"given," made-in-advance. Though unconsciously its systems of logic are
created to enhance the self-feeling, they appear to consciousness as
highly impersonal and abstract. As in the intellectualist philosophies,
forms of thought are regarded as themselves objects of thought. Systems
of general ideas are imposed upon the minds of men apparently from
without. Universal acceptance is demanded. Thought becomes stereotyped.
What ought to be is confused with what is, the ideal becomes more real
than fact.
In the essays on "Pragmatism" William James showed that the rationalist
system, even that of the great philosopher, is in large measure
determined by the thinker's peculiar "temperament." Elsewhere he speaks
of the "Sentiment of Rationality." For a discussion of the various types
of philosophical rationalism, the reader is referred to the criticisms
by William James, F. C. S. Schiller, Dewey, and other Pragmatists. It is
sufficient for our purpose to note the fact that the rationalist type of
mind everywhere shows a tendency to assert the unreality of the world of
everyday experience, and to seek comfort and security in the
contemplation of a logically ordered system or world of "pure reason."
Ideals, not concrete things, are the true realities. The world with
which we are always wrestling is but a distorted manifestation, a
jumbled, stereotyped copy of what James ironically referred to as "the
de luxe edition which exists in the Absolute." The parable of the cave
which Plato gives in the _Republic_ represents ordinary knowledge as a
delusion, and the empirically known world as but dancing shadows on the
wall of our subterranean prison.
R. W. Livingstone, who sees in Platonism, from the very beginning, a
certain world-weariness and turning away of the Greek spirit from the
healthy realism which had formerly characterized it, says:
For if Greece showed men how to trust their own nature and lead
a simply human life, how to look straight in the face of the
world and read the beauty that met them on the surface, certain
Greek writers preached a different lesson from this. In
opposition to directness they taught us to look past the
"unimaginary and actual" qualities of things to secondary
meanings and inner symbolism. In opposition to liberty and
humanism they taught us to mistrust our nature, to see in it
weakness, helplessness, and incurable taint, to pass beyond
humanity to communion with God, to live less for this world than
for one to come.... Perhaps to some people it may seem
surprising that this writer is Plato.
According to this view reality may be found only by means of "pure
knowledge," and, to give a familiar quotation from the Phædo:
If we would have pure knowledge of anything we must be quit of
the body; the soul in herself must behold things in themselves;
and then we shall attain the wisdom which we desire and of which
we say that we are lovers; not while we live, but after death;
for if, while in company with the body, the soul cannot have
pure knowledge, one of two things follows--either knowledge is
not to be obtained at all, or if at all after death.
Intellectualism may not always be so clearly other-worldly as Plato
shows himself to be in this passage. But it commonly argues that behind
the visible world of "illusory sense experience" lies the true ground
and cause--an unseen order in which the contradictions of experience are
either unknown or harmonized, an external and unchangeable "Substance,"
a self-contained Absolute to which our ephemeral personalities with
their imperfections and problems are unknown. A "thing in itself," or
principle of Being which transcends our experience.
This type of thinking, whether it be known as Idealism, Rationalism,
Intellectualism, or Absolutism, finds little sympathy from those who
approach the study of philosophy from the standpoint of psychology. The
following passages taken from _Studies in Humanism_ by Schiller, show
that even without the technique of the analytical method, it was not
hard to detect some of the motives which prompted the construction of
systems of this sort. The partisanism of one of these motives is rather
suggestive for our study of the mind of the crowd. Says our author:
Logical defects rarely kill beliefs to which men, for
psychological reasons, remain attached.... This may suggest to
us that we may have perhaps unwittingly misunderstood
Absolutism, and done it a grave injustice.... What if its real
appeal was not logical but psychological?...
The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears out these
anticipations. It was originally a deliberate importation from
Germany, with a purpose. And this purpose was a religious
one--that of counteracting the antireligious developments of
Science. The indigenous philosophy, the old British empiricism,
was useless for this purpose. For though a form of
intellectualism, its sensationalism was in no wise hostile to
Science. On the contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself
with, and to promote, the great scientific movement of the
nineteenth century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed
Oxford between 1859 and 1870.
But this movement excited natural and not unwarranted alarm in
that great center of theology. For Science, flushed with its
hard-won liberty, ignorant of philosophy, and as yet unconscious
of its proper limitations, was decidedly aggressive and
overconfident. It seemed naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by
the law of its being. The logic of Mill, the philosophy of
Evolution, the faith in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on
material lines), threatened to carry all before them.
What was to be done? Nothing directly; for on its own ground
Science seemed invulnerable, and had the knack of crushing the
subtlest dialectics by the knockdown force of sheer scientific
fact. But might it not be possible to change the venue, to
shift the battleground to a region _ubi instabilis terra unda_
(where the land afforded no firm footing), where the frozen sea
could not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists
so that phantoms might well pass for realities--the realm, in
short, of metaphysics?...
So it was rarely necessary to do more than recite the august
table of _a priori_ categories in order to make the most
audacious scientist feel that he had got out of his depth; while
at the merest mention of the Hegelian dialectic all the
"advanced thinkers" of the time would flee affrighted.
Schiller's sense of humor doubtless leads him to exaggerate somewhat the
deliberateness of this importation of German metaphysics. That these
borrowed transcendental and dialectical systems served their purpose in
the warfare of traditional theologies against Science is but half the
truth. The other half is that these logical formulas provided certain
intelligent believers with a defense, or safe refuge, in their own inner
conflicts.
That this is the case, Schiller evidently has little doubt. After
discussing Absolutism itself as a sort of religion, and showing that its
"catch-words" taken at their face value are not only emotionally barren,
but also logically meaningless because "inapplicable to our actual
experience," he then proceeds to an examination of the unconscious
motives which determine this sort of thinking. His description of these
motives, so far as it goes, is an excellent little bit of analytical
psychology. He says:
How then can Absolutism possibly be a religion? It must appeal
to psychological motives of a different sort, rare enough to
account for its total divergence from the ordinary religious
feelings and compelling enough to account for the fanaticism
with which it is held and the persistence with which the same
old round of negations has been reiterated through the ages. Of
such psychological motives we shall indicate the more important
and reputable.
(1) It is decidedly flattering to one's spiritual pride to feel
oneself a "part" or "manifestation" or "vehicle" or
"reproduction" of the Absolute Mind, and to some this feeling
affords so much strength and comfort and such exquisite delight
that they refrain from inquiring what these phrases mean.... It
is, moreover, the strength of this feeling which explains the
blindness of Absolutists toward the logical defects of their own
theory....
(2) There is a strange delight in wide generalization merely as
such, which, when pursued without reference to the ends which it
subserves, and without regard to its actual functioning, often
results in a sort of logical vertigo. This probably has much to
do with the peculiar "craving for unity" which is held to be the
distinctive affliction of philosophers. At any rate, the thought
of an all-embracing One or Whole seems to be regarded as
valuable and elevating quite apart from any definite function it
performs in knowing, or light it throws on any actual problem.
(3) The thought of an Absolute Unity is cherished as a guarantee
of cosmic stability. In face of the restless vicissitudes of
phenomena it seems to secure us against falling out of the
Universe. It assures us _a_ _priori_--and that is its supreme
value--that the cosmic order cannot fall to pieces and leave us
dazed and confounded among the debris.... We want to have an
absolute assurance _a priori_ concerning the future, and the
thought of the absolute seems designed to give it. It is
probably this last notion that, consciously or unconsciously,
weighs most in the psychology of the Absolutists' creed.
In this connection the reader will recall the passage quoted from
Adler's _The Neurotic Constitution_, in which it was shown that the
fictitious "guiding-lines" or rational systems of both the neurotic and
normal are motivated by this craving for security. But it makes all the
difference in the world whether the system of ideas is used, as in
science and common sense, to solve real problems in an objective world,
or is created to be an artificial and imaginary defense of the ego
against a subjective feeling of insecurity; whether, in a word, the
craving for security moves one to do something calculated to render the
forces with which he must deal concretely more congenial and hospitable
to his will, or makes him content to withdraw and file a demur to the
challenge of the environment in the form of theoretical denial of the
reality of the situation.
There is no denying the fact that Absolute Idealism, if not taken too
seriously, may have the function for some people of steadying their
nerves in the battle of life. And though, as I believe, logically
untenable, it not infrequently serves as a rationalization of
faith-values which work out beneficially, and, quite apart from their
metaphysical trappings, may be even indispensable. Yet when carried to
its logical conclusions such thinking inevitably distorts the meaning of
personal living, robs our world and our acts of their feeling of
reality, serves as an instrument for "regression" or withdrawal of
interest from the real tasks and objects of living men and women, and in
fact functions for much the same purpose, if not precisely in the same
way, as do the ideal systems of the psychopath.
In justice to idealism it should be added that this is by no means the
only species of Rationalism which may lead to such psychic results.
There are various paths by which the craving for artificial security may
lead to such attempts to reduce the whole of possible experience to
logical unity that the realities of time and change and of individual
experience are denied. How many deterministic theories, with all their
scientific jargon, are really motivated by an inability to accept a
world with an element of chance in it. There is a sense in which all
science by subsuming like individuals in a common class, and thus
ignoring their individuality, in so far as they are alike in certain
respects, gains added power over all of them. There is a sense, too, in
which science, by discovering that whenever a given combination of
elements occurs, a definitely foreseen result will follow, is justified
in ignoring time and treating certain futures as if they were already
tucked up the sleeves of the present. It should be remembered that this
sort of determinism is purely methodological, and is, like all thinking,
done for a purpose--that of effecting desirable ends in a world made up
of concrete situations.
When this purpose becomes supplanted by a passion to discount all future
change in general--when one imagines that he has a formula which enables
him to write the equation of the curve of the universe, science has
degenerated into scientificism, or head-in-the-sand philosophy. The
magic formula has precisely the same psychic value as the "absolute." I
know a number of economic determinists, for instance, who just cannot
get out of their heads the notion that social evolution is a process
absolutely underwritten, guaranteed, and predictable, without the least
possible doubt. In such a philosophy of history as this the individual
is of course a mere "product of his environment," and his role as a
creator of value is nil. On this "materialistic" theory, the individual
is as truly a mere manifestation of impersonal evolutionary forces as he
is, according to orthodox Platonism, a mere manifestation of the
abstract idea of his species. Notwithstanding the professed
impersonalism of this view, its value for consolation in minimizing the
causes of the spiritual difference in men--that is, its function for
enhancing the self-feeling of some people, is obvious. That such an idea
should become a crowd-idea is not to be wondered at. And this leads me
to my point. _It is no mere accident that the crowd takes to
rationalistic philosophies like a duck to water._
The crowd-man, however unsophisticated he may be, is a Platonist at
heart. He may never have heard the word epistemology, but his theory of
knowledge is essentially the same as Plato's. Religious crowds are, to
one familiar with the Dialogues, astonishingly Platonic. There is the
same habit of giving ontological rather than functional value to general
ideas, the same other-worldliness, the same moral dilemmas, the same
contempt for the material, for the human body, for selfhood; the same
assertion of finality, and the conformist spirit.
Reformist crowds differ only superficially from religious crowds.
Patriotic crowds make use of a different terminology, but their mental
habits are the same. It has become a cult among crowds with tendencies
toward social revolution to paint their faces with the colors of a
borrowed nineteenth-century materialism. But all this is mere swagger
and "frightfulness," an attempt to make themselves look terrible and
frighten the bourgeois. I am sure that no one who has seen all this
radical rigmarole, as I have had occasion to see it, can be deceived by
it. These dreadful materialist doctrines of the radical crowd are wooden
guns, no thicker than the soap-box. As a matter of fact, the radical
crowds are extremely idealistic. With all their talk of proletarian
opposition to intellectualism, Socialists never become a crowd without
becoming as intellectualist as Fichte or Hegel. There is a sense in
which Marx himself never succeeded in escaping Hegel's dilemmas, he only
followed the fashion in those days of turning them upside down.
With radical crowds as with conservative, there is the same substitution
of a closed system of ideas for the shifting phenomena of our empirical
world; the same worship of abstract forms of thought, the same
uncompromising spirit and insistence upon general uniformity of
opinions; the same orthodoxy. All orthodoxy is nothing other than the
will of the crowd to keep itself together. With all kinds of crowds,
also, there is the same diverting of attention from the personal and the
concrete to the impersonal and the general; the same flight from reality
to the transcendental for escape, for consolation, for defense, for
vindication; the same fiction that existence is at bottom a sort of
logical proposition, a magic formula or principle of Being to be
correctly copied and learned by rote; the same attempt to create the
world or find reality by thinking rather than by acting.
The intellectualist bias of the average man is doubtless due in great
part to the fact that theology, and therefore the religious education of
the young, both Christian and Jewish, has throughout the history of
these religions been saturated with Platonism. But then, the universal
sway of this philosopher may be explained by the fact that there is
something in his abstractionism which is congenial to the creed-making
propensities of the crowd-mind. The great _a priori_ thinkers, Plato,
St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Green,
etc., have often been called solitary men, but it is significant that
their doctrines survive in popularized form in the creeds and
shibboleths of permanent crowds of all descriptions. While humanists,
nominalists, empiricists, realists, pragmatists, men like Protagoras,
Epicurus, Abelard, Bacon, Locke, Hume, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bergson,
James, have always had a hard time of it. They are considered
destructive, for the reason that the tendency of their teaching is to
disintegrate the crowd-mind and call one back to himself. Their names
are seldom mentioned in popular assemblies except to discredit them.
Yet it is on the whole these latter thinkers who orient us in our real
world, make us courageously face the facts with which we have to deal,
stimulate our wills, force us to use our ideas for what they
are--instruments for better living,--inspire us to finer and more
correct valuations of things, and point out the way to freedom for those
who dare walk in it.
All this, however, is the very thing that the crowd-mind is running
headlong away from. As a crowd we do not wish to think empirically. Why
should we seek piecemeal goods by tedious and dangerous effort, when we
have only to do a little trick of attention, and behold The Good,
abstract, perfect, universal, waiting just around the corner in the
realm of pure reason, ready to swallow up and demolish all evil? Are we
not even now in possession of Love, Justice, Beauty, and Truth by the
sheer magic of thinking of them in the abstract, calling them
"principles" and writing the words with the initial letters in capitals?
The very mental processes by which a group of people becomes a crowd
change such abstract nouns from mere class names into copies of
supermundane realities.
In wholesome thinking principles are of course necessary. They are what
I might call "leading ideas." Their function is to lead to more
satisfactory thinking--that is, to other ideas which are desired. Or
they are useful in leading us to actions the results of which are
intended and wished for. They may also be principles of valuation
guiding us in the choice of ends. If there were no substantial agreement
among us concerning certain principles we could not relate our conduct
to one another at all; social life would be impossible. But necessary as
such leading ideas are, they are means rather than ends. Circumstances
may demand that we alter them or make exceptions to their application.
To the crowd-mind a principle appears as an end in itself. It must be
vindicated at all costs. To offend against it in one point is to be
guilty of breaking the whole law. Crowds are always uncompromising about
their principles. They must apply to all alike. Crowds are no respecters
of persons.
As crowd-men we never appear without some set of principles or some
cause over our heads. Crowds crawl under their principles like worms
under stones. They cover up the wrigglings of the unconscious, and
protect it from attack. Every crowd uses its principles as universal
demands. In this way it gets unction upon other crowds, puts them in the
wrong, makes them give assent to the crowd's real purpose by challenging
them to deny the righteousness of the professed justifications of that
purpose. It is said that the Sioux Indians, some years ago, used to put
their women and children in front of their firing line. The braves could
then crouch behind these innocent ones and shoot at white men, knowing
that it would be a violation of the principles of humanity for the white
soldiers to shoot back and risk killing women and children. Crowds
frequently make just such use of their principles. About each crowd,
like the circle of fire which the gods placed about the sleeping
Brunhilde, there is a flaming hedge of logical abstractions, sanctions,
taboos, which none but the intellectually courageous few dare cross. In
this way the slumbering critical faculties of the crowd-mind are
protected against the intrusion of realities from outside the cult. The
intellectual curiosity of the members of the group is kept within proper
bounds. Hostile persons or groups dare not resist us, for in so doing
they make themselves enemies of Truth, of Morality, of Liberty, etc.
Both political parties, by a common impulse, "drape themselves in the
Flag." It is an interesting fact that the most antagonistic crowds
profess much the same set of principles. The "secondary rationalization"
of crowds, both Northern and Southern, at the time of the Civil War,
made use of our traditional principles of American Liberty, and
Christian Morality. We have seen both pacifist and militarist crowds
setting forth their manifestoes in terms of New Testament teaching. Each
religious sect exists only to teach "the one system of doctrine
logically deduced from Scripture."
As an illustration of this sort of reasoning, I give here a few passages
from a propagandist publication in which the crowd-will to dominate
takes the typical American method of striving to force its cult ideas
upon the community as a whole by means of restrictive moralist
legislation--in this case attempt is made to prohibit the exhibition of
motion pictures on Sunday. That the demand for such legislation is for
the most part a pure class-crowd phenomenon, designed to enhance the
self-feeling and economic interests of the "reformers," by keeping the
poor from having a good time, is I think, rather obvious. The reasoning
here is interesting, as the real motive is so thinly disguised by
pietistic platitudes that the two follow each other in alternate
succession:
(1) Sunday Movies are not needed. The people have six days and
six nights each week on which to attend the movies. Is not that
plenty of time for all?
(2) Sunday Movie Theaters commercialize the Christian Sabbath.
While "the Sabbath was made for man," _yet it is God's day_. We
have no right to sell it for business purposes. It is a day for
rest and worship, not a day for greed and gain. Sunday would,
of course, be the best day in the week financially for the
movies. It would also be the best day in the week for the open
saloons and horse-racing, but that is no reason why these should
be allowed on Sunday. _The Sabbath must not be commercialized._
(3) _Sunday Movie Theaters destroy the rest and quiet of many
people, especially those who live in the residential district_
of cities and in the neighborhood where such motion-picture
theaters are located. Great crowds pour along the streets near
such theaters, often breaking the Sunday quiet of that part of
the city by loud and boisterous talk.
Thousands of people every year are moving away from the downtown
noisy districts of the cities out into the quiet residential
districts in order to have quiet Sundays. But when a
motion-picture theater comes and locates next to their homes, or
in their block, as has been done in many cases, and great noisy,
boisterous crowds surge back and forth before their homes all
Sunday afternoon and evening, going to the movies, they are
being robbed of _that for which they paid their money when they
bought a home in that quiet part of the city_....