Agapasm exhibits them the most clearly. The good result is here brought
to pass, first, by the bestowal of spontaneous energy by the parent upon
the offspring, and, second, by the disposition of the latter to catch
the general idea of those about it and thus to subserve the general
purpose. In order to express the relation that tychasm and anancasm bear
to agapasm, let me borrow a word from geometry. An ellipse crossed by a
straight line is a sort of cubic curve; for a cubic is a curve which is
cut thrice by a straight line; now a straight line might cut the ellipse
twice and its associated straight line a third time. Still the ellipse
with the straight line across it would not have the characteristics of a
cubic. It would have, for instance, no contrary flexure, which no true
cubic wants; and it would have two nodes, which no true cubic has. The
geometers say that it is a _degenerate_ cubic. Just so, tychasm and
anancasm are degenerate forms of agapasm.
Men who seek to reconcile the Darwinian idea with Christianity will
remark that tychastic evolution, like the agapastic, depends upon a
reproductive creation, the forms preserved being those that use the
spontaneity conferred upon them in such wise as to be drawn into harmony
with their original, quite after the Christian scheme. Very good! This
only shows that just as love cannot have a contrary, but must embrace
what is most opposed to it, as a degenerate case of it, so tychasm is
a kind of agapasm. Only, in the tychastic evolution progress is solely
owing to the distribution of the napkin-hidden talent of the rejected
servant among those not rejected, just as ruined gamesters leave their
money on the table to make those not yet ruined so much the richer.
It makes the felicity of the lambs just the damnation of the goats,
transposed to the other side of the equation. In genuine agapasm, on the
other hand, advance takes place by virtue of a positive sympathy among
the created springing from continuity of mind. This is the idea which
tychasticism knows not how to manage.
The anancasticist might here interpose, claiming that the mode of
evolution for which he contends agrees with agapasm at the point at which
tychasm departs from it. For it makes development go through certain
phases, having its inevitable ebbs and flows, yet tending on the whole to
a foreordained perfection. Bare existence by this its destiny betrays an
intrinsic affinity for the good. Herein, it must be admitted, anancasm
shows itself to be in a broad acception a species of agapasm. Some forms
of it might easily be mistaken for the genuine agapasm. The Hegelian
philosophy is such an anancasticism. With its revelatory religion, with
its synechism (however imperfectly set forth), with its “reflection,”
the whole idea of the theory is superb, almost sublime. Yet, after all,
living freedom is practically omitted from its method. The whole movement
is that of a vast engine, impelled by a _vis a tergo_, with a blind and
mysterious fate of arriving at a lofty goal. I mean that such an engine
it _would_ be, if it really worked; but in point of fact, it is a Keely
motor. Grant that it really acts as it professes to act, and there is
nothing to do but accept the philosophy. But never was there seen such an
example of a long chain of reasoning,—shall I say with a flaw in every
link?—no, with every link a handful of sand, squeezed into shape in a
dream. Or say, it is a pasteboard model of a philosophy that in reality
does not exist. If we use the one precious thing it contains, the idea
of it, introducing the tychism which the arbitrariness of its every step
suggests, and make that the support of a vital freedom which is the
breath of the spirit of love, we may be able to produce that genuine
agapasticism, at which Hegel was aiming.
A THIRD ASPECT. DISCRIMINATION.
In the very nature of things, the line of demarcation between the three
modes of evolution is not perfectly sharp. That does not prevent its
being quite real; perhaps it is rather a mark of its reality. There is
in the nature of things no sharp line of demarcation between the three
fundamental colors, red, green, and violet. But for all that they are
really different. The main question is whether three radically different
evolutionary elements have been operative; and the second question is
what are the most striking characteristics of whatever elements have been
operative.
I propose to devote a few pages to a very slight examination of these
questions in their relation to the historical development of human
thought. I first formulate for the reader’s convenience the briefest
possible definitions of the three conceivable modes of development
of thought, distinguishing also two varieties of anancasm and three
of agapasm. The tychastic development of thought, then, will consist
in slight departures from habitual ideas in different directions
indifferently, quite purposeless and quite unconstrained whether by
outward circumstances or by force of logic, these new departures being
followed by unforeseen results which tend to fix some of them as habits
more than others. The anancastic development of thought will consist
of new ideas adopted without foreseeing whither they tend, but having
a character determined by causes either external to the mind, such
as changed circumstances of life, or internal to the mind as logical
developments of ideas already accepted, such as generalisations. The
agapastic development of thought is the adoption of certain mental
tendencies, not altogether heedlessly, as in tychasm, nor quite blindly
by the mere force of circumstances or of logic, as in anancasm, but by
an immediate attraction for the idea itself, whose nature is divined
before the mind possesses it, by the power of sympathy, that is, by
virtue of the continuity of mind; and this mental tendency may be of
three varieties, as follows. First, it may affect a whole people or
community in its collective personality, and be thence communicated
to such individuals as are in powerfully sympathetic connection with
the collective people, although they may be intellectually incapable
of attaining the idea by their private understandings or even perhaps
of consciously apprehending it. Second, it may affect a private person
directly, yet so that he is only enabled to apprehend the idea, or
to appreciate its attractiveness, by virtue of his sympathy with his
neighbors, under the influence of a striking experience or development of
thought. The conversion of St. Paul may be taken as an example of what
is meant. Third, it may affect an individual, independently of his human
affections, by virtue of an attraction it exercises upon his mind, even
before he has comprehended it. This is the phenomenon which has been
well called the _divination_ of genius; for it is due to the continuity
between the man’s mind and the Most High.
Let us next consider by means of what tests we can discriminate between
these different categories of evolution. No absolute criterion is
possible in the nature of things, since in the nature of things there is
no sharp line of demarcation between the different classes. Nevertheless,
quantitative symptoms may be found by which a sagacious and sympathetic
judge of human nature may be able to estimate the approximate proportions
in which the different kinds of influence are commingled.
So far as the historical evolution of human thought has been tychastic,
it should have proceeded by insensible or minute steps; for such is the
nature of chances when so multiplied as to show phenomena of regularity.
For example, assume that of the native-born white adult males of the
United States in 1880, one fourth part were below 5 feet 4 inches in
stature and one fourth part above 5 feet 8 inches. Then by the principles
of probability, among the whole population, we should expect
216 under 4 feet 6 inches, 216 above 6 feet 6 inches.
48 ” 4 ” 5 ” 48 ” 6 ” 7 ”
9 ” 4 ” 4 ” 9 ” 6 ” 8 ”
less than 2 ” 4 ” 3 ” less than 2 ” 6 ” 9 ”
I set down these figures to show how insignificantly few are the cases in
which anything very far out of the common run presents itself by chance.
Though the stature of only every second man is included within the four
inches between 5 feet 4 inches and 5 feet 8 inches, yet if this interval
be extended by thrice four inches above and below, it will embrace all
our 8 millions odd of native-born adult white males (of 1880), except
only 9 taller and 9 shorter.
The test of minute variation, if _not_ satisfied, absolutely negatives
tychasm. If it _is_ satisfied, we shall find that it negatives anancasm
but not agapasm. We want a positive test, satisfied by tychasm, only. Now
wherever we find men’s thought taking by imperceptible degrees a turn
contrary to the purposes which animate them, in spite of their highest
impulses, there, we may safely conclude, there has been a tychastic
action.
Students of the history of mind there be of an erudition to fill an
imperfect scholar like me with envy edulcorated by joyous admiration,
who maintain that ideas when just started are and can be little more
than freaks, since they cannot yet have been critically examined, and
further that everywhere and at all times progress has been so gradual
that it is difficult to make out distinctly what original step any given
man has taken. It would follow that tychasm has been the sole method of
intellectual development. I have to confess I cannot read history so; I
cannot help thinking that while tychasm has sometimes been operative, at
others great steps covering nearly the same ground and made by different
men independently, have been mistaken for a succession of small steps,
and further that students have been reluctant to admit a real entitative
“spirit” of an age or of a people, under the mistaken and unscrutinised
impression that they should thus be opening the door to wild and
unnatural hypotheses. I find, on the contrary, that, however it may
be with the education of individual minds, the historical development
of thought has seldom been of a tychastic nature, and exclusively in
backward and barbarising movements. I desire to speak with the extreme
modesty which befits a student of logic who is required to survey so
very wide a field of human thought that he can cover it only by a
reconnaisance, to which only the greatest skill and most adroit methods
can impart any value at all; but, after all, I can only express my own
opinions and not those of anybody else; and in my humble judgment, the
largest example of tychasm is afforded by the history of Christianity,
from about its establishment by Constantine, to, say, the time of the
Irish monasteries, an era or eon of about 500 years. Undoubtedly the
external circumstance which more than all others at first inclined men
to accept Christianity in its loveliness and tenderness, was the fearful
extent to which society was broken up into units by the unmitigated greed
and hard-heartedness into which the Romans had seduced the world. And yet
it was that very same fact, more than any other external circumstance,
that fostered that bitterness against the wicked world of which the
primitive Gospel of Mark contains not a single trace. At least, I do
not detect it in the remark about the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,
where nothing is said about vengeance, nor even in that speech where the
closing lines of Isaiah are quoted, about the worm and the fire that
feed upon the “carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me.”
But little by little the bitterness increases until in the last book
of the New Testament, its poor distracted author represents that all
the time Christ was talking about having come to save the world, the
secret design was to catch the entire human race, with the exception of
a paltry 144000, and souse them all in brimstone lake, and as the smoke
of their torment went up for ever and ever, to turn and remark, “There
is no curse any more.” Would it be an insensible smirk or a fiendish
grin that should accompany such an utterance? I wish I could believe
St. John did not write it; but it is his gospel which tells about the
“resurrection unto condemnation,”—that is of men’s being resuscitated
just for the sake of torturing them;—and, at any rate, the Revelation is
a very ancient composition. One can understand that the early Christians
were like men trying with all their might to climb a steep declivity of
smooth wet clay; the deepest and truest element of their life, animating
both heart and head, was universal-love; but they were continually, and
against their wills, slipping into a party spirit, every slip serving
as a precedent, in a fashion but too familiar to every man. This party
feeling insensibly grew until by about A. D. 330 the lustre of the
pristine integrity that in St. Mark reflects the white spirit of light
was so far tarnished that Eusebius, (the Jared Sparks of that day,) in
the preface to his History, could announce his intention of exaggerating
everything that tended to the glory of the church and of suppressing
whatever might disgrace it. His Latin contemporary Lactantius is worse,
still; and so the darkling went on increasing until before the end of the
century the great library of Alexandria was destroyed by Theophilus,[22]
until Gregory the Great, two centuries later, burnt the great library of
Rome, proclaiming that “Ignorance is the mother of devotion,” (which is
true, just as oppression and injustice is the mother of spirituality,)
until a sober description of the state of the church would be a thing
our not too nice newspapers would treat as “unfit for publication.” All
this movement is shown by the application of the test given above to
have been tychastic. Another very much like it on a small scale, only a
hundred times swifter, for the study of which there are documents by the
library-full, is to be found in the history of the French Revolution.
Anancastic evolution advances by successive strides with pauses between.
The reason is that in this process a habit of thought having been
overthrown is supplanted by the next strongest. Now this next strongest
is sure to be widely disparate from the first, and as often as not
is its direct contrary. It reminds one of our old rule of making the
second candidate vice-president. This character, therefore, clearly
distinguishes anancasm from tychasm. The character which distinguishes
it from agapasm is its purposelessness. But external and internal
anancasm have to be examined separately. Development under the pressure
of external circumstances, or cataclasmine evolution, is in most cases
unmistakable enough. It has numberless degrees of intensity, from the
brute force, the plain war, which has more than once turned the current
of the world’s thought, down to the hard fact of evidence, or what has
been taken for it, which has been known to convince men by hordes. The
only hesitation that can subsist in the presence of such a history is
a quantitative one. Never are external influences the only ones which
affect the mind, and therefore it must be a matter of judgment for which
it would scarcely be worth while to attempt to set rules, whether a
given movement is to be regarded as principally governed from without
or not. In the rise of medieval thought, I mean scholasticism and
the synchronistic art developments, undoubtedly the crusades and the
discovery of the writings of Aristotle were powerful influences. The
development of scholasticism from Roscellin to Albertus Magnus closely
follows the successive steps in the knowledge of Aristotle. Prantl
thinks that that is the whole story, and few men have thumbed more
books than Carl Prantl. He has done good solid work, notwithstanding
his slap-dash judgments. But we shall never make so much as a good
beginning of comprehending scholasticism until the whole has been
systematically explored and digested by a company of students regularly
organised and held under rule for that purpose. But as for the period we
are now specially considering, that which synchronised the Romanesque
architecture, the literature is easily mastered. It does not quite
justify Prantl’s dicta as to the slavish dependence of these authors
upon their authorities. Moreover, they kept a definite purpose steadily
before their minds, throughout all their studies. I am, therefore, unable
to offer this period of scholasticism as an example of pure external
anancasm, which seems to be the fluorine of the intellectual elements.
Perhaps the recent Japanese reception of western ideas is the purest
instance of it in history. Yet in combination with other elements,
nothing is commoner. If the development of ideas under the influence of
the study of external facts be considered as external anancasm,—it is on
the border between the external and the internal forms,—it is, of course,
the principal thing in modern learning. But Whewell, whose masterly
comprehension of the history of science critics have been too ignorant
properly to appreciate, clearly shows that it is far from being the
overwhelmingly preponderant influence, even there.
Internal anancasm, or logical groping, which advances upon a predestined
line without being able to foresee whither it is to be carried nor to
steer its course, this is the rule of development of philosophy. Hegel
first made the world understand this; and he seeks to make logic not
merely the subjective guide and monitor of thought, which was all it had
been ambitioning before, but to be the very main-spring of thinking,
and not merely of individual thinking but of discussion, of the history
of the development of thought, of all history, of all development.
This involves a positive, clearly demonstrable error. Let the logic in
question be of whatever kind it may, a logic of necessary inference or
a logic of probable inference, (the theory might perhaps be shaped to
fit either,) in any case it supposes that logic is sufficient of itself
to determine what conclusion follows from given premises; for unless it
will do so much, it will not suffice to explain why an individual train
of reasoning should take just the course it does take, to say nothing of
other kinds of development. It thus supposes that from given premises,
only one conclusion can logically be drawn, and that there is no scope
at all for free choice. That from given premises only one conclusion can
logically be drawn, is one of the false notions which have come from
logicians’ confining their attention to that Nantucket of thought, the
logic of non-relative terms. In the logic of relatives, it does not hold
good.
One remark occurs to me. If the evolution of history is in considerable
part of the nature of internal anancasm, it resembles the development of
individual men; and just as 33 years is a rough but natural unit of time
for individuals, being the average age at which man has issue, so there
should be an approximate period at the end of which one great historical
movement ought to be likely to be supplanted by another. Let us see if we
can make out anything of the kind. Take the governmental development of
Rome as being sufficiently long and set down the principal dates.
B. C. 753, Foundation of Rome.
B. C. 510, Expulsion of the Tarquins.
B. C. 27, Octavius assumes title Augustus.
A. D. 476, End of Western Empire.
A. D. 962, Holy Roman Empire.
A. D. 1453, Fall of Constantinople.
The last event was one of the most significant in history, especially
for Italy. The intervals are 243, 483, 502, 486, 491 years. All are
rather curiously near equal, except the first which is half the others.
Successive reigns of kings would not commonly be so near equal. Let us
set down a few dates in the history of thought.
B. C. 585, Eclipse of Thales. Beginning of Greek philosophy.
A. D. 30, The crucifixion.
A. D. 529, Closing of Athenian schools. End of Greek philosophy.
A. D. 1125, (Approximate) Rise of the Universities of Bologna and Paris.
A. D. 1543, Publication of the “De Revolutionibus” of Copernicus.
Beginning of Modern Science.
The intervals are 615, 499, 596, 418, years. In the history of
metaphysics, we may take the following:
B. C. 322, Death of Aristotle.
A. D. 1274, Death of Aquinas.
A. D. 1804, Death of Kant.
The intervals are 1595 and 530 years. The former is about thrice the
latter.
From these figures, no conclusion can fairly be drawn. At the same time,
they suggest that perhaps there may be a rough natural era of about 500
years. Should there be any independent evidence of this, the intervals
noticed may gain some significance.
The agapastic development of thought should, if it exists, be
distinguished by its purposive character, this purpose being the
development of an idea. We should have a direct agapic or sympathetic
comprehension and recognition of it, by virtue of the continuity of
thought. I here take it for granted that such continuity of thought
has been sufficiently proved by the arguments used in my paper on the
“Law of Mind” in _The Monist_ of last July. Even if those arguments are
not quite convincing in themselves, yet if they are reënforced by an
apparent agapasm in the history of thought, the two propositions will
lend one another mutual aid. The reader will, I trust, be too well
grounded in logic to mistake such mutual support for a vicious circle in
reasoning. If it could be shown directly that there is such an entity
as the “spirit of an age” or of a people, and that mere individual
intelligence will not account for all the phenomena, this would be proof
enough at once of agapasticism and of synechism. I must acknowledge
that I am unable to produce a cogent demonstration of this; but I am, I
believe, able to adduce such arguments as will serve to confirm those
which have been drawn from other facts. I believe that all the greatest
achievements of mind have been beyond the powers of unaided individuals;
and I find, apart from the support this opinion receives from synechistic
considerations, and from the purposive character of many great movements,
direct reason for so thinking in the sublimity of the ideas and in their
occurring simultaneously and independently to a number of individuals
of no extraordinary general powers. The pointed Gothic architecture in
several of its developments appears to me to be of such a character. All
attempts to imitate it by modern architects of the greatest learning and
genius appear flat and tame, and are felt by their authors to be so.
Yet at the time the style was living, there was quite an abundance of
men capable of producing works of this kind of gigantic sublimity and
power. In more than one case, extant documents show that the cathedral
chapters, in the selection of architects, treated high artistic genius as
a secondary consideration, as if there were no lack of persons able to
supply that; and the results justify their confidence. Were individuals
in general, then, in those ages possessed of such lofty natures and high
intellect? Such an opinion would break down under the first examination.