
is emerging, and unless we understand the radical character of this
unbelief we shall never understand the moral confusion of this age. We
shall fail to see that morals taught with authority are pervaded with
a sense of unreality because the sense of authority is no longer real.
Men will not feel that wisdom is authentic if they are asked to believe
that it derives from something which does not seem authentic.
We may be quite certain, therefore, that we shall not succeed in making
the traditional morality convincingly authentic to modern men. The
whole tendency of the age is to make it seem less and less authentic.
The effort to impose it, nevertheless, merely deepens the confusion by
converting the discussion of morals from an examination of experience
into a dispute over its metaphysical sanctions. The consequence of this
dispute is to drive men, especially the most sensitive and courageous,
further away from insight into virtue and deeper and deeper into mere
negation and rebellion. What they are actually rebelling against is the
theocratic system in which they do not believe. But because that system
appears to them to claim a vested interest in morality they empty out
the baby with the [p229] bath, and lose all sense of the inwardness of
deposited wisdom.
For that reason the recovery of moral insight depends upon
disentangling virtue from its traditional sanctions and the
metaphysical framework which has hitherto supported it. It will be
said, I know, that this would rob virtue of its popular prestige. My
answer is that in those communities which are deeply under modern
influences the loss of belief in these very traditional sanctions and
this very metaphysical framework has robbed virtue of its relevance.
I should readily grant that for communities and for individuals which
are outside the orbit of modernity, it is neither necessary nor
desirable to disentangle morality from its ancient associations. It is
also impossible to do so, for when the ancestral order is genuinely
alive, there is no problem of unbelief. But where the problem exists,
when the ancient premises of morality have faded into mere verbal
acknowledgments, then these ancient premises obscure vision. They have
ceased to be the sanctions of virtue and have become obstructions to
moral insight. Only by deliberately thinking their way past these
obstructions can modern men recover that innocence of the eye, that
fresh, authentic sense of the good in human relations on which a living
morality depends.
I have tried in these pages to do that for myself. I am under no
illusion as to the present value of the conceptions arrived at.
I regard them simply as a probable clue to the understanding of
modernity. If the clue is the correct one, the more we explore the
modern world the more coherence it will give to our understanding of
it. A true insight is fruitful; it multiplies insight, until at last
it not [p230] only illuminates a situation but provides a practical
guide to conduct. I believe the insight of high religion into the value
of disinterestedness will, if pursued resolutely, untangle the moral
confusion of the age and make plain, as it is not now plain, what we
are really driving at in our manifold activity, what we are compelled
to want, what, rather dimly now, we do want, and how to proceed about
achieving it. To say that is to say that I believe in the hypothesis.
I do believe in it. I believe that this valuation of human life, which
was once the possession of an élite, now conforms to the premises of a
whole civilization.
The proof of that must lie in a detailed and searching examination
of the facts all about us. If the ideal of human character which
is prophesied in high religion is really suitable and necessary in
modern civilization, then an examination ought to show that events
themselves are pregnant with it. If they are not, then all this is
moonshine and cobwebs and castles in the air. Unless circumstance and
necessity are behind it, the insight of high religion is still, as it
has always been hitherto, a noble eccentricity of the soul. For men
will not take it seriously, they will not devote themselves to the
discovery and invention of ways of cultivating maturity, detachment,
and disinterestedness unless events conspire to drive them to it.
The realization of this ideal is plainly a process of education in
the most inclusive sense of that term. But it will not do much good
to tell mothers that they should lead their children away from their
childishness; an actual mother, even if she understood so abstruse a
bit of advice, and did not reject it out of hand as a reflection upon
the [p231] glory of childhood, would insist upon being told very
concretely what this good advice means and how with a bawling infant in
the cradle you go about cultivating his capacity to be disinterested.
It is not much better to offer the advice to school teachers; they will
wish to know what they must not do that they now do, and what they must
do that they leave undone. But the answers to these questions are no
more to be had from the original concept than are rules for breeding
fine cattle to be had from the theory of evolution and Mendel’s law. By
the use of the concept, psychologists and educators may, if the concept
is correct and if they are properly encouraged, thread their way by
dialectic and by experiment to practical knowledge which is actually
usable as a method of education and as a personal discipline.
If they are to do that they will have to see quite clearly just how
and in what sense the ideal of disinterestedness is inherent and
inevitable in the modern world. The remaining chapters of this book are
an attempt to do that by demonstrating that in three great phases of
human interest, in business, in government, and in sexual relations,
the ideal is now implicit and necessary.
CHAPTER XII [p232]
THE BUSINESS OF THE GREAT SOCIETY
1. _The Invention of Invention_
One of the characteristics of the age we live in is that we are forever
trying to explain it. We feel that if we understood it better we should
know better how to live in it, and should cease to be aliens who do not
know the landmarks of a strange country. There is, however, a school
of philosophic historians who argue that this sense of novelty in the
modern world is an illusion, and that as a matter of fact mankind has
passed before through the same phase of the same inexorable cycle. The
boldest of them, like Oswald Spengler, cite chapter and verse to show
that there have been several of these great cycles of development from
incubation through maturity to decay, and that our western civilization
which began about 900 A.D. is now in the phase which corresponds with
the century after Pericles in the classical world.
That the analogy is striking no reader of Spengler will deny who can
endure Spengler’s procrustean determination to make the evidence fit
the theory. We can see the growth of towns at the expense of the
farms, the rise of capitalism, the growth of international trade and
finance, a development of nationalism, of democracy, attempts at the
abolition of war through international organization, and with it all
a dissolution of the popular religion, of [p233] the traditional
morality, and vast and searching inquiry into the meaning of life.
There is little doubt that the speculation of the Greek philosophers
seems extraordinarily fresh to us, because they were confronted with a
situation in many respects remarkably like our own.
But however nicely such analogies are worked out they are superficial
and misleading. There is something radically new in the modern world,
something for which there is no parallel in any other civilization.
This new thing is usually described as power-driven machinery. Thus
Mr. Charles A. Beard says that “what is called Western or modern
civilization by way of contrast with the civilization of the Orient or
Mediæval times is at bottom a civilization that rests upon machinery
and science as distinguished from one founded on agriculture or
handicraft commerce. It is in reality a technological civilization ...
and ... it threatens to overcome and transform the whole globe.” By way
of illustrating how deeply machinery affects human life, Mr. Beard says
that because they are untouched by this machine civilization “there
are more fundamental resemblances between the culture of a peasant in
a remote village in Spain and that of a peasant in a remote village
in Japan than between the culture of a Christian priest of the upper
Pyrenees and that of a Baptist clergyman in a thriving manufacturing
town in Illinois.”
Mr. H. G. Wells uses much the same argument to show that in spite of
the apparent similarities there is an essential difference between our
civilization and the later phases of the classical. “The essential
difference,” he says, “between the amassing of riches, the extinction
of small farmers and small business men, and the phase of [p234] big
finance in the latter centuries of the Roman republic on the one hand,
and the very similar concentration of capital in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries on the other, lies in the profound difference in
the character of labor that the mechanical revolution was bringing
about. The power of the old world was human power; everything depended
ultimately upon the driving power of human muscle, the muscle of
ignorant and subjugated men. A little animal muscle, supplied by draft
oxen, horse traction, and the like contributed. Where a weight had to
be lifted, men lifted it; where a rock had to be quarried, men chipped
it out; where a field had to be ploughed, men and oxen ploughed it;
the Roman equivalent of the steamship was the galley with its banks of
sweating rowers.... The Roman civilization was built upon cheap and
degraded human beings; modern civilization is being rebuilt upon cheap
mechanical power.”
These differences are genuine enough, and yet it is doubtful whether
Mr. Wells has described the really “new thing in human experience.”
After all a great deal of cheap man power is still used in conjunction
with cheap mechanical power; it is somewhat of an idealization to
talk as if the machine had supplanted the drudge. What Mr. Wells has
in mind, of course, is that in the Roman world a vast proportion of
mankind were doomed to “purely mechanical drudgery” whereas in the
modern world there is tangible hope that they will be released from it.
They are not yet released from it, however, and their hope of release
rests upon the really new element in human experience.
The various mechanical inventions from James Watt’s [p235] steam
engine to the electric dishwasher and vacuum cleaner are not this new
element. All these inventions, singly or collectively, though they have
revolutionized the manner of human life, are not the ultimate reason
why men put such hope in machines. Their hope is not based on the
machines we possess. They are obviously a mixed blessing. Their hope is
based on the machines that are yet to be made, and they have reason to
hope because a really new thing has come into the world. That thing is
the invention of invention.
Men have not merely invented the modern machines. There have been
machines invented since the earliest days, incalculably important, like
the wheel, like sailing ships, like the windmill and the watermill.
But in modern times men have invented a method of inventing, they have
discovered a method of discovery. Mechanical progress has ceased to
be casual and accidental and has become systematic and cumulative. We
know, as no other people ever knew before, that we shall make more
and more perfect machines. When Mr. Beard says that “the machine
civilization differs from all others in that it is highly dynamic,
containing within itself the seeds of constant reconstruction,” he is,
I take it, referring to this supreme discovery which is the art of
discovery itself.
2. _The Creative Principle in Modernity_
Although the disposition to scientific thought may be said to have
originated in remote antiquity, it was not until the Sixteenth Century
of our era that it ceased to appear spasmodically and as if by chance.
The Greeks had their schools on the shores of the Ægean, in Sicily,
[p236] and in Alexandria, and in them some of the conclusions and much
of the spirit of scientific inquiry was imaginatively anticipated.
But the conscious organized effort to relate “general principles to
irreducible and stubborn facts,” as Mr. Whitehead puts it, began about
three hundred years ago. The first society chiefly devoted to science
seems to have been founded by della Porta at Naples in 1560, but it
was closed by the ecclesiastical authorities. Forty years later the
_Accademia dei Lincei_ was founded at Rome with Galileo among its early
members. The Royal Society of London was chartered in 1662. The French
Academy of Sciences began its meetings in 1666, the Berlin Academy in
1700, the American Philosophical Association was proposed by Benjamin
Franklin in 1743 and organized in 1769.
The active pursuit of science is a matter, then, of only a few hundred
years. The practical consequences in the form of useful inventions are
still more recent. Newcomen’s air-and-steam engine dates from 1705,
but it was not until 1764 that James Watt produced a practicable steam
engine. It was not until the beginning of the Nineteenth Century that
invention really got under way and began to transform the structure
of civilization. It was not until about 1850 that the importance of
invention had impressed itself upon the English people, yet they were
the first to experience the effects of the mechanical revolution. They
had seen the first railway, the first steamboat, the illumination
of towns by gas, and the application of power-driven machinery to
manufacture. Professor Bury fixes the Exhibition of London in 1851 as
the event which marks the public recognition of the role of science
[p237] in modern civilization. The Prince Consort who originated the
Exhibition said in his opening speech that it was designed “to give
us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at
which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new
starting-point from which the nations will be able to direct their
further exertions.”
But this public recognition was at first rather sentimental and
gaping. The full realization of the place of science in modern life
came slowly, and only in our generation can it be said that political
rulers, captains of industry, and leaders of thought have actually
begun to appreciate how central is science in our civilization, and to
act upon that realization. In our time governments have begun to take
science seriously and to promote research and invention not only in
the art of war, but in the interest of trade, agriculture, and public
hygiene. Great corporations have established laboratories of their
own, not merely for the perfecting of their own processes, but for
the promotion of pure research. Money has become available in great
quantities for scientific work in the universities, and the educational
curriculum down to the lowest grades has begun to be reorganized not
only in order to train a minority of the population for research and
invention, but to train the great majority to understand and use the
machines and the processes which are available.
The motives and the habits of mind which are thus brought into play at
the very heart of modern civilization are mature and disinterested.
That may not be the primary intention, but it is the inevitable
result. No doubt [p238] governments encourage research in order to
have powerful weapons with which to overawe their neighbors; no doubt
industries encourage research because it pays; no doubt scientists
and inventors are in some measure moved by the desire for wealth and
fame; no doubt the general public approves of science because of the
pleasures and conveniences it provides; no doubt there is an intuitive
sense in modern communities that the prospects of survival both for
nations and for individuals are somehow related to their command of
scientific knowledge. But nevertheless, whatever the motives which
cause men to endow laboratories, to work patiently in laboratories or
to buy the products, the fact remains that inside the laboratory, at
the heart of this whole business, the habit of disinterested realism in
dealing with the data is the indispensable habit of mind. Unless this
habit of mind exists in the actual research, all the endowments and
honorary degrees and prize awards will not produce the results desired.
This is an original and tremendous fact in human experience: that a
whole civilization should be dependent upon technology, that this
technology should be dependent upon pure science, and that this pure
science should be dependent upon a race of men who consciously refuse,
as Mr. Bertrand Russell has said, to regard their “own desires, tastes,
and interests as affording a key to the understanding of the world.”
When I say that the refusal is conscious I do not mean merely that
scientists tell themselves that they must ignore their prejudices.
They have developed an elaborate method for detecting and discounting
their prejudices. It consists of instruments of precision, an accurate
vocabulary, [p239] controlled experiment, and the submission not only
of their results but of their processes to the judgment of their peers.
This method provides a body in which the spirit of disinterestedness
can live, and it might be said that modern science, not in its crude
consequences but in its inward principle, not, that is to say, as
manifested in automobiles, electric refrigerators, and rayon silk, but
in the behavior of the men who invent and perfect these things, is
the actual realization in a practicable mode of conduct which can be
learned and practiced, of the insight of high religion. The scientific
discipline is one way in which this insight, hitherto lyrical and
personal and apart, is brought down to earth and into direct and
decisive contact with the concerns of mankind.
It is no exaggeration to say that pure science is high religion
incarnate. No doubt the science we have is not the whole incarnation,
but as far as it goes it translates into a usable procedure what in the
teaching of the sages has been an esoteric insight. Scientific method
can be learned. The learning of it matures the human character. Its
value can be demonstrated in concrete results. Its importance in human
life is indisputable. But the insight of high religion as such could be
appreciated only by those who were already mature; it corresponded to
nothing in the experience and the necessities of the ordinary man. It
could be talked about but not taught; it could inspire only the few who
were somehow already inspired. With the discovery of scientific method
the insight has ceased to be an intangible and somewhat formless idea
and has become an organized effort which moves mankind more profoundly
than anything else in human affairs. Therefore, [p240] what was once
a personal attitude on the part of a few who were somewhat withdrawn
and disregarded has become the central principle in the careers of
innumerable, immensely influential, men.
Because the scientific discipline is, in fact, the creative element in
that which is distinctively modern, circumstances conspire to enhance
its prestige and to extend its acceptance. It is the ultimate source
of profit and of power, and therefore it is assured of protection and
encouragement by those who rule the modern state. They cannot afford
not to cultivate the scientific spirit: the nation which does not
cultivate it cannot hold its place among the nations, the corporation
which ignores it will be destroyed by its competitors. The training of
an ever increasing number of pure scientists, of inventors, and of men
who can operate and repair machinery is, therefore, a sheer practical
necessity. The scientific discipline has become, as Mr. Graham Wallas
would say, an essential part of our social heritage. For the machine
technology requires a population which in some measure partakes of the
spirit which created it.
Naturally enough, however, the influence of the scientific spirit
becomes more and more diluted the further one goes from the work of the
men who actually conceive, discover, invent, and perfect the modern
machines. From Faraday, Maxwell, and Hertz who did the chief work
which made possible the wireless it is a long way to the broker who
sells radio stock or the householder with his six-tube set. I have not
been supposing that these latter partake in any way of the original
spirit which made the radio possible. But it is a fact of enormous
consequences, [p241] cumulative in its effect upon the education of
succeeding generations, that the radio, and all the other contrivances
around which modern civilization is constructed, should be possible
only by the increasing use of a scientific discipline.
3. _Naive Capitalism_
The application of science to the daily affairs of men was acclaimed
at first with more enthusiasm than understanding. “That early people,”
said Buffon, speaking of the Babylonians, “was very happy, because
it was very scientific.” Entranced with the success of the Newtonian
physics and by the dazzling effect of inventions, the intellectuals
of the Eighteenth Century persuaded themselves that science was a
messianic force which would liberate mankind from pain, drudgery, and
error. It was believed that science would somewhat mysteriously endow
mankind with invincible power over the forces of nature, and that men,
if they were released from the bondage of religious custom and belief,
could employ the power of science to their own consummate happiness.
The mechanical revolution, in short, was inaugurated on the theory
that the natural man must be liberated from moral conventions and that
nature must be subjugated by mechanical instruments.
There are intelligible historical reasons why our great grandfathers
adopted this view. They found themselves in a world regulated by the
customs and beliefs of a landed society. They could not operate their
factories successfully in such a society, and they rebelled fiercely
against the customs which restricted them. That rebellion [p242]
was rationalized in the philosophy of _laissez-faire_ which meant in
essence that machine industry must not be interfered with by landlords
and peasants who had feudal rights, nor by governments which protected
those rights. On the positive side this rebellion expressed itself in
declarations of the rights of man. These declarations were a denial of
the vested rights of men under the old landed order and an assertion of
the rights of men, particularly the new middle-class men, who proposed
to make the most of the new industrial and mechanical order. By the
rights of men they meant primarily freedom of contract, freedom of
trade, freedom of occupation—those freedoms, that is to say, which
made it possible for the new employer to buy and sell, to hire and fire
without being accountable to anyone.
The prophet of this new dispensation was Adam Smith. In the _Wealth of
Nations_ he wrote that
All systems either of preference or of restraint ... being thus
completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural
liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as
he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to
pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry
and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order
of men.
The employing class in the early days of capitalism honestly believed,
and indeed its less enlightened members still believe to this very
day, that somehow the general welfare will be served by trusting
naively to the acquisitive instincts of the employing capitalist. Thus
at the outset the machine technology was applied under the direction
of men who scorned as sentimental, when they [p243] did not regard
as subversive, that disinterestedness which alone makes possible the
machine technology itself. They did not understand science. They merely
exploited certain of the inventions which scientists produced. What
they believed, insofar as they had any philosophy, was that there
exists a preestablished harmony in the universe—an “obvious and
simple system of natural liberty,” in Adam Smith’s language, “which
establishes itself of its own accord”—by which if each man naively
pursued his primitive impulse to have and to hold in competition with
other men, peace, prosperity, and happiness would ensue.
They did not ensue. And the social history of the last seventy-five
years has in large measure been concerned with the birth pains of an
industrial philosophy that will really suit the machine technology and
the nature of man. For the notion that an intricate and delicately
poised industrial mechanism could be operated by uneducated men
snatching competitively at profits was soon exposed as a simple-minded
delusion.
It was discovered that if each banker was permitted to do what seemed
to him immediately most profitable, the result was a succession of
disastrous inflations and deflations of credit; that if natural
resources in oil, coal, lumber, and the like were subjected to the
competitive principle, the result was a shocking waste of irreplaceable
wealth; that if the hiring and firing of labor were carried on under
absolute freedom of contract, a whole chain of social evils in the form
of child labor, unsuitable labor for women, sweating, unemployment,
and the importation of cheap and unassimilable labor resulted; that if
business men were left to their own devices the consumer of necessary
[p244] goods was helpless when he was confronted with industries
in which there was an element of monopoly. There is no need here to
recount the well-known story of how in every modern community the
theory of free competition has in the course of the last generation
been modified by legislation, by organized labor, by organized business
itself. So little has _laissez-faire_ worked under actual experience
that all the powers of the government have actually had to be invoked
to preserve a certain amount of compulsory “free competition.” For the
industrial machine, as soon as it passes out of the early phase of
rough exploitation in virgin territory, becomes unmanageable by naively
competitive and acquisitive men.
4. _The Credo of Old-Style Business_
It was frequently pointed out by moralists like Ruskin and William
Morris, and by churchmen as well, that this “obvious and simple system
of natural liberty” by which “every man was left perfectly free to
pursue his own interest his own way,” was not only contrary to the
dogmas of the popular religion but irreconcilable with moral wisdom.
The credo of the unregenerate business man was utterly atheistical in
its premises, for it displaced the notion that there is any higher
will than his own to which the employer is accountable. It was more
than atheistical, however; it was, in Aristotle’s sense of the word,
barbarous in that it implied “the living as one likes” with virtually
complete acquiescence in the supremacy of the acquisitive instinct.
There is no reason to suppose that such theoretical comments on the
credo of naive capitalism did more than [p245] rub off a little
of its unction. Capitalism may be, as Mr. Maynard Keynes has said,
“absolutely irreligious ... often, though not always, a mere congeries
of possessors and pursuers.” Were the credo workable in practice, some
way would have been found of anointing it with attractive phrases. The
real reason for the gradual abandonment of the credo, proclaimed by
Adam Smith and repeated so steadily since his day, is that the credo
of naive capitalism is deeply at variance with the real character
of modern industry. It rests upon false premises, is therefore
contradicted by experience, and has proved to be unworkable.
The system of natural liberty assumes that if each man pursues his own
interest his own way, each man will promote his interest. There is an
unanalyzed fallacy in this theory which makes it utterly meaningless.
It is assumed that each man knows his own interest and can therefore
pursue it. But that is precisely what no man is certain to know, and
what few men can possibly know if they consult only their own impulses.
There is nothing in the natural equipment of man which enables him to
know intuitively whether it will be profitable to increase his output
or reduce it, to enter a new line of business, to buy or to sell, or to
make any of the other thousand and one decisions on which the conduct
of business depends. Since he is not born with this wisdom, since
he does not automatically absorb it from the air, to pursue his own
interest his own way is a fairly certain way to disaster.
The fallacy of the theory of natural liberty is undetected in a
bonanza period of industrial development. Where the business man has
unexhausted natural resources to [p246] draw upon, where there is a
surplus of customers competing for his goods, he can with naive and
furious energy pursue his own interests his own way and reap enormous
profits. There is no real resistance from the outside; there are no
stubborn and irreducible facts to which he must adjust himself. He
can proceed with an infantile philosophy to achieve success. But this
bonanza period when the omnipotence of the capitalist is unthwarted,
and his omniscience therefore assumed, soon comes to an end. In
advanced communities the mere multiplication of industries produces
such a complicated environment that the business man is compelled to
substitute considered policies for his intuitions, objective surveys
for his guesses, and conferences world without end for his natural
liberties.
What has upset the idea of the old-style business man that he knows
what’s what is that the relevant facts are no longer visible. The owner
of a primitive factory might have known all his working men and all
his customers; the keeper of a little neighborhood shop may still, to
a certain extent, know personally his whole business. But for most
men to-day the facts which matter vitally to them are out of sight,
beyond their personal control, intricate, subject to more or less
unpredictable changes, and even with highly technical reporting and
analysis almost unintelligible to the average man.
It is, of course, the machine process itself which has created these
complications. Men are forced to buy and sell in markets that for many
commodities are world-wide: they do not buy and sell in one market
but in many markets, in markets for raw materials, in markets for
semi-finished goods, in wholesale and retail markets, in labor [p247]
markets, in the money market. They employ and are employed in corporate
organizations which are owned here, there, and everywhere. They compete
not only with their obvious competitors in the same line of business,
but with competitors in wholly different lines of business, automobiles
with railroads, railroads with ships, cotton goods with silk and silk
with artificial silk, pianos with furs and cigarettes with chewing gum.
The modern environment is invisible, complex, without settled plan,
subtly and swiftly changing, offering innumerable choices, demanding
great knowledge and imaginative effort to comprehend it.
It is not a social order at all as the Greek city state or the feudal
society was a social order. It is rather a field for careers, an arena
of talents, an ordeal by trial and error, and a risky speculation. No
man has an established position in the modern world. There is no system
of rights and duties to which he is clearly subject. He moves among
these complexities which are shrouded in obscurity, making the best he
can out of what little it is possible for him to know.
5. _Old-Style Reform and Revolution_
Naive capitalism—that is to say, the theory of each for himself
according to such light as he might happen to possess—produced such
monstrous evils the world over that an anti-capitalist reaction was
the inevitable result. What had happened was that the most intricate
and consequential technology which man has ever employed on this
planet was given over to the direction of a class of enterprising,
acquisitive, uneducated, and undisciplined [p248] men. No doubt it
could not have been otherwise. The only discipline that was known was
the discipline of custom in a society of farmers, hand-workers, and
traders. The only education available was one based on the premises
of the past. The revolution in human affairs produced by the machine
began slowly, and no one could have anticipated its course. It would
be absurd, therefore, to complain in retrospect over the fact that
no one was prepared for the industrial changes which took place.
The only absurdity, and it is still a prevalent one, is to go on
supposing that the political philosophy and the “economic laws” which
were extemporized to justify the behavior of the first bewildered
capitalists have any real bearing upon modern industry.
But it is almost equally absurd to take too seriously the “reforms”
and “solutions” which were devised by kindhearted men to alleviate
the pains suffered by those who were hurt by the results of this
early capitalist control of the machine. These proposals, when they
are examined, turn out almost invariably to have been proposals for
coercing or for abolishing the then masters of industry. I do not
mean to deny the utility of the long series of legislative enactments
which began about the middle of the Nineteenth Century and are still
being elaborated. The factory acts, the regulatory laws, the measures
designed to protect the consumers against fraud were, looked at singly,
good, bad, or indifferent. As a whole they were a necessary attempt
to police those who had been left free to pursue their own interest
their own way. But when it has been said that they were necessary,
and that they are still necessary, it is important to realize just
what they [p249] imply. They imply that the masters of industry are
unregenerate and will remain unregenerate. The whole effort to police
capitalism assumes that the capitalist can be civilized only by means
of the police. The trouble with this theory is that there is no way
to make sure that the policemen will themselves be civilized. It
presupposes that somehow politicians and office-holders will be wise
enough and disinterested enough to make business men do what they would
not otherwise do. The fundamental problem, which is to find a way of
directing industry wisely, is not solved. It is merely deposited on the
doorsteps of the politician.
The revolutionary programs sponsored by the socialists in the half
century before the Great War were based on the notion that it is
impossible to police the capitalist-employers and that, therefore, they
should be abolished. In their place functionaries were to be installed.
The theory was that these functionaries, being hired by the state and
being deprived of all incentive for personal profit, would administer
the industrial machine disinterestedly. The trouble with this theory is
in its assumption that the removal of one kind of temptation, namely,
the possibility of direct personal pecuniary profit—will make the
functionaries mature and disinterested men.
This is nothing but a new variant of the ascetic principle that it is
possible to shut off an undesirable impulse by thwarting it. Human
nature does not work that way. The mere frustration of an impulse like
acquisitiveness produces either some new expression of that impulse or
disorders due to its frustration. It produces, that is to say, either
corruption or the lethargy, the pedantry, and the [p250] officiousness
which are the diseases of bureaucracy the world over. The socialists
are right, as the early Christians were right, in their profound
distrust of the acquisitive instinct as the dominant motive in society.
But they are wrong in supposing that by transferring the command of
industry from business men to socialist officials they can in any
fundamental sense alter the acquisitive instinct. That can be done only
by refining the human character through a better understanding of the
environment. I do not mean to say that a revolution like the Russian
does not sweep away a vast amount of accumulated rubbish. I am talking
not about the salutary destruction which may accompany a revolution,
but of the problem which confronts the successful revolutionists when
they have to carry on the necessary affairs of men.
When that time comes they are bound to find that the administration
of industry under socialism no less than under capitalism depends
upon the character of the administrators. Corrupt, stupid, grasping
functionaries will make at least as big a muddle of socialism as
stupid, selfish, and acquisitive employers can make of capitalism.
There is no escape from this elementary truth, and all social policies
which attempt to ignore it must come to grief. They are essentially
utopian. The early doctrine of _laissez-faire_ was utopian because it
assumed that unregenerate men were destined somehow to muddle their
way to a harmonious result. The early socialism was utopian because it
assumed that these same unregenerate men, once the laws of property had
been altered, would somehow muddle their way to a harmonious result.
Both ignored the chief lesson of human experience, which is [p251] the
insight of high religion, that unregenerate men can only muddle into
muddle.
A dim recognition of this truth has helped to inspire the procedure of
the two most recent manifestations of the revolutionary spirit. I refer
to bolshevism and to fascism. It is proper, I believe, to talk of them
as one phenomenon for their fundamental similarities, as most everyone
but the bolshevists and the fascists themselves has noted, are much
greater than their superficial differences. They were attempts to cure
the evils resulting from the breakdown of a somewhat primitive form
of capitalism. In neither Russia nor Italy had modern industrialism
passed beyond its adolescent phase. In both countries the prevailing
social order for the great mass of people was still pre-machine and
pre-industrial. In both countries the acids of modernity had not yet
eaten deeply into the religious disposition of the people. In both
countries the natural pattern of all government was still the primitive
pattern of the hierarchy with an absolute sovereign at the top. The
bolshevik dictatorship and the fascist dictatorship, underneath all
their modernist labels and theories, are feudal military organizations
attempting to subdue and administer the machine technology.
The theorists of the two dictatorships are, however, men educated under
modern influences, and the result is that their theories are an attempt
to explain the primitive behavior of the two dictatorships in terms
which are consistent with modern ideas. The formula reached in both
instances is the same one. The dictatorships are said to be temporary.
Their purpose, we are told, is to put the [p252] new social order
into effect, and to keep it going long enough by dictation from on top
to give time for a new generation to grow up which will be purged of
those vices which would make the new order unworkable. The bolshevists
and fascists regard themselves as ever so much more realistic than
the old democratic socialists and the _laissez-faire_ liberals whom
they have executed, exiled, or dosed with castor oil. In an important
sense they are more realistic. They have recognized that a substitute
for primitive capitalism cannot be inaugurated or administered by a
generation which has been schooled in the ways of primitive capitalism.
And therefore the oligarchy of dictators, as a conscious, enlightened,
superior, and heavily armed minority, propose to administer the
industrial machine as trustees until there is a generation ready to
accept the responsibilities.
It would be idle to predict that they will not succeed. But it is
reasonable, I believe, to predict that if they succeed it will
be because they are administering relatively simple industrial
arrangements. It is precisely because the economic system of Russia is
still fundamentally pre-capitalist and pre-mechanical that the feudal
organization of the bolshevists is most likely to survive. Because
the economic system of Italy is more modern than Russia’s, the future
of the fascist dictatorship is much less assured. For insofar as the
machine technology is advanced, it becomes complex, delicate, and
difficult to manage by commands from the top.
6. _The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct_
While both the bolshevists and the fascists look upon [p253]
themselves as pathfinders of progress, it is fairly clear, I think,
that they are, in the literal meaning of the term, reactionary. They
have won their victories among the people to whom modern large scale
industrial organization is still an unnatural and alien thing. It is no
accident that fascism or bolshevism took root in Italy and Spain, but
not in Germany and England, in Hungary but not in Austria, in Poland
but not in Czechoslovakia, in Russia but not in Scandinavia, in China
but not in Japan, in Central America but not in Canada or the United
States. Dictatorship, based on a military hierarchy, administering
the affairs of the community on behalf of the “nation” or of the
“proletariat,” is nothing but a return to the natural organization of
society in the pre-machine age. Some countries, like Russia, Mexico,
and China, for example, are still living in the pre-machine age.
Others, like Italy, had become only partially industrialized when they
were subjected to such strains by the War that they reverted to the
feudal pattern of behavior. Unable to master the industrial process by
methods which are appropriate to it, the fascists and the bolshevists
are attempting to master it by methods which antedate it. That is why
military dictatorship in a country like Mexico may be looked upon as
the normal type of social control, whereas in Italy it is regressive
and neurotic. Feudal habits are appropriate to a feudal society; in
a semi-industrialized nation they are a social disease. It is the
disease of frightened and despairing men who, having failed to adjust
themselves to the reality of the industrial process, try, by main
force and awkwardness, to adjust the machine process to a pre-machine
mentality. [p254]
The more primitive the machine process is—that is, the more nearly it
resembles the petty handicrafts of earlier days—the better are the
chances for survival of a bolshevist or fascist dictatorship. Where
the machine technology is really established and advanced it is simply
unmanageable by militarized functionaries. For when the process has
become infinitely complicated, the subdivision of function is carried
so far, the internal adjustments are so numerous and so varied that
no collection of oligarchs in a capital city, however much they may
look like supermen, can possibly direct the industrial system. In its
advanced stages, as it now exists in England, Germany, or the United
States, nobody comprehends the system as a whole. One has only to
glance over the financial pages of an American newspaper, to look at
the list of corporations doing business, to try and imagine the myriad
daily decisions at a thousand points which their business involves,
in order to realize the bewildering complexity of modern industrial
society. To suppose that all that can be administered, or even
directed, from any central point by any human brain, by any cabinet of
officeholders or cabal of revolutionists, is simply to have failed to
take it in. Here is the essential reason why bolshevism and fascism
are, as we say, un-American. They are no less un-Belgian, un-German,
un-English. For they are unindustrial.
The same reasons which make dictatorship unworkable are rapidly
rendering obsolete the attempts to reform industry by policing it.
Every year as the machine technology becomes more elaborated, the
legislative control for which the pre-war progressives fought becomes
less [p255] effective. It becomes more and more difficult for
legislatures to make laws to protect the workers which really fit the
rapidly changing conditions of work. Hence the tendency to put the real
law-making power in the hands of administrative officials and judges
who can adjust the general purpose of the law to the unclassifiable
facts of industry. The whole attempt to regulate public utilities in
the interest of the consumer is chaotic, for these organizations, by
their intricacies, their scale, and their constant revolutions in
technology, tend to escape the jurisdiction of officials exercising
a local jurisdiction. The current outcry against the multiplication
of laws and the meddling of legislatures is in part, but not wholly,
the outcry of old-fashioned business men demanding their old natural
liberty to pursue their own interest their own way. The outcry is
due no less to a recognition that the industrial process is becoming
too subtly organized to be policed successfully by the wholesale,
uninformed enactments of legislatures.
Yet the very thing which makes an advanced industrial organization
too complex to be directed by a dictatorship, or to be policed by
democratic politicians, is forcing the leaders of industry to evolve
forms of self-control. When I say that they are being forced to do this
I am not referring to those ostentatiously benevolent things which are
done now and then as sops to Cerberus. There is a certain amount of
reform undertaken voluntarily by men who profess to fear ‘bolshevism,’
and if not bolshevism, then Congress. That is relatively unimportant.
So also is the discovery that it pays to cultivate the good will of
the public. What I am referring to is the fact that the [p256] sheer
complexity of the industrial system would make it unmanageable to
business men, no less than to politicians or dictators, if business men
were not learning to organize its control.
It is the necessity of stabilizing their own business, of directing
technical processes which are beyond the understanding of stockholders,
of adjusting the supply and demand of the multitudinous elements
they deal in, which is the compelling force behind that divorce
between management and ownership, that growing use of experts and of
statistical measurements, and that development of trade associations,
of conferences, committees, and councils, with which modern industry
is honeycombed. The captain of industry in the romantic sense tends to
disappear in highly evolved industrial organizations. His thundering
commands are replaced by the decisions of executives who consult with
representatives of the interests involved and check their opinions
by the findings of experts. The greater the corporation the more
the shareholders and the directors lose the actual direction of the
institution. They cannot direct the corporation because they do
not really know what it is and what it is doing. That knowledge is
subdivided among the executives and bureau chiefs and consultants, all
of them on salary; each of them is so relatively small a factor in the
whole that his personal success is in very large degree bound up with
the success of the institution. A certain amount of jealousy, intrigue,
and destructive pushing, of office politics, in short, naturally
prevails, men being what they are. But as compared with the old-style
business man, the ordinary executive in a great corporation is
something quite strange. He is [p257] so little the monarch of all he
surveys, his experience is so continually with stubborn and irreducible
facts, he is so much compelled to adjust his own preferences to the
preferences of others, that he becomes a relatively disinterested
person. The more clearly he realizes the nature of his position in
industry, the more he tends to submit his desires to the discipline of
objective information. And the more he does this the less dominated
he is by the acquisitiveness of immaturity. He may on the side gamble
acquisitively in the stock market or at the race track, but in relation
to his business his acquisitive instinct tends to become diffused and
to be absorbed in the job itself.
7. _Ideals_
It is my impression that when machine industry reaches a certain scale
of complexity it exerts such pressure upon the men who run it that they
cannot help socializing it. They are subject to a kind of economic
selection under which only those men survive who are capable of taking
a somewhat disinterested view of their work. A mature industry, because
it is too subtly organized to be run by naively passionate men, puts a
premium upon men whose characters are sufficiently matured to make them
respect reality and to discount their own prejudices.
When the machine technology is really advanced, that is to say when it
has drawn great masses of men within the orbit of its influence, when
a corporation has become really great, the old distinction between
public and private interest becomes very dim. I think it is destined
largely to disappear. It is difficult even to-day to say [p258]
whether the great railways, the General Electric Company, the United
States Steel Corporation, the bigger insurance companies and banks are
public or private institutions. When institutions reach a point where
the legal owners are virtually disfranchised, when the direction is in
the hands of salaried executives, technicians, and experts who hold
themselves more or less accountable in standards of conduct to their
fellow professionals, when the ultimate control is looked upon by the
directors not as “business” but as a trust, it is not fanciful to say,
as Mr. Keynes has said, that “the battle of socialism against unlimited
private profit is being won in detail hour by hour.”
Insofar as industry itself evolves its own control, it will regain its
liberty from external interference. To say that is to say simply that
the “natural liberty” of the early business man was unworkable because
the early business man was unregenerate: he was immature, and he was
therefore acquisitive. The only kind of liberty which is workable in
the real world is the liberty of the disinterested man, of the man who
has transformed his passions by an understanding of necessity. He can,
as Confucius said, follow what his heart desires without transgressing
what is right. For he has learned to desire what is right.
The more perfectly we understand the implications of the machine
technology upon which our civilization is based, the easier it will be
for us to live with it. We shall discern the ideals of our industry in
the necessities of industry itself. They are the direction in which it
must evolve if it is to fulfill itself. That is what ideals are. They
are not hallucinations. They are not a collection [p259] of pretty and
casual preferences. Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that
which is desirable in that which is possible. As we discern the ideals
of the machine technology we can consciously pursue them, knowing that
we are not vainly trying to impose our casual prejudices, but that we
are in harmony with the age we live in.
CHAPTER XIII [p260]
GOVERNMENT IN THE GREAT SOCIETY
1. _Loyalty_
The difficulty of discovering an industrial philosophy which fits
machine industry on a large scale has proved less trying than the
discovery of a political philosophy which fits the modern state. I do
not know why this should be so unless it be that, as compared with
politicians, business men have had a closer opportunity to observe
and more pressing reasons for trying to understand the transformation
wrought by machinery and scientific invention. Certainly even the best
political thinking is notably inferior in realism and in pertinence
to the economic thinking which now plays so important a part in the
direction of industry. To a very considerable degree the writer on
politics to-day is about where the economist was when all economic
theory began and for all practical purposes seemed to end with Robinson
Crusoe and his man Friday. Nobody takes political science very
seriously, for nobody is convinced that it is a science or that it has
any important bearing on politics.
In very considerable measure political theory in the modern world
is sterilized by its own ideas. There have been passed down from
generation to generation a collection of concepts which are so hallowed
and so dense that their only use is to excite emotions and to obscure
insight. [p261] How many of us really know what we are talking
about when we use words like the state, sovereignty, independence,
democracy, representative government, national honor, liberty, and
loyalty? Very few of us, I think, could define any of these terms
under cross-examination, though we are prepared to shed blood, or at
least ink, in their behalf. These terms have ceased to be intellectual
instruments for apprehending the facts we have to deal with and have
become push buttons which touch off emotional reflexes.
As good a way as any to raise the temperature of political debate is to
talk about loyalty. Everybody regards himself as loyal and resents any
imputation upon his loyalty, yet even a cursory inspection of this term
will show, I think, that it may mean any number of different things.
It is clearest when used in a military sense. A loyal soldier is one
who obeys his superior officer. A loyal officer is one who obeys his
commander-in-chief. But just exactly what is a loyal commander-in-chief
cannot be told so easily. He is loyal to the nation. He is loyal to the
best interests of the nation. But what those best interests may be,
whether they mean making peace or carrying the war into the enemy’s
country, is an exceedingly debatable question. When the citizen’s
loyalty is in question the whole matter becomes immensely subtle. Must
he be loyal to every law and every command issued by the established
authorities, kings, legislators, and aldermen? There are many who would
say that this is the definition of civic loyalty, to obey the law
without qualifications while it is a law. But such definition puts the
taint of disloyalty on almost all citizens [p262] of the modern state.
For the fact is that all the laws on the books are not even known, and
that a considerable portion are entirely disregarded, and many it is
impossible to obey. The definition, moreover, places outside the pale
many who rank as great patriots, men who defied the law out of loyalty
to some principle which the lawmakers have rejected. But what makes
matters even more complicated is the fact that in modern communities
the principle is accepted that the commands of the established
authorities not only may be criticized but that they ought to be.
At this stage of political development the military element in
loyalty has virtually disappeared. The idea of toleration, of freedom
of speech, and above all the idea of organized opposition, alters
radically the attributes of the sovereign. For a sovereign who has to
be obeyed but not believed in, whose decisions are legitimate matters
of dispute, who may be displaced by his bitterest opponents, has lost
all semblance of omnipotence and omniscience. “He has sovereignty,”
wrote Jean Bodin, “who, after God, acknowledges no one greater than
himself.” Our governors command only for the time being—and within
strict limits. Their authority is only such as they can win and hold.
Political loyalty under these conditions, whatever else it may be,
is certainly not unqualified allegiance to those who hold office, to
the policies they pursue, or even to the laws they enact. Neither the
government as it exists, nor its conduct, nor even the constitution by
which it operates, exercises any ultimate claim upon the loyalty of the
citizen. The most one can say, I think, is that the loyal citizen is
one who loves his country and regards the status quo as an arrangement
which he [p263] is at liberty to modify only by argument, according to
well-understood rules, without violence, and with due regard for the
interests and opinions of his fellow men. If he is loyal to this ideal
of political conduct he is as loyal as the modern state can force him
to be, or as it is desirable that he should be.
2. _The Evolution of Loyalty_
Broadly speaking, the evolution of political loyalty passes through
three phases. In the earliest, the most primitive, and for almost all
men the most natural, loyalty is allegiance to a chieftain; in the
middle phase it tends to become allegiance to an institution—that is
to say, to a corporate, rather than to a human, personality; and in the
last phase it becomes allegiance to a pattern of conduct. The kind of
government which any community is capable of operating is very largely
determined by the kind of loyalty of which its members are capable.
It is plain, for example, that among a people who are capable only of
loyalty to another human being the political system is bound to take
the shape of a hierarchy, in which each man is loyal to his superior,
and the man at the top is loyal to God alone. Such a society will be
feudal, military, theocratic. If it is successfully organized it will
be an ordered despotism, culminating, as the feudal system did, in
God’s Vice-gerent on earth. If it is unsuccessfully organized, as for
example, in the more backward countries of Central America to-day,
the system of personal allegiances will produce little factions each
with its chief, all of them contending for, without quite achieving,
absolute power. This type of organization is so fundamentally [p264]
human that it prevails even in communities which think they have
outgrown it. Thus it appears in what Americans call a political
machine, which is nothing but a hierarchy of professional politicians
held together by profitable personal loyalties. The political boss
is a demilitarized chieftain in the direct line of descent from his
prototypes.
The modern world has come to regard organization on the basis of human
allegiances as alien and dangerous. Yet the political machine exists
even in the most advanced communities. The reason for that is obvious.
With the enfranchisement of virtually the whole adult population,
political power has passed into the hands of a great mass of people
most of whom are altogether incapable of loyalty to institutions,
much less to ideas. They do not understand them. For these voters
the only kind of political behavior is through allegiance to a human
superior, and modern democracies are considered fortunate if the
political leaders and bosses on whom these human allegiances converge
are relatively loyal to the institutions of the country. This, for
example, is the meaning of the dramatic speech in which President
Calles on September 1, 1928, voluntarily renounced the continuation of
his own dictatorship. “For the first time in Mexican history,” he said,
“the Republic faces a situation (owing to the assassination of General
Obregon) whose dominant note is the lack of a military leader, which
is going to make it finally possible for us to direct the policy of
the country into truly institutional channels, striving to pass once
for all from our historical condition of one-man rule to the higher,
more dignified, more useful, and more civilized condition of a nation
of laws and institutions.” It is [p265] hardly to be supposed that
President Calles thought that the Mexican people as a whole could pass
once for all from their historical condition of one-man rule. What he
meant was that the political chieftains to whom the people were loyal
ought thereafter to arrange the succession and to exercise power not
as seemed desirable to them, or as they might imagine that God had
privately commanded them, but in accordance with objective rules of
political conduct.
The conceptions of sovereignty which we inherit are derived from the
primitive system of personal allegiances. That is why the conception
of sovereignty has become increasingly confused as modern civilization
has become more complex. In the Middle Ages the theory reached its
symmetrical perfection. Mankind was conceived as a great organism in
which the spiritual and temporal hierarchies were united as the soul
is united with the body in “an inseverable connection and an unbroken
interaction which must display itself in every part and also throughout
the whole.” But of course even in the Middle Ages the symmetry of this
conception was marred by the fierce disputes between the Emperors and
the Popes. After the Sixteenth Century the whole conception began to
disintegrate. There appeared a congeries of monarchs each claiming to
rule in his territory by divine right. But obviously when there are
many agents of the Lord ruling men, and when they do not agree, the
theory of sovereignty in its moral aspects is in grave difficulties.
As time went on, limitations of all kinds began to be imposed upon
sovereigns. The existence at the same time of many sovereigns produced
the need of international law, for obviously there could have been no
international [p266] law in a world where all of mankind, barring
infidels who did not have to be considered, were under one sovereign
power. The limitations imposed by international law from without were
accompanied by limitations imposed from within.
These limitations from within were based on quite practical
considerations. There grew up slowly in the Middle Ages the idea
that the State originated “in a contract of Subjection made between
People and Ruler.” The first modern writer to argue effectively that
government was based not on a warrant from the Lord, but on a “social
compact” is said to have been Richard Hooker, a clergyman of the
Established Church, who held, in 1594, that the royal authority was
derived from a contract between the king and the people. This idea
soon became popular, for it suited the needs of all those who did not
participate in the privileges of the absolute monarchy. It suited not
only the Church of England, when as in Hooker’s time it was assailed,
but also the dissenting churches, and then the rising middle class
whose ambitions were frustrated by the landed nobles with the king at
their head. The doctrine of the social compact was expounded in many
different forms in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries by men like
Milton, Spinoza, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
As an historical theory to explain the origin of human society it
is of course demonstrably false, but as a weapon for breaking up
the concentration of sovereign power and distributing it, the idea
has played a mighty role in history. It is almost certain to appear
wherever there is an absolutism which men feel the need of checking.
But the [p267] theory of the social compact disappears when power
has become so widely diffused that no one can any longer locate
the sovereign. That is what is happening in the advanced modern
communities. The sovereign, whom it was once desirable to put under
contract, has become so anonymous and diffuse that his very existence
to-day is a legal fiction rather than a political fact. And loyalty
by the same token is no longer provided with a personal superior of
indubitable prestige to which it can be attached.
3. _Pluralism_
The relationship between lord and vassals in which each man attaches
himself for better or worse to some superior person tends gradually to
disappear in the modern world. Its passing was somewhat prematurely
announced by the Declaration of the Rights of Man; it did not wholly
disappear by the dissolution of the bonds which bound one man to
another, for the psychological bonds are stronger than the legal.
Nevertheless the effect of modern civilization is to dissolve these
psychological bonds, to break up clannishness and personal dependence.
Men and women alike tend to become more or less independent persons
rather than to remain members of a social organism.
The reason for this lies in the diversification of their interests.
Life in the ancestral order was not only simpler and contained within
narrower limits than it is to-day, but there was a far greater unity
in the activity of each individual. Working the land, fighting,
raising a family, worshipping, were so closely related that they could
be governed by a very simple allegiance to the chief of the tribe
[p268] or the lord of the manor. In the modern world this synthesis
has disintegrated and the activities of a man cannot be directed by a
simple allegiance. Each man finds himself the center of a complex of
loyalties. He is loyal to his government, he is loyal to his state, he
is loyal to his village, he is loyal to his neighborhood. He has his
own family. He has his wife’s family. His wife has her family. He has
his church. His wife may have a different church. He may be an employer
of thousands of men. He may be an employee. He must be loyal to his
corporation, to his trade union, or his professional society. He is
a buyer in many different markets. He is a seller in many different
markets. He is a creditor and a debtor. He owns shares in several
industries. He belongs to a political party, to clubs, to a social set.
The multiplicity of his interests makes it impossible for him to give
his whole allegiance to any person or to any institution.
It may be, in fact for most men it must be, that in each of these
associations he follows a leader. In any considerable number of people
it is certain that they will group themselves in hierarchical form.
In every club, in every social circle, in every trade union, in every
stockholders’ meeting there are leaders and their lieutenants and the
led. But these allegiances are partial. Because a man has so many
loyalties each loyalty commands only a segment of himself. They are
not, therefore, whole-hearted loyalties like that of a good soldier
to his captain. They are qualified, calculated, debatable, and they
are sanctioned not by inherent authority but by expediency or inertia.
[p269]
The outward manifestation of these complex loyalties of the modern man
is the multitude of institutions through which the affairs of mankind
are directed. Now since each of these corporate entities represents
only a part of any man’s interest, except perhaps in the case of the
paid executive secretary, none of these institutions can count to the
bitter end upon the undivided loyalty of all its members. The conflicts
between institutions are in considerable measure conflicts of interest
within the same individuals. There is a point where the activity of a
man’s trade union may so seriously affect the value of the securities
he owns that he does not know which way his interest lies. The
criss-crossing of loyalties is so great in an advanced community that
no grouping is self-contained. No grouping, therefore, can maintain a
military discipline or a military character. For when men strive too
fiercely as members of any one group they soon find that they are at
war with themselves as members of another group.
The statement that modern society is pluralistic cannot, then, be
dismissed as a newfangled notion invented by theorists. It is a sober
description of the actual facts. Each man has countless interests
through which he is attached to a very complex social situation.
The complexity of his allegiance cannot fail to be reflected in his
political conduct.
4. _Live and Let Live_
One of the inevitable effects of being attached to many different,
somewhat conflicting, interdependent groupings is to blunt the edges
of partisanship. It is possible to [p270] be fiercely partisan only
as against those who are wholly alien. It is a fair generalization to
say that the fiercest Democrats are to be found where there are the
fewest Republicans, the most bloodthirsty patriots in the safest swivel
chairs. Where men are personally entangled with the groups that are
in potential conflict, where Democrats and Republicans belong to the
same country club and where Protestants and Catholics marry each other,
it is psychologically impossible to be sharply intolerant. That is
why astute directors of corporations adopt the policy of distributing
their securities as widely as they can; they know quite well that
even the most modest shareholder is in some measure insulated against
anti-corporate agitation. It is inherent in the complex pluralism of
the modern world that men should behave moderately, and experience
amply confirms this conclusion.
There is little doubt that in the great metropolitan centers there
exists a disposition to live and let live, to give and take, to agree
and to agree to differ, which is not to be found in simple homogeneous
communities. In complex communities life quickly becomes intolerable if
men are intolerant. For they are in daily contact with almost everybody
and everything they could conceivably wish to persecute. Their victims
would be their customers, their employees, their landlords, their
tenants and perhaps their wives’ relations. But in a simple community
a kind of pastoral intolerance for everything alien adds a quaint
flavor to living. For the most part it vents itself in the open air.
The terrible indictments drawn up in a Mississippi village against the
Pope in Rome, the Russian nation, the vices of Paris, and the [p271]
enormities of New York are in the main quite lyrical. The Pope may
never even know what the Mississippi preacher thinks of him and New
York continues to go to, but never apparently to reach, hell.
When an agitator wishes to start a crusade, a religious revival, an
inquisition, or some sort of jingo excitement, the further he goes from
the centers of modern civilization the more following he can attract.
It is in the backwoods and in the hill country, in kitchens and in
old men’s clubs, that fanaticism can be kindled. The urban crowd, if
it has been urban for any length of time and has become used to its
environment, may be fickle, faddish, nervous, unstable, but it lacks
the concentration of energy to become fiercely excited for any length
of time about anything. At its worst it is a raging mob, but it is
not persistently fanatical. There are too many things to attract its
attention for it to remain preoccupied for long with any one thing.
To responsible men of affairs the complexity of modern civilization is
a daily lesson in the necessity of not pressing any claim too far, of
understanding opposing points of view, of seeking to reconcile them, of
conducting matters so that there is some kind of harmony in a plural
society. This accounts, I think, for the increasing use of political
devices which are wholly unknown in simpler societies. There is, for
example, the ideal of a civil service. It is wholly modern and it is
quite revolutionary. For it assumes that a great deal of the business
of the state can and must be carried on by a class of men who have no
personal and no party allegiance, who are in fact neutral in politics
and concerned only with the execution [p272] of a task. I know how
imperfectly the civil service works, but that it should exist at all,
and that the ideal it embodies should be generally acknowledged,
is profound testimony as to how inherent in the modern situation
is the concept of disinterestedness. The theory of an independent
judiciary arises out of the same need for disinterested judgment.
Even more significant, perhaps, is the use in all political debates
of the evidence of technicians, experts, and neutral investigators.
The statesman who imagined he had thought up a solution for a social
problem while he was in his bath would be a good deal of a joke; even
if he had stumbled on a good idea, he would not dare to commit himself
to it without elaborate preliminary surveys, investigations, hearings,
conferences, and the like.
Men occupying responsible posts in the Great Society have become aware,
in short, that their guesses and their prejudices are untrustworthy,
and that successful decisions can be made only in a neutral spirit by
comparing their hypotheses with their understanding of reality.
5. _Government in the People_
It has been the cause of considerable wonder to many persons that the
most complex modern communities, where the old loyalties are most
completely dissolved, where authority has so little prestige, where
moral codes are held in such small esteem, should nevertheless have
proved to be far more impervious to the strain of war and revolution
than the older and simpler types of civilization. It has been Russia,
China, Poland, Italy, Spain, rather than England, Germany, Belgium,
and the United States which have been most disorderly in the post-war
[p273] period. The contrary might have been expected. It might well
have been anticipated that the highly organized, delicately poised
social mechanisms would disintegrate the most easily.
Yet it is now evident why modern civilization is so durable. Its
strength lies in its sensitiveness. The effect of bad decisions is
so quickly felt, the consequences are so inescapably serious, that
corrective action is almost immediately set in motion. A simple society
like Russia can let its railroads go gradually to wrack and ruin, but
a complex society like London or New York is instantly disorganized
if the railroads do not run on schedule. So many persons are at once
affected in so many vitally important ways that remedies have to be
found immediately. This does not mean that modern states are governed
as wisely as they should be, or that they do not neglect much that they
cannot really afford to neglect. They blunder along badly enough in all
conscience. There is nevertheless a minimum of order and of necessary
services which they have to provide for themselves. They have to keep
going. They cannot afford the luxury of prolonged disorder or of a
general paralysis. Their own necessities are dependent on such fragile
structures, and everyone is so much affected, that when a modern state
is in trouble it can draw upon incomparable reserves of public spirit.
“I made ninety-one local committees in ninety-one local communities to
look after the Mississippi flood,” Mr. Hoover once explained, “that’s
what I principally did.... You say: ‘a couple of thousand refugees are
coming. They’ve got to have accommodations. Huts. [p274] Water-mains.
Sewers. Streets. Dining-halls. Meals. Doctors. Everything.’... So
you go away and they go ahead and just simply do it. Of all those
ninety-one committees there was just one that fell down.” Mr. Hard,
who reports these remarks, goes on to make Mr. Hoover say that: “No
other Main Street in the world could have done what the American
Main Street did in the Mississippi flood; and Europe may jeer as it
pleases at our mass production and our mass organization and our mass
education. The safety of the United States is its multitudinous mass
leadership.” Allowing for the fact that these remarks appeared in a
campaign biography at a time when Mr. Hoover’s friends were rather
concerned about demonstrating the intensity of his patriotism, there
is nevertheless substantial truth in them. I am inclined to believe
that “multitudinous mass leadership” will be found wherever industrial
society is firmly established, that is to say, wherever a people has
lived with the machine process long enough to acquire the aptitudes
that it calls for. This capacity to organize, to administer affairs,
to deal realistically with necessity, can hardly be due to some
congenital superiority in the American people. They are, after all
only transplanted Europeans. That their aptitudes may be somewhat more
highly developed is not, however, inconceivable: the new civilization
may have developed more freely in a land where it did not have to
contend with the institutions of a military, feudal, and clerical
society.
The essential point is that as the machine technology makes social
relations complex, it dissolves the habits of obedience and dependence;
it disintegrates the centralization [p275] of power and of leadership;
it diffuses the experience of responsible decision throughout the
population, compelling each man to acquire the habit of making
judgments instead of looking for orders, of adjusting his will to the
wills of others instead of trusting to custom and organic loyalties.
The real law under which modern society is administered is neither the
accumulated precedents of tradition nor a set of commands originating
on high which are imposed like orders in an army upon the rank and file
below. The real law in the modern state is the multitude of little
decisions made daily by millions of men.
Because this is so, the character of government is changing radically.
This change is obscured for us in our theorizing by the fact that our
political ideas derive from a different kind of social experience.
We think of governing as the act of a person; for the actual king we
have tried to substitute a corporate king, which we call the nation,
the people, the majority, public opinion, or the general will. But
none of these entities has the attributes of a king, and the failure
of political thinking to lay the ghosts of monarchy leads to endless
misunderstanding. The crucial difference between modern politics and
that to which mankind has been accustomed is that the power to act and
to compel obedience is almost never sufficiently centralized nowadays
to be exercised by one will. The power is distributed and qualified so
that power is exerted not by command but by interaction.
The prime business of government, therefore, is not to direct the
affairs of the community, but to harmonize the direction which the
community gives to its affairs. [p276] The Congress of the United
States, for example, does not consult the conscience and its God and
then decree a tariff law. It enacts the kind of tariff which at the
moment represents the most stable compromise among the interests which
have made themselves heard. The law may be outrageously unfair. But if
it is, that is because those whose interests are neglected did not at
that time have the power to make themselves felt. If the law favors
manufacturers rather than farmers, it is because the manufacturers
at that time have greater weight in the social equilibrium than the
farmers. That may sound hard. But it is doubtful whether a modern
legislature can make laws effective if those laws are not the formal
expression of what the persons actually affected can and wish to do.
The amount of law is relatively small which a modern legislature can
successfully impose. The reason for this is that unless the enforcement
of the law is taken in hand by the citizenry, the officials as such
are quite helpless. It is possible to enforce the law of contracts,
because the injured party will sue; it is possible to enforce the law
against burglary, because almost everybody will report a burglary to
the police. But it is not possible to enforce the old-fashioned speed
laws on the highways because the police are too few and far between,
the pedestrians are uninterested, and motorists like to speed. There is
here a very fundamental principle of modern lawmaking: insofar as a law
depends upon the initiative of officials in detecting violations and in
prosecuting, that law will almost certainly be difficult to enforce. If
a considerable part of the population is hostile to the law, and if the
[p277] majority has only a platonic belief in it, the law will surely
break down. For what gives law reality is not that it is commanded by
the sovereign but that it brings the organized force of the state to
the aid of those citizens who believe in the law.
What the government really does is not to rule men, but to add
overwhelming force to men when they rule their affairs. The passage
of a law is in effect a promise that the police, the courts, and the
officials will defend and enforce certain rights when citizens choose
to exercise them. For all practical purposes this is just as true when
what was once a private wrong to be redressed by private action in law
courts on proof of specific injury has been made by statute a public
wrong which is preventable and punishable by administrative action.
When the citizens are no longer interested in preventing or punishing
specific instances of what the statute declares is a public wrong, the
statute becomes a dead letter. The principle is most obviously true in
the case of a sumptuary law like prohibition. The reason prohibition
is unenforceable in the great cities is that the citizens will not
report the names and addresses of their bootleggers to the prohibition
officials. But the principle is no less true in less obvious cases,
as, for example, in tariffs or laws to regulate railroads. Thus it is
difficult to enforce the tariff law on jewels, for they are easily
smuggled. Insofar as the law is enforced it is because jewelers find
it profitable to maintain an organization which detects smuggling.
Because they know the ins and outs of the trade, and have men in all
the jewelry markets of the world who have an interest in catching
smugglers, it is possible for the United [p278] States Government to
make a fair showing in administering the law. The government cannot
from hour to hour inspect all the transactions of its people, and
any law which rests on the premise that government can do this is
a foolish law. The railroad laws are enforced because shippers are
vigilant. The criminal laws depend upon how earnestly citizens object
to certain kinds of crime. In fact it may be said that laws which make
certain kinds of conduct illicit are effective insofar as the breach
of these laws arouses the citizenry to call in the police and to take
the trouble to help the police. It is not enough that the mass of the
population should be law-abiding. A minority can stultify the law if
the population as a whole is not also law-enforcing.
This is the real sense in which it can be said that power in the modern
state resides not in the government but in the people. As that phrase
is usually employed it alleges that ‘the people,’ as articulated by
elected officials, can govern by command as the monarch or tribal
chieftain once governed. In this sense government by the people is a
delusion. What we have among advanced communities is something that
might perhaps be described as government in the people. The naively
democratic theory was that out of the mass of the voters there arose a
cloud of wills which ascended to heaven, condensed into a thunderbolt,
and then smote the people. It was supposed that the opinion of masses
of persons somehow became the opinion of a corporate person called The
People, and that this corporate person then directed human affairs like
a monarch. But that is not what happens. Government is in the people
and stays there. Government is [p279] their multitudinous decisions in
concrete situations, and what officials do is to assist and facilitate
this process of governing. Effective laws may be said to register an
understanding among those concerned by which the law-abiding know
what to expect and what is expected of them; they are insured with
all the force that the state commands against the disruption of this
understanding by the recalcitrant minority. In the modern state a law
which does not register the inward assent of most of those who are
affected will have very little force as against the breakers of that
law. For it is only by that inward assent that power becomes mobilized
to enforce the law. The government in the person of its officials, its
paltry inspectors and policemen, has relatively little power of its
own. It derives its power from the people in amounts which vary with
the circumstances of each law. That is why the same government may act
with invincible majesty in one place and with ludicrous futility in
another.
6. _Politicians and Statesmen_
The role of the leader would be easier to define if it were agreed
to give separate meanings to two very common words. I mean the words
“politician” and “statesman.” In popular usage a vague distinction
is recognized: to call a man a statesman is eulogy, to call him a
politician is to be, however faintly, disparaging. The dictionary, in
fact, defines a politician as one who seeks to subserve the interests
of a political party _merely_; as an afterthought it defines him as
one skilled in political science: a statesman. And in defining a
statesman the [p280] dictionary says that he is a political leader of
distinguished ability.
These definitions can, I think, be improved upon by clarifying the
meanings which are vaguely intended in popular usage. When we think
offhand of a politician we think of a man who works for a partial
interest. At the worst it is his own pocket. At the best it may be
his party, his class, or an institution with which he is identified.
We never feel that he can or will take into account all the interests
concerned, and because bias and partisanship are the qualities of
his conduct, we feel, unless we are naively afflicted with the same
bias, that he is not to be trusted too far. Now the word ‘statesman,’
when it is not mere pomposity, connotes a man whose mind is elevated
sufficiently above the conflict of contending parties to enable him to
adopt a course of action which takes into account a greater number of
interests in the perspective of a longer period of time. It is some
such conception as this that Edmund Burke had in mind when he wrote
that the state “ought not to be considered as nothing better than a
partnership in a trade of pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco, or
some other such low concern, to be taken up for a little temporary
interest and to be dissolved by the fancy of the parties.... It is a
partnership in a higher and more permanent sense—a partnership in all
science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue and in
all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained
in many generations it becomes a partnership not only between those
who are living, but between those who are dead and those who are to be
born.” [p281]
The politician, then, is a man who seeks to attain the special objects
of particular interests. If he is the leader of a political party he
will try either to purchase the support of particular interests by
specific pledges, or if that is impracticable, he will employ some
form of deception. I include under the term ‘deception’ the whole art
of propaganda, whether it consists of half-truths, lies, ambiguities,
evasions, calculated silence, red herrings, unresponsiveness, slogans,
catchwords, showmanship, bathos, hokum, and buncombe. They are, one and
all, methods of preventing a disinterested inquiry into the situation.
I do not say that any one can be elected to office without employing
deception, though I am inclined to think that there is a new school of
political reporters in the land who with a kind of beautiful cruelty
are making it rather embarrassing for politicians to employ their old
tricks. A man may have to be a politician to be elected when there is
adult suffrage, and it may be that statesmanship, in the sense in which
I am using the term, cannot occupy the whole attention of any public
man. It is true at least that it never does.
The reason for this is that in order to hold office a man must array in
his support a varied assortment of persons with all sorts of confused
and conflicting purposes. When then, it may be asked, does he begin to
be a statesman? He begins whenever he stops trying merely to satisfy or
to obfuscate the momentary wishes of his constituents, and sets out to
make them realize and assent to those hidden interests of theirs which
are permanent because they fit the facts and can be harmonized with the
interests of their neighbors. The politician says: “I [p282] will give
you what you want.” The statesman says: “What you think you want is
this. What it is possible for you to get is that. What you really want,
therefore, is the following.” The politician stirs up a following; the
statesman leads it. The politician, in brief, accepts unregenerate
desire at its face value and either fulfills it or perpetrates a fraud;
the statesman re-educates desire by confronting it with the reality,
and so makes possible an enduring adjustment of interests within the
community.
The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions
is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which
converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate
from the naive self-interest of each group to its permanent and real
interest. It is a difficult art which requires great courage, deep
sympathy, and a vast amount of information. That is why it is so rare.
But when a statesman is successful in converting his constituents from
a childlike pursuit of what seems interesting to a realistic view of
their interests, he receives a kind of support which the ordinary glib
politician can never hope for. Candor is a bitter pill when first it is
tasted but it is full of health, and once a man becomes established in
the public mind as a person who deals habitually and successfully with
real things, he acquires an eminence of a wholly different quality from
that of even the most celebrated caterer to the popular favor. His hold
on the people is enduring because he promises nothing which he cannot
achieve; he proposes nothing which turns out to be a fake. Sooner or
later the politician, because he deals in unrealities, is found out.
Then he either goes to jail, or he is tolerated [p283] cynically as a
picturesque and amiable scoundrel; or he retires and ceases to meddle
with the destinies of men. The words of a statesman prove to have value
because they express not the desires of the moment but the conditions
under which desires can actually be adjusted to reality. His projects
are policies which lay down an ordered plan of action in which all the
elements affected will, after they have had some experience of it,
find it profitable to co-operate. His laws register what the people
really desire when they have clarified their wants. His laws have force
because they mobilize the energies which alone can make laws effective.
It is not necessary, nor is it probable, that a statesmanlike policy
will win such assent when it is first proposed. Nor is it necessary
for the statesman to wait until he has won complete assent. There are
many things which people cannot understand until they have lived with
them for a while. Often, therefore, the great statesman is bound to
act boldly in advance of his constituents. When he does this he stakes
his judgment as to what the people will in the end find to be good
against what the people happen ardently to desire. This capacity to
act upon the hidden realities of a situation in spite of appearances
is the essence of statesmanship. It consists in giving the people
not what they want but what they will learn to want. It requires the
courage which is possible only in a mind that is detached from the
agitations of the moment. It requires the insight which comes only from
an objective and discerning knowledge of the facts, and a high and
imperturbable disinterestedness.
CHAPTER XIV [p284]
LOVE IN THE GREAT SOCIETY
1. _The External Control of Sexual Conduct_
While the changes which modernity implies affect the premises of
all human conduct, the problem as a whole engages the attention of
relatively few persons. The larger number of men and women living
within the orbit of the Great Society are no doubt aware that their
inherited beliefs about religion, politics, business, and sex do not
square entirely with the actual beliefs upon which they feel compelled
to act. But the fundamental alterations in political and economic
ideals which the machine technology is inducing come home to each man
only indirectly and partially. The consequences are subtle, delayed,
and what is even more important, they are outside the scope of the
ordinary man’s personal decision. There is little that is urgent,
immediate, or decisive which he can do, even if he understands them,
about the changes in the structure and purpose of industry and the
state. Most men can manage, therefore, to live without ever attempting
to decide for themselves any fundamental question about business or
politics. But they can neither ignore changes in sexual relations nor
do they wish to. It is possible for a man to be a socialist or an
individualist without ever having to make one responsible decision
in which his theories play any part. But what he thinks [p285]
about divorce and contraception, continence and license, monogamy,
prostitution, and sexual experience outside of marriage, are matters
that are bound at some point in his life to affect his own happiness
immediately and directly. It is possible to be hypocritical about
sex. But it is not possible for any adult who is not anæsthetic to be
indifferent. The affairs of state may be regulated by leaders. But the
affairs of a man and a woman are inescapably their own.
That obviously is the reason why in the popular mind it is immediately
assumed that when morals are discussed it is sexual morals that are
meant. The morals of the politician and the voter, of the shareholder
and executive and employee, are only moderately interesting to the
general public: thus they almost never supply the main theme of popular
fiction. But the relation between boy and girl, man and woman, husband
and wife, mistress and lover, parents and children, are themes which
no amount of repetition makes stale. The explanation is obvious. The
modern audience is composed of persons among whom only a comparatively
negligible few are serenely happy in their personal lives. Popular
fiction responds to their longings: to the unappeased it offers some
measure of vicarious satisfaction, to the prurient an indulgence, to
the worried, if not a way out, then at least the comfort of knowing
that their secret despair is a common, and not a unique, experience.
Yet in spite of this immense preoccupation with sex it is
extraordinarily difficult to arrive at any reliable knowledge of what
actual change in human behavior it reflects. This is not surprising.
In fact this is the very [p286] essence of the matter. The reason it
is difficult to know the actual facts about sexual behavior in modern
society is that sexual behavior eludes observation and control. We know
that the old conventions have lost most of their authority because we
cannot know about, and therefore can no longer regulate, the sexual
behavior of others. It may be that there is, as some optimists believe,
a fine but candid restraint practiced among modern men and women. It
may be that incredible licentiousness exists all about us, as the
gloomier prophets insist. It may be that there is just about as much
unconventional conduct and no more than there has always been. Nobody,
I think, really knows. Nobody knows whether the conversation about
sex reflects more promiscuity or less hypocrisy. But what everybody
must know is that sexual conduct, whatever it may be, is regulated
personally and not publicly in modern society. If there is restraint it
is, in the last analysis, voluntary; if there is promiscuity, it can be
quite secret.
The circumstances which have wrought this change are inherent in modern
ways of living. Until quite recently the main conventions of sex were
enforced first by the parents and then by the husband through their
control over the life of the woman. The main conventions were: first,
that she must not encourage or display any amorous inclinations except
where there was practical certainty that the young man’s intentions
were serious; second, that when she was married to the young man
she submitted to his embraces only because the Lord somehow failed
to contrive a less vile method of perpetuating the species. All the
minor conventions were [p287] subsidiary to these; the whole system
was organized on the premise that procreation was the woman’s only
sanction for sexual intercourse. Such control as was exercised over
the conduct of men was subordinate to this control over the conduct of
women. The chastity of women before marriage was guarded; that meant
that seduction was a crime, but that relations with “lost” or unchaste
women were tolerated. The virtuous man, by popular standards, was one
who before his marriage did not have sexual relations with a virtuous
woman. There is ample testimony in the outcries of moralists that even
in the olden days these conventions were not perfectly administered.
But they were sufficiently well administered to remain the accepted
conventions, honored even in the breach. It was possible, because of
the way people lived, to administer them.
The woman lived a sheltered life. That is another way of saying
that she lived under the constant inspection of her family. She
lived at home. She worked at home. She met young men under the
zealous chaperonage of practically the whole community. No doubt,
couples slipped away occasionally and more went on than was known or
acknowledged. But even then there was a very powerful deterrent against
an illicit relationship. This deterrent was the fear of pregnancy.
That in the end made it almost certain that if a secret affair were
consummated it could not be kept secret and that terrible penalties
would be exacted. In the modern world effective chaperonage has become
impracticable and the fear of pregnancy has been virtually eliminated
by the very general knowledge of contraceptive methods. [p288]
The whole revolution in the field of sexual morals turns upon the fact
that external control of the chastity of women is becoming impossible.
2. _Birth Control_
The Biblical account of how Jehovah slew Onan for disobeying his
father’s commandment to go to his brother’s widow, Tamar, and “perform
the duty of an husband’s brother,” shows that the deliberate prevention
of conception is not a new discovery. Mr. Harold Cox must be right when
he says “it is fairly certain that in all ages and in all countries
men and women have practiced various devices to prevent conception
while continuing to indulge in sexual intercourse.” For while I know
of no positive evidence to support this, it appears to be self-evident
that the human race within historical times has not multiplied up to
the limits of human fecundity. Since it is hardly probable that this
has been due to the continence of husbands, nor wholly to infanticide,
abortion, infant mortality, and postponement of marriage, it is safe to
conclude that birth control is an ancient practice.
Nevertheless, it was not until the Nineteenth Century that the
practice of contraception began to be publicly advocated on grounds
of public policy. Until the industrial age the weight of opinion was
overwhelmingly in favor of very large families. Kings and nobles needed
soldiers and retainers: “As arrows in the hand of a mighty man, so are
the children of youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of
them. They shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies
in the [p289] gate.” Fathers of families desired many sons. The early
factory owners could use abundant cheap labor. There had been men from
Plato’s time who had their doubts about the value of an indefinitely
growing population. But the substantial opinion down to the end of
the Eighteenth Century was Adam Smith’s that: “the most decisive mark
of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its
inhabitants.”
Apparently it was the sinister character of the early factory system,
and the ominous unrest which pervaded Europe after the French
Revolution, which rather suddenly changed into pessimism this bland
optimism about an ever growing population. Malthus published the first
edition of his _Essay on Population_ in 1798. This book is undoubtedly
one of the great landmarks of human culture, for it focussed the
attention of Europe on the necessity of regulating the growth of
population. Malthus himself, it seems, hoped that this regulation
could be achieved by the postponement of marriage and by continence.
It is not clear whether he disapproved of what is now called
neo-Malthusianism, or whether he did not regard it as practicable.
Nevertheless, within less than twenty-five years James Mill in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_ had in guarded fashion put forward the
neo-Malthusian principle, and shortly thereafter, that is in 1823, an
active public propaganda was set on foot, most probably by Francis
Place, by means of what were known as the “diabolical handbills.”
These leaflets were addressed to the working classes and contained
descriptions of methods for preventing conception. Some of them were
sent to a good lady named Mrs. Fildes, who [p290] indignantly, but
mistakenly from her point of view, assisted the nefarious propaganda
by exposing it in the public prints. Fifty years later Mr. Bradlaugh
and Mrs. Besant had themselves indicted and tried for selling an
illustrated edition of Knowlton’s _Fruits of Philosophy_. After that
advertisement, neo-Malthusian principles and practices were known and
were, therefore, available to all but the poorest and most illiterate.
No propaganda so threatening to the established moral order ever
encountered such an ineffective opposition. I do not know how much
money has been spent on the propaganda nor how many martyrs have had
to coerce reluctant judges to try them. But it is evident that once it
was known that fairly dependable methods of contraception exist, the
people took the matter into their own hands. For the public reasons by
which neo-Malthusianism was justified were also private reasons. The
social philosopher said that population must be adjusted to the means
of subsistence. Man and wife said that they must have only as many
children as they could afford to rear. The eugenist said that certain
stocks ought not to multiply. Individual women decided that too many
children, or even any children, were bad for their health. But these
were not the only reasons which explain the demand for neo-Malthusian
knowledge. There was also the very plain demand due to a desire to
enjoy sexual intercourse without social consequences.
On this aspect of birth control the liberal reformers have, I think,
been until recently more than a little disingenuous. They have been
arguing for the removal of the prohibitory laws, and they have built
their case on two [p291] main theses. They have argued, first, that
the limitation of births was sound public policy for economic and
eugenic reasons; and second, that it was necessary to the happiness
of families, the health of mothers, and the welfare of children. All
these reasons may be unimpeachable. I think they are. But it was idle
to pretend that the dissemination of this knowledge, even if legally
confined to the instruction of married women by licensed physicians,
could be kept from the rest of the adult population. Obviously that
which all married couples are permitted to know every one is bound
to know. Human curiosity will make that certain. Now this is what
the Christian churches, especially the Roman Catholic, which oppose
contraception on principle, instantly recognized. They were quite
right. They were quite right, too, in recognizing that whether or
not birth control is eugenic, hygienic, and economic, it is the most
revolutionary practice in the history of sexual morals.
For when conception could be prevented, there was an end to the theory
that woman submits to the embrace of the male only for purposes of
procreation. She had to be persuaded to co-operate, and no possible
reason could be advanced except that the pleasure was reciprocal.
She had to understand and inwardly assent to the principle that it
is proper to have sexual intercourse with her husband and to prevent
conception. She had, therefore, to give up the whole traditional theory
which she may have only half-believed anyway, that sexual intercourse
was an impure means to a noble end. She could no longer believe that
procreation alone mitigated the vileness of cohabiting with a man, and
so she had to change her valuation [p292] and accept it as inherently
delightful. Thus by an inevitable process the practice of contraception
led husbands and wives to the conviction that they need not be in the
least ashamed of their desires for each other.
But this transvaluation of values within the sanctity of the marital
chamber could hardly be kept a secret. What had happened was that
married couples were indulging in the pleasures of sex because
they had learned how to isolate them from the responsibilities of
parenthood. When we talk about the unconventional theories of the
younger generation we might in all honesty take this fact into account.
They have had it demonstrated to them by their own parents, by those
in whom the administering of the conventions is vested, that under
certain circumstances it is legitimate and proper to gratify sexual
desire apart from any obligation to the family or to the race. They
have been taught that it is possible to do this, and that it may be
proper. Therefore, the older generation could no longer argue that
sexual intercourse as such was evil. It could no longer argue that it
was obviously dangerous. It could only maintain that the psychological
consequences are serious if sexual gratification is not made incidental
to the enduring partnership of marriage and a home. That may be, in
fact, I think it can be shown to be, the real wisdom of the matter.
Yet if it is the wisdom of the matter, it is a kind of wisdom which
men and women can acquire by experience alone. They do not have it
instinctively. They cannot be compelled to adopt it. They can only
learn to believe it.
That is a very different thing from submitting to a convention upheld
by all human and divine authority. [p293]
3. _The Logic of Birth Control_
With contraception established as a more or less legitimate idea in
modern society, a vast discussion has ensued as to how the practice
of it can be rationalized. In this discussion the pace is set by
those who accept the apparent logic of contraception and are prepared
boldly to revise the sexual conventions accordingly. They take as
their major premise the obvious fact that by contraception it is
possible to dissociate procreation from gratification, and therefore
to pursue independently what Mr. Havelock Ellis calls the primary and
secondary objects of the sexual impulse. They propose, therefore, to
sanction two distinct sets of conventions: one designed to protect
the interests of the offspring by promoting intelligent, secure, and
cheerful parenthood; the other designed to permit the freest and
fullest expression of the erotic personality. They propose, in other
words, to distinguish between parenthood as a vocation involving public
responsibility, and love as an art, pursued privately for the sake of
happiness.
As a preparation for the vocation of parenthood it is proposed
to educate both men and women in the care, both physical and
psychological, of children. It is proposed further that mating for
parenthood shall become an altogether deliberate and voluntary
choice: the argument here is that the duties of parenthood cannot
be successfully fulfilled except where both parents cheerfully and
knowingly assume them. Therefore, it is proposed, in order to avert the
dangers of love at first sight and of mating under the blind compulsion
of instinct, that a period of free experimentation [p294] be allowed
to precede the solemn engagement to produce and rear children. This
engagement is regarded as so much a public responsibility that it is
even proposed, and to some extent has been embodied in the law of
certain jurisdictions, that marriages for parenthood must be sanctioned
by medical authority. In order, too, that no compulsive considerations
may determine what ought to be a free and intelligent choice, it is
argued that women should be economically independent before and during
marriage. As this may not be possible for women without property
of their own during the years when they are bearing and rearing
children, it is proposed in some form or other to endow motherhood.
This endowment may take the form of a legal claim upon the earnings of
the father, or it may mean a subsidy from the state through mothers’
pensions, free medical attention, day nurseries, and kindergartens. The
principle that successful parenthood must be voluntary is maintained
as consistently as possible. Therefore, among those who follow the
logic of their idea, it is proposed that even marriages deliberately
entered into for procreation shall be dissoluble at the will of either
party, the state intervening only to insure the economic security of
the offspring. It is proposed, furthermore, that where women find the
vocation of motherhood impracticable for one reason or another, they
may be relieved of the duty of rearing their children.
Not all of the advanced reformers adopt the whole of this program, but
the whole of this program is logically inherent in the conception of
parenthood as a vocation deliberately undertaken, publicly pursued, and
motivated solely by the parental instincts. [p295]
The separate set of conventions which it is proposed to adopt for the
development of love as an art have a logic of their own. Their function
is not to protect the welfare of the child but the happiness of lovers.
It is very easy to misunderstand this conception. Mr. Havelock Ellis,
in fact, describes it as a “divine and elusive mystery,” a description
which threatens to provide a rather elusive standard by which to fix a
new set of sexual conventions. But baffling as this sounds, it is not
wholly inscrutable, and a sufficient understanding of what is meant can
be attained by clearing up the dangerous ambiguity in the phrase “love
as an art.”
There are two arts of love and it makes a considerable difference
which one is meant. There is the art of love as Casanova, for example,
practiced it. It is the art of seduction, courtship, and sexual
gratification: it is an art which culminates in the sexual act. It
can be repeated with the same lover and with other lovers, but it
exhausts itself in the moment of ecstasy. When that moment is reached,
the work of art is done, and the lover as artist “after an interval,
perhaps of stupor and vital recuperation” must start all over again,
until at last the rhythm is so stale it is a weariness to start at
all; or the lover must find new lovers and new resistances to conquer.
The aftermath of romantic love—that is, of love that is consummated
in sexual ecstasy—is either tedium in middle age or the compulsive
adventurousness of the libertine.
Now this is not what Mr. Ellis means when he talks about love as an
art. “The act of intercourse,” he says, “is only an incident, and not
an essential in love.” Incident to what? His answer is that it is an
incident to an [p296] “exquisitely and variously and harmoniously
blended” activity of “all the finer activities of the organism,
physical and psychic.” I take this to mean that when a man and woman
are successfully in love, their whole activity is energized and
victorious. They walk better, their digestion improves, they think
more clearly, their secret worries drop away, the world is fresh and
interesting, and they can do more than they dreamed that they could
do. In love of this kind sexual intimacy is not the dead end of desire
as it is in romantic or promiscuous love, but periodic affirmation of
the inward delight of desire pervading an active life. Love of this
sort can grow: it is not, like youth itself, a moment that comes and is
gone and remains only a memory of something which cannot be recovered.
It can grow because it has something to grow upon and to grow with;
it is not contracted and stale because it has for its object, not the
mere relief of physical tension, but all the objects with which the
two lovers are concerned. They desire their worlds in each other, and
therefore their love is as interesting as their worlds and their worlds
are as interesting as their love.
It is to promote unions of this sort that the older liberals are
proposing a new set of sexual conventions. There are, however,
reformers in the field who take a much less exalted view of the sexual
act, who regard it, indeed, not only as without biological or social
significance, but also as without any very impressive psychological
significance. “The practice of birth control,” says Mr. C. E. M. Joad,
for example, “will profoundly modify our sexual habits. It will enable
the pleasures of sex to be tasted without its penalties, and it will
remove the most [p297] formidable deterrent to irregular intercourse.”
For birth control “offers to the young ... the prospect of shameless,
harmless, and unlimited pleasure.” But whether the reformers agree with
Mr. Ellis that sexual intimacy is, as he says, a sacrament signifying
some great spiritual reality, or with Mr. Joad that it is a harmless
pleasure, they are agreed that the sexual conventions should be revised
to permit such unions without penalties and without any sense of shame.
They ask public opinion to sanction what contraception has made
feasible. They point out that “a large number of the men and women
of to-day form sexual relationships outside marriage—whether or
not they ultimately lead to marriage—which they conceal or seek to
conceal from the world.” These relationships, says Mr. Ellis, differ
from the extra-marital manifestations of the sexual life of the past
in that they do not derive from prostitution or seduction. Both of
these ancient practices, he adds, are diminishing, for prostitution is
becoming less attractive and, with the education of women, seduction
is becoming less possible. The novelty of these new relations, the
prevalence of which is conceded though it cannot be measured, lies in
the fact that they are entered into voluntarily, have no obvious social
consequences, and are altogether beyond the power of law or opinion to
control. The argument, therefore, is that they should be approved, the
chief point made being that by removing all stigma from such unions,
they will become candid, wholesome, and delightful. The objection of
the reformers to the existing conventions is that the sense of sin
poisons the spontaneous goodness of such relationships. [p298]
The actual proposals go by a great variety of fancy names such as free
love, trial marriage, companionate marriage. When these proposals are
examined it is evident they all take birth control as their major
premise, and then deduce from it some part or all of the logical
consequences. Companionate marriage, for example, is from the point
of view of the law, whatever it may be subjectively, nothing but
a somewhat roundabout way of saying that childless couples may be
divorced by mutual consent. It is a proposal, if not to control, then
at least to register, publicly all sexual unions, the theory being that
this public registration will abolish shame and furtiveness and give
them a certain permanence. Companionate marriage is frankly an attempt
at a compromise between marriages that are difficult to dissolve and
clandestine relationships which have no sanction whatever.
The uncompromising logic of birth control has been stated more clearly,
I think, by Mr. Bertrand Russell than by anyone else. Writing to Judge
Lindsey during the uproar about companionate marriage, Mr. Russell said:
I go further than you do: the things which your enemies say about
you would be largely true of me. My own view is that the state
and the law should take no notice of sexual relations apart from
children, and that no marriage ceremony should be valid unless
accompanied by a medical certificate of the woman’s pregnancy.
But when once there are children, I think that divorce should be
avoided except for very grave cause. I should not regard physical
infidelity as a very grave cause and should teach people that
it is to be expected and tolerated, but should not involve the
begetting of illegitimate children—not because illegitimacy is
bad in [p299] itself, but because a home with two parents is
best for children. I do not feel that the main thing in marriage
is the feeling of the parents for each other; the main thing is
cooperation in bearing children.
In this admirably clear statement there is set forth a plan for that
complete separation between the primary and secondary function of
sexual intercourse which contraception makes possible.
4. _The Use of Convention_
It is one thing, however, to recognize the full logic of birth control
and quite another thing to say that convention ought to be determined
by that logic. One might as well argue that because automobiles can be
driven at a hundred miles an hour the laws should sanction driving at
the rate of a hundred miles an hour. Birth control is a device like the
automobile, and its inherent possibilities do not fix the best uses to
be made of it.
What an understanding of the logic of birth control does is to set
before us the limits of coercive control of sexual relations. The law
can, for example, make divorce very difficult where there are children.
It could, as Mr. Bertrand Russell suggests, refuse divorce on the
ground of infidelity. On the other hand the law cannot effectively
prohibit infidelity, and as a matter of fact does not do so to-day.
It cannot effectively prohibit fornication though there are statutes
against it. Therefore, what Mr. Russell has done is to describe
accurately enough the actual limits of effective legal control.
But sexual conventions are not statutes, and it is important to define
quite clearly just what they are. In the [p300] older world they were
rules of conduct enforceable by the family and the community through
habit, coercion, and authority. In this sense of the word, convention
tends to lose force and effect in modern civilization. Yet a convention
is essentially a theory of conduct and all human conduct implies some
theory of conduct. Therefore, although it may be that no convention
is any longer coercive, conventions remain, are adopted, revised, and
debated. They embody the considered results of experience: perhaps the
experience of a lonely pioneer or perhaps the collective experience of
the dominant members of a community. In any event they are as necessary
to a society which recognizes no authority as to one which does. For
the inexperienced must be offered some kind of hypothesis when they
are confronted with the necessity of making choices: they cannot be so
utterly open-minded that they stand inert until something collides with
them. In the modern world, therefore, the function of conventions is to
declare the meaning of experience. A good convention is one which will
most probably show the inexperienced the way to happy experience.
Just because the rule of sexual conduct by authority is dissolving,
the need of conventions which will guide conduct is increasing.
That, in fact, is the reason for the immense and urgent discussion
of sex throughout the modern world. It is an attempt to attain an
understanding of the bewilderingly new experiences to which few men or
women know how to adjust themselves. The true business of the moralist
in the midst of all this is not to denounce this and to advocate that,
but to see as clearly as he can into the meaning of it, so that out
of the chaos of [p301] pain and happiness and worry he may help to
deliver a usable insight.
It is, I think, to the separation of parenthood as a vocation from love
as an end in itself that the moralist must address himself. For this is
the heart of the problem: to determine whether this separation, which
birth control has made feasible and which law can no longer prevent, is
in harmony with the conditions of human happiness.
5. _The New Hedonism_
Among those who hold that the separation of the primary and secondary
functions of the sexual impulse is good and should constitute the major
premise of modern sexual conventions, there are, as I have already
pointed out, two schools of thought. There are the transcendentalists
who believe with Mr. Havelock Ellis that “sexual pleasure, wisely used
and not abused, may prove the stimulus and liberator of our finest and
most exalted activities,” and there are the unpretentious hedonists
who believe that sexual pleasure is pleasure and not the stimulus or
liberator of anything important. Both are, as we say, emancipated:
neither recognizes the legitimacy of objective control unless a child
is born, and both reject as an evil the traditional subjective control
exercised by the sense of sin. Where they differ is in their valuation
of love.
Hedonism as an attitude toward life is, of course, not a new thing in
the world, but it has never before been tested out under such favorable
conditions. To be a successful hedonist a man must have the opportunity
to seek his pleasures without fear of any kind. Theodorus of Cyrene,
[p302] who taught about 310 B.C., saw that clearly, and therefore
to release men from fear openly denied the Olympian gods. But the
newest hedonism has had an even better prospect than the classical:
it finds men emancipated not only of all fear of divine authority
and human custom but of physical and social consequences as well. If
the pursuit of pleasure by carefree men were the way to happiness,
hedonism ought, then, to be proving itself triumphantly in the modern
world. Possibly it is too early to judge, but the fact is nevertheless
highly significant, I think, that the new hedonists should already have
arrived at the same conclusion as the later hedonists in the classical
world. Hegesias, for example, wrote when hedonism had already had a
great vogue: he was called, rather significantly, the “persuader to
die.” For having started from the premise that pleasure is the end of
life, he concluded that, since life affords at least as much pain as
pleasure, the end of life cannot be realized. There is now a generation
in the world which is approaching middle age. They have exercised the
privileges which were won by the iconoclasts who attacked what was
usually called the Puritan or Victorian tradition. They have exercised
the privileges without external restraint and without inhibition. Their
conclusions are reported in the latest works of fiction. Do they report
that they have found happiness in their freedom? Well, hardly. Instead
of the gladness which they were promised, they seem, like Hegesias, to
have found the wasteland.
“If love has come to be less often a sin,” says that very discerning
critic of life and letters, Mr. Joseph Wood Krutch, “it has come also
to be less often a supreme privilege. [p303] If one turns to the
smarter of those novelists who describe the doings of the more advanced
set of those who are experimenting with life—to, for example, Mr.
Aldous Huxley or Mr. Ernest Hemingway,—one will discover in their
tragic farces the picture of a society which is at bottom in despair
because, though it is more completely absorbed in the pursuit of love
than in anything else, it has lost the sense of any ultimate importance
inherent in the experience which preoccupies it; and if one turns to
the graver of the intellectual writers,—to, for example, Mr. D. H.
Lawrence, Mr. T. S. Eliot, or Mr. James Joyce,—one will find both
explicitly and implicitly a similar sense that the transcendental value
of love has become somehow attenuated, and that, to take a perfectly
concrete example, a conclusion which does no more than bring a man and
woman into complete possession of one another is a mere bathos which
does nothing except legitimately provoke the comment, ‘Well, what of
it?’ One can hardly imagine them concerned with what used to be called,
in a phrase which they have helped to make faintly ridiculous, ‘the
right to love.’ Individual freedom they have inherited and assumed
as a right, but they are concerned with something which their more
restricted forefathers assumed—with, that is to say, the value of love
itself. No inhibitions either within or without restrain them, but they
are asking themselves, ‘What is it worth?’ and they are certainly no
longer feeling that it is obviously and in itself something which makes
life worth the living.
“To Huxley and Hemingway—I take them as the most conspicuous exemplars
of a whole school—love is at times only a sort of obscene joke. The
former in particular has [p304] delighted to mock sentiment with
physiology, to place the emotions of the lover in comic juxtaposition
with quaint biological lore, and to picture a romantic pair ‘quietly
sweating palm to palm.’ But the joke is one which turns quickly bitter
upon the tongue, for a great and gratifying illusion has passed away,
leaving the need for it still there. His characters still feel the
psychological urge, and, since they have no sense of sin in connection
with it, they yield easily and continually to that urge; but they
have also the human need to respect their chief preoccupation, and
it is the capacity to do this that they have lost. Absorbed in the
pursuit of sexual satisfaction, they never find love and they are
scarcely aware that they are seeking it, but they are far from content
with themselves. In a generally devaluated world they are eagerly
endeavoring to get what they can in the pursuit of satisfactions which
are sufficiently instinctive to retain inevitably a modicum of animal
pleasure, but they cannot transmute that simple animal pleasure into
anything else. They themselves not infrequently share the contempt with
which their creator regards them, and nothing could be less seductive,
because nothing could be less glamorous, than the description of the
debaucheries born of nothing except a sense of the emptiness of life.”
This “generally devaluated world,” of which Mr. Krutch speaks, what
is it after all, but a world in which nothing connects itself very
much with anything else? If you start with the belief that love is
the pleasure of a moment, is it really surprising that it yields only
a momentary pleasure? For it is the most ironical of all illusions
to suppose that one is free of illusions in contracting any [p305]
human desire to its primary physiological satisfaction. Does a man
dine well because he ingests the requisite number of calories? Is he
freer from illusions about his appetite than the man who creates an
interesting dinner party out of the underlying fact that his guests and
he have the need to fill their stomachs? Would it really be a mark of
enlightenment if each of them filled his stomach in the solitary and
solemn conviction that good conversation and pleasant companionship are
one thing and nutrition is another?
This much the transcendentalists understand well enough. They do
not wish to isolate the satisfaction of desire from our “finest
and most exalted activities.” They would make it “the stimulus and
the liberator” of these activities. They would use it to arouse to
“wholesome activity all the complex and interrelated systems of the
organism.” But what are these finest and most exalted activities which
are to be stimulated and liberated? The discovery of truth, the making
of works of art, meditation and insight? Mr. Ellis does not specify. If
these are the activities that are meant, then the discussion applies to
a very few of the men and women on earth. For the activities of most
of them are necessarily concerned with earning a living and managing
a household and rearing children and finding recreation. If the art
of love is to stimulate and liberate activities, it is these prosaic
activities which it must stimulate and liberate. But if you idealize
the logic of birth control, make parenthood a separate vocation,
isolate love from work and the hard realities of living, and say that
it must be spontaneous and carefree, what have you done? You have
separated [p306] it from all the important activities which it might
stimulate and liberate. You have made love spontaneous but empty, and
you have made home-building and parenthood efficient, responsible, and
dull.
What has happened, I believe, is what so often happens in the first
enthusiasm for a revolutionary invention. Its possibilities are so
dazzling that men forget that inventions belong to man and not man to
his inventions. In the discussion which has ensued since birth control
became generally feasible, the central confusion has been that the
reformers have tried to fix their sexual ideals in accordance with the
logic of birth control instead of the logic of human nature. Birth
control does make feasible this dissociation of interests which were
once organically united. There are undoubtedly the best of reasons
for dissociating them up to a point. But how completely it is wise
to dissociate them is a matter to be determined not by saying how
completely it is possible to dissociate them, but how much it is
desirable to dissociate them.
All the varieties of the modern doctrine that man is a collection of
separate impulses, each of which can attain its private satisfaction,
are in fundamental contradiction not only with the traditional body of
human wisdom but with the modern conception of the human character.
Thus in one breath it is said in advanced circles that love is a series
of casual episodes, and in the next it transpires that the speaker is
in process of having himself elaborately psychoanalyzed in order to
disengage his soul from the effects of apparently trivial episodes
in his childhood. On the one hand it is asserted that sex pervades
everything and on the other that sexual behavior is inconsequential.
[p307] It is taught that experience is cumulative, that we are what
our past has made us and shall be what we are making of ourselves now,
and then with bland indifference to the significance of this we are
told that all experiences are free, equal, and independent.
6. _Marriage and Affinity_
It is not hard to see why those who are concerned in revising sexual
conventions should have taken the logic of birth control rather than
knowledge of human nature as their major premise. Birth control is an
immensely beneficent invention which can and does relieve men and women
of some of the most tragic sorrows which afflict them: the tragedies of
the unwanted child, the tragedies of insupportable economic burdens,
the tragedies of excessive child bearing and the destruction of youth
and the necessity of living in an unrelenting series of pregnancies. It
offers them freedom from intolerable mismating, from sterile virtue,
from withering denials of happiness. These are the facts which the
reformers saw, and in birth control they saw the instrument by which
such freedom could be obtained.
The sexual conventions which they have proposed are really designed to
cure notorious evils. They do not define the good life in sex; they
point out ways of escape from the bad life. Thus companionate marriage
is proposed by Judge Lindsey not as a type of union which is inherently
desirable, but as an avenue of escape from corrupt marriages on the
one hand and furtive promiscuity on the other. The movement for free
divorce comes down to this: it is necessary because so many marriages
[p308] are a failure. The whole theory that love is separate from
parenthood and home-building is supported by the evidence in those
cases where married couples are not lovers. It is the pathology of
sexual relations which inspires the reformers of sexual conventions.
There is no need to quarrel with them because they insist upon remedies
for manifest evils. Deep confusion results when they forget that these
remedies are only remedies, and go on to institute them as ideals.
It is better, without any doubt, that incompatible couples should
be divorced and that each should then be free to find a mate who is
compatible. But the frequency with which men and women have to resort
to divorce because they are incompatible will be greatly influenced by
the notions they have before and during marriage of what compatibility
is, and what it involves. The remedies for failure are important. But
what is central is the conception of sexual relations by which they
expect to live successfully.
They cannot—I am, of course, speaking broadly—expect to live
successfully by the conception that the primary and secondary functions
of sex are in separate compartments of the soul. I have indicated
why this conception is self-defeating and why, since human nature is
organic and experience cumulative, our activities must, so to speak,
engage and imply each other. Mates who are not lovers will not really
cooperate, as Mr. Bertrand Russell thinks they should, in bearing
children; they will be distracted, insufficient, and worst of all they
will be merely dutiful. Lovers who have nothing to do but love each
other are not really to be envied; love and nothing else very soon is
nothing else. The emotion of love, in spite [p309] of the romantics,
is not self-sustaining; it endures only when the lovers love many
things together, and not merely each other. It is this understanding
that love cannot successfully be isolated from the business of living
which is the enduring wisdom of the institution of marriage. Let the
law be what it may be as to what constitutes a marriage contract and
how and when it may be dissolved. Let public opinion be as tolerant
as it can be toward any and every kind of irregular and experimental
relationship. When all the criticisms have been made, when all
supernatural sanctions have been discarded, all subjective inhibitions
erased, all compulsions abolished, the convention of marriage still
remains to be considered as an interpretation of human experience. It
is by the test of how genuinely it interprets human experience that the
convention of marriage will ultimately be judged.
The wisdom of marriage rests upon an extremely unsentimental view of
lovers and their passions. Its assumptions, when they are frankly
exposed, are horrifying to those who have been brought up in the
popular romantic tradition of the Nineteenth Century. These assumptions
are that, given an initial attraction, a common social background,
common responsibilities, and the conviction that the relationship is
permanent, compatibility in marriage can normally be achieved. It is
precisely this that the prevailing sentimentality about love denies.
It assumes that marriages are made in heaven, that compatibility is
instinctive, a mere coincidence, that happy unions are, in the last
analysis, lucky accidents in which two people who happen to suit
each other happen to have met. The convention of marriage rests on
an interpretation of [p310] human nature which does not confuse the
subjective feeling of the lovers that their passion is unique, with
the brutal but objective fact that, had they never met, each of them
would in all probability have found a lover who was just as unique.
“Love,” says Mr. Santayana, “is indeed much less exacting than it
thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for one-tenth
that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at hand,
an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for some one
else; for, although with acquaintance the quality of an attachment
naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that person
its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of the
passion is much the same for every object.”
This is the reason why the popular conception of romantic love as the
meeting of two affinities produces so much unhappiness. The mysterious
glow of passion is accepted as a sign that the great coincidence has
occurred; there is a wedding and soon, as the glow of passion cools, it
is discovered that no instinctive and preordained affinity is present.
At this point the wisdom of popular romantic marriage is exhausted. For
it proceeds on the assumption that love is a mysterious visitation.
There is nothing left, then, but to grin and bear a miserably dull and
nagging fate, or to break off and try again. The deep fallacy of the
conception is in the failure to realize that compatibility is a process
and not an accident, that it depends upon the maturing of instinctive
desire by adaptation to the whole nature of the other person and to the
common concerns of the pair of lovers.
The romantic theory of affinities rests upon an immature [p311] theory
of desire. It springs from an infantile belief that the success of
love is in the satisfactions which the other person provides. What
this really means is that in childlike fashion the lover expects
his mistress to supply him with happiness. But in the adult world
that expectation is false. Because nine-tenths of the cause, as Mr.
Santayana says, are in the lover for one-tenth that may be in the
object, it is what the lover does about that nine-tenths which is
decisive for his happiness. It is the claim, therefore, of those
who uphold the ideal of marriage as a full partnership, and reject
the ideal which would separate love as an art from parenthood as a
vocation, that in the home made by a couple who propose to see it
through, there are provided the essential conditions under which
the passions of men and women are most likely to become mature, and
therefore harmonious and disinterested.
7. _The Schooling of Desire_
They need not deny, indeed it would be foolish as well as cruel for
them to underestimate, the enormous difficulty of achieving successful
marriages under modern conditions. For with the dissolution of
authority and compulsion, a successful marriage depends wholly upon the
capacity of the man and the woman to make it successful. They have to
accomplish wholly by understanding and sympathy and disinterestedness
of purpose what was once in a very large measure achieved by habit,
necessity, and the absence of any practicable alternative. It takes
two persons to make a successful marriage in the modern world, and
that fact more than doubles its difficulty. For these reasons alone
the modern state ought to do what it [p312] would none the less be
compelled to do: it ought to provide decent ways of retreat in case of
failure.
But if it is the truth that the convention of marriage correctly
interprets human experience, whereas the separatist conventions are
self-defeating, then the convention of marriage will prove to be the
conclusion which emerges out of all this immense experimenting. It
will survive not as a rule of law imposed by force, for that is now, I
think, become impossible. It will not survive as a moral commandment
with which the elderly can threaten the young. They will not listen.
It will survive as the dominant insight into the reality of love and
happiness, or it will not survive at all. That does not mean that all
persons will live under the convention of marriage. As a matter of fact
in civilized ages all persons never have. It means that the convention
of marriage, when it is clarified by insight into reality, is likely
to be the hypothesis upon which men and women will ordinarily proceed.
There will be no compulsion behind it except the compulsion in each man
and woman to reach a true adjustment of his life.
It is in this necessity of clarifying their love for those who are
closest to them that the moral problems of the new age come to a
personal issue. It is in the realm of sexual relations that mankind is
being schooled amidst pain and worry for the novel conditions which
modernity imposes. It is there, rather than in politics, business, or
even in religion, that the issues are urgent, vivid, and inescapable.
It is there that they touch most poignantly and most radically the
organic roots of human personality. And it is there, in the ordering of
their personal attachments, [p313] that for most men the process of
salvation must necessarily begin.
For disinterestedness in all things, as Dean Inge says, is a mountain
track which the many are likely in the future as in the past to find
cold, bleak, and bare: that is why “the road of ascent is by personal
affection for man.” By the happy ordering of their personal affections
they may establish the type and the quality and the direction of their
desires for all things. It is in the hidden issues between lovers,
more than anywhere else, that modern men and women are compelled, by
personal anguish rather than by laws and preachments or even by the
persuasions of abstract philosophy, to transcend naive desire and to
reach out towards a mature and disinterested partnership with their
world.
CHAPTER XV [p314]
THE MORALIST IN AN UNBELIEVING WORLD
1. _The Declaration of Ideals_
Of all the bewilderments of the present age none is greater than that
of the conscientious and candid moralist himself. The very name of
moralist seems to have become a term of disparagement and to suggest
a somewhat pretentious and a somewhat stupid, perhaps even a somewhat
hypocritical, meddler in other men’s lives. In the minds of very many
in the modern generation moralists are set down as persons who, in the
words of Dean Inge, fancy themselves attracted by God when they are
really only repelled by man.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is an historical
accident. It so happens that those who administered the affairs of the
established churches have, by and large, failed utterly to comprehend
how deep and how inexorable was the dissolution of the ancestral order.
They imagined either that this change in human affairs was a kind of
temporary corruption, or that, like the eighty propositions listed in
the Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, it could be regarded as due to “errors”
of the human mind. There were, of course, churchmen who knew better,
but on the whole those who prevailed in the great ecclesiastical
[p315] establishments could not believe that the skepticism of mind
and the freedom of action which modern men exercise were due to
inexorable historic causes. They declined to acknowledge that modern
freedom was not merely a wilful iconoclasm, but the liquidation of an
older order of human life.
Because they could not comprehend the magnitude of the revolution in
which they were involved, they set themselves the task of impeding its
progress by chastising the rebels and refuting their rationalizations.
This was described as a vindication of morals. The effect was to
associate morality with the vindication of the habits and dispositions
of those who were most thoroughly out of sympathy with the genuine
needs of modern men.
The difficulties of the new age were much more urgent than those which
the orthodox moralists were concerned with. The moralists insisted
that conduct must conform to the established code; what really worried
men was how to adjust their conduct to the novel circumstances which
confronted them. When they discovered that those who professed to be
moralists were continuing to deny that the novelty of modern things had
any bearing upon human conduct, and that morality was a word signifying
a return to usages which it was impossible to follow, even if it were
desirable, there was a kind of tacit agreement to let the moralists be
moral and to find other language in which to describe the difference
between good and bad, right and wrong. Mr. Joad is not unrepresentative
of this reaction into contempt when he speaks of “the dowagers, the
aunts, the old maids, the parsons, the town councillors, the clerks,
the members of vigilance committees and purity [p316] leagues, all
those who are themselves too old to enjoy sex, too unattractive to
obtain what they would wish to enjoy, or too respectable to prefer
enjoyment to respectability.” Thus for many the name of moralist came
to be very nearly synonymous with antipathy to the genius and the
vitality of the modern age.
But it is idle for moralists to ascribe the decline of their influence
to the perversity of their fellow creatures. The phenomenon is
world-wide. Moreover, it is most intensely present at precisely those
points where the effect of science and the machine technology have
been most thoroughly manifested. The moralists are not confronted
with a scandal but with history. They have to come to terms with a
process in the life of mankind which is working upon the inner springs
of being and altering inevitably the premises of conduct. They need
not suppose that their pews are empty and that their exhortations are
ignored because modern men are really as wilful as the manners of the
younger generation lead them to conclude. Much of what appears to be a
tough self-sufficiency is protective: it is a brittle crust covering
depths of uncertainty. If the advice of moralists is ignored, it is
not because this generation is too proud to listen, or unaware that
it has anything to learn. On the contrary there is such curiosity and
questioning as never before engaged so large a number of men. The
audience to which a genuine moralist might speak is there. If it is
inattentive when the orthodox moralist speaks, it is because he seems
to speak irrelevantly.
The trouble with the moralists is in the moralists themselves: they
have failed to understand their times. They [p317] think they are
dealing with a generation that refuses to believe in ancient authority.
They are, in fact, dealing with a generation that cannot believe in
it. They think they are confronted with men who have an irrational
preference for immorality, whereas the men and women about them are
ridden by doubts because they do not know what they prefer, nor why.
The moralists fancy that they are standing upon the rock of eternal
truth, surveying the chaos about them. They are greatly mistaken.
Nothing in the modern world is more chaotic—not its politics, its
business, or its sexual relations—than the minds of orthodox moralists
who suppose that the problem of morals is somehow to find a way of
reinforcing the sanctions which are dissolving. How can we, they say in
effect, find formulas and rhetoric potent enough to make men behave?
How can we revive in them that love and fear of God, that sense of the
creature’s dependence upon his creator, that obedience to the commands
of a heavenly king, which once gave force and effect to the moral code?
They have misconceived the moral problem, and therefore they
misconceive the function of the moralist. An authoritative code of
morals has force and effect when it expresses the settled customs of
a stable society: the pharisee can impose upon the minority only such
conventions as the majority find appropriate and necessary. But when
customs are unsettled, as they are in the modern world, by continual
change in the circumstances of life, the pharisee is helpless. He
cannot command with authority because his commands no longer imply the
usages of the community: they express the prejudices of the moralist
rather than the practices of men. When that [p318] happens, it is
presumptuous to issue moral commandments, for in fact nobody has
authority to command. It is useless to command when nobody has the
disposition to obey. It is futile when nobody really knows exactly
what to command. In such societies, wherever they have appeared among
civilized men, the moralist has ceased to be an administrator of usages
and has had to become an interpreter of human needs. For ages when
custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist
cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He
has to seek insight rather than to preach.
The disesteem into which moralists have fallen is due at bottom to
their failure to see that in an age like this one the function of the
moralist is not to exhort men to be good but to elucidate what the
good is. The problem of sanctions is secondary. For sanctions cannot
be artificially constructed: they are a product of agreement and
usage. Where no agreement exists, where no usages are established,
where ideals are not clarified and where conventions are not
followed comfortably by the mass of men, there are not, and cannot
be, sanctions. It is possible to command where most men are already
obedient. But even the greatest general cannot discipline a whole army
at once. It is only when the greater part of his army is with him that
he can quell the mutiny of a faction.
The acids of modernity are dissolving the usages and the sanctions to
which men once habitually conformed. It is therefore impossible for the
moralist to command. He can only persuade. To persuade he must show
that the course of conduct he advocates is not an arbitrary pattern
[p319] to which vitality must submit, but that which vitality itself
would choose if it were clearly understood. He must be able to show
that goodness is victorious vitality and badness defeated vitality;
that sin is the denial and virtue the fulfilment of the promise
inherent in the purposes of men. The good, said the Greek moralist, is
“that which all things aim at”; we may perhaps take this to mean that
the good is that which men would wish to do if they knew what they were
doing.
If the morality of the naive hedonist who blindly seeks the
gratification of his instincts is irrational in that he trusts immature
desire, disregards intelligence and damns the consequences, the
morality of the pharisee is no less irrational. It reduces itself to
the wholly arbitrary proposition that the best life for man would be
some other kind of life than that which satisfies his nature. The true
function of the moralist in an age when usage is unsettled is what
Aristotle who lived in such an age described it to be: to promote good
conduct by discovering and explaining the mark at which things aim. The
moralist is irrelevant, if not meddlesome and dangerous, unless in his
teaching he strives to give a true account, imaginatively conceived,
of that which experience would show is desirable among the choices
that are possible and necessary. If he is to be listened to, and if
he is to deserve a hearing among his fellows, he must set himself
this task which is so much humbler than to command and so much more
difficult than to exhort: he must seek to anticipate and to supplement
the insight of his fellow men into the problems of their adjustment to
reality. He must find ways to make clear and ordered and expressive
those concerns [p320] which are latent but overlaid and confused by
their preoccupations and misunderstandings.
Could he do that with perfect lucidity he would not need to summon the
police nor evoke the fear of hell: hell would be what it really is,
and what in all inspired moralities it has always been understood to
be, the very quality of evil itself. Nor would he find himself in the
absurd predicament of seeming to argue that virtue is highly desirable
but intensely unpleasant. It would not be necessary to praise goodness,
for it would be that which men most ardently desired. Were the nature
of good and evil really made plain by moralists, their teachings would
appear to the modern listener not like exhortations from without, but
as Keats said of poetry: “a wording of his own highest thoughts and ...
almost a remembrance.”
2. _The Choice of a Way_
What modernity requires of the moralist is that he should see with an
innocent eye how men must reform their wants in a world which is not
concerned to make them happy. The problem, as I have tried to show, is
not a new one. It has been faced and solved by the masters of wisdom.
What is new is the scale on which the problem is presented—in that so
many must face it now—and its radical character in that the organic
bonds of custom and belief are dissolving. There ensues a continual
necessity of adjusting their lives to complex novelty. In such a
world simple customs are unsuitable and authoritative commandments
incredible. No prescription can now be written which men can naively
and obediently follow. They have, therefore, to reeducate their
[p321] wants by an understanding of their own relation to a world
which is unconcerned with their hopes and fears. From the moralists
they can get only hypotheses—distillations of experience carefully
examined—probabilities, that is to say, upon which they may begin to
act, but which they themselves must constantly correct by their own
insight.
It is difficult for the orthodox moralists to believe that amidst the
ruins of authority men will ever learn to do this. They can point to
the urban crowds and ask whether anyone supposes that such persons are
capable of ordering their lives by so subtle an instrument as the human
understanding. They can insist with unanswerable force that this is
absurd: that the great mass of men must be guided by rules and moved
by the symbols of hope and fear. And they can ask what there is in
the conception of the moralist as I have outlined it which takes the
character of the populace into account.
What I take into account first of all is the fact, which it seems to
me is indisputable, that for the modern populace the old rules are
becoming progressively unsuitable and the old symbols of hope and fear
progressively unreal. I ascribe that to the inherent character of the
modern ways of living. I conclude from this that if the populace must
be led, if it must have easily comprehended rules, if it must have
common symbols of hope and fear, the question is how are its leaders
to be developed, rules to be worked out, symbols created. The ultimate
question is not how the populace is to be ruled, but what the teachers
are to think. That is the question that has to be settled first: it is
the preface to everything else.
For while moralists are at sixes and sevens in their own [p322]
souls, not much can be done about morality, however high or low may
be our estimates of the popular intelligence and character. If it
were necessary to assume that ideals are relevant only if they are
universally attainable, it would be a waste of time to discuss them.
For it is evident enough that many, if not most men, must fail to
comprehend what modern morality implies. But to recognize this is not
to prophesy that the world is doomed unless men perform the miracle
of reverting to their ancestral tradition. This is not the first time
in the history of mankind when a revolution in the affairs of men
has produced chaos in the human spirit. The world can endure a good
deal of chaos. It always has. The ideal inherent in any age is never
realized completely: Greece, which we like to idealize as an oasis of
rationality, was only in some respects Hellenic; the Ages of Faith
were only somewhat Christian. The processes of nature and of society
go on somehow none the less. Men are born and they live and die with
some happiness and some sorrow though they neither envisage wholly nor
nearly approximate the ideals they pursue.
But if civilization is to be coherent and confident it must be _known_
in that civilization what its ideals are. There must exist in the form
of clearly available ideas an understanding of what the fulfilment of
the promise of that civilization might mean, an imaginative conception
of the good at which it might, and, if it is to flourish, at which
it must aim. That knowledge, though no one has it perfectly, and
though relatively few have it at all, is the principle of all order
and certainty in the life of that people. By it they can clarify the
practical conduct [p323] of life in some measure, and add immeasurably
to its dignity.
To elucidate the ideals with which the modern world is pregnant is
the original business of the moralist. Insofar as he succeeds in
disentangling that which men think they believe from that which
it is appropriate for them to believe, he is opening his mind to
a true vision of the good life. The vision itself we can discern,
only faintly, for we have as yet only the occasional and fragmentary
testimony of sages and saints and heroes, dim anticipations here and
there, a most imperfect science of human behavior, and our own obscure
endeavor to make explicit and rational the stresses of the modern
world within our own souls. But we can begin to see, I think, that the
evidence converges upon the theory that what the sages have prophesied
as high religion, what psychologists delineate as matured personality,
and the disinterestedness which the Great Society requires for its
practical fulfilment, are all of a piece, and are the basic elements of
a modern morality. I think the truth lies in this theory.
If it does, experience will enrich and refine it, and what is now an
abstract principle arrived at by intuition and dialectic will engender
ideas that marshal, illuminate, and anticipate the subtle and intricate
detail of our actual experience. That at least can be our belief. In
the meantime, the modern moralist cannot expect soon to construct a
systematic and harmonious moral edifice like that which St. Thomas
Aquinas and Dante constructed to house the aspirations of the mediæval
world. He is in a much earlier phase in the evolution of his world,
in the phase of inquiry and prophecy rather than of ordering and
harmonizing, [p324] and he is under the necessity of remaining close
to the elements of experience in order to apprehend them freshly.
He cannot, therefore, permit the old symbols of faith and the old
formulations of right and wrong to prejudice his insight. Insofar as
they contain wisdom for him or can become its vehicles, he will return
to them. But he cannot return to them with honor or with sincerity
until he has himself gone and drunk deeply at the sources of experience
from which they originated.
Only when he has done that can he again in any honest sense take
possession of the wisdom which he inherits. It requires wisdom to
understand wisdom; the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.
In the great moral systems and the great religions of mankind are
embedded the record of how men have dealt with destiny, and only the
thoughtless will argue that that record is obsolete and insignificant.
But it is overlaid with much that is obsolete and for that reason it
is undeciphered and inexpressive. The wisdom it contains has to be
discovered anew before the old symbols will yield up their meaning.
That is the only way in which Bacon’s aphorism can be fulfilled,
that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth
in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” The depth
in philosophy which can bring them about is a much deeper and more
poignant experience than complacent churchmen suppose.
It can be no mere settling back into that from which men in the ardor
of their youth escaped. This man and that may settle back, to be sure;
he may cease to inquire though his questions are unanswered. But such
conformity is sterile, and due to mere weariness of mind and [p325]
body. The inquiry goes on because it has to go on, and while the
vitality of our race is unimpaired, there will be men who feel with Mr.
Whitehead that “to acquiesce in discrepancy is destructive of candor
and of moral cleanliness,” and that “it belongs to the self-respect of
intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment.”
The crisis in the religious loyalties of mankind cannot be resolved by
weariness and good nature, or by the invention of little intellectual
devices for straightening out the dilemmas of biology and Genesis,
history and the Gospels with which so many churchmen busy themselves.
Beneath these little conflicts there is a real dilemma which modern men
cannot successfully evade. “Where is the way where light dwelleth?”
They are compelled to choose consciously, clearly, and with full
realization of what the choice implies, between religion as a system of
cosmic government and religion as insight into a cleansed and matured
personality: between God conceived as the master of that fate, creator,
providence, and king, and God conceived as the highest good at which
they might aim. For God is the supreme symbol in which man expresses
his destiny, and if that symbol is confused, his life is confused.
Men have not, hitherto, had to make that choice, for the historic
churches have sheltered both kinds of religious experience, and the
same mysteries have been the symbols of both. That confusion is no
longer benign because men are no longer unconscious of it. They are
aware that it is a confusion, and they are stultified by it. Because
the popular religion of supernatural governments is undermined, the
symbols of religion do not provide clear channels [p326] for religious
experience. They are choked with the debris of dead notions in which
men are unable to believe and unwilling to disbelieve. The result is a
frustration in the inner life which will persist as long as the leaders
of thought speak of God in more senses than one, and thus render all
faith invalid, insincere, and faltering.
3. _The Religion of the Spirit_
The choice is at last a personal one. The decision is rendered not by
argument but by feeling. Those who believe that their salvation lies
in obedience to, and communion with, the King of Creation can know how
whole-hearted their faith is by the confidence of their own hearts. If
they are at peace, they need inquire no further. There are, however,
those who do not find a principle of order in the belief that they are
related to a supernatural power. They cannot be argued into the ancient
belief, for it has been dissolved by the circumstances of their lives.
They are deeply perplexed. They have learned that the absence of belief
is vacancy; they know, from disillusionment and anxiety, that there is
no freedom in mere freedom. They must find, then, some other principle
which will give coherence and direction to their lives.
If the argument in these pages is sound, they need not look for and,
in fact, cannot hope for, some new and unexpected revelation. Since
they are unable to find a principle of order in the authority of a
will outside themselves, there is no place they can find it except
in an ideal of the human personality. But they do not have to invent
such an ideal out of hand. The ideal way of life for men who must make
their own terms with experience and find [p327] their own happiness
has been stated again and again. It is that only the regenerate, the
disinterested, the mature, can make use of freedom. This is the central
insight of the teachers of wisdom. We can see now, I think, that it
is also the mark at which the modern study of human nature points. We
can see, too, that it is the pattern of successful conduct in the most
advanced phases of the development of modern civilization. The ideal,
then, is an old one, but its confirmation and its practical pertinence
are new. The world is able at last to take seriously what its greatest
teachers have said. And since all things need a name, if they are to be
talked about, devotion to this ideal may properly be called by the name
which these greatest teachers gave it; it may be called the religion
of the spirit. At the heart of it is the knowledge that the goal of
human effort is to be able, in the words I have so often quoted from
Confucius, to follow what the heart desires without transgressing what
is right.
In an age when custom is dissolved and authority is broken, the
religion of the spirit is not merely a possible way of life. In
principle it is the only way which transcends the difficulties. It
alone is perfectly neutral about the constitution of the universe, in
that it has no expectation that the universe will justify naive desire.
Therefore, the progress of science cannot upset it. Its indifference to
what the facts may be is indeed the very spirit of scientific inquiry.
A religion which rests upon particular conclusions in astronomy,
biology, and history may be fatally injured by the discovery of new
truths. But the religion of the spirit does not depend upon creeds and
cosmologies; it has no vested interest in any particular truth. It is
[p328] concerned not with the organization of matter, but with the
quality of human desire.
It alone can endure the variety and complexity of things, for the
religion of the spirit has no thesis to defend. It seeks excellence
wherever it may appear, and finds it in anything which is inwardly
understood; its motive is not acquisition but sympathy. Whatever is
completely understood with sympathy for its own logic and purposes
ceases to be external and stubborn and is wholly tamed. To understand
is not only to pardon, but in the end to love. There is no itch in
the religion of the spirit to make men good by bearing down upon them
with righteousness and making them conform to a pattern. Its social
principle is to live and let live. It has the only tolerable code of
manners for a society in which men and women have become freely-moving
individuals, no longer held in the grooves of custom by their ancestral
ways. It is the only disposition of the soul which meets the moral
difficulties of an anarchical age, for its principle is to civilize the
passions, not by regulating them imperiously, but by transforming them
with a mature understanding of their place in an adult environment.
It is the only possible hygiene of the soul for men whose selves have
become disjointed by the loss of their central certainties, because
it counsels them to draw the sting of possessiveness out of their
passions, and thus by removing anxiety to render them harmonious and
serene.
The philosophy of the spirit is an almost exact reversal of the
worldling’s philosophy. The ordinary man believes that he will be
blessed if he is virtuous, and therefore virtue seems to him a price
he pays now for a blessedness he [p329] will some day enjoy. While
he is waiting for his reward, therefore, virtue seems to him drab,
arbitrary, and meaningless. For the reward is deferred, and there is
really no instant proof that virtue really leads to the happiness he
has been promised. Because the reward is deferred, it too becomes
vague and dubious, for that which we never experience, we cannot truly
understand. In the realm of the spirit, blessedness is not deferred:
there is no future which is more auspicious than the present; there
are no compensations later for evils now. Evil is to be overcome now
and happiness is to be achieved now, for the kingdom of God is within
you. The life of the spirit is not a commercial transaction in which
the profit has to be anticipated; it is a kind of experience which is
inherently profitable.
And so the mature man would take the world as it comes, and within
himself remain quite unperturbed. When he acted, he would know that he
was only testing an hypothesis, and if he failed, he would know that he
had made a mistake. He would be quite prepared for the discovery that
he might make mistakes, for his intelligence would be disentangled from
his hopes. The failure of his experiment could not, therefore, involve
the failure of his life. For the aspect of life which implicated his
soul would be his understanding of life, and, to the understanding,
defeat is no less interesting than victory. It would be no effort,
therefore, for him to be tolerant, and no annoyance to be skeptical.
He would face pain with fortitude, for he would have put it away
from the inner chambers of his soul. Fear would not haunt him, for
he would be without compulsion to seize anything and without anxiety
[p330] as to its fate. He would be strong, not with the strength of
hard resolves, but because he was free of that tension which vain
expectations beget. Would his life be uninteresting because he was
disinterested? He would have the whole universe, rather than the prison
of his own hopes and fears, for his habitation, and in imagination all
possible forms of being. How could that be dull unless he brought the
dullness with him? He might dwell with all beauty and all knowledge,
and they are inexhaustible. Would he, then, dream idle dreams? Only if
he chose to. For he might go quite simply about the business of the
world, a good deal more effectively perhaps than the worldling, in
that he did not place an absolute value upon it, and deceive himself.
Would he be hopeful? Not if to be hopeful was to expect the world to
submit rather soon to his vanity. Would he be hopeless? Hope is an
expectation of favors to come, and he would take his delights here and
now. Since nothing gnawed at his vitals, neither doubt nor ambition,
nor frustration, nor fear, he would move easily through life. And so
whether he saw the thing as comedy, or high tragedy, or plain farce, he
would affirm that it is what it is, and that the wise man can enjoy it.
APPENDIX [p331]
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At the suggestion of the publishers, the references which follow have
been segregated in an appendix instead of being scattered as footnotes
through the text. They felt, rightly enough, I think, that in a book of
this character the purpose of the notes was to acknowledge indebtedness
for the material cited rather than to support the argument, and
that the reader would prefer not to have the text encumbered by the
apparatus of a kind of scholarship to which the author makes no
pretensions.
While these notes, except in a few instances, refer only to matter
actually used in the text, they are also an approximate bibliography
of the works which I have consulted. I wish I could adequately
acknowledge the obligation I owe to my teachers, William James, George
Santayana, and Graham Wallas, though that perhaps is self-evident. I
should like to thank Miss Jane Mather and Miss Orrie Lashin for help
in the preparation of the manuscript. I am under special obligation
to my wife, Faye Lippmann, without whose assistance I could not have
completed the book.
W. L.
New York City, January, 1929.
NOTES [p332]
[Transcriber’s note: a standard page of this book had 31 or 32 lines.]
PAGE LINE
4 32 Quoted in Irving Babbitt, _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 181.
5 4 John Herman Randall Jr., _The Making of the Modern Mind_,
p. 118.
5 21 From _The City of Dreadful Night_, cited, Babbitt, op.
cit., p. 332.
5 24 For discussion of this theme, cf. Babbitt, op. cit.
passim.
5 29 Shelley, _Prometheus Unbound_, Act III, Scene IV.
6 12 From Byron, _The Island_, cited, Babbitt, op. cit., p. 186.
6 16 From T. H. Huxley, _Address on University Education_,
delivered, 1876, at the formal opening of Johns Hopkins
University. I am indebted to Mr. Henry Hazlitt for the
quotation.
7 11 Cited, Babbitt, op. cit., p. 341.
7 20 Nietzsche, _Thus Spake Zarathustra_, LXIX, cited,
Babbitt, op. cit., p. 261.
11 12 Cf. W. R. Inge, _The Platonic Tradition in English
Religious Thought_.
11 19 W. C. Greene, Introduction to Selection from the
_Dialogues of Plato_, p. xxiv.
13 27 Calvin, _Institutes_, Book IV, Chapter X, Paragraph 7,
cited A. C. M’Giffert, _Protestant Thought Before Kant_, p.
90.
21 32 Harry Emerson Fosdick, _Adventurous Religion_, p. 59.
24 8 W. C. Brownell, Scribner’s Magazine, Vol. XXX, p. 112,
cited in footnote, William James, _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_, p. 115.
24 25 William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_,
p. 518.
25 12 James, op. cit., p. 519.
26 7 Alfred North Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_,
pp. 249–250.
27 12 Bertrand Russell, _A Free Man’s Worship_, in _Mysticism
and Logic_, p. 54.
27 27 Kirsopp Lake, _The Religion of Yesterday and Tomorrow_.
30 2 W. R. Inge, _Science, Religion and Reality_, p. 388. [p333]
31 3 Cf. W. B. Riley, _The Faith of the Fundamentalists_,
Times Current History, June, 1927.
34 18 _Fundamentalism and the Faith_, Commonweal, Aug. 19,
1925.
35 25 George Santayana, _Reason in Religion_, p. 97.
37 22 The material in this section is taken from Harry Emerson
Fosdick, _The Modern Use of the Bible_.
40 2 Fosdick, op. cit., p. 83.
42 5 Fosdick, _The Desire for Immortality_, in _Adventurous
Religion_.
44 10 W. R. Inge, _The Philosophy of Plotinus_, Vol. II, p. 166.
44 23 W. R. Inge, _The Platonic Tradition in English Religious
Thought_.
47 30 Fosdick, _The Modern Use of the Bible_.
51 22 Cf. Rudolf Otto, _Chrysostom on the Inconceivable in
God_, in _The Idea of the Holy_. Appendix I; cf. also
the _Catholic Encyclopedia_, Vol. VIII, p. 452; cf. also
William James, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_,
Lecture III.
56 21 Lord Acton, inaugural _Lecture on the Study of History_,
in _Lectures on Modern History_.
70 29 Otto Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_—
Translated by F. W. Maitland, p. 7.
71 14 From the Song of Roland, cited, Henry Adams,
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, p. 29.
72 18 For an analysis of the texts on which this claim was
based, cf. James T. Shotwell and Louise Ropes Loomis, _The
See of Peter_.
73 18 Cited in A. C. M’Giffert, _Protestant Thought Before
Kant_, p. 44.
74 7 For a comprehensive condemnation by the Holy See of
modern opinions which undermine the authority of the Roman
Catholic Church, see the Syllabus of Pius IX (1864) and
the Syllabus of Pius X (1907). The Syllabus of 1864 lists
and condemns eighty principal errors of our time, and
is described by the Catholic Encyclopedia (Vol. XIV, p.
369) as opposition “to the high tide of that intellectual
movement of the Nineteenth Century which strove to sweep
away the foundations of all human and Divine order.”
The Syllabus of 1907 condemns sixty-five propositions
of the Modernists which would “destroy the foundations
of all natural and supernatural knowledge.” (Catholic
Encyclopedia, Vol. XIV, [p334] p. 370.) It should be noted
that there is difference of opinion among Catholic scholars
as to the binding power of these two pronouncements, and
also that their meaning is open to elaborate interpretation.
75 2 _Catholic Encyclopedia_, Vol. XIV, p. 766.
76 20 J. N. Figgis, _Political Thought in the Sixteenth
Century_, Cambridge Modern History, Vol. III, p. 743.
79 4 Cf. J. N. Figgis, op. cit., p. 742.
80 20 For an able recent exposition by an American of this
theory of absolutism, cf. Charles C. Marshall, _The Roman
Catholic Church in the Modern State_.
85 24 Cited R. H. Tawney, _Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism_, p. 44.
86 13 Cited Tawney, op. cit., p. 243.
98 6 The facts cited in this section are from: E. Mâle, _L’Art
Religieux du XIIIeme Siècle en France_, and _L’Art
Religieux de la Fin du Moyen-Age en France_. But cf. G. G.
Coulton, _Art and the Reformation_.
102 28 _Prometheus Unbound_, cited A. N. Whitehead, _Science
and the Modern World_, p. 119.
104 23 R. H. Wilenski, _The Modern Movement in Art_, p. 5.
109 10 Cf. Diego Rivera, _The Revolution in Painting_, in
Creative Art, Vol. IV, No. 1. “And there is absolutely
no reason to be frightened because the subject is so
essential. On the contrary, precisely because the
subject is admitted as a prime necessity, the artist is
absolutely free to create a thoroughly plastic form of
art. The subject is to the painter what the rails are
to a locomotive. He cannot do without it. In fact, when
he refuses to seek or accept a subject, his own plastic
methods and his own esthetic theories become his subject
instead. And even if he escapes them, he himself becomes
the subject of his work. He becomes nothing but an
illustrator of his own state of mind, and in trying to
liberate himself he falls into the worst form of slavery.
That is the cause of all the boredom which emanates
from so many of the large expositions of modern art, a
fact testified to again and again by the most different
temperaments.”
109 18 Bernard Berenson, _The Florentine Painters of the
Renaissance_, p. 19.
111 4 Cf. R. H. Wilenski, _The Modern Movement in Art_, p. 119.
116 4 Cf. George Santayana, _Reason in Religion_, pp. 92 et
seq. [p335]
119 28 Cf. _Catholic Encyclopedia_, Vol. X, p. 342.
123 17 Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_, p. 257.
127 2 A. S. Eddington, _Stars and Atoms_, p. 121.
128 1 John Herman Randall Jr., _The Making of the Modern Mind_,
p. 100.
128 9 _Epist. ad Can Grand_, cited in footnote to _Paradiso_ in
the Temple Classics.
129 3 Cf. P. W. Bridgman, _The Logic of Modern Physics_, p. 45.
129 23 C. S. Peirce, _How to Make Our Ideas Clear in Chance,
Love and Logic_, edited by Morris R. Cohen.
130 4 Bridgman, op. cit., p. 38.
135 2 Cited L. R. Farnell, _The Attributes of God_, p. 275.
137 31 Cf. M. C. Otto, _Natural Laws and Human Hopes_, pp. 32
et seq.
146 29 The _Catholic Encyclopedia_, Vol. XII, p. 345.
147 29 Cf. B. L. Manning, _The People’s Faith in the Time of
Wyclif_.
148 3 Fosdick, _Adventurous Religion_, p. 85 et seq.
148 9 Santayana, _Reason in Religion_, p. 43.
148 17 L. R. Farnell, _The Attributes of God_, p. 15.
149 14 Manning, op. cit.
159 2 Herbert Asbury, _A Methodist Saint, The Life of Bishop
Asbury_, p. 265.
160 20 Cf. _Encyclopedia Britannica_, “Asceticism.”
161 17 Cf. _Catholic Encyclopedia_, Vol. I, p. 768.
162 5 Quoted in Irving Babbitt, _Rousseau and Romanticism_, p. 45.
162 19 _Rabelais_, Book II, Chapter 34.
163 6 Cited Henry Osborn Taylor, _Thought and Expression in the
Sixteenth Century_, Vol. I, p. 330.
163 25 Babbitt, op. cit., p. 161.
163 28 Cf. Dora Russell, _The Right to be Happy_.
164 5 Cf. Bertrand Russell, _Political Ideals_.
165 17 T. W. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 111.
166 22 _Ethics_, Book II, Chapter 9.
177 3 S. Freud, _Formulierung über die zwei Prinzipien des
psychischen Geschehens_, 1911, Jahrb, Bd., I, s. 411.
177 10 S. Ferenczi, _Stages in the Development of the Sense of
Reality_, 1913. In _Contributions to Psychoanalysis_,
translated by Dr. Ernest Jones.
192 13 Spinoza, _Ethics_, Part V, Prop. XLII.
192 23 Cf. T. W. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 110.
192 31 _Confucian Analects_, Book II, Chapter 4.
195 25 A. N. Whitehead, _Religion in the Making_, pp. 15–16. [p336]
196 20 _Analects_ VII, XX.
197 24 _Ethics_, Part V, Prop. XLII.
199 19 Cf. T. W. Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 84.
199 30 C. Snouck Hurgronje, _Mohammedanism_, p. 82.
200 18 _Republic_, VI, 495, 504.
205 5 Cf. J. Burnet, _Philosophy_ in _The Legacy of Greece_,
edited by R. W. Livingstone, p. 67.
218 9 Lucretius, _On the Nature of Things_, Book Third,
Translation by H. A. J. Munro.
220 1 Spinoza, _Ethics_, Part V, Prop. III.
220 4 Id., Part V, Prop. VI.
224 28 Aristotle, _Ethics_, Book IV, Chapter III.
232 18 Oswald Spengler, _The Decline of the West_.
233 25 C. A. Beard, _Is Western Civilization in Peril?_
Harper’s Magazine, August, 1928.
234 17 H. G. Wells, _The Outline of History_, Vol. II, pp. 394–5.
235 30 A. N. Whitehead, _Science and the Modern World_, p. 4.
236 10 W. T. Sedgwick and H. W. Tyler, _A Short History of
Science_, p. 269. Cf. Martha Ornstein, _The Role of
Scientific Societies in the Seventeenth Century_.
237 7 J. B. Bury, _The Idea of Progress_, p. 330.
238 16 For a most illuminating description of the behavior of a
great scientific investigator, cf. Claude Bernard, _An
Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine_.
238 26 Bertrand Russell, _Mysticism and Logic_, p. 42.
240 19 Cf. Graham Wallas, _Our Social Heritage_, Chapter I.
241 12 John Herman Randall Jr., _The Making of the Modern
Mind_, p. 279.
242 24 Adam Smith, _The Wealth of Nations_, Book IV, Chapter 9.
245 4 Cited in R. H. Tawney, _Religion and the Rise of
Capitalism_, p. 286.
265 19 Otto Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Age_,
Translated by F. W. Maitland, p. 23.
266 9 Id., p. 88.
266 12 Cf. J. W. Garner, _Introduction to Political Science_, p. 92.
267 7 For a discussion of the concept of sovereignty in the
modern world, cf. Otto Gierke, _Political Theories of
the Middle Ages_; J. N. Figgis, _Churches in the Modern
State_; Lord Acton, _History of Freedom and Other Essays_;
H. J. Laski, _A Grammar of Politics_; Kung Chuan Hsiao,
_Political Pluralism_.
274 11 William Hard, _Who’s Hoover?_ p. 193.
280 31 _Reflections on the French Revolution_, cf. Garner, op.
cit., p. 112. [p337]
288 6 Genesis XXXVIII; cf. Harold Cox, _The Problem of
Population_, pp. 208–211, for an interpretation of the
story of Onan in the light of Deut. XXV, which shows that
the crime of Onan was not the spilling of his seed, but a
breach of Jewish tribal law in refusing “to perform the
duty of a husband’s brother” with his brother’s widow.
289 1 Psalm 127, cf. Cox, op. cit.
289 9 The historical data are from A. M. Carr-Saunders, _The
Population Problem_, Chapter I.
295 6 Havelock Ellis, _Love as an Art_, in Count Hermann
Keyserling’s _The Book of Marriage_, p. 388.
295 21 Santayana, _The Life of Reason_, Vol. II, p. 10.
297 3 C. E. M. Joad, _Thrasymachus_, or _The Future of Morals_,
pp. 54–55.
297 15 Havelock Ellis, _The Family_, in _Whither Mankind_, p. 216.
299 4 Quoted in Judge Ben B. Lindsey and Wainwright Evans, _The
Companionate Marriage_, p. 210.
302 18 Cf. Alfred Weber, _History of Philosophy_, p. 72.
304 24 _Love—Or the Life and Death of a Value_, Atlantic
Monthly, August, 1928.
310 14 _Reason in Society_, p. 22.
313 6 W. R. Inge, _The Philosophy of Plotinus_, Vol. II, p. 161.
320 15 John Keats, Letters to John Taylor, Feb. 27, 1818—in
_Oxford Book of English Prose_, No. 379.
INDEX [p339]
Absolute state, 80
Absolutism, 266
_Accademia dei Lincei_, 236
“Acids of modernity.” _See_ Modernity.
Acquisitive instinct, 250
Acton, Lord, 56
Adams, Henry, 71
Adeimantus, 160
Adultery, 89
“Agnostic,” 28, 77
Agnostics, 29, 54
Agnosticism, 34
Allegiance, 263, 265, 267, 268–269
Allegory, 37, 38–40
American farmer, 85, 276
Americanism, 61, 63, 274
American Philosophical Association, 236
Anabaptists, 15
Analysis, scientific, 107
Ananias, 95
Anarchy, moral, 209
Anne, St., 149
Anthropomorphism, 28, 148
Anti-evolution laws, 31
Antioch, 51, 52
Apostles, 58, 99, 120, 200
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 11, 68, 71, 100, 218, 323
Arcadia, 148, 162
Arians, 52
Aristocracy, 15
Aristophanes, 4
Aristotle, 26, 48, 127, 156, 157, 161, 166–167, 194, 224, 244, 319
Art, 112;
Christian, 101;
for art’s sake, 101, 104–105, 107
Artist, modern, 108–109
Artists and the Catholic Church, 98–101, 104
Asbury, Bishop, 158
Asbury, Herbert, 158
Asceticism, 155, 156–161, 191, 192, 204, 205
Astronomers, Newtonian, 123
Atheism, 28, 324
“Atheist,” 28, 29
Atheists, 6, 54, 194
Augsburg, Peace of, 79
Augustine, St., 37, 38, 69, 71, 73, 113, 196
Authority, 13, 14, 166, 202, 262, 272, 317, 326;
divine, 135;
ecclesiastical, 14–15, 35, 76, 93, 133, 236;
moral, 9
Bacon, 324
Baxter, 86
Beard, Charles A., 233, 235
Beauty, religion of, 18
Beauvais, Vincent de, 99
Behavior, 171–172, 186
Behaviorism, 174, 177
Belief, childish, 185, 189, 190
Berenson, 109
Bergson, 107
Berlin Academy, 236
Besant, Mrs., 290
Betelguese, 169
Bible, 13, 23, 27, 34–35, 37, 38–39, 40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47–48, 60,
78, 121, 131, 132, 162, 214, 288;
epic of, 116, 117
Biblical world, 40
Bigotry, 190
Bill of Rights, 114
Biologists, 150–151, 325
Birth control, 93, 285, 287, 289–291, 292–293, 296–297, 298–299, 301,
305–306, 307
Bishop of Rome, 71
Bodin, Jean, 262
Bolshevism, 251–253, 254–255 [p340]
Bradlaugh, 290
Breuer, 220
Bridgman, Prof., 129
Broadway Temple, 88
Brownell, W. C., 24
Bryan, 77
Buddha, 46, 155, 156, 161, 165, 193, 194, 199, 200
Buffon, 241
Bunyan, John, 86
Bureaucracy, 249–250
Burke, Edmund, 280
Bury, Prof. John B., 236
Business, 231, 284;
and the Catholic Church, 84–88;
organized, 244;
stabilization of, 256
Byron, 5, 6
Calles, 264, 265
Calvin, 13, 39, 73, 74, 135
Calvinism, 13
Canby, Henry Seidel, 17
Capitalism, 16, 85, 245, 247–248, 250–251;
primitive, 251–252;
rise of, 232, 245–246
Capitalists, 242;
abolition of, 249–250;
coercion of, 248–249
Capitalistic credo, 244–245
Caste, 199
Catholic Church, 7, 15, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 49, 58, 72, 73, 77, 81,
84–85, 86, 94, 98, 117, 120, 161, 205–206, 291
_Catholic Encyclopedia_, 51, 74
Catholicism, 11, 15, 35, 58, 78, 81, 86, 109
Catholics, 74, 76–77
Cause and effect, 181
Cecilia, St., 98–99
Certainty, feeling of, 19, 21, 322
Certainty, moral. _See_ Moral certainty.
Chateaubriand, 5
Chesterton, G. K., 56–57
Children and the churches, 91, 93
Christ, 13, 14, 23, 29–30, 33, 58, 74, 99, 205;
_See also_ Jesus.
“Christ, athletes of,” 160
Christian capitalism, 87
_Christian Directory_, 86
Christian doctrine, 152, 163
Christian Fathers, 207
Christianity, 8–9, 11, 29–30, 32, 34, 55, 58, 205–206, 250;
foundations of, 51
_Christianity and Liberalism_, 32
Christian socialism, 87
Chrysostom, St., 51–54
Church and state, 75, 79–80, 112
Church attendance, 48
Church councils, 58
Church of England, 266
Church of St. Urban, 98
_City of God_, 69, 71;
_See also “Civitas Dei.”_
Civilization, cycle of, 232;
modern, 4, 9, 62, 230, 233–234, 237, 240, 241, 265, 267, 271, 273,
300, 327;
Roman, 233–234;
technological, 233, 238, 240
Civil service, 271–272
Civil War, 66
_Civitas Dei_, 70;
_See also “City of God.”_
Commercial enterprise, 86
Commonsense, religion of, 44, 45
_Commonweal_, 34
Communities, homogeneous, 270–271
Competition, 247;
free, 244
Compulsions, old and new, 9–10
Comstock, Anthony, 156
Conceptions of God, 51;
Eighteenth-Century, 55;
Luther’s, 53;
mediæval, 55, 71–72;
Modernist, 55;
Oriental, 55;
St. Chrysostom’s, 52–53
Concepts, fixed, 171
_Conclusions to The Renaissance_, 106
Conduct, human, 145, 230, 284, 323
Conformity, 12, 324–325, 328
Confucius, 193, 196, 258, 327
Conventions, new, 12
Conversion, 192, 198
Council of Vienna, 87
Counter-Reformation, 94, 96
Courage, 222–223
Cox, Harold, 288 [p341]
Creation, 99;
theory of, 11
Creative evolution, 18, 117, 131
Creator, dependence on, 69
Credulity, modern, 8–9
Creeds, profusion of, 110
_Critique of Pure Reason_, 136
Cults, modern, 9, 14, 125–126
Culture, theocratic, 164, 175, 221
Curia, 81
Curiosity, 129–130
Custom, 166, 167, 241, 327
Dante, 11, 68, 69, 128, 323
Darwin, 210
Darwinism, 125, 132, 174
Darrow, Clarence, 13
Davids, Rhys, 165
Decoding the Bible, 41, 47
Della Porta, 236
Democracy, 15, 264, 278
Desire, reform of, 201, 202, 282, 320–321
Desires, human, 145, 146, 165, 167–170, 172, 180, 182, 186, 190, 193,
206, 216, 310–311, 319
Destiny, human, 133, 184, 218, 324
Development, concept of, 171–172, 174, 191;
industrial, 245–246, 252, 253–254, 255, 257, 258
_Dialogue of Dives and Pauper_, 147
Dictatorship, military, 253, 264
Disciplines, 202, 203, 205
Disillusionment, 17, 326
Disinterestedness, 204, 206, 209, 210, 221, 225, 230–231, 237,
238–239, 243, 258, 272, 281, 283, 311, 313, 323, 327, 330
Disorders, social, 191–192, 206
Disposition to believe, 143
_Divine Comedy_, 69, 128
Divine government, sense of, 72, 95, 194;
theory of, 71–72, 82, 175
Divine right of kings, 79, 265
Divorce, 299, 308
Doge, 81
Dogma, 13, 96, 125, 133, 176, 244
Domain of religion, 82
Donne, John, 40
Doubt, freedom from, 16
Ecclesiastical establishments, 196, 201, 314–315
Eckhart, 196
Economic order, new, 86, 246–248
Eddington, Dr., 127
Eden, 37
Education, 175, 184, 191, 192, 198, 230
Eighteenth Century, 154, 174, 266, 289
_Élan vital_, 55
Eliot, T. S., 303
Ellis, Havelock, 293, 295–296, 297, 301, 305
Emancipation, 19;
of women, 91–92
Emotions, 220
_Encyclopedia Britannica_, 289
England, 253–254, 272, 273
Environment, 145, 172, 180, 181, 184, 189, 190, 247, 250
Epistles of St. Paul, 44
Erasmus, 196
_Essay on Population_, 289
Estheticism, 105, 107
Ethical codes, 49, 165
_Ethics_, 166
Evil, problem of, 145, 156, 213, 214, 216–217, 218, 329;
sense of, 188, 189, 218–219
Evils, social, 243
Evolution, 60, 117, 122, 125, 132, 171, 210, 231;
_See also_ Creative evolution.
Excommunication, 76
Executives, modern business, 256–257
Exhibition of London, 236–237
Existence, 108, 117, 123
Exodus, 27, 118
Experience, Christian, 33;
esthetic, 106;
lessons of, 181, 182, 183, 186, 188, 189, 192, 195, 227;
scientific, 220
Faith, age of, 83, 322;
questions of, 77 [p342]
Fallacy, 167, 168
Family, 88, 91–92, 93
Fanaticism, 271
Faraday, 240
Fascism, 251–253, 254
_Faust_, 116
Federal Council of Churches of Christ, 87
Ferenczi, Dr. S., 177–179
Fetich worship, 160
Feudal system, 85–86, 242, 252, 253, 263, 266–267
Figgis, Dr., 76, 81
Fildes, Mrs., 289–290
Flaubert, 7
Ford, Henry, 64
Fornication, 89
Fosdick, Rev. Harry Emerson, 21–22, 40, 41, 42, 45–46, 47, 97, 147–148
Fourth Gospel, 11, 44, 194
Francis, St., 69, 113
Franklin, Benjamin, 236
Freedom, 17, 136, 242, 262, 315, 326, 327;
religious, 75
French Academy of Sciences, 236
Freud, 107, 157, 176, 177, 179, 220
_Fruits of Philosophy_, 290
Fundamentalism, 30–31, 34–35, 64
Fundamentalists, 31, 33–34, 51, 60, 77
Galileo, 123–124, 236
Gargantua, 162–163
Genesis, 27, 38, 131, 132, 325
Geneva, 74
Genteel, cult of, 155
Gentleman, ideal of, 167
Germany, 254, 272
_Gestalt-theorie_, 174, 177
Gierke, 70
Giotto, 109
Gnostics, 52
God, attributes of, 213–214, 215–216
Gods, Greek, 10, 302
Godlessness, 194
Gods, popular. _See_ Theology, popular.
Golden Age, 151
Golden mean, 166–167, 180
Good and evil, 135, 137, 153, 168, 170, 172, 214–215, 320
“Good life,” 156, 172, 191, 202, 319, 323
Good Samaritan, 37
Gospels, 37, 44, 206, 325
Government, 231, 275–276, 278–279
Grace, meaning of, 58;
religion of, 12
Greek Church, 51
Hammurabi, code of, 136
Happiness, pursuit of, 4, 153, 166, 198, 328–329
Heaven, Christian, 146
Hedonism, 301–302, 304, 319
Hegesias, 302
Hellenism, 322
Hemingway, Ernest, 303
Hera, 148
_Heretics_, 56
Heroism, 156
Hertz, 240
Heterodoxy, 12, 62
Hierarchies, 92, 263, 265, 268
Higher Criticism, 40
“Higher sense,” 11
High religion, 193, 203–204, 207, 208, 230, 239;
function of, 193;
insight of, 207–208, 209, 230, 239, 251
Hildebrand, 58
Historians, philosophic, 232
Historical scholarship, 157
History, 143, 157
Hobbes, 266
Holy Land, 149
Holy See, 73, 74
Homer, 10, 43
Hooker, Richard, 266
Hoover, 273–274
Hope and fear, 321, 330
Hosea, 12
Human development, 177, 234
Humanism, 137–139, 143–144, 164, 166, 167, 172, 175, 196, 221
Humanity, religion of, 18 [p343]
Human nature, 157, 161, 164, 165, 169, 171–172, 173, 175–176,
183–184, 207, 227, 306, 327
Huss, 73
Huxley, Aldous, 303
Huxley, Thomas Henry, 6
Iconoclasm, 17, 96, 315
Iconoclasts, 15, 302
Idealism, debacle of, 17
Ideals, foundation of, 133, 224, 323;
succession of, 111
Ideas, crystallization of, 20
Idols, smashing of, 15, 16
Illusions, 8, 189, 232
Immortality, 11, 41–43, 45, 122, 180, 188
Impersonal, worship of the, 44
Impulses, 165–166, 168, 169, 192, 222, 224, 227, 306
Industry, ideals of, 258–259;
modern, 248, 251, 255–256, 260, 273–274, 288
Inertia, human, 208, 227
Infallibility, 81
Infantilism, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 184, 185, 189–190, 191
Inferno, 146
Inge, Dean, 28, 29–30, 42, 44, 46, 196, 313, 314
Inquiry, disinterested, 132;
freedom of, 126
Inquisition, 123–124, 161
Inspiration, 13, 46
Intelligence, 186;
machinery of, 64
Interests, diversification of, 267–268, 269–270, 274, 328
Internal life, 152, 195, 196
Invention of invention, 235
Inventions, mechanical, 234–235
Irreligion, modern, 12, 53–54
Isaiah, 12
Italy, 251–253, 272
James I, 79
James, William, 18, 24–26
Jefferson, 15
Jehovah, 12, 214, 288;
_See also_ Yahveh.
Jerome, St., 161
Jesus, 12, 46, 99, 119, 155, 193, 199, 200;
_See also_ Christ.
Jews, 52
Joad, C. E. M., 296, 297, 315–316
Job, 213–216
Job, Book of, 214, 216
John, Gospel of. _See_ Fourth Gospel.
John, St., 99
Joyce, James, 303
Judaism, 12
Judgment, private, 15, 34
Kant, Immanuel, 136–137
Keats, 320
Kelvin, Lord, 129
Keynes, Maynard, 245, 258
Knowledge, limitations of, 202
Knowlton, 290
Knox, 73
Krutch, Joseph Wood, 302–303, 304
Ku Klux Klan, 31
Labor, organized, 244
_Laissez-faire_, 242, 244, 250, 252
Lake, Kirsopp, 27–29
Lamarckism, 125
“Land of heart’s desire,” 151–152
Last Judgment, 99
Law enforcement, 277–278
Law, international, 265–266
Lawrence, D. H., 303
Leadership, mass, 274–275
Legislation, modern, 275–276, 279
Lent, 1492, 38
Leviticus, 37
Lewis, Sinclair, 16
Liberalism, 6, 152
Liberals, Protestant, 34;
religious, 21, 33
Liberty, natural, 243, 244–246, 258
Life, art of, 175, 326–327;
mediæval view of, 154, 323;
wisdom of, 156, 330
Lindbergh, Col. Charles A., 222–223 [p344]
Lindsey, Judge, 298, 307
Locke, 266
Love, art of, 293, 295, 301, 303, 305, 308–309;
value of, 302–304, 306, 310
Lowell Lectures, 25
Loyalty, 261–263, 268–269, 272, 325
Lucretius, 218
Luther, 13, 14–15, 39, 53–54, 73–74, 79, 196
Lutheran Church, 13
Lutherans, 77
Machen, Prof. J. Gresham, 32, 33–34
Machine process, 246, 253–254, 274
Machine technology, 242–243, 247, 251, 252, 254, 257, 258–259, 274,
284, 316
Mâle, 100, 101
Malthus, 289
Manichæans, 52
Man, nature of, 152, 243
Manner of life, 235
Markets, 246–247
Marriage, 89, 286, 288, 289, 291, 309, 310–311, 312;
companionate, 298, 307
Marxianism, 16
Mary, St. _See_ Virgin Mary.
Masses, 148–149, 278
Matriarchal societies, 91
Maturity, 174–175, 176–177, 179–180, 183–184, 185, 186, 189, 190,
191–192, 204, 209, 225, 230, 237, 239, 313, 323, 325, 327,
328–329
Maxwell, 240
Mazzini, 18
Meaning of things, 183
Mechanism, 125, 128, 130–131
Medical progress, 218
Melanchthon, 79
Mencken, H. L., 13, 16
Mendel’s law, 231
Messianic Kingdom, 11
Methodism, 6;
American, 158
Mexico, 253, 265
Middle Ages, 70–72, 73, 94, 129, 131, 161, 265, 266
Mill, James, 289
Milton, 74, 266
Minority, recalcitrant, 279
Miracles, 118, 119–120
Mississippi flood, 273–274
Modernism, 18, 32, 33, 59, 77, 117, 217
Modernists, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 42, 51
Modernity, 5, 8, 14, 15, 19, 56, 68, 96, 105, 110, 112, 143, 158,
196–197, 208, 229, 251, 284, 316, 318, 320, 321
Modern man, 4, 8–10, 12, 19, 21, 24, 40, 41, 51, 54, 57, 59, 94, 111,
112, 113, 114, 152, 153, 158, 161, 194, 203, 227–228, 315, 316
Modern men. _See_ Modern man.
_Modern Movement in Art, The_, 104
Modern spirit, 36, 110, 143
Modern state, 260, 262–263, 267, 272–273, 275, 279, 311
Modern world, 14, 19, 20, 268–269, 270, 300, 311, 322–324
Mohammed, 145
Mohammedanism, 199
Monasticism, 204–206
Montaigne, 48, 175, 196
Moral certainty, 9–10, 15, 115
Moral codes, 3, 49, 135, 167, 170, 171, 201, 208–209, 226, 228, 272,
317, 319
Moral confusion, 155, 228, 230
Moral effect, 179–180
Moral effort, 175
Moral guidance, 14, 205
Moral insight, 227–228, 229
Moralists, 164, 165, 166, 167, 170, 172, 173, 208–209, 225, 244, 300,
314–315, 316–319, 320–321, 323
Morality, 114–115, 117, 136, 137–139, 145;
divine, 49–50;
sanctions of, 78, 166, 176, 228;
theistic, 138;
_See also_ Morals.
Moral law, 46, 48, 191, 233 [p345]
Moral philosophies, 156
Moral problem, 134, 166, 168, 192, 229, 312, 317
Morals, 17, 112, 151, 157, 192, 208, 210, 227–228, 229, 241, 322;
_See also_ Morality.
Moral values, 106
Morris, William, 5, 244
Mortality, 188, 191
Mosaic law, 136
Moses, 49
Moving pictures, 6
Music, 182
Musset, Alfred de, 163
Mystics, 147, 196
Nain, 119
Naples, 236
Nationalism, 63–64, 232
Natural goodness, 163
Natural man, 19, 162, 163, 241
Natural selection, 18, 150
Nature and science, 241
Nature, laws of, 117, 122, 125, 150, 165, 195;
religion of, 18
Necessity, experience of, 187
Need to believe, 125, 203
Neo-Malthusianism, 289–290
Neo-Platonism, Christian, 28
Neo-Platonists, modern, 11
New Jerusalem, 115, 116
Newspapers, popular, 6, 64–65
New York, 66, 271, 273
Nicæa, Second Council of, 98, 100, 101
Nietzsche, 7, 157
Nietzscheanism, 16
Nineteenth Century, 5, 16, 18, 174, 288, 309
Nirvana, 145, 165, 199
Noah’s Ark, 38
Noguchi, 223
Non-sectarianism, 77–78
Novels, autobiographical, 113
Objectivity, 132
Obregon, Gen., 264
Old Testament, 55, 214
Onan, 288
Order, ancestral, 68, 153, 207, 208, 228, 267, 314, 322;
cosmic, 8, 195, 202, 216;
industrial, 242
Origen, 11, 28, 29, 37, 39, 196
Original sin, 198
“Orthodox,” 57, 122
Orthodoxy, 10, 11, 12, 19–20, 32, 35, 194, 216
“Overbeliefs,” 24
Pach, Walter, 95
Pagans, 52
Painting, religious, 94–96, 97–98
Pantagruelists, 162
Pantheism, 117–118
Paradise, 128, 145, 146
_Paradise Lost_, 116
Parenthood, 292–294, 301, 305
Paris, 111, 223
Passions, harmony of, 198, 206, 208
_Pater_, 149
Pater, Walter, 106–107
Patriotism, 18, 78, 82
Paul, St., 12–13, 50, 52, 58, 90, 99, 155, 161
Peace of mind, 7–8
Peirce, Charles S., 129
Periclean Age, 11, 232
Personality, persistence of, 42
Peter, St., 72, 74, 99, 146
Petrarch, 5
_Phædo_, 159
Pharisees, 12, 317, 319
Philistines, 104
Philosophers, Greek, 10, 159, 233, 235–236
Philosophy, 324;
industrial, 243, 260;
modern, 157, 158;
political, 260
Physicists, 102, 124, 129
Physics, 143, 157, 174, 241
_Pilgrim’s Progress, The_, 200
Place, Francis, 289
Plato, 10, 48, 156, 159, 161, 200, 289
Platonic tradition, 28
Platonism, 43
Platonists, 42–43, 196
Pleasure and pain, 177, 179, 302 [p346]
Plot, John, 149
Plotinus, 155
Political conduct, 264–265, 284
Political machine, 264
Politician, the, 279–282
Pope, the, 13, 15, 72, 79, 81, 85, 265, 270–271
Pope Innocent IV, 85
Pope Paul V, 81
Pope Pius IX, 75
Population, growth of, 289–291
Post-Darwinians, 18
Pragmatism, 119
Prayer, 146–149
Pre-machine age, 253
Presbyterians, 79
Priesthood, 73
Primitive peoples, 159
Procreation, 166
Progress, religion of, 18
Prohibition, 31, 277
Propaganda, 281
Prophet, artist as, 101–102, 103, 104
Prophets, 12
Protestantism, 15, 30, 32, 34, 52, 77, 86
Protestants, 34–35
Pseudo-religions, 125
Psychiatry, 158, 159
Psychoanalysis, 6, 125, 174, 177, 179, 220
Psychology, 143, 171, 172, 173, 174, 220;
abnormal, 171;
folk, 171;
popular, 114;
scientific, 173, 176
Public interest, 257–258
Public opinion, 167
Public schools, 76–77
Public utilities, regulation of, 254–255
Purgatory, 146
Puritanism, 154, 302
Purpose, cosmic, 9
Pythagoras, 204–205
Rabelais, 161, 162–163
Randall, Dr., 127–128
Rationalists, 24–25
Rationalization, 39
Reality, 177, 179, 180, 193, 216, 272, 312, 319
Reason and faith, 51, 121
Rebellion, 16–17, 19, 190
Rebels, 15–18, 19
Reconstruction, essays in, 14
Redemption, 11, 115
Reformation, 13, 72–73, 94, 154
Reformers, Eighteenth-Century, 15;
Protestant, 34, 39, 40, 73, 96
Relative motion, 124
Religion, 8, 10, 17, 18–19, 23, 112, 123, 131, 284, 324;
aristocracy in, 197, 200, 202, 203;
need of, 123;
of the spirit, 44, 46, 196–197, 203, 205–206, 327–328;
popular, 14, 32–33, 47, 50, 69, 91, 94, 127, 131–132, 143, 145,
176, 194, 195–196, 201, 202, 208, 216, 227, 232, 244, 325 (_See
also_ Theology, popular);
traditional, 122, 124, 203
Religious experience, 33, 90–91, 125, 325–326
Religious synthesis, 111, 124
Religious thought, 96
Religious wars, 74
Religious writing, 97
Renaissance, 94–95, 161;
High, 154
Renan, 7
Renunciation, 45, 156, 157, 191, 192, 206
_Republic_, 159–160
Revelation, 124, 126, 127, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 143, 318, 326;
logic of, 121;
sense of, 13
Revivals, 14
Revolution, French, 289;
industrial, 210, 248;
mechanical, 19, 234, 236, 241, 248, 289;
Russian, 250–251;
spiritual, 133–134
Rewards and punishments, 201, 202, 213
Riggs, Father, 34
Righteousness, sense of, 16
Right of revolution, 82
Right to believe, 25
Rights of men, 242, 267
Roland, 71 [p347]
Roman Catholic Church. _See_ Catholic Church.
Roman Empire, 58, 205
Romantics, 18, 26, 154
Rome, 149, 236
Rousseau, 154, 266
Royal Society of London, 236
Ruskin, 244
Russell, Bertrand, 27, 114, 157, 238, 298–299, 308
Russell, Dora, 163
Russia, 250–253, 272, 273
Sages, teaching of, 198, 200, 210, 239
Saintliness, 156
Salvation, 75, 88, 147, 195–197, 198, 201, 313
Santayana, George, 19, 35, 36, 43, 68, 145, 148, 182, 310, 311
Sargent, John, 95
Savonarola, 37
Schoolmen, 127, 129
Science, 10, 18, 19, 112, 120, 123, 153, 176, 205;
and religion, 123–124, 132–133;
concepts in, 102–103, 107, 122;
Greek, 210;
logic of, 121;
mediæval, 128;
method of, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 157, 239;
modern, 127, 128, 236–237, 239, 316;
popular, 127;
pure, 237–238, 239
_Science and the Modern World_, 123
Scientific discipline, 239–240, 241
Scientific explanation, 130, 131
Scientific hypotheses, 125, 126–127
Scientific inquiry, 35, 123, 236
Scientific materialism, 131
Scientific method. _See_ Science, method of.
Scientific research, 236–237, 238
Scientific spirit, 240, 327
Scientific theory, 133, 209
Scribes, 12
Scriptures. _See_ Bible.
Self-discipline, 45, 196–197, 198
Serenity, 7–8
Sex, 284–285, 288, 299–300, 306, 308;
and religion, 89–90
Sexual conventions, 299–300, 301, 307–308
Sexual ideal, 93–94, 293, 301, 305–306, 307
Sexuality, 150, 165–166, 303–304
Sexual relations, 231, 284–287, 288–289, 291–292, 295–296, 297, 299,
308, 312
Shaw, George Bernard, 18, 48, 156
Shelley, 5–6, 102
Simeon Stylites, St., 158
Sinai, 136, 227
Smith, Adam, 242, 243, 245
“Social compact,” 266–267
Socialism, 249–250, 258
Socialists, 249, 250, 252
Social system, American, 65–67, 273–274
Society, 19, 190, 206, 207, 241, 250, 266, 276, 284, 322;
opinion of, 134
Socrates, 10, 11, 155, 159, 160, 161, 219, 220
Song of Solomon, 38
Sophists, 219, 220
Sophisticated violence, 64
Soul, 114, 196
Sovereignty, conception of, 265, 267
Space, sense of, 180
Species, propagation of, 150
Speculation, philosophic, 233
Spengler, 62, 232
Spinoza, 155, 156, 161, 192, 193, 194, 197, 216, 219, 220, 266
Spirituality, 154, 197, 204, 329–330
Staël, Madame de, 162
Statesman, the, 279–283
Steele, Richard, 86
Stimuli, 182
Stoddard, Lothrop, 64
Suffering, irrational, 213
_Summa_, 100
Supernatural kingdom, 143, 325–326
Superstition, 218
Survival of the fittest, 150
Syllabus of Pope Pius IX, 314
Symbolism, 34, 45, 68, 100, 325 [p348]
Tabu, 160
Tamar, 288
Tariff, 276–277
Ten Commandments, 78
Tennessee, 77
Theism, 136, 137
Theocracy, 194, 195, 197, 203, 227, 228
Theodorus of Cyrene, 301–302
Theology, Catholic, 51, 119;
popular, 10–11, 23 (_see also_ Religion, popular)
Thirteenth Century, 11
Thomas à Kempis, 113
Thomson, James, 5
Thought, contemporary, 194;
scientific, 125, 235
Time, sense of, 181
Toleration, 74–77, 123
Totemism, 160
Towns, rise of, 19, 232
_Tradesman’s Calling, The_, 86
Traditions, religious, 61–62, 96, 97
Transubstantiation, 58
Trent, Council of, 14, 100–101
Trinity, 70
_True Law of Free Monarchy_, 79
“Truth, the,” 129
_Unam sanctam_, 81
Unbelief, 3–20, 28, 228, 229, 326
Understanding, 181–183, 191, 206, 321, 329
Uneasiness, modern, 14
United States, 253–254, 272, 274, 276, 277–278
Universe, 8, 128, 129, 145
Usury, 84, 85, 86, 87
Utopia, 151
Valerian, 98–99
Values, transvaluation of, 16, 181
Versailles, Court of, 95
Vicegerent of God, 72
Victoria, Queen, 155, 302
View of life, traditional, 109
Villers, 162
Virgin Mary, 96, 99, 115, 149
Virtue, 166, 192, 221–225, 226–227, 228–229, 320, 329;
conception of, 226, 318, 319, 324
Voltaire, 16, 197
Wallas, Graham, 240
Walter Reed Hospital, 223
Walwayn, Thomas, 149
War, abolition of, 232
Watt, James, 234, 236
_Wealth of Nations_, 242
Wells, H. G., 233–234
West, Lady Alice, 148–149
Whitehead, Alfred North, 25–27, 123–124, 195, 236, 325
Wilenski, R. H., 104, 111
Will, human, 195
Will of God, 10, 195
Will to believe, 25, 53
Wisdom, 185–186, 198–199, 201, 226–228, 229, 244, 320, 324
Woman, economic independence of, 93
Women, chastity of, 286–288, 291
Wordsworth, 5, 18, 180
World, character of, 186
World’s Christian Fundamentalist Association, 30, 31
World War, 17, 253, 272–273
Wyclif, 37, 73
Wynne, Father, 146
Yahveh, 55, 214.
_See also_ Jehovah.
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