Man’s prospects are not at present so rosy that he can neglect any
means of improving them. He has recently made a number of changes
in his customs and ways of life, partly with intention, partly by
accident. These changes are involving such widespread further changes
that the fairly near future is likely to see an almost complete
reorganization of our lives, in their intimate aspects as much as in
their public. Man himself is changing, together with his circumstances;
he has changed in the past, it is true, but never perhaps so swiftly.
His circumstances are not known to have ever changed so much or so
suddenly before, with psychological as well as with economic, social
and political dangers. This suddenness threatens us. Some parts of
human nature resist change more than others. We risk disaster, if some
of our customs change, while others which should change with them stay
as they are.
Habits that have endured for many thousands of years are not easy to
throw off--least of all when they are habits of thought, and when they
do not come into open conflict with changing circumstances, or do not
clearly involve us in loss or inconvenience. Yet the loss may be great
without our knowing anything about it. Before 1590 no one knew how
inconvenient were our natural habits of thought about the ways in which
a stone may fall; yet the modern world began when Galileo discovered
what really happens. Only persons thought to be crazy knew before 1800
that ordinary traditional ideas as to cleanliness are dangerously
inadequate. The infant’s average ‘expectation of life’ has increased by
about 30 years since Lister upset them. Nobody before Sir Ronald Ross
knew what were the consequences of thinking about malaria in terms of
influences and miasmas instead of in terms of mosquitoes. The Roman
Empire might perhaps have still been flourishing if someone had found
this out before A.D. 100.
With such examples all about us we can no longer, in any department
of life, so easily accept what was good enough for our fathers as good
enough for ourselves, or for our children. We are forced to wonder
whether our ideas, even upon subjects apparently of little practical
importance, such as poetry, may not be dangerously inadequate. It
becomes indeed somewhat alarming to recognize, as we must, that our
habits of thought remain, as regards most of our affairs much as
they were 5,000 years ago. The Sciences are, of course, simply the
exceptions to this rule. Outside the Sciences--and the greater part of
our thinking still goes on outside the Sciences--we think very much
as our ancestors thought a hundred or two hundred generations ago.
Certainly this is so as regards official views about poetry. Is it not
possible that these are wrong, as wrong as most ideas of an equally
hoary antiquity? Is it not possible that to the men of the future our
life to-day will seem a continual, ceaseless disaster due only to our
own stupidity, to the nervelessness with which we accept and transmit
ideas which do not and never have applied to anything?
_The average educated man is growing more conscious_, an
extraordinarily significant change. It is probably due to the fact
that his life is becoming more complex, more intricate, his desires
and needs more varied and more apt to conflict. And as he becomes
more conscious he can no longer be content to drift in unreflecting
obedience to custom. He is forced to reflect. And if reflection often
takes the form of inconclusive worrying, that is no more than might be
expected in view of the unparalleled difficulty of the task. To live
reasonably is much more difficult to-day than it was in Dr. Johnson’s
time, and even then, as Boswell shows, it was difficult enough.
To live reasonably is not to live by reason alone--the mistake is easy,
and, if carried far, disastrous--but to live in a way of which reason,
a clear full sense of the whole situation, would approve. And the most
important part of the whole situation, as always, is ourselves, our
own psychological make-up. The more we learn about the physical world,
about our bodies, for example, the more points we find at which our
ordinary behaviour is out of accord with the facts, inapplicable,
wasteful, disadvantageous, dangerous or absurd. Witness our habit of
boiling our vegetables. We have still to learn how to feed ourselves
satisfactorily. Similarly, the little that is yet known about the mind
already shows that our ways of thinking and feeling about very many of
the things with which we concern ourselves are out of accord with the
facts. This is pre-eminently true of our ways of thinking and feeling
about poetry. We think and talk in terms of states of affairs which
have never existed. We attribute to ourselves and to things, powers
which neither we nor they possess. And equally we overlook or misuse
powers which are all important to us.
Day by day, in recent years, man is getting more out of place in
Nature. Where he is going to he does not yet know, he has not yet
decided. As a consequence he finds life more and more bewildering,
more and more difficult to live coherently. Thus he turns to consider
himself, his own nature. For the first step towards a reasonable way of
life is a better understanding of human nature.
It has long been recognized that if only something could be done in
psychology remotely comparable to what has been achieved in physics,
practical consequences might be expected even more remarkable than any
that the engineer can contrive. The first positive steps in the science
of the mind have been slow in coming, but already they are beginning to
change man’s whole outlook.