From the economic and spiritual subjection of his mother the child

forms its ideal of the relation of men and women. We speak about

the influence of the parents. It is deeper than most of us realize.

The child is influenced by its parents, but not only for good, as

sentimentalists seem to imagine. The boy may absorb all the admirable

qualities of his father, but he is just as capable of absorbing his

father’s contempt for woman’s mind, his father’s capacity for playing

the little tyrant, and his father’s bad economic habits. The girl

learns to obey, to wait on the lordly male, to feel unimportant in

human affairs, to hold on with unremitting force to the privileges that

sex gives her. And out of it all we get the people of to-day, unused

to the very meaning of democracy, grasping their own with an almost

hysterical tenacity.

The sense of property may be a deep instinct. But surely the nineteenth

century home stimulated that instinct to the point of morbidity. For

it did almost nothing to bring the child into contact with the real

antidote to acquisitiveness--a sense of social property. To own things

in common is, it seems to me, one of the most educating experiences

in the world. Those people who can feel that they possess the parks,

the libraries, the museums of their city, are likely to be far more

civilized people than those who want a park which they can enclose,

and who want to own a masterpiece all by themselves. It is well known

that there is among sea-faring people a rare comradeship. May this not

be due to the fact that the sea is there for all to use and none to

own? On the high road men salute each other in passing. Farmers seem at

times to have a kind of personal friendship with the weather and the

turning seasons, and those things which no single man can appropriate.

Now in the complicated civilization upon which we are entering, it

will be impossible for many people to enjoy the primitive sense of

absolute possession. We shall need men and women who can take an

interest in collective property, who can feel personally and vividly

about it. One of the great promises of the conservation movement is

the evidence it gave of a passionate attachment to public possessions.

But that attachment is something that almost everyone to-day has had

to acquire after he was grown up. We are all of us compelled to

overcome the habits and ideals of a childhood where social property

was almost unknown. In this respect the only child is perhaps the most

deeply miseducated. He has had what he had as his in fee simple. But

all children have far too little contact with other children--too few

toys that are owned in common, too few group nurseries. Now boys, when

they grow to be a bit older, do come in for a little social education.

The gang is a fine experience, even though a few windows are smashed.

The boy who can talk about “us fellers” has a better start for the

modern world than the little girl of the same age who is imitating

her mother’s housekeeping. From the gang to the athletic team,

class spirit, school spirit--with all their faults and misdirected

energy--they do mean loyalty to something larger than the petty details

of the moment.

One of the supreme values of feminism is that it will have to socialize

the home. When women seek a career they have to specialize. When they

specialize they have to coöperate. They have to abandon more and

more the self-sufficient individualism of the older family. They will

have to market through associations. They will do a great deal more

of the housework through associations, just as they are now beginning

to have bread baked outside and the washing done by laundries that

are not part of the home. If they are not satisfied with the kind

of work that is done for the home but outside of it, they will have

to learn that difficult business of democracy which consists in

expressing and enforcing their desires upon industry. And just as

from the kindergarten up, education has become a collective function,

so undoubtedly a great deal of the care and training of infants will

become specialized.

This doesn’t mean baby-farms or barracks or any of the other nightmares

of the hysterical imagination. Nobody is proposing to separate the

child from its parents any more than the child is now separated. It is

curious how readily any woman who can afford it will trust her infant

to the most ignorant nurse-girl, and then be horribly shocked at the

idea of trusting her child to day nurseries in charge of trained women.

The private nurse-girl often abuses the child in unmentionable ways,

but she is preferred because she seems somehow to satisfy the feeling

of possession. The penalty that grown-ups pay for the sins of the

superstitious and unsocialized nursery is something that we are just

beginning to understand from the researches of the psychiatrists.

There is one question about feminism which is sure to have risen in the

mind of any reader who has followed the argument up to this point. Does

the awakening of women mean an attack upon monogamy? For the moment

anyone dares to criticize any arrangement of the existing home he might

as well be prepared to find himself classed as a sexual anarchist. It

is curious how little faith conservatives have in the institution of

the family. They will tell you how deep it is in the needs of mankind,

and they will turn around and act as if the home were so fragile that

collapse would follow the first whiff of criticism.

Now I believe that the family _is_ deeply grounded in the needs of

mankind, or it would never survive the destructive attacks made upon

it, not by radical theorists, mind you, but by social conditions.

At the present moment over half the men of the working-class do not

earn enough to support a family, and that’s why their wives and their

daughters are drawn into industry. The family survives that, men and

women do still want to marry and have children. But we put every kind

of obstacle in their way. We pay such wages that young men can’t afford

to marry. We do not teach them the elementary facts of sex. We allow

them to pick up knowledge in whispered and hidden ways. We surround

them with the tingle and glare of cities, stimulate them, and then fall

upon them with a morality which shows no quarter. We support a large

class of women in idleness, the soil in which every foolish freak can

flourish. We thrust people into marriage and forbid them with fearful

penalties to learn any way of controlling their own fertility. We do

almost no single, sensible, and deliberate thing to make family life a

success. And still the family survives.

It has survived all manner of stupidity. It will survive the

application of intelligence. It will not collapse because the home is

no longer the scene of drudgery and wasted labor or because children

are reared to meet modern civilization. It will not collapse because

women have become educated, or because they have attained a new

self-respect.

But in answer to the direct question whether monogamy is to go by

the board, the only possible answer is this: there is no reason for

supposing that there will be any less of it than there is to-day.

That is not saying very much, perhaps, but more than that no honest

person can guarantee. He can believe that when the thousand irritations

of married life are reduced, the irritations of an unsound economic

status, of ignorance in the art of love, then the family will have a

better chance than it has ever had. How many homes have been wrecked

by the sheer inability of men and women to understand each other can

be seen by the enormous use made of the theme in modern literature.

It does not seem to me that education and a growing sensitiveness are

likely to make for promiscuity.

For you have to hold yourself very cheaply to endure the appalling

and unselective intimacy that promiscuity means. To treat women as

things and yourself as a predatory animal is the product not of

emancipation and self-respect, but of ignorance and inferiority. The

uprising of women as personalities is not likely to make them value

themselves less, nor is it likely that they will be satisfied with the

fragments of love they now attain. Of course, every movement attracts

what Roosevelt calls its “lunatic fringe,” and feminism has collected

about it a great rag-tag of bohemianism. But it cannot be judged by

that; it must be judged by its effect on the great mass of women who,

half-consciously for the most part, are seeking not a new form of

studio and café life, but a readjustment to work and love and interest.

There is among them, so far as I can see, no indication of any desire

for an impressionistic sexual career.

To be sure they don’t treat a woman who has had relations out of

marriage as if she were a leper. They are not inclined to visit upon

the offspring of illegitimacy the curse of patriarchal Judæa. But so

far as their own demands go they are set in overwhelming measure upon

greater sexual sincerity. They are, if anything, too stern in their

morality and, perhaps, too naïve. But the legislation they initiate,

the books they write, look almost entirely to the establishment of a

far more enduring and intelligently directed family.

The effect of the woman’s movement will accumulate with the

generations. The results are bound to be so far-reaching that we

can hardly guess them to-day. For we are tapping a reservoir of

possibilities when women begin to use not only their generalized

womanliness but their special abilities. For the child it means, as

I have tried to suggest, a change in the very conditions where the

property sense is aggravated and where the need for authority and

individual assertiveness is built up. The greatest obstacles to a

coöperative civilization are under fire from the feminists. Those

obstacles to-day are more than anything else a childhood in which

the anti-social impulses are fixed. The awakening of women points

straight to the discipline of coöperation. And so it is laying the real

foundations for the modern world.

For understand that the forms of coöperation are of precious little

value without a people trained to use them. The old family with its

dominating father, its submissive and amateurish mother produced

inevitably men who had little sense of a common life, and women who

were jealous of an enlarging civilization. It is this that feminism

comes to correct, and that is why its promise reaches far beyond the

present bewilderment.

CHAPTER XII

Bogeys

There are people who are always waiting for the heavens to fall. In

1879, when Massachusetts granted school suffrage to women, a legislator

arose and said: “If we make this experiment we shall destroy the

race, which will be blasted by Almighty God.” That silly man was not

a prehistoric specimen. He is always with us. And he is in the soul

of most of us. He is the panic that seized Chicago over the Haymarket

anarchists; he is what makes preachers cry out that the tango is

wrecking the nation; he is the white slave legend; he is Mr. Taft

contemplating the recall of judges.

I know how bogeys are made. I was a child of four during the panic of

’93, and Cleveland has always been a sinister figure to me. His name

was uttered with monstrous dread in the household. Then came Bryan, an

ogre from the West, and a waiting for the election returns of 1896 with

beating heart. And to this day I find myself with a subtle prejudice

against Democrats that goes deeper than what we call political

conviction.

I can remember a birthday “party” for two or three chums which

developed into a “rough-house.” In the excitement we used cakes as

ammunition, leaving the carpet in a shocking state. This angered the

maid who was responsible for the tidiness of my room to such a pitch

that only religion seemed adequate for the occasion. In the late

afternoon she began to talk to me in a solemn voice. I would have

preferred a thousand beatings to that voice in the wretched gaslight

which used to darken homes before electricity reached the middle-class.

The flickering shadows on the cake-strewn carpet were unbearable and

accusing shapes full of foreboding to boys lost in sin. I burst into

tears at the impending wrath of God. And for years God was the terror

of the twilight.

With that somehow or other was associated a belief that the world was

about to come to an end. I think the nurse had read the predictions of

some astronomer in a newspaper, and the news was communicated to me. It

became part of the twilight, and was mixed up with thunderstorms, and

going into a dark room. Then too, there were ghosts, but I laid them

one night after everyone had gone to bed in what is undoubtedly the

most heroic exploit of my life. I still glow with pride in the telling.

I got out of bed and turned on the light, identified the ghost with the

lace curtain, went back to bed, turned on the light once more, made

sure that the ghost _was_ the curtain, and felt immeasurably happier.

Generally, however, we create the bogey by pulling the bed-clothes over

our heads. A friend of mine couldn’t be cured of his socialist phobia

until he happened one day to see the most terrible agitator of them all

buying a pair of suspenders. For in the seclusion and half-light of

class tradition and private superstition, in a whispered and hesitant

atmosphere, phantoms thrive. But in direct contact by an unromantic

light evil is no longer a bogey but a problem. That is the way to

approach evil: by stating it and manhandling it: the fevered gloom

subsides, for that gloom does not belong to evil; it is merely the

feeling of a person who is afraid of evil. “Death,” said a wise man,

“is not feared because it is evil, but it is evil because it is feared.”

To overcome the subjective terrors: that is an important aspect of the

age-long struggle out of barbarism. Romantic persons like to paint

savages as care-free poets living in thoughtless happiness from day to

day. Nothing could be further from the facts. The life of a savage is

beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated

world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are

obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to

propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical

and capricious, the simplest thing is occult. In that atmosphere there

is no possibility of men being able to face their life without heroics

and without terror, simply and gladly. They need authority: they need

to be taken in charge; they cannot trust themselves.

That is why the exorcising of bogeys is so intimate a part of the

effort at self-government. Think of the ordinary business man’s

notion of an anarchist, or the anarchist’s notion of a business man;

many men’s feeling about Theodore Roosevelt, or Bill Haywood, or the

Capitalist Class, or the Money Power, or Sex Reform--I use capital

letters because these fantasies have become terrific monsters of the

imagination. Our life is overwrought with timidities and panics,

distorting superstitions and fantastic lures: our souls are misshapen

by the plucking of invisible hands.

The regiment of bogeys is waiting for people at birth, where the

cruellest unreason clusters about illegitimacy. It attacks the young

child who asks how he was born. For answer he is given lies and a

sense of shame; for ever afterwards he too lies and is ashamed. And

so we begin to build up the sense of sin and the furtiveness of sex.

The body becomes the object of a sneaking curiosity, of a tingling and

embarrassing interest. We surround the obvious with great wastes of

silence, and over the simplest facts we teach the soul to stutter.

What we call purity is not honest and temperate desire, but a divided

life in which our “Better Nature” occasionally wins a bankrupt victory.

Children are immured in what their parents fondly picture to be a

citadel of innocence. In reality, they are plunged into fantastic

brooding or into a haphazard education. Behind innocence there gathers

a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse;

clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind.

Then too the whole edifice of class-feeling--what “is done” and

what “isn’t done,” and who are “the best people” and who are the

“impossible,” and sleepless nights over whether you were correctly

dressed, or whether you will be invited to be seen with Mrs. So-and-So.

It makes sheep out of those who conform and freaks out of those who

rebel. Every fairly intelligent person is aware that the price of

respectability is a muffled soul bent on the trivial and the mediocre.

The mere fact that the weight of custom is on the accidents of class

is a tremendous item in the lives of those who try to live in a human

sphere. No one escapes the deformity altogether. Certainly not the

modern rebel. His impulse is to break away from the worship of idols

to central human values. But the obstruction of class feeling is so

great that he becomes a kind of specialist in rebellion. He is so busy

asserting that he isn’t conventional that the easy, natural humanity

he professes to admire is almost the last thing he achieves. Hence the

eccentricity and the paradox, the malice and the wantonness of the

iconoclast.

The fear of losing one’s job, the necessity of being somebody in a

crowded and clamorous world, the terror that old age will not be

secured, that your children will lack opportunity--there are a thousand

terrors which arise out of the unorganized and unstable economic system

under which we live. These are not terrors which can be blown away by

criticism; they will go only when society is intelligent enough to

have made destitution impossible, when it secures opportunity to every

child, when it establishes for every human being a minimum of comfort

below which he cannot sink. Then a great amount of social hesitancy

will disappear. Every issue will not be fought as if life depended

upon it, and mankind will have emerged from a fear economy. There are

those who cannot conceive of a nation not driven by fear. They seem to

feel that enterprise would diminish in a sort of placid contentment.

That, it seems to me, is a serious error. The regime of fear produces

dreaming and servile races, as in India and China and parts of Ireland.

The enterprise that will be fruitful to modern civilization is not

the undernourished child of hard necessity, but the high spirits and

exuberant well-being of a happy people.

It is a common observation that no man can live well who fears death.

The overcareful person is really dying all his life. He is a miser, and

he pays the miser’s penalty: he never enjoys his own treasure because

he will not spend it. And so when we hear that he who would find his

own soul must lose it first, we are not listening to an idle paradox or

to some counsel of perfection. Those who hold life lightly are the real

masters of it: the lavish givers have the most to give.

But anyone who picks his way through the world as if he were walking

on eggs will find it a difficult and unsatisfactory place. Writers

and scientists and statesmen who are forever preoccupied with their

immediate reputation, always counting the costs, are buying rubbish

for a fortune. The thinker who has a mortal fear of being wrong will

give all that is valuable in himself to that little ambition. A mistake

matters far less than most of us imagine: the world is not brittle, but

elastic.

If we could know the inner history of weakness, of what disappoints

us in leaders, the timidity of thought, the hesitancy and the drift,

we should find in endless cases that the imagination had been blinded

and the will scattered by the haunting horror of constructed evils. We

falter from childhood amidst shames and fears, we move in closed spaces

where stale tradition enervates, we grow hysterical over success and

failure, and so by surrounding instinct with terror, we prepare the

soul for weakness.

There is a brilliant statement of Freud’s that in the Middle Ages

people withdrew to a monastery, whereas in modern times they become

nervous. He means that formerly men could find refuge from their sense

of sin, their bogeys, and their conflicts, in a special environment

and a fulfilling religion. But to-day they are the victims of their

weakness. So if confidence is to become adequate for us we must set

about expunging that weakness and disciplining a new strength.

A great deal can be done by exorcising bogeys--by refusing to add the

terrors of the imagination to the terrors of fact. But there is in

addition more positive work to do. We have to build up a disciplined

love of the real world. It is no easy task. As yet, we see only in the

vaguest way the affirmative direction of democratic culture. For the

breakdown of absolutism is more evident than the way to mastery.

CHAPTER XIII

Poverty, Chastity, Obedience

Poverty, chastity, and obedience are not the ideals of a self-governing

people. Occasionally, however, some well-fed old gentleman announces

that it would be wrong to abolish want because poverty is such an

excellent training ground for character. The sentiment does not attract

the poor, of course, and even the friends of the old gentleman wish

that he had not made an ass of himself. And of course, there are not

many modern people who could agree with the mediæval theory that

celibacy is more blessed than marriage. They prefer a father and a

mother to a monk and a nun, and St. Paul’s dictum that it is better

to marry than burn will not seem to them a very noble tribute to the

family. As to obedience, they continue to like it pretty well in other

people, no doubt, and yet their greatest admiration goes out to those

who stand on their own feet.

These mediæval vows are the true discipline of authority. In their

absolute form they were meant only for those who sought absolute

perfection. But to ordinary mortals, who could accept them only

in moderation, they were still the best atmosphere for a world in

which democracy was impossible. I do not mean to imply that the

Church deliberately created an ideal which sapped the possibility

of self-government. That would be to endow the Church with an

inconceivably deliberate intelligence. All I mean is that in the

undemocratic world which the Church dominated, ideals grew up which

expressed the truth about that world.

The desire for self-government has become vivid with the accumulation

of a great surplus of wealth. Man to-day has at last seen the

possibility of freeing himself from his supreme difficulty. It wasn’t

easy to think much of the possibilities of this world while he lived

on the edge of starvation. Resignation to hardship was a much more

natural outlook. But in the midst of plenty, the imagination becomes

ambitious, rebellion against misery is at last justified, and dreams

have a basis in fact.

Of course, there are immense sections of the globe where the hard

conditions of the older life still prevail, and there the ideal of

democracy is still a very ineffective phrase. But the United States has

for the most part lifted itself out of primitive hardship, and that

fact, more than our supposedly democratic constitution, is what has

justified in some measure the hope which inspires our history. We have

been far from wise with the great treasure we possessed, and no nation

has such cause for shame at the existence of poverty. We have only our

shortsighted selves to blame. But the blunders are not fatal: American

wealth has hardly been tapped. And that is why America still offers the

greatest promise to democracy.

The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole

population well above the misery line. To create a minimum standard

of life below which no human being can fall is the most elementary

duty of the democratic state. For those who go below the line of

civilized decency not only suffer wretchedly: they breed the poisons of

self-government. They form the famous slum proletariat about whom even

the socialists despair. Occasionally some dramatic figure rises out of

them, occasionally they mutter and rebel and send the newspapers into a

panic. But for the purposes of constructive revolution this submerged

mass is of little use, for it is harassed, beaten, helpless. These last

will not be first. They may scare the rest of us into a little reform.

But out of sheer wretchedness will come little of the material or the

power of democracy, for as Walter Weyl has said, “A man or a class,

crushed to earth--is crushed to earth.”

Unfit for self-government, they are the most easily led, the most

easily fooled, and the most easily corrupted. You can’t build a

modern nation out of Georgia crackers, poverty-stricken negroes, the

homeless and helpless of the great cities. They make a governing class

essential. They are used by the forces of reaction. Once in a while

they are used by revolutionists for agitation, but always they are

used. Before you can begin to have democracy you need a country in

which everyone has some stake and some taste of its promise.

Now to link chastity with poverty as one of the props of absolutism

is to prepare for yourself a peck of trouble. “Do you advocate

unchastity?” shrieks the frightened person. As unchastity means to most

people promiscuity, I say emphatically, “No, it isn’t unchastity that

we wish.” We don’t wish poverty, but that doesn’t mean that we are for

parvenus and millionaires. And so for sex, we don’t seek Don Juans or

ascetics, we seek fathers and mothers, and a life that isn’t swamped by

sex.

Life can be swamped by sex very easily if sex is not normally

satisfied. Those who can’t have a piece of flesh, said Nietzsche, often

grasp at a piece of spirit. I must confess I never saw anything very

noble or pure in the dreams of St. Theresa. And as for St. Anthony in

the Wilderness--surely that was no solution of the sex problem. But

it was a wonderful way of cementing loyalty, to deny men and women a

human life, and suggest that they marry the Church. The mediæval vow

of chastity did not mean a sudden disappearance of the sexual life: it

meant a concentration of that life upon the spiritual authority.

With poverty and chastity effectively enforced, there would have

been very little need to preach obedience. That was necessary only

because human nature didn’t permit of any thoroughgoing application

of the first two vows. Had the Church achieved its full ambition,

to be glorious and rich amidst poverty, to offer the only spiritual

compensation to thwarted lives, then the Church would have had few

disloyal sons. But as it didn’t succeed completely, it had to demand

the third vow--obedience--as a kind of extra prop if the other two

failed.

It is no wonder then, that the upholders of authority recognize in the

labor movement and the women’s awakening their mortal foes, or that

Ibsen in that classic prophecy of his, should have seen in these same

movements the two greatest forces for human emancipation. They are the

power through which there will be accomplished that transvaluation

of values which democracy means. They are pointed toward a frank

worldliness, a coöperation among free people, they are pointed away

from submissive want, balked impulse, and unquestioned obedience.

We can begin to see, then, a little of what democratic culture implies.

There was a time, not so long ago, when scholars, and “cultured people”

generally, regarded Ruskin’s interest in political economy as the

unfortunate perversion of a man who was born to better things. We

do no longer regard it as “sordid” to take an interest in economic

problems. I have met artists who deplore Mr. George Russell’s interest

in agricultural coöperation as unworthy of the poet who is known to

the world by the mystic letters Æ. The interest of the working-class

in its bread and butter problem is still occasionally the chance for

a scolding about its “materialism.” But in the main, modern democrats

recognize that the abolition of poverty is the most immediate question

before the world to-day, and they have imagination enough to know that

the success of the war against poverty will be the conquest of new

territory for civilized life.

So too, the day is passing when the child is taught to regard the

body as a filthy thing. We train quite frankly for parenthood, not

for the ecstasies of the celibate. Our interest in sex is no longer

to annihilate it, but to educate it, to find civilized opportunities

for its expression. We hope to organize industry and housekeeping so

that normal mating shall not be a monstrously difficult problem. And

there is an increasing number of people who judge sexual conduct by its

results in the quality of human life. They don’t think that marriage

justifies licentiousness, nor will they say that every unconventional

union is necessarily evil. They know the tyrannies that indissoluble

marriage produces, and they are beginning to know the equal oppressions

of what is called “Free love.” They are becoming concrete and realistic

about sex. They are saying that where love exists with self-respect

and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the

parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor

let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that

modern men are seeking to create. They desire such a family not because

they are afraid not to advocate it, but because they have reason to

believe that this is the most fruitful way of ordering human life.

When we speak of the modern intellect we mean this habit of judging

rules by their results instead of by their sources. The fact that an

idea is old or that it is “advanced,” that the Pope said it or Bernard

Shaw, all that is of no decisive importance. The real question always

turns on what an idea is worth in the satisfaction of human desire.

Objections will arise at once. It will be said that you can’t judge

rules of life or beliefs by their results, because many an idea of the

greatest value may at first be very disagreeable. In other words, it is

often necessary to sacrifice immediate advantages to distant results.

That is perfectly true, of course, and the balancing of present wants

against the future is really the central problem of ethics. Will you

weigh action by its results on this particular venture, or on your

whole life, or by its results on your generation, or on the generations

to come? There is no simple answer to those questions. Every human

being makes his own particular compromise. There are few people so

concentrated on the immediate that they don’t look ahead a little, if

it’s only to the extent of taking out a life insurance policy. There

have been a few fanatics who lived so absolutely for the millennium

that they made a little hell for their companions. But the wiser a man

is, it seems to me, the more vividly he can see the future as part of

the evolving present. He doesn’t break the flow of life, he directs it,

hastens it, but preserves its continuity. The people who really matter

in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule,

or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.

But of course, to act for results instead of in response to authority

requires a readiness of thought that no one can achieve at all times.

You cannot question everything radically at every moment. You have to

do an infinite number of acts without thinking about their results. I

have to follow the orders of my physician. We all of us have to follow

the lead of specialists.

And so, it is easy to score points against anyone who suggests that

modern thought is substituting the pragmatic test by results for the

old obedience to authority. It can’t do that altogether. We cannot be

absolute pragmatists. But we judge by results as much as we can, as

much as our human limitations allow. Where we have to accept dogmas

without question we do so not because we have any special awe of them,

but because we know that we are too ignorant, or too busy, to analyze

them through. I know how unphilosophical this will sound to those who

worship neatness in thought.

Well, if they can find some surer key to the complexity of life, all

power to them. But let them be careful that they are not building a

theory which is symmetrical only on the printed page. Nothing is easier

than to simplify life and then make a philosophy about it. The trouble

is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified

life. If somebody can create an absolute system of beliefs and rules

of conduct that will guide a business man at eleven o’clock in the

morning, a boy trying to select a career, a woman in an unhappy love

affair,--well then, surely no pragmatist will object. He insists only

that philosophy shall come down to earth and be tried out there.

In some such spirit as I have tried to suggest, the modern world is

reversing the old virtues of authority. They aimed deliberately to

make men unworldly. They did not aim to found society on a full use

of the earth’s resources; they did not aim to use the whole nature

of man; they did not intend him to think out the full expression of

his desires. Democracy is a turning upon those ideals in a pursuit,

at first unconsciously, of the richest life that men can devise for

themselves.

CHAPTER XIV

Mastery

The Dyaks of Borneo, it is said, were not accustomed to chopping down a

tree, as white men do, by notching out V-shaped cuts. “Hence,” says Mr.

Marett in telling the story, “any Dyak caught imitating the European

fashion was punished by a fine. And yet so well aware were they that

this method was an improvement on their own that, when they could trust

each other not to tell, they would surreptitiously use it.”

If you went to an elder of the Dyak race and asked him why the newer

method was forbidden, he would probably have told you that it was

wrong. The answer would not have satisfied you, but the Dyak would

have inquired no further. What was wrong was filled with impending

calamity. Now, of course, there is no end of conservatism to-day which

is just as instinctive, just as fearful of unimagined evil, and just

as dumbly irrational as the Dyaks’. I have heard a middle-aged woman

say “It isn’t done” as if the voice of the universe spoke through her.

But there is a rationalized conservatism. If you go to an elder of

the Boston race and ask why new projects are so unexceptionally bad,

he will tell you that without reverence for tradition life becomes

unsettled, and a nation loses itself for lack of cohesion.

These essays are based upon that observation, but added to it is the

observation, just as important, that tradition will not work in the

complexity of modern life. For if you ask Americans to remain true to

the traditions of all their Fathers, there would be a pretty confusion

if they followed your advice. There is great confusion, as it is, due

in large measure to the persistency which men follow tradition in a

world unsuited to it. They modify a bit, however, they apply “the

rule of reason” to their old loyalties, and so a little adjustment is

possible. But there can be no real cohesion for America in following

scrupulously the inherited ideals of our people. Between the Sons of

the Revolution, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the Orangemen, the

plantation life of the South, the refugees from Russia, the Balkan

Slavs, there is in their traditions a conflict of prejudice and custom

that would make all America as clamorous as the Stock Exchange on a

busy day. Nor is there going to be lasting inspiration for Bulgarian

immigrants in the legend of the Mayflower.

The only possible cohesion now is a loyalty that looks forward. America

is preëminently the country where there is practical substance in

Nietzsche’s advice that we should live not for our fatherland but for

our children’s land.

To do this men have to substitute purpose for tradition: and that is,

I believe, the profoundest change that has ever taken place in human

history. We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled

down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social

organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and

control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned.

We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means.

The massive part of man’s life has always been, and still is,

subconscious. The influence of his intelligence seems insignificant

in comparison with attachments and desires, brute forces, and natural

catastrophes. Our life is managed from behind the scenes: we are actors

in dramas that we cannot interpret. Of almost no decisive event can

we say: this was our own choosing. We happen upon careers, necessity

pushing, blind inclination pulling. If we stop to think we are amazed

that we should be what we are. And so we have come to call mysterious

everything that counts, and the more mysterious the better some of us

pretend to think it is. We drift into our work, we fall in love, and

our lives seem like the intermittent flicker of an obstinate lamp. War

panics, and financial panics, revivals, fads sweep us before them. Men

go to war not knowing why, hurl themselves at cannon as if they were

bags of flour, seek impossible goals, submit to senseless wrongs, for

mankind lives to-day only in the intervals of a fitful sleep.

There is indeed a dreaming quality in life: moved as it is from within

by unconscious desires and habits, and from without by the brute forces

of climate and soil and wind and tide. There are stretches in every day

when we have no sense of ourselves at all, and men often wake up with a

start: “Have I lived as long as I’m supposed to have lived?... Here I

am, this kind of person who has passed through these experiences--well,

I didn’t quite know it.”

That, I think, is the beginning of what we call reflection: a desire

to realize the drama in which we are acting, to be awake during our

own lifetime. When we cultivate reflection by watching ourselves and

the world outside, the thing we call science begins. We draw the hidden

into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of it,

note its history, experiment, reflect on error, and we find that our

conscious life is no longer a trivial iridescence, but a progressively

powerful way of domesticating the brute.

This is what mastery means: the substitution of conscious intention

for unconscious striving. Civilization, it seems to me, is just this

constant effort to introduce plan where there has been clash, and

purpose into the jungles of disordered growth. But to shape the world

nearer to the heart’s desire requires a knowledge of the heart’s desire

and of the world. You cannot throw yourself blindly against unknown

facts and trust to luck that the result will be satisfactory.

Yet from the way many business men, minor artists, and modern

philosophers talk you would think that the best world can be created by

the mere conflict of economic egotisms, the mere eruption of fantasy,

and the mere surge of blind instinct. There is to-day a widespread

attempt to show the futility of ideas. Now in so far as this movement

represents a critical insight into the emotional basis of ideas, it

is a fundamental contribution to human power. But when it seeks to

fall back upon the unconscious, when the return to nature is the ideal

of a deliberate vegetable, this movement is like the effort of the

animal that tried to eat itself: the tail could be managed and the

hind legs, but the head was an insurmountable difficulty. You can have

misleading ideas, but you cannot escape ideas. To give up theory, to

cease formulating your desire is not to reach back, as some people

imagine, to profounder sources of inspiration. It is to put yourself at

the mercy of stray ideas, of ancient impositions or trumped-up fads.

Accident becomes the master, the accident largely of your own training,

and you become the plaything of whatever happens to have accumulated at

the bottom of your mind, or to find itself sanctified in the newspaper

you read and the suburb that suited your income.

There have been fine things produced in the world without intention.

Most of our happiness has come to us, I imagine, by the fortunate

meeting of events. But happiness has always been a precarious incident,

elusive and shifting in an unaccountable world. In love, especially,

men rejoice and suffer through what are to them mysterious ways. Yet

when it is suggested that the intelligence must invade our unconscious

life, men shrink from it as from dangerous and clumsy meddling. It is

dangerous and clumsy now, but it is the path we shall have to follow.

We have to penetrate the dreaming brute in ourselves, and make him

answerable to our waking life.

It is a long and difficult process, one for which we are just beginning

to find a method. But there is no other way that offers any hope.

To shove our impulses underground by the taboo is to force them to

virulent and uncontrolled expression. To follow impulse wherever it

leads means the satisfaction of one impulse at the expense of all the

others. The glutton and the rake can satisfy only their gluttonous and

rakish impulses, and that isn’t enough for happiness. What civilized

men aim at is neither whim nor taboo, but a frank recognition of

desire, disciplined by a knowledge of what is possible, and ordered by

the conscious purpose of their lives.

There is a story that experimental psychology grew from the discovery

that two astronomers trying to time the movement of the same heavenly

body reached different results. It became necessary then to time the

astronomers themselves in order to discount the differences in the

speed of their reactions. Now whether the story is literally true or

not, it is very significant. For it symbolizes the essential quality

of modern science--its growing self-consciousness. There have been

scientific discoveries all through the ages. Heron of Alexandria

invented a steam-turbine about 200 B. C. They had gunpowder in Ancient

China. But these discoveries lay dormant, and they appear to us now as

interesting accidents. What we have learned is to organize invention

deliberately, to create a record for it and preserve its continuity,

to subsidize it, and surround it with criticism. We have not only

scientific work, but a philosophy of science, and that philosophy is

the source of fruitful scientific work. We have become conscious about

scientific method; we have set about studying the minds of scientists.

This gives us an infinitely greater control of human invention, for we

are learning to control the inventor. We are able already to discount

some of the limitations of those engaged in research: we should not,

for example, send a man who was color blind to report on the protective

coloring of animals; we begin to see how much it matters in many

investigations whether the student is an auditory or a visualizing

type. Well, psychology opens up greater possibilities than this for

the conscious control of scientific progress. It has begun to penetrate

emotional prejudice, to show why some men are so deeply attached

to authority, why philosophers have such unphilosophical likes and

dislikes. We ask now of an economist, who his friends are, what his

ambitions, his class bias. When one thinker exalts absolute freedom,

another violent repression, we have ceased to take such ideas at their

face value, and modern psychology, especially the school of Freud, has

begun to work out a technique for cutting under the surface of our

thoughts.

The power of criticizing the scientific mind is, I believe, our best

guarantee for the progress of scientific discovery. This is the inner

sanctuary of civilized power. For when science becomes its own critic

it assures its own future. It is able, then, to attack the source of

error itself; to forestall its own timidities, and control its own bias.

If the scientific temper were as much a part of us as the faltering

ethics we now absorb in our childhood, then we might hope to face our

problems with something like assurance. A mere emotion of futurity,

that sense of “vital urge” which is so common to-day, will fritter

itself away unless it comes under the scientific discipline, where

men use language accurately, know fact from fancy, search out their

own prejudice, are willing to learn from failures, and do not shrink

from the long process of close observation. Then only shall we have a

substitute for authority. Rightly understood science is the culture

under which people can live forward in the midst of complexity, and

treat life not as something given but as something to be shaped. Custom

and authority will work in a simple and unchanging civilization, but in

our world only those will conquer who can understand.

There is nothing accidental then in the fact that democracy in politics

is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together.

As absolutism falls, science arises. It _is_ self-government. For when

the impulse which overthrows kings and priests and unquestioned creeds

becomes self-conscious we call it science.

Inventions and laboratories, Greek words, mathematical formulæ, fat

books, are only the outward sign of an attitude toward life, an

attitude which is self-governing, and most adequately named humanistic.

Science is the irreconcilable foe of bogeys, and therefore, a method

of laying the conflicts of the soul. It is the unfrightened, masterful

and humble approach to reality--the needs of our natures and the

possibilities of the world. The scientific spirit is the discipline

of democracy, the escape from drift, the outlook of a free man. Its

direction is to distinguish fact from fancy; its “enthusiasm is for the

possible”; its promise is the shaping of fact to a chastened and honest

dream.

CHAPTER XV

Modern Communion

But, you will say, granted that the breakdown of authority in a

complicated world has left men spiritually homeless, and made their

souls uneasy; granted that it may be possible to exorcise many of

the bogeys which haunt them, and to cultivate a natural worldliness

in which economic and sexual terror will have been reduced; granted

that women are tending to create a new environment for the child in

which the property sense will not be stimulated morbidly, and where

coöperation will become as obvious as obedience and isolation were

in the past; suppose too, that an expanding civilization gives such

varied resources that man will live more fully, and rely less on the

compensations of thwarted desire; suppose that the spirit of science

pervades his daily work, not as a mutilated specialty, but as a rich

interest in the world with a vivid desire to shape it,--suppose all

that, would there not be lacking the one supreme virtue of the older

creeds, their capacity for binding the world together?

There would be justice in such a criticism. There is a terrible

loneliness that comes to men when they realize their feebleness before

a brutally uninterested universe. In his own life-work, say as a

teacher, a person may be making some one class-room more serviceable to

a few children. But he will feel, as the more imaginative teachers do,

that his work is like that of Sisyphus, he no sooner achieves a thing

than it is undone. How can he educate a child for a few hours a day,

when the home, the streets, the newspapers, the movies, the shop, are

all busy miseducating? Wherever there is a constructive man at work

you are likely to find this same complaint, that he is working alone.

He may be heartwhole and eager, without bogeys or unnecessary fears.

He may be free of the weaknesses that have reared so many faiths, and

yet he seeks assurance in a communion with something outside himself,

at the most perhaps, in a common purpose, at least, in a fellowship of

effort.

Religions have placed human action in a large and friendly setting.

They have enabled men to play their little rôle by making it essential

to the drama of eternity. “God needs me, Christ died for me, after

all I may be a poor creature, but I’m indispensable.” And, as if by

feeling themselves part of greatness, men have added to their stature.

So even the meekest freshman in a grandstand is a more exalted person

because his college team has captured the front page of the newspapers.

He may be merely one in thousands who cheered for the eleven heroes,

yet somehow he has partaken of their heroism. He is like the cockney

who talks of “our Empire,” like the Irish immigrants who tell how we

licked the British at Yorktown, like the crank whose society of eight

people is entitled “Association for Advancing the Human Race.” It is

well known that in a strike it matters enormously whether the men are

fighting for a “fair day’s wage” or for “the emancipation of labor.”

The history of martyrs is the history of people who expanded to their

faith. Indeed, men have shaken destiny because they felt they embodied

it. Patriotism, the Cause, Humanity, Perfection, Righteousness,

Liberty,--all of them large and windy abstractions to outsiders, are

more powerful than dynamite to those who feel them. “My country is the

world,” said Garrison, while Boston hated him. “I fight for women,”

says Mrs. Pankhurst. “I am a fate,” said Nietzsche. “This is the

true joy in life,” says Bernard Shaw, “the being used for a purpose

recognized by yourself as a mighty one.”

It is no idle question then to ask what there is in the outlook of a

modern man to bind his world together. Well, if he is looking for

absolute assurance, an infallible refuge in weakness and terror, we

have to answer that there is no such certainty. He may learn that

while there is no promise of ultimate salvation, there is at least

no fear of ultimate damnation; that in the modern world things are

not so irremediable, and he may meet a large charity in its endless

variety. He can find some understanding, an assurance perhaps of life’s

resiliency, he may come to know that nothing is so final as he thought

it was, that the future is not staked on one enterprise, that life

rises out of its own ashes, and renews its own opportunities. But if he

demands personal guarantees, he may have to lie in order to get them.

Almost all men do require something to focus their interest in order

to sustain it. A great idea like Socialism has done that for millions.

But Socialism simply as a great passion can easily produce its

superstitions and its barbarisms. What men need in their specialties

in order to enable them to coöperate is not alone a binding passion,

but a common discipline. Science, I believe, implies such a discipline.

It is the fact that scientists approach the world with an understood

method that enables them to give and take from each other whether

they live in Calcutta or in San Francisco. The scientific world is

the best example we have to-day of how specialists can coöperate. Of

course there are profound disagreements, intrigues, racial and national

prejudices, even among scientific men, for a common method will not

wipe out the older cleavages, and it is not a perfectly cohesive force.

But for the kind of civilization we are entering it is as yet the best

we know.

There are undoubtedly beginnings of such a common method in public

affairs. We read English books for help in dealing with American

conditions. Social legislation is to-day a world-wide interest, so

that reformers in Oregon may draw upon Australasian experiment. The

labor movement has international organization with the result that

its experience becomes available for use. There is no need to multiply

examples. Instruments of a coöperative mind are being forged, be it the

world-wide moving picture or some immense generalization of natural

science.

This work has aroused in many men the old sense of cosmic wonder,

and called forth devotion to impersonal ends. Nor can it be denied

that in the study of institutions, in laboratories of research, there

have appeared the same loyalty and courage to which the old religions

could point as to their finest flower. Moreover, these devotions which

science can show, come in the main redeemed from barbarism and pointed

to civilized use. There is, to be sure, a certain raw novelty in modern

forms of devotion, as there is in uninhabited houses, in new clothes

and in new wine--they have hardly felt the mellowing of human contact,

that saturation of brute things with the qualities of their users,

which makes men love the old, the inadequate, the foolish, as against

what is sane and clean, but unfamiliar. Science, too, is a concrete

and essentially humble enterprise; spiritually sufficient it may be,

to-day, only for the more robust. But the release from economic want,

the emancipation from manufactured bogeys, the franker acceptance of

normal desire, should tend to make men surer of themselves. And so most

of them may not find it necessary to believe the impossible, but will

reach their satisfaction in contemplating reality, in decorating it,

shaping it, and conquering it.

They may find, as Santayana suggests, that “to see better what we now

see, to see by anticipation what we should actually see under other

conditions, is wonderfully to satisfy curiosity and to enlighten

conduct. At the same time, scientific thinking involves no less inward

excitement than dramatic fiction does. It summons before us an even

larger number of objects in their fatal direction upon our interests.

Were science adequate it would indeed absorb those passions which now,

since they must be satisfied somehow, have to be satisfied by dramatic

myths.... All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then

inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts

from the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross

and basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems

comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista

opens through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then,

perhaps, we recognize that in science we are surveying all it concerns

us to know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be.”

For the discipline of science is the only one which gives any assurance

that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same

conclusion. And as the modern world can be civilized only by the effort

of innumerable people we have a right to call science the discipline

of democracy. No omnipotent ruler can deal with our world, nor the

scattered anarchy of individual temperaments. Mastery is inevitably

a matter of coöperation, which means that a great variety of people

working in different ways must find some order in their specialties.

They will find it, I think, in a common discipline which distinguishes

between fact and fancy, and works always with the implied resolution to

make the best out of what is possible.

For behind this development of common method there are profound desires

at work. As yet they are vaguely humanitarian. But they can be enriched

by withdrawing them from vague fantasy in order to center them on a

conception of what human life might be. This is what morality meant to

the Greeks in their best period, an estimate of what was valuable, not

a code of what should be forbidden. It is this task that morality must

resume, for with the reappearance of a deliberate worldliness, it means

again a searching for the sources of earthly happiness.

In some men this quest may lead to luminous passion. “The state-making

dream,” Wells calls it, and he speaks of those who “have imagined

cities grown more powerful and peoples made rich and multitudinous by

their efforts, they thought in terms of harbors and shining navies,

great roads engineered marvellously, jungles cleared and deserts

conquered, the ending of muddle and dirt and misery; the ending of

confusions that waste human possibilities; they thought of these things

with passion and desire as other men think of the soft lines and tender

beauty of women. Thousands of men there are to-day almost mastered by

this white passion of statecraft, and in nearly everyone who reads and

thinks you could find, I suspect, some sort of answering response.”

And then with careful truth he adds, “But in every one it presents

itself extraordinarily entangled and mixed up with other, more intimate

things.”

We begin to recognize a vague spirit which may suggest a common

purpose. We live in a fellowship with scientists whose books we cannot

read, with educators whose work we do not understand. Conservative

critics laugh at what they call the futurist habit of mind. It is very

easy to point out how blind and unintelligent is the enthusiasm of

liberal people, how eager they are to accept Bergson, Montessori, Freud

and the Cubists. But there is something fundamentally dull in these

sneers. For granted the faddishness of modern people, there is yet more

than faddishness in being friendly to novelty in a novel environment.

It is the glimmer of intention, the absurd, human contradictory sign

of faith. Men call it by different names--progress, the welfare of the

race--it is perhaps not ready for precise formulation in a neat and

inspiring slogan. But nevertheless, it is the business of critics to

understand these beginnings, for they are already a great practical

force. They enable men to share their hopes with strangers, to travel

about and talk to people of widely different professions and origin,

yet to find the assurance that they are part of a great undertaking.

CHAPTER XVI

Fact and Fancy

Most people still feel that there is something inhuman about the

scientific attitude. They think at once of a world grown over-precise,

of love regulated by galvanometers and sphygmographs, of table talk

abolished because nutrition is confined to capsules prepared in a

laboratory, of babies brought up in incubators. Instead of desire,

statistical abstracts; a chilly, measured, weighed, and labelled

existence. There is a famous cartoon of Max Beerbohm’s in which H.

G. Wells is depicted “conjuring up the darling future.” A spectacled

mother holds in her arm a spectacled infant, mostly head like a

pollywog, while she dangles before it a pair of geometrical dividers.

Mr. Chesterton’s nightmare of a future in which jolly beer and

jolly dirt and jolly superstition shall have disappeared is merely a

somewhat violently literary expression of what the average man feels.

Science as it comes through the newspapers announces that kissing is

unhygienic and that love is a form of lunacy. Science is the occupation

of absent-minded professors, of difficult and unsociable persons, wise

enough, no doubt, but not altogether in their right minds. And then,

of course, when wireless telegraphy is perfected, science becomes an

omnipotent magic, wonderful or fearful, infinite in its power, but

always something above and beyond the ordinary thoughts of men. So

the suggestion that Twentieth Century democracy is bound up with the

progress of the scientific spirit will make many people think of

“Organized charity, all cold and iced,

In the name of a cautious, statistical Christ.”

There is a basis for these fears. Scientists have often been very

arrogant, unnecessarily sure of themselves, and only too glad to

pooh-pooh what they couldn’t fit into some theory. This was especially

true of those who grew up in the controversies of the nineteenth

century. There was a kind of malicious fun in telling a devout man

that thought depended on phosphor and that his magnificent visions

were merely an excitation of the cortex. Of course, far-seeing men

like Huxley protested that the sensation of red had not been destroyed

because light-waves had been measured.

Yet there were plenty of scientific bigots who would have liked to

annihilate what they could not weigh. Certainly it is true that the

general effect of science at first was to create impatience with the

emotional life. Many proud possessors of the Spencerian mind devoted

their glowing youth to a study of those bleak books which used to pass

for scientific manuals. They regarded religion with scorn and art with

condescension, and sometimes they nerved themselves up to admire beauty

as one of the necessary weaknesses of an otherwise reasonable man.

Truth for them was as neat as a checkerboard, and they made you feel

like the man from Corinth who asked a Spartan “whether the trees grew

square in his country.”

It always surprises one of these hard-headed people to be told that

he lives in a world, which has a fantastic resemblance to a cubist

painting. For the rationalist’s vision expresses his own love of form,

while it distorts the object. Now in a thinker who pretends to be

dealing with actual events this is a dangerous delusion. He will come

to believe that square things, sharply defined things, very tangible

things, are somehow more genuine than elusive and changing ones. It’s

a short step from this to denying the existence of anything which is

not easily defined. But note what he has done: seduced by a method

of thought, the rigorous, classifying method where each color is all

one tone, he has come to regard his method as more important than the

blendings and interweavings of reality. Like any dreamer he gives up

the search for truth in order to coddle himself in his simple, private

universe. The hardness of such a rationalist is on the surface only: at

bottom there is a weakness which clings to stiff and solid frames of

thought because the subtlety of life is distressing.

It is a great deal easier, for example, to talk of Labor and Capital

than to keep in mind all the different kinds of workers or how they

shade off into capitalists. It is immensely difficult to think about

the actual complexity in the relations of men, and that is why eager

and active people substitute for the facts those large abstractions

with their rigid simplicity. But the workingman who is something of a

capitalist himself, the employer who works as hard as anyone under him,

can’t see how the straight conflict between Exploited and Exploiter,

Labor and Capital, applies in the particular situation.

What puzzles them is one of the oldest difficulties of thought: that

any large classification fits each single fact very badly. They are

like “the bewildered porter in Punch” quoted by Graham Wallas, “who

had to arrange the subtleties of nature according to the unsubtle

tariff-schedule of his company. ‘Cats ... is dogs, and guinea-pigs is

dogs, but this ’ere tortoise is a hinsect.’”

Now we all have to do the same injustice to the tortoise, or in the

language of philosophy, we have to use concepts. How much we shall

use them depends upon what we are trying to do. For the purposes of

the soap-box a few very rough distinctions are about all anyone can

handle. In a group of friends, you can be a bit subtler. The moment

you act in some real situation, say in some labor dispute, your large

generalizations have to undergo enormous modification. For you will

find yourself dealing there with a particular employer who is not

exactly like any other employer and with workers for whom race and

education, the fact that it’s a cold winter, and a hundred other

little complications turn the balance.

The only rule to follow, it seems to me, is that of James: “Use

concepts when they help, and drop them when they hinder understanding.”

For “the world we practically live in is one in which it is impossible,

except by theoretic retrospection, to disentangle the contributions of

intellect from those of sense. They are wrapped and rolled together as

a gunshot in the mountains is wrapt and rolled in fold on fold of echo

and reverberative clamor.... The two mental functions thus play into

each other’s hands. Perception prompts our thought, and thought in turn

enriches our perception. The more we see, the more we think; while the

more we think, the more we see in our immediate experiences, and the

greater grows the detail and the more significant the articulateness of

our perception.”

There is nothing in the scientific temper which need make it inevitably

hostile to the variety of life. But many scientists have been hostile.

And the reason for that is not so difficult to see. The first triumphs

of the scientific mind were in mathematics, astronomy, and physics, out

of which grows engineering. The habit of mind which produced such great

results was naturally exalted, so that men began to feel that science

which wasn’t mechanical, wasn’t science. They dreamt of a time when

living bodies, consciousness and human relations, would be adjusted

with the accuracy of a machine. But they were merely following an

analogy, which a real scientist would abandon the moment it appeared

that living organisms differ from the inert. I do not know whether any

such distinction must be made, but there is nothing in the scientific

temper which would preclude it.

* * * * *

In the long controversy with religious belief the true temper of

the scientific mind was revealed. There have been hasty people who

announced boldly that any interest in the immortality of the soul

was “unscientific.” William James, in fact, was accused of treason

because he listened to mystics and indulged in psychical research.

Wasn’t he opening the gates to superstition and obscurantism? It was

an ignorant attack. For the attitude of William James toward “ghosts”

was the very opposite of blind belief. He listened to evidence. No

apostle of authority can find the least comfort in that. For the moment

you test belief by experience you have destroyed the whole structure

of authority. It may well happen that the growth of knowledge will

prove the wisdom in many a popular saying, or confirm the truth of

a “superstition.” It would be surprising if it didn’t, for the long

adjustments of the race must have accumulated much unconscious truth.

But when these truths are held because there is evidence for them,

their whole character is changed. They are no longer blind beliefs;

they are subject to amendment when new evidence appears, and their

danger is gone.

The last few years have produced a striking illustration of this within

the Catholic Church. The Modernist movement is nothing but an outburst

of the scientific spirit in the very citadel of authority. For the

Modernists propose to accept Catholicism on the basis of experience.

It is no wonder, then, that the Pope issued his Encyclical letter

denouncing the Modernists root and branch, for once you substitute

evidence for authoritative revelation the ruin of absolutism is

prepared. There is no compromise possible between authority and

the scientific spirit. They may happen to agree on some particular

point to-day, but there is no guarantee that they will not disagree

to-morrow. The Modernist may subscribe to the whole creed, but from

the point of view of the absolutist his heresy is of the deepest and

subtlest kind. All the fixity of eternal principles comes crashing

about your head if you derive them simply from human experience. There

is a sentence of Santayana’s which destroys with a terrible brevity

the ambitions of those who accept the scientific spirit and cling to

traditional authority. “The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses

but as hypotheses they are not gods.”

There is no question that science has won its way, in part, by insult

and blindness, often by a harsh ignorance of the value of older creeds.

It is associated with a certain hardness of mind and narrowness of

feeling, as if it were a vandal in a sanctuary. But that also is not

essential to the scientific mind; it is rather an accompaniment of the

bitter controversy in which science grew up.

We can begin now to define the attitude of science toward the past. It

may be summed up, I think, by saying that only when we have destroyed

the authority of tradition can we appreciate its treasure. So long as

tradition is a blind command it is for our world an evil and dangerous

thing. But once you see the past merely as a theater of human effort,

it overflows with suggestion.

Men can reverence the dead if they are buried. But they will no longer

sit at table with corpses, ghosts, and skeletons. They can respect

both life and death; they must resent a confusion of life and death.

The conservative has made such a confusion, and out of it arises our

contempt for the traditionalist mind. Scorn of the antiquarian has been

transferred to antiquity. Modern men have said in a way that rather

than deal with the past through a conservative, they would leave it to

him as his exclusive domain.

There is hardly need to rehearse the grounds of this contempt.

Whenever evil is defended or tyranny devised, it is done in the name

of tradition. So the loss of a sense of the past has come to mean a

definite emancipation. Then, too, it looks at times as if men felt they

could not move forward if they stared backward,--that Greece and Rome

are a fatal lure which enervate and render dry-as-dust. They think of

pedants in closed university ground, walled in from all enthusiasm,

tangled in the creepers that shackle with their beauty.

Modern men are afraid of the past. It is a record of human achievement,

but its other face is human defeat. Too often it speaks through the

words of Koheleth the Preacher,--that which is crooked cannot be made

straight. History is full of unbearable analogies which make enthusiasm

cold and stale. It tells of the complications that are not foreseen, of

the successes that caricature the vision. Conservatives may dwell upon

the perspective which history gives. It is just this perspective which

men fear, the looking at life through the wrong end of the opera glass.

It is a good instinct which refuses to see the present as a bubble on

the stream of time. For the bubble in which we live is more of our

concern than all the rivers which have flowed into the sea.

And yet, the past can be a way to freedom. The present order is held

very lightly and without undue reverence in a mind which knows how

varied is human experience. An imagination fed on the past will come

to see the present as a very temporary thing. Wherever routine and

convention become unbearable weights, the abundance of the past is a

source of liberty. Merely to realize that your way of living is not the

only way, is to free yourself from its authority. It brings a kind of

lucidity in which society is rocked by a devastating Why? Why should

men who have one life to live submit to the drudgeries and vexations

that we call civilization? The whole shell is strained by a wild

rationality.

The past has been used to throttle the present. Why should we not turn

around and use it for a different purpose? We have sunk under the

weight of its gloomy sanctity. Can we not free ourselves in the light

of its great variety?

That is just what the best scholarship of our time has tried to do. The

Nineteenth Century undoubtedly meant a shattering of the traditional

faiths. And yet no century has ever been so eager to understand the

very idols it was breaking. The same period in which the secular

spirit won its greatest triumphs saw the first real effort at an

understanding of superstition and magic, ritual and taboo, religious

need and doctrinal sources. Indeed, the interest of the scientific

spirit in the past has been so masterful that all previous history

looks like village gossip. It is utterly untrue, therefore, to say that

the modern outlook means an abrupt break with the accumulated wisdom

of the past. It has meant a break with blind obedience to an ignorant

fabrication about the past. But that break is what has opened to us

the lessons of history as they have never been opened to any other

people. It has been said that we know more about Homer than Plato did;

no one would dream of comparing the modern knowledge of classical

antiquity with Dante’s or with Shakespeare’s. The Biblical scholars

of the last hundred years, in spite of all their so-called atheism,

have, I believe, seen deeper into the basis of Christianity than the

Church which has represented it. And while they have undoubtedly

shaken authority, they have built up a sympathetic understanding of the

human values it contained. All this is the sheerest commonplace, yet

conservatives continue to accuse the scientific spirit of blindness to

the great past. They deceive themselves in their outcry. They don’t

really fear a neglect of the past. They don’t really mean that modern

men ignore it. What they miss in modern science is submission. They

feel vaguely that scientific interest in the past makes of history a

double-edged weapon. The absolutist has suddenly discovered that a

study of the very thing he adores destroys obedience to it. The men

who talk most about reverence for the American Constitution are the

last people in the world to welcome a study of its origin. For the

conservative is not devoted to a real past. He is devoted to his own

comfortable image of it.

We have come to look at history with ease and without too much

reverence. To be sure that puts a bridle on a great deal of haphazard

optimism. There is a strain of doubt in the speculations of an

historian. But there is a full compensation for the loss of barren

hopes in the bodily warmth that comes from knowing how millions of men

have acted, have hoped, have built better than they knew, or failed. If

the dream of perfection and endless progress fades, is that necessarily

so great a loss? It does not seem possible that life will lose its

flavor because we have robbed it of a few abstract and careless

dreams. For the modern sense of what the past contains can give a new

realization of the fertility in existence. That is a rock upon which

to build. Instead of a “featureless future,” instead of an aspiring

vacuum, which ends in disappointment, we may see a more modest future,

but one inhabited by living people. This is the great boon of the past,

that it saturates thought with concrete images. And it leaves scope for

invention, for the control of nature and buoyant living. For by taking

with a certain levity our schemes for improvement we shatter the sects

and liberate thought.

There is, however, a persistent feeling that science means the

abandonment of the imagination for a grubby absorption in facts. It

is far truer to say that with the scientific spirit the imagination

comes into its own. Fantasy has been a solace in defeat, a refuge from

reality, a compensation to the thwarted, a dreaming desire for better

things. But under the discipline of science, desire becomes concrete:

it not only imagines, but it creates as well. So we can say with real

justice that vision is for the first time able to direct the shaping of

a world.

One of the myths that modern critics are overthrowing is the notion

that science is a passionless pursuit of dead facts. For even in the

most “disinterested” inquiry, there is, as Bertrand Russell says, some

interest that determines the direction of our curiosity. Men will endow

medical schools and institutes of technology, but only very idle and

superfluously rich persons would think of devoting much time to the

use of adverbs in the Bible or to the comparative history of Icelandic

particles. Science is a very human thing. It springs from a need, is

directed by curiosity to choose an interesting field of study, and in

that field seeks results that concern men. The ideal of science, it

seems to me, is to seek interesting truth critical of one’s interest.

If the student is merely disinterested, he is a pedant; if he seeks

only what catches his passing fancy, he is romantic. The true scientist

is inspired by a vision without being the victim of it.

Before the scientific spirit can reach its full bloom, it will have to

acquire an honest sense of the rôle that fantasy plays in all its work.

This is true especially of the social sciences. We are just beginning

to realize the importance in economics of the economist’s utopia. We

are learning the determining influence of a thinker’s dream. Thus Adam

Smith’s utopia was a place where enterprise was unshackled: he longed

for a freedom which the corporate guilds and feudal restrictions of

his time denied. He had seen Watts persecuted for his steam engine;

had seen him take refuge in the university grounds at Glasgow from a

crusted society that had no use for disturbing inventions. So Adam

Smith endowed nature and men with the virtues that Eighteenth Century

England lacked,--he dreamed his utopia of laissez-faire. Guided by

that utopia, he sought facts and built arguments into a science of

economics. He justified his dream. It was timely, for it uttered the

hopes of England. His facts were plausible almost immediately, his

arguments swam with the flood-tide of opinion. The “Wealth of Nations”

became the Bible of English trade,--like all Bibles it was true to hope

and practical for those who used it.

One man, at least, in the Nineteenth Century, achieved a result similar

to Adam Smith’s. Ricardo didn’t. As Prof. Marshall points out, Ricardo,

who was a stockbroker, erected the “pure science” of economics on the

very limited motives he knew. Even a fine spirit like John Stuart Mill

was doomed to a large measure of sterility because he did not grasp

the revolutionary dream that was rising in his time. What Ricardo had

no idea of doing, what Mill failed to do, Karl Marx did. In his own

time, the ’50’s and ’60’s, Marx saw through a bewildering maze of facts

and put his hand upon the revolutionary trend. And so he stood in as

commanding a position to the middle age of capitalism as Adam Smith did

to its infancy. Marx won out, not because his books are easy reading:

they are not, except for occasional bursts of irony and wrath. He did

not win out because the respectable of the world founded universities

in his honor; they didn’t. He won out because his vision was a rising

one in the facts of his time.

The facts have changed in sixty years, and with them our vision:

Marx was not omniscient, and the revolutionary movement is no longer

adequately expressed by him. You do not have to go to the hostile

critics of Marx. The inadequacy of Marx for the present age is freely

admitted by a rising group within the socialist movement. In many

essential ways, events have not justified his prophecies. The middle

class has not disappeared: in this country it is the dominant power

expressing itself through the Progressives, and through the Wilson

Administration. The middle class has put the “Money Power” on the

defensive. Big business is losing its control of the government. The

farmers are a class with enormous power, misunderstood and neglected by

the city-bred theories of socialism. The great line-up of two hostile

classes hasn’t happened. There have been fierce conflicts between

employers and employees, but a united working class facing united

capitalists is an unreal picture of American conditions. Labor has

within itself innumerable deep conflicts of interest. Business men are

divided by trades and by sections. And there is an unexpected burst of

sheerly democratic impulse which blurs class lines. Internationalism

is still a very distant dream, and while men are less provincial, it is

doubtful whether the national idea is any weaker. Patriotism itself has

gained a new dignity by its increasing alliance with democratic reform,

and there is actually ground for supposing that love of country is

coming to mean love of country and not hatred of other countries. There

is a growth of that abused thing, public spirit, and the growth is so

powerful that it may be able to ride the mere clashing of self-interest.

I repeat these commonplaces with no intention of casting any doubts

upon the historic service of Karl Marx. If they go to show anything

it is this: that the probabilities have changed, and that only by

expressing that fact can _our_ social science be built up. Adam Smith

and Karl Marx, each in his own way, took a revolutionary purpose and

expressed it. One can say without fear of contradiction that they are

the two most fertile minds that have dealt with the modern problem.

But the orthodox economists and the orthodox Marxians are out of

touch with the latent forces of this age: both have proved themselves

largely sterile. They have built a dialectic, one might almost say, a

dialect, upon the texts of their masters; they have lost their command

over change, and so they have become apologetic, and eager to save

their faces in the wreck of their creed. The effect on socialism has

been very disastrous. In America, to borrow no unnecessary trouble,

socialist thinking has almost come to a standstill. The leaders of the

movement write one weary book after another in which the old formulæ

are restated. But not a single study of any depth has been made by an

American Marxian of the American trust, trade union, political system

or foreign policy. And as for the underlying spiritual habits of the

American people, there is hardly any recognition that such habits

exist. There has been on the other hand a very noticeable hostility

to original effort. Yet even if Karl Marx captured the secret of

social evolution (which is doubtful), and even if Karl Kautsky is his

vicar, the necessity still remains of showing concretely how that key

unlocks the American difficulty. A principle is at best a guide: it

is certainly not an open sesame to the future to be applied without

hesitation by any pamphleteer. It is no longer very illuminating to

meet the American problem with the stale vision of continental Europe

in 1850.

The first way to estimate a social philosophy is to test the vision

which it embodies. For this is what determines the direction of the

thinker’s interest, and from it his arguments take their lead. But you

cannot always trust his own statement as to his purpose. Every thinker

is abstractedly devoted to truth, and almost everybody presents himself

as a lover of justice and righteousness. But he may see justice in

almost anything,--in the unfettered action of business men, or the

“dictatorship of the proletariat.” Real criticism would find out what

he sees and admires instinctively,--what are, in short, the governing

assumptions of his thought. Thus Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom” is

laid in the main upon sympathy with “those on the make,” with the

man looking for a career; upon horror at the crimes of monopoly, and

little recognition of the crimes of competition. It is, I believe,

a vigorous restatement of the traditional American utopia in which

justice is to be attained by the balance of self-interest. There is a

kind of hope that an equality in push will neutralize all dangers, and

produce an automatic coöperation. So Wilson seems to see the working

man merely as a possible shopkeeper. The assumptions are those of

a generous commercialism. It is a vision of chivalrous enterprise.

Or take the message of Haywood: he sees the unskilled laborer, the

genuine proletarian without property in things or in craft; he sees

the outcast, the convict, the casual, the bum, the peon, with such

wonderful warmth and great understanding that they have come to embody

for him the whole social problem. What are the troubles of a business

man harassed by a bad credit system to these ultimate miseries in which

are concentrated the failures of our civilization? Do you think there

will be any “reason” for Haywood in a social philosophy which seems to

forget the very things which fill his sky? He has only to take a walk

through Union Square to feel what fools his critics are.

It may seem curious to approach a pretentiously scientific volume

with the question: What is this man’s dearest wish? The usual method

is to regard that as of no importance, and to turn immediately to

testing of logic or criticism of fact. It is no wonder that writers are

not convinced by hostile reviews, or that editorials make so little

impression on propagandists. Unless you go to the passionate source

of ideas, you are a cat looking at a king. What does it matter to the

suffragettes that they are called hysterical and lectured about their

mistaken tactics? That is so much scrubby, withered stupidity fit only

to set off vividly the grandeur of ideas it attacks. Or does anyone

suppose that feminism is dependent on the logic of its supporters

or opponents? Certainly not. Until you begin to see in feminism the

opposition of attitudes toward life, drawn by hope and pushed by

events, you are still the six-weeks convert who can rattle off her

argument and repartee in a fusillade across the dinner-table.

Criticism will have to slough off the prejudices of the older

rationalism if it is to have any radical influence on ideas. It is

sophomoric to suppose that the emotional life can be treated as a

decadent survival. Men’s desires are not something barbaric which the

intellect must shun. Their desires are what make their lives, they are

what move and govern. You are not talking of human beings when you

talk of “pure reason.” And, therefore, anyone who deepens the conflict

between thought and feeling is merely adding confusion to difficulty.

The practical line of construction is to saturate feeling with

ideas. That is the only way in which men can tap their own power,--by

passionate ideas. There is, of course, no greater difficulty in thought

than to attain a delicate adjustment of our own desires to what is

possible. All important thinking achieves such an adjustment, and we

recognize its success by the fact that it gives us control over brute

things. That sense of control is the yielding of fact to intelligent

desire. But if we try to ignore the desire that moves our thought,

if we try in short to be “absolutely objective,” we succeed only in

accumulating useless facts, or we become the unconscious victims of our

wishes. If thinking didn’t serve desire, it would be the most useless

occupation in the world.

The only reason, of course, for casting suspicion upon the emotional

life is that it does so often falsify the world and build a fool’s

paradise in a human hell. But when you have faced this fully, there is

still no reason for attempting the vain effort of jumping out of our

human skins. The danger means simply that desire has to be subjected to

criticism. It is a difficult task. But it is one that we are capable of

beginning, for the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing

capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.

* * * * *

There have been a large number of very frank attempts to express the

vision of an ideal commonwealth. Plato, More, Bacon, Campanella,

Fourier, William Morris, Bellamy, H. G. Wells, are only a few among

many. From them come the obvious utopias, pictures of a better world

by gifted and dissatisfied men. They are strangely alike. Generally

the utopia is located in Peru, or a mythical island, or in the year

two thousand, or centuries back, or Nowhere. Life is fixed: the notion

of change is rare, for men do not easily associate perfection with

movement. Moreover, the citizens of these utopias are the disciplined

servants of the community. They are rigorously planned types with

sharply defined careers laid out for them from birth to death. A real

man would regard this ideal life as an unmitigated tyranny. But why are

the utopias tyrannical? I imagine it is because the dreamer’s notion of

perfection is a place where everything and everybody is the puppet of

his will. In a happy dream the dreamer is omnipotent: that is why it

is a happy dream. So utopias tend toward a scrupulous order, eating in

common mess halls, mating by order of the state, working as the servant

of the community. There is no democracy in a utopia,--no willingness

to allow intractable human beings the pleasure of going to the devil

in their own way. Even in the utopias which pretend to be democratic,

that is, where the citizens vote, the assumption always exists that the

citizens vote as the dreamer would have them vote. He simply calls his

will the will of the people.

Now these qualities, so obvious in the utopias, can be detected in

all sorts of thinking which would be horrified at the word utopian.

Most economics is about life either on Robinson Crusoe’s island, or at

least in some imaginary and ideally simplified nation. Few economists

can remember that their reasoning is built upon an unreal picture of

man and industry. By the time the details are worked out, economists

have the greatest difficulty in recalling the fact that they have been

talking about an imaginary world, a world which pleases their fancy

because it yields to their logic.

Classical economics is related to the utopias in that it deals with

some place, not England and not the United States, where motives are

utterly simple, and rigorously automatic. The imaginary world of the

economist is not, however, a generous fantasy of a fine life. It is

a crass abstraction, industrialism idealized until it is no longer

industrialism.

The bureaucratic dreams of reformers often bear a striking resemblance

to the honest fantasies of the Utopians. What we are coming to

call “State Socialism” is in fact an attempt to impose a benevolent

governing class on humanity. Oh, for wise and powerful officials to

bring order out of chaos, end the “muddle,” and make men clean, sober

and civic-minded. There is no real understanding of democracy in the

State Socialist, for he doesn’t attempt to build with the assent and

voluntary coöperation of men and women. But he avoids the laborious and

disheartening method of popular education, and takes satisfaction in

devising a ruling class, inspired by him, as a short-cut to perfection.

But let no one suppose that the “revolutionist” who denounces State

Socialism is thereby free from the utopian habit of mind. He may scorn

the brutal fictions of the economist or the depressing benevolence of

the bureaucrat, only to imagine a world more unreal than either. I have

before me a syndicalist utopia written by two of the most prominent

leaders in France. It is a picture of the Revolution which is going

to happen. The working men of France do just what the syndicalist

dream says they should do. Suddenly, when the crash comes, there is

an exhibition of skill in organizing; there rises to the surface a

coöperative power epoch-making in the history of the race. Millions of

men who fight and curse each other every day, their interests divided

by trade and locality, suddenly become unanimous and efficient. Why?

Because the authors of the book would like it so, because they have

imagined that their will had become the will of the people. They have

treated French working men as the puppets of their fancy.

And yet, as Oscar Wilde said, no map of the world is worth a glance

that hasn’t Utopia on it. Our business is not to lay aside the dream,

but to make it plausible. We have to aim at visions of the possible

by subjecting fancy to criticism. The usual thing to do is to follow

fiction unreservedly: that produces the castle in Spain and news from

nowhere. Or to deny fancy, and suppress it: that means that the

thinker becomes the victim of his prejudice, the unconscious slave of

his desires. The third course is to drag dreams out into the light of

day, show their sources, compare them with fact, transform them to

possibilities. They should not run wild. They cannot be discarded. So

they must be disciplined. For modern civilization demands something

greater than the fantasies of a child or the close observation of

patient investigators, something greater that is born of their union:

it calls for a dream that suffuses the actual with a sense of the

possible.

This is the creative imagination, and to it we owe all attempts to

bridge the gap between what we wish and what we have. Romanticism can

falter: “it would be lovely, if----”; Philistia can answer: “what is,

is”; but the disciplined imagination alone can say, “I will.” Mere

fantasy gives up the struggle with actual affairs in order to find a

temporary home in the warmth of memory and the fervor of impossible

hopes. So in the intimacies of his own life each man confesses by his

dreams that he and his world are at odds: that his desires overflow

experience and ask for more than they can ever have. If he remains

there, he may build splendid utopias, and shirk the effort to realize

them; he is the eternal Peer Gynt, hero of his own epic, dawdler

and coward in the world. He is uncompromising in his dreams, and

acquiescent in his deeds. At the other pole is the philistine with his

smug sense of the comfort of life, pledged to his routine, convinced

that change is over, satisfied that he and his are the pinnacles

of creation. Nothing is possible for him, because nothing more is

desirable: the long travail of creation is done, and there he is. To

all wild dreams he presents a shrewd and well-seasoned knowledge of

genuine affairs. Vision beats in vain against his solid world.

In the creative imagination no relevant fact is shirked; yet over all

the things that are there hovers a feeling for what they might be. A

sharp and clear sense of existence is shot through with the light

of its possibilities. Each fact is a place where the roads fork.

Each event is a vista. Each moment is a choice. To the man who lives

without question from day to day, life is just one thing after another;

to the mere dreamer it is harsh and unyielding. But to the creative

imagination fact is plastic, and ready to be moulded by him who

understands it.

That, I believe, is the spirit of invention: around each observation

there gathers an aura of conjectures. The scientific discoverer can

penetrate the crevices of fact with moving guesses; each experiment

is suspended in pregnant hypotheses. It is the spirit of the working

artist, embodied in the fine myth that the block of marble imprisoned a

statue which the sculptor released. To the artist his material is not

dead clay or a silent palette, but a living substance clamoring for its

form. It is the dilettante who could do a fine work if it weren’t for

the hardness of the stone. It is the esthete who can do everything but

write his poems. It is the amateur who complains about the conflict

between matter and spirit. Not the producing artist: his medium is a

friendly thing, the very substance of his dream. It is the spirit of

education: not to produce a row of respectable automata, but to draw

out of each child the promise that is in it.

It is the spirit of valuable statecraft: the genius among politicians

is he who can deal in his own time with the social forces that lead

to a better one. He does not ask for a world of angels before he

can begin. He does not think his duty in life is merely to keep old

institutions in good repair. He grasps the facts of his age, sees

in the confusion of events currents like the union, the trust, the

coöperative,--suffuses them with their promise, and directs them into

the structure of the future.

It is the spirit of all fine living: to live ready, to lighten

experience by a knowledge of its alternatives, to let no fact be

opaque, but to make what happens transparent with the choices it

offers.

To escape from barren routine and vain fantasy in order to leaven

reality with its possibilities: this must be the endless effort of a

democratic people. To stand-pat on whatever happens to exist is to put

yourself at the mercy of all the blind mutterings and brute forces that

move beneath the surface of events. The labor movement, the women’s

awakening, industry on a national scale, will work themselves out to

distorted and wasted ends, if they come merely as blind pushes against

invincible ignorance. But if they are left to themselves, if the

labor movement becomes the plaything of its own visions, if it is not

welded and disciplined to the other interests of civilization, then

its wonderful possibilities will be frittered away. And likewise, so

long as the large organization of business is in the hands of economic

adventurers or attacked by its defeated competitors, there is no chance

to make of it what it could be.

The method of a self-governing people is to meet every issue with an

affirmative proposal which draws its strength from some latent promise.

Thus the real remedy for violence in industrial disputes is to give

labor power that brings responsibility. The remedy for commercialism

is collective organization in which the profiteer has given way to the

industrial statesman. The incentive to efficiency is not alone love of

competent work but a desire to get greater social values out of human

life. The way out of corrupt and inept politics is to use the political

state for interesting and important purposes. The unrest of women

cannot be met by a few negative freedoms: only the finding of careers

and the creation of positive functions can make liberty valuable. In

the drift of our emotional life, the genuine hope is to substitute for

terror and weakness, a frank and open worldliness, a love of mortal

things in the discipline of science.

These are not idle dreams: they are, it seems to me, concrete

possibilities of the actual world in which we live. I have tried

in this book to suggest a few of them, to make clearer to myself

by illustrations, the attitude of mind with which we can begin to

approach our strangely complex world. It lacks precision, it lacks

the definiteness of a panacea, and all of us rebel against that. But

mastery in our world cannot mean any single, neat, and absolute line

of procedure. There is something multitudinous about the very notion

of democracy, something that offends our inherited intellectual

prejudices. This book would have a more dramatic climax if I could say

that mastery consisted in some one thing: say in a big union of the

working class, or the nationalization of all business. But it isn’t

possible to say that because there are too many factors which compete

for a place, too many forces that disturb a simple formula. Mastery,

whether we like it or not, is an immense collaboration, in which all

the promises of to-day will have their vote.

Our business as critics is to make those promises evident, to give

to the men who embody them a consciousness of them, to show how they

clash with facts, to bathe them in suggestion. In that atmosphere we

can go about organizing the new structure of society, building up

producers’ and consumers’ controls, laying down plans for wise uses of

our natural resources, working wherever we happen to be, or wherever

our abilities call us, on the substitution of design for accident,

human purposes for brute destiny. It is not easy, nor as yet a normal

attitude toward life. The sustained effort it requires is so great that

few can maintain it for any length of time. Anyone who has tried will

report that no intellectual discipline is comparable in the severity

of its demands: from the weariness it engenders men fall either into

sheer speculation or mechanical repetition. How often does a book

begin truly, and turn off exhausted into a conventional ending. You

can almost see the point where the author gave up his struggle, and

called in the claptrap of a happy accident. How often does a reformer

begin with penetration, entangle himself in officialdom, and end in

excuses for uninspired deeds. Who has not wept over the critical paper

which started off so bravely, handling each event with freshness and

skill, only to become cluttered in its own successes and redundant with

stale virtues. Everyone has met the man who approached life eagerly

and tapered off to a middle age where the effort is over, his opinions

formed, his habits immutable, with nothing to do but live in the house

he has built, and sip what he has brewed.

Effort wells up, beats bravely against reality, and in weariness

simmers down into routine or fantasy. No doubt much of this is due to

physiological causes, some of which lie beyond our present control. And

yet in large measure the explanation lies elsewhere. There are fine

maturities to give our pessimism the lie. This abandonment of effort is

due, I imagine, to the fact that the conscious mastery of experience

is, comparatively speaking, a new turn in human culture. The old

absolutisms of caste and church and state made more modest demands than

democracy does: life was settled and fantasy was organized into ritual

and riveted by authority. But the modern world swings wide and loose,

it has thrown men upon their own responsibility. And for that gigantic

task they lack experience, they are fettered and bound and finally

broken by ancient terrors that huddle about them. Think of the enormous

effort that goes into mere rebellion, think of the struggle that young

men and women go through in what they call a fight for independence,

independence which is nothing but an opportunity to begin. They have to

break with habits rooted in the animal loyalties of their childhood,

and the rupture has consequences greater than most people realize.

The scars are very deep, even the most successful rebel is somewhat

crippled. No wonder then that those who win freedom are often unable to

use it; no wonder that liberty brings its despair.

There are people who think that rebellion is an inevitable

accompaniment of progress. I don’t see why it should be. If it is

possible to destroy, as I think we are doing, the very basis of

authority, then change becomes a matter of invention and deliberate

experiment. No doubt there is a long road to travel before we attain

such a civilization. But it seems to me that we have every right to

look forward to it--to a time when childhood will cease to be assaulted

by bogeys, when eagerness for life will cease to be a sin. There is no

more reason why everyone should go through the rebellions of our time

than that everyone should have to start a suffrage movement to secure

his vote.

To idealize rebellion is simply to make a virtue out of necessity.

It shows more clearly than anything else that the sheer struggle for

freedom is an exhausting thing, so exhausting that the people who lead

it are often unable to appreciate its uses. But just as the men who

founded democracy were more concerned with the evils of the kingly

system than they were with the possibilities of self-government, so it

is with working men and women, and with all those who are in revolt

against the subtle tyrannies of the school and the home and the creed.

Only with difficulty does the affirmative vision emerge.

Each of us contributes to it what he can in the intervals of his battle

with surviving absolutisms. The vision is clearer to-day than it was to

the rebels of the nineteenth century. We are more used to freedom than

they were. But in comparison with what we need our vision is murky,

fragmentary, and distorted. We have dared to look upon life naturally,

we have exorcised many bogeys and laid many superstitions, we have felt

reality bend to our purposes. We gather assurance from these hints.

FOOTNOTES

[1] From _Cleveland Press_, Dec. 5, 1913. Quoted _The Public_, Dec. 26,

1913.

[2] See The Great Society, by Graham Wallas, for a psychological

analysis of this change of social scale. I had the privilege of reading

Mr. Wallas’s book in manuscript while I was revising this one. My

obligations go far deeper than that, however, for they extend back to

the spring of 1910, when Mr. Wallas came from England to lecture at

Harvard. In A Preface to Politics I tried to express my sense of the

way in which Graham Wallas marks a turning point in the history of

political thinking.

[3] Hearings--62nd Cong., 2nd Session, 1911-12.

[4] _N. Y. Times Annalist_, Jan. 12, 1914.

[5] See “Boycotts and the Labor Struggle,” by Harry W. Laidler. John

Lane Co.

[6] J. Russell Smith, Industrial and Commercial Geography, p. 398.

[7] See Human Nature in Politics by Graham Wallas, p. 161.