THE LIFE OF REASON
The Phases of Human Progress
Volumes One Through Five
GEORGE SANTAYANA
hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê
In Five Volumes
Introduction to Life of Reason
Volume One
Volume Two
Volume Three
Volume Four
Volume Five
REASON IN COMMON SENSE
Volume One of “The Life of Reason”
GEORGE SANTAYANA
hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS
Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.—Efficacious
reflection is reason.—The Life of Reason a name for all practical
thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.—It is
the sum of Art.—It has a natural basis which makes it definable.—Modern
philosophy not helpful.—Positivism no positive ideal.—Christian
philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.—Liberal
theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.—The Greeks
thought straight in both physics and morals.—Heraclitus and the
immediate.—Democritus and the naturally intelligible.—Socrates and the
autonomy of mind.—Plato gave the ideal its full expression.—Aristotle
supplied its natural basis.—Philosophy thus complete, yet in need
of restatement.—Plato’s myths in lieu of physics.—Aristotle’s final
causes.—Modern science can avoid such expedients.—Transcendentalism
true but inconsequential.—Verbal ethics.—Spinoza and the Life of
Reason.—Modern and classic sources of inspiration. Pages 1-32
REASON IN COMMON SENSE
CHAPTER I
THE BIRTH OF REASON
Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with
a chosen good.—Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent,
indifferent.—In experience order is relative to interests which
determine the moral status of all powers.—The discovered conditions
of reason not its beginning.—The flux first.—Life the fixation of
interests.—Primary dualities.—First gropings.—Instinct the nucleus of
reason.—Better and worse the fundamental categories. Pages 35-47
CHAPTER II
FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS
Dreams before thoughts.—The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by
physical forces.—Internal order supervenes.—Intrinsic pleasure in
existence.—Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it
suffuses an object.—Subhuman delights.—Animal living.—Causes at last
discerned.—Attention guided by bodily impulse. Pages 48-63
CHAPTER III
THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS
Nature man’s home.—Difficulties in conceiving nature.—Transcendental
qualms.—Thought an aspect of life and transitive.—Perception
cumulative and synthetic.—No identical agent needed.—Example of the
sun.—His primitive divinity.—Causes and essences contrasted.—Voracity
of intellect.—Can the transcendent be known?—Can the immediate
be meant?—Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?—_Mens
naturaliter platonica_.—Identity and independence predicated of things.
Pages 64-83
CHAPTER IV
ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY
Psychology as a solvent.—Misconceived rôle of intelligence.—All
criticism dogmatic.—A choice of hypotheses.—Critics
disguised enthusiasts.—Hume’s gratuitous scepticism.—Kant’s
substitute for knowledge.—False subjectivity attributed to
reason.—Chimerical reconstruction.—The Critique a work on
mental architecture.—Incoherences.—Nature the true system of
conditions.—Artificial pathos in subjectivism.—Berkeley’s algebra
of perception.—Horror of physics.—Puerility in morals.—Truism and
sophism.—Reality is the practical made intelligible.—Vain “realities”
and trustworthy “fictions”. Pages 84-117
CHAPTER V
NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED
Man’s feeble grasp of nature.—Its unity ideal and discoverable only
by steady thought.—Mind the erratic residue of existence.—Ghostly
character of mind.—Hypostasis and criticism both need
control.—Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.—Spirit and
sense defined by their relation to nature.—Vague notions of nature
involve vague notions of spirit.—Sense and spirit the life of nature,
which science redistributes but does not deny. Pages 118-136
CHAPTER VI
DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS
Another background for current experience may be found in alien
minds.—Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy
between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.—Subject and
object empirical, not transcendental, terms.—Objects originally
soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.—Tertiary qualities
transposed.—Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities
of perceived body—“Pathetic fallacy” normal, yet ordinarily
fallacious.—Case where it is not a fallacy.—Knowledge succeeds only by
accident.—Limits of insight.—Perception of character.—Conduct divined,
consciousness ignored.—Consciousness untrustworthy.—Metaphorical
mind.—Summary. Pages 137-160
CHAPTER VII
CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE
So-called abstract qualities primary.—General qualities prior to
particular things.—Universals are concretions in discourse.—Similar
reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.—Ideas
are ideal.—So-called abstractions complete facts.—Things concretions
of concretions.—Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the
order of nature.—Aristotle’s compromise.—Empirical bias in favour of
contiguity.—Artificial divorce of logic from practice.—Their mutual
involution.—Rationalistic suicide.—Complementary character of essence
and existence. Pages 161-183
CHAPTER VIII
ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS
Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical
principle.—Concretions in discourse express instinctive
reactions.—Idealism rudimentary.—Naturalism sad.—The soul akin to
the eternal and ideal.—Her inexperience.—Platonism spontaneous.—Its
essential fidelity to the ideal.—Equal rights of empiricism.—Logic
dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.—Reason
and docility.—Applicable thought and clarified experience. Pages 184-204
CHAPTER IX
HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL
Functional relations of mind and body.—They form one natural
life.—Artifices involved in separating them.—Consciousness expresses
vital equilibrium and docility.—Its worthlessness as a cause and value
as an expression.—Thought’s march automatic and thereby implicated in
events.—Contemplative essence of action.—Mechanical efficacy alien to
thought’s essence.—Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.—It
is the seat of value.—Apparent utility of pain.—Its real
impotence.—Preformations involved.—Its untoward significance.—Perfect
function not unconscious.—Inchoate ethics.—Thought the entelechy of
being.—Its exuberance. Pages 205-235
CHAPTER X
THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION
Honesty in hedonism.—Necessary qualifications.—The will must
judge.—Injustice inherent in representation.—Æsthetic and speculative
cruelty.—Imputed values: their inconstancy.—Methods of control.—Example
of fame.—Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic.—Irrational
religious allegiance.—Pathetic idealisations.—Inevitable impulsiveness
in prophecy.—The test a controlled present ideal. Pages 236-255
CHAPTER XI
SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL
The ultimate end a resultant.—Demands the substance of
ideals.—Discipline of the will.—Demands made practical and
consistent.—The ideal natural.—Need of unity and finality.—Ideals of
nothing.—Darwin on moral sense.—Conscience and reason compared.—Reason
imposes no new sacrifice.—Natural goods attainable and compatible in
principle.—Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason. Pages
256-268
CHAPTER XII
FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE
Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.—Contrary
currents of opinion.—Pantheism.—Instability in existences does
not dethrone their ideals.—Absolutist philosophy human and
halting.—All science a deliverance of momentary thought.—All
criticism likewise.—Origins inessential.—Ideals functional.—They
are transferable to similar beings.—Authority internal.—Reason
autonomous.—Its distribution.—Natural selection of minds.—Living
stability.—Continuity necessary to progress.—Limits of variation.
Spirit a heritage.—Perfectibility.—Nature and human nature.—Human
nature formulated.—Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.
Pages 269-291
Introduction to “The Life of Reason”
[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.]
Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by
man, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or
religion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man’s
career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although
this variation may often regard or propitiate things external,
adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of
these external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only
by the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his
life. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might
unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless
scintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian
sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for
interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of
heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In
which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole
experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these
questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an
individual, is the purpose of the following work.
[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason.]
A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a
mouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual
consideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same
thing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles
of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism.
So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before
and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or
retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part
of his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which
nothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain
idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the
absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute
a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the
future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and
veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly
called reason. Man’s rational life consists in those moments in which
reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then
works in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt.
Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its
presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action.
Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative
worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of
will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some
purpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational
action; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what
is the same thing, of profitable living.
[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all
action justified by its fruits in consciousness.]
Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the
happy maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we
may say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The _Life of
Reason_ will then be a name for that part of experience which perceives
and pursues ideals—all conduct so controlled and all sense so
interpreted as to perfect natural happiness.
Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and
pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a
devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since
the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by
hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would
take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a
progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the
ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being.
In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having
its sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience
would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the
increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without
a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow,
the improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor desired.
The Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere
incident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progress
itself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as they
can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man’s rational
moments would be to take an inventory of all his goods; for he is not
himself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he ever
appropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the ground
of some physical relation which they may have to his being.
Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we should
not recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to some
degree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measure
relevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams,
do not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin to
represent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and realities
confronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness in the
total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams,
in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths of
universal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts
would not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to pursue
certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined by
any vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with the union of
instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened, establishes
values in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, while
at the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive,
beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities
among which it arises.
Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly
led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse
expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection
expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of
Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once
the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All
reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in
happiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to
time a partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when his
passions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds
visions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of
Reason in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world’s glitter
and a clear residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experience
not to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a
doubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievement
not neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, every
consolation not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered
together and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy
marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which if wholly divorced
would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is
generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas
which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be
vain.
[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art.]
Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense of
the word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purpose
is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea
is creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the
product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like
art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the
spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.
Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;
but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its
issues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify
and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the
world in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend
its sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere
exemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it
is from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion
and mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already
actual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously,
to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a
confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important
to avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they
are—poetic expressions of the ideal—help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man’s mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man’s
imitation of divinity.
[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]
To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,
is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is
attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of
Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of
man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and
confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a
romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,
without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are
free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the
living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each
initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not
realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the
world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial
office to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative
and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that
progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it
direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its
natural goal.
[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]
There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a
critique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,
indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical
theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow
from current science and speculation the picture they draw of man’s
conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may
furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint
of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the
mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour,
as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of
catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the
naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from
the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.
Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a
function still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.
Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that
direction which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If they
combine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are
usually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued
(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but what
happiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by
putting together their national prejudices and party saws.
[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal.]
The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinks
itself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like
children escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in
freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit
were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you
astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than
that there should be a great many people and that they should be all
alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and
later they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have
discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;
they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reason
and gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is
pure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal
error that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having a
soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there.
[Sidenote: Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and
conditions.]
The profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity were
attached in the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised into
many new ones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; but
myth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting its
history and conditions. This method was indeed not original with the
Fathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself
in an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his
school. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard poetic
fictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul’s
primitive incapacity to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign
from thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Such
confusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rational
estimate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions and
consequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves a
false emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordination
among human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers alleged
to provide for their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot be
conceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-empted and its
function gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry by
artificial stimulation and repression.
The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were
extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and while
they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe
fabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and
powers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern
Rome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human action
were still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed,
it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in
which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not
destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:
it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only
a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is
the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has
not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a
new and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbing
effect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms have
been cured and the disease driven in.
[Sidenote: Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural
world.]
The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle
subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and
spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,
however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in
Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to
reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,
future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be
shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an
ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural
grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished
description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are
submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other
hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that
which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the
objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will
not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them,
because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human
or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which
can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life.
The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for
the Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in order
to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but this
effort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned,
not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime to
think its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernatural
machinery which was to have secured prosperity, while that still
enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it had
artificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim.
An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of
real things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper
than the earth’s foundations—such an earnestness, until culture turns
it into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It
will try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind the
constellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its
companions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and
infinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those
which the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are
parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet
zealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on
something invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or
enjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and
little joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal
mist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no
pertinent direction.
[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.]
In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients
led a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as
men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped
at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus
giving that background to human life which shrewd observation would
always have descried, and which modern science has laboriously
rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and
pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be
arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was
instability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains
the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division
which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel
again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus’s expressions. These were
thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating
and direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and
reflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who
discloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but
innocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,
scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried
to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous
enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to
its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of
immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does
not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a
transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.
[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]
The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the
expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All
they could do was to iterate their master’s maxim, and declare
everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason
in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had
opened the door into another region: had he passed through, his
philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would
have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials.
Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a
synthesis had not yet arrived.
[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible.]
At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce
phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and
to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a
natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not
merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this
scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic
existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural
science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be
compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for
chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation
if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that
very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be
for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly
formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible
as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it
fails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more
propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as
we learn better how to live in it.
The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be
worlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner
organisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it
disclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if
constant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. So
that while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysical
truth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficacious
structure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practical
intelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.
His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partly
revived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents
an ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in some
particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others.
In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins,
transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.
Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato.
It is a pity that Democritus’ physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. For
with the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, the
theory of existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory been
incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked none
of its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal science
had overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialectical
physics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies,
built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, and
condemned thought to confusion for two thousand years.
[Sidenote: Socrates and the autonomy of mind.]
If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them the
first natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them the
first moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenian
agora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other
scene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,
intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal
science lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of
reason, in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its
sum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might
describe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one’s own mind. Nor is he
who knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has
nothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone
but the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its
only object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit the
consciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and
ethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made
man the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as
they neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had
first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven
and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and
use, so that man’s works might justify themselves to his mind, now found
in Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Life
of Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived.
[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression.]
Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his
utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what
gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism—if we choose to
take it symbolically—was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were
not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because
you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might
harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem
that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to
bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from
the depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which had
inspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic
traditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of
evening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues
that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so
sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him
censure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to
see beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made
him harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to
preserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from political
preoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved
the absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing
pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality.
[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis.]
Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been
carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision
to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and
more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and
adequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race.
Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain
prophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the
rational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical
dangers that he wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondness
for transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more than
playful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first
place, Aristotle’s has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed
expression of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is
perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything
natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and
weighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato’s
more discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The
Life of Reason finds there its classic explication.
[Sidenote: Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.]
As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free from
preoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable in
consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable
that a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle’s scope, judgment, or
authority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. It
might seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done
before with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior
things at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to
read and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness
and masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of
reason remain the same the facts of human life and of human conscience
alter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic,
and it may be useful to restate old truths in new words, the better to
prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek,
concise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument
illustrations, appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparable
from its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are better
than what in modern times would be substituted for them, being less
sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what
is profound and universal in natural morality by embodying it in images
which do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last
sanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world,
because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to
us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and
honour.
The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,
things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice—piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add
that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are
extravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his
greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and
become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and
little sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not
wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can
adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their
development; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature
and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These
forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative
power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to
fight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of conscience
has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character.
Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is
the impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history
has afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of which
Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and
clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic
with physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is
the aggravated extension. Socrates’ pupils could not abandon his ideal
principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;
they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology
was afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no
naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the
mythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as
Aristotle’s judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their
relative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no
physics and that Aristotle’s physics was false; so that ideal science in
the one suffered from want of environment and control, while in the
other it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application.
[Sidenote: Plato’s myths in lieu of physics.]
What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts of
philosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied to
leave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He
adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus’s doctrine of the immediate, which he
now called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if
you arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some
logical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea
makes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a
phenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression on
Plato’s mind and had helped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenides
had called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy
the strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at the
same time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substance
and many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many
Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to appearance, for the one
concept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is called
metaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of the Eleatic
Absolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomena
manifested.
The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat is
technical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say
on any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful in
misunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were now
conceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it and
caused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions
could thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantial
physical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good
sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined
peopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth.
Aristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought
they might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were
identified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus
lost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the
sense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely
dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but the
appearance of these characters and values here and now is what needs
explanation in physics, an explanation which can be furnished, of
course, only by the physical concatenation and distribution of causes.
[Sidenote: Aristotle’s final causes. Modern science can avoid such
expedients.]
Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle’s make this necessary
distinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as his
science was only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in
his eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to
its ideal quality; as in heredity the father’s human character, not his
physical structure, might seem to warrant the son’s humanity. Every
ideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other
embodiment; but as when the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is considered
it seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must
somehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in
order to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause for
perpetual movement in the world.
It must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who is
not less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination,
that the transformation of the highest good into a physical power is
merely incidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that time
excusable) in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle’s deity is always a
moral ideal and every detail in its definition is based on
discrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to the
ways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; this
deity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whatever
exists. It is mythical only in its physical application; in moral
philosophy it remains a legitimate conception.
Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for
that eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant
to physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be
identified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but
possess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no
transitive process. Such an intellect and truth are expressions having a
different metaphorical background and connotation, but, when thought
out, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard
which human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effective
essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely
endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic
is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which
obliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.
Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as
possible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of
love or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is
imputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the
functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal,
endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute
intellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to
the Life of Reason as Plato’s idea of the good. Though less
comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all
passion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the region
it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;
which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to
absorb and be absorbed in the truth.
The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in
physics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath
which had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer
inspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events,
they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became
a matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould
the state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was
approaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other
world; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief
interregnum, resumed it for long ages.
[Sidenote: Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.]
Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer
who at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally
together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the
conditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his
interests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and
Democritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a
picture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day,
has done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still
repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more
radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in
spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken
for granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling,
like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed
constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his
unstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have
reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an
interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by
common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans
to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective
self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and
embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has
known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or
dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are
men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a
dream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on,
and the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptions
it is able to lead us.
[Sidenote: Verbal ethics.]
Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of
what goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much
to help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to
modern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of
its attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or
some theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals
reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the
secondary question What ought I to do? without having answered the
primary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religion
rather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to
be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid
with reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they
leave in the one labelled “morality” the more sublime they think their
morality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far
that nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region
which should contain all human goods.
[Sidenote: Spinoza and the Life of Reason.]
Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial views
about the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority rather
than in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in
happiness. One great modern philosopher, however, was free from these
preconceptions, and might have reconstituted the Life of Reason had he
had a sufficient interest in culture. Spinoza brought man back into
nature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may
recognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza’s
sympathy with mankind fell short of imagination; any noble political or
poetical ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane,
everything human necessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal,
with the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza
cultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in
speculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would
need to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher
ranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not
necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and
generosity in Spinoza’s practical ideals.
[Sidenote: Modern and classic sources of inspiration.]
For moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; but
not, of course, for moral inspiration. Industrialism and democracy, the
French Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic system, which
in the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness and
wisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philosophers, and
point unmistakably toward their several goals. Our task is not to
construct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with one
another and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alike
ignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which is
behind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; but
it may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when its
satisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent
with better things. The age of controversy is past; that of
interpretation has succeeded.
Here, then, is the programme of the following work: Starting with the
immediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describe
the Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be
primary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers around
them, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are
approached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great
task, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either
to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines
of an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present and
individual intelligence more resolute and free.
REASON IN COMMON SENSE
CHAPTER I—THE BIRTH OF REASON
[Sidenote: Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible
with a chosen good.]
Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once
much debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much
because it had been solved as because one party had been silenced by
social pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age when
observation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists
look back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and
shifting its character in regeneration. The order now established in the
world may be traced back to a situation in which it did not appear.
Dialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging that
every collocation of things must have been preceded by another
collocation in itself no less definite and precise; and further that
some principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained,
else successive states would stand in no relation to one another,
notably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a natural
law, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentialities are
dispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also the
passage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are
told, must always have possessed a structure.
The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with a
qualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return—nay, it
reigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the
universe—if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of the
objects we are wont to distinguish, a nature such that human life and
human thought would be impossible in its bosom; but this nature must be
presumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendency
of its movement be taken into account, all the complexities and
beauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordingly
continual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement,
favourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. The
process by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable gradually
shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it
involves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the
forms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initial
energy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is
it here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own
causes is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sense
which might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here the
process, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity,
support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised
for a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget
his children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them.
[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.]
Of course the various states of the world, when we survey them
retrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historic
truth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If
we wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an “Absolute”
where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond
it, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists,
and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;
but such language involves an after-image of motion and life, of
preparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all
pre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by
its very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is
to shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for
the Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about
us, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can
wish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;
only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its
relative capacity can it be good for anything.
The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the
world and out of which the next moment’s order is developed, may
accordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values
suggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to
the first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably
carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and
eulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of
its momentum, a basis for the second moment’s values as well.
[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determine
the moral status of all powers.]
Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient
order in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, a
vanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated by
man only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed and
extended. For man’s consciousness is evidently practical; it clings to
his fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of
his fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which
those fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness has
not been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the world
it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has fallen
into shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in
human discourse, the inference is drawn that the original disposition
of things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just
those feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since
accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may
thus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further
march of events. It will be observed, however, that what is credibly
asserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able
to make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular
fashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational
construction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency
for the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the
universe, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainly
has begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it
still only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this
awakening is of course not the same as that of the environing world
ultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery
itself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed.
We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the
real universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make
their acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moral
status, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace
the visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown.
[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.]
To revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration,
not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology,
retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear
and write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial
evidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world
already wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what
is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and
its function in rendering that body’s volatile instincts and sensations
harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they
depend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which
any modification of living bodies’ inertia seems to be accompanied,
began to respond to represented objects, and to maintain that inertia
not absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly through
labour. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage of an adaptation
which had long been carried on by irrational and even unconscious
processes. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses and
conditions which gives reason its tasks and its _point-d’appui_.
Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externally
to its life. The description of conditions involves their previous
discovery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies of
thought. Such scientific resources are absent in those first moments of
rational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter in
reason’s memoirs would no more entail the description of its real
environment than the first chapter in human history would include true
accounts of astronomy, psychology, and animal evolution.
[Sidenote: The flux first.]
In order to begin at the beginning we must try to fall back on
uninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect,
however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling
rejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds.
They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily
indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are
mystics, distrusting thought and craving the largeness of indistinction,
they may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem
positively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation.
If on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediate
with scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they
cannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however,
are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if
dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the
substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of
matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who
attempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist,
dealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks
into the immediate much better appreciated the situation. This immediate
is not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and
brutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they have
any permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dull
suicide and no salvation. Peace, which is after all what the mystic
seeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it in
a measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he still
practises, not by his heats or his languors.
The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the immediate, but what reason
draws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is the
perturbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace in
reason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of ideal
permanence. When the flux manages to form an eddy and to maintain by
breathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slight
foothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in
the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal.
[Sidenote: Life the fixation of interests.]
Life begins to have some value and continuity so soon as there is
something definite that lives and something definite to live for. The
primacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythical
way of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being in
the absence of realities or ideas marking its direction and contrasting
the eventualities it seeks with those it flies from; and tendency, no
less than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, while
aspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice is
not deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal
relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all
valuation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be
physically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some
point in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it
could show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible to
approach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert
will in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the
transcendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite
passions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer
world—this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of
all failure or success.
[Sidenote: Primary dualities.]
Those sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysis
to yield two ideal and related terms—two points in space or two
characters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now
and then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuates
some term and so makes possible a discrimination of parts and directions
in its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests.
What we first discover in ourselves, before the influence we obey has
given rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already in
motion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the points
of the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home.
[Sidenote: First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason.]
The guide in early sensuous education is the same that conducts the
whole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, and
experiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to
distinguish the nurse’s breast from sundry blank or disquieting
presences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its
associates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The discomfort of its
absence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached the
chief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfaction
disentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluid
continuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is
what first is able to appease his unrest.
Had the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found no
instinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would never
have persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by
unnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred.
Experience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishly
perpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a
grove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be aroused
by a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when
it came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. It
seemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real,
because by natural contiguity it flowed from something pertinent and
important to life. Every accompanying sensation which shared that
privilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ultimately
become a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing.
The same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive of
bodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and in
those dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst of
sophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of human
nature. Reason’s work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths,
disjointed fragments of rationality, springing up in a moral wilderness.
In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer,
but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts
accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man’s gayety, dispels
his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks
for a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in
the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he
knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image
pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragic
earnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be
strong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered
before it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; it
may impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is
the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normally
intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed
to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its more
or less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This
madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in
his life, the man has something to live for. The blind affinity that
like a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them,
suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light.
[Sidenote: Better and worse the fundamental categories.]
Here, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation, we may see
clearly illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simply
the unity given to all existence by a mind _in love with the good_. In
the higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality
depends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can be
made, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is a
better form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued to
create and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a better
form given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and propagated,
and ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to which
this form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like all
excellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a natural
being to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognised
and the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the
same time veering in harmony with that estimation, then reason has been
born and a moral world has arisen.
CHAPTER II—FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS
[Sidenote: Dreams before thoughts.]
Consciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation,
to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first
quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a
notion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose
its hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the
present with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the
absent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for
self-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not
too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;
but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and
generous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its
own interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even
an indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external
attach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed what
gives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no relevance or
relation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the same
body or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness grows
sophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for
its ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may
incidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as a
part of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honest
selfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements it
observes; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its
commotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.
Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside,
and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality
which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from
habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects
of feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really
peripheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream.
Psychologists have discussed perception _ad nauseam_ and become horribly
entangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce
approach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all
evidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if
they did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions
dramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to
examination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a
dream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has
inferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it
is an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has become
symbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.
Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their
status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of
imagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not in
perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason
are but its chastened and ultimate form.
[Sidenote: The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.]
Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times
miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at
other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own
brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should
hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to
retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and
universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing
human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve
perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to
history nourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is
encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps
him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but
that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and
highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming
within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement
which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is
still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at
court.
[Sidenote: Internal order supervenes.]
If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better
than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for
that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct
involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The
predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our
attention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an
elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone
compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of
ideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come from
experience; they never could have been poets and must have forgotten
that they were ever children. The great difficulty in education is to
get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually
disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but
habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to
disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions
to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and
has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being
“out of their senses,” when they have in fact fallen back into them; or
of those who have “lost their mind,” when they have lost merely that
habitual control over consciousness which prevented it from flaring into
all sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having become
deranged, their minds, far from correcting that derangement, instantly
share and betray it. A dream is always simmering below the conventional
surface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and
serenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even there
we are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world;
somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into the
scheme and baffle rational ambition.
A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its
environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can
set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that
sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit. If they are
unstable at all, it is because they ordinarily correspond to strains and
conjunctions which a vigorous body overcomes, or which dissolve the body
altogether. A pain not incidental to the play of practical instincts may
easily be recurrent, and it might be perpetual if even the worst habits
were not intermittent and the most useless agitations exhausting. Some
respite will therefore ensue upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, in
like manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enough
to be harmless or not strong enough to be debilitating, it too may last
for ever.
An imaginative life may therefore exist parasitically in a man, hardly
touching his action or environment. There is no possibility of
exorcising these apparitions by their own power. A nightmare does not
dispel itself; it endures until the organic strain which caused it is
relaxed either by natural exhaustion or by some external influence.
Therefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous and trivial,
shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing
nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature,
moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South American
jungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing
but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is
no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flaming
mythologies, metaphysical perspectives lost in infinity, arise in
remarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climate
and the whole forest disappears.
It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, to
deride a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is not
interpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to
trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their
own fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of
order and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these
principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may
be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the
Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that
dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden
egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.
[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence.]
[Sidenote: Pleasure a good,]
Visionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Why
any form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explained
transcendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render every
instance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality
of an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be
disclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of
mind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no
reason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which
certain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is
intelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification,
and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtue
in a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness.
But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque
affectation: it amounts to giving “good” and “evil” artificial
definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not only
is good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is
the basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is the
very essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to
their highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something
which it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any
person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible
knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor
could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that
sentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors
anything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a
proportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all
the spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself
remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things
can only change that totality proportionately to the ingredient
absorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own
colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being
equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more
pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total
temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for
there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to
superstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case,
the first things lost.
[Sidenote: but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.]
Pleasures differ sensibly in intensity; but the intensest pleasures are
often the blindest, and it is hard to recall or estimate a feeling with
which no definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step in
making pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make it
pleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, and
gives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can now
be named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object,
and its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The more
articulate the world that produces emotion the more controllable and
recoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order in
ideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A voluminous
dumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over a
multitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one
scale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not in
experience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day.
[Sidenote: Subhuman delights.]
Here we come upon a crisis in human development which shows clearly how
much the Life of Reason is a natural thing, a growth that a different
course of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to have
said on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothing
was real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects and
ideas: it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may,
however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment
because its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingled
with longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be
without ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an
unutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a
corpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the
Life of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all these
revulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch
as systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation of
animal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths have
come may very likely have had its own incommunicable values, its
absolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, in
moments of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures and
strains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks its
own level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns
have a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions
and ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlarge
their volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not be
unwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks through
what is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form is
delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a
euthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poet
who says, “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”; and, without any
poetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every
luxurious escape from humanity.
The step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to be
predictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means
irrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direction of reason; and
though reason’s path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open to
existence, it is the only one that we are tracing here; the only one,
obviously, which human discourse is competent to trace.
[Sidenote: Animal living.]
When consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity, its value
is no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations in its tone
are attached to the observed movement of its objects; in these objects
its values are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic values may thus
arise in imagination; terrible and delightful presences may chase one
another across the void; life will be a kind of music made by all the
senses together. Many animals probably have this form of experience;
they are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern
what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparition
that reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now
gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens and
fades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees
afar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in the
animal’s feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a new
circle of sensations appears, with a new principle governing interest
and desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love.
But the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has
come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his
feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase—all that
is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety,
scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in
dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is
providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute
helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet
that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This
is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and
it lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary human
consciousness.
[Sidenote: Causes at last discerned.]
The story which such animal experience contains, however, needs only to
be better articulated in order to disclose its underlying machinery. The
figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their
entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable
of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon a
third step is made in imaginative experience. As pleasures and pains
were formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalled
into a world. _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, said a poet
who stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answer
which art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Reason
and think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledge
and motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so that
their respective transformations are collated, and they become
significant of one another. In proportion as such understanding advances
each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the
rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with
resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or
issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it
sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst
predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with
nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room
for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of
the whole.
At the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not all
impressions contribute equally to the new growth; many, in fact, which
were formerly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attention
ignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of something
more. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristocratic few
establish their oligarchy, themselves unequivocal. The first principles
of logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have been
quite different and yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, a
language no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters
may suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among all
possible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories of
thought, which a grammarian’s philosophy might think primordial
necessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order.
Why, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principles
of selection guide mental growth?
[Sidenote: Attention guided by bodily impulse.]
To give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible,
since it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural ground
is, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connections, where
thought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, are
mere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave the
question altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, not
indeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, but
what are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developing
the Life of Reason, come to understand its conditions. When
consciousness awakes the body has, as we long afterward discover, a
definite organisation. Without guidance from reflection bodily processes
have been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have been
set up between its organs and the surrounding objects.
On these affinities and reactions sense and intellect are grafted. The
plants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellent
fruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations that
attention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the system
exercises its natural activities that passion, will, and meditation
possess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, no
prophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the living
organism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy.
The soul adopts the body’s aims; from the body and from its instincts
she draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes.
Thus reason enters into partnership with the world and begins to be
respected there; which it would never be if it were not expressive of
the same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and render
them fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is significant
in action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body’s
side; that sympathetic bias enables her to distinguish events pertinent
to the chosen interests, to compare impulse with satisfaction, and, by
representing a new and circular current in the system, to preside over
the formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at once
and responding to more opportunities.
CHAPTER III—THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS
[Sidenote: Nature man’s home.]
At first sight it might seem an idle observation that the first task of
intelligence is to represent the environing reality, a reality actually
represented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos
in space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In trying
to conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomena
are the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science and
practical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as
inhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is not
somehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy can
build no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown so
accustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware how
difficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgotten
the possibility that such a vision should never have arisen at all. A
brief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology of
perception, may here serve to remind us of the great work which the
budding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares.
[Sidenote: Difficulties in conceiving nature.]
Consider how the shocks out of which the notion of material things is to
be built first strike home into the soul. Eye and hand, if we may
neglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, all
varying with the position of outer objects and with the other material
conditions. A chaos of multitudinous impressions rains in from all sides
at all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an original
primacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things are
continually distracting attention. There are infinite reverberations in
memory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created in
the brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects.
All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches’ brew. And
more: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of
digestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which
has not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to
the whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what
consciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and
lethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such as
fall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness.
Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to
struggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and
disillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete
enlightenment.
[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms.]
The onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophy
upon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a
pertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.
Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by
enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each
its own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin
themselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common
cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would
a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically
involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of
fact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to
acquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing
states, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene.
It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of
images belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic
necessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having
them for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of
sensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the
elements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar
term, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certain
instinctive reactions are attached, and the sensations that may be
involved in that apparition, when each for any reason becomes emphatic,
are referred to it as its qualities or its effects.
Such complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacity
to survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their
implication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by
this sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a
representative function. And this is a great step. It manifests the
mind’s powers. It illustrates those transformations of consciousness the
principle of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We must
accordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very roots
of reason.
[Sidenote: Thought an aspect of life and transitive]
The chief perplexity, however, which besets this subject and makes
discussions of it so often end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thought
is not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaust
the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the
analogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said with
profound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise
if reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for
transition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of
existence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function of
thought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, have
inadvertently transferred to the living act what is true only of its
ideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treated
psychologically, that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the
ideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at the
periphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is but
one centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must
execute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it is
one of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are more
natural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent by
fulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital and
inexplicable.
[Sidenote: Perception cumulative and synthetic]
The process of counting is perhaps as simple an instance as can be found
of a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikes
two: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the
first blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutely
no trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it is
certain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never
arise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reaction
which had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no
complication. However numerous the successive impressions might come to
be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in
character with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous
response for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects that
succeeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the
same round of impressions—an everlasting progression without a shadow
of progress. Such, too, is the idiot’s life: his liquid brain transmits
every impulse without resistance and retains the record of no
impression.
Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of both
structure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that a
second stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of the
old sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when the
second arrives, so that this second, coming into a consciousness still
filled by the first, is a different experience from the first, which
fell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the newcomer finds
in the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. The
first stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mere
iteration of the first. It is 1^{1}, where the coefficient represents
the reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, and
forming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may be
distinguished. The meaning of “two,” then, is “this after that” or “this
again,” where we have a simultaneous sense of two things which have been
separately perceived but are identified as similar in their nature.
Repetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative before
it can give rise to the consciousness of repetition.
The first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium should
retain something of the first impression while it receives the second,
or (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the second sensation
should be felt together with a survival of the first from which it is
distinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified in
point of character.
[Sidenote: No identical agent needed.]
Now, to secure this, it is not enough that the sensorium should be
materially continuous, or that a “spiritual substance” or a
“transcendental ego” should persist in time to receive the second
sensation after having received and registered the first. A perfectly
elastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul, or a quite absolute ego
might remain perfectly identical with itself through various experiences
without collating them. It would then remain, in fact, more truly and
literally identical than if it were modified somewhat by those
successive shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus unchanged would be
incapable of memory, unfit to connect a past perception with one present
or to become aware of their relation. It is not identity in the
substance impressed, but growing complication in the phenomenon
presented, that makes possible a sense of diversity and relation between
things. The identity of substance or spirit, if it were absolute, would
indeed prevent comparison, because it would exclude modifications, and
it is the survival of past modifications within the present that makes
comparisons possible. We may impress any number of forms successively on
the same water, and the identity of the substance will not help those
forms to survive and accumulate their effects. But if we have a surface
that retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from
wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour
will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual
plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or
agent, that is efficacious in perpetuating thought and gathering
experience.
[Sidenote: Example of the sun.]
Were not Nature and all her parts such models of patience and
pertinacity, they never would have succeeded in impressing their
existence on something so volatile and irresponsible as thought is. A
sensation needs to be violent, like the sun’s blinding light, to arrest
attention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough for the system to
acquire a respectful attitude, and grow predisposed to resume it. A
repetition of that sensation will thereafter meet with a prepared
response which we call recognition; the concomitants of the old
experience will form themselves afresh about the new one and by their
convergence give it a sort of welcome and interpretation. The movement,
for instance, by which the face was raised toward the heavens was
perhaps one element which added to the first sensation, brightness, a
concomitant sensation, height; the brightness was not bright merely,
but high. Now when the brightness reappears the face will more quickly
be lifted up; the place where the brightness shone will be looked for;
the brightness will have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere. The
heat which at the same moment may have burned the forehead will also be
expected and, when felt, projected into the brightness, which will now
be hot as well as high. So with whatever other sensations time may
associate with this group. They will all adhere to the original
impression, enriching it with an individuality which will render it
before long a familiar complex in experience, and one easy to recognise
and to complete in idea.
[Sidenote: His primitive divinity.]
In the case of so vivid a thing as the sun’s brightness many other
sensations beside those out of which science draws the qualities
attributed to that heavenly body adhere in the primitive mind to the
phenomenon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god. He is beneficent
and necessary no less than bright and high; he rises upon all happy
opportunities and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all life
and fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming and
going are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light and
heat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so
the feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul
are projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than to
anything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally
attributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issue
and term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those
emotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality.
It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his
apparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The
substance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by
no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to
support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is
a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all
the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand
in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we
are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those
miscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the god
from the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different
and more reflective stage in the Life of Reason.
[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted.]
When reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience,
busies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way
things coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events,
that reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic and
independent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical
science. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge and
question the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible
return as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no
less unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic
or the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order
to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to
normalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence will
ultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes,
essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in
discourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the
other their settled character.
[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect.]
We talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered no
perception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds
for ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while
it can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar,
cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a
native bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water
does not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience
into constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in
consciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence
itself—the character shared by those sundry perceptions—will stand and
become a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock,
the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count
and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If
this is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is
counting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitely
varied perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of
the environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regiment
of soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new
turn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at some
break.
The senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects,
gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These
slight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation
comes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as a
reburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations
are only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the
passing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of
artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual
instinct and involves an æsthetic power of diving bodily into the stream
of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped
at once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every
datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested
for the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarily
remains in memory is no representative of particular moments or
shocks—though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated
from within—but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintance
with a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of
_knowledge_.
[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]
But what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May not
the sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed
unknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which
reason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they
lasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is
this new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible but
indispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important? Strange
that the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should be
something we cannot know.
[Sidenote: Can the immediate be meant?]
An answer these doubts will perhaps appear if we ask ourselves what sort
of contact with reality would satisfy us, and in what terms we expect or
desire to possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it simply
corroboration that we look for? Is it a verification of truth in sense?
It would be unreasonable, in that case, after all the evidence we demand
has been gathered, to complain that the ideal term thus concurrently
suggested, the super-sensible substance, reality, or independent object,
does not itself descend into the arena of immediate sensuous
presentation. Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour
and possess _what we mean_. Knowledge is recognition of something
absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. It is an advance on
sensation precisely because it is representative. The terms or goals of
thought have for their function to subtend long tracts of sensuous
experience, to be ideal links between fact and fact, invisible wires
behind the scenes, threads along which inference may run in making
phenomena intelligible and controllable. An idea that should become an
image would cease to be ideal; a principle that is to remain a principle
can never become a fact. A God that you could see with the eyes of the
body, a heaven you might climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, would
be parts of this created and interpretable world, not terms in its
interpretation nor objects in a spiritual sphere. Now external objects
are thought to be principles and sources of experience; they are
accordingly conceived realities on an ideal plane. We may look for all
the evidence we choose before we declare our inference to be warranted;
but we must not ask for something more than evidence, nor expect to know
realities without inferring them anew. They are revealed only to
understanding. We cannot cease to think and still continue to know.
[Sidenote: Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?]
It may be said, however, that principles and external objects are
interesting only because they symbolise further sensations, that
thought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is a
ghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession. We
may grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality.
Intelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of us
would gladly have more of it, others find that they already have too
much. The tension of thought distresses them and to represent what they
cannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. To
such minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolong
dissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass into
immediacy. If reality (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense)
is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. All
intelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse would
then be an unreal and conventional structure, impinging ultimately on
sense from which it would derive its sole validity.
There would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were not
its use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existential
and immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality; that will not
prevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual world
will continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bubbles of
consciousness on which it is painted. Reality would not be, in that
case, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal
of things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then need
thought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it
would have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent
music to throbs and significance to being.
[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica.]
The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is
not thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense,
if it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What the
site is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of
discourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits defined
by the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moral
world, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediate
experience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradox
to call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that represents
the rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into the
whole in the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raised
to its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will a
philosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term as
reality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal
aspect that endows existence with character and value, together with
representative scope and a certain lien upon eternity.
More legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledge
reaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when,
as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by
thinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no
longer in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If
necessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact an
argument against the importance and validity of sensation, not in the
least a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earth
for the Platonic city, its constitution is none the less recorded and
enshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where
to lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was called
reality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an
imaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to
be a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its
estimation.
It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (little as most men may
suspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception.
When you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at the
idealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs and
tables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason as
a deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experience
that reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense is
pure confidence in reason. You will not be so idiotic as to make no
inferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith so
unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists
when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider
scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes,
many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is
the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not
only look but _see_; for you understand.
[Sidenote: Identity and independence predicated of things.]
Now the practical burden of such understanding, if you take the trouble
to analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is:
assurance of eventual sensations. But as these sensations, in memory and
expectation, are numerous and indefinitely variable, you are not able to
hold them clearly before the mind; indeed, the realisation of all the
potentialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a task
absolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependent
as they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousand
trivial accidents, are far from representing adequately all that might
be discovered or that is actually known about the object before you.
This object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any of
the sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these
sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing
assignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your
fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity,
the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which,
underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving
linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of
its present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in its
materials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared,
and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the object
presents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In the
first place various sensations and felt relations, which cannot be kept
distinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse,
represented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuous
image. In the second place the new perception is referred to that ideal
entity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect.
Such are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a
term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations,
and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the
assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation,
recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the
ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation of
that object.
Thus the notion of an independent and permanent world is an ideal term
used to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the
recurrence in time of recognisable groups of sensations. This coherence
and recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at all
or understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wish
to defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity,
all we need do is to point to that coherence and recurrence in external
phenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in the
beginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him to
discount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust in
reason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no less
spontaneous and victorious movement of thought.
CHAPTER IV—ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY
[Sidenote: Psychology as a solvent.]
The English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance,
and whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, did
not study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a
science that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of mind. They had
a more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thought
that if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would
discredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they
retained confidence in any notion—as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter
and in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this
malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven—it was
merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their
reasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas
whose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referred
to sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and
deprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather the
uncriticised, could be true. Consequently the advance of psychology
meant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion after
another was clarified and reduced to its elements it was _ipso facto_
deprived of its function.
So far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truth
are ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use,
that while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and
pragmatic sanctions in the mind’s economy they confessed on the other
that the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be
found in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inference
could be drawn from these phenomena not based on some inherent “tendency
to feign.” The analysis which was in truth legitimising and purifying
knowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer they
came to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt of
building up anything upon it. Self-knowledge meant, they fancied,
self-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thought
grew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite
serious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in
subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was
to sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct.
In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discredited
itself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even better
than backgammon, might take a hand with the wits and historians of his
day, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant,
though the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mystical
sophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom
had been knocked out of the world; that in comparison with some
unutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and that
validity for all possible experience was weak validity, in comparison
with validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and time
could not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms of
perception, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when the
sad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories were
instruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if such
an idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and
were dishonoured together; so that, the soul’s occupation being gone,
she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and
irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage
of an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical
illusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond.
[Sidenote: Misconceived rôle of intelligence.]
What idea, we may well ask ourselves, did these modern philosophers
entertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and mediæval metaphysics?
What understanding had they of the spirit in which the natural organs of
reason had been exercised and developed in those schools? Frankly, very
little; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sense
the distinction between reality and appearance, but they forgot the
function of that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which was
nothing but to translate the chaos of perception into the regular play
of stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and valid
in the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science of
perception raised to the reflective plane, the objects maintaining
themselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those still
floundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. The
function of envisaging reality, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus,
had been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns,
therefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, and
that what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached
only by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damaging
discovery.
Of course, it is possible to disregard the suggestions of reason in any
particular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, that
the hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. But
that this hypothesis is erroneous does not follow from the fact that it
is a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard all
reasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. If
intelligence is assumed to be an organ of cognition and a vehicle for
truth, a given hypothesis about the causes of perception can only be
discarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has been
supplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet the
multiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intelligible
scheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control.
[Sidenote: All criticism dogmatic.]
Scepticism is always possible while it is partial. It will remain the
privilege and resource of a free mind that has elasticity enough to
disintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from a
variety of sides and with more than a single method. But the method
chosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must be
adhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruction the novel
view may produce in science will be science still, and will involve
assumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmas
and assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if it
were a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which some
non-assertive philosophy could furnish a substitute. But dogmatism is
merely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat
further than others into the stratum beneath current conventions and
make us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silently
in the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of
reason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the
philosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always
remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we
thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin,
we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a
blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual
experience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation
and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler
edifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for
experience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it
would be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of
inference underived but inevitable.
[Sidenote: A choice of hypotheses.]
No doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They were
too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad
human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed
the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was
eternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the
world’s intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that
confidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and
nothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd
suspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction and
to prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one,
perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mind
out of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory
will make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If all
our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this
will become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the
other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the
common fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having
been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following
necessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to a
satisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.
[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts.]
Now this is in truth exactly the conviction which those malicious
psychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples and
transcendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by
authority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, “the
frequency of insignificant speech is one.” Their psychology was not
merely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into
the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its
old age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of
those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a
physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for
the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticism
stopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did not
care to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever
else still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of
psychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual
essences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a
different quarter, used the same critical method in support of a
different dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of
Providence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice
which reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wished
the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature,
lest consideration of her history and laws should breed “mathematical
atheists”; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream
and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith
would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would
be bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any
rival object left for serious or intelligent consideration.
The psychological analysis on which these partial or total negations
were founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices to
which it had recourse in distinguishing simple and complex ideas,
principles of association and inference, were nothing but premonitions
of what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mental
process to its organic and external supports; for experience has no
other divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing its
objects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom
explicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an
introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them;
as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between
impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on
relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation
respectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain.
[Sidenote: Hume’s gratuitous scepticism.]
Hume it was who carried this psychological analysis to its goal, giving
it greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the further
advantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own to
substitute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. His
curiosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laid
bare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singular
lucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice
of a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoils
on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce
five-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not ready
to propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in
practice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An
ulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, for
though inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil of
that mythical philosophy which attributed the value of things to their
origin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolic
way, erected the highest good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in
spite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume could
not discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he had
destroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one;
his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who
asked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychology
and criticism seemed accordingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was
left free to choose between the distractions of backgammon and “sitting
down in a forlorn scepticism.”
In his first youth, while disintegrating reflection still overpowered
the active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of
genuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normal
habits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves
in his own person and he yielded to the “tendency to feign” so far at
least as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments
he received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of
courtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite
conventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence of
our estates, our neighbours’ independent existence, or even the
justification of a good bishop’s faith and income. Against
metaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its
savour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of
the world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption of
all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited
his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe
into more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a
voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the
rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he
laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to
which his interests happened to attach.
[Sidenote: Kant’s substitute for knowledge.]
Kant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon
the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to
make way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocation
involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which
German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver
between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To
substitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect
humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a
faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of
methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between
endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over
us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our
thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and
products of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and
illumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms.
Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _the
same natural ideas_ which had previously been taken for absolute
knowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise,
and his analysis free from venom and _arrière-pensée_. Man, because of
his finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a
traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, the
hidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what
else shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his
perception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his
understanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for
faith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a
practical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the
governance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using his
only possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of
understanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already,
to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant’s criticism amounted
simply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and
hypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly
acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing
but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism
of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with
self. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion to
reason’s support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in
the intellect, a faith naturally expressing man’s practical and ideal
nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.
[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason.]
Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was not
absent from Kant’s system in its critical phase and in its application
to science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge
another and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant,
because “subjective,” the whole structure of human intelligence, with
all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and
to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic
religious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, and
far more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; and
it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that
they remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success
or of happiness. The “categorical imperative” was a shadow of the ten
commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets
of the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably
imbedded in the old man’s mind, he regarded as the evidences of an
inward but supernatural revelation.
[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction.]
Only the quaint severity of Kant’s education and character can make
intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural
postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a
God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been
Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to
other cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it might
not justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superstition
the sanction of their morality. For the “practical” proofs of freedom,
immortality, and Providence—of which all evidence in reason or
experience had previously been denied—exceed in perfunctory sophistry
anything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth
the guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a
figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock
allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world
we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our
nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind
was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external
and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able
to do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our
senses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through
many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion,
these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all
knowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone
possesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in
contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of
knowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and
not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the
intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such
inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is
first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as
subjective and of merely empirical validity.
“Merely empirical” is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is
less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is
something given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, for
instance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see
God. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral
law, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance
and true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that
it expresses interests and aspirations in which man’s fate in time and
space, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, is
concerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this
is a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personal
superstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His
notions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, and
did not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was
simply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice,
authorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great
clearing which the Critique was supposed to have made.
It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that
as the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychological
machinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with the
beginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstract
materialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, a
popular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development;
in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, a
withdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception
of the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out,
a flight from the natural world altogether.
[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture.]
The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in
arrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich
architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation,
comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of
intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The
dynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas,
if not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in its
principle. It was as great an enlargement of Hume’s work as Hume’s had
been of Locke’s or Locke’s of Hobbes’s. And the very fact that the
metaphysical residuum practically disappeared—for the weak
reconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as
irrelevant—renders the work essentially valid, essentially a
description of something real. It is therefore a great source of
instruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems of
mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a
confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely
incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can
at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions
absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the
transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that
between the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability.
Kant’s assumptions and his conclusions, his superstitions and his
wisdom, alternate without neutralising each other.
[Sidenote: Incoherences.]
That experience is a product of two factors is an assumption made by
Kant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the fact that
organ and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is
the substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought,
is Kant’s conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here
experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without
conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable
objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience
and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism
which—if we have it at all—must be fundamental, he made derivative;
and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute.
Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical
or malicious.
Ask what can be meant by “conditions of experience” and Kant’s
bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is
a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural
connections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are
the characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience;
in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be
used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in
general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used,
as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its
conditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of
stimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most
pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the
condition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last
sense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion that
only by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge
of an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a
vista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given
thought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are the
principles of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires this
perspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system of
successive or collateral existences.
The circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term
reserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark
flying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift his
point of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense
of natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an
antecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logical
energy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of
pregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience but
constitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould
of experience came to figure, in Kant’s mythology, as machinery behind
the scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner in
a marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus
suggest itself—favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actual
psychological situation—that all experience, in every sense of the
word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions
of experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of
experience in the lowest.
[Sidenote: Nature the true system of conditions.]
It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no
natural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; for
every real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience,
and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest
and non-exhaustive experience—that is, any particular sensation,
thought, or life—which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to
natural conditions. Saint Lawrence’s experience of being roasted, for
instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the
court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other
parts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned,
fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping
and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or
supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions;
the whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, is
the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of
this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other
objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe’s casual sensation of light is
a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother’s. The true
conditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find
by experience, sensations of light do not appear.
Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have
felt that the phrase “subjective conditions” is a contradiction in
terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and
imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are
_ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the “objective” world.
All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective
and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together
the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of
an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially
observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically;
and common-sense is right as against Kant’s subjectivism in regarding
nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.
This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given
existence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially
dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not
“conditions” inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence,
potentialities and powers? Kant’s fabled conditions also are inferred;
but they are inferred illegitimately since the “subjective” ones are
dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the
thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function.
Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions
are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary
position of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes,
objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of
experience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to
experience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form
was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to
impress that form on whatever happened to have it.
All this was opposed to Kant’s own discovery and to his critical
doctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those
conditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops and
progresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order of
knowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay
in not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise
and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having
one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became
mythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition
experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone
could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious.
The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experience
which the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and
perceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It
is, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts,
hypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point
we test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thence
made by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of
existence.
[Sidenote: Artificial pathos in subjectivism.]
The ambiguity in Kant’s doctrine makes him a confusing representative of
that criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer.
When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognised
independent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life,
we need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a true
one. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis
indispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a false
hypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant’s
answer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery
in the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes
for perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But
this inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there
was a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not
intellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be
obtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised
Kant’s system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the
justification for the use of such categories as that of cause and
substance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) was
invalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not true
reality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merely
an idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude
immediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to
a supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or
non-discursive discourse.
So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing,
that it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making inferences
from the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of
understanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of
nature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense
that this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory.
Understanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and
oracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any
reality—such as God, for instance—should not be just as empirical as
the other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reason
discovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by
reason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for a
moment a man’s waking attention—that is what Kant never tells us and
never himself knew.
Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we
may therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who
seek to invalidate the discovery of material objects.
[Sidenote: Berkeley’s algebra of perception.]
Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was
patched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our
minds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of
course in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating
sensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a
permanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, because
“substance,” “permanence,” and “space” are non-existent ideas, _i.e._,
they are not images in sense. They might, however, be “notions” like
that of “spirit,” which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system,
to be, mysteriously enough, _that which has_ ideas. Or they might be
(what would do just as well for our purpose) that which he elsewhere
called them, algebraic signs used to facilitate the operations of
thought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraic
in a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, in
respect of their object or signification, not concrete images but terms
in a mental process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then,
denounce them? They could be used with all confidence to lead us back
to the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations which
they enabled us to state and discover. Experience would thus be
furnished with an intelligible structure and articulation, and a
psychological analysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuous
material and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley’s objection to
these algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of space,
matter, independent existence, and efficient causality which these
methods involve?
[Sidenote: Horror of physics.]
What he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpreting
experience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the
fashion of “mathematical atheists” we could understand experience as
well as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to
it than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which is
called the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to
expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception
and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an
idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater
wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time—long before days of
“Siris” and tar-water—was too ignorant and hasty to understand how
inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man’s
tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom.
He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no
longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared,
those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never
leads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand,
amid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled by
whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious
prejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no
better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the
reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers
of reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science
had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the
value of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped
him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of
reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else
humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in
philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of
reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral.
[Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]
Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and
perfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could
solve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and
mature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in things
divine were they not interpretations and sublimations of things
natural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising
ambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to
cajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of
idealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values.
Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense
and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven,
an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if there
were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than
to study the ways of nature and man.
Converse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadder
philosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or
Spinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of
that intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree
of pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was
satisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find out
how the consciousness that God is the direct author of our incidental
perceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights and
principles are to be substituted for those that disclose the economy of
nature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absolute
providentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence of
fellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired by
conventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, except
grudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley
had nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repetition of
the truism that ideas are all “in the mind” constituted his total
wisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue of
which we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all,
which was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human development, at
least to refrain from regarding our necessary thoughts on nature as true
or rational. Intelligence was but a false method of imagination by which
God trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossible
to endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shall
we think of the critical acumen or practical wisdom of a philosopher who
dreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary implication in
thought and action?
[Sidenote: Truism and sophism.]
In the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called philosophy we
may delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: _esse est
percipi_. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through
perception alone can we get at being—a modest and familiar notion which
makes, as Plato’s “Theætetus” shows, not a bad point of departure for a
serious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, is
to deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make and
which the speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase; for he
would not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering a
tautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception,
we should indeed never know that it existed; but once perceived or
inferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practical
competence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; and
our ability to make this supposition is registered in the difference
between the two words _to be_ and _to be perceived_—words which are by
no means synonymous but designate two very different relations of things
in thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of
assertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-consciousness,
has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy
between two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of such
sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in
one sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by
showing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has
also been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus
of my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity
to say that I am the only object of my thought and perception.
[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible.]
To confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with its
meaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus
come about that the function of intelligence should be altogether
misconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that
figments of reason could never become elements of sense but must always
remain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and
therefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend
to give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical
intellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of
experience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called
illusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they
last, they have no sustained function and no right to practical
dominion.
Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal
consciousness which first used the category of substance and passed from
its perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. “Beware, my
child,” he would have said, “you are taking a dangerous step, one which
may hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speak
of cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in
your mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in
mid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit a
great impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes
the world continues to exist until you open them again, you will
inevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about
the discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and
deafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel
will be extinguished in your soul.” “But,” that tender Peripatetic might
answer, “I cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes: I know
and almost feel their persistent presence, and I always find them again,
upon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to which
the operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence.
If I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptible
transformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceive
me; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether the
conditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understand
what sort of a world I lived in.”
“Ah, my child,” the good Bishop would reply, “you misunderstand me. You
may indeed, nay, you must, live and think _as if_ everything remained
independently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which God
in his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into your
soul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessary
hypotheses and support your humble and prudent expectations. Only you
must not attribute that constancy to the things themselves which is due
to steadfastness in the designs of Providence. _Think and act_ as if a
material world existed, but do not for a moment _believe_ it to exist.”
[Sidenote: Vain “realities” and trustworthy “fictions.”]
With this advice, coming reassuringly from the combined forces of
scepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its own
devices, satisfied that even according to the most malicious
psychologists its first step toward the comprehension of experience is
one it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for the
present at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reason
is not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous
“realities”; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which are
necessary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The first
among these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is the
indispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in their
congeries, shifts, and secret animation the system and life of nature.
NOTE—There is a larger question raised by Berkeley’s
arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely,
whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental
representation can be supposed to inform us about anything.
Berkeley of course assumed this power in that he continued to
believe in God, in other spirits, in the continuity of
experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to
material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that
they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings,
exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It
could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects,
in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence
inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to
which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical
criticism, such as that contained in Kant’s antinomies, the
royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked;
to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive
and representative value in that idea. The fact that material
objects were represented or conceived would not of itself
prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be
necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and
function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of
Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their
relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have
augured ill for Berkeley’s prejudices; what its result might
have been we can see in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In
order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of
his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more
insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative
character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all
knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought
and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind
it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given
cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then,
two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently,
viz., that nothing can be known which is different in
character or nature from the object present to the thinking
mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since
it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz., that
nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature
or character to the “ideas” within it; or, to put the same
thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea
which is different from that idea in point of existence. The
first maxim does not contradict the existence of external
objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that
the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the
grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory
represents his past experience by inward similarity and
conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the
moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another
and their general system. Else the idealist’s philosophy
itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion.
CHAPTER V—NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED
[Sidenote: Man’s feeble grasp of nature.]
When the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and to
attribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the
variety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains
a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view
of the world. An animal’s customary habitat may have constant features
and their relations in space may be learned by continuous exploration;
but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory
and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we
find ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take
it for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space,
in which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and if
we have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the
single map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly
relegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and
the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call
these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have
visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this
single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and
common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to
geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three
dimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some
part of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to
events in some other sphere.
This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive,
since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached
scenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do
not hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of the
world is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performed
without speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims of
fancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have no
clear conception of the spatial relations that keep together the world
in which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals,
following a habitual scent, without dominating the range of their
instinctive wanderings. Reality is rather a story to them than a system
of objects and forces, nor would they think themselves mad if at any
time their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vague
dramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual application, seem to
such dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations of
efficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, which
they scarcely conceive of; and in this primordial prejudice they are
confirmed by superstitious affinities often surviving in their religion
and philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are like
landsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of their
position: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of
navigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect
are reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known
universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require
superhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them to
throw compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthusiastically for El
Dorado. The theory of navigation is essentially as speculative as that
of salvation, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment and
repeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land.
[Sidenote: Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.]
The theory that all real objects and places lie together in one even and
homogeneous space, conceived as similar in its constitution to the parts
of extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of the
greatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all
our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the
best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which
such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and
certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to
nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world,
which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not
to exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters
in unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb human
labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to
make this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward taming
experience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a
weapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature
makes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural life
has still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar
articulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very
act that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her
side or rather in her bosom.
That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point
useful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry,
metaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, or
whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could
find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the
brain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man’s apprehension long
before mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for
the objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives,
naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material
world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which
culminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now
familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is
not derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient
concomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.
Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateral
projections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or
the other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to
various ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum
subsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failure
to find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does
not indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of
God—for history proves the contrary—but indicates rather the atrophy
in this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had
attained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and
God would in that case disappear from human experience as music would
disappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made
conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is
observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty
do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist;
and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient
fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not
remove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience
may have suggested to men.
What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of
their own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without
intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an
animal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banishing from his
frivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill
him would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never
crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence
would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new
world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion,
some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of
reference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then the
laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will
become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or
unfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen
observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be
chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments
and warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the
dramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms
of passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious
chaos a deeper mechanical order. Men’s thoughts, like the weather, are
not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the
man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving
about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the
principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.
Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or
steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far
as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in
its pregnant sense, impossible.
[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence.]
We have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into the
one space which the understanding envisages are relegated to another
sphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As
material objects, making a single system which fills space and evolves
in time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous
experience, so, _pari passu_, the rest of experience, with all its other
outgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms
the sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. We
have in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in the
transcendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sum
total and mere fact of existence—for mind, so taken, can have no origin
and indeed no specific meaning—but the genesis of mind as a determinate
form of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to
experience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation,
inhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.
Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the
leavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world
has been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in the
chaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical
significance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. The
trustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex of
connected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not
soon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and
halting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is
a step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter
clings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and
dripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious
passions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at
first conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the
unintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But as
attention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm
and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical
process, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath.
Meantime the incidental effects, the “secondary qualities,” are
relegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute the
realm of appearance, the realm of mind.
[Sidenote: Ghostly character of mind.]
Mind is therefore sometimes identified with the unreal. We oppose, in an
antithesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true,
fancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external reality
is, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions of
experience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought and
practice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which its
idea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of our
own minds. Their common substance is the immediate flux. This living
worm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it has
divided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified the
crude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass;
nature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causal
substructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux is
explained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitated
these contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable identity and
having the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some of
these terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in all
their ideal stability—for there is constancy in their motions and
transformations—to make the intelligible external world of practice and
science. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this construction,
whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with the
newest conception of reality, we then call the mind.
Raw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature and
approves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue of
experience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this residual
sensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what it
presents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanical
associates. This inconsequential character of what remains over follows
of itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficacious
into the external world. If this fact is ever called in question, it is
only because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose wills
and ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways falling
short of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic
or, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the
first flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off
first and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat
thin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is
still unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea of
material nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces,
and includes many spiritual and moral functions.
The material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not that
clear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest,
which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of
man’s soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile
sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms
to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth
and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still
does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human
passion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a
fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those
very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so
much of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soul
herself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no
marvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an
uninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have
seemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all the
more ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.
[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control.]
This movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all the
wealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to
a contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experience
is sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can
serve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so the
criticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reason
when the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object
conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and
functional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by
the headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of
objectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried to
absurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity;
reason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction
against imagination has left the external world, as represented in many
minds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which
matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an
irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change
slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions,
such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of
a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has
produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion
may perhaps repay a moment’s attention; they may enable us, when seen in
their logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasising
intellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light through
all these gropings.
[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]
What helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is a
permanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between a
floating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circumstances, is
present only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment.
Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to
radiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to
lose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequent
perception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitions
substantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by
continuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare
visitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the
household. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the
object of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually
recover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may
originally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the
mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce
them, and as friendly communication can be established with the real
world. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant external
stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be
changed unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and
proportion in their variations. Even when not much changed in
themselves, mere ideas fall into a new setting, whereas things, unless
something else has intervened to move them, reappear in their old
places. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts are
hidden from them by divine miracle.
Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanent
that dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primary
existence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Perceptions caused
by external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained in
comparison with thoughts and fancies; but the objects are themselves in
flux and a man’s relation to them may be even more variable; so that
very often a memory or a sentiment will recur, almost unchanged in
character, long after the perception that first aroused it has become
impossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; its
formations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. These
ideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than
things external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is
most real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds,
rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself
seems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning
and placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material
things, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and
independence than material objects are credited with. It is divine.
When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men some
knowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far from
seeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both now
often called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate:
the world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. The
notions of permanence and independence by which material objects are
conceived apply also, of course, to everything spiritual; and while the
dominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are as
remote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; they
govern nature or, if they neglect to do so, it is from aversion or high
indifference; they visit man with obsessions and diseases; they hasten
to extricate him from difficulties; and they dwell in him, constituting
his powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is a
mere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. It
gives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures are
dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes.
[Sidenote: Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.]
Such are, for primitive apperception, the three great realms of being:
nature, sense, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remain
uncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, is
long neglected by reflection. No attempt is made to describe its
processes or ally them systematically to natural changes. Its
illusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to foster
scepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant theme
for poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can be
conceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting and
self-contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixed
character until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with reference
to natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires a
form and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definition
and distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as its
principle.
[Sidenote: Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.]
The form nature acquires is, however, itself vague and uncertain and can
ill serve, for long ages, to define the other realms which depend on it
for definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat the
spiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the moon
everything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declared
to preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips at
death, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculous
life that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the other
hand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritual
causes, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that moved
it. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and a
natural force. It was identified with everything in which it was
manifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that
operation.
[Sidenote: Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science
redistributes but does not deny.]
If the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fall
within it; it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux that
intelligence acknowledges first stray material objects and then their
general system. The elements of experience not taken up into the
constitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the
end the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be
clothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed me
to believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished every
evening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger
brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern
regions. My theory would have robbed yesterday’s sun of its life and
brightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed
anywhere; but it would have added the sun’s qualities afresh to a matter
that did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that
would produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for that
astronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the single
sun—which now exists and spreads its influences without
interruption—of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has
become a congeries of chemical substances. The facts revealed to
perception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployed
throughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the human
brain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested;
these have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematic
connection between them all. They are the materials of the system, which
has been conceived by making existences continuous, whenever this
extension of their being was needful to render their recurrences
intelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of
its objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, from
which, as from any other part, the rest of nature might be
scientifically inferred.
Spirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a different
manner. Taken existentially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is
the form or value which nature acquires when viewed from the
vantage-ground of any interest. Individual objects are recognisable for
a time not because the flux is materially arrested but because it
somewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and brings
different parts of the surrounding process into definable and prolonged
relations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet others
may continue, like the series of suns imagined by Heraclitus, to perform
the same office. The function will outlast the particular organ. That
interest in reference to which the function is defined will essentially
determine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. These
ideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature
in so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect
and eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite in
constitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophy
might call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far
as it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit
would be the part of nature’s fertility by which such expression was
secured.
CHAPTER VI—DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS
[Sidenote: Another background for current experience may be found in
alien minds.]
When a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has been
distinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expense
of the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical
skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect
calculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to
mind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is
represented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments
of life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the last
and the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to
the most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of
reputed reality—the minds of others—which could serve, even after the
supposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent
order and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate
consciousness nodded. But other men’s minds, being themselves precarious
and ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute for
nature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object of
experience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile is
needed to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties,
however, are actually attributed to one of the minds supposed to
confront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind has
therefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative to
nature or her other name: it is _par excellence_ the seat of all
potentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance.
Speculative problems would be greatly clarified, and what is genuine in
them would be more easily distinguished from what is artificial, if we
could gather together again the original sources for the belief in
separate minds and compare these sources with those we have already
assigned to the conception of nature. But speculative problems are not
alone concerned, for in all social life we envisage fellow-creatures
conceived to share the same thoughts and passions and to be similarly
affected by events. What is the basis of this conviction? What are the
forms it takes, and in what sense is it a part or an expression of
reason?
This question is difficult, and in broaching it we cannot expect much
aid from what philosophers have hitherto said on the subject. For the
most part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature’s kindly
disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do
not occur to him at all. The suggestions which have actually been made
in the matter may be reduced to two: first, that we conceive other men’s
minds by projecting into their bodies those feelings which we
immediately perceive to accompany similar operations in ourselves, that
is, we infer alien minds by analogy; and second, that we are immediately
aware of them and feel them to be friendly or hostile counterparts of
our own thinking and effort, that is, we evoke them by dramatic
imagination.
[Sidenote: Two usual accounts of this conception criticised:]
[Sidenote: analogy between bodies,]
The first suggestion has the advantage that it escapes solipsism by a
reasonable argument, provided the existence of the material world has
already been granted. But if the material world is called back into the
private mind, it is evident that every soul supposed to inhabit it or to
be expressed in it must follow it thither, as inevitably as the
characters and forces in an imagined story must remain with it in the
inventor’s imagination. When, on the contrary, nature is left standing,
it is reasonable to suppose that animals having a similar origin and
similar physical powers should have similar minds, if any of them was to
have a mind at all. The theory, however, is not satisfactory on other
grounds. We do not in reality associate our own grimaces with the
feelings that accompany them and subsequently, on recognising similar
grimaces in another, proceed to attribute emotions to him like those we
formerly experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily perceived, and
other men’s actions often reveal passions which we have never had, at
least with anything like their suggested colouring and intensity. This
first view is strangely artificial and mistakes for the natural origin
of the belief in question what may be perhaps its ultimate test.
[Sidenote: and dramatic dialogue in the soul.]
The second suggestion, on the other in hand, takes us into a mystic
region. That we evoke the felt souls of our fellows by dramatic
imagination is doubtless true; but this does not explain how we come to
do so, under what stimulus and in what circumstances. Nor does it avoid
solipsism; for the felt counterparts of my own will are echoes within
me, while if other minds actually exist they cannot have for their
essence to play a game with me in my own fancy. Such society would be
mythical, and while the sense for society may well be mythical in its
origin, it must acquire some other character if it is to have practical
and moral validity. But practical and moral validity is above all what
society seems to have. This second theory, therefore, while its feeling
for psychological reality is keener, does not make the recognition of
other minds intelligible and leaves our faith in them without
justification.
[Sidenote: Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.]
In approaching the subject afresh we should do well to remember that
crude experience knows nothing of the distinction between subject and
object. This distinction is a division in things, a contrast
established between masses of images which show different
characteristics in their modes of existence and relation. If this truth
is overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experience
instead of being, like body and mind, its contrasted parts, the revenge
of fate is quick and ironical; either subject or object must immediately
collapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modifications
of the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object.
[Sidenote: Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary
qualities.]
Now the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy has
this important consequence: that for crude experience all data whatever
lie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate,
desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a
visible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology is
therefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object they
agitate—our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars,
if the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and still
unfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and
ideas from their objects. This education was needed because crude
experience is a chaos, and the qualities it jumbles together do not
march together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, if
knowledge (that is, ideas with eventual application and practical
transcendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must be
adjusted to certain elements of experience and not to others, and those
chiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them by
trained apperception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken no
account of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crude
experience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality.
The fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to natural
bodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merely
material, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our own
consciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is far
from being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this day
in believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualities
attributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if we
deny their presence in ourselves (_e.g._, in the case of omniscience),
that is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has already
become special and the region of ideals (in which omniscience lies) has
been formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is well
constituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all,
every ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attracted
into the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure and
motion supply a nucleus. The moving image is therefore impregnated not
only with secondary qualities—colour, heat, etc.—but with qualities
which we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice,
feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities are
attributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt.
Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round,
but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and
all-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us
when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The
fact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede
the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience
whatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter
how soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have
most numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for
crude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifested
and when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that they
appear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their
eventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior
effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit
than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive
and devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed,
stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only
the sun’s material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to
one born blind, who cannot add the sun’s brightness to its warmth
except by faith in some happier man’s reported intuition. The
mythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of
truest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart
and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or
analogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest
contemplation.
[Sidenote: Tertiary qualities transposed.]
More often, however, tertiary qualities are somewhat transposed in
projection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated into
sonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same way
painfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate,
and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in
experience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, which
remains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributes
to the gods not only happiness—the object’s direct tertiary
quality—but goodness—its tertiary quality transposed and made
potential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful in
happiness throughout imagined experience. The devil, in like manner, is
cruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science still
attributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical
notion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort.
In this case we may distinguish two stages or degrees in the
transposition: first, before we think of our own pulling, we say the
object itself pulls; in the first transposition we say it pulls against
us, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but it is still
conceived in the same direct terms of effort; and in the second
transposition this intermittent effort is made potential or slumbering
in what we call strength or force.
[Sidenote: Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived
body.]
It is obvious that the feelings attributed to other men are nothing but
the tertiary qualities of their bodies. In beings of the same species,
however, these qualities are naturally exceedingly numerous, variable,
and precise. Nature has made man man’s constant study. His thought, from
infancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy about
his neighbour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment’s
sympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend’s presence a
voluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing a
friend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image,
the moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world.
The sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns to
the lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of
life’s mystery and penetrated to the peaceful centre of things. What the
mystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what
the lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone,
is much more a spirit, a person, a haunting mind, than a set of visual
sensations; yet the visual sensations are connected inextricably with
that spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensations
failed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose possessions are
discriminated and distributed into a mastered world where everything has
its department, its special relations, its limited importance; we are
dealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passing
influences and reacting on them massively and without reserve.
This mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant. Its sense for present
spirit is no miracle of intelligence or of analogical reasoning; on the
contrary, it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary consciousness.
Those visual sensations suddenly cut off cannot there be recognised for
what they are. The consequences which their present disappearance may
have for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated,
much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that
retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the
loss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of
gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening
before him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement in
an actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this
drunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality
of the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not
by a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable and
most personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered
images of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We
endow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any
dramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high
pressure—and crude experience is rich in dreams—becomes our notion of
the life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life,
because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches
itself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is
consequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or
those creatures’ souls.
[Sidenote: “Pathetic fallacy” normal yet ordinarily fallacious.]
The pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imagined
world. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in those
things and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of their
essence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived
as their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to
betray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation.
They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the
beginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more
than those objects, been “subjectified” or localised in the thinker’s
body, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to
have in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for these
passions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream
in us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of
his motions, is our perception of his thoughts.
A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete
illusion. The thought is one’s own, it is associated with an image
moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of
that image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and
actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy.
A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the
poetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience will
in such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental
divergence which at once manifests itself between the course of
phenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond
question that those feelings were private fancies merged with
observation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in the
object but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in
the mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic
distortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables,
metaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end even
poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself will
soon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human
emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual
sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and
occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of
the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the
steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and
collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its
majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, while
its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth.
[Sidenote: Case where it is not a fallacy.]
A primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain cases
become the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise
no one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life
are tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing
exceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and
emotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this
habit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under
special circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is
evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the
case in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the
observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd
are swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributes
to the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but this
emotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are then feeling.
Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling
which really accompanies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the intention
and passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels;
but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably
contagious and monotonous passion. It is awakened by the slightest
hostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation;
those we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently
and the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each man
instinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passing
in all their souls.
Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to the
percipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct.
Contagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far as
they are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall
and correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a
vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight.
[Sidenote: Knowledge succeeds only by accident.]
Let the reader meditate for a moment upon the following point: to know
reality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge means
significant representation, discourse about an existence not contained
in the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from the
ideas which represent it. But if knowledge does not possess its object
how can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can it
be knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value?
Consciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies what
actually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge its
cognitive and useful essence, its transitive function and validity. In
knowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justified
illusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot
hitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yet
irrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, and
multiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logic
and finds uses for the reason it breeds.
Now, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the same
habitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a
miraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which,
though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual
justification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects by
psychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the
object, something not possibly revealed by any future examination of
that object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its
metaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present
in the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected
with their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated to
his private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation.
To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is
evidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be one
in point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other
being happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologist
himself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts
which lie in the mythologist’s bosom and are attributed by him to his
fellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp
an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself
accidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its
lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten
knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other
beings will have been revealed to private intuition.
[Sidenote: Limits of insight]
This miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have not
understood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as
does the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception.
The gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer’s bodily habit
differs from the habit and body observed. Misunderstanding begins with
constitutional divergence and deteriorates rapidly into false
imputations and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understanding
coincide with the limits of similar structure and common occupation, so
that the distortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard to
understand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and
capacity to play; men and women do not really understand each other,
what rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust,
idealisation, or satire; foreigners’ minds are pure enigmas, and those
attributed to animals are a grotesque compound of Æsop and physiology.
When we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed
to nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look to
such fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need;
while, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quite
unintelligible to infidels who have never followed its worship
sympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of its
sanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of insight commonly
shown in what calls itself the history of religions. We hear, for
instance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe and
momentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historian
accustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarly
Catholic piety seems to the Protestant an æsthetic indulgence, a
religion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion its
externals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy
reaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life.
Language is an artificial means of establishing unanimity and
transferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase,
like every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which a
certain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into the
speaker’s attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment to
contagion and imitation in expression is an impediment to comprehension.
For this reason language, like all art, becomes pale with years; words
and figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; the
feeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by their
repetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a
relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a
scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a
learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even
a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.
Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,
The moon comes back, the spirit not.
[Sidenote: Perception of character]
There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of
reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that
name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are
familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we
should be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are
going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. Hence the
expression of a face or figure; hence the traces of habit and passion
visible in a man and that indescribable something about him which
inspires confidence or mistrust. The gift of reading character is partly
instinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresight
and is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action.
Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names
indicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being
mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting
to whisper suggestions in a man’s ear). We may accordingly delude
ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates
habit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if
conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of
reverberation or penumbra surrounding the pictured activities.
[Sidenote: Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.]
It is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character and habit
and to divine at a glance all a creature’s potentialities. This sort of
penetration characterises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the
dog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leader
in the judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates and
enemies; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or of
natural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indications
of events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the heavens so
the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than
their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure
of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually
unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful,
he does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people’s
inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own
purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and
inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people’s character and
destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such
apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know
themselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the
discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their
own capacity, situation, or fate.
If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in which
candour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had heard some
intelligent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words an account of
their author’s true and contemptible character, he would have been loud
in protestations that no such ignoble characteristics existed in his
eloquent consciousness; and they might not have existed there, because
his consciousness was a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expression
of his own nature as of man’s. When the mind is irrational no practical
purpose is served by stopping to understand it, because such a mind is
irrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide the man’s practice
can be as well understood by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise
governor ignores his subjects’ religion or concerns himself only with
its economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that control
life are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the mind
may be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the British in
India, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men may endure it
for the sake of their material interests, they will never love it for
itself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with, while
nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see
one’s equation written out.
[Sidenote: Consciousness untrustworthy.]
Nevertheless this same algebraic sense for character plays a large part
in human friendship. A chief element in friendship is trust, and trust
is not to be acquired by reproducing consciousness but only by
penetrating to the constitutional instincts which, in determining action
and habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is not a property
of ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from the
animals to the seasons and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship its
deepest sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force,
ability, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by his floating
thoughts but an assurance founded on our own observation that his
conduct and character are to be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity,
much emotion and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and to
merit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures independent
of incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue which
under given circumstances would insure the noblest action and with that
action, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which would
arise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than of
themselves.
[Sidenote: Metaphorical mind.]
The expression of habit in psychic metaphors is a procedure known also
to theology. Whenever natural or moral law is declared to reveal the
divine mind, this mind is a set of formal or ethical principles rather
than an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramatically. What is
conceived is the god’s operation, not his emotions. In this way God’s
goodness becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his wrath a symbol
for its dangers, his commandments a symbol for its laws. The deity
spoken of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic character; it
could be called a city—dear City of Zeus—as readily as an
intelligence. And that intelligence which ancient and ingenuous
philosophers said they saw in the world was always intelligence in this
algebraic sense, it was intelligible order. Nor did the Hebrew prophets,
in their emphatic political philosophy, seem to mean much more by
Jehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue their
appropriate fruits.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
True society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar lives
and enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to
attribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other
actually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who has
never had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates the
auditor’s mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that
he compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy between
actions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inference
regarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but this
eventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Its
source is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic
fallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to others
is something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramatically
enacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions it
is suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiary
qualities happen to correspond to an experience actually animating the
object to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the object
is a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, who
assigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and by
imitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions of
intelligible expression and true communion; beyond these limits nothing
is possible save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic designation of
observed habits under the name of moral dispositions.
CHAPTER VII—CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE
[Sidenote: So-called abstract qualities primary.]
Ideas of material objects ordinarily absorb the human mind, and their
prevalence has led to the rash supposition that ideas of all other kinds
are posterior to physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a process
of abstraction. The table, people said, was a particular and single
reality; its colour, form, and material were parts of its integral
nature, qualities which might be attended to separately, perhaps, but
which actually existed only in the table itself. Colour, form, and
material were therefore abstract elements. They might come before the
mind separately and be contrasted objects of attention, but they were
incapable of existing in nature except together, in the concrete reality
called a particular thing. Moreover, as the same colour, shape, or
substance might be found in various tables, these abstract qualities
were thought to be general qualities as well; they were universal terms
which might be predicated of many individual things. A contrast could
then be drawn between these qualities or ideas, which the mind may
envisage, and the concrete reality existing beyond. Thus philosophy
could reach the familiar maxim of Aristotle that the particular alone
exists in nature and the general alone in the mind.
[Sidenote: General qualities prior to particular things.]
Such language expresses correctly enough a secondary conventional stage
of conception, but it ignores the primary fictions on which convention
itself must rest. Individual physical objects must be discovered before
abstractions can be made from their conceived nature; the bird must be
caught before it is plucked. To discover a physical object is to pack in
the same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data like
coloured form and tangible surface. Intelligence, observing these
sensible qualities to evolve together, and to be controlled at once by
external forces, or by one’s own voluntary motions, identifies them in
their operation although they remain for ever distinct in their sensible
character. A physical object is accordingly conceived by fusing or
interlacing spatial qualities, in a manner helpful to practical
intelligence. It is a far higher and remoter thing than the elements it
is compacted of and that suggest it; what habits of appearance and
disappearance the latter may have, the object reduces to permanent and
calculable principles. It is altogether erroneous, therefore, to view an
object’s sensible qualities as abstractions from it, seeing they are its
original and component elements; nor can the sensible qualities be
viewed as generic notions arising by comparison of several concrete
objects, seeing that these concretions would never have been made or
thought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations and
recurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and already
recognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the true
particulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention and
projected against the background of consciousness.
The immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two different
methods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary,
and so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored in
psychology. The secondary method, by which external things are
discovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the fact
that when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable in
their repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixed
relation to some voluntary operation on the observer’s part, they may be
associated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space.
Those having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatial
character, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touch
may be identified by being presented together and being found to undergo
simultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to other
perceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the term
of an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences through
all the senses within a certain field of association, defined by its
practical relations. That ideal object is thereby endowed with as many
qualities and powers as I had associable sensations of which to make it
up. This object is a concretion of my perceptions in space, so that the
redness, hardness, sweetness, and roundness of the apple are all fused
together in my practical regard and given one local habitation and one
name.
[Sidenote: Universals are concretions in discourse.]
This kind of synthesis, this superposition and mixture of images into
notions of physical objects, is not, however, the only kind to which
perceptions are subject. They fall together by virtue of their
qualitative identity even before their spatial superposition; for in
order to be known as repeatedly simultaneous, and associable by
contiguity, they must be associated by similarity and known as
individually repeated. The various recurrences of a sensation must be
recognised as recurrences, and this implies the collection of sensations
into classes of similars and the apperception of a common nature in
several data. Now the more frequent a perception is the harder it will
be to discriminate in memory its past occurrences from one another, and
yet the more readily will its present recurrence be recognised as
familiar. The perception in sense will consequently be received as a
repetition not of any single earlier sensation but of a familiar and
generic experience. This experience, a spontaneous reconstruction based
on all previous sensations of that kind, will be the one habitual _idea_
with which recurring sensations will be henceforth identified. Such a
living concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is the
idea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an
abstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived by
putting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system.
Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms most
prominent in human knowledge, ideas and things. Two methods of
conception divide our attention in common life; science and philosophy
develop both, although often with an unjustifiable bias in favour of one
or the other. They are nothing but the old principles of Aristotelian
psychology, association by similarity and association by contiguity.
Only now, after logicians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticising
them and psychologists in applying them, we may go back of the
traditional position and apply the ancient principles at a deeper stage
of mental life.
[Sidenote: Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield
an idea.]
Association by similarity is a fusion of impressions merging what is
common in them, interchanging what is peculiar, and cancelling in the
end what is incompatible; so that any excitement reaching that centre
revives one generic reaction which yields the idea. These concrete
generalities are actual feelings, the first terms in mental discourse,
the first distinguishable particulars in knowledge, and the first
bearers of names. Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream begins
with the act of recognising these pervasive entities, which having
character and ideal permanence can furnish common points of reference
for different moments of discourse. Save for ideas no perception could
have significance, or acquire that indicative force which we call
knowledge. For it would refer to nothing to which another perception
might also have referred; and so long as perceptions have no common
reference, so long as successive moments do not enrich by their
contributions the same object of thought, evidently experience, in the
pregnant sense of the word, is impossible. No fund of valid ideas, no
wisdom, could in that case be acquired by living.
[Sidenote: Ideas are ideal.]
Ideas, although their material is of course sensuous, are not sensations
nor perceptions nor objects of any possible immediate experience: they
are creatures of intelligence, goals of thought, ideal terms which
cogitation and action circle about. As the centre of mass is a body,
while it may by chance coincide with one or another of its atoms, is no
atom itself and no material constituent of the bulk that obeys its
motion, so an idea, the centre of mass of a certain mental system, is no
material fragment of that system, but an ideal term of reference and
signification by allegiance to which the details of consciousness first
become parts of a system and of a thought. An idea is an ideal. It
represents a functional relation in the diffuse existences to which it
gives a name and a rational value. An idea is an expression of life,
and shares with life that transitive and elusive nature which defies
definition by mere enumeration of its materials. The peculiarity of life
is that it lives; and thought also, when living, passes out of itself
and directs itself on the ideal, on the eventual. It is an activity.
Activity does not consist in velocity of change but in constancy of
purpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and many processes toward one
ideal harmony and one concomitant ideal result. The most rudimentary
apperception, recognition, or expectation, is already a case of
representative cognition, of transitive thought resting in a permanent
essence. Memory is an obvious case of the same thing; for the past, in
its truth, is a system of experiences in relation, a system now
non-existent and never, as a system, itself experienced, yet confronted
in retrospect and made the ideal object and standard for all historical
thinking.
[Sidenote: So-called abstractions complete facts.]
These arrested and recognisable ideas, concretions of similars
succeeding one another in time, are not abstractions; but they may come
to be regarded as such after the other kind of concretions in
experience, concretions of superposed perceptions in space, have become
the leading objects of attention. The sensuous material for both
concretions is the same; the perception which, recurring in different
objects otherwise not retained in memory gives the idea of roundness, is
the same perception which helps to constitute the spatial concretion
called the sun. Roundness may therefore be carelessly called an
abstraction from the real object “sun”; whereas the peculiar
optical and muscular feelings by which the sense of roundness is
constituted—probably feelings of gyration and perpetual unbroken
movement—are much earlier than any solar observations; they are a
self-sufficing element in experience which, by repetition in various
accidental contests, has come to be recognised and named, and to be a
characteristic by virtue of which more complex objects can be
distinguished and defined. The idea of the sun is a much later product,
and the real sun is so far from being an original datum from which
roundness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite ideal
construction, a spatial concretion into which the logical concretion
roundness enters as a prior and independent factor. Roundness may be
felt in the dark, by a mere suggestion of motion, and is a complete
experience in itself. When this recognisable experience happens to be
associated by contiguity with other recognisable experiences of heat,
light, height, and yellowness, and these various independent objects are
projected into the same portion of a real space; then a concretion
occurs, and these ideas being recognised in that region and finding a
momentary embodiment there, become the qualities of a thing.
A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind,
if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the
mind’s inertia and conceptions of things by its activity.
[Sidenote: Things concretions of concretions.]
Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. A
concretion in discourse occurs by repetition and mere emphasis on a
datum, but a concretion in existence requires a synthesis of disparate
elements and relations. An idea is nothing but a sensation apperceived
and rendered cognitive, so that it envisages its own recognised
character as its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation of
yellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its
own specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term
into rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of
propositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered
only when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be
observed, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven
together into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness first
becomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive of
causes, that is, when it becomes practical, it perceives things.
[Sidenote: Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of
nature.]
Concretions of qualities recurrent in time and concretions of qualities
associated in existence are alike involved in daily life and
inextricably ingrown into the structure of reason. In consciousness and
for logic, association by similarity, with its aggregations and
identifications of recurrences in time, is fundamental rather than
association by contiguity and its existential syntheses; for
recognition identifies similars perceived in succession, and without
recognition of similars there could be no known persistence of
phenomena. But physiologically and for the observer association by
contiguity comes first. All instinct—without which there would be no
fixity or recurrence in ideation—makes movement follow impression in an
immediate way which for consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition of
sensations, a juxtaposition which it can neither explain nor avoid. Yet
this juxtaposition, in which pleasure, pain, and striving are prominent
factors, is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads before the mind
that moving and variegated field in which it learns to make its first
observations. Facts—the burdens of successive moments—are all
associated by contiguity, from the first facts of perception and passion
to the last facts of fate and conscience. We undergo events, we grow
into character, by the subterraneous working of irrational forces that
make their incalculable irruptions into life none the less wonderfully
in the revelations of a man’s heart to himself than in the cataclysms of
the world around him. Nature’s placid procedure, to which we yield so
willingly in times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states which can
only be understood when it is made its own standard and law. A sort of
philosophy without wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life, this
blind budding of existence, to some logical or moral necessity; but this
very attempt remains, perhaps, the most striking monument to that
irrational fatality that rules affairs, a monument which reason itself
is compelled to raise with unsuspected irony.
[Sidenote: Aristotle’s compromise.]
Reliance on external perception, constant appeals to concrete fact and
physical sanctions, have always led the mass of reasonable men to
magnify concretions in existence and belittle concretions in discourse.
They are too clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things. The most
authoritative thinker on this subject, because the most mature,
Aristotle himself, taught that things had reality, individuality,
independence, and were the outer cause of perception, while general
ideas, products of association by similarity, existed only in the mind.
The public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine and
overlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher’s teaching, could
go home comforted and believing that material things were primary and
perfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects those
realities produced on our incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had a
juster view of general concepts and made in the end the whole material
universe gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in a
metaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced natural science
need no longer appeal. While in the shock of life man was always coming
upon the accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not but recast
everything in ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures and
intelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the origin of
knowledge lay in the impact of matter upon sense its goal was the
comprehension of essences, and that while man was involved by his animal
nature in the accidents of experience he was also by virtue of his
rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was
thus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life,
although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas,
this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its
basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience,
preferred incoherence to partiality.
[Sidenote: Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.]
Active life and the philosophy that borrows its concepts from practice
has thus laid a great emphasis on association by contiguity. Hobbes and
Locke made knowledge of this kind the only knowledge of reality, while
recognising it to be quite empirical, tentative, and problematical. It
was a kind of acquaintance with fact that increased with years and
brought the mind into harmony with something initially alien to it.
Besides this practical knowledge or prudence there was a sort of verbal
and merely ideal knowledge, a knowledge of the meaning and relation of
abstract terms. In mathematics and logic we might carry out long trains
of abstracted thought and analyse and develop our imaginations _ad
infinitum_. These speculations, however, were in the air or—what for
these philosophers is much the same thing—in the mind; their
applicability and their relevance to practical life and to objects given
in perception remained quite problematical. A self-developing science, a
synthetic science _a priori_, had a value entirely hypothetical and
provisional; its practical truth depended on the verification of its
results in some eventual sensible experience. Association was invoked to
explain the adjustment of ideation to the order of external perception.
Association, by which association by contiguity was generally
understood, thus became the battle-cry of empiricism; if association by
similarity had been equally in mind, the philosophy of pregnant reason
could also have adopted the principle for its own. But logicians and
mathematicians naturally neglect the psychology of their own processes
and, accustomed as they are to an irresponsible and constructive use of
the intellect, regard as a confused and uninspired intruder the critic
who, by a retrospective and naturalistic method, tries to give them a
little knowledge of themselves.
[Sidenote: Artificial divorce of logic from practice.]
Rational ideas must arise somehow in the mind, and since they are not
meant to be without application to the world of experience, it is
interesting to discover the point of contact between the two and the
nature of their interdependence. This would have been found in the
mind’s initial capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those compacted
of sensations that are persistently similar, and those compacted of
sensations that are momentarily fused. In empirical philosophy the
applicability of logic and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes a
misinterpretation: a miracle if the process of nature independently
follows the inward elaboration of human ideas; a misinterpretation if
the bias of intelligence imposes _a priori_ upon reality a character and
order not inherent in it. The mistake of empiricists—among which Kant
is in this respect to be numbered—which enabled them to disregard this
difficulty, was that they admitted, beside rational thinking, another
instinctive kind of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom the
Englishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit,
or will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselves
out in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspired
art of life.
Here we observe a certain elementary crudity or barbarism which the
human spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only are
chance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverenced
all the more, like the wind and fire of idolaters, precisely for not
being amenable to the petty rules of human reason. In truth, however,
the English duality between prudence and science is no more fundamental
than the German duality between reason and understanding.[A] The true
contrast is between impulse and reflection, instinct and intelligence.
When men feel the primordial authority of the animal in them and have
little respect for a glimmering reason which they suspect to be
secondary but cannot discern to be ultimate, they readily imagine they
are appealing to something higher than intelligence when in reality they
are falling back on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to
them at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason at
all they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is
indeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be the
sole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most men
sufficiently proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does
not live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and
dreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, in
so far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is a
form of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectual
and not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience;
for he lives by instinct.
[Sidenote: Their mutual involution.]
The Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes and pursuit of aims,
begins precisely where instinctive operation ceases to be merely such by
becoming conscious of its purposes and representative of its conditions.
Logical forms of thought impregnate and constitute practical intellect.
The shock of experience can indeed correct, disappoint, or inhibit
rational expectation, but it cannot take its place. The very first
lesson that experience should again teach us after our disappointment
would be a rebirth of reason in the soul. Reason has the indomitable
persistence of all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as waves
beat on the shore. To observe its defeat is already to give it a new
embodiment. Prudence itself is a vague science, and science, when it
contains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence, a description of
experience and a guide to life. Speculative reason, if it is not also
practical, is not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to experience
may be correct in form, the method they are reached by may parody
scientific method, but they cannot be true in substance, because they
refer to nothing. Like music, they have no object. They merely flow, and
please those whose unattached sensibility they somehow flatter.
Hume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself,
saw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression of
instinct, and that consequently no rational spheres could exist other
than the mathematical and the empirical, and that what is not a datum
must certainly be a construction. In establishing his “tendencies to
feign” at the basis of intelligence, and in confessing that he yielded
to them himself no less in his criticism of human nature than in his
practical life, he admitted the involution of reason—that
unintelligible instinct—in all the observations and maxims vouchsafed
to an empiricist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however, in a
somewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature, and he has paid the price of
that indulgence in personal humour by incurring the immortal hatred of
sentimentalists who are too much scandalised by his tone ever to
understand his principles.
[Sidenote: Rationalistic suicide.]
If the common mistake in empiricism is not to see the omnipresence of
reason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit its
variability and dependence, not to understand its natural life.
Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive
kind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from
the paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his
descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. “The
whole is one,” Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same
sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical
terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an
indistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world.
Parmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that he
arrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz., the
fact that it is. Being exists, and nothing else does; whereby every
relation and variation in experience is reduced to a negligible
illusion, and reason loses its function at the moment of asserting its
absolute authority. Notable lesson, taught us like so many others by the
first experiments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and insight, a mind
led quickly by noble self-confidence to the ultimate goals of thought.
Such a pitch of heroism and abstraction has not been reached by any
rationalist since. No one else has been willing to ignore entirely all
the data and constructions of experience, save the highest concept
reached by assimilations in that experience; no one else has been
willing to demolish all the scaffolding and all the stones of his
edifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol which he had planted
on the summit. Yet all rationalists have longed to demolish or to
degrade some part of the substructure, like those Gothic architects who
wished to hang the vaults of their churches upon the slenderest possible
supports, abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the dead walls
of the building. So experience and its crowning conceptions were to rest
wholly on a skeleton of general natures, physical forces being
assimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained by identification of
similars taking the place of those gained by grouping disparate things
in their historical conjunctions. These contiguous sensations, which
occasionally exemplify the logical contrasts in ideas and give them
incidental existence, were either ignored altogether and dismissed as
unmeaning, or admitted merely as illusions. The eye was to be trained to
pass from that parti-coloured chaos to the firm lines and permanent
divisions that were supposed to sustain it and frame it in.
Rationalism is a kind of builder’s bias which the impartial public
cannot share; for the dead walls and glass screens which may have no
function in supporting the roof are yet as needful as the roof itself to
shelter and beauty. So the incidental filling of experience which
remains unclassified under logical categories retains all its primary
reality and importance. The outlines of it emphasised by logic, though
they may be the essential vehicle of our most soaring thoughts, are only
a method and a style of architecture. They neither absorb the whole
material of life nor monopolise its values. And as each material imposes
upon the builder’s ingenuity a different type of construction, and
stone, wood, and iron must be treated on different structural
principles, so logical methods of comprehension, spontaneous though they
be in their mental origin, must prove themselves fitted to the natural
order and affinity of the facts.[B] Nor is there in this necessity any
violence to the spontaneity of reason: for reason also has manifold
forms, and the accidents of experience are more than matched in variety
by the multiplicity of categories. Here one principle of order and there
another shoots into the mind, which breeds more genera and species than
the most fertile terrestrial slime can breed individuals.
[Sidenote: Complementary character of essence and existence.]
Language, then, with the logic imbedded in it, is a repository of terms
formed by identifying successive perceptions, as the external world is a
repository of objects conceived by superposing perceptions that exist
together. Being formed on different principles these two orders of
conception—the logical and the physical—do not coincide, and the
attempt to fuse them into one system of demonstrable reality or moral
physics is doomed to failure by the very nature of the terms compared.
When the Eleatics proved the impossibility—_i.e._, the
inexpressibility—of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved the
unreal character of all objects of experience and of all natural
knowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between the
concretions in existence which were the object of their thought and the
concretions in discourse which were its measure. The two do not fit; and
intrenched as these philosophers were in the forms of logic they
compelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not fully
expressible in those particular forms. Thus they took their revenge upon
the vulgar who, being busy chiefly with material things and dwelling in
an atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every product
of logical construction or reflective analysis. These logical products,
however, are not really abstract, but, as we have seen, concretions
arrived at by a different method than that which results in material
conceptions. Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerate
of several simultaneous sensations, logical entity is a homogeneous
revival in memory of similar sensations temporally distinct.
Thus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed with logic fight an
eternal battle, the logician charging the physical world with
unintelligibility and the man of common-sense charging the logical
world with abstractness and unreality. The former view is the more
profound, since association by similarity is the more elementary and
gives constancy to meanings; while the latter view is the more
practical, since association by contiguity alone informs the mind about
the mechanical sequence of its own experience. Neither principle can be
dispensed with, and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishing
to be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make anybody
understand the history of events and the conjunction of objects, or on
the other hand as if cognitive and moral processes could have any other
terms than constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of things or
the standard of values must always be an ideal figment; existence must
always be an empirical fact. The former remains always remote from
natural existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle.[C]
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato’s
Reason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenal
experience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values and
meanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. The
German Reason was only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetic
history of the world for its natural development. German idealism,
accordingly, was not, like Plato’s, a moral philosophy hypostasised but
a false physics adored.]
[Footnote B: This natural order and affinity is something imputed to the
ultimate object of thought—the reality—by the last act of judgment
assuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable by
consciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has been
made; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuous
material some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notion
of an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and
mature conception of the natural order arrived at after many such
experiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latest
hypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understand
events and compares them with the objective order which he believes
himself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest the
reader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before any
application of human categories, with the last conception of that order
attained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former is
faith’s ideal object.]
[Footnote C: For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede
conceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things are
discovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second ideal
synthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may be
composed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names are
such secondary concretions in discourse. “Venice” is a term covering
many successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy,
belonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each of
these states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion in
existence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisable
qualities—light, motion, beauty—each of which was an original
concretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is
recognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by its
constituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an ideal
essence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raise
natural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon a
higher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations were
raised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this ideal character they
have become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then
possess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified into
logical terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smelted
again in imagination, into forms of spirit.]
CHAPTER VIII—ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS
[Sidenote: Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.]
Those who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuries
commonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certain
consecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, while
other speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to all
that is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone in
philosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that their
opinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, in
reflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers of
no less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonly
absolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, it
would be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the race
are bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but with
discovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominant
trust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so that
philosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidence
is offered but that they chime in with current aspirations or
traditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, even
in philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.
Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind in
all its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principle
of discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestations
already discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas
she framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that her
latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we
shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems
corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of
idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating
concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and
the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising
concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of
nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the
last instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to
that habit and plane of ideation.
[Sidenote: Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions.]
We have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can be
associated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporally
diffused experiences must precede their local fusion into material
objects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concrete
objects can be recognised in practice before their general qualities
have been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive,
that is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, rather
than on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perception
occurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it is
instinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive value
to sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes it
consciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. If
practical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant,
reason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.
[Sidenote: Idealism rudimentary.]
This description of the case involves an application or extension of our
theory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is
instinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded
confidence and without attending to the indications that justify that
action, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in
experience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural
survivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough
to be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded
in the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a
heightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and
vaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an
embosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte
would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events
are recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We
trail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy
and movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria
capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient
and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the
inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the
creative forces of nature.
The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which
attention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:
such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability
to descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical
background and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream
full of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as
yet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it
has no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and
perpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are
concretions in discourse, ideas combined in their æsthetic and logical
harmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The
disorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not
discovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms
that occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning.
Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a
nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What
perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences,
they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as
parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the
barbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.
This is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a
matter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is
disregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and
remote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves
inopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous
imagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and
perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old
presences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of the
warp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substance
of spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmost
principle of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions that
they pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations
of geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidated
ideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in a
sense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so
that Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal
wisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if
expected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it
assaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation
individual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may please
in their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres to
the thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The
shock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We should
retire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent and
rational thoughts.
[Sidenote: Naturalism sad.]
It is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that while
all the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated with
external things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe material
laws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion of
melancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat
reason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our best
hopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful a
universe? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powers
and for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, while
nature’s voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look, act,
and enjoy? And when someone, in protest against such senseless oracular
prejudices, has actually embraced the life and faith of nature and
taught others to look to the natural world for all motives and
sanctions, expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigorate
human life, why have those innocent hopes failed so miserably? Why is
that sensuous optimism we may call Greek, or that industrial optimism we
may call American, such a thin disguise for despair? Why does each melt
away and become a mockery at the first approach of reflection? Why has
man’s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and
reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?
[Sidenote: The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.]
We may answer in the words of Saint Paul: because things seen are
temporal and things not seen are eternal. And we may add, remembering
our analysis of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eternal is the
truly human, that which is akin to the first indispensable products of
intelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images in
discourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling the mind with
permanent and recognisable objects, and strengthening it with a
synthetic, dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experience.
Concretion in existence, on the contrary, yields essentially detached
and empirical unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, and
unintelligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to assimilate
in them precisely that which makes them real, namely, their presence
here and now, in this order and number. The form and quality of them we
can retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflection, but
their existence and individuality remain a datum of sense needing to be
verified anew at every moment and actually receiving continual
verification or disproof while we live in this world.
“This world” we call it, not without justifiable pathos, for many other
worlds are conceivable and if discovered might prove more rational and
intelligible and more akin to the soul than this strange universe which
man has hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment. The
materials of experience are no sooner in hand than they are transformed
by intelligence, reduced to those permanent presences, those natures and
relations, which alone can live in discourse. Those materials,
rearranged into the abstract summaries we call history or science, or
pieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call poetry or
religion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we please,
all nearer to reason’s ideal than is the actual chaos of perceptual
experience, and some nearer to the heart’s desire. When an empirical
philosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of
imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this
alone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of our
nature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by external
experience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability of
scientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependence
upon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of
existences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence and
mortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable,
is saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance.
[Sidenote: Her inexperience.]
That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and their affinity to
moral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habits
of intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, which
in sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion and
concern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level on
which it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, the region of
all the more vivid and massive human interests. The pleasures which lie
beneath it are ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are not
perceived. Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophy
accordingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment to
homespun ideas. The actual is too remote and unfriendly to the dreamer;
to understand it he has to learn a foreign tongue, which his native
prejudice imagines to be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is,
however, that nature’s language is too rich for man; and the discomfort
he feels when he is compelled to use it merely marks his lack of
education. There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by
merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by
declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal
and necessary harmonies of the world.
[Sidenote: Platonism spontaneous.]
The thinker’s bias is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man of
reflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality to
these alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way of
thinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt
with nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Plato
saw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definable
meanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be the
constituents of reality. And with that directness and audacity which was
possible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics had
already given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse,
like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities,
existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic
artificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicable
necessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multiplied
themselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised by
their resemblance to their originals, but were at once cancelled and
expunged by virtue of their essential inadequacy. What sounds are to
words and words to thoughts, that was a thing to its idea.
[Sidenote: Its essential fidelity to the ideal.]
Plato, however, retained the moral and significant essence of his ideas,
and while he made them ideal absolutes, fixed meanings antecedent to
their changing expressions, never dreamed that they could be natural
existences, or psychological beings. In an original thinker, in one who
really thinks and does not merely argue, to call a thing supernatural,
or spiritual, or intelligible is to declare that it is no _thing_ at
all, no existence actual or possible, but a value, a term of thought, a
merely ideal principle; and the more its reality in such a sense is
insisted on the more its incommensurability with brute existence is
asserted. To express this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; a
vehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that he
inherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence,
and did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with the
arrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations have
learned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although their
natural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they always
represented meanings and functions and were never degraded from the
moral to the physical sphere. The counterpart of this genuine ideality
was that the theory retained its moral force and did not degenerate into
a bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul’s
destiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in this
illogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return,
after her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of sense
and accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desires
were no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuous
perceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him,
through disappointment, to look for it only in those satisfactions which
can be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelligence, must rise from
appearance to reality, and rest in that divine world which is the
fulfilment of the human.
[Sidenote: Equal rights of empiricism.]
A geometrician does a good service when he declares and explicates the
nature of the triangle, an object suggested by many casual and recurring
sensations. His service is not less real, even if less obvious, when he
arrests some fundamental concretion in discourse, and formulates the
first principles of logic. Mastering such definitions, sinking into the
dry life of such forms, he may spin out and develop indefinitely, in the
freedom of his irresponsible logic, their implications and congruous
extensions, opening by his demonstration a depth of knowledge which we
should otherwise never have discovered in ourselves. But if the geometer
had a fanatical zeal and forbade us to consider space and the triangles
it contains otherwise than as his own ideal science considers them:
forbade us, for instance, to inquire how we came to perceive those
triangles or that space; what organs and senses conspired in furnishing
the idea of them; what material objects show that character, and how
they came to offer themselves to our observation—then surely the
geometer would qualify his service with a distinct injury and while he
opened our eyes to one fascinating vista would tend to blind them to
others no less tempting and beautiful. For the naturalist and
psychologist have also their rights and can tell us things well worth
knowing; nor will any theory they may possibly propose concerning the
origin of spatial ideas and their material embodiments ever invalidate
the demonstrations of geometry. These, in their hypothetical sphere, are
perfectly autonomous and self-generating, and their applicability to
experience will hold so long as the initial images they are applied to
continue to abound in perception.
If we awoke to-morrow in a world containing nothing but music, geometry
would indeed lose its relevance to our future experience; but it would
keep its ideal cogency, and become again a living language if any
spatial objects should ever reappear in sense.
The history of such reappearances—natural history—is meantime a good
subject for observation and experiment. Chronicler and critic can always
approach experience with a method complementary to the deductive methods
pursued in mathematics and logic: instead of developing the import of a
definition, he can investigate its origin and describe its relation to
other disparate phenomena. The mathematician develops the import of
given ideas; the psychologist investigates their origin and describes
their relation to the rest of human experience. So the prophet develops
the import of his trance, and the theologian the import of the prophecy:
which prevents not the historian from coming later and showing the
origin, the growth, and the possible function of that maniacal sort of
wisdom. True, the theologian commonly dreads a critic more than does the
geometer, but this happens only because the theologian has probably not
developed the import of his facts with any austerity or clearness, but
has distorted that ideal interpretation with all sorts of concessions
and side-glances at other tenets to which he is already pledged, so that
he justly fears, when his methods are exposed, that the religious heart
will be alienated from him and his conclusions be left with no foothold
in human nature. If he had not been guilty of such misrepresentation, no
history or criticism that reviewed his construction would do anything
but recommend it to all those who found in themselves the primary
religious facts and religious faculties which that construction had
faithfully interpreted in its ideal deductions and extensions. All who
perceived the facts would thus learn their import; and theology would
reveal to the soul her natural religion, just as Euclid reveals to
architects and navigators the structure of natural space, so that they
value his demonstrations not only for their hypothetical cogency but
for their practical relevance and truth.
[Sidenote: Logic dependent on fact for its importance,]
Now, like the geometer and ingenuous theologian that he was, Plato
developed the import of moral and logical experience. Even his
followers, though they might give rein to narrower and more fantastic
enthusiasms, often unveiled secrets, hidden in the oracular intent of
the heart, which might never have been disclosed but for their lessons.
But with a zeal unbecoming so well grounded a philosophy they turned
their backs upon the rest of wisdom, they disparaged the evidence of
sense, they grew hot against the ultimate practical sanctions furnished
by impulse and pleasure, they proscribed beauty in art (where Plato had
proscribed chiefly what to a fine sensibility is meretricious ugliness),
and in a word they sought to abolish all human activities other than the
one pre-eminent in themselves. In revenge for their hostility the great
world has never given them more than a distrustful admiration and,
confronted daily by the evident truths they denied, has encouraged
itself to forget the truths they asserted. For they had the bias of
reflection and man is born to do more than reflect; they attributed
reality and validity only to logical ideas, and man finds other objects
continually thrusting themselves before his eyes, claiming his affection
and controlling his fortunes.
The most legitimate constructions of reason soon become merely
speculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere of practical
application; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself at every turn to
the opaque brutality of fact, loses his respect for the higher reaches
of logic and forgets that his recognition of facts themselves is an
application of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursued
metaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the understanding; now he is
wedded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls business or in
the habit he calls duty some substitute for natural happiness. He fears
to question the value of his life, having found that such questioning
adds nothing to his powers; and he thinks the mariner would die of old
age in port who should wait for reason to justify his voyage. Reason is
indeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, must
sacrifice before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all
things from the One involves not only the incarnation but the
crucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed by its supposed
expressions, and can only shine in a darkness which does not comprehend
it. For reason is essentially hypothetical and subsidiary, and can never
constitute what it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in nature.
[Sidenote: and for its subsistence.]
If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and to
subordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately become
irrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtue
of a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the
satisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is to
render him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that
he may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism is
not any incidental error committed in its deductions, although such
necessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is its
denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in the
world, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history and
dishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastards
should fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard
philosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and has no
roots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection on
fact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which can
be verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable
and articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering their
lineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology has
analysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent.
For unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out
of recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which further
perceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced.
Such a mechanism once discovered confirms itself at every breath we
draw, and surrounds every object in history and nature with infinite
and true suggestions, making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potent
over the mind. The naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because his
constructions, though no less hypothetical and speculative than the
idealist’s dreams, are such legitimate and fruitful fictions that they
are obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligible level where it
arises, means not sensible fact, but valid ideation, verified
hypothesis, and inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears and
deprecates any theory of his own origin and function, he is only obeying
the instinct of self-preservation; for he knows very well that his past
will not bear examination. He is heir to every superstition and by
profession an apologist; his deepest vocation is to rescue, by some
logical _tour de force_, what spontaneously he himself would have taken
for a consecrated error. Now history and criticism would involve, as he
instinctively perceives, the reduction of his doctrines to their
pragmatic value, to their ideal significance for real life. But he
detests any admission of relativity in his doctrines, all the more
because he cannot avow his reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here as
in so many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a bad conscience.
Bigotry and craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then come
to reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his interests
which turns his face away from history and criticism; until his system,
in its monstrous unreality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable,
and provokes a general revolt in which too often the truth of it is
buried with the error in a common oblivion.
[Sidenote: Reason and docility.]
If idealism is intrenched in the very structure of human reason,
empiricism represents all those energies of the external universe which,
as Spinoza says, must infinitely exceed the energies of man. If
meditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the
subject of science itself. Docility to the facts makes the sanity of
science. Reason is only half grown and not really distinguishable from
imagination so long as she cannot check and recast her own processes
wherever they render the moulds of thought unfit for their
subject-matter. Docility is, as we have seen, the deepest condition of
reason’s existence; for if a form of mental synthesis were by chance
developed which was incapable of appropriating the data of sense, these
data could not be remembered or introduced at all into a growing and
cumulative experience. Sensations would leave no memorial; while logical
thoughts would play idly, like so many parasites in the mind, and
ultimately languish and die of inanition. To be nourished and employed,
intelligence must have developed such structure and habits as will
enable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that the
persistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has some
applicability, however partial, to the facts of sentience.
[Sidenote: Applicable thought and clarified experience.]
This applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also its
eventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousness
of more and more facts crowding into the memory and demanding
co-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimate
problem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation of
her problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but a method in
living; and by facing the flux of sensations and impulses that
constitute mortal life with the gift of ideal construction and the
aspiration toward eternal goods, she is only doing her duty and
manifesting what she is. To accumulate facts, moreover, is in itself to
prove that rational activity is already awakened, because a
consciousness of multitudinous accidents diversifying experience
involves a wide scope in memory, good methods of classification, and
keen senses, so that all working together they may collect many
observations. Memory and all its instruments are embodiments, on a
modest scale, of rational activities which in theory and speculation
reappear upon a higher level. The expansion of the mind in point of
retentiveness and wealth of images is as much an advance in knowledge as
is its development in point of organisation. The structure may be
widened at the base as well as raised toward its ideal summit, and while
a mass of information imperfectly digested leaves something still for
intelligence to do, it shows at the same time how much intelligence has
done already.
The function of reason is to dominate experience; and obviously
openness to new impressions is no less necessary to that end than is the
possession of principles by which new impressions may be interpreted.
CHAPTER IX—HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL
[Sidenote: Functional relations of mind and body.]
Nothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of
experience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mind
to body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodies
have reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense begins
to inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body and
on its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressive
of physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence and
harmony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature is reason’s basis and
theme; reason is nature’s consciousness; and, from the point of view of
that consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also nature’s
justification and goal.
To separate things so closely bound together as are mind and body,
reason and nature, is consequently a violent and artificial divorce, and
a man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in which
it is decreed. But to avoid divorce it is well first to avoid unnatural
unions, and not to attribute to our two elements, which must be
partners for life, relations repugnant to their respective natures and
offices. Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the
witness and reward of its operation. Mind is the body’s entelechy, a
value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain
perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should
remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind
perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses
into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.
No connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as nature
and life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical. The
union will be denaturalised and, so far as philosophy goes, actually
destroyed, if we seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If we
isolate the terms mind and body and study the inward implications of
each apart, we shall never discover the other. That matter cannot, by
transposition of its particles, _become_ what we call consciousness, is
an admitted truth; that mind cannot _become_ its own occasions or
determine its own march, though it be a truth not recognised by all
philosophers, is in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialectically
studied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous and unaccountable
addendum; mind, studied in the same way, makes nature an embarrassing
idea, a figment which ought to be subservient to conscious aims and
perfectly transparent, but which remains opaque and overwhelming. In
order to escape these sophistications, it suffices to revert to
immediate observation and state the question in its proper terms: nature
lives, and perception is a private echo and response to ambient motions.
The soul is the voice of the body’s interests; in watching them a man
defines the world that sustains him and that conditions all his
satisfactions. In discerning his origin he christens Nature by the
eloquent name of mother, under which title she enters the universe of
discourse. Simultaneously he discerns his own existence and marks off
the inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him not to obliterate
these discoveries. By trying to give his mind false points of attachment
in nature he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason which
is so much the essence of his life.
[Sidenote: They form one natural life.]
Consciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life and the seat of
all its values. Its place in the natural world is like that of its own
ideal products, art, religion, or science; it translates natural
relations into synthetic and ideal symbols by which things are
interpreted with reference to the interests of consciousness itself.
This representation is also an existence and has its place along with
all other existences in the bosom of nature. In this sense its
connection with its organs, and with all that affects the body or that
the body affects, is a natural connection. If the word cause did not
suggest dialectical bonds we might innocently say that thought was a
link in the chain of natural causes. It is at least a link in the chain
of natural events; for it has determinate antecedents in the brain and
senses and determinate consequents in actions and words. But this
dependence and this efficacy have nothing logical about them; they are
habitual collocations in the world, like lightning and thunder. A more
minute inspection of psycho-physical processes, were it practicable,
would doubtless disclose undreamed of complexities and harmonies in
them; the mathematical and dynamic relations of stimulus and sensation
might perhaps be formulated with precision. But the terms used in the
equation, their quality and inward habit, would always remain data which
the naturalist would have to assume after having learned them by
inspection. Movement could never be deduced dialectically or graphically
from thought nor thought from movement. Indeed no natural relation is in
a different case. Neither gravity, nor chemical reaction, nor life and
reproduction, nor time, space, and motion themselves are logically
deducible, nor intelligible in terms of their limits. The phenomena have
to be accepted at their face value and allowed to retain a certain
empirical complexity; otherwise the seed of all science is sterilised
and calculation cannot proceed for want of discernible and pregnant
elements.
How fine nature’s habits may be, where repetition begins, and down to
what depth a mathematical treatment can penetrate, is a question for
the natural sciences to solve. Whether consciousness, for instance,
accompanies vegetative life, or even all motion, is a point to be
decided solely by empirical analogy. When the exact physical conditions
of thought are discovered in man, we may infer how far thought is
diffused through the universe, for it will be coextensive with the
conditions it will have been shown to have. Now, in a very rough way, we
know already what these conditions are. They are first the existence of
an organic body and then its possession of adaptable instincts, of
instincts that can be modified by experience. This capacity is what an
observer calls intelligence; docility is the observable half of reason.
When an animal winces at a blow and readjusts his pose, we say he feels;
and we say he thinks when we see him brooding over his impressions, and
find him launching into a new course of action after a silent decoction
of his potential impulses. Conversely, when observation covers both the
mental and the physical process, that is, in our own experience, we find
that felt impulses, the conceived objects for which they make, and the
values they determine are all correlated with animal instincts and
external impressions. A desire is the inward sign of a physical
proclivity to act, an image in sense is the sign in most cases of some
material object in the environment and always, we may presume, of some
cerebral change. The brain seems to simmer like a caldron in which all
sorts of matters are perpetually transforming themselves into all sorts
of shapes. When this cerebral reorganisation is pertinent to the
external situation and renders the man, when he resumes action, more a
master of his world, the accompanying thought is said to be practical;
for it brings a consciousness of power and an earnest of success.
Cerebral processes are of course largely hypothetical. Theory suggests
their existence, and experience can verify that theory only in an
indirect and imperfect manner. The addition of a physical substratum to
all thinking is only a scientific expedient, a hypothesis expressing the
faith that nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond the reaches
of minute verification. The accompanying consciousness, on the other
hand, is something intimately felt by each man in his own person; it is
a portion of crude and immediate experience. That it accompanies changes
in his body and in the world is not an inference for him but a datum.
But when crude experience is somewhat refined and the soul, at first
mingled with every image, finds that it inhabits only her private body,
to whose fortunes hers are altogether wedded, we begin to imagine that
we know the cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond the
narrow limits of our own person only the material phase of things is
open to our observation. To add a mental phase to every part and motion
of the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious fancy. It violates all
empirical analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crude
experience is not mere material existence, but reactive organisation
and docility.
[Sidenote: Artifices involved in separating them.]
The limits set to observation, however, render the mental and material
spheres far from coincident, and even in a rough way mutually
supplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit of
interlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a natural
system with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half
material and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with a
ghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forced
themselves on human attention, have been taken for independent and
separable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuous
and superficial, has accordingly been allowed to link this purely mental
event with that purely mechanical one. The linkage is practically not
deceptive, because mental transformations are indeed signs of changes in
bodies; and so long as a cause is defined merely as a sign, mental and
physical changes may truly be said to cause one another. But so soon as
this form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiricism and to
establish phenomenal laws, the mental factor has to fall out of the
efficient process and be represented there by what, upon accurate
examination, it is seen to be really the sign of—I mean by some
physiological event.
If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the
German transcendentalists did, the _cogito ergo sum_ of their master,
and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing but
an instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might have
expected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach of
their positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standing
only by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the whole
world from becoming presently a _bête-machine._ Psychic events have no
links save through their organs and their objects; the function of the
material world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. The
internal relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical; their
realm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march of events. If we
must speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, we
should say that matter is the pervasive cause of mind’s distribution,
and mind the pervasive cause of matter’s discovery and value. To ask for
an efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is to
have already turned one’s face in the direction of matter and mechanical
laws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph for
materialism. To ask for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn
no less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualities
from which instrumentality and further use have been eliminated. Spirit
is useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone
rescues all else from vanity. It is called practical when it is
prophetic of its own better fulfilments, which is the case whenever
forces are being turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploring
its relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to grasp the
world.
[Sidenote: Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.]
We saw in the beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave
consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or
reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness
is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the
chief episodes in the body’s fortunes. The organs, by their structure,
select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences
abroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned to
feed upon them, might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation.
Every instinct or habitual impulse further selects from the passing
bodily affections those that are pertinent to its own operation and
which consequently adhere to it and modify its reactive machinery.
Prevalent and notable sensations are therefore signs, presumably marking
the presence of objects important for the body’s welfare or for the
execution of its predestined offices. So that not only are the soul’s
aims transcripts of the body’s tendencies, but all ideas are grafted
upon the interplay of these tendencies with environing forces. Early
images hover about primary wants as highest conceptions do about
ultimate achievements.
[Sidenote: Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression]
Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no
motion would be an action, no change a progress; but thought is in no
way instrumental or servile; it is an experience realised, not a force
to be used. That same spontaneity in nature which has suggested a good
must be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the actual resources
of our minds we perceive that we are as little informed concerning the
means and processes of action as concerning the reason why our motives
move us. To execute the simplest intention we must rely on fate: our own
acts are mysteries to us. Do I know how I open my eyes or how I walk
down stairs? Is it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that guides
me in these acts? Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body and
points out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Or
is it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes the
marvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of
the operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent
rebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act;
when they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case do
we in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. The
mind at best vaguely forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbal
sense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers in consciousness
while the act is being performed; but this premonition is itself the
sense of a process already present and betrays the tendency at work; it
can obviously give no aid or direction to the unknown mechanical process
that produced it and that must realise its own prophecy, if that
prophecy is to be realised at all.
That such an unknown mechanism exists, and is adequate to explain every
so-called decision, is indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailed
verification, although conceived by legitimate analogy with whatever is
known about natural processes; but that the mind is not the source of
itself or its own transformations is a matter of present experience; for
the world is an unaccountable datum, in its existence, in its laws, and
in its incidents. The highest hopes of science and morality look only to
discovering those laws and bringing one set of incidents—facts of
perception—into harmony with another set—facts of preference. This
hoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in the mind; but the mind
cannot be its cause since, by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideas
it seeks nor has power to realise the harmonies it desiderates. These
have to be waited for and begged of destiny; human will, not controlling
its basis, cannot possibly control its effects. Its existence and its
efforts have at best the value of a good omen. They show in what
direction natural forces are moving in so far as they are embodied in
given men.
[Sidenote: Thought’s march automatic and thereby implicated in events.]
Men, like all things else in the world, are products and vehicles of
natural energy, and their operation counts. But their conscious will, in
its moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of that
will’s eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour both
depend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with its
conscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even the
voluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our
stature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as full
of potentiality as he is of impotence. A will that represents many
active forces, and is skilful in divination and augury, may long boast
to be almighty without being contradicted by the event.
[Sidenote: Contemplative essence of action.]
That thought is not self-directive appears best in the most immaterial
processes. In strife against external forces men, being ignorant of
their deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of their action to
their chance ideas; but when the process is wholly internal the real
factors are more evenly represented in consciousness and the magical,
involuntary nature of life is better perceived. My hand, guided by I
know not what machinery, is at this moment adding syllable to syllable
upon this paper, to the general fulfilment, perhaps, of my felt intent,
yet giving that intent an articulation wholly unforeseen, and often
disappointing. The thoughts to be expressed simmer half-consciously in
my brain. I feel their burden and tendency without seeing their form,
until the mechanical train of impulsive association, started by the
perusal of what precedes or by the accidental emergence of some new
idea, lights the fuse and precipitates the phrases. If this happens in
the most reflective and deliberate of activities, like this of
composition, how much more does it happen in positive action, “The die
is cast,” said Caesar, feeling a decision in himself of which he could
neither count nor weigh the multitudinous causes; and so says every
strong and clear intellect, every well-formed character, seizing at the
same moment with comprehensive instinct both its purposes and the means
by which they shall be attained. Only the fool, whose will signifies
nothing, boasts to have created it himself.
We must not seek the function of thought, then, in any supposed power to
discover either ends not suggested by natural impulse or means to the
accomplishment of those irrational ends. Attention is utterly powerless
to change or create its objects in either respect; it rather registers
without surprise—for it expects nothing in particular—and watches
eagerly the images bubbling up in the living mind and the processes
evolving there. These processes are themselves full of potency and
promise; will and reflection are no more inconsequential than any other
processes bound by natural links to the rest of the world. Even if an
atomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything in
nature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its
natural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearls
together is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy and
implication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purely
empirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangement
by which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, there
is no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into the
web and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by its
material antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanical
laws, which would also preside over the further transition from thought
into its material expression.
[Sidenote: Mechanical efficacy alien to thought’s essence.]
This inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible from
constituting the mind’s function and value, or its efficacy in a moral
and rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give no
rationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to some
better mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is therefore
always derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious than
the utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part they
may play empirically in introducing those moral values which are
intrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it is
not worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it must
terminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being good
in itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimate
good is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that what
instrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished without
loss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if that
instrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because it
already contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In a
word, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may be
attributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter—an efficacy which
matter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism.
And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas
they would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations,
ultimate fruits.
[Sidenote: Consciousness transcendental.]
The incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, an
instrument in the natural world will appear from a different point of
view if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level.
Since the material world is an object for thought, and potential in
relation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of
reality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this side
of the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannot
expect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among the
actors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotent
and supreme. It has been well said that
Only the free divine the laws,
The causeless only know the cause.
Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and free
will evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogether
universal and notional, without inherent determinations or specific
affinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implications
and will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego to
which all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is the
ground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found in
the world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is
not determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Another
experience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness is
not itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particular
locus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It is
merely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. All
force, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specific
objects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no
less than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is
generated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous
objects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural
order lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly
intervene to fill the chasm—for these are parcels and expressions of
the natural order—but only nothingness and pure chance.
[Sidenote: and transcendent.]
Thought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is of
natural affinities; yet consciousness of an object’s value, while it
declares the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes its
entire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, an
impulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. It
would matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, or
what animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot in
nature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve no
progress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce one
eventual state of things better than another. These preferences are in
themselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of
supererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of
Hercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express
and depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the
causal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength of
Hercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art
and civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matter
would be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of its
function, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. What
gives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence in
human discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its own
direction, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passion
carries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise the
mechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form and
possibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render these
tendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shall
lie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment of
benefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement.
Nature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; a
possibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment would
justify nature and man in their common venture.
[Sidenote: It is the seat of value.]
Satisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it all
talk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confused
verbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdraws
attention from what works the wonder—namely, that human and moral
colouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy they
have. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter
of no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of all
evils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural
demand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible
from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought
about by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there is
an essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this bias
expresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the senses
and the will. Impulse makes value possible; and the value becomes actual
when the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and have
a conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the
sanction of character.[D]
That thought is nature’s concomitant expression or entelechy, never one
of her instruments, is a truth long ago divined by the more judicious
thinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza; but it has not met with general
acceptance or even consideration. It is obstructed by superficial
empiricism, which associates the better-known aspects of events directly
together, without considering what mechanical bonds may secretly unite
them; it is obstructed also by the traditional mythical idealism, intent
as this philosophy is on proving nature to be the expression of
something ulterior and non-natural and on hugging the fatal
misconception that ideals and eventual goods are creative and miraculous
forces, without perceiving that it thereby renders goods and ideals
perfectly senseless; for how can anything be a good at all to which some
existing nature is not already directed? It may therefore be worth
while, before leaving this phase of the subject, to consider one or two
prejudices which might make it sound paradoxical to say, as we propose,
that ideals are ideal and nature natural.
[Sidenote: Apparent utility of pain]
[Sidenote: Its real impotence.]
Of all forms of consciousness the one apparently most useful is pain,
which is also the one most immersed in matter and most opposite to
ideality and excellence. Its utility lies in the warning it gives: in
trying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we desire to escape
pain is certain; its very definition can hardly go beyond the statement
that pain is that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on account
of its intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how to
initiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and in
itself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we should long ago have
been saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and
our incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those
we feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselves
indefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, is
present in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to describe
by a circumlocution what is of course a primary sensation, we might
scarcely do better than to say that pain is consciousness at once
intense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, and
arrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. The
horror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerable
tedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment.
In itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and its
vacancy offers no expedients by which it might be unknotted and
relieved.
Pain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign of impotence in the
sufferer. Its appearance, far from constituting its own remedy, is like
all other organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia and tends only
to its own continuance. A man’s hatred of his own condition no more
helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.
If we allowed ourselves to speak in such a case of efficacy at all, we
should say that pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various ways,
now by weakening the system, now by prompting convulsive efforts, now by
spreading to other beings through the contagion of sympathy or
vengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays a maladjustment which
has more or less natural stability. It may be instantaneous only; by its
lack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate destruction of one of
its factors. In that case we fabulously say that the pain has
instinctively removed its own cause. Pain is here apparently useful
because it expresses an incipient tension which the self-preserving
forces in the organism are sufficient to remove. Pain’s appearance is
then the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed by virtue of its
inner nature or of any art it can initiate, but merely by virtue of
mechanical associations between its cause and its remedy. The burned
child dreads the fire and, reading only the surface of his life, fancies
that the pain once felt and still remembered is the ground of his new
prudence. Punishments, however, are not always efficacious, as everyone
knows who has tried to govern children or cities by the rod; suffering
does not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelligence and docility
are already there; that is, unless the friction which the pain betrayed
sufficed to obliterate permanently one of the impulses in conflict. This
readjustment, on which real improvement hangs and which alone makes
“experience” useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repetition
of the pains endured; it corresponds rather to such a plasticity in the
organism that the painful conflict is no longer produced.
[Sidenote: Preformations involved.]
Threatened destruction would not involve pain unless that threatened
destruction were being resisted; so that the reaction which pain is
supposed to cause must already be taking place before pain can be felt.
A will without direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibition cannot
be the primary source of any effort or of any ideal. Determinate
impulses must exist already for their inhibition to have taken place or
for the pain to arise which is the sign of that inhibition. The child’s
dread of the fire marks the acceleration of that impulse which, when he
was burned, originally enabled him to withdraw his hand; and if he did
not now shrink in anticipation he would not remember the pain nor know
to what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to awaken the reaction
which touch at first was needed to produce; the will has extended its
line of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield; and pain has
been driven back to the frontiers of the spirit. The conflicting
reactions are now peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aversion
is nothing to that once involved in the burn. Had this aversion to fire
been innate, as many aversions are, no pain would have been caused,
because no profound maladjustment would have occurred. The surviving
attraction, checked by fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation in
the brain which was the seat of conflicting reactions.
[Sidenote: Its untoward significance.]
To say that this conflict is the guide to its own issue is to talk
without thinking. The conflict is the sign of inadequate organisation,
or of non-adaptation in the given organism to the various stimuli which
irritate it. The reconstruction which follows this conflict, when it
indeed follows, is of course a new and better adaptation; so that what
involves the pain may often be a process of training which directs
reaction into new and smoother channels. But the pain is present whether
a permanent adaptation is being attained or not. It is present in
progressive dissolution and in hopeless and exhausting struggles far
more than in education or in profitable correction. Toothache and
sea-sickness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful ills. The
intenser the pain the more probable its uselessness. Only in vanishing
is it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just as
disease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already,
medicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. Where a
man’s nature is out of gear and his instincts are inordinate, suffering
may be a sign that a dangerous peace, in which impulse was carrying him
ignorantly into paths without issue, is giving place to a peace with
security in which his reconstructed character may respond without
friction to the world, and enable him to gather a clearer experience and
enjoy a purer vitality. The utility of pain is thus apparent only, and
due to empirical haste in collating events that have no regular nor
inward relation; and even this imputed utility pain has only in
proportion to the worthlessness of those who need it.
[Sidenote: Perfect function no unconscious.]
A second current prejudice which may deserve notice suggests that an
organ, when its function is perfect, becomes unconscious, so that if
adaptation were complete life would disappear. The well-learned routine
of any mechanical art passes into habit, and habit into unconscious
operation. The virtuoso is not aware how he manipulates his instrument;
what was conscious labour in the beginning has become instinct and
miracle in the end. Thus it might appear that to eliminate friction and
difficulty would be to eliminate consciousness, and therefore value,
from the world. Life would thus be involved in a contradiction and moral
effort in an absurdity; for while the constant aim of practice is
perfection and that of labour ease, and both are without meaning or
standard unless directed to the attainment of these ends, yet such
attainment, if it were actual, would be worthless, so that what alone
justifies effort would lack justification and would in fact be incapable
of existence. The good musician must strive to play perfectly, but,
alas, we are told, if he succeeded he would have become an automaton.
The good man must aspire to holiness, but, alas, if he reached holiness
his moral life would have evaporated.
These melodramatic prophecies, however, need not alarm us. They are
founded on nothing but rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuine
good. When we attain perfection of function we lose consciousness of the
medium, to become more clearly conscious of the result. The eye that
does its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense of muscular
tension or weariness; but it gives all the brighter and steadier image
of the object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and the
labour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the musician, could he
play so divinely as to be unconscious of his body, his instrument, and
the very lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in the harmony,
more completely master of its unities and beauty. At such moments the
body’s long labour at last brings forth the soul. Life from its
inception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice and
bearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is to
round out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of power, of
joy, of intelligence. Not to have understood it is to have passed
through life without understanding anything.
The analogy extends to morals, where also the means may be
advantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to
which work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be
fulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure
activity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter
passivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two
extremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former limit is
reached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidental
flux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishing
point, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear by
diremption. Such feeling denotes inward disorganisation and a hopeless
conflict of reflex actions tending toward dissolution. The second limit
is reached in contemplation, when anything is loved, understood, or
enjoyed. Synthetic power is then at its height; the mind can survey its
experience and correlate all the motions it suggests. Power in the mind
is exactly proportionate to representative scope, and representative
scope to rational activity. A steady vision of all things in their true
order and worth results from perfection of function and is its index; it
secures the greatest distinctness in thought together with the greatest
decision, wisdom, and ease in action, as the lightning is brilliant and
quick. It also secures, so far as human energies avail, its own
perpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within and without lasts
long and goes far.
[Sidenote: Inchoate ethics.]
To confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is not
unnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but can imagine
neither the cause nor the fruits of that portentous commotion. All
functions, in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It is
then supposed that what serves no further purpose can have no value, and
that he who suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and no life. To
attain an ideal seems to destroy its worth. Moral life, at that low
level, is a fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane and
liberal interests. The barbarian’s intensity is without seriousness and
his passion without joy. His philosophy, which means to glorify all
experience and to digest all vice, is in truth an expression of pathetic
innocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning
hand, to assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be anything but
glorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one who has never seen
anything worth seeing nor loved anything worth loving. Immaturity could
go no farther than to acknowledge no limits defining will and happiness.
When such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an authoritative
ideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happiness
becomes at once definite and attainable; for adjustment is possible to a
world that has a fruitful and intelligible structure.
Such incoherences, which might well arise in ages without traditions,
may be preserved and fostered by superstition. Perpetual servile
employments and subjection to an irrational society may render people
incapable even of conceiving a liberal life. They may come to think
their happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear the
large emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world. Like the prisoner of
Chillon, after so long a captivity, they would regain their freedom with
a sigh. The wholesome influences of nature, however, would soon revive
their wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision of
perfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer air. Freedom
and perfection are synonymous with life. The peace they bring is one
whose names are also rapture, power,
Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace.
[Sidenote: Thought the entelechy of being.]
Thought belongs to the sphere of ultimate results. What, indeed, could
be more fitting than that consciousness, which is self-revealing and
transcendentally primary, should be its own excuse for being and should
contain its own total value, together with the total value of everything
else? What could be more proper than that the whole worth of ideas
should be ideal? To make an idea instrumental would be to prostitute
what, being self-existent, should be self-justifying. That continual
absoluteness which consciousness possesses, since in it alone all heaven
and earth are at any moment revealed, ought to convince any radical and
heart-searching philosopher that all values should be continually
integrated and realised there, where all energies are being momently
focussed. Thought is a fulfilment; its function is to lend utility to
its causes and to make actual those conceived and subterranean processes
which find in it their ultimate expression. Thought is nature
represented; it is potential energy producing life and becoming an
actual appearance.
[Sidenote: Its exuberance.]
The conditions of consciousness, however, are far from being its only
theme. As consciousness bears a transcendent relation to the dynamic
world (for it is actual and spiritual, while the dynamic is potential
and material) so it may be exuberant and irresponsibly rich. Although
its elements, in point of distribution and derivation, are grounded in
matter, as music is in vibrations, yet in point of character the result
may be infinitely redundant. The complete musician would devote but a
small part of his attention to the basis of music, its mechanism,
psychology, or history. Long before he had represented to his mind the
causes of his art, he would have proceeded to practise and enjoy it. So
sense and imagination, passion and reason, may enrich the soil that
breeds them and cover it with a maze of flowers.
The theme of consciousness is accordingly far more than the material
world which constitutes its basis, though this also is one of its
themes; thought is no less at home in various expressions and
embroideries with which the material world can be overlaid in
imagination. The material world is conceived by digging beneath
experience to find its cause; it is the efficacious structure and
skeleton of things. This is the subject of scientific retrospect and
calculation. The forces disclosed by physical studies are of course not
directed to producing a mind that might merely describe them. A force is
expressed in many other ways than by being defined; it may be felt,
resisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised. Forces work; they are
not, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From that
matter which might be describable in mechanical formulæ there issue
notwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible,
imaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal world
emanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by the
interest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rational
interpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express nature
exuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, by
a different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote D: Aristippus asked Socrates “whether he knew anything good,
so that if he answered by naming food or drink or money or health or
strength or valour or anything of that sort, he might at once show that
it was sometimes an evil. Socrates, however, knew very well that if
anything troubles us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in the
most pertinent fashion. ‘Are you asking me,’ he said, ‘if I know
anything good for a fever?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the other. ‘Or for sore
eyes?’ ‘Not that, either.’ ‘Or for hunger?’ ‘No, not for hunger.’ ‘Well,
then,’ said he, ‘if you ask me whether I know a good that is good for
nothing, I neither know it nor want to know it’”—Xenophon, Memorabilia,
iii., 8.]
CHAPTER X—THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION
[Sidenote: Honesty in hedonism.]
To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as
balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics
a worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted
honesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite
opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of
all logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify
itself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would
not justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire
is forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a
preponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or
weakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. Who
would not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?
By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even
obliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the
sign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to
interpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be
impossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient
arrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and
totally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees
pain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to
act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil
already occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to
any impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A
perfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at
what, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and
this is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of
satisfaction eventually possible.
[Sidenote: Necessary qualifications.]
In spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure in all
deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate
sources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an
eventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any
act or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs
about future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality,
is based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value is
nothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the object
of pursuit nothing but the ideal object, counterpart of the present
demand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and the
environment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in
achieving the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic psychology,
therefore, by no means involves any opposition to eudæmonism in ethics.
Eudæmonism is another name for wisdom: there is no other _moral_
morality. Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve
itself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty
to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity,
and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out what
superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made
those persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence
remains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what
happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can
only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so
that while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify
their pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous,
thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in
which satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is
the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.
[Sidenote: The will must judge.]
The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and
pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their
total bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must
be compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to
judge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment
passed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus when Petrarch says that a
thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal of
value deeper than either pleasure or pain, an ideal which makes a life
of satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to his
soul. If our demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneous
affirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed indifference to
some single tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang is only
the thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and that a life so balanced
is nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing. This
judgment, for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truth
expresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch’s. It merely means that, as
a matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts our wills
and attracts them vehemently. So that the only possible criterion for
the relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses
among them or among combinations of them; nor can the intensity of
pleasures and pains, apart from the physical violence of their
expression, be judged by any other standard than by the power they have,
when represented, to control the will’s movement.
[Sidenote: Injustice inherent in representation]
Here we come upon one of those initial irrationalities in the world
theories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality in
things, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value of
any experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the value
which that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is to
compare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendental
isolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lying
side by side with another datum, like two objects given in a single
consciousness. Successive values, to be compared, must be represented;
but the conditions of representation are such that they rob objects of
the values they had at their first appearance to substitute the values
they possess at their recurrence. For representation mirrors
consciousness only by mirroring its objects, and the emotional reaction
upon those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached by
indirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to will
and emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, like
gesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measure
an absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value.
Apart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, we
should always attribute to an event in every other experience the value
which its image now had in our own. But in that case the pathetic
fallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in one
vital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be in
another vital context upon the situation which that idea represents.
[Sidenote: Æsthetic and speculative cruelty.]
This divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders it
initially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on a
flower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy
which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and
feel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our
horizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite
thrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in æsthetic pleasures,
in lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; in
the unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards the
uniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as a
justification for the inherent evils in the experience described; in the
unjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so
completely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of
all discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in
things, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These
pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and
unintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own
value. Æsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution
to the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of
that experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction.
The satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging the
images present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual
function, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such a
faculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures as
intense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions,
wrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth in
the most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep,
the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in
themselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in
engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the
whole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of
imagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the
detail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be
suggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition
between them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top
experience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality.
Absorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension of
all fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particular
facts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebral
excitement.
[Sidenote: Imputed values: their inconstancy.]
That luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form is
present in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard our
own past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it.
Last year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, are
not otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recalling
them; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which they contained we do not
even seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy or
unhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination or
repulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physical
indulgence, often most violent when the pleasure—judged by its
concomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it—was most
intense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that the
unspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lost
immediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheated
reflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicited
the will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps it
yields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph—a moment only
half-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and so
unfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The same
situation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite and
relaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind rather
with aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare
says, are cruel and not to be trusted.
A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe:
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream ...
Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated.
[Sidenote: Methods of control.]
Past reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent in
the very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yet
reason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and by
confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter
of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically
just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by
comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same
conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A
love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various
lovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleeting
sentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, no
independent method of discovering values. They must be rated as the
sensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, shows
them to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnished
by the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing all
knowledge; an absent joy can only be represented by a tinge of emotion
dyeing an image that pictures the situation in which the joy was felt;
but the suggested value being once projected into the potential world,
that land of inferred being, this projection may be controlled and
corroborated by other suggestions and associations relevant to it, which
it is the function of reason to collect and compare. A right estimate of
absent values must be conventional and mediated by signs. Direct
sympathies, which suffice for instinctive present co-operation, fail to
transmit alien or opposite pleasures. They over-emphasise momentary
relations, while they necessarily ignore permanent bonds. Therefore the
same intellect that puts a mechanical reality behind perception must put
a moral reality behind sympathy.
[Sidenote: Example of fame.]
Fame, for example, is a good; its value arises from a certain movement
of will and emotion which is elicited by the thought that one’s name
might be associated with great deeds and with the memory of them. The
glow of this thought bathes the object it describes, so that fame is
felt to have a value quite distinct from that which the expectation of
fame may have in the present moment. Should this expectation be foolish
and destined to prove false, it would have no value, and be indeed the
more ludicrous and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in it, and
the longer his illusion lasted. The heart is resolutely set on its
object and despises its own phenomena, not reflecting that its emotions
have first revealed that object’s worth and alone can maintain it. For
if a man cares nothing for fame, what value has it?
This projection of interest into excellence takes place mechanically and
is in the first instance irrational. Did all glow die out from memory
and expectation, the events represented remaining unchanged, we should
be incapable of assigning any value to those events, just as, if eyes
were lacking, we should be incapable of assigning colour to the world,
which would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at present. So fame could
never be regarded as a good if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yet
now, because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as a good,
absolute and intrinsic. This moral hypostasis involved in the love of
fame could never be rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or die
out unobserved, were it not associated with other conceptions and other
habits of estimating values. For the passions are humanised only by
being juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame is not man’s only
goal and the realisation of it comes into manifold relations with other
interests no less vivid, we are able to criticise the impulse to pursue
it.
Fame may be the consequence of benefits conferred upon mankind. In that
case the abstract desire for fame would be reinforced and, as it were,
justified by its congruity with the more voluminous and stable desire to
benefit our fellow-men. Or, again, the achievements which insure fame
and the genius that wins it probably involve a high degree of vitality
and many profound inward satisfactions to the man of genius himself; so
that again the abstract love of fame would be reinforced by the
independent and more rational desire for a noble and comprehensive
experience. On the other hand, the minds of posterity, whose homage is
craved by the ambitious man, will probably have very false conceptions
of his thoughts and purposes. What they will call by his name will be,
in a great measure, a fiction of their own fancy and not his portrait at
all. Would Caesar recognise himself in the current notions of him, drawn
from some school-history, or perhaps from Shakespeare’s satirical
portrait? Would Christ recognise himself upon our altars, or in the
romances about him constructed by imaginative critics? And not only is
remote experience thus hopelessly lost and misrepresented, but even this
nominal memorial ultimately disappears.
The love of fame, if tempered by these and similar considerations, would
tend to take a place in man’s ideal such as its roots in human nature
and its functions in human progress might seem to justify. It would be
rationalised in the only sense in which any primary desire can be
rationalised, namely, by being combined with all others in a consistent
whole. How much of it would survive a thorough sifting and criticism,
may well remain in doubt. The result would naturally differ for
different temperaments and in different states of society. The wisest
men, perhaps, while they would continue to feel some love of honour and
some interest in their image in other minds, would yet wish that
posterity might praise them as Sallust praises Cato by saying: _Esse
quam videri bonus maluit_; he preferred worth to reputation.
[Sidenote: Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic.]
The fact that value is attributed to absent experience according to the
value experience has in representation appears again in one of the most
curious anomalies in human life—the exorbitant interest which thought
and reflection take in the form of experience and the slight account
they make of its intensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth when
they are over, the pangs of despised love when that love is finally
forgotten or requited, the travail of sin when once salvation is
assured, all melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clear
sky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely remembered and not
reproducible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when absurdity is not yet
tedious, the rapture of sport or passion, the immense peace found in a
mystical surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours count
for nothing when they are once gone. The memory of them cannot cure a
fit of the blues nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty act of
malice or vengeance, or reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace,
on the other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page of
music is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all the
happiness which one’s own life or that of the universe may ever have
contained. Why should overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affect
imagination so little while it responds sympathetically to æsthetic and
intellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects that, it must
be confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Why
should we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose works
we know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has been
infinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great
merchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why should
we smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls the
inventor of the spinning-jenny one of the _true_ benefactors of mankind?
Is it not probable, on the whole, that he has had a greater and less
equivocal influence on human happiness than Shakespeare with all his
plays and sonnets? But the cheapness of cotton cloth produces no
particularly delightful image in the fancy to be compared with Hamlet or
Imogen. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly
deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.
[Sidenote: Irrational religious allegiance.]
The same æsthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians have
attempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely those
actions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of
justice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy
and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made for
the complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts
of obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thus
virtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity
in a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the type
regarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to the
benefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here and
attributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures that
entertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The
character of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox among
us are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not the
character of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world
lacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverse
existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by
his inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted
with all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, like
Prometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthly
blessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon
the cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebuked
in their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and
united, by their common indifference to the world, in one mystic
brotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready to
learn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their
heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and
desperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all
civic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan
world to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.
All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneath
this theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, and
broke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of each
man as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christ
remained in men’s hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so that
even now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being pure
children of nature, are without the least understanding of what
Christianity came to do in the world, they still offer his person and
words a sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform that
sacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as their bungling fancy can,
into a patron of Philistia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of a
character that is the extreme negation of all that these good souls
inwardly value and outwardly pursue? Because the image of Christ and the
associations of his religion, apart from their original import, remain
rooted in the mind: they remain the focus for such wayward emotions and
mystic intuitions as their magnetism can still attract, and the value
which this hallowed compound possesses in representation is transferred
to its nominal object, and Christ is the conventional name for all the
impulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the Christian.
[Sidenote: Pathetic idealizations.]
Symbols, when their significance has been great, outlive their first
significance. The image of Christ was a last refuge to the world; it was
a consolation and a new ground for hope, from which no misfortune could
drive the worshipper. Its value as an idea was therefore immense, as to
the lover the idea of his untasted joys, or to the dying man the idea of
health and invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more ask himself
whether his deity, in its total operation, has really blessed him and
deserved his praise than the lover can ask if his lady is worth pursuing
or the expiring cripple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit to
be once more young and whole. That life is worth living is the most
necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible
of conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of joy and sorrow, can
neither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm; only a present ideal will avail
to move the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint’s halo is an
optical illusion; it glorifies his actions whatever their eventual
influence in the world, because they seem to have, when rehearsed
dramatically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about them.
Thus it appears that the great figures of art or religion, together
with all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on the
values they represent. The image has more lustre than the original, and
is often the more important and influential fact. Things are esteemed as
they weigh in representation. A _memorable thing_, people say in their
eulogies, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. For
things are called great because they are memorable, they are not
remembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys,
the widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if in
some rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgotten
again and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiest
experience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a
picturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, is
idolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang of
him, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of their
sorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the only
happiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeble
realities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When
life dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits still
among the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once
possessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice in
representation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable;
for it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever their
original or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only by
their present function and utility.
[Sidenote: Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.]
[Sidenote: The test a controlled present ideal.]
The error involved in attributing value to the past is naturally
aggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the latter
case imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and is
consequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of a
thing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in its
presence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrant
that the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptable
and good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation
would be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rational
authority and represents a better experience than the actual condition
it is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as many
circumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress or
modify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that the
object envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with all
experience rather than with a part only. The possible error remains even
then; but a practical mind will always accept the risk of error when it
has made every possible correction. A rational will is not a will that
has reason for its basis or that possesses any other proof that its
realisation would be possible or good than the oracle which a living
will inspires and pronounces. The rationality possible to the will lies
not in its source but in its method. An ideal cannot wait for its
realisation to prove its validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only to
be adequate as an ideal, that is, to express completely what the soul at
present demands, and to do justice to all extant interests.
CHAPTER XI—SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL
[Sidenote: The ultimate end a resultant.]
Reason’s function is to embody the good, but the test of excellence is
itself ideal; therefore before we can assure ourselves that reason has
been manifested in any given case we must make out the reasonableness of
the ideal that inspires us. And in general, before we can convince
ourselves that a Life of Reason, or practice guided by science and
directed toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we must make
out the possibility and character of its ultimate end. Yet each ideal is
its own justification; so that the only sense in which an ultimate end
can be established and become a test of general progress is this: that a
harmony and co-operation of impulses should be conceived, leading to the
maximum satisfaction possible in the whole community of spirits affected
by our action. Now, without considering for the present any concrete
Utopia, such, for instance, as Plato’s Republic or the heavenly
beatitude described by theologians, we may inquire what formal qualities
are imposed on the ideal by its nature and function and by the relation
it bears to experience and to desire.
[Sidenote: Demands the substance of ideals.]
The ideal has the same relation to given demands that the reality has to
given perceptions. In the face of the ideal, particular demands forfeit
their authority and the goods to which a particular being may aspire
cease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction of desire comes to appear an
indifferent or unholy thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to be
realised. So, precisely, in perception, flying impressions come to be
regarded as illusory when contrasted with a stable conception of
reality. Yet of course flying impressions are the only material out of
which that conception can be formed. Life itself is a flying impression,
and had we no personal and instant experience, importuning us at each
successive moment, we should have no occasion to ask for a reality at
all, and no materials out of which to construct so gratuitous an idea.
In the same way present demands are the only materials and occasions for
any ideal: without demands the ideal would have no _locus standi_ or
foothold in the world, no power, no charm, and no prerogative. If the
ideal can confront particular desires and put them to shame, that
happens only because the ideal is the object of a more profound and
voluminous desire and embodies the good which they blindly and perhaps
deviously pursue. Demands could not be misdirected, goods sought could
not be false, if the standard by which they are to be corrected were
not constructed out of them. Otherwise each demand would render its
object a detached, absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when each
desire in turn has singed its wings and retired before some disillusion,
reflection may set in to suggest residual satisfactions that may still
be possible, or some shifting of the ground by which much of what was
hoped for may yet be attained.
[Sidenote: Discipline of the will.]
[Sidenote: Demands made practical and consistent.]
The force for this new trial is but the old impulse renewed; this new
hope is a justified remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in this
second campaign, takes the field conscious that it has indomitable
enemies and ready to sign a reasonable peace, and even to capitulate
before superior forces. Such tameness may be at first merely a
consequence of exhaustion and prudence; but a mortal will, though
absolute in its deliverances, is very far from constant, and its
sacrifices soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home. The old
ambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious and
extravagant; the circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field of
conventional happiness. Experience, which brings about this humbler and
more prosaic state of mind, has its own imaginative fruits. Among those
forces which compelled each particular impulse to abate its pretensions,
the most conspicuous were other impulses, other interests active in
oneself and in one’s neighbours. When the power of these alien demands
is recognised they begin, in a physical way, to be respected; when an
adjustment to them is sought they begin to be understood, for it is only
by studying their expression and tendency that the degree of their
hostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, it
is to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into a
sullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathies
which in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether.
Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personal
interests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous
welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for
whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original
impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of
savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when
sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The
factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does
the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that
animated them survive this discipline and the new purpose is really
esteemed; else the ideal would have no moral force. An ideal
representing no living interest would be irrelevant to practice, just as
a conception of reality would be irrelevant to perception which should
not be composed of the materials that sense supplies, or should not
re-embody actual sensations in an intelligible system.
[Sidenote: The ideal natural.]
Here we have, then, one condition which the ideal must fulfil: it must
be a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot. An ideal out of
relation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being an
ideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not the
acme but the atrophy of moral endeavour. Mysticism and asceticism run
into this danger, when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good too
symbolically presented breeds a superstitious repugnance toward
everything naturally prized. So also an artificial scepticism can regard
all experience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the chimera of an
absolute reality. As an absolute reality would be indescribable and
without a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme good
which was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respect
for such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that
shibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligent
choice or the development of appreciation for natural pleasures, it
would constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistently
indulged in, could only issue in madness or revert to imbecility.
[Sidenote: Need of unity and finality.]
[Sidenote: Ideals of nothing.]
No less important, however, than this basis which the ideal must have in
extant demands, is the harmony with which reason must endow it. If
without the one the ideal loses its value, without the other it loses
its finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect; its demands are
expressed in incidental desires, elicited by a variety of objects which
perhaps cannot coexist in the world. If we merely transcribe these
miscellaneous demands or allow these floating desires to dictate to us
the elements of the ideal, we shall never come to a Whole or to an End.
One new fancy after another will seem an embodiment of perfection, and
we shall contradict each expression of our ideal by every other. A
certain school of philosophy—if we may give that name to the systematic
neglect of reason—has so immersed itself in the contemplation of this
sort of inconstancy, which is indeed prevalent enough in the world, that
it has mistaken it for a normal and necessary process. The greatness of
the ideal has been put in its vagueness and in an elasticity which makes
it wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal of progress, beside
being thus made to lie at every point of the compass in succession, is
removed to an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of attaining it
is denied and progress itself is made illusory. For a progress must be
directed to attaining some definite type of life, the counterpart of a
given natural endowment, and nothing can be called an improvement which
does not contain an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a mockery
that left us, for some new reason, as much impeded as before and as far
removed from peace.
The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was drawn at
first by satirists, unhappily with too much justification in the facts.
Some grosser minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a good either
truly attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake that
satire on human folly for a sober account of the whole universe; and
finally others were not ashamed to represent it as the ideal itself—so
soon is the dyer’s hand subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mind
cannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony continually preserved or
restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which
disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order,
cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life
with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and
strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is
piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that
since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to
be. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever interests and
judgments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into a
vortex, and created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an ideal
purpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself, are
self-defining and self-preserving: by partly fixing a structure they fix
an ideal. But the barbarian can hardly regard such things, for to have
distinguished and fostered them would be to have founded a civilisation.
[Sidenote: Darwin on moral sense.]
Reason’s function in defining the ideal is in principle extremely
simple, although all time and all existence would have to be gathered in
before the applications of that principle could be exhausted. A better
example of its essential working could hardly be found than one which
Darwin gives to illustrate the natural origin of moral sense. A swallow,
impelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full of unfledged young,
would endure a moral conflict. The more lasting impulse, memory being
assumed, would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged again after being
momentarily obscured by an intermittent passion. “While the mother bird
is feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is
probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is more
persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young
ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived
at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to
act, what an agony of remorse each bird would feel if, from being
endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image
continually passing before her mind of her young ones perishing in the
bleak north from cold and hunger.”[E] She would doubtless upbraid
herself, like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own dearest
good. The perfidy, however, was not wholly senseless, because the
forgotten instinct was not less natural and necessary than the
remembered one, and its satisfaction no less true. Temptation has the
same basis as duty. The difference is one of volume and permanence in
the rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will assume toward
these depends more on the representability of the demands compared than
on their original vehemence or ultimate results.
[Sidenote: Conscience and reason compared.]
A passionate conscience may thus arise in the play of impulses differing
in permanence, without involving a judicial exercise of reason. Nor does
such a conscience involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal presence
of particular demands. Conflicts in the conscience are thus quite
natural and would continually occur but for the narrowness that commonly
characterises a mind inspired by passion. A life of sin and repentance
is as remote as possible from a Life of Reason. Yet the same situation
which produces conscience and the sense of duty is an occasion for
applying reason to action and for forming an ideal, so soon as the
demands and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and balanced
imaginatively. The stork might do more than feel the conflict of his two
impulses, he might do more than embody in alternation the eloquence of
two hostile thoughts. He might pass judgment upon them impartially and,
in the felt presence of both, conceive what might be a union or
compromise between them.
This resultant object of pursuit, conceived in reflection and in itself
the initial goal of neither impulse, is the ideal of a mind occupied by
the two: it is the aim prescribed by reason under the circumstances. It
differs from the prescription of conscience, in that conscience is often
the spokesman of one interest or of a group of interests in opposition
to other primary impulses which it would annul altogether; while reason
and the ideal are not active forces nor embodiments of passion at all,
but merely a method by which objects of desire are compared in
reflection. The goodness of an end is felt inwardly by conscience; by
reason it can be only taken upon trust and registered as a fact. For
conscience the object of an opposed will is an evil, for reason it is a
good on the same ground as any other good, because it is pursued by a
natural impulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Conscience, in fine,
is a party to moral strife, reason an observer of it who, however, plays
the most important and beneficent part in the outcome by suggesting the
terms of peace. This suggested peace, inspired by sympathy and by
knowledge of the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value and
practical force from the irrational impulses which it embodies, and
borrows its final authority from the truth with which it recognises them
all and the necessity by which it imposes on each such sacrifices as are
requisite to a general harmony.
[Sidenote: Reason imposes no new sacrifice.]
Could each impulse, apart from reason, gain perfect satisfaction,
it would doubtless laugh at justice. The divine, to exercise
suasion, must use an _argumentum ad hominem_; reason must justify
itself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is what an
irresponsible impulse can never hope for: all other impulses,
though absent perhaps from the mind, are none the less present in
nature and have possession of the field through their physical
basis. They offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder. To
disregard them is therefore to gain nothing: reason, far from
creating the partial renunciation and proportionate sacrifices
which it imposes, really minimises them by making them voluntary
and fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear so severe a frown,
really fosters all possible pleasures; what it retrenches is
nothing to what blind forces and natural catastrophes would
otherwise cut off; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding to
spontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral security and an
intellectual light.
[Sidenote: Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.]
Those who are guided only by an irrational conscience can hardly
understand what a good life would be. Their Utopias have to be
supernatural in order that the irresponsible rules which they call
morality may lead by miracle to happy results. But such a magical and
undeserved happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury: only one
phase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished an
ideal cannot really attract the will. For human nature has been moulded
by the same natural forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled,
and, apart from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances, the
things man’s heart desires are attainable under his natural conditions
and would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of desires and
interests in the world is not radical any more than man’s
dissatisfaction with his own nature can be; for every particular ideal,
being an expression of human nature in operation, must in the end
involve the primary human faculties and cannot be essentially
incompatible with any other ideal which involves them too.
To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that ideal to its natural
conditions—in other words, to live the Life of Reason—is something
perfectly possible; for those demands, being akin to one another in
spite of themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than by
blind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any profound
revolution in nature, merely expresses her actual tendency and forecasts
what her perfect functioning would be.
[Sidenote: Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason.]
Reason as such represents or rather constitutes a single formal
interest, the interest in harmony. When two interests are simultaneous
and fall within one act of apprehension the desirability of harmonising
them is involved in the very effort to realise them together. If
attention and imagination are steady enough to face this implication
and not to allow impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tendencies,
reason comes into being. Henceforth things actual and things desired are
confronted by an ideal which has both pertinence and authority.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote E: Descent of Man, chapter iii.]
CHAPTER XII—FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE
[Sidenote: Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.]
A conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally on
observing the passions of men, passions which under various disguises
seem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greek
philosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define this
idea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that a
single and identical essence, present in all men, determined their
powers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the human
ideal and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man, did not abandon the
notion of a specific humanity. On the contrary, such a notion was
implied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in the
universal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if human
nature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men to
preserve unanimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature was
likewise the entity which the English psychologists set themselves to
describe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixed
and universal human nature that its constancy, in his opinion, was the
source of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he doubted for a moment
the stability of human nature, the foundations of his system would have
fallen out; the forms of perception and thought would at once have lost
their boasted necessity, since to-morrow might dawn upon new categories
and a modified _a priori_ intuition of space or time; and the avenue
would also have been closed by which man was led, through his
unalterable moral sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical truths.
[Sidenote: Contrary currents of opinion.]
[Sidenote: Evolution]
The force of this long tradition has been broken, however, by two
influences of great weight in recent times, the theory of evolution and
the revival of pantheism. The first has reintroduced flux into the
conception of existence and the second into the conception of values. If
natural species are fluid and pass into one another, human nature is
merely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribes
of animals, a group to which new qualities are constantly tending to
attach themselves while other faculties become extinct, now in whole
races, now in sporadic individuals. Human nature is therefore a
variable, and its ideal cannot have a greater constancy than the demands
to which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of one man or one age
have any authority over another, since the harmony existing in their
nature and interests is accidental and each is a transitional phase in
an indefinite evolution. The crystallisation of moral forces at any
moment is consequently to be explained by universal, not by human, laws;
the philosopher’s interest cannot be to trace the implications of
present and unstable desires, but rather to discover the mechanical law
by which these desires have been generated and will be transformed, so
that they will change irrevocably both their basis and their objects.
[Sidenote: Pantheism.]
To this picture of physical instability furnished by popular science are
to be added the mystical self-denials involved in pantheism. These come
to reinforce the doctrine that human nature is a shifting thing with the
sentiment that it is a finite and unworthy one: for every determination
of being, it is said, has its significance as well as its origin in the
infinite continuum of which it is a part. Forms are limitations, and
limitations, according to this philosophy, would be defects, so that
man’s only goal would be to escape humanity and lose himself in the
divine nebula that has produced and must invalidate each of his thoughts
and ideals. As there would be but one spirit in the world, and that
infinite, so there would be but one ideal and that indiscriminate. The
despair which the naturalist’s view of human instability might tend to
produce is turned by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;
and the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges that Life of Reason
which science seemed to condemn to gradual extinction.
[Sidenote: Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.]
Reason is a human function. Though the name of reason has been applied
to various alleged principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical,
these principles all lack the essence of rationality, in that they are
not conscious movements toward satisfaction, not, in other words, moral
and beneficent principles at all. Be the instability of human nature
what it may, therefore, the instability of reason is not less, since
reason is but a function of human nature. However relative and
subordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may be, these ideals
remain the only possible moral standards for man, the only tests which
he can apply for value or authority, in any other quarter. And among
unstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable than
that which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferent
to good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry would
indeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at in
following out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertia
and the ambiguity of words. In truth mystics do not practise so entire a
renunciation of reason as they preach: eternal validity and the capacity
to deal with absolute reality are still assumed by them to belong to
thought or at least to feeling. Only they overlook in their description
of human nature just that faculty which they exercise in their
speculation; their map leaves out the ground on which they stand. The
rest, which they are not identified with for the moment, they proceed
to regard _de haut en bas_ and to discredit as a momentary manifestation
of universal laws, physical or divine. They forget that this faith in
law, this absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for the
ultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that they
endure them as they might a fever and that the animal instincts are
patent on which those spiritual yearnings repose.
[Sidenote: Absolutist philosophy human and halting.]
This last fact would be nothing against the feelings in question, if
they were not made vehicles for absolute revelations. On the contrary,
such a relativity in instincts is the source of their importance. In
virtue of this relativity they have some basis and function in the
world; for did they not repose on human nature they could never express
or transform it. Religion and philosophy are not always beneficent or
important, but when they are it is precisely because they help to
develop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by means
of them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is an
ostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such a
pretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisation
is easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For in
their eagerness to empty their mind of human prejudices they reduce its
rational burden to a minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise,
it is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten accident of
language or training has survived the crash of the universe and made the
one demonstrable path to Absolute Truth.
[Sidenote: All science a deliverance of momentary thought.]
Neither the path of abstraction followed by the mystics, nor that of
direct and, as it avers, unbiassed observation followed by the
naturalists, can lead beyond that region of common experience,
traditional feeling, and conventional thought which all minds enter at
birth and can elude only at the risk of inward collapse and extinction.
The fact that observation involves the senses, and the senses their
organs, is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook; and when we add
that logical habits, sanctioned by utility, are needed to interpret the
data of sense, the humanity of science and all its constructions becomes
clearer than day. Superstition itself could not be more human. The path
of unbiassed observation is not a path away from conventional life; it
is a progress in conventions. It improves human belief by increasing the
proportion of two of its ingredients, attentive perception and practical
calculus. The whole resulting vision, as it is sustained from moment to
moment by present experience and instinct, has no value apart from
actual ideals. And if it proves human nature to be unstable, it can
build that proof on nothing more stable than human faculty as at the
moment it happens to be.
[Sidenote: All criticism likewise.]
Nor is abstraction a less human process, as if by becoming very
abstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplace
of the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man’s
reason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makes
haste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind overloaded with its experience,
the trick of an eye that cannot master a profuse and ever-changing
world? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this system of signals in
thought, be the Absolute Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain reality
by making a silhouette of our dreams? If the scientific world be a
product of human faculties, the metaphysical world must be doubly so;
for the material there given to human understanding is here worked over
again by human art. This constitutes the dignity and value of dialectic,
that in spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to experience a
relation similar to that which the arts bear to the same, where sensible
images, selected by the artist’s genius and already coloured by his
æsthetic bias, are redyed in the process of reproduction whenever he has
a great style, and saturated anew with his mind.
There can be no question, then, of eluding human nature or of conceiving
it and its environment in such a way as to stop its operation. We may
take up our position in one region of experience or in another, we may,
in unconsciousness of the interests and assumptions that support us,
criticise the truth or value of results obtained elsewhere. Our
criticism will be solid in proportion to the solidity of the unnamed
convictions that inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep roots
and fruitful ramifications which those convictions may have in human
life. Ultimate truth and ultimate value will be reasonably attributed to
those ideas and possessions which can give human nature, as it is, the
highest satisfaction. We may admit that human nature is variable; but
that admission, if justified, will be justified by the satisfaction
which it gives human nature to make it. We might even admit that human
ideals are vain but only if they were nothing worth for the attainment
of the veritable human ideal.
[Sidenote: Origins inessential.]
The given constitution of reason, with whatever a dialectical philosophy
might elicit from it, obviously determines nothing about the causes that
may have brought reason to its present pass or the phases that may have
preceded its appearance. Certain notions about physics might no doubt
suggest themselves to the moralist, who never can be the whole man; he
might suspect, for instance, that the transitive intent of intellect and
will pointed to their vital basis. Transcendence in operation might seem
appropriate only to a being with a history and with an organism subject
to external influences, whose mind should thus come to represent not
merely its momentary state but also its constitutive past and its
eventual fortunes. Such suggestions, however, would be extraneous to
dialectical self-knowledge. They would be tentative only, and human
nature would be freely admitted to be as variable, as relative, and as
transitory as the natural history of the universe might make it.
[Sidenote: Ideals functional.]
The error, however, would be profound and the contradiction hopeless if
we should deny the ideal authority of human nature because we had
discovered its origin and conditions. Nature and evolution, let us say,
have brought life to the present form; but this life lives, these organs
have determinate functions, and human nature, here and now, in relation
to the ideal energies it unfolds, is a fundamental essence, a collection
of activities with determinate limits, relations, and ideals. The
integration and determinateness of these faculties is the condition for
any synthetic operation of reason. As the structure of the steam-engine
has varied greatly since its first invention, and its attributions have
increased, so the structure of human nature has undoubtedly varied since
man first appeared upon the earth; but as in each steam-engine at each
moment there must be a limit of mobility, a unity of function and a
clear determination of parts and tensions, so in human nature, as found
at any time in any man, there is a definite scope by virtue of which
alone he can have a reliable memory, a recognisable character, a faculty
of connected thought and speech, a social utility, and a moral ideal. On
man’s given structure, on his activity hovering about fixed objects,
depends the possibility of conceiving or testing any truth or making
any progress in happiness.
[Sidenote: They are transferable to similar beings.]
Thinkers of different experience and organisation have _pro tanto_
different logics and different moral laws. There are limits to
communication even among beings of the same race, and the faculties and
ideals of one intelligence are not transferable without change to any
other. If this historic diversity in minds were complete, so that each
lived in its own moral world, a science of each of these moral worlds
would still be possible provided some inner fixity or constancy existed
in its meanings. In every human thought together with an immortal intent
there is a mortal and irrecoverable perception: something in it perishes
instantly, the part that can be materially preserved being proportionate
to the stability or fertility of the organ that produced it. If the
function is imitable, the object it terminates in will reappear, and two
or more moments, having the same ideal, will utter comparable messages
and may perhaps be unanimous. Unanimity in thought involves identity of
functions and similarity in organs. These conditions mark off the sphere
of rational communication and society; where they fail altogether there
is no mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral solidarity.
[Sidenote: Authority internal.]
The inner authority of reason, however, is no more destroyed because it
has limits in physical expression or because irrational things exist,
than the grammar of a given language is invalidated because other
languages do not share it, or because some people break its rules and
others are dumb altogether. Innumerable madmen make no difference to the
laws of thought, which borrow their authority from the inward intent and
cogency of each rational mind. Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse
for being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reason
satisfaction is made the measure of good.
The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be
prepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the
bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather
resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the
accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.
In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That universal soul sometimes
spoken of, which is to harmonise and correct individual demands, if it
were a will and an intelligence in act, would itself be an individual
like the others; while if it possessed no will and no intelligence, such
as individuals may have, it would be a physical force or law, a dynamic
system without moral authority and with a merely potential or
represented existence. For to be actual and self-existent is to be
individual. The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physical
power or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art without
falling into manifest idolatry.
[Sidenote: Reason autonomous.]
Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation
of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no
general or abstract essence, the average of all men’s characters, nor
even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy
of the living individual, be he typical or singular. That his type
should be odd or common is merely a physical accident. If he can know
himself by expressing the entelechy of his own nature in the form of a
consistent ideal, he is a rational creature after his own kind, even if,
like the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only individual of his
species. What the majority of human animals may tend to, or what the
past or future variations of a race may be, has nothing to do with
determining the ideal of human nature in a living man, or in an ideal
society of men bound together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Plato
could not have reasoned well about the republic without adjusting
himself to the politics of Buddha or Rousseau, and we should not be able
to determine our own morality without making concessions to the
cannibals or giving a vote to the ants. Within the field of an
anthropology that tests humanity by the skull’s shape, there might be
room for any number of independent moralities, and although, as we shall
see, there is actually a similar foundation in all human and even in all
animal natures, which supports a rudimentary morality common to all, yet
a perfect morality is not really common to any two men nor to any two
phases of the same man’s life.
[Sidenote: Its distribution.]
The distribution of reason, though a subject irrelevant to pure logic or
morals, is one naturally interesting to a rational man, for he is
concerned to know how far beings exist with a congenial structure and an
ideal akin to his own. That circumstance will largely influence his
happiness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sympathetic animal.
His moral idealism itself will crave support from others, if not to give
it direction, at least to give it warmth and courage. The best part of
wealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitted only to a
kindred mind. Hostile natures cannot be brought together by mutual
invective nor harmonised by the brute destruction and disappearance of
either party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared,
and the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile to
one another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred
unanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and rejoice together in
its embodiment.
[Sidenote: Natural selection of minds.]
This has happened to some extent in the whole world, on account of
natural conditions which limit the forms of life possible in one region;
for nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too great
originality and heresy with death. Such moral integration has occurred
very markedly in every good race and society whose members, by adapting
themselves to the same external forces, have created and discovered
their common soul. Spiritual unity is a natural product. There are those
who see a great mystery in the presence of eternal values and impersonal
ideals in a moving and animal world, and think to solve that dualism, as
they call it, by denying that nature can have spiritual functions or
spirit a natural cause; but nothing can be simpler if we make, as we
should, existence the test of possibility. _Ab esse ad posse valet
illatio_. Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion is the
perpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth, and speculation. Nor is
this origin merely imputed to ideals by a late and cynical observer: it
is manifest in the ideals themselves, by their subject matter and
intent. For what are ideals about, what do they idealise, except natural
existence and natural passions? That would be a miserable and
superfluous ideal indeed that was nobody’s ideal of nothing. The
pertinence of ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst and
flimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that elude nature’s limits
and belie her potentialities. Ideals are forerunners or heralds of
nature’s successes, not always followed, indeed, by their fulfilment,
for nature is but nature and has to feel her way; but they are an
earnest, at least, of an achieved organisation, an incipient
accomplishment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the world.
To speak of nature’s successes is, of course, to impute success
retroactively; but the expression may be allowed when we consider that
the same functional equilibrium which is looked back upon as a good by
the soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it creates
the possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is more
than a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made a
sense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend or
previously esteem those formations which are the condition of value or
intention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition;
but when those formations arise they determine estimation, and fix the
direction of preference, so that the evolution which produced them, when
looked back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained, cannot help
seeming to have been directed toward the good now distinguished and
partly attained. For this reason creation is regarded as a work of love,
and the power that brought order out of chaos is called intelligence.
[Sidenote: Living stability.]
These natural formations, tending to generate and realise each its
ideal, are, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, produced no less
mechanically, doubtless, than the onward current, yet seeming to arrest
or to reverse it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series of
phases with a recognisable rhythm; memory reverses it by modifying this
rhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those that
supervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. This stability
is relative, being still a mode of flux, and consists fundamentally in
repetition. Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it
preserves form and disregards time and matter. Inheritance is repetition
on a larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations; while habit and
memory are a sort of heredity within the individual, since here an old
perception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a forward
march. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; much
as a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited
from the preceding notes, which give it a new setting.
[Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress.]
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is
set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as
among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is
frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in
consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and
barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a
second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and
suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they
thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and
true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and
all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical,
repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile
readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to
die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case
must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic
to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age
is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same
inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and
degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.
[Sidenote: Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.]
Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must not
be lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed into
Italian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure,
but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every
individual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as
the increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation
already attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered,
growth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what is
gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again
and progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languages
or religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at the
beginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression
there; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and
all comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary.
Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.
The variation human nature is open to is not, then, variation in any
direction. There are transformations that would destroy it. So long as
it endures it must retain all that constitutes it now, all that it has
so far gathered and worked into its substance. The genealogy of progress
is like that of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor. It
starts, so to speak, from a single point, free as yet to take any
direction. When once, however, evolution has taken a single step, say in
the direction of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced without
extinction of the species. Such extinction may take place while progress
in other lines is continued. All that preceded the forking of the dead
and the living branch will be as well represented and as legitimately
continued by the surviving radiates as it could have been by the
vertebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate ideal is lost for ever,
and no more progress is possible along that line.
[Sidenote: Perfectibility.]
The future of moral evolution is accordingly infinite, but its character
is more and more determinate at every step. Mankind can never, without
perishing, surrender its animal nature, its need to eat and drink, its
sexual method of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty of
speech, its arts of music, poetry, and building. Particular races cannot
subsist if they renounce their savage instincts, but die, like wild
animals, in captivity; and particular individuals die when not suffered
any longer to retain their memories, their bodies, or even their master
passions. Thus human nature survives amid a continual fluctuation of its
embodiments. At every step twigs and leaves are thrown out that last but
one season; but the underlying stem may have meantime grown stronger and
more luxuriant. Whole branches sometimes wither, but others may continue
to bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the common root to every
uttermost flower; but at each forking in the growth the branches part
company, and what happens in one is no direct concern of the others. The
products of one age and nation may well be unintelligible to another;
the elements of humanity common to both may lie lower down. So that the
highest things are communicable to the fewest persons, and yet, among
these few, are the most perfectly communicable. The more elaborate and
determinate a man’s heritage and genius are, the more he has in common
with his next of kin, and the more he can transmit and implant in his
posterity for ever. Civilisation is cumulative. The farther it goes the
intenser it is, substituting articulate interests for animal fumes and
for enigmatic passions. Such articulate interests can be shared; and
the infinite vistas they open up can be pursued for ever with the
knowledge that a work long ago begun is being perfected and that an
ideal is being embodied which need never be outworn.
[Sidenote: Nature and human nature.]
So long as external conditions remain constant it is obvious that the
greater organisation a being possesses the greater strength he will
have. If indeed primary conditions varied, the finer creatures would die
first; for their adaptation is more exquisite and the irreversible core
of their being much larger relatively; but in a constant environment
their equipment makes them irresistible and secures their permanence and
multiplication. Now man is a part of nature and her organisation may be
regarded as the foundation of his own: the word nature is therefore less
equivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one of
her more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore represents
the universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmic
equilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable of
being long maintained. Some of the ancients thought it eternal; physics
now suggests a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium, by which
the stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed to
proceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stability
nature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no one
knows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to what
excellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikely
that before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for more
improvement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is
remarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. This
possibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who think
the natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life can
be lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with the
tragic possibility that progress and human life should some day end
together. If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal all
adaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essential
catastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could be
hoped for in all eternity. I am not sure that a humanity such as we
know, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more
exhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity
together with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its
compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better
times may come.
[Sidenote: Human nature formulated.]
Human nature, then, has for its core the substance of nature at large,
and is one of its more complex formations. Its determination is
progressive. It varies indefinitely in its historic manifestations and
fades into what, as a matter of natural history, might no longer be
termed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinate
entelechy, the ideal of that being’s life, based on his instincts,
summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and
shared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. His
perceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as
embodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards of
justice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of
it, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions of its
inherent tendencies.
[Sidenote: Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.]
This definition of human nature, clear as it may be in itself and true
to the facts, will perhaps hardly make sufficiently plain how the Life
of Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal world a creative and
absolute authority. A more concrete description of human nature may
accordingly not come amiss, especially as the important practical
question touching the extension of a given moral authority over times
and places depends on the degree of kinship found among the creatures
inhabiting those regions. To give a general picture of human nature and
its rational functions will be the task of the following books. The
truth of a description which must be largely historical may not be
indifferent to the reader, and I shall study to avoid bias in the
presentation, in so far as is compatible with frankness and brevity; yet
even if some bias should manifest itself and if the picture were
historically false, the rational principles we shall be trying to
illustrate will not thereby be invalidated. Illustrations might have
been sought in some fictitious world, if imagination had not seemed so
much less interesting than reality, which besides enforces with
unapproachable eloquence the main principle in view, namely, that nature
carries its ideal with it and that the progressive organisation of
irrational impulses makes a rational life.
*** End of Volume I ***
REASON IN SOCIETY
Volume Two of “The Life of Reason”
GEORGE SANTAYANA
hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê
CONTENTS
BOOK II.—REASON IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER I
LOVE
Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.—Nutrition and
reproduction.—Priority of the latter.—Love celebrates the initial
triumph of form and is deeply ideal.—Difficulty in describing
love.—One-sided or inverted theories about it.—Sexual functions its
basis.—Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.—Glory of
animal love.—Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.—Moral censure provoked.—The heart alienated from the
world.—Childish ideals.—Their light all focussed on the object of
love.—Three environments for love.—Subjectivity of the
passion.—Machinery regulating choice.—The choice
unstable.—Instinctive essence of love.—Its ideality.—Its universal
scope.—Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34
CHAPTER II
THE FAMILY
The family arises spontaneously.—It harmonises natural
interests.—Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.—The
naturally dull achieve intelligence.—It is more blessed to save than to
create.—Parental instinct regards childhood only.—Handing on the torch
of life.—Adventitious functions assumed by the family.—Inertia in
human nature.—Family tyrannies.—Difficulty in abstracting from the
family.—Possibility of substitutes.—Plato’s heroic
communism.—Opposite modern tendencies.—Individualism in a sense
rational.—The family tamed.—Possible readjustments and
reversions.—The ideal includes generation.—Inner values already lodged
in this function.—Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.
Pages 35-59
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR
Patriarchal economy.—Origin of the state.—Three uses of
civilisation.—Its rationality contingent.—Sources of wealth.—Excess
of it possible.—Irrational industry.—Its jovial and ingenious
side.—Its tyranny.—An impossible remedy.—Basis of government.—How
rationality accrues.—Ferocious but useful despotisms.—Occasional
advantage of being conquered.—Origin of free governments.—Their
democratic tendencies.—Imperial peace.—Nominal and real status of
armies.—Their action irresponsible.—Pugnacity human.—Barrack-room
philosophy.—Military virtues.—They are splendid vices.—Absolute value
in strife.—Sport a civilised way of preserving it.—Who shall found the
universal commonwealth? Pages 60-87
CHAPTER IV
THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL
Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.—Its causes natural
and its privileges just.—Advantage of inequality.—Fable of the belly
and the members.—Fallacy in it.—Theism expresses better the
aristocratic ideal.—A heaven with many mansions.—If God is defined as
the human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.—When natures differ
perfections differ too.—Theory that stations actually correspond to
faculty.—Its falsity.—Feeble individuality the rule.—Sophistical
envy.—Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.—Mutilation by
crowding.—A hint to optimists.—How aristocracies might do good.—Man
adds wrong to nature’s injury.—Conditions of a just inequality. Pages
88-113
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY
Democracy as an end and as a means.—Natural democracy leads to
monarchy.—Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.—Ideals
and expedients.—Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if
rational, would serve common interests.—People jealous of eminence.—It
is representative, but subject to decay.—Ancient citizenship a
privilege.—Modern democracy industrial.—Dangers to current
civilisation.—Is current civilisation a good?—Horrors of materialistic
democracy.—Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.—The difficulty the
same as in all Socialism.—The masses would have to be plebeian in
position and patrician in feeling.—Organisation for ideal ends breeds
fanaticism.—Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136
CHAPTER VI
FREE SOCIETY
Primacy of nature over spirit.—All experience at bottom
liberal.—Social experience has its ideality too.—The self an
ideal.—Romantic egotism.—Vanity.—Ambiguities of fame.—Its possible
ideality.—Comradeship.—External conditions of friendship.—Identity in
sex required, and in age.—Constituents of friendship.—Personal
liking.—The refracting human medium for ideas.—Affection based on the
refraction.—The medium must also be transparent.—Common interests
indispensable.—Friendship between man and wife.—Between master and
disciple.—Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.—Automatic
idealisation of heroes. Pages 137-159
CHAPTER VII
PATRIOTISM
The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must be
represented symbolically.—Ambiguous limits of a native country,
geographical and moral.—Sentimental and political patriotism.—The
earth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty.—Race, when
distinct, the greatest of distinctions.—“Pure” races may be morally
sterile.—True nationality direction on a definite ideal.—Country well
represented by domestic and civic religion.—Misleading identification
of country with government.—Sporting or belligerent
patriotism.—Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government
supported is universally beneficent.—Accidents of birth and training
affect the ideal.—They are conditions and may contribute
something.—They are not ends.—The symbol for country may be a man and
may become an idol.—Feudal representation sensitive but
partial.—Monarchical representation comprehensive but
treacherous.—Impersonal symbols no advantage.—Patriotism not
self-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal. Pages 160-183
CHAPTER VIII
IDEAL SOCIETY
The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.—It gives rise
to conscience or sympathy with the public voice.—Guises of public
opinion.—Oracles and revelations.—The ideal a measure for all
existences and no existence itself.—Contrast between natural and
intellectual bonds.—Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal
society.—Significant symbols revert to the concrete.—Nature a symbol
for destiny.—Representative notions have also inherent
values.—Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.—Their opposite outlook.—In translating existence into human
terms they give human nature its highest exercise.—Science should be
mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.—Summary of this book. Pages
184-205
REASON IN SOCIETY
CHAPTER I
LOVE
[Sidenote: Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.]
If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought
to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all
other interests would be subsumed. His acts would explain themselves
without looking beyond his given essence, and his soul would be like a
musical composition, which once written out cannot grow different and
once rendered can ask for nothing but, at most, to be rendered over
again. In truth, however, man is an animal, a portion of the natural
flux; and the consequence is that his nature has a moving centre, his
functions an external reference, and his ideal a true ideality. What he
strives to preserve, in preserving himself, is something which he never
has been at any particular moment. He maintains his equilibrium by
motion. His goal is in a sense beyond him, since it is not his
experience, but a form which all experience ought to receive. The inmost
texture of his being is propulsive, and there is nothing more intimately
bound up with his success than mobility and devotion to transcendent
aims. If there is a transitive function in knowledge and an unselfish
purpose in love, that is only because, at bottom, there is a
self-reproductive, flying essence in all existence.
If the equilibrium of man’s being were stable he would need neither
nutrition, reproduction, nor sense. As it is, sense must renew his ideas
and guide his instincts otherwise than as their inner evolution would
demand; and regenerative processes must strive to repair beneath the
constant irreparable lapse of his substance. His business is to create
and remodel those organisms in which ideals are bred. In order to have a
soul to save he must perpetually form it anew; he must, so to speak,
_earn his own living_. In this vital labour, we may ask, is nutrition or
reproduction the deeper function? Or, to put the corresponding moral
question, is the body or the state the primary good?
[Sidenote: Nutrition and reproduction]
If we view the situation from the individual’s side, as
self-consciousness might view it, we may reply that nutrition is
fundamental, for if the body were not nourished every faculty would
decay. Could nutrition only succeed and keep the body young,
reproduction would be unnecessary, with its poor pretence at maintaining
the mobile human form in a series of examples. On the other hand, if we
view the matter from above, as science and philosophy should, we may say
that nutrition is but germination of a pervasive sort, that the body is
a tabernacle in which the transmissible human spirit is carried for a
while, a shell for the immortal seed that dwells in it and has created
it. This seed, however, for rational estimation, is merely a means to
the existence and happiness of individuals. Transpersonal and continuous
in its own fluid being, the potential grows personal in its ideal
fulfilments. In other words, this potentiality is material (though
called sometimes an idea) and has its only value in the particular
creatures it may produce.
[Sidenote: Priority of the latter]
Reproduction is accordingly primary and more completely instrumental
than nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, while
nutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality.
Reproduction initiates life and remains at life’s core, a function
without which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is more
central, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a way
peripheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking the
ideal’s first victory over the universal flux, before any higher
function than reproduction itself has accrued to the animal. To nourish
an existing being is to presuppose a pause in generation; the nucleus,
before it dissolves into other individuals, gathers about itself, for
its own glory, certain temporal and personal faculties. It lives for
itself; while in procreation it signs its own death-warrant, makes its
will, and institutes its heir.
[Sidenote: Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply
ideal.]
This situation has its counterpart in feeling. Replenishment is a sort
of delayed breathing, as if the animal had to hunt for air: it
necessitates more activity than it contains; it engages external senses
in its service and promotes intelligence. After securing a dumb
satisfaction, or even in preparing it, it leaves the habits it employed
free for observation and ideal exercise. Reproduction, on the contrary,
depletes; it is an expense of spirit, a drag on physical and mental
life; it entangles rather than liberates; it fuses the soul again into
the impersonal, blind flux. Yet, since it constitutes the primary and
central triumph of life, it is in itself more ideal and generous than
nutrition; it fascinates the will in an absolute fashion, and the
pleasures it brings are largely spiritual. For though the
instrumentalities of reproduction may seem gross and trivial from a
conventional point of view, its essence is really ideal, the perfect
type, indeed, of ideality, since form and an identical life are therein
sustained successfully by a more rhythmical flux of matter.
It may seem fanciful, even if not unmeaning, to say that a man’s soul
more truly survives in his son’s youth than in his own decrepitude; but
this principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, in
which individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itself
in so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetables
soul and seed go forth together and leave nothing but a husk behind. In
the human individual love may seem a mere incident of youth and a
sentimental madness; but that episode, if we consider the race, is
indispensable to the whole drama; and if we look to the order in which
ideal interests have grown up and to their superposition in moral
experience, love will seem the truly primitive and initiatory passion.
Consciousness, amused ordinarily by the most superficial processes,
itself bears witness to the underlying claims of reproduction and is
drawn by it for a moment into life’s central vortex; and love, while it
betrays its deep roots by the imperative force it exerts and the silence
it imposes on all current passions, betrays also its ideal mission by
casting an altogether novel and poetic spell over the mind.
[Sidenote: Difficulty in describing love.]
The conscious quality of this passion differs so much in various races
and individuals, and at various points in the same life, that no account
of it will ever satisfy everybody.[A] Poets and novelists never tire of
depicting it anew; but although the experience they tell of is fresh
and unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on the
whole, from a great monotony. Love’s gesture and symptoms are noted and
unvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, can
give of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, who
renounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedly
inadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; to
the naturalist it is a thin veil and prelude to the self-assertion of
lust. This opposition has prevented philosophers from doing justice to
the subject. Two things need to be admitted by anyone who would not go
wholly astray in such speculation: one, that love has an animal basis;
the other, that it has an ideal object. Since these two propositions
have usually been thought contradictory, no writer has ventured to
present more than half the truth, and that half out of its true
relations.
[Sidenote: One-sided or inverted theories about it.]
Plato, who gave eloquent expression to the ideal burden of the passion,
and divined its political and cosmic message, passed over its natural
history with a few mythical fancies; and Schopenhauer, into whose
system a naturalistic treatment would have fitted so easily, allowed his
metaphysics to carry him at this point into verbal inanities; while, of
course, like all profane writers on the subject, he failed to appreciate
the oracles which Plato had delivered. In popular feeling, where
sentiment and observation must both make themselves felt somehow or
other, the tendency is to imagine that love is an absolute, non-natural
energy which, for some unknown reason, or for none at all, lights upon
particular persons, and rests there eternally, as on its ultimate goal.
In other words, it makes the origin of love divine and its object
natural: which is the exact opposite of the truth. If it were once seen,
however, that every ideal expresses some natural function, and that no
natural function is incapable, in its free exercise, of evolving some
ideal and finding justification, not in some collateral animal, but in
an inherent operation like life or thought, which being transmissible in
its form is also eternal, then the philosophy of love should not prove
permanently barren. For love is a brilliant illustration of a principle
everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the
friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can be
no philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or in
denying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in its
origin and all spiritual in its possible fruits.
[Sidenote: Sexual functions its basis.]
Plastic matter, in transmitting its organisation, takes various courses
which it is the part of natural history to describe. Even after
reproduction has become sexual, it will offer no basis for love if it
does not require a union of the two parent bodies. Did germinal
substances, unconsciously diffused, meet by chance in the external
medium and unite there, it is obvious that whatever obsessions or
pleasures maturity might bring they would not have the quality which men
call love. But when an individual of the opposite sex must be met with,
recognised, and pursued, and must prove responsive, then each is haunted
by the possible other. Each feels in a generic way the presence and
attraction of his fellows; he vibrates to their touch, he dreams of
their image, he is restless and wistful if alone. When the vague need
that solicits him is met by the presence of a possible mate it is
extraordinarily kindled. Then, if it reaches fruition, it subsides
immediately, and after an interval, perhaps, of stupor and vital
recuperation, the animal regains his independence, his peace, and his
impartial curiosity. You might think him on the way to becoming
intelligent; but the renewed nutrition and cravings of the sexual
machinery soon engross his attention again; all his sprightly
indifference vanishes before nature’s categorical imperative. That
fierce and turbid pleasure, by which his obedience is rewarded, hastens
his dissolution; every day the ensuing lassitude and emptiness give him
a clearer premonition of death. It is not figuratively only that his
soul has passed into his offspring. The vocation to produce them was a
chief part of his being, and when that function is sufficiently
fulfilled he is superfluous in the world and becomes partly superfluous
even to himself. The confines of his dream are narrowed. He moves
apathetically and dies forlorn.
Some echo of the vital rhythm which pervades not merely the generations
of animals, but the seasons and the stars, emerges sometimes in
consciousness; on reaching the tropics in the mortal ecliptic, which the
human individual may touch many times without much change in his outer
fortunes, the soul may occasionally divine that it is passing through a
supreme crisis. Passion, when vehement, may bring atavistic sentiments.
When love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, and
even, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of the
universe.[B] The human soul reverts at such a moment to what an
ephemeral insect might feel, buzzing till it finds its mate in the noon.
Its whole destiny was wooing, and, that mission accomplished, it sings
its _Nunc dimittis_, renouncing heartily all irrelevant things, now that
the one fated and all-satisfying good has been achieved. Where parental
instincts exist also, nature soon shifts her loom: a milder impulse
succeeds, and a satisfaction of a gentler sort follows in the birth of
children. The transcendental illusion is here corrected, and it is seen
that the extinction the lovers had accepted needed not to be complete.
The death they welcomed was not without its little resurrection. The
feeble worm they had generated bore their immortality within it.
The varieties of sexual economy are many and to each may correspond, for
all we know, a special sentiment. Sometimes the union established is
intermittent; sometimes it crowns the end of life and dissolves it
altogether; sometimes it remains, while it lasts, monogamous; sometimes
the sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodic
in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures
throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd
together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the
time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of
what they have just discovered to be the fair.
[Sidenote: Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.]
A naturalist not ashamed to indulge his poetic imagination might easily
paint for us the drama of these diverse loves. It suffices for our
purpose to observe that the varying passions and duties which life can
contain depend upon the organic functions of the animal. A fish
incapable of coition, absolved from all care for its young, which it
never sees or never distinguishes from the casual swimmers darting
across its path, such a fish, being without social faculties or calls to
co-operation, cannot have the instincts, perceptions, or emotions which
belong to social beings. A male of some higher species that feels only
once a year the sudden solicitations of love cannot be sentimental in
all the four seasons: his head-long passion, exhausted upon its present
object and dismissed at once without remainder, leaves his senses
perfectly free and colourless to scrutinise his residual world. Whatever
further fears or desires may haunt him will have nothing mystical or
sentimental about them. He will be a man of business all the year round,
and a lover only on May-day. A female that does not suffice for the
rearing of her young will expect and normally receive her mate’s aid
long after the pleasures of love are forgotten by him. Disinterested
fidelity on his part will then be her right and his duty. But a female
that, once pregnant, needs, like the hen, no further co-operation on the
male’s part will turn from him at once with absolute indifference to
brood perpetually on her eggs, undisturbed by the least sense of
solitude or jealousy. And the chicks that at first follow her and find
shelter under her wings will soon be forgotten also and relegated to the
mechanical landscape. There is no pain in the timely snapping of the
dearest bonds where society has not become a permanent organism, and
perpetual friendship is not one of its possible modes.
Transcendent and ideal passions may well judge themselves to have an
incomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more than what every
passion, were it articulate, would assign to itself and to its objects.
The dumbness of a passion may accordingly, from one point of view, be
called the index of its baseness; for if it cannot ally itself with
ideas its affinities can hardly lie in the rational mind nor its
advocates be among the poets. But if we listen to the master-passion
itself rather than to the loquacious arts it may have enlisted in its
service, we shall understand that it is not self-condemned because it is
silent, nor an anomaly in nature because inharmonious with human life.
The fish’s heartlessness is his virtue; the male bee’s lasciviousness is
his vocation; and if these functions were retrenched or encumbered in
order to assimilate them to human excellence they would be merely
dislocated. We should not produce virtue where there was vice, but
defeat a possible arrangement which would have had its own vitality and
order.
[Sidenote: Glory of animal love.]
Animal love is a marvellous force; and while it issues in acts that may
be followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a more
sympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it.
Erotic poets, to hide their want of ability to make the dumb passion
speak, have played feebly with veiled insinuations and comic effects;
while more serious sonneteers have harped exclusively on secondary and
somewhat literary emotions, abstractly conjugating the verb to love.
Lucretius, in spite of his didactic turns, has been on this subject,
too, the most ingenuous and magnificent of poets, although he chose to
confine his description to the external history of sexual desire. It is
a pity that he did not turn, with his sublime sincerity, to the inner
side of it also, and write the drama of the awakened senses, the
poignant suasion of beauty, when it clouds the brain, and makes the
conventional earth, seen through that bright haze, seem a sorry fable.
Western poets should not have despised what the Orientals, in their
fugitive stanzas, seem often to have sung most exquisitely: the joy of
gazing on the beloved, of following or being followed, of tacit
understandings and avowals, of flight together into some solitude to
people it with those ineffable confidences which so naturally follow the
outward proofs of love. All this makes the brightest page of many a
life, the only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal;
while if the beasts could speak they would give us, no doubt, endless
versions of the only joy in which, as we may fancy, the blood of the
universe flows consciously through their hearts.
The darkness which conventionally covers this passion is one of the
saddest consequences of Adam’s fall. It was a terrible misfortune in
man’s development that he should not have been able to acquire the
higher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths of
his being be thus polluted and the most delightful of nature’s mysteries
be an occasion not for communion with her, as it should have remained,
but for depravity and sorrow?
[Sidenote: Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.]
This question, asked in moral perplexity, admits of a scientific answer.
Man, in becoming more complex, becomes less stably organised. His sexual
instinct, instead of being intermittent, but violent and boldly
declared, becomes practically constant, but is entangled in many
cross-currents of desire, in many other equally imperfect adaptations of
structure to various ends. Indulgence in any impulse can then easily
become excessive and thwart the rest; for it may be aroused artificially
and maintained from without, so that in turn it disturbs its neighbours.
Sometimes the sexual instinct may be stimulated out of season by
example, by a too wakeful fancy, by language, by pride—for all these
forces are now working in the same field and intermingling their
suggestions. At the same time the same instinct may derange others, and
make them fail at their proper and pressing occasions.
[Sidenote: Moral censure provoked.]
In consequence of such derangements, reflection and public opinion will
come to condemn what in itself was perfectly innocent. The corruption of
a given instinct by others and of others by it, becomes the ground for
long attempts to suppress or enslave it. With the haste and formalism
natural to language and to law, external and arbitrary limits are set to
its operation. As no inward adjustment can possibly correspond to these
conventional barriers and compartments of life, a war between nature and
morality breaks out both in society and in each particular bosom—a war
in which every victory is a sorrow and every defeat a dishonour. As one
instinct after another becomes furious or disorganised, cowardly or
criminal, under these artificial restrictions, the public and private
conscience turns against it all its forces, necessarily without much
nice discrimination; the frank passions of youth are met with a grimace
of horror on all sides, with _rumores senum severiorum_, with an
insistence on reticence and hypocrisy. Such suppression is favourable to
corruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supply
the place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaid
with pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty. Hereupon the
authorities that rule in such matters naturally redouble their vigilance
and exaggerate their reasonable censure: chastity begins to seem
essentially holy and perpetual virginity ends by becoming an absolute
ideal. Thus the disorder in man’s life and disposition, when grown
intolerable, leads him to condemn the very elements out of which order
might have been constituted, and to mistake his total confusion for his
total depravity.
[Sidenote: The heart alienated from the world.]
Banished from the open day, covered with mockery, and publicly ignored,
this necessary pleasure flourishes none the less in dark places and in
the secret soul. Its familiar presence there, its intimate habitation in
what is most oneself, helps to cut the world in two and to separate the
inner from the outer life. In that mysticism which cannot disguise its
erotic affinities this disruption reaches an absolute and theoretic
form; but in many a youth little suspected of mysticism it produces
estrangement from the conventional moralising world, which he
instinctively regards as artificial and alien. It prepares him for
excursions into a private fairy-land in which unthought-of joys will
blossom amid friendlier magic forces. The truly good then seems to be
the fantastic, the sensuous, the prodigally unreal. He gladly forgets
the dreary world he lives in to listen for a thousand and one nights to
his dreams.
[Sidenote: Childish ideals.]
This is the region where those who have no conception of the Life of
Reason place the ideal; and an ideal is indeed there but the ideal of a
single and inordinate impulse. A rational mind, on the contrary, moves
by preference in the real world, cultivating all human interests in due
proportion. The love-sick and luxurious dream-land dear to irrational
poets is a distorted image of the ideal world; but this distortion has
still an ideal motive, since it is made to satisfy the cravings of a
forgotten part of the soul and to make a home for those elements in
human nature which have been denied overt existence. If the ideal is
meantime so sadly caricatured, the fault lies with the circumstances of
life that have not allowed the sane will adequate exercise. Lack of
strength and of opportunity makes it impossible for man to preserve all
his interests in a just harmony; and his conscious ideal, springing up
as it too often does in protest against suffering and tyranny, has not
scope and range enough to include the actual opportunities for action.
Nature herself, by making a slave of the body, has thus made a tyrant of
the soul.
[Sidenote: Their light all focussed on the object of love.]
Fairy-land and a mystical heaven contain many other factors besides that
furnished by unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal
images may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these
fantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and
vaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but
mindless æstheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood
on such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for
romantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back from
its loose reveries and fixes it upon a single object. Then the ideal
seems at last to have been brought down to earth. Its embodiment has
been discovered amongst the children of men. Imagination narrows her
range. Instead of all sorts of flatteries to sense and improbable
delicious adventures, the lover imagines but a single joy: to be master
of his love in body and soul. Jealousy pursues him. Even if he dreads no
physical betrayal, he suffers from terror and morbid sensitiveness at
every hint of mental estrangement.
[Sidenote: Three environments for love.]
This attachment is often the more absorbing the more unaccountable it
seems; and as in hypnotism the subject is dead to all influences but
that of the operator, so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to
the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not
selected; it is recognised and obeyed. Pre-arranged reactions in the
system respond to whatever stimulus, at a propitious moment, happens to
break through and arouse them pervasively. Nature has opened various
avenues to that passion in whose successful operation she has so much at
stake. Sometimes the magic influence asserts itself suddenly, sometimes
gently and unawares. One approach, which in poetry has usurped more
than its share of attention, is through beauty; another, less glorious,
but often more efficacious, through surprised sense and premonitions of
pleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities.
Contemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence nor
even the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply it
with a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, for
instance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, the
sympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such an
effect no passion would be needed, as none is needed to perceive beauty
or to feel pleasure.
What Aristotle calls friendships of utility, pleasure, or virtue, all
resting on common interests of some impersonal sort, are far from
possessing the quality of love, its thrill, flutter, and absolute sway
over happiness and misery. But it may well fall to such influences to
awaken or feed the passion where it actually arises. Whatever
circumstances pave the way, love does not itself appear until a sexual
affinity is declared. When a woman, for instance, contemplating
marriage, asks herself whether she really loves her suitor or merely
accepts him, the test is the possibility of awakening a sexual affinity.
For this reason women of the world often love their husbands more truly
than they did their lovers, because marriage has evoked an elementary
feeling which before lay smothered under a heap of coquetries,
vanities, and conventions.
[Sidenote: Subjectivity of the passion.]
Man, on the contrary, is polygamous by instinct, although often kept
faithful by habit no less than by duty. If his fancy is left free, it is
apt to wander. We observe this in romantic passion no less than in a
life of mere gallantry and pleasure. Sentimental illusions may become a
habit, and the shorter the dream is the more often it is repeated, so
that any susceptible poet may find that he, like Alfred de Musset, “must
love incessantly, who once has loved.” Love is indeed much less exacting
than it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for
one-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at
hand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for
someone else; for although with acquaintance the quality of an
attachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that
person its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of
the passion is much the same for every object. What really affects the
character of love is the lover’s temperament, age, and experience. The
objects that appeal to each man reveal his nature; but those
unparalleled virtues and that unique divinity which the lover discovers
there are reflections of his own adoration, things that ecstasy is very
cunning in. He loves what he imagines and worships what he creates.
[Sidenote: Machinery regulating choice.]
Those who do not consider these matters so curiously may feel that to
refer love in this way chiefly to inner processes is at once ignominious
and fantastic. But nothing could be more natural; the soul accurately
renders, in this experience, what is going on in the body and in the
race. Nature had a problem to solve in sexual reproduction which would
have daunted a less ruthless experimenter. She had to bring together
automatically, and at the dictation, as they felt, of their
irresponsible wills, just the creatures that by uniting might reproduce
the species. The complete sexual reaction had to be woven together out
of many incomplete reactions to various stimuli, reactions not
specifically sexual. The outer senses had to be engaged, and many
secondary characters found in bodies had to be used to attract
attention, until the deeper instinctive response should have time to
gather itself together and assert itself openly. Many mechanical
preformations and reflexes must conspire to constitute a determinate
instinct. We name this instinct after its ultimate function, looking
forward to the uses we observe it to have; and it seems to us in
consequence an inexplicable anomaly that many a time the instinct is set
in motion when its alleged purpose cannot be fulfilled; as when love
appears prematurely or too late, or fixes upon a creature of the wrong
age or sex. These anomalies show us how nature is built up and, far from
being inexplicable, are hints that tend to make everything clear, when
once a verbal and mythical philosophy has been abandoned.
Responses which we may call sexual in view of results to which they may
ultimately lead are thus often quite independent, and exist before they
are drawn into the vortex of a complete and actually generative act.
External stimulus and present idea will consequently be altogether
inadequate to explain the profound upheaval which may ensue, if, as we
say, we actually fall in love. That the senses should be played upon is
nothing, if no deeper reaction is aroused. All depends on the juncture
at which, so to speak, the sexual circuit is completed and the emotional
currents begin to circulate. Whatever object, at such a critical moment,
fills the field of consciousness becomes a signal and associate for the
whole sexual mood. It is breathlessly devoured in that pause and
concentration of attention, that rearrangement of the soul, which love
is conceived in; and the whole new life which that image is engulfed in
is foolishly supposed to be its effect. For the image is in
consciousness, but not the profound predispositions which gave it place
and power.
[Sidenote: The choice unstable.]
This association between passion and its signals may be merely
momentary, or it may be perpetual: a Don Juan and a Dante are both
genuine lovers. In a gay society the gallant addresses every woman as if
she charmed him, and perhaps actually finds any kind of beauty, or mere
femininity anywhere, a sufficient spur to his desire. These momentary
fascinations are not necessarily false: they may for an instant be quite
absorbing and irresistible; they may genuinely suffuse the whole mind.
Such mercurial fire will indeed require a certain imaginative
temperament; and there are many persons who, short of a life-long
domestic attachment, can conceive of nothing but sordid vice. But even
an inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally
combustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because
they come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in
which it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in its
formative stage.
Thus Plato did not hesitate to make the love of all wines, under
whatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wine
and an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, he
wittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter the
most opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing his
inclination. To be omnivorous is one pole of true love: to be exclusive
is the other. A man whose heart, if I may say so, lies deeper, hidden
under a thicker coat of mail, will have less play of fancy, and will be
far from finding every charm charming, or every sort of beauty a
stimulus to love. Yet he may not be less prone to the tender passion,
and when once smitten may be so penetrated by an unimagined tenderness
and joy, that he will declare himself incapable of ever loving again,
and may actually be so. Having no rivals and a deeper soil, love can
ripen better in such a constant spirit; it will not waste itself in a
continual patter of little pleasures and illusions. But unless the
passion of it is to die down, it must somehow assert its universality:
what it loses in diversity it must gain in applicability. It must become
a principle of action and an influence colouring everything that is
dreamt of; otherwise it would have lost its dignity and sunk into a dead
memory or a domestic bond.
[Sidenote: Instinctive essence of love.]
True love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners have much
to do with such incidents, and the race which happens to set, at a given
time, the fashion in literature makes its temperament public and
exercises a sort of contagion over all men’s fancies. If women are
rarely seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to; if all imagination has
to build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion, people fall in love
at first sight. For they must fall in love somehow, and any stimulus is
enough if none more powerful is forthcoming. When society, on the
contrary, allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, a
first impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and obliterated
by others. Acquaintance becomes necessary for love when it is necessary
for memory. But what makes true love is not the information conveyed by
acquaintance, not any circumstantial charms that may be therein
discovered; it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity, an
inexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence organising the
world, like a luminous crystal, about one magic point. So that although
love seldom springs up suddenly in these days into anything like a
full-blown passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time a
conquest over the heart; for all virtues, sympathies, confidences will
fail to move a man to tenderness and to worship, unless a poignant
effluence from the object envelop him, so that he begins to walk, as it
were, in a dream.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some people
so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest
on circumstantial evidence. But a finely constituted being is sensitive
to its deepest affinities. This is precisely what refinement consists
in, that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a sure
premonition of things ultimate and important. Fine senses vibrate at
once to harmonies which it may take long to verify; so sight is finer
than touch, and thought than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reason
half-way, and is prepared for the consonances that may follow. Beautiful
things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
The grounds we may bring ourselves to assign for our preferences are
discovered by analysing those preferences, and articulate judgments
follow upon emotions which they ought to express, but which they
sometimes sophisticate. So, too, the reasons we give for love either
express what it feels or else are insincere, attempting to justify at
the bar of reason and convention something which is far more primitive
than they and underlies them both. True instinct can dispense with such
excuses. It appeals to the event and is justified by the response which
nature makes to it. It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannot
dominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it is
presumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible.
Unrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world,
where the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single
line to stand perfect and unmarred.
The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a
thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain
a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we
succeed. If we put them by, although in other respects we may call
ourselves happy, we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, and
all that was essentially possible has not been realised. Love in that
case still owns a hidden and potential object, and we sanctify, perhaps,
whatever kindnesses or partialities we indulge in by a secret loyalty to
something impersonal and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would not
have been necessary had things responded to our first expectations. We
might then have identified the ideal with the object that happened to
call it forth. The Life of Reason might have been led instinctively, and
we might have been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace.
[Sidenote: Its ideality.]
As it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse of time, force
us to shuffle our affections and take them as they come, or as we are
suffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, a
friend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an
idea. A divinity passes through these various temples; they may all
remain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outward
change, long after the god has fled from the last into his native
heaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing when
we have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed and
perfunctory attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty,
repeating the empty names of creatures that have long ceased to be what
we once could love, and assuring ourselves that we have remained
constant, without admitting that the world, which is in irreparable
flux, has from the first been betraying us.
Ashamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to smile cynically at
the glory that once shone upon us, and call it a dream. But cynicism is
wasted on the ideal. There is indeed no idol ever identified with the
ideal which honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some day
unmask and discredit. Every real object must cease to be what it seemed,
and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. Yet what the soul
desires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream, but
continually embodies, with varying success, the potentialities it
contains and that prompt desire. Everything that satisfies at all, even
if partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it.
Existence, however, cannot be arrested; and only the transmissible forms
of things can endure, to match the transmissible faculties which living
beings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly significant,
perpetual, and as constant as the nature it expresses; but it can never
itself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure.
[Sidenote: Its universal scope.]
Love is accordingly only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love,
is deceived. His madness, as Plato taught, is divine; for though it be
folly to identify the idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardly
justified. That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted ideally
and given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural causes and of the
mystery it comes to celebrate. The lover knows much more about absolute
good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the
latter, too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms in
discourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods are at best
natural existences, more or less indifferent facts. What the lover comes
upon, on the contrary, is truly persuasive, and witnesses to itself, so
that he worships from the heart and beholds what he worships. That the
true object is no natural being, but an ideal form essentially eternal
and capable of endless embodiments, is far from abolishing its worth; on
the contrary, this fact makes love ideally relevant to generation, by
which the human soul and body may be for ever renewed, and at the same
time makes it a thing for large thoughts to be focussed upon, a thing
representing all rational aims.
Whenever this ideality is absent and a lover sees nothing in his
mistress but what everyone else may find in her, loving her honestly in
her unvarnished and accidental person, there is a friendly and humorous
affection, admirable in itself, but no passion or bewitchment of love;
she is a member of his group, not a spirit in his pantheon. Such an
affection may be altogether what it should be; it may bring a happiness
all the more stable because the heart is quite whole, and no divine
shaft has pierced it. It is hard to stanch wounds inflicted by a god.
The glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death
and immortality together. Love could not be called divine without
platitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal object; to be divine it
must not envisage an accidental good but the principle of goodness, that
which gives other goods their ultimate meaning, and makes all functions
useful. Love is a true natural religion; it has a visible cult, it is
kindled by natural beauties and bows to the best symbol it may find for
its hope; it sanctifies a natural mystery; and, finally, when
understood, it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was
truly the principle of all good.
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never
take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and
elementary. It is accordingly most truly love when it is irresistible
and fatal. The substance of all passion, if we could gather it together,
would be the basis of all ideals, to which all goods would have to
refer. Love actually accomplishes something of the sort; being
primordial it underlies other demands, and can be wholly satisfied only
by a happiness which is ultimate and comprehensive. Lovers are vividly
aware of this fact: their ideal, apparently so inarticulate, seems to
them to include everything. It shares the mystical quality of all
primitive life. Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vague
experience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whatever
clearness is afterward attained. They cling to the notion that nothing
can have a spiritual scope that does not spring from reflection. But in
that case life itself, which brings reflection about, would never
support spiritual interests, and all that is moral would be unnatural
and consequently self-destructive. In truth, all spiritual interests
are supported by animal life; in this the generative function is
fundamental; and it is therefore no paradox, but something altogether
fitting, that if that function realised all it comprises, nothing human
would remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ, of
course, from a first satisfaction, just as all that reproduction
reproduces differs from the reproductive function itself, and vastly
exceeds it. All organs and activities which are inherited, in a sense,
grow out of the reproductive process and serve to clothe it; so that
when the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually
called up and, so to speak, made consciously potential; and love yearns
for the universe of values.
[Sidenote: Its euthanasia.]
This secret is gradually revealed to those who are inwardly attentive
and allow love to teach them something. A man who has truly loved,
though he may come to recognise the thousand incidental illusions into
which love may have led him, will not recant its essential faith. He
will keep his sense for the ideal and his power to worship. The further
objects by which these gifts will be entertained will vary with the
situation. A philosopher, a soldier, and a courtesan will express the
same religion in different ways. In fortunate cases love may glide
imperceptibly into settled domestic affections, giving them henceforth a
touch of ideality; for when love dies in the odour of sanctity people
venerate his relics. In other cases allegiance to the ideal may appear
more sullenly, breaking out in whims, or in little sentimental practices
which might seem half-conventional. Again it may inspire a religious
conversion, charitable works, or even artistic labours. In all these
ways people attempt more or less seriously to lead the Life of Reason,
expressing outwardly allegiance to whatever in their minds has come to
stand for the ideal. If to create was love’s impulse originally, to
create is its effort still, after it has been chastened and has received
some rational extension. The machinery which serves reproduction thus
finds kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal life;
and what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty may be sublimated
even more, until it yearns for an ideal immortality in a transfigured
world, a world made worthy of that love which its children have so often
lavished on it in their dreams.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote A: The wide uses of the English word love add to the
difficulty. I shall take the liberty of limiting the term here to
imaginative passion, to being in love, excluding all other ways of
loving. It follows that love—like its shadow, jealousy—will often be
merely an ingredient in an actual state of feeling; friendship and
confidence, with satisfaction at being liked in return, will often be
mingled with it. We shall have to separate physiologically things which
in consciousness exist undivided, since a philosophic description is
bound to be analytic and cannot render everything at once. Where a poet
might conceive a new composite, making it live, a moralist must dissect
the experience and rest in its eternal elements.]
[Footnote B: One example, among a thousand, is the cry of Siegfried and
Brünhilde in Wagner:
Lachend lass’ uns verderben
Lachend zu Grunde geh’n.
Fahr hin, Walhall’s
Leuchtende Welt!...
Leb’ wohl, pragende
Götter Pracht!
Ende in Wonne,
Du ewig Geschlecht!]
CHAPTER II
THE FAMILY
[Sidenote: The family arises spontaneously.]
Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the
impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless
only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins
presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship
into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half
plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its
consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations we
have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices,
bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once
seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal
career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in
accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He
sails henceforth for one point of the compass.
[Sidenote: It harmonises natural interests.]
The family is one of nature’s masterpieces. It would be hard to conceive
a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents
should represent or support one another better. The husband has an
interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker
gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a
help-mate at home to take thought for his daily necessities. Parents
lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow
their parents with a vicarious immortality.
[Sidenote: Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.]
The long childhood in the human race has made it possible and needful to
transmit acquired experience: possible, because the child’s brain, being
immature, allows instincts and habits to be formed after birth, under
the influence of that very environment in which they are to operate; and
also needful, since children are long incapable of providing for
themselves and compel their parents, if the race is not to die out, to
continue their care, and to diversify it. To be born half-made is an
immense advantage. Structure performed is formed blindly; the _a priori_
is as dangerous in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings of
compulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in any creature
harmonious with the world it is called upon to live in. Nothing but
casual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casual
variations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate in
forming instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art,
mastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the
secret of man’s pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years to
control action advantageously. He has an age of play which is his
apprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selective
experiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage and
suffers little by his mistakes.
[Sidenote: The naturally dull achieve intelligence.]
Had all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been,
nothing essential could have been learned afterward. Mankind would have
contained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still
for ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and as
that animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the most
teachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are most
incorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first prove
ultimately the least intelligent. They depend less on circumstances, but
do not respond to them so well. In some nations everybody is by nature
so astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes any
difference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely that
generation, follows generation without essential progress, and no one
ever remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races,
with a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of the
world within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has planned
on so great a scale.
[Sidenote: It is more blessed to save than to create.]
Generation answers no actual demand except that existing in the parents,
and it establishes a new demand without guaranteeing its satisfaction.
Birth is a benefit only problematically and by anticipation, on the
presumption that the faculties newly embodied are to be exercised
successfully. The second function of the family, to rear, is therefore
higher than the first. To foster and perfect a life after it has been
awakened, to co-operate with a will already launched into the world, is
a positive good work. It has a moral quality and is not mere vegetation;
for in expressing the agent and giving him ideal employment, it helps
the creature affected to employ itself better, too, and to find
expression. In propagating and sowing broadcast precarious beings there
is fertility only, such as plants and animals may have; but there is
charity in furthering what is already rooted in existence and is
striving to live.
This principle is strikingly illustrated in religion. When the Jews had
become spiritual they gave the name of Father to Jehovah, who had before
been only the Lord of Armies or the architect of the cosmos. A mere
source of being would not deserve to be called father, unless it shared
its creatures’ nature and therefore their interests. A deity not so much
responsible for men’s existence or situation as solicitous for their
welfare, who pitied a weakness he could not have intended and was
pleased by a love he could not command, might appropriately be called a
father. It then becomes possible to conceive moral intercourse and
mutual loyalty between God and man, such as Hebrew religion so earnestly
insisted on; for both then have the same interests in the world and look
toward the same consummations. So the natural relations subsisting
between parents and children become moral when it is not merely
derivation that unites them, but community of purpose. The father then
represents his children while they are under his tutelage, and afterward
they represent him, carrying on his arts and inheriting his mind.
[Sidenote: Parental instinct regards childhood only.]
These arts in some cases are little more than retarded instincts,
faculties that ripen late and that manifest themselves without special
instruction when the system is mature. So a bird feeds her young until
they are fledged and can provide for themselves. Parental functions in
such cases are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the
instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied
upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children’s
physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the
vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the
child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and
delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually
fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life
of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular
tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine
community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children.
Often the parent’s influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the
more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what
makes the parents’ claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is
founded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly
theirs, that no longer exists in the man.
To train character and mind would seem to be a father’s natural office,
but as a matter of fact he commonly delegates that task to society. The
fledgling venturing for the first time into the air may learn of his
father and imitate his style of flight; but once launched into the open
it will find the whole sky full of possible masters. The one ultimately
chosen will not necessarily be the nearest; in reason it should be the
most congenial, from whom most can be learned. To choose an imitable
hero is the boy’s first act of freedom; his heart grows by finding its
elective affinities, and it grows most away from home. It will grow also
by returning there, when home has become a part of the world or a refuge
from it; but even then the profoundest messages will come from religion
and from solitary dreams. A consequence is that parental influence, to
be permanent, requires that the family should be hedged about with high
barriers and that the father he endowed with political and religious
authority. He can then exercise the immense influence due to all
tradition, which he represents, and all law, which he administers; but
it is not his bare instincts as a father that give him this ascendency.
It is a social system that has delegated to him most of its functions,
so that all authority flows through him, and he retails justice and
knowledge, besides holding all wealth in his hand. When the father,
apart from these official prerogatives, is eager and able to mould his
children’s minds, a new relation half natural and half ideal, which is
friendship, springs up between father and son. In this ties of blood
merely furnish the opportunity, and what chiefly counts is a moral
impulse, on the one side, to beget children in the spirit, and on the
other a youthful hunger for experience and ideas.
[Sidenote: Handing on the torch of life.]
If _Nunc dimittis_ is a psalm for love to sing, it is even more
appropriate for parental piety. On seeing heirs and representatives of
ours already in the world, we are inclined to give them place and trust
them to realise our foiled ambitions. They, we fancy, will be more
fortunate than we; we shall have screened them from whatever has most
maimed our own lives. Their purer souls, as we imagine, will reach
better things than are now possible to ours, distracted and abused so
long. We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to
the flames, when we find the immortal text already half engrossed in a
fairer copy. In all this there is undoubtedly a measure of illusion,
since little clear improvement is ordinarily possible in the world, and
while our children may improve upon us in some respects, the devil will
catch them unprepared in another quarter. Yet the hope in question is a
transcript of primary impersonal functions to which nature, at certain
levels, limits the animal will. To keep life going was, in the
beginning, the sole triumph of life. Even when nothing but reproduction
was aimed at or attained, existence was made possible and ideally stable
by securing so much; and when the ideal was enlarged so as to include
training and rearing the new generation, life was even better intrenched
and protected. Though further material progress may not be made easier
by this development, since more dangers become fatal as beings grow
complex and mutually dependent, a great step in moral progress has at
any rate been taken.
In itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just as
irrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child also
desires his own happiness, the child’s will sanctions and supports the
father’s. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make one
rational life. The father’s instinct and sense of duty are now
vindicated experimentally in the child’s progress, while the son,
besides the joy of living, has the pious function of satisfying his
parent’s hopes. Even if life could achieve nothing more than this, it
would have reached something profoundly natural and perfectly ideal. In
patriarchal ages men feel it is enough to have inherited their human
patrimony, to have enjoyed it, and to hand it down unimpaired. He who is
not childless goes down to his grave in peace. Reason may afterward come
to larger vistas and more spiritual aims, but the principle of love and
responsibility will not be altered. It will demand that wills be made
harmonious and satisfactions compatible.
[Sidenote: Adventitious functions assumed by the family.]
Life is experimental, and whatever performs some necessary function, and
cannot be discarded, is a safe nucleus for many a parasite, a
starting-point for many new experiments. So the family, in serving to
keep the race alive, becomes a point of departure for many institutions.
It assumes offices which might have been allotted to some other agency,
had not the family pre-empted them, profiting by its established
authority and annexing them to its domain. In no civilised community,
for instance, has the union of man and wife been limited to its barely
necessary period. It has continued after the family was reared and has
remained life-long; it has commonly involved a common dwelling and
religion and often common friends and property. Again, the children’s
emancipation has been put off indefinitely. The Roman father had a
perpetual jurisdiction and such absolute authority that, in the palmy
days of the Roman family, no other subsisted over it. He alone was a
citizen and responsible to the state, while his household were subject
to him in law, as well as in property and religion. In simple rural
communities the family has often been also the chief industrial unit,
almost all necessaries being produced under domestic economy.
[Sidenote: Inertia in human nature.]
Now the instincts and delights which nature associates with reproduction
cannot stretch so far. Their magic fails, and the political and
industrial family, which still thinks itself natural, is in truth casual
and conventional. There is no real instinct to protect those who can
already protect themselves; nor have they any profit in obeying nor, in
the end, any duty to do so. A _patria potestas_ much prolonged or
extended is therefore an abuse and prolific in abuses. The chieftain’s
mind, not being ruled by paternal instincts, will pursue arbitrary
personal ends, and it is hardly to be expected that his own wealth or
power or ideal interests will correspond with those of his subjects. The
government and supervision required by adults is what we call political;
it should stretch over all families alike. To annex this political
control to fatherhood is to confess that social instinct is singularly
barren, and that the common mind is not plastic enough to devise new
organs appropriate to the functions which a large society involves.
After all, the family is an early expedient and in many ways
irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be
nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees,
and if lovers had never been tied together by a bond less ethereal than
ideal passion, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a
division of labour would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but
it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
For we pay a high price for our conquests in this quarter, and the
sweets of home are balanced not only by its tenderer sorrows, but by a
thousand artificial prejudices, enmities, and restrictions. It takes
patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer
unhappiness. Young men escape as soon as they can, at least in fancy,
into the wide world; all prophets are homeless and all inspired artists;
philosophers think out some communism or other, and monks put it in
practice. There is indeed no more irrational ground for living together
than that we have sprung from the same loins. They say blood is thicker
than water; yet similar forces easily compete while dissimilar forces
may perhaps co-operate. It is the end that is sacred, not the beginning.
A common origin unites reasonable creatures only if it involves common
thoughts and purposes; and these may bind together individuals of the
most remote races and ages, when once they have discovered one another.
It is difficulties of access, ignorance, and material confinement that
shut in the heart to its narrow loyalties; and perhaps greater mobility,
science, and the mingling of nations will one day reorganise the moral
world. It was a pure spokesman of the spirit who said that whosoever
should do the will of his _Father who was in heaven_, the same was his
brother and sister and mother.
[Sidenote: Family tyrannies.]
The family also perpetuates accidental social differences, exaggerating
and making them hereditary; it thus defeats that just moiety of the
democratic ideal which demands that all men should have equal
opportunities. In human society chance only decides what education a man
shall receive, what wealth and influence he shall enjoy, even what
religion and profession he shall adopt. People shudder at the system of
castes which prevails in India; but is not every family a little caste?
Was a man assigned to his family because he belonged to it in spirit, or
can he choose another? Half the potentialities in the human race are
thus stifled, half its incapacities fostered and made inveterate. The
family, too, is largely responsible for the fierce prejudices that
prevail about women, about religion, about seemly occupations, about
war, death, and honour. In all these matters men judge in a blind way,
inspired by a feminine passion that has no mercy for anything that
eludes the traditional household, not even for its members’ souls.
[Sidenote: Difficulty in abstracting from the family.]
At the same time there are insuperable difficulties in proposing any
substitute for the family. In the first place, all society at present
rests on this institution, so that we cannot easily discern which of our
habits and sentiments are parcels of it, and which are attached to it
adventitiously and have an independent basis. A reformer hewing so near
to the tree’s root never knows how much he may be felling. Possibly his
own ideal would lose its secret support if what it condemns had wholly
disappeared. For instance, it is conceivable that a communist,
abolishing the family in order to make opportunities equal and remove
the more cruel injustices of fortune, might be drying up that milk of
human kindness which had fed his own enthusiasm; for the foundlings
which he decreed were to people the earth might at once disown all
socialism and prove a brood of inhuman egoists. Or, as not wholly
contemptible theories have maintained, it might happen that if fathers
were relieved of care for their children and children of all paternal
suasion, human virtue would lose its two chief stays.
[Sidenote: Possibility of substitutes.]
On the other hand, an opposite danger is present in this sort of
speculation. Things now associated with the family may not depend upon
it, but might flourish equally well in a different soil. The family
being the earliest and closest society into which men enter, it assumes
the primary functions which all society can exercise. Possibly if any
other institution had been first in the field it might have had a
comparable moral influence. One of the great lessons, for example, which
society has to teach its members is that society exists. The child, like
the animal, is a colossal egoist, not from a want of sensibility, but
through his deep transcendental isolation. The mind is naturally its own
world and its solipsism needs to be broken down by social influence. The
child must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather
than instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become
cognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally
is, sensitively, selfishly fanciful.
To break down transcendental conceit is a function usually confided to
the family, and yet the family is not well fitted to perform it. To
mothers and nurses their darlings are always exceptional; even fathers
and brothers teach a child that he is very different from other
creatures and of infinitely greater consequence, since he lies closer to
their hearts and may expect from them all sorts of favouring services.
The whole household, in proportion as it spreads about the child a
brooding and indulgent atmosphere, nurses wilfulness and illusion. For
this reason the noblest and happiest children are those brought up, as
in Greece or England, under simple general conventions by persons
trained and hired for the purpose. The best training in character is
found in very large families or in schools, where boys educate one
another. Priceless in this regard is athletic exercise; for here the
test of ability is visible, the comparison not odious, the need of
co-operation clear, and the consciousness of power genuine and therefore
ennobling. Socratic dialectic is not a better means of learning to know
oneself. Such self-knowledge is objective and free from
self-consciousness; it sees the self in a general medium and measures it
by a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, under
other circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has a
distorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almost
everyone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in every
life, tends to be valued above more important elements in personal
happiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, military
victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family might
well be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had a
father and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes to
remember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked with
family occasions; but to name a man’s more private memories, attached to
special surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet these
other surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and if
familiar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect.
This appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable a
tradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a social
echo. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, toward
school, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say that
such associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealously
cultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, would
not breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which most
men now derive from the family?
[Sidenote: Plato’s heroic communism.]
Nevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the least
satisfactory. Plato’s is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed it
would have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented in
man. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for its
inception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means of
making heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulations
men would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Plato
suggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientific
institutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be all
manner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded on
inclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or by
open divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separated
by governmental policy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princes
who marry for political reasons often find a second household necessary
to their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion,
and patriotism makes with overwhelming force against such
irregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vows
freely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert in
practice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato’s citizens
were not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just cause
for rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion or
habit submit to such regulation?
Even when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardour
which that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears.
Apparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state,
were alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves,
tradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices and
were, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato in
this matter proposes little more than what military and monastic orders
have actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarried
class in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore,
does not abolish the family.
[Sidenote: Opposite modern tendencies.]
Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and
practice incline in these days tend to transform the family without
abolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the
children in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The
family has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested
by this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and
sentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor
is it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke
Christian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are
thus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the
cure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue
and the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its
non-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer,
penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It
has so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation
would be gone if once the sin could be abolished.
[Sidenote: Individualism in a sense rational.]
While a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard to
conceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the marked
tendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism.
Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever
social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on
conscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needs
society first that he may come safely into being, and then that he may
have something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal and
has neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things is
either to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the
more currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It
would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of
society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it
lent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justly
subordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freer
generation, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason is
simply that such subordination is a part of man’s natural devotion to
things rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be
personally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a natural
object of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, because
only when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active and
immortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alien
ends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be
sacrificed.
Individualism is therefore the only ideal possible. The excellence of
societies is measured by what they provide for their members. A cumbrous
and sanctified social order manifests dulness, and cannot subsist
without it. It immerses man in instrumentalities, weighs him down with
atrophied organs, and by subjecting him eternally to fruitless
sacrifices renders him stupid and superstitious and ready to be himself
tyrannical when the opportunity occurs. A sure sign of having escaped
barbarism is therefore to feel keenly the pragmatic values belonging to
all institutions, to look deep into the human sanctions of things.
Greece was on this ground more civilised than Rome, and Athens more than
Sparta. Ill-governed communities may be more intelligent than
well-governed ones, when people feel the motive and partial advantage
underlying the abuses they tolerate (as happens where slavery or
nepotism is prevalent), but when on the other hand no reason is
perceived for the good laws which are established (as when law is based
on revelation). The effort to adjust old institutions suddenly to felt
needs may not always be prudent, because the needs most felt may not be
the deepest, yet so far as it goes the effort is intelligent.
[Sidenote: The family tamed.]
The family in a barbarous age remains sacrosanct and traditional;
nothing in its law, manners, or ritual is open to amendment. The
unhappiness which may consequently overtake individuals is hushed up or
positively blamed, with no thought of tinkering with the holy
institutions which are its cause. Civilised men think more and cannot
endure objectless tyrannies. It is inevitable, therefore, that as
barbarism recedes the family should become more sensitive to its
members’ personal interests. Husband and wife, when they are happily
matched, are in liberal communities more truly united than before,
because such closer friendship expresses their personal inclination.
Children are still cared for, because love of them is natural, but they
are ruled less and sooner suffered to choose their own associations.
They are more largely given in charge to persons not belonging to the
family, especially fitted to supply their education. The whole, in a
word, exists more and more for the sake of the parts, and the closeness,
duration, and scope of family ties comes to vary greatly in different
households. Barbaric custom, imposed in all cases alike without respect
of persons, yields to a regimen that dares to be elastic and will take
pains to be just.
[Sidenote: Possible readjustments and reversions.]
How far these liberties should extend and where they would pass into
license and undermine rational life, is another question. The pressure
of circumstances is what ordinarily forces governments to be absolute.
Political liberty is a sign of moral and economic independence. The
family may safely weaken its legal and customary authority so long as
the individual can support and satisfy himself. Children evidently never
can; consequently they must remain in a family or in some artificial
substitute for it which would be no less coercive. But to what extent
men and women, in a future age, may need to rely on ties of
consanguinity or marriage in order not to grow solitary, purposeless,
and depraved, is for prophets only to predict. If changes continue in
the present direction much that is now in bad odour may come to be
accepted as normal. It might happen, for instance, as a consequence of
woman’s independence, that mothers alone should be their children’s
guardians and sole mistresses in their houses; the husband, if he were
acknowledged at all, having at most a pecuniary responsibility for his
offspring. Such an arrangement would make a stable home for the
children, while leaving marriage dissoluble at the will of either party.
It may well be doubted, however, whether women, if given every
encouragement to establish and protect themselves, would not in the end
fly again into man’s arms and prefer to be drudges and mistresses at
home to living disciplined and submerged in some larger community.
Indeed, the effect of women’s emancipation might well prove to be the
opposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition between
men and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority
that, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should
find themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have
to begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and to
men’s fondness in order to regain their lost social position.
[Sidenote: The ideal includes generation.]
There is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract.
An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which
it furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had
agriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own
rationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in
which those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created
the ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death
were abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: its
pleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results—pregnancy,
child-birth, infancy—would seem positively horrible. But so long as
reproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwise
we should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream of
non-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would be
borrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressed
indirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatible
functions. Man being an inevitably reproductive animal his reproductive
function must be included in his perfect life.
[Sidenote: Inner values already lodged in this function.]
Now, any function to reach perfection it must fulfil two conditions: it
must be delightful in itself, endowing its occasions and results with
ideal interest, and it must also co-operate harmoniously with all other
functions so that life may be profitable and happy. In the matter of
reproduction nature has already fulfilled the first of these conditions
in its essentials. It has indeed super-abundantly fulfilled them, and
not only has love appeared in man’s soul, the type and symbol of all
vital perfection, but a tenderness and charm, a pathos passing into the
frankest joy, has been spread over pregnancy, birth, and childhood. If
many pangs and tears still prove how tentative and violent, even here,
are nature’s most brilliant feats, science and kindness may strive not
unsuccessfully to diminish or abolish those profound traces of evil. But
reproduction will not be perfectly organised until the second condition
is fulfilled as well, and here nature has as yet been more remiss.
Family life, as Western nations possess it, is still regulated in a very
bungling, painful, and unstable manner. Hence, in the first rank of
evils, prostitution, adultery, divorce, improvident and unhappy
marriages; and in the second rank, a morality compacted of three
inharmonious parts, with incompatible ideals, each in its way
legitimate: I mean the ideals of passion, of convention, and of reason;
add, besides, genius and religion thwarted by family ties, single lives
empty, wedded lives constrained, a shallow gallantry, and a dull virtue.
[Sidenote: Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.]
How to surround the natural sanctities of wedlock with wise custom and
law, how to combine the maximum of spiritual freedom with the maximum of
moral cohesion, is a problem for experiment to solve. It cannot be
solved, even ideally, in a Utopia. For each interest in play has its
rights and the prophet neither knows what interests may at a given
future time subsist in the world, nor what relative force they may have,
nor what mechanical conditions may control their expression. The
statesman in his sphere and the individual in his must find, as they go,
the best practical solutions. All that can be indicated beforehand is
the principle which improvements in this institution would comply with
if they were really improvements. They would reform and perfect the
function of reproduction without discarding it; they would maintain the
family unless they could devise some institution that combined intrinsic
and representative values better than does that natural artifice, and
they would recast either the instincts or the laws concerned, or both
simultaneously, until the family ceased to clash seriously with any of
these three things: natural affection, rational nurture, and moral
freedom.
CHAPTER III
INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR
[Sidenote: Patriarchal economy.]
We have seen that the family, an association useful in rearing the
young, may become a means of further maintenance and defence. It is the
first economic and the first military group. Children become servants,
and servants, being adopted and brought up in the family, become like
other children and supply the family’s growing wants. It was no small
part of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal man
that children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-long
subjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age.
The daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, and
prepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmented
further by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle. This numerous household,
bound together by personal authority and by common fortunes, was
sufficient to carry on many rude industries. It wandered from pasture to
pasture, practised hospitality, watched the stars, and seems (at least
in poetic retrospect) to have been not unhappy. A Roman adage has
declared that to know the world one household suffices; and one
patriarchal family, in its simplicity and grandeur, seems to have given
scope enough for almost all human virtues. And those early men, as Vico
says, were sublime poets.
[Sidenote: Origin of the state.]
Nevertheless, such a condition can only subsist in deserts where those
who try to till the soil cannot grow strong enough to maintain
themselves against marauding herdsmen. Whenever agriculture yields
better returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support a
protector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of land
turns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of such
a passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population and
in requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon its
neighbours; this encroachment means war; and war, when there are fields
and granaries to protect, and slaves and artisans to keep at their
domestic labours, means fortifications, an army, and a general. And to
match the army in the field another must be maintained at home, composed
of judges, priests, builders, cooks, barbers, and doctors. Such is the
inception of what, in the literal sense of the word, may be called
civilisation.
[Sidenote: Three uses of civilisation.]
Civilisation secures three chief advantages: greater wealth, greater
safety, and greater variety of experience. Whether, in spite of this,
there is a real—that is, a moral—advance is a question impossible to
answer off-hand, because wealth, safety, and variety are not absolute
goods, and their value is great or small according to the further values
they may help to secure. This is obvious in the case of riches. But
safety also is only good when there is something to preserve better than
courage, and when the prolongation of life can serve to intensify its
excellence. An animal’s existence is not improved when made safe by
imprisonment and domestication; it is only degraded and rendered passive
and melancholy. The human savage likewise craves a freedom and many a
danger inconsistent with civilisation, because independent of reason. He
does not yet identify his interests with any persistent and ideal
harmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, length
of life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a small
chance of reaching old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animal
economy, where vigour is the greatest joy, propagation the highest
function, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety,
accordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflective
and rational. But the fact that a state arises does not in itself imply
rationality. It makes rationality possible, but leaves it potential.
[Sidenote: Its rationality contingent.]
Similar considerations apply to variety. To increase the number of
instincts and functions is probably to produce confusion and to augment
that secondary and reverberating kind of evil which consists in
expecting pain and regretting misfortune. On the other hand, a perfect
life could never be accused of monotony. All desirable variety lies
within the circle of perfection. Thus we do not tire of possessing two
legs nor wish, for the sake of variety, to be occasionally lunatics.
Accordingly, an increase in variety of function is a good only if a
unity can still be secured embracing that variety; otherwise it would
have been better that the irrelevant function should have been developed
by independent individuals or should not have arisen at all. The
function of seeing double adds more to the variety than to the spice of
life. Whether civilisation is a blessing depends, then, on its ulterior
uses. Judged by those interests which already exist when it arises, it
is very likely a burden and oppression. The birds’ instinctive economy
would not be benefited by a tax-gatherer, a recruiting-sergeant, a sect
or two of theologians, and the other usual organs of human polity.
For the Life of Reason, however, civilisation is a necessary condition.
Although animal life, within man and beyond him, has its wild beauty and
mystic justifications, yet that specific form of life which we call
rational, and which is no less natural than the rest, would never have
arisen without an expansion of human faculty, an increase in mental
scope, for which civilisation is necessary. Wealth, safety, variety of
pursuits, are all requisite if memory and purpose are to be trained
increasingly, and if a steadfast art of living is to supervene upon
instinct and dream.
[Sidenote: Sources of wealth.]
Wealth is itself expressive of reason for it arises whenever men,
instead of doing nothing or beating about casually in the world, take to
gathering fruits of nature which they may have uses for in future, or
fostering their growth, or actually contriving their appearance. Such is
man’s first industrial habit, seen in grazing, agriculture, and mining.
Among nature’s products are also those of man’s own purposeless and
imitative activity, results of his idle ingenuity and restlessness. Some
of these, like nature’s other random creations, may chance to have some
utility. They may then become conspicuous to reflection, be strengthened
by the relations which they establish in life, and be henceforth called
works of human art. They then constitute a second industrial habit and
that other sort of riches which is supplied by manufacture.
[Sidenote: Excess of it possible.]
The amount of wealth man can produce is apparently limited only by time,
invention, and the material at hand. It can very easily exceed his
capacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth were
originally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processes
by mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism into
harmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. The
machinery to produce wealth, of which man’s own energies have become a
part, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrial
ideal would be an international community with universal free trade,
extreme division of labour, and no unproductive consumption. Such an
arrangement would undoubtedly produce a maximum of riches, and any
objections made to it, if intelligent, must be made on other than
universal economic grounds. Free trade may be opposed, for instance
(while patriotism takes the invidious form of jealousy and while peace
is not secure), on the ground that it interferes with vested interests
and settled populations or with national completeness and
self-sufficiency, or that absorption in a single industry is
unfavourable to intellectual life. The latter is also an obvious
objection to any great division of labour, even in liberal fields; while
any man with a tender heart and traditional prejudices might hesitate to
condemn the irresponsible rich to extinction, together with all paupers,
mystics, and old maids living on annuities.
Such attacks on industrialism, however, are mere skirmishes and express
prejudices of one sort or another. The formidable judgment industrialism
has to face is that of reason, which demands that the increase and
specification of labour be justified by benefits somewhere actually
realised and integrated in individuals. Wealth must justify itself in
happiness. Someone must live better for having produced or enjoyed these
possessions. And he would not live better, even granting that the
possessions were in themselves advantages, if these advantages were
bought at too high a price and removed other greater opportunities or
benefits. The belle must not sit so long prinking before the glass as to
miss the party, and man must not work so hard and burden himself with so
many cares as to have no breath or interest left for things free and
intellectual. Work and life too often are contrasted and complementary
things; but they would not be contrasted nor even separable if work were
not servile, for of course man can have no life save in occupation, and
in the exercise of his faculties; contemplation itself can deal only
with what practice contains or discloses. But the pursuit of wealth is a
pursuit of instruments. The division of labour when extreme does
violence to natural genius and obliterates natural distinctions in
capacity. What is properly called industry is not art or self-justifying
activity, but on the contrary a distinctly compulsory and merely
instrumental labour, which if justified at all must be justified by some
ulterior advantage which it secures. In regard to such instrumental
activities the question is always pertinent whether they do not produce
more than is useful, or prevent the existence of something that is
intrinsically good.
[Sidenote: Irrational industry.]
Occidental society has evidently run in this direction into great
abuses, complicating life prodigiously without ennobling the mind. It
has put into rich men’s hands facilities and luxuries which they trifle
with without achieving any dignity or true magnificence in living,
while the poor, if physically more comfortable than formerly, are not
meantime notably wiser or merrier. Ideal distinction has been sacrificed
in the best men, to add material comforts to the worst. Things, as
Emerson said, are in the saddle and ride mankind. The means crowd out
the ends and civilisation reverts, when it least thinks it, to
barbarism.
[Sidenote: Its jovial and ingenious side.]
The acceptable side of industrialism, which is supposed to be inspired
exclusively by utility, is not utility at all but pure achievement. If
we wish to do such an age justice we must judge it as we should a child
and praise its feats without inquiring after its purposes. That is its
own spirit: a spirit dominant at the present time, particularly in
America, where industrialism appears most free from alloy. There is a
curious delight in turning things over, changing their shape,
discovering their possibilities, making of them some new contrivance.
Use, in these experimental minds, as in nature, is only incidental.
There is an irrational creative impulse, a zest in novelty, in
progression, in beating the other man, or, as they say, in breaking the
record. There is also a fascination in seeing the world unbosom itself
of ancient secrets, obey man’s coaxing, and take on unheard-of shapes.
The highest building, the largest steamer, the fastest train, the book
reaching the widest circulation have, in America, a clear title to
respect. When the just functions of things are as yet not discriminated,
the superlative in any direction seems naturally admirable. Again, many
possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to
make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many
exertions. An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced from
reason and from everything useful, is also confused in some minds with
traditional duties; and a school of popular hierophants is not lacking
that turns it into a sort of religion and perhaps calls it idealism.
Impulse is more visible in all this than purpose, imagination more than
judgment; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound in invention and
effort and to let the future cash the account.
[Sidenote: Its tyranny.]
Wealth is excessive when it reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber,
when it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, from
making his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toil
underground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession with
production begrudge themselves all holidays, all concessions to
inclination, to merriment, to fancy; nay, they would even curtail as
much as possible the free years of their youth, when they might see the
blue, before rendering up their souls to the Leviathan. Visible signs of
such unreason soon appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which
life puts on; for those instruments which somehow emancipate themselves
from their uses soon become hateful. In nature irresponsible wildness
can be turned to beauty, because every product can be recomposed into
some abstract manifestation of force or form; but the monstrous in man
himself and in his works immediately offends, for here everything is
expected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the human
has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in
the maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbaric
civilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken
a deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautiful
tyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which past revolutions have
been directed.
[Sidenote: An impossible remedy.]
Both the sordidness and the luxury which industrialism may involve,
could be remedied, however, by a better distribution of the product. The
riches now created by labour would probably not seriously debauch
mankind if each man had only his share; and such a proportionate return
would enable him to perceive directly how far his interests required him
to employ himself in material production and how far he could allow
himself leisure for spontaneous things—religion, play, art, study,
conversation. In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or
two a day of manual labour—a very welcome quantity—would provide for
material wants; the rest could then be all the more competently
dedicated to a liberal life; for a healthy soul needs matter quite as
much for an object of interest as for a means of sustenance. But
philosophers do not yet people nor even govern the world, and so simple
a Utopia which reason, if it had direct efficacy, would long ago have
reduced to act, is made impossible by the cross-currents of instinct,
tradition, and fancy which variously deflect affairs.
[Sidenote: Basis of government.]
What are called the laws of nature are so many observations made by man
on a way things have of repeating themselves by replying always to their
old causes and never, as reason’s prejudice would expect, to their new
opportunities. This inertia, which physics registers in the first law of
motion, natural history and psychology call habit. Habit is a physical
law. It is the basis and force of all morality, but is not morality
itself. In society it takes the form of custom which, when codified, is
called law and when enforced is called government. Government is the
political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of
inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. But, like any
mechanical complication, it may become rational, and many of its forms
and operations may be defended on rational grounds. All natural
organisms, from protoplasm to poetry, can exercise certain ideal
functions and symbolise in their structure certain ideal relations.
Protoplasm tends to propagate itself, and in so doing may turn into a
conscious ideal the end it already tends to realise; but there could be
no desire for self-preservation were there not already a self
preserved. So government can by its existence define the commonwealth
it tends to preserve, and its acts may be approved from the point of
view of those eventual interests which they satisfy. But government
neither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely
because it is inevitable. It becomes good in so far as the inevitable
adjustment of political forces which it embodies is also a just
provision for all the human interests which it creates or affects.
[Sidenote: How rationality accrues.]
Suppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries and game
enough in the woods, should descend into some meadow where a flock of
sheep were grazing and pounce upon a lame lamb which could not run away
with the others, tear its flesh, suck up its blood, and dress himself in
its skin. All this could not be called an affair undertaken in the
sheep’s interest. And yet it might well conduce to their interest in the
end. For the savage, finding himself soon hungry again, and
insufficiently warm in that scanty garment, might attack the flock a
second time, and thereby begin to accustom himself, and also his
delighted family, to a new and more substantial sort of raiment and
diet. Suppose, now, a pack of wolves, or a second savage, or a disease
should attack those unhappy sheep. Would not their primeval enemy defend
them? Would he not have identified himself with their interests to this
extent, that their total extinction or discomfiture would alarm him
also? And in so far as he provided for their well-being, would he not
have become a good shepherd? If, now, some philosophic wether, a lover
of his kind, reasoned with his fellows upon the change in their
condition, he might shudder indeed at those early episodes and at the
contribution of lambs and fleeces which would not cease to be levied by
the new government; but he might also consider that such a contribution
was nothing in comparison with what was formerly exacted by wolves,
diseases, frosts, and casual robbers, when the flock was much smaller
than it had now grown to be, and much less able to withstand decimation.
And he might even have conceived an admiration for the remarkable wisdom
and beauty of that great shepherd, dressed in such a wealth of wool; and
he might remember pleasantly some occasional caress received from him
and the daily trough filled with water by his providential hand. And he
might not be far from maintaining not only the rational origin, but the
divine right of shepherds.
Such a savage enemy, incidentally turned into a useful master, is called
a conqueror or king. Only in human experience the case is not so simple
and harmony is seldom established so quickly. The history of Asia is
replete with examples of conquest and extortion in which a rural
population living in comparative plenty is attacked by some more
ferocious neighbour who, after a round of pillage, establishes a quite
unnecessary government, raising taxes and soldiers for purposes
absolutely remote from the conquered people’s interests. Such a
government is nothing but a chronic raid, mitigated by the desire to
leave the inhabitants prosperous enough to be continually despoiled
afresh. Even this modicum of protection, however, can establish a
certain moral bond between ruler and subject; an intelligent government
and an intelligent fealty become conceivable.
[Sidenote: Ferocious but useful despotisms.]
Not only may the established régime be superior to any other that could
be substituted for it at the time, but some security against total
destruction, and a certain opportunity for the arts and for personal
advancement may follow subjugation. A moderate decrease in personal
independence may be compensated by a novel public grandeur; palace and
temple may make amends for hovels somewhat more squalid than before.
Hence, those who cannot conceive a rational polity, or a co-operative
greatness in the state, especially if they have a luxurious fancy, can
take pleasure in despotism; for it does not, after all, make so much
difference to an ordinary fool whether what he suffers from is another’s
oppression or his own lazy improvidence; and he can console himself by
saying with Goldsmith:
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
The part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
At the same time a court and a hierarchy, with their interesting pomp
and historic continuity, with their combined appeal to greed and
imagination, redeem human existence from pervasive vulgarity and allow
somebody at least to strut proudly over the earth. Serfs are not in a
worse material condition than savages, and their spiritual opportunities
are infinitely greater; for their eye and fancy are fed with visions of
human greatness, and even if they cannot improve their outward estate
they can possess a poetry and a religion. It suffices to watch an
Oriental rabble at prayer, or listening in profound immobility to some
wandering story-teller or musician, to feel how much such a people may
have to ruminate upon, and how truly Arabian days and Arabian Nights go
together. The ideas evolved may be wild and futile and the emotions
savagely sensuous, yet they constitute a fund of inner experience, a
rich soil for better imaginative growths. To such Oriental cogitations,
for instance, carried on under the shadow of uncontrollable despotisms,
mankind owes all its greater religions.
A government’s origin has nothing to do with its legitimacy; that is,
with its representative operation. An absolutism based on conquest or on
religious fraud may wholly lose its hostile function. It may become the
nucleus of a national organisation expressing justly enough the people’s
requirements. Such a representative character is harder to attain when
the government is foreign, for diversity in race language and local ties
makes the ruler less apt involuntarily to represent his subjects; his
measures must subserve their interests intentionally, out of sympathy,
policy, and a sense of duty, virtues which are seldom efficacious for
any continuous period. A native government, even if based on initial
outrage, can more easily drift into excellence; for when a great man
mounts the throne he has only to read his own soul and follow his
instinctive ambitions in order to make himself the leader and spokesman
of his nation. An Alexander, an Alfred, a Peter the Great, are examples
of persons who with varying degrees of virtue were representative
rulers: their policy, however irrationally inspired, happened to serve
their subjects and the world. Besides, a native government is less
easily absolute. Many influences control the ruler in his aims and
habits, such as religion, custom, and the very language he speaks, by
which praise and blame are assigned automatically to the objects loved
or hated by the people. He cannot, unless he be an intentional monster,
oppose himself wholly to the common soul.
[Sidenote: Occasional advantage of being conquered.]
For this very reason, however, native governments are little fitted to
redeem or transform a people, and all great upheavals and regenerations
have been brought about by conquest, by the substitution of one race and
spirit for another in the counsels of the world. What the Orient owes to
Greece, the Occident to Rome, India to England, native America to Spain,
is a civilisation incomparably better than that which the conquered
people could ever have provided for themselves. Conquest is a good means
of recasting those ideals, perhaps impracticable and ignorant, which a
native government at its best would try to preserve. Such inapt ideals,
it is true, would doubtless remodel themselves if they could be partly
realised. Progress from within is possible, otherwise no progress would
be possible for humanity at large. But conquest gives at once a freer
field to those types of polity which, since they go with strength,
presumably represent the better adjustment to natural conditions, and
therefore the better ideal. Though the substance of ideals is the will,
their mould must be experience and a true discernment of opportunity; so
that while all ideals, regarded _in vacuo_, are equal in ideality, they
are, under given circumstances, very diverse in worth.
[Sidenote: Origin of free governments.]
When not founded on conquest, which is the usual source of despotism,
government is ordinarily based on traditional authority vested in elders
or patriarchal kings. This is the origin of the classic state, and of
all aristocracy and freedom. The economic and political unit is a great
household with its lord, his wife and children, clients and slaves. In
the interstices of these households there may be a certain floating
residuum—freedmen, artisans, merchants, strangers. These people, while
free, are without such rights as even slaves possess; they have no share
in the religion, education, and resources of any established family.
For purposes of defence and religion the heads of houses gather together
in assemblies, elect or recognise some chief, and agree upon laws,
usually little more than extant customs regulated and formally
sanctioned.
[Sidenote: Their democratic tendencies.]
Such a state tends to expand in two directions. In the first place, it
becomes more democratic; that is, it tends to recognise other influences
than that which heads of families—_patres conscripti_—possess. The
people without such fathers, those who are not patricians, also have
children and come to imitate on a smaller scale the patriarchal economy.
These plebeians are admitted to citizenship. But they have no such
religious dignity and power in their little families as the patricians
have in theirs; they are scarcely better than loose individuals,
representing nothing but their own sweet wills. This individualism and
levity is not, however, confined to the plebeians; it extends to the
patrician houses. Individualism is the second direction in which a
patriarchal society yields to innovation. As the state grows the family
weakens; and while in early Rome, for instance, only the _pater
familias_ was responsible to the city, and his children and slaves only
to him, in Greece we find from early times individuals called to account
before public judges. A federation of households thus became a republic.
The king, that chief who enjoyed a certain hereditary precedence in
sacrifices or in war, yields to elected generals and magistrates whose
power, while it lasts, is much greater; for no other comparable power
now subsists in the levelled state.
Modern Europe has seen an almost parallel development of democracy and
individualism, together with the establishment of great artificial
governments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based on
conquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful or
chivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes—the
burghers—grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened by
being divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king,
emperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs,
representatives of great states, and the people became, in a political
sense, a comparatively level multitude. Where parliamentary government
was established it became possible to subordinate or exclude the monarch
and his court; but the government remains an involuntary institution,
and the individual must adapt himself to its exigencies. The church
which once overshadowed the state has now lost its coercive authority
and the single man stands alone before an impersonal written law, a
constitutional government, and a widely diffused and contagious public
opinion, characterised by enormous inertia, incoherence, and blindness.
Contemporary national units are strongly marked and stimulate on
occasion a perfervid artificial patriotism; but they are strangely
unrepresentative of either personal or universal interests and may yield
in turn to new combinations, if the industrial and intellectual
solidarity of mankind, every day more obvious, ever finds a fit organ to
express and to defend it.
[Sidenote: Imperial peace.]
A despotic military government founded on alien force and aiming at its
own magnificence is often more efficient in defending its subjects than
is a government expressing only the people’s energies, as the predatory
shepherd and his dog prove better guardians for a flock than its own
wethers. The robbers that at their first incursion brought terror to
merchant and peasant may become almost immediately representative organs
of society—an army and a judiciary. Disputes between subjects are
naturally submitted to the invader, under whose laws and good-will alone
a practical settlement can now be effected; and this alien tribunal,
being exempt from local prejudices and interested in peace that taxes
may be undiminished, may administer a comparatively impartial justice,
until corrupted by bribes. The constant compensation tyranny brings,
which keeps it from at once exhausting its victims, is the silence it
imposes on their private squabbles. One distant universal enemy is less
oppressive than a thousand unchecked pilferers and plotters at home. For
this reason the reader of ancient history so often has occasion to
remark what immense prosperity Asiatic provinces enjoyed between the
periods when their successive conquerors devastated them. They
flourished exceedingly the moment peace and a certain order were
established in them.
[Sidenote: Nominal and real status of armies.]
Tyranny not only protects the subject against his kinsmen, thus taking
on the functions of law and police, but it also protects him against
military invasion, and thus takes on the function of an army. An army,
considered ideally, is an organ for the state’s protection; but it is
far from being such in its origin, since at first an army is nothing but
a ravenous and lusty horde quartered in a conquered country; yet the
cost of such an incubus may come to be regarded as an insurance against
further attack, and so what is in its real basis an inevitable burden
resulting from a chance balance of forces may be justified in
after-thought as a rational device for defensive purposes. Such an
ulterior justification has nothing to do, however, with the causes that
maintain armies or military policies: and accordingly those virginal
minds that think things originated in the uses they may have acquired,
have frequent cause to be pained and perplexed at the abuses and
over-development of militarism. An insurance capitalised may exceed the
value of the property insured, and the drain caused by armies and navies
may be much greater than the havoc they prevent. The evils against which
they are supposed to be directed are often evils only in a cant and
conventional sense, since the events deprecated (like absorption by a
neighbouring state) might be in themselves no misfortune to the people,
but perhaps a singular blessing. And those dreaded possibilities, even
if really evil, may well be less so than is the hateful actuality of
military taxes, military service, and military arrogance.
[Sidenote: Their action irresponsible.]
Nor is this all: the military classes, since they inherit the blood and
habits of conquerors, naturally love war and their irrational
combativeness is reinforced by interest; for in war officers can shine
and rise, while the danger of death, to a brave man, is rather a spur
and a pleasing excitement than a terror. A military class is therefore
always recalling, foretelling, and meditating war; it fosters artificial
and senseless jealousies toward other governments that possess armies;
and finally, as often as not, it precipitates disaster by bringing about
the objectless struggle on which it has set its heart.
[Sidenote: Pugnacity human.]
These natural phenomena, unintelligently regarded as anomalies and
abuses, are the appanage of war in its pristine and proper form. To
fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they
will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because
they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in
opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked
at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for a
reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior
despises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonable
conflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and
consequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and
for victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor. If
fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct
could never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few men
can live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beasts
of prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there are
diligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no good
fruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes does
so is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.
[Sidenote: Barrack-room philosophy.]
Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. There
are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race
decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this
shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its
industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be
governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to
breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought
about the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered;
it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being
descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it
is not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if the
conditions of life are propitious, we observe a people’s energies
bursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength they
have stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is the
unmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the best
survive, while in war it is often the best that perish) that descends
victoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies
at the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epoch
and is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, and
merged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in
some other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable of
victory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of courage and
virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.
[Sidenote: Military virtues.]
Military institutions, adventitious and ill-adapted excrescences as they
usually are, can acquire rational values in various ways. Besides
occasional defence, they furnish a profession congenial to many, and a
spectacle and emotion interesting to all. Blind courage is an animal
virtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a
certain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice
without vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather
than desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of
virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of
steadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as
there is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to
be one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is
unavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to
face. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler’s instinct, with a love of
hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already
to be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight
in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain,
and a positive crime in the statesman.
Discipline, or the habit of obedience, is a better sort of courage which
military life also requires. Discipline is the acquired faculty of
surrendering an immediate personal good for the sake of a remote and
impersonal one of greater value. This difficult wisdom is made easier by
training in an army, because the great forces of habit, example and
social suasion, are there enlisted in its service. But these natural
aids make it lose its conscious rationality, so that it ceases to be a
virtue except potentially; for to resist an impulse by force of habit or
external command may or may not be to follow the better course.
Besides fostering these rudimentary virtues the army gives the nation’s
soul its most festive and flaunting embodiment. Popular heroes, stirring
episodes, obvious turning-points in history, commonly belong to military
life.
[Sidenote: They are splendid vices.]
Nevertheless the panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level on
which a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want of
refined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all
blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative
instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in
another’s evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world
is the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is a
willing accomplice of that perversity in things who delights in
another’s discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension of
plunging into danger without reason, or the idiot’s pleasure in facing a
pure chance. To find joy in another’s trouble is, as man is constituted,
not unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one’s own
trouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man. These are
the chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has to
grow.
[Sidenote: Absolute value in strife.]
If war could be abolished and the defence of all interests intrusted to
courts of law, there would remain unsatisfied a primary and therefore
ineradicable instinct—a love of conflict, of rivalry, and of victory.
If we desire to abolish war because it tries to do good by doing harm,
we must not ourselves do an injury to human nature while trying to
smooth it out. Now the test and limit of all necessary reform is vital
harmony. No impulse can be condemned arbitrarily or because some other
impulse or group of interests is, in a Platonic way, out of sympathy
with it. An instinct can be condemned only if it prevents the
realisation of other instincts, and only in so far as it does so. War,
which has instinctive warrant, must therefore be transformed only in so
far as it does harm to other interests. The evils of war are obvious
enough; could not the virtues of war, animal courage, discipline, and
self-knowledge, together with gaiety and enthusiasm, find some harmless
occasion for their development?
[Sidenote: Sport a civilised way of preserving it.]
Such a harmless simulacrum of war is seen in sport. The arduous and
competitive element in sport is not harmful, if the discipline involved
brings no loss of faculty or of right sensitiveness, and the rivalry no
rancour. In war states wish to be efficient in order to conquer, but in
sport men wish to prove their excellence because they wish to have it.
If this excellence does not exist, the aim is missed, and to discover
that failure is no new misfortune. To have failed unwittingly would have
been worse; and to recognise superiority in another is consistent with a
relatively good and honourable performance, so that even nominal failure
may be a substantial success. And merit in a rival should bring a
friendly delight even to the vanquished if they are true lovers of sport
and of excellence. Sport is a liberal form of war stripped of its
compulsions and malignity; a rational art and the expression of a
civilised instinct.
[Sidenote: Who shall found the universal commonwealth?]
The abolition of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by a
new collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest of
piratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for military
sanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by some
imperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romans
approached this ideal because their vast military power stood behind
their governors and prætors. Science and commerce might conceivably
resume that lost imperial function. If at the present day two or three
powerful governments could so far forget their irrational origin as to
renounce the right to occasional piracy and could unite in enforcing the
decisions of some international tribunal, they would thereby constitute
that tribunal the organ of a universal government and render war
impossible between responsible states. But on account of their
irrational basis all governments largely misrepresent the true interests
of those who live under them. They pursue conventional and captious ends
to which alone public energies can as yet be efficiently directed.
CHAPTER IV
THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL
[Sidenote: Eminence, once existing, grows by its own.]
“To him that hath shall be given,” says the Gospel, representing as a
principle of divine justice one that undoubtedly holds in earthly
economy. A not dissimilar observation is made in the proverb:
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Indeed, some trifling
acquisition often gives an animal an initial advantage which may easily
roll up and increase prodigiously, becoming the basis of prolonged good
fortune. Sometimes this initial advantage is a matter of natural
structure, like talent, strength, or goodness; sometimes an accidental
accretion, like breeding, instruction, or wealth. Such advantages grow
by the opportunities they make; and it is possible for a man launched
into the world at the right moment with the right equipment to mount
easily from eminence to eminence and accomplish very great things
without doing more than genially follow his instincts and respond with
ardour, like an Alexander or a Shakespeare, to his opportunities. A
great endowment, doubled by great good fortune, raises men like these
into supreme representatives of mankind.
[Sidenote: Its causes natural and its privileges just.]
It is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader.
On the contrary, we thereby seize an opportunity to exercise our
freedom, availing ourselves of the best instrument obtainable to
accomplish our ends. A man may be a natural either by his character or
by his position. The advantages a man draws from that peculiar structure
of his brain which renders him, for instance, a ready speaker or an
ingenious mathematician, are by common consent regarded as legitimate
advantages. The public will use and reward such ability without jealousy
and with positive delight. In an unsophisticated age the same feeling
prevails in regard to those advantages which a man may draw from more
external circumstances. If a traveller, having been shipwrecked in some
expedition, should learn the secrets of an unknown land, its arts and
resources, his fellow-citizens, on his return, would not hesitate to
follow his direction in respect to those novel matters. It would be
senseless folly on their part to begrudge him his adventitious eminence
and refuse to esteem him of more consequence than their uninitiated
selves. Yet when people, ignoring the natural causes of all that is
called artificial, think that but for an unlucky chance they, too, might
have enjoyed the advantages which raise other men above them, they
sometimes affect not to recognise actual distinctions and abilities, or
study enviously the means of annulling them. So long, however, as by the
operation of any causes whatever some real competence accrues to anyone,
it is for the general interest that this competence should bear its
natural fruits, diversifying the face of society and giving its
possessor a corresponding distinction.
[Sidenote: Advantage of inequality.]
Variety in the world is an unmixed blessing so long as each distinct
function can be exercised without hindrance to any other. There is no
greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as
if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know
that many are, have been, and will be better than he. Grant that no one
is positively degraded by the great man’s greatness and it follows that
everyone is exalted by it. Beauty, genius, holiness, even power and
extraordinary wealth, radiate their virtue and make the world in which
they exist a better and a more joyful place to live in. Hence the
insatiable vulgar curiosity about great people, and the strange way in
which the desire for fame (by which the distinguished man sinks to the
common level) is met and satisfied by the universal interest in whatever
is extraordinary. This avidity not to miss knowledge of things notable,
and to enact vicariously all singular rôles, shows the need men have of
distinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it. For it is
the presence of variety and a nearer approach somewhere to just and
ideal achievement that gives men perspective in their judgments and
opens vistas from the dull foreground of their lives to sea, mountain,
and stars.
No merely idle curiosity shows itself in this instinct; rather a mark of
human potentiality that recognises in what is yet attained a sad
caricature of what is essentially attainable. For man’s spirit is
intellectual and naturally demands dominion and science; it craves in
all things friendliness and beauty. The least hint of attainment in
these directions fills it with satisfaction and the sense of realised
expectation. So much so that when no inkling of a supreme fulfilment is
found in the world or in the heart, men still cling to the notion of it
in God or the hope of it in heaven, and religion, when it entertains
them with that ideal, seems to have reached its highest height. Love of
uniformity would quench the thirst for new outlets, for perfect, even if
alien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not been
actually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal.
[Sidenote: Fable of the belly and the members.]
[Sidenote: Fallacy in it.]
Menenius Agrippa expressed very well the aristocratic theory of society
when he compared the state to a human body in which the common people
were the hands and feet, and the nobles the belly. The people, when they
forgot the conditions of their own well-being, might accuse themselves
of folly and the nobles of insolent idleness, for the poor spent their
lives in hopeless labour that others who did nothing might enjoy all.
But there was a secret circulation of substance in the body politic, and
the focussing of all benefits in the few was the cause of nutrition and
prosperity to the many. Perhaps the truth might be even better expressed
in a physiological figure somewhat more modern, by saying that the
brain, which consumes much blood, well repays its obligations to the
stomach and members, for it co-ordinates their motions and prepares
their satisfactions. Yet there is this important difference between the
human body and the state, a difference which renders Agrippa’s fable
wholly misleading: the hands and feet have no separate consciousness,
and if they are ill used it is the common self that feels the weariness
and the bruises. But in the state the various members have a separate
sensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, in
co-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may lead
them to oppress one another perpetually. At one time the brain,
forgetting the members, may feast on opiates and unceasing music; and
again, the members, thinking they could more economically shift for
themselves, may starve the brain and reduce the body politic to a colony
of vegetating microbes. In a word, the consciousness inhabiting the
brain embodies the functions of all the body’s organs, and responds in a
general way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state every
cell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence,
realises only his own happiness.
[Sidenote: Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.]
For an ideal aristocracy we should not look to Plato’s Republic, for
that Utopia is avowedly the ideal only for fallen and corrupt states,
since luxury and injustice, we are told, first necessitated war, and the
guiding idea of all the Platonic regimen is military efficiency.
Aristocracy finds a more ideal expression in theism; for theism imagines
the values of existence to be divided into two unequal parts: on the one
hand the infinite value of God’s life, on the other the finite values of
all the created hierarchy. According to theistic cosmology, there was a
metaphysical necessity, if creatures were to exist at all, that they
should be in some measure inferior to godhead; otherwise they would have
been indistinguishable from the godhead itself according to the
principle called the identity of indiscernibles, which declares that two
beings exactly alike cannot exist without collapsing into an undivided
unit. The propagation of life involved, then, declension from pure
vitality, and to diffuse being meant to dilute it with nothingness. This
declension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining some
vestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greater
proportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, below
them man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere,
as it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection;
yet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinity
would still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only a
beauty in the whole, to whose existence and order such inequalities
would be essential, but also no evil to the creature and no injustice;
for a modicum of good is not made evil simply because a greater good is
elsewhere possible. On the contrary, by accepting that appointed place
and that specific happiness, each servant of the universal harmony could
feel its infinite value and could thrill the more profoundly to a music
which he helped to intone.
[Sidenote: A heaven with many mansions.]
Dante has expressed this thought with great simplicity and beauty. He
asks a friend’s spirit, which he finds lodged in the lowest circle of
paradise, if a desire to mount higher does not sometimes visit him; and
the spirit replies:
“Brother, the force of charity quiets our will, making us wish only for
what we have and thirst for nothing more. If we desired to be in a
sublimer sphere, our desires would be discordant with the will of him
who here allots us our divers stations—something which you will see
there is no room for in these circles, if to dwell in charity be needful
here, and if you consider duly the nature of charity. For it belongs to
the essence of that blessed state to keep within the divine purposes,
that our own purposes may become one also. Thus, the manner in which we
are ranged from step to step in this kingdom pleases the whole kingdom,
as it does the king who gives us will to will with him. And his will is
our peace; it is that sea toward which all things move that his will
creates and that nature fashions.”[C]
[Sidenote: If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only
paradise.]
Such pious resignation has in it something pathetic and constrained,
which Dante could not or would not disguise. For a theism which, like
Aristotle’s and Dante’s, has a Platonic essence, God is really nothing
but the goal of human aspiration embodied imaginatively. This fact makes
these philosophers feel that whatever falls short of divinity has
something imperfect about it. God is what man ought to be; and man,
while he is still himself, must yearn for ever, like Aristotle’s cosmos,
making in his perpetual round a vain imitation of deity, and an eternal
prayer. Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle’s philosophy, the
hopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow and
sacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling. In both, virtue implies a
certain sense of defeat, a fatal unnatural limitation, as if a pristine
ideal had been surrendered and what remained were at best a compromise.
Accordingly we need not be surprised if aspiration, in all these men,
finally takes a mystical turn; and Dante’s ghostly friends, after
propounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men’s
eyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to which
God had assigned them and plunging into the “sea” of his absolute
ecstasy. For, if the word God stands for man’s spiritual ideal, heaven
can consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. They
instinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short of
deification; and the Christian mystics reached the same goal by less
overt courses. They merged the popular idea of a personal God in their
foretaste of peace and perfection; and their whole religion was an
effort to escape humanity.
[Sidenote: When natures differ perfections differ too.]
It is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a different
interpretation. If by deity we mean not man’s ideal—intellectual or
sensuous—but the total cosmic order, then the universal hierarchy may
be understood naturalistically so that each sphere gives scope for one
sort of good. God, or the highest being, would then be simply the life
of nature as a whole, if nature has a conscious life, or that of its
noblest portion. The supposed “metaphysical evil” involved in finitude
would then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. In
realising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly
happy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being.
Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if
conventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their
soul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any sense
perfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, the
entelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, or
of some other actual existence. Under these circumstances, inhabitants
even of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in their
way as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic note
would any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have to
renounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them would
have been a deeper joy. They would be asked to renounce nothing but
what, for them, would be an evil. The overruling providence would then
in truth be fatherly, by providing for each being that which it inwardly
craved. Persons of one rank would not be improved by passing into the
so-called higher sphere, any more than the ox would be improved by being
transformed into a lark, or a king into a poet.
Man in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine to
be the law of gravity, or Spinoza’s substance, or Hegel’s dialectical
idea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express some
element of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding to
man’s purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity. Every man’s
ideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only by
expressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction over
him. Heaven accordingly has really many mansions, each truly heavenly to
him who would inhabit it, and there is really no room for discord in
those rounds. One ideal can no more conflict with another than truth can
jostle truth; but men, or the disorganised functions within a given
individual, may be in physical conflict, as opinion may wrestle with
opinion in the world’s arena or in an ignorant brain. Among ideals
themselves infinite variety is consistent with perfect harmony, but
matter that has not yet developed or discovered its organic affinities
may well show groping and contradictory tendencies. When, however, these
embryonic disorders are once righted, each possible life knows its
natural paradise, and what some unintelligent outsider might say in
dispraise of that ideal will never wound or ruffle the self-justified
creature whose ideal it is, any more than a cat’s aversion to water will
disturb a fish’s plan of life.
[Sidenote: Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.]
An aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if the
variety and superposition of functions in it expressed a corresponding
diversity in its members’ faculties and ideals. And, indeed, what
aristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men really
differ so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave,
another for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king. All
professions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations. Some
men, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functions
are spontaneous in them. So long as they are humanely treated, it is,
we may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contribution
their labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highest
dignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficient
privilege.
Such assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism
about them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the
tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other
regions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would
often entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom
benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a
prima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more
sharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and
then each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonly
dissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their sex. One
tribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing
like the lark; a third would show a devil’s innate fondness for stoking
a fiery furnace.
[Sidenote: Its falsity.]
Aristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist in
India, and the social classes we find in the western world, are not now
based on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination. They
are based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced by
custom and perpetuated by inheritance. A certain circulation,
corresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place in
the body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken place
increasingly. Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom;
some, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top. But these readjustments
are insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuates
all the classes, and even such shifts as occur at once re-establish
artificial conditions for the next generation. As a rule, men’s station
determines their occupation without their gifts determining their
station. Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy or
pampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of its
natural leaders.
[Sidenote: Feeble individuality the rule.]
It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such
artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be
charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the
individual soul. It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss
their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on
them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career,
first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of
racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the
habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed
in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying
words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.
But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to
some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as
Schopenhauer said, _Fabrikwaaren der Natur_.
Variety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be
inwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially important
and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper
must be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated
and enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are those
trained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius
must be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition. A
rich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of all
possible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens up
new vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substance
organised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths may
begin. Thus it is only in recent times that discoveries in science have
been frequent, because natural science until lately possessed no settled
method and no considerable fund of acquired truths. So, too, in
political society, statesmanship is made possible by traditional
policies, generalship by military institutions, great financiers by
established commerce.
If we ventured to generalise these observations we might say that such
an unequal distribution of capacity as might justify aristocracy should
be looked for only in civilised states. Savages are born free and equal,
but wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits the
loose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity.
Under forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to light
possibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have been
possibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves do
not of themselves develop into brocade. A certain personal idiosyncrasy
must be assumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silk
and all men having like opportunities would be equally great. This
idiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of
nature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as
it does among barbarians.
[Sidenote: Sophistical envy.]
Distinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot become
important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to
individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction
nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the
man in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had
been born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as
he is, but only as he might have been, if _per impossibile_ he had not
been himself. There is a strange metaphysical illusion in imagining that
a man might change his parents, his body, his early environment, and
yet retain his personality. In its higher faculties his personality is
produced by his special relations. If Shakespeare had been born in Italy
he might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he could
never have been. Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who are
not Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth’s time that Shakespeare had that
advantage and was thereby enabled to exist.
The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two
environments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that the
illusion of a change of rôles without a change of characters may retain
some colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable
to make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, the
spirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp.
Lucifer’s fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial.
His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the
happiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way of
rebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitude
that creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, would
envy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand
Lama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently
leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a
nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace
of a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds and
another misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmuted
each man into the other. So adventitious a circumstance seems easily
transferable without undermining that personal distinction which it had
come to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such
suppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an
accident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideally
transferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have
exchanged genders.
What extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds is
the generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The first
personal pronoun “I” is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can
accompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an
individual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he
shares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up
his life. Each man’s memory embraces a certain field, and if the
landscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes it
to shift and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, other
men dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own experience
becomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might have
been had _he_ enjoyed those other men’s opportunities or even (so far
can unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The wholly
different creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would have
existed in that case would still have called itself “I”; and so, the
dreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a different
situation.
If a new birth could still be called by a man’s own name, the reason
would be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis
for the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to
fruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as
it realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner and
vaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personal
endowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that even
his uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his
finitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial
idiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in
heaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most
perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he
instinctively craves for himself.
[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.]
It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the
aristocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own nature
the most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble
nobody’s dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are
open is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent
suffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not something
comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private
fate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the
moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his
unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can
any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge
or justify that moment’s bitterness. The pain may be whistled away and
forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little
coarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with
unrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having
existed; it must remain for ever to trouble God’s omniscience and be a
part of that hell which the creation too truly involves.
[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding.]
The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa’s ingenious parable and the
joyful humility of Dante’s celestial friends, and renders both equally
irrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as
she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another’s life.
That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the
whole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabled
every living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments of
the others’ ends possible to them also. An approach to such an
equilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough
sifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible
alone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce
everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about
terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led to
punish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for
the honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creatures
together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her
bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some
unsuspecting creature.
This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and
makes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves a
wrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour and
privation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise,
but by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity and
renders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have been
divine. The lower classes, in submitting to the hardship and meanness of
their lives—which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had no
aristocracy existed—must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting by
their ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it.
Instead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they suffer
from is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less—for
the worst of men is human—the injury is more sensible. The
inclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourging
them, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has an
added sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live
like the gods in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have
been innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful
world, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.
[Sidenote: A hint to optimists.]
It would be a happy relief to the aristocrat’s conscience, when he
possesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that common
people were nothing but _bêtes-machines_, and that only a groundless
prejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist where
evidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunate
people could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant
justification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy
would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion.
Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician
might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and
indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be
self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying
that a slave’s life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the
labours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the
conveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, those
servile operations could come to consciousness only where they attained
their end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universal
happiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in so
far as they might attain perfection, would be the only life in
existence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred
could exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous and
ridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended to
apologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and
infinitely more consoling.
[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good.]
But so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might
call the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that
we exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by
radiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above
less would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefit
might take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military
protection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all
needful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. An
industrial and political oligarchy might defend itself on that ground.
Or the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as it
does when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here the
people neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence
of a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is,
in their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercise
financial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch
their daughters into fashionable society. Finally, if the only
aristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public
rewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take
the form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men.
Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. The
fruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be
monopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their wider
diffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more
intense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the share
which falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. The
saints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have
flourished in schools.
At the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training
and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by
popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people
are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of
diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society
aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the
less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great
mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such
things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to
boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this
dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must
become mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purified
and high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken the
planet.
[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature’s injury.]
Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that
which mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits of
inevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles
for nature’s primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer are
only further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. For
it lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of its
products are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formed
and on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel,
since it forms and maintains them blindly, without considering
difficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government,
like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of
natural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which
the philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the
weather. But when the vehicle of nature’s inclemency is a heartless man,
even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. The
source of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and the
result is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be that
offence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justly
arouses indignation and endures remorse.
[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality.]
Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of
remorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slow
and ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by
perpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent
physical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the
infliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal would
propose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even if
established could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tend
to destroy its ideal by abolishing its own existence. In the second
place, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist
in the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which
wrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal state
and the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but
where all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order
to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and
clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the
other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The
services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them
should be made the servant’s spontaneous and specific ideal. The
privileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on the
rest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwarting
their natural potentialities. For the humble to give their labour would
then be blessed in reality, and not merely by imputation, while for the
great to receive those benefits would be blessed also, not in fact only
but in justice.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote C: Paradiso. Canto III., 70-87.]
CHAPTER V
DEMOCRACY
[Sidenote: Democracy as an end and as a means.]
[Sidenote: Natural democracy leads to monarchy.]
The word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the body
politic or for a constitutional form of government in which power lies
more or less directly in the people’s hands. The former may be called
social democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differ
widely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered,
social democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper to
communities where there is general competence and no marked personal
eminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the American
pioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democratic
government, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will be
no aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness to
lend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much under
leaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. In
other words, there will be that most democratic of governments—no
government at all. But when pressure of circumstances, danger, or
inward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to a
social democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentary
monarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leader
presents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freely
criticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery;
he will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radically
his equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy and
aristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminences
are still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by the
force of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergent
classes.
[Sidenote: Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.]
Political democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificial
product. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges,
through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the
people’s part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the
discovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and
representative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great
empire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in
England and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less
democratic institutions. For under democratic governments the people
have not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions
and jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only a
veto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious
self-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the
family, private property, religious practices, or international
frontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as
the popular classes could never have produced; but these products of
natural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent
protest is raised against them. The people’s liberty consists not in
their original responsibility for what exists—for they are guiltless of
it—but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing any
detail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure,
which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself
from time to time to their instinct and mind.
[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients.]
If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and
political democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general
ethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and
inconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the family
and hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is
merely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother
government of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no
special ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the
general interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps
all women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising
in great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy,
and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very
large rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.
We may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regarding
democratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its function
is that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal,
since its origin is simply that of society itself.
[Sidenote: Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational,
would serve common interests.]
The possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of a
selfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrusting
their interests to one another’s keeping. If passion never overcame
prudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitable
also to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. For
if we assume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, it
would evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man should
exercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government,
having facilities for information and ready resources, might be left to
determine all matters of policy; for its members’ private interests
would coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices and
irrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, they
would surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respect
than would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy every
decision would otherwise have to be referred.
Thus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king’s and
the country’s interests coincident; public prosperity fills his
treasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms his
authority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to govern
alone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to draw
up creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift for
management or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It is
in this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, for
they seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctive
system is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; but
government, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such a
spontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their own
interests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; and
further, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, in
so far as they have not been harmonised by reason.
To rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every other
interest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interests
predominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all
others, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his
action, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse
and more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in
justice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should
be doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious
effort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform:
only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue
which would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in
expressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a
condition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and
hates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to
secure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to
think him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows
that it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetic
helplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.
[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence.]
These errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler,
are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence
he probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very
likely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in
every calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are
radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so.
Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they
clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it.
Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative
eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely
because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous
action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control.
Men of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may be
occasionally _hired_; but they will be closely watched and directed by
the people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishly
intrusting their affairs to other men’s hands.
A fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man at
his neighbour’s. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all those
concerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and
frequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the
fact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is that
each man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means to
advance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can in
the end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain his
practical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity.
[Sidenote: It is representative.]
All just government pursues the general good; the choice between
aristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end.
One arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, and
another to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existence
of available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrong
if it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminence
is synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence not
representative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravagance
or notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or
feeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many
diffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment is
filled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concerned
is mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests and
speaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such true
excellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society,
naturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting true
greatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is not
made representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing its
members by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only by
embodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, the
people’s conscious and unconscious interests.
[Sidenote: But subject to decay.]
Democratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failure
of theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative and
to secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders may
have possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional and
baseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and express
humanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. The
government reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the way
of all wisdom. Under such circumstances it is a happy thing if the
people possess enough initiative to assert themselves and, after
clearing the ground in a more or less summary fashion, allow some new
organisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace the
old encumbrances and tyrannies.
[Sidenote: Ancient citizenship a privilege.]
In the heroic ages of Greece and Rome patriotism was stimulated in
manifold ways. The city was a fatherland, a church, an army, and almost
a family. It had its own school of art, its own dialect, its own feasts,
its own fables. Every possible social interest was either embodied in
the love of country or, like friendship and fame, closely associated
with it. Patriotism could then be expected to sway every mind at all
capable of moral enthusiasm. Furthermore, only the flower of the
population were citizens. In rural districts the farmer might be a
freeman; but he probably had slaves whose work he merely superintended.
The meaner and more debasing offices, mining, sea-faring, domestic
service, and the more laborious part of all industries, were relegated
to slaves. The citizens were a privileged class. Military discipline and
the street life natural in Mediterranean countries, kept public events
and public men always under everybody’s eyes: the state was a bodily
presence. Democracy, when it arose in such communities, was still
aristocratic; it imposed few new duties upon the common citizens, while
it diffused many privileges and exemptions among them.
[Sidenote: Modern democracy industrial.]
The social democracy which is the ideal of many in modern times, on the
other hand, excludes slavery, unites whole nations and even all mankind
into a society of equals, and admits no local or racial privileges by
which the sense of fellowship may be stimulated. Public spirit could not
be sustained in such a community by exemptions, rivalries, or ambitions.
No one, indeed, would be a slave, everyone would have an elementary
education and a chance to demonstrate his capacity; but he would be
probably condemned to those occupations which in ancient republics were
assigned to slaves. At least at the opening of his career he would find
himself on the lowest subsisting plane of humanity, and he would
probably remain on it throughout his life. In other words, the citizens
of a social democracy would be all labourers; for even those who rose
to be leaders would, in a genuine democracy, rise from the ranks and
belong in education and habits to the same class as all the others.
[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation.]
Under such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic society
would have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives for
work which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want,
ambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the first
was eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love of
occupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sort
of labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous and
uninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance or
waywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can never
be the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Before
labour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, more
varied, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity.
Otherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties.
A state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up the
bulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every
liberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historic
essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt,
would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They
possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in
gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up
an aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted in
diffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It has
not sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation
from them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. All
its founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspired
by an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth and
speaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; it
mitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, among
others, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If social
democracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this new
civilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But it
doubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, on
leadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolish
aristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority
would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto
flowed.
[Sidenote: Is current civilisation a good?]
Civilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with a
certain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way of
defending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good.
In one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to a
more simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracy
has fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age than
in an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal and
material, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easily
shared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead of
dividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking.
The necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in a
sparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted
not only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even in
our society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship which
the civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should
triumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishing
the amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury,
many instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced.
We might see the means of communication, lately so marvellously
developed, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting in
harbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while a
rural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, would
spread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling them
seats of Babylonian servitude and folly.
Such anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is no
probability that a reaction against material progress should set in in
the near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and population
continues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose that
these tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment in
civilisation is the last the world will see?
[Sidenote: Horrors of materialistic democracy.]
If social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth and
proposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnace
at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By
whom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of
pleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and
energy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of
religion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they
spend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and the
presence of a rich class still profoundly influence popular ideals.
Imagine those aristocratic influences removed, and would any head be
lifted above a dead level of infinite dulness and vulgarity? Would
mankind be anything but a trivial, sensuous, superstitious,
custom-ridden herd? There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and
anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every
budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce
stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws
of a dragon. Anyone would be a hero who should quell the monster. A
foreign invader or domestic despot would at least have steps to his
throne, possible standing-places for art and intelligence; his
supercilious indifference would discountenance the popular gods, and
allow some courageous hand at last to shatter them. Social democracy at
high pressure would leave no room for liberty. The only freeman in it
would be one whose whole ideal was to be an average man.
[Sidenote: Timocracy or socialistic democracy.]
Perhaps, however, social democracy might take a more liberal form. It
might allow the benefits of civilisation to be integrated in eminent
men, whose influence in turn should direct and temper the general life.
This would be timocracy—a government by men of merit. The same
abilities which raised these men to eminence would enable them to
apprehend ideal things and to employ material resources for the common
advantage. They would formulate religion, cultivate the arts and
sciences, provide for government and all public conveniences, and
inspire patriotism by their discourse and example. At the same time a
new motive would be added to common labour, I mean ambition. For there
would be not only a possibility of greater reward but a possibility of
greater service. The competitive motive which socialism is supposed to
destroy would be restored in timocracy, and an incentive offered to
excellence and industry. The country’s resources would increase for the
very reason that somebody might conceivably profit by them; and everyone
would have at least an ideal interest in ministering to that complete
life which he or his children, or whoever was most capable of
appreciation, was actually to enjoy.
Such a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) would
differ from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removal
of hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they would
grow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality of
opportunity. If power remained in the people’s hands, the government
would be democratic; but a full development of timocracy would allow the
proved leader to gain great ascendancy. The better security the law
offered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraint
would it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminence
would indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if they
were not able to see and do what was requisite better than the community
at large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of its
members, far less, therefore, than its members have when added together
and less even than the wiser part of them.
A timocracy would therefore seem to unite the advantages of all forms of
government and to avoid their respective abuses. It would promote
freedom scientifically. It might be a monarchy, if men existed fit to
be kings; but they would have to give signs of their fitness and their
honours would probably not be hereditary. Like aristocracy, it would
display a great diversity of institutions and superposed classes, a
stimulating variety in ways of living; it would be favourable to art and
science and to noble idiosyncrasies. Among its activities the
culminating and most conspicuous ones would be liberal. Yet there would
be no isolation of the aristocratic body; its blood would be drawn from
the people, and only its traditions from itself. Like social democracy,
finally, it would be just and open to every man, but it would not
depress humanity nor wish to cast everybody in a common mould.
[Sidenote: The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.]
There are immense difficulties, however, in the way of such a Utopia,
some physical and others moral. Timocracy would have to begin by
uprooting the individual from his present natural soil and transplanting
him to that in which his spirit might flourish best. This proposed
transfer is what makes the system ideally excellent, since nature is a
means only; but it makes it also almost impossible to establish, since
nature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in the
few fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men to
that situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they find
no influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. It
is clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family or
greatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to that
medium where lay the creature’s spiritual affinities; his origins would
be disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast
his disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate,
conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning,
nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have
seen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in
that ideal direction.
Even less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require a
moral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful.
A motive which now generates political democracy, impatience of
sacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into its
opposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art or
of religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs of
the state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially;
while if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensive
development which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need to
forget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He must
find his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; and
when, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he must
find an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complex
society to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He must
learn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no reward
save his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country’s
greatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a close
organisation and much training; and as military and religious
timocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so an
industrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, which
would make large inroads upon personal freedom.
[Sidenote: The masses would have to be plebeian in position and
patrician in feeling.]
The question here suggests itself whether such a citizen, once having
accepted his humble lot, would be in a different position from the
plebeians in an aristocracy. The same subordination would be imposed
upon him, only the ground assigned for his submission would be no longer
self-interest and necessity, but patriotic duty. This patriotism would
have to be of an exalted type. Its end would not be, as in industrial
society, to secure the private interests of each citizen; its end would
be the glory and perfection of the state as imagination or philosophy
might conceive them. This glory and perfection would not be a benefit to
anyone who was not in some degree a philosopher and a poet. They would
seem, then, to be the special interests of an aristocracy, not indeed an
aristocracy of wealth or power, but an aristocracy of noble minds.
Those whose hearts could prize the state’s ideal perfection would be
those in whom its benefits would be integrated. And the common citizen
would find in their existence, and in his own participation in their
virtue, the sole justification for his loyalty.
Ideal patriotism is not secured when each man, although without natural
eminence, pursues his private interests. What renders man an imaginative
and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which
could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion,
science, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are covered by
the single passion of patriotism; and then a conception of one’s
country, its history and mission becomes the touchstone of every ideal
impulse. Timocracy requires this kind of patriotism in everybody; so
that if public duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many for
the sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only be that the
many covet, appreciate, and appropriate their country’s ideal glories,
quite as much as the favoured class ever could in any aristocracy.
[Sidenote: Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.]
Is this possible? What might happen if the human race were immensely
improved and exalted there is as yet no saying; but experience has given
no example of efficacious devotion to communal ideals except in small
cities, held together by close military and religious bonds and having
no important relations to anything external. Even this antique virtue
was short-lived and sadly thwarted by private and party passion. Where
public spirit has held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very different
type of communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by a
notable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to an
arbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore,
that a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now
constituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes for
themselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing such
narrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world.
To ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty
which meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whatever
benefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England.
It is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes would
inspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if
actually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an
indoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; it
imposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle or
habit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomes
superstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence.
[Sidenote: Public spirit the life of democracy.]
Now it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Office
in it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour,
and being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestly
administered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit of
personal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or to
teach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulated
irrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not be
transmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chief
imaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgar
and not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. A
life of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting
or really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need
prizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment.
Genius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in a
democratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so
well fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial
and simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl
unbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than
that which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting
would be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and
inwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must be
notably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist,
the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero.
We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same
time how ominous, was Montesquieu’s saying that the principle of
democracy is virtue.
CHAPTER VI
FREE SOCIETY
[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]
Natural society unites beings in time and space; it fixes affection on
those creatures on which we depend and to which our action must be
adapted. Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as
more and more things become tributary to our personal being. In marriage
and the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted
on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or
corporate. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life;
and this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since all
spirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or be
conceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, lay
beneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view, and to give
preference a direction. Things could not be near or far, worse or
better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged
somewhere in space and time. Reason is a principle of order appearing in
a subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an
irrational datum. Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse,
and impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.
At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only
because, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience.
Nature’s works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke;
mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of
view of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows
impassioned and vehement. Nature’s values are imputed to her
retroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical
and moral primacy of its own. In themselves events are perfectly
mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor
avoiding what we call failures. And so they would always have remained
in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science
had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance,
arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.
Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy
in the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise
where an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself. Such an
equilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that
produced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it
sustains in being an ideal form. This form is what consciousness
corresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant
thoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems
to serve. The being to whom they come is the most widely based and
synthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion as
the body feeds on the surrounding world. Noble ideas, although rare and
difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.
[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]
Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal
through and through. On one level as much as on another, it celebrates
an attained balance in nature, or grieves at its collapse; it prophesies
and remembers, it loves and dreams. It sees even nature from the point
of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal
standards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects,
entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining,
and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary
mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful
reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness
into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great
persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into
prodigious abstract systems of thought. Every experience of victory,
eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if
repeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.
[Sidenote: Social experience has its ideality too.]
Society also breeds its ideal harmonies. At first it establishes
affections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it
grows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and
sympathetic purposes. These ideal affinities, although grounded like the
others on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication),
do not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely as
on a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music,
while sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to its
own universe of sound.
[Sidenote: The self an ideal.]
Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. Its
personages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist who
calls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies. When most nearly
material these personages are human souls—the ideal life of particular
bodies—or floating mortal reputations—echoes of those ideal lives in
one another. From this relative substantiality they fade into notions of
country, posterity, humanity, and the gods. These figures all represent
some circle of events or forces in the real world; but such
representation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate. The
boundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguely
drawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite. This
ambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the
personages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion—his idea
of himself. “There is society where none intrudes;” and for most men
sympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion.
True memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of past
experience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental
discourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and social
connotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings. Or
rather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office. A
man’s notion of himself is a concretion in discourse for which his more
constant somatic feelings, his ruling interests, and his social
relations furnish most of the substance.
[Sidenote: Romantic egotism.]
The more reflective and self-conscious a man is the more completely will
his experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial “I.” If
philosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even
regard all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and encourage
himself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic and
sentimental colour. But the more successful he is in stuffing everything
into his self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void become
which surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive
dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no
longer contrasted with anything else. The egotist must therefore people
the desert he has spread about him, and he naturally peoples it with
mythical counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination is
sensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates
a poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, they
are projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future. He will
then say that all experience is really his own and that some
inexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in his
omniscient mind.
[Sidenote: Vanity.]
Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimes
felt, in their way, the absorbing force of self-consciousness. La
Rochefoucauld could describe _amour propre_ as the spring of all human
sentiments. _Amour propre_ involves preoccupation not merely with the
idea of self, but with that idea reproduced in other men’s minds; the
soliloquy has become a dialogue, or rather a solo with an echoing
chorus. Interest in one’s own social figure is to some extent a material
interest, for other men’s love or aversion is a principle read into
their acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men’s
acts for his happiness. An individual’s concern for the attitude society
takes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his own
practical welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly interest.
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when
known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Nothing could better
prove the mythical character of self-consciousness than this extreme
sensitiveness to alien opinions; for if a man really knew himself he
would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a
subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
Indeed, those opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon the
reality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at the stock
fortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy.
As it is, however, the least breath of irresponsible and anonymous
censure lashes our self-esteem and sometimes quite transforms our plans
and affections. The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most
inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. We crave support in
vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that
sphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, we
know too well that they are woven of thin air. A hostile word, by
starting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and
threatens to dissolve their being.
[Sidenote: Ambiguities of fame.]
The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to
deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination
almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have
no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which
reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame. The
direct object of this passion—that a name should survive in men’s
mouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached—seems
a thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how
little we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are to
remember us. What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him
at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from
which everything he loved has departed? Yet, beneath this desire for
nominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambition
of which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so high
a value on fame. They often identified fame with immortality, a subject
on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since
prevailed.
[Sidenote: Its possible ideality.]
Fame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not embodied in a
monument, a biography, or the repetition of a strange name by strangers;
it consists in the immortality of a man’s work, his spirit, his
efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. When
Horace—no model of magnanimity—wrote his _exegi monumentum_, he was
not thinking that the pleasure he would continue to give would remind
people of his trivial personality, which indeed he never particularly
celebrated and which had much better lie buried with his bones. He was
thinking, of course, of that pleasure itself; thinking that the delight,
half lyric, half sarcastic, which those delicate cameos had given him
to carve would be perennially renewed in all who retraced them. Nay,
perhaps we may not go too far in saying that even that impersonal
satisfaction was not the deepest he felt; the deepest, very likely,
flowed from the immortality, not of his monument, but of the subject and
passion it commemorated; that tenderness, I mean, and that disillusion
with mortal life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed,
and in expressing appropriated, some recurring human moods, some mocking
renunciations; and he knew that his spirit was immortal, being linked
and identified with that portion of the truth. He had become a little
spokesman of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats more or less
articulately; and even if he should cease to be honoured in men’s
memories, he would continue to be unwittingly honoured and justified in
their lives.
What we may conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace’s
apprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame.
With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression
involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth
genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and
fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When the
Virgin in the Magnificat says, “Behold, from henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed,” the psalmist surely means to express a
spiritual exaltation exempt from vanity; he merely translates into a
rhetorical figure the fact that what had been first revealed to Mary
would also bless all generations. That the Church should in consequence
deem and pronounce her blessed is an incident describing, but not
creating, the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus the
outward sign or recognition of an inward representative authority
residing in genius or good fortune, an authority in which lies the whole
worth of fame. Those will substantially remember and honour us who keep
our ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have
anticipated.
Free society differs from that which is natural and legal precisely in
this, that it does not cultivate relations which in the last analysis
are experienced and material, but turns exclusively to unanimities in
meanings, to collaborations in an ideal world. The basis of free society
is of course natural, as we said, but free society has ideal goals.
Spirits cannot touch save by becoming unanimous. At the same time public
opinion, reputation, and impersonal sympathy reinforce only very general
feelings, and reinforce them vaguely; and as the inner play of sentiment
becomes precise, it craves more specific points of support or
comparison. It is in creatures of our own species that we chiefly scent
the aroma of inward sympathy, because it is they that are visibly moved
on the same occasions as ourselves; and it is to those among our
fellow-men who share our special haunts and habits that we feel more
precise affinities. Though the ground for such feeling is animal contact
and contagion, its deliverance does not revert to those natural
accidents, but concerns a represented sympathy in represented souls.
Friendship, springing from accidental association, terminates in a
consciousness of ideal and essential agreement.
[Sidenote: Comradeship.]
Comradeship is a form of friendship still akin to general sociability
and gregariousness. When men are “in the same boat together,” when a
common anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their human
kinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity
subsisting between them. The same effect is produced by a common
estrangement from the rest of society. For this reason comradeship lasts
no longer than the circumstances that bring it about. Its constancy is
proportionate to the monotony of people’s lives and minds. There is a
lasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy again
and have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship with
one’s countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable and
polyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understand
them. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding
or profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolise
the man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy, a longer youth, a richer
experience, would break down all these limits of fellowship. Such
clingings to the familiar are three parts dread of the unfamiliar and
want of resource in its presence, for one part in them of genuine
loyalty. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a
man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like
home.
[Sidenote: External conditions of friendship.]
Though comradeship is an accidental bond, it is the condition of ideal
friendship, for the ideal, in all spheres, is nothing but the accidental
confirming itself and generating its own standard. Men must meet to
love, and many other accidents besides conjunction must conspire to make
a true friendship possible. In order that friendship may fulfil the
conditions even of comradeship, it is requisite that the friends have
the same social status, so that they may live at ease together and have
congenial tastes. They must further have enough community of occupation
and gifts to give each an appreciation of the other’s faculty; for
qualities are not complementary unless they are qualities of the same
substance. Nothing must be actual in either friend that is not potential
in the other.
[Sidenote: Identity in sex required.]
For this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex,
for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their
reasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between
men and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies
precisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding,
but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the
dark. As man’s body differs from woman’s in sex and strength, so his
mind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate but
can never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organised
like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and
essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is
a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but
passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without
justice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or less
than friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more,
because (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as in
respect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about
a woman’s mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts
it out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards.
She has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally
_à propos_. There is a gallantry of the mind which pervades all
conversation with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward children
and mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking as it
does an intellectual alienation as profound as that which separates us
from the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship.
[Sidenote: and in age.]
Friends, moreover, should have been young together. Much difference in
age defeats equality and forbids frankness on many a fundamental
subject; it confronts two minds of unlike focus: one near-sighted and
without perspective, the other seeing only the background of present
things. While comparisons in these respects may be interesting and
borrowings sometimes possible, lending the older mind life and the
younger mind wisdom, such intercourse has hardly the value of
spontaneous sympathy, in which the spark of mutual intelligence flies,
as it should, almost without words. Contagion is the only source of
valid mind-reading: you must imitate to understand, and where the
plasticity of two minds is not similar their mutual interpretations are
necessarily false. They idealise in their friends whatever they do not
invent or ignore, and the friendship which should have lived on energies
conspiring spontaneously together dies into conscious appreciation.
[Sidenote: Constituents of friendship.]
All these are merely permissive conditions for friendship; its positive
essence is yet to find. How, we may ask, does the vision of the general
_socius_, humanity, become specific in the vision of a particular friend
without losing its ideality or reverting to practical values? Of course,
individuals might be singled out for the special benefits they may have
conferred; but a friend’s only gift is himself, and friendship is not
friendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does not
terminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake.
Such objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterranean
and instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow from
their ulterior effects and manifestations. To praise the utility of
friendship, as the ancients so often did, and to regard it as a
political institution justified, like victory or government, by its
material results, is to lose one’s moral bearings. The value of victory
or good government is rather to be found in the fact that, among other
things, it might render friendship possible. We are not to look now for
what makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found in
friendship that may lend utility to life.
[Sidenote: Personal liking.]
The first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises the
comrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity.
Whatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it has
had time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual
habit, its first assault is always on the senses, and no sense is an
indifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate of
vibration and gives its stimuli a varying welcome. Little as we may
attend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betray
themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and
things, in the _je ne sais quoi_ that makes instinctive sympathy. Voice,
manner, aspect, hints of congenial tastes and judgments, a jest in the
right key, a gesture marking the right aversions, all these trifles
leave behind a pervasive impression. We reject a vision we find
indigestible and without congruity to our inner dream; we accept and
incorporate another into our private pantheon, where it becomes a
legitimate figure, however dumb and subsidiary it may remain.
In a refined nature these sensuous premonitions of sympathy are seldom
misleading. Liking cannot, of course, grow into friendship over night as
it might into love; the pleasing impression, even if retained, will lie
perfectly passive and harmless in the mind, until new and different
impressions follow to deepen the interest at first evoked and to remove
its centre of gravity altogether from the senses. In love, if the field
is clear, a single glimpse may, like Tristan’s potion, produce a violent
and irresistible passion; but in friendship the result remains more
proportionate to the incidental causes, discrimination is preserved,
jealousy and exclusiveness are avoided. That vigilant, besetting,
insatiable affection, so full of doubts and torments, with which the
lover follows his object, is out of place here; for the friend has no
property in his friend’s body or leisure or residual ties; he accepts
what is offered and what is acceptable, and the rest he leaves in peace.
He is distinctly not his brother’s keeper, for the society of friends is
free.
[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]
Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or
comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral
appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to
produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting,
friendship does not arise. Recognition given to a man’s talent or virtue
is not properly friendship. Friends must desire to live as much as
possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures.
Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give
spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be
indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them,
and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human
medium through which it beheld the good.
[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]
No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or
should be transparent. Transparency is a virtue only in artificial
instruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic
operation is not itself a portion of human life. In looking through a
field-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows
about their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its
pigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns. The sense for colour
is a vital endowment and an ingredient in human happiness; but no
vitality is added by the intervention of further media which are not
themselves living organs.
A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the
energies he exerts. When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone
into the observer’s experience, no friendship is possible. This is
always the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed
personality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived
nexus for the work he performed. In a philosopher or artist, too,
personality is merely instrumental, for, although in a sense pervasive,
a creative personality evaporates into its expression, and whatever part
of it may not have been translated into ideas is completely negligible
from the public point of view. That portion of a man’s soul which he has
not alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him
otherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public
attributions. Such persons are his friends. Into their lives he has
entered not merely through an idea with which his name may be
associated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but
by awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of
emotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly
arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely
accent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal
sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous
affinity colouring a spiritual light.
[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]
If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal
loyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in
chance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with
mere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of
common ideal interests. That is a silly and effeminate friendship in
which the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of
how each stands in the other’s eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort,
in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather
a feeble form of love than properly a friendship. In extreme youth such
a weakness may perhaps indicate capacity for friendship of a nobler
type, because when taste and knowledge have not yet taken shape, the
only way, often, in which ideal interests can herald themselves is in
the guise of some imagined union from which it is vaguely felt they
might be developed, just as in love sexual and social instincts mask
themselves in an unreasoning obsession, or as for mystic devotion every
ideal masks itself in God. All these sentimental feelings are at any
rate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more
discriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may
possibly pitch on a higher key.
[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]
The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is
what makes true friendship so rare. It is found chiefly in youth, for
youth best unites the two requisite conditions—affectionate comradeship
and ardour in pursuing such liberal aims as may be pursued in common.
Life in camp or college is favourable to friendship, for there generous
activities are carried on in unison and yet leave leisure for playful
expansion and opportunity for a choice in friends. The ancients, so long
as they were free, spent their whole life in forum and palæstra, camp,
theatre, and temple, and in consequence could live by friendship even in
their maturer years; but modern life is unfavourable to its continuance.
What with business cares, with political bonds remote and invisible,
with the prior claims of family, and with individualities both of mind
and habit growing daily more erratic, early friends find themselves very
soon parted by unbridgeable chasms. For friendship to flourish personal
life would have to become more public and social life more simple and
humane.
[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]
The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient
ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite of
intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are
bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection
for children, and, what is of great importance, common financial
interests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting
unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a
marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise
of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it
requires.
[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]
When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain
become altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking
may be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political
fellowships. Discipleship is a union of this kind. Without claiming any
share in the master’s private life, perhaps without having ever seen
him, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and
guidance in following the ideal which links us together. Hero-worship is
an imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes
and take actual persons for their symbols. Such companionship, perhaps
wholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society.
The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is
irrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the
idealising mind. There is or need be no comradeship, no actual force or
influence transmitted from him. Certain capacities and tendencies in the
worshipper are brought to a focus by the hero’s image, who is thereby
first discovered and deputed to be a hero. He is an unmoved mover, like
Aristotle’s God and like every ideal to which thought or action is
directed.
The symbol, however, is ambiguous in hero-worship, being in one sense
ideal, the representation of an inner demand, and in another sense a
sensible experience, the representative of an external reality.
Accordingly the symbol, when highly prized and long contemplated, may
easily become an idol; that in it which is not ideal nor representative
of the worshipper’s demand may be imported confusedly into the total
adored, and may thus receive a senseless worship. The devotion which
was, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in
fancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal. For this
reason it is very important that the first objects to fix the soul’s
admiration should be really admirable, for otherwise their accidental
blemishes will corrupt the mind to which they appear _sub specie boni_.
[Sidenote: Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.]
Discipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations. Since the
meaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since
the image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real
external object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarily
fall apart. The idol will be discredited. An ideal, ideally conceived
and known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth,
will take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to every
actual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, and
worship to an admiration more or less selective and critical.
[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes.]
A disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannot
exercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we are
expected to imitate. The more fruitful procedure is accordingly to
idealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimise
in it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time all
the unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can
help to give that model a persuasive vitality. This poetic process is
all the more successful for being automatic. It is in this way that
heroes and gods have been created. A legend or fable lying in the mind
and continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new
eloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already
awakened, and was destined to awake again. To measure the importance of
this truth the reader need only conceive the distance traversed from the
Achilles that may have existed to the hero in Homer, or from Jesus as he
might have been in real life, or even as he is in the gospels, to Christ
in the Church.
CHAPTER VII
PATRIOTISM
[Sidenote: The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must
be represented symbolically.]
The mythical social idea most potent over practical minds is perhaps the
idea of country. When a tribe, enlarged and domiciled, has become a
state, much social feeling that was before evoked by things visible
loses its sensuous object. Yet each man remains no less dependent than
formerly on his nation, although less swayed by its visible presence and
example; he is no less concerned, materially and ideally, in the
fortunes of the community. If a sense for social relations is to endure,
some symbol must take the place of the moving crowd, the visible
stronghold, and the outspread fields and orchards that once made up his
country; some intellectual figment must arise to focus political
interests, no longer confined to the crops and the priest’s medicinal
auguries. It is altogether impossible that the individual should have a
discursive and adequate knowledge of statecraft and economy. Whatever
idea, then, he frames to represent his undistinguished political
relations becomes the centre of his patriotism.
When intelligence is not keen this idea may remain sensuous. The
visible instruments of social life—chieftains, armies, monuments, the
dialect and dress of the district, with all customs and pleasures
traditional there—these are what a sensuous man may understand by his
country. Bereft of these sensations he would feel lost and incapable;
the habits formed in that environment would be galled by any other. This
fondness for home, this dread of change and exile, is all the love of
country he knows. If by chance, without too much added thought, he could
rise to a certain poetic sentiment, he might feel attachment also to the
landscape, to the memorable spots and aspects of his native land. These
objects, which rhetoric calls sacred, might really have a certain
sanctity for him; a wave of pious emotion might run over him at the
sight of them, a pang when in absence they were recalled. These very
things, however, like the man who prizes them, are dependent on a much
larger system; and if patriotism is to embrace ideally what really
produces human well-being it should extend over a wider field and to
less picturable objects.
[Sidenote: Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical and
moral.]
To define one’s country is not so simple a matter as it may seem. The
habitat of a man’s youth, to which actual associations may bind him, is
hardly his country until he has conceived the political and historical
forces that include that habitat in their sphere of influence and have
determined its familiar institutions. Such forces are numerous and
their spheres include one another like concentric rings. France, for
instance, is an uncommonly distinct and self-conscious nation, with a
long historic identity and a compact territory. Yet what is the France a
Frenchman is to think of and love? Paris itself has various quarters and
moral climates, one of which may well be loved while another is
detested. The provinces have customs, temperaments, political ideals,
and even languages of their own. Is Alsace-Lorraine beyond the pale of
French patriotism? And if not, why utterly exclude French-speaking
Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Belgium, or Quebec? Or is a Frenchman
rather to love the colonies by way of compensation? Is an Algerian Moor
or a native of Tonquin his true fellow-citizen? Is Tahiti a part of his
“country”? The truth is, if we look at the heart of the matter, a
Protestant born in Paris is less a Frenchman than is a Catholic born in
Geneva.
If we pass from geography to institutions the same vagueness exists.
France to one man represents the Revolution, to another the Empire, to a
third the Church, and the vestiges of the _ancien régime_. Furthermore,
how far into the past is patriotism to look? Is Charlemagne one of the
glories of French history? Is it Julius Cæsar or Vicingetorix that is to
warm the patriotic heart? Want of reflection and a blind subservience to
the colours of the map has led some historians to call Roman victories
defeats suffered by their country, even when that country is essentially
so Roman, for instance, as Spain. With as good reason might a Sicilian
or a Florentine chafe under the Latin conquest, or an American blush at
the invasion of his country by the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, even
geographically, the limits and the very heart of a man’s country are
often ambiguous. Was Alexander’s country Macedon or Greece? Was General
Lee’s the United States or Virginia? The ancients defined their country
from within outward; its heart was the city and its limits those of that
city’s dominion or affinities. Moderns generally define their country
rather stupidly by its administrative frontiers; and yet an Austrian
would have some difficulty in applying even this conventional criterion.
[Sidenote: Sentimental and political patriotism.]
The object of patriotism is in truth something ideal, a moral entity
definable only by the ties which a man’s imagination and reason can at
any moment recognise. If he has insight and depth of feeling he will
perceive that what deserves his loyalty is the entire civilisation to
which he owes his spiritual life and into which that life will presently
flow back, with whatever new elements he may have added. Patriotism
accordingly has two aspects: it is partly sentiment by which it looks
back upon the sources of culture, and partly policy, or allegiance to
those ideals which, being suggested by what has already been attained,
animate the better organs of society and demand further embodiment. To
love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must
involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its
inherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand for
changes and for effort. Party allegiance is a true form of patriotism.
For a party, at least in its intent, is an association of persons
advocating the same policy. Every thoughtful man must advocate some
policy, and unless he has the misfortune to stand quite alone in his
conception of public welfare he will seek to carry out that policy by
the aid of such other persons as advocate it also.
[Sidenote: The earth and the race the first objects of rational
loyalty.]
The springs of culture, which retrospective patriotism regards, go back
in the last instance to cosmic forces. The necessity that marshals the
stars makes possible the world men live in, and is the first general and
law-giver to every nation. The earth’s geography, its inexorable
climates with their flora and fauna, make a play-ground for the human
will which should be well surveyed by any statesman who wishes to judge
and act, not fantastically, but with reference to the real situation.
Geography is a most enlightening science. In describing the habitat of
man it largely explains his history. Animal battles give the right and
only key to human conflicts, for the superadded rational element in man
is not partisan, but on the contrary insinuates into his economy the
novel principle of justice and peace. As this leaven, however, can
mingle only with elements predisposed to receive it, the basis of reason
itself, in so far as it attains expression, must be sought in the
natural world. The fortunes of the human family among the animals thus
come to concern reason and to be the background of progress.
Within humanity the next sphere of interest for a patriot is the race
from which he is descended, with its traditional languages and
religions. Blood is the ground of character and intelligence. The fruits
of civilisation may, indeed, be transmitted from one race to another and
consequently a certain artificial homogeneity may be secured amongst
different nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place each
race will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall of
the Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types of
barbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselves
everywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained by
commerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way and
yield to local civilisations no less diverse than Christendom and Islam.
[Sidenote: Race, when distinct, the greatest of distinctions.]
Community of race is a far deeper bond than community of language,
education, or government. Where one political system dominates various
races it forces their common culture to be external merely. This is
perhaps the secret of that strange recrudescence of national feeling,
apart often from political divisions, which has closely followed the
French Revolution and the industrial era. The more two different peoples
grow alike in externals the more conscious and jealous they become of
diversity in their souls; and where individuals are too insignificant to
preserve any personality or distinction of their own, they flock
together into little intentional societies and factious groups, in the
hope of giving their imagination, in its extremity, some little food and
comfort. Private nationalities and private religions are luxuries at
such a time in considerable demand. The future may possibly see in the
Occident that divorce between administrative and ideal groups which is
familiar in the Orient; so that under no matter what government and with
utter cosmopolitanism in industry and science, each race may guard its
own poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, would
always be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life,
because mind must either represent nature and the conditions of action
or else be content to persist precariously and without a function, like
a sort of ghost.
[Sidenote: “Pure” races may be morally sterile.]
Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment
to the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope,
and a relative stability. It is therefore of the greatest importance not
to obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, and
thus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolonged
sifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against any
fusion, for instance, of white and black peoples. Mixture is in itself
no evil if the two nations, being approximately equal, but having
complementary gifts, can modify them without ultimate loss, and possibly
to advantage. Indeed the so-called pure races, since their purity has
gone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively little
spiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out native
genius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterate
it. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as
when they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the
same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails
inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.
There is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, in
standing on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were of
moral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has the
right spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (since
monkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when blood
means character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomes
important. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his political
and moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holds
an approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have little
efficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great tradition
nor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, will
falsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the public
medium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, and
therefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; and
a general genius means an exceptional and distinct race.
[Sidenote: True nationality direction on a definite ideal.]
Environment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last and
may make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumed
efficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet in
practice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain that
omnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is more
treacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keep
it warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submitted
to the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort of
ritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought they
were maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turning
its forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practically
extinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing to
revive it. The ways of the Roman world—a kindred promiscuous
population—prevailed over that local ritual and rendered it
perfunctory, because there were no longer any living souls to understand
that a man might place his happiness in his country’s life and care
nothing for Oriental luxury or Oriental superstition, things coming to
flatter his personal lusts and make him useless and unhappy.
Institutions without men are as futile as men without institutions.
Before race can be a rational object for patriotism there must exist a
_traditional genius_, handed down by inheritance or else by adoption,
when the persons adopted can really appreciate the mysteries they are
initiated into. Blood could be disregarded, if only the political ideal
remained constant and progress was sustained, the laws being modified
only to preserve their spirit. A state lives in any case by exchanging
persons, and all spiritual life is maintained by exchanging expressions.
Life is a circulation; it can digest whatever materials will assume a
form already determined ideally and enable that form to come forth more
clearly and be determined in more particulars. Stagnant matter
necessarily decays and in effect is false to the spirit no less than a
spirit that changes is false to itself.
[Sidenote: Country well represented by domestic and civic religion.]
The spirit of a race is a mythical entity expressing the individual soul
in its most constant and profound instincts and expanding it in the
direction in which correct representation is most easily possible, in
the direction of ancestors, kinsmen, and descendants. In ancient cities,
where patriotism was intense, it was expressed in a tribal and civic
religion. The lares, the local gods, the deified heroes associated with
them, were either ancestors idealised or ideals of manhood taking the
form of patrons and supernatural protectors. Jupiter Capitolinus and the
Spirit of Rome were a single object. To worship Jupiter in that Capitol
was to dedicate oneself to the service of Rome. A foreigner could no
more share that devotion than a neighbour could share the religion of
the hearth without sharing by adoption the life of the family. Paganism
was the least artificial of religions and the most poetical; its myths
were comparatively transparent and what they expressed was comparatively
real. In that religion patriotism and family duties could take
imaginable forms, and those forms, apart from the inevitable tinge of
superstition which surrounded them, did not materially vitiate the
allegiance due to the actual forces on which human happiness depends.
[Sidenote: Misleading identification of country with government.]
[Sidenote: Sporting or belligerent patriotism.]
What has driven patriotism, as commonly felt and conceived, so far from
rational courses and has attached it to vapid objects has been the
initial illegitimacy of all governments. Under such circumstances,
patriotism is merely a passion for ascendency. Properly it animates the
army, the government, the aristocracy; from those circles it can
percolate, not perhaps without the help of some sophistry and
intimidation, into the mass of the people, who are told that their
government’s fortunes are their own. Now the rabble has a great
propensity to take sides, promptly and passionately, in any spectacular
contest; the least feeling of affinity, the slightest emotional
consonance, will turn the balance and divert in one direction
sympathetic forces which, for every practical purpose, might just as
well have rushed the other way. Most governments are in truth private
societies pitted against one another in the international arena and
giving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely of
enterprise; but the people’s passions are easily enlisted in such a
game, of course on the side of their own government, just as each
college or region backs its own athletes, even to the extent of paying
their bills. Nations give the same kind of support to their fighting
governments, and the sporting passions and illusions concerned are what,
in the national game, is called patriotism.
Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and
countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from
local ravages, whether its own army or the enemy’s is victorious in war,
nor does it really affect any man’s welfare whether the party he happens
to belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such cases,
only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or the
official classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall from
power. The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to
pay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a
maximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some son
at the front, some cousin in the government, or some historical
sentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of his country, the
oppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardour, and
will decry as dead to duty and honour anyone who points out how perverse
is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public
interest.
[Sidenote: Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government
supported is universally beneficent.]
In proportion as governments become good and begin to operate for the
general welfare, patriotism itself becomes representative and an
expression of reason; but just in the same measure does hostility to
that government on the part of foreigners become groundless and
perverse. A competitive patriotism involves ill-will toward all other
states and a secret and constant desire to see them thrashed and
subordinated. It follows that a good government, while it justifies this
governmental patriotism in its subjects, disallows it in all other men.
For a good government is an international benefit, and the prosperity
and true greatness of any country is a boon sooner or later to the whole
world; it may eclipse alien governments and draw away local populations
or industries, but it necessarily benefits alien individuals in so far
as it is allowed to affect them at all.
Animosity against a well-governed country is therefore madness. A
rational patriotism would rather take the form of imitating and
supporting that so-called foreign country, and even, if practicable, of
fusing with it. The invidious and aggressive form of patriotism, though
inspired generally only by local conceit, would nevertheless be really
justified if such conceit happened to be well grounded. A dream of
universal predominance visiting a truly virtuous and intelligent people
would be an aspiration toward universal beneficence. For every man who
is governed at all must be governed by others; the point is, that the
others, in ruling him, shall help him to be himself and give scope to
his congenial activities. When coerced in that direction he obeys a
force which, in the best sense of the word, _represents_ him, and
consequently he is truly free; nor could he be ruled by a more native
and rightful authority than by one that divines and satisfies his true
necessities.
[Sidenote: Accidents of birth and training affect the ideal.]
A man’s nature is not, however, a quantity or quality fixed unalterably
and _a priori_. As breeding and selection improve a race, so every
experience modifies the individual and offers a changed basis for future
experience. The language, religion, education, and prejudices acquired
in youth bias character and predetermine the directions in which
development may go on. A child might possibly change his country; a man
can only wish that he might change it. Therefore, among the true
interests which a government should represent, nationality itself must
be included.
[Sidenote: They are conditions and may contribute something.]
Mechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do not come merely to
vitiate the ideal; they come to create it. The historical background of
life is a part of its substance and the ideal can never grow
independently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources
of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients who
kissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed nobly
and passionately what every man feels for those regions and those
traditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in. There is a
profound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however
they may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reason
the homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances of
an ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood’s dishes, remain
always a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, in
their vague totality, make a man’s true nationality. A government, in
order to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move in
sympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect their
idiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. If
parting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how much
more would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul.
[Sidenote: They are not ends.]
Tenderness to such creative influences is a mark of profundity; it has
the same relation to political life that transcendentalism has to
science and morals; it shrinks back into radical facts, into centres of
vital radiation, and quickens the sense for inner origins. Nationality
is a natural force and a constituent in character which should be
reckoned with and by no means be allowed to miss those fruits which it
alone might bear; but, like the things it venerates, it is only a
starting-point for liberal life. Just as to be always talking about
transcendental points of reference, primordial reality, and the self to
which everything appears, though at first it might pass for spiritual
insight, is in the end nothing but pedantry and impotence, so to be
always harping on nationality is to convert what should be a recognition
of natural conditions into a ridiculous pride in one’s own oddities.
Nature has hidden the roots of things, and though botany must now and
then dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is still
under ground, if flowers and fruits are to be expected. The private
loyalties which a man must have toward his own people, grounding as they
alone can his morality and genius, need nevertheless to be seldom
paraded. Attention, when well directed, turns rather to making immanent
racial forces blossom out in the common medium and express themselves in
ways consonant with practical reason and universal progress. A man’s
feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the
world.
What a statesman might well aim at would be to give the special
sentiments and gifts of his countrymen such a turn that, while
continuing all vital traditions, they might find less and less of what
is human alien to their genius. Differences in nationality, founded on
race and habitat, must always subsist; but what has been superadded
artificially by ignorance and bigotry may be gradually abolished in view
of universal relations better understood. There is a certain plane on
which all races, if they reach it at all, must live in common, the plane
of morals and science; which is not to say that even in those activities
the mind betrays no racial accent. What is excluded from science and
morals is not variety, but contradiction. Any community which had begun
to cultivate the Life of Reason in those highest fields would tend to
live rationally on all subordinate levels also; for with science and
morality rationally applied the best possible use would be made of every
local and historical accident. Where traditions had some virtue or
necessity about them they would be preserved; where they were remediable
prejudices they would be superseded.
[Sidenote: The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol.]
At the birth of society instincts existed, needful to the animal and
having a certain glorious impetuosity about them, which prompted common
action and speech, and a public morality, and men were led to construct
myths that might seem to justify this co-operation. Paternal authority
could easily suggest one symbol for social loyalty: the chief, probably
a venerable and imperious personage, could be called a father and obeyed
as a natural master. His command might by convention be regarded as an
expression of the common voice, just as the father’s will is by nature
the representative of his children’s interests. Again, the members of
each community were distinguished from their enemies by many a sign and
custom; these signs and customs might also become a graphic symbol for
the common life.
Both these cases suggest how easily a symbol takes the place of its
object and becomes an idol. If the symbol happens to be a man there are
natural human sentiments awakened by him; and whatever respect his
character or gifts may inspire, whatever charm there may be in his
person, whatever graciousness he may add to his official favours or
commands, increase immensely his personal ascendency. A king has a great
opportunity to make himself loved. This scope given to private
inclination is what, to ordinary fancy, makes royalty enviable; few envy
its impersonal power and historic weight. Yet if a king were nothing but
a man surrounded by flatterers, who was cheered when he drove abroad,
there would be little stability in monarchy. A king is really the
state’s hinge and centre of gravity, the point where all private and
party ambitions meet and, in a sense, are neutralised. It is not easy
for factions to overturn him, for every other force in the state will
instinctively support him against faction. His elevation above everyone,
the identity of his sober interests with those of the state at large, is
calculated to make him the people’s natural representative; his word has
therefore a genuine authority, and his ascendency, not being invidious,
is able to secure internal peace, even when not enlightened enough to
insure prosperity or to avoid foreign wars. Accordingly, whenever a
monarchy is at all representative time has an irresistible tendency to
increase its prestige; the king is felt to be the guardian as well as
the symbol of all public greatness.
Meantime a double dislocation is possible here: patriotism may be wholly
identified with personal loyalty to the sovereign, while the sovereign
himself, instead of making public interests his own, may direct his
policy so as to satisfy his private passions. The first confusion leads
to a conflict between tradition and reason; the second to the ruin of
either the state or the monarchy. In a word, a symbol needs to remain
transparent and to become adequate; failing in either respect, it misses
its function.
[Sidenote: Feudal representation sensitive but partial.]
The feudal system offers perhaps the best illustration of a patriotism
wholly submerged in loyalty. The sense of mutual obligation and service
was very clear in this case; the vassal in swearing fealty knew
perfectly well what sort of a bargain he was striking. A feudal
government, while it lasted, was accordingly highly responsive and
responsible. If false to its calling, it could be readily disowned, for
it is easy to break an oath and to make new military associations,
especially where territorial units are small and their links accidental.
But this personal, conscious, and jealous subordination of man to man
constituted a government of insignificant scope. Military functions were
alone considered and the rest was allowed to shift for itself. Feudalism
could have been possible only in a barbarous age when the arts existed
on sufferance and lived on by little tentative resurrections. The feudal
lord was a genuine representative of a very small part of his vassal’s
interests. This slight bond sufficed, however, to give him a great
prestige and to stimulate in him all the habits and virtues of a
responsible master; so that in England, where vestiges of feudalism
abound to this day, there is an aristocracy not merely titular.
[Sidenote: Monarchical representation comprehensive but treacherous.]
A highly concentrated monarchy presents the exactly opposite phenomenon.
Here subordination is involuntary and mutual responsibility largely
unconscious. On the other hand, the scope of representation is very wide
and the monarch may well embody the whole life of the nation. A great
court, with officers of state and a standing army, is sensitive to
nothing so much as to general appearances and general results. The
invisible forces of industry, morality, and personal ambition that
really sustain the state are not studied or fomented by such a
government; so that when these resources begin to fail, the ensuing
catastrophes are a mystery to everybody. The king and his ministers
never cease wondering how they can be so constantly unfortunate.
So long, however, as the nation’s vital force is unspent and taxes and
soldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn those
resources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged by
the patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined into
a certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left to
themselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself,
unless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinated
with other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberal
life is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free by
that same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeats
practical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceits
are part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its best
products are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forces
of society—hunger, conscience, and malice—will not do any great harm
when they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving the
spirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit and
flesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so much
elegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes away
without a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructive
impulse possesses her to-day.
[Sidenote: Impersonal symbols no advantage.]
Where no suitable persons are found to embody the state’s unity, other
symbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there are
the laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much a
fetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditional
policy of revenge or conquest, or even the country’s name or flag, may
serve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man can
substitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as at
first sight it might seem; for in the first place men are often
thoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness;
while, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its natural
insipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, when
it uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloak
for private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to be
the only interests in question.
[Sidenote: Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whose
aims are ideal.]
The essence of patriotism is thus annulled, for patriotism does not
consist in considering the private and sordid interests of others as
well as one’s own, by a kind of sympathy which is merely vicarious or
epidemic selfishness; patriotism consists rather in being sensitive to
a set of interests which no one could have had if he had lived in
isolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, and
in a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the vice
of liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but the
sum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; whereby
science, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease to
be matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merely
as instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each is
well fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves the
partial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend instead
to memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain conscious
continuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal
existence. It is not for man’s interest to live unless he can live in
the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate
and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into
the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of
personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not
discerning their country’s interests, which they might have
appropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.
Democracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whose
patriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desire
to increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivably
be a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal,
might suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality.
Patriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. The
value of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to the
free forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerves
him to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, but
because it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal and
friendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from his
ancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterity
qualified by his own.
CHAPTER VIII
IDEAL SOCIETY
[Sidenote: The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.]
To many beings—to almost all that people the earth and sky—each soul
is not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to be
perceived; the proximity of others passes unnoticed. It is far from
requisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded as
either a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunition
and idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some of
these beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont to
notice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostile
relations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with a
vague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, of
parental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious or
impersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described as
an aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in which
mates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried.
Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful
and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It
renders solitude terrible without making society particularly
delightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can
reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment
from an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separated
from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of
possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time
active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with
all its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and
employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal
existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.
Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe
but insufficient to live on.
Similar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subject
to simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makes
possible the conception of many minds having a common experience. The
elements of this experience they express to one another by signs. For
when spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowing
well his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude and
gesture of his fellows for its expression—for his own attitude and
gesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without further
instruction, the outward sign for his inner experience.
[Sidenote: It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the public
voice.]
It is see how a moral world can grow out of these primary intuitions.
Knowing, for instance, the expression of anger, a man may come to find
anger directed against himself; together with physical fear in the
presence of attack, he will feel the contagion of his enemy’s passion,
especially if his enemy be the whole group whose reactions he is wont to
share, and something in him will strive to be angry together with the
rest of the world. He will perfectly understand that indignation against
himself which in fact he instinctively shares. This self-condemning
emotion will be his sense of shame and his conscience. Words soon come
to give definition to such a feeling, which without expression in
language would have but little stability. For when a man is attracted to
an act, even if it be condemned by others, he views it as delightful and
eligible in itself; but when he is forced, by the conventional use of
words, to attach to that act an opprobrious epithet, an epithet which he
himself has always applied with scorn, he finds himself unable to
suppress the emotion connoted by the word; he cannot defend his
rebellious intuition against the tyranny of language; he is inwardly
confused and divided against himself, and out of his own mouth convicted
of wickedness.
A proof of the notable influence that language has on these emotions may
be found in their transformations. The connivance of a very few persons
is sufficient to establish among them a new application of eulogistic
terms; it will suffice to suppress all qualms in the pursuance of their
common impulse and to consecrate a new ideal of character. It is
accordingly no paradox that there should be honour among thieves,
kindness among harlots, and probity among fanatics. They have not lost
their conscience; they have merely introduced a flattering heresy into
the conventional code, to make room for the particular passion indulged
in their little world.
[Sidenote: Guises of public opinion.]
Sympathy with the general mind may also take other forms. Public
opinion, in a vivacious and clear-headed community, may be felt to be
the casual and irresponsible thing which in truth it is. Homer, for
instance, has no more solemn vehicle for it than the indefinite and
unaccountable [Greek: tis]. “So,” he tells us, “somebody or anybody
said.” In the Greek tragedians this unauthoritative entity was replaced
by the chorus, an assemblage of conventional persons, incapable of any
original perception, but possessing a fund of traditional lore, a just
if somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus was
therefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choir
of which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, the
tragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, if
ill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke in
archaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts.
These sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite of their
little pertinence to living issues, partly on account of the mystery
which enshrouded their forgotten passion and partly on account of the
fantastic interpretations which that pregnant obscurity allowed.
[Sidenote: Oracles and revelations.]
Far more powerful, however, are those embodiments of the general
conscience which religion furnishes in its first and spontaneous phase,
as when the Hebrew prophets dared to cry, “So saith the Lord.” Such
faith in one’s own inspiration is a more pliable oracle than tradition
or a tragic chorus, and more responsive to the needs and changes of the
hour. Occidental philosophers, in their less simple and less eloquent
manner, have often repeated that arrogant Hebraic cry: they have told us
in their systems what God thinks about the world. Such pretensions would
be surprising did we not remind ourselves of the obvious truth that what
men attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope for
in themselves, and that the commandments, mythically said to come from
the Most High, flow in fact from common reason and local experience.
If history did not enable us to trace this derivation, the ever-present
practical standard for faith would sufficiently indicate it; for no one
would accept as divine a revelation which he felt to be immoral or found
to be pernicious. And yet such a deviation into the maleficent is always
possible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil and
transplanted into a realm of imagination, where it is subject to all
sorts of arbitrary distortions. If the sexual instinct should attach us
(as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beings
incapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating the
race, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that our
joys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of the
world. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring us into
the imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or on
whose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way depended, we
should try to lead back our sense of fellowship to its natural
foundations and possible sanctions.
Society exists so far as does analogous existence and community of ends.
We may, in refining the social instinct, find some fellowship in the
clouds and in the stars, for these, though remote, are companions of our
career. By poetic analogy we may include in the social world whatever
helps or thwarts our development, and is auxiliary to the energies of
the soul, even if that object be inanimate. Whatever spirit in the past
or future, or in the remotest regions of the sky, shares our love and
pursuit, say of mathematics or of music, or of any ideal object,
becomes, if we can somehow divine his existence, a partner in our joys
and sorrows, and a welcome friend.
[Sidenote: The ideal a measure for all existences and no existence
itself.]
Those ideal objects, however, for whose sake all revolutions in space
and time may be followed with interest, are not themselves members of
our society. The ideal to which all forces should minister is itself no
force or factor in its own realisation. Such a possible disposition of
things is a mere idea, eternal and inert, a form life might possibly
take on and the one our endeavours, if they were consistent, would wish
to impose on it. This ideal itself, however, has often been expressed in
some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an
innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very
innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of
bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real
forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an
illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments;
and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry
with us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated
characters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to have
defeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglected
rational labour and at the same time debauched social sense.
The religious extensions of society should therefore be carefully
watched; for while sometimes, as with the Hebrew prophets, religion
gives dramatic expression to actual social forces and helps to intensify
moral feeling, it often, as in mystics of all creeds and ages, deadens
the consciousness of real ties by feigning ties which are purely
imaginary. This self-deception is the more frequent because there float
before men who live in the spirit ideals which they look to with the
respect naturally rendered to whatever is true, beautiful, or good; and
the symbolic rendering of these ideals, which is the rational function
of religion, may be confused with its superstitious or utilitarian
part—with exploiting occult forces to aid us in the work of life.
Occult forces may indeed exist, and they may even be so disposed that
the ideal is served by their agency; but the most notable embodiment of
a principle is not itself a principle, being only an instance, and the
most exact fulfilment of a law is not a law, being simply an event. To
discover a law may meantime be the most interesting of events, and the
image or formula that expresses a principle may be the most welcome of
intellectual presences. These symbols, weighted with their wide
significance, may hold the mind and attract its energies into their
vortex; and human genius is certainly not at its worst when employed in
framing a good myth or a good argument. The lover of representation, be
he thinker or dramatist, moves by preference in an ideal society. His
communion with the world is half a soliloquy, for the personages in his
dialogue are private symbols, and being symbols they stand for what is
not themselves; the language he imputes to them is his own, though it
is their ways that prompt him to impute that language to them. Plastic
images of his own making and shifting are his sole means of envisaging
eternal principles and ultimate substances, things ideal and potential,
which can never become phenomenal in their own persons.
[Sidenote: Contrast between natural and intellectual bonds.]
It is an inspiring thought, and a true one, that in proportion as a
man’s interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates
and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach
the same impersonal level of ideas—a level which his own influence may
help them to maintain. Patriotism envisages this ideal life in so far as
it is locally coloured and grounded in certain racial aptitudes and
traditions; but the community recognised in patriotism is imbedded in a
larger one embracing all living creatures. While in some respects we
find sympathy more complete the nearer home we remain, in another sense
there is no true companionship except with the universe. Instinctive
society, with its compulsory affections, is of course deeper and more
elementary than any free or intellectual union. Love is at once more
animal than friendship and more divine; and the same thing may be said
of family affection when compared with patriotism. What lies nearer the
roots of our being must needs enjoy a wider prevalence and engage the
soul more completely, being able to touch its depths and hush its
primordial murmurs.
On the other hand, the free spirit, the political and speculative
genius in man, chafes under those blind involutions and material bonds.
Natural, beneficent, sacred, as in a sense they may be, they somehow
oppress the intellect and, like a brooding mother, half stifle what they
feed. Something drives the youth afield, into solitude, into alien
friendships; only in the face of nature and an indifferent world can he
become himself. Such a flight from home and all its pieties grows more
urgent when there is some real conflict of temper or conscience between
the young man and what is established in his family; and this happens
often because, after all, the most beneficent conventions are but
mechanisms which must ignore the nicer sensibilities and divergences of
living souls.
[Sidenote: Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal society.]
Common men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine at them,
and great men break them down. But to defy the world is a serious
business, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touch
in the first place only the world’s ideals. Most men’s conscience,
habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual
comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally
suggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one’s own experience
and elicit one’s own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems too
often audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born to
disregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying that
they are taking chances at all. For in the first instance it never
occurs to the inventor that he is the source of his new insight; he
thinks he has merely opened his eyes and seen what, by an inconceivable
folly, the whole world had grown blind to. Wise men in antiquity, he
imagines, saw the facts as he sees them, as the gods see them now, and
as all sane men shall see them henceforward.
Thus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some new
spiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration in
some lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted,
as he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice from
heaven; no delusion will be too obvious, no re-interpretation too
forced, if it can help him to find external support somewhere for his
spontaneous conviction. To denounce one authority he needs to invoke
another, and if no other be found, he will invent or, as they say, he
will postulate one. His courage in facing the actual world is thus
supported by his ability to expand the world in imagination. In
separating himself from his fellow-men he has made a new companion out
of his ideal. An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry,
“I know that my redeemer liveth”; and the antiphonal response will come
more wistfully after reflection:
“It fortifies my soul to know
That though I wander, Truth is so.”
[Sidenote: Significant symbols revert to the concrete.]
The deceptions which nature practises on men are not always cruel. These
are also kindly deceptions which prompt him to pursue or expect his own
good when, though not destined to come in the form he looks for, this
good is really destined to come in some shape or other. Such, for
instance, are the illusions of romantic love, which may really terminate
in a family life practically better than the absolute and chimerical
unions which that love had dreamed of. Such, again, are those illusions
of conscience which attach unspeakable vague penalties and repugnances
to acts which commonly have bad results, though these are impossible to
forecast with precision. When disillusion comes, while it may bring a
momentary shock, it ends by producing a settled satisfaction unknown
before, a satisfaction which the coveted prize, could it have been
attained, would hardly have secured. When on the day of judgment, or
earlier, a man perceives that what he thought he was doing for the
Lord’s sake he was really doing for the benefit of the least, perhaps,
of the Lord’s creatures, his satisfaction, after a moment’s surprise,
will certainly be very genuine.
[Sidenote: Nature a symbol for destiny.]
Such kindly illusions are involved in the symbolic method by which
general relations and the inconceivably diffuse reality of things have
to be apprehended. The stars are in human thought a symbol for the
silent forces of destiny, really embodied in forms beyond our
apprehension; for who shall say what actual being may or may not
correspond to that potentiality of life or sensation which is all that
the external world can be to our science? When astrology invented the
horoscope it made an absurdly premature translation of celestial
hieroglyphics into that language of universal destiny which in the end
they may be made to speak. The perfect astronomer, when he understood at
last exactly what pragmatic value the universe has, and what fortunes
the stars actually forebode, would be pleasantly surprised to discover
that he was nothing but an astrologer grown competent and honest.
[Sidenote: Representative notions have also inherent values.]
Ideal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for it
is the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presents
us with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous a
truth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needs
translation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our own
past or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far from
nullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimise it. A conception not
reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not
exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a
fraud. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols are
presences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which we
have inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar to
human thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rational
perspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making
it representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not
only for their representative or practical value, implying useful
adjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their
immediate or æsthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they
enlighten and exercise.
This is prevailingly true in the fine arts which seem to express man
even more than they express nature; although in art also the symbol
would lose all its significance and much of its inward articulation if
natural objects and eventual experience could be disregarded in
constructing it. In music, indeed, this ulterior significance is reduced
to a minimum; yet it persists, since music brings an ideal object before
the mind which needs, to some extent, translation into terms no longer
musical—terms, for instance, of skill, dramatic passion, or moral
sentiment. But in music pre-eminently, and very largely in all the arts,
external propriety is adventitious; so much can the mere presence and
weight of a symbol fill the mind and constitute an absolute possession.
[Sidenote: Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.]
In religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to represent
external truths. The inventors of these symbols think they are merely
uncovering a self-existent reality, having in itself the very form seen
in their idea. They do not perceive that the society of God or Nature
is an ideal society, nor that these phantoms, looming in their
imagination, are but significant figments whose existent basis is a
minute and indefinite series of ordinary perceptions. They consequently
attribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the object
as they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions,
the history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turn
contains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are described
by theory. Consequently the presence of God or Nature seems to the
mythologist not an ideal, but a real and mutual society, as if
collateral beings, endowed with the conceived characters, actually
existed as men exist. But this opinion is untenable. As Hobbes said, in
a phrase which ought to be inscribed in golden letters over the head of
every talking philosopher: _No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
knowledge of fact_. Absolute knowledge of fact is immediate, it is
experiential. We should have to _become_ God or Nature in order to know
for a fact that they existed. Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand,
where it relates to existence, is faith only, a faith which in these
matters means trust. For the forces of Nature or the gods, if they had
crude existence, so that we might conceivably become what they are,
would lose that causal and that religious function which are their
essence respectively. They would be merely collateral existences, loaded
with all sorts of irrelevant properties, parts of the universal flux,
members of a natural society; and while as such they would have their
relative importance, they would be embraced in turn within an
intelligible system of relations, while their rights and dignities would
need to be determined by some supervening ideal. A nature existing in
act would require metaphysics—the account of a deeper nature—to
express its relation to the mind that knew and judged it. Any actual god
would need to possess a religion of his own, in order to fix his ideal
of conduct and his rights in respect to his creatures or rather, as we
should then be, to his neighbours. This situation may have no terrors
for the thoughtless; but it evidently introduces something deeper than
Nature and something higher than God, depriving these words of the best
sense in which a philosopher might care to use them.
[Sidenote: Their opposite outlook.]
The divine and the material are contrasted points of reference required
by the actual. Reason, working on the immediate flux of appearances,
reaches these ideal realms and, resting in them, perforce calls them
realities. One—the realm of causes—supplies appearances with a basis
and calculable order; the other—the realm of truth and
felicity—supplies them with a standard and justification. Natural
society may accordingly be contrasted with ideal society, not because
Nature is not, logically speaking, ideal too, but because in natural
society we ally ourselves consciously with our origins and
surroundings, in ideal society with our purposes. There is an immense
difference in spirituality, in ideality of the moral sort, between
gathering or conciliating forces for action and fixing the ends which
action should pursue. Both fields are ideal in the sense that
intelligence alone could discover or exploit them; yet to call nature
ideal is undoubtedly equivocal, since its ideal function is precisely to
be the substance and cause of the given flux, a ground-work for
experience which, while merely inferred and potential, is none the less
mechanical and material. The ideality of nature is indeed of such a sort
as to be forfeited if the trusty instrument and true antecedent of human
life were not found there. We should be frivolous and inconstant, taking
our philosophy for a game and not for method in living, if having set
out to look for the causes and practical order of things, and having
found them, we should declare that they were not _really_ casual or
efficient, on the strange ground that our discovery of them had been a
feat of intelligence and had proved a priceless boon. The absurdity
could not be greater if in moral science, after the goal of all effort
had been determined and happiness defined, we declared that this was not
_really_ the good.
Those who are shocked at the assertion that God and Nature are ideal,
and that their contrasted prerogatives depend on that fact, may, of
course, use the same words in a different way, making them synonymous,
and may readily “prove” that God or Nature exists materially and has
absolute being. We need but agree to designate by those terms the sum of
existences, whatever they (or it) may be to their own feeling. Then the
ontological proof asserts its rights unmistakably. Science and religion,
however, are superfluous if what we wish to learn is that there is
Something, and that All-there-is must assuredly be All-there-is.
Ecstasies may doubtless ensue upon considering that Being is and
Non-Being is not, as they are said to ensue upon long enough considering
one’s navel; but the Life of Reason is made of more variegated stuff.
Science, when it is not dialectical, describes an ideal order of
existences in space and time, such that all incidental facts, as they
come, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplates
some pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Both religion and
science live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and the
other a hypothesis. Both introduce into the mind an ideal society.
The Life of Reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the
expression of man alone. A theory of nature is nothing but a mass of
observations, made with a hunter’s and an artist’s eye. A mortal has no
time for sympathy with his victim or his model; and, beyond a certain
range, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in order to live he must
devour one-half the world and disregard the other, so in order to think
and practically to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with his
materials; otherwise his intellect would melt again into endless and
irrevocable dreams. The law of gravity, because it so notably unifies
the motions of matter, is something which these motions themselves know
nothing of; it is a description of them in terms of human discourse.
Such discourse can never assure us absolutely that the motions it
forecasts will occur; the sensible proof must ensue spontaneously in its
own good time. In the interval our theory remains pure presumption and
hypothesis. Reliable as it may be in that capacity, it is no replica of
anything on its own level existing beyond. It creates, like all
intelligence, a secondary and merely symbolic world.
[Sidenote: In translating existence into human terms they give human
nature its highest exercise.]
When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact,
between potential generalities and actual particulars, has been
thoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in
science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these
creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity
itself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial
mind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, if
they were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to
consideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable
sensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for a
diffused experience having a certain order and tendency; they render
that reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in
which its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to
advantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus become
eloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur and
practical truth.
The facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they were rehearsed
unimaginatively, in their own flat infinity, would be far from arousing
the same emotions. The human eye sees in perspective; its glory would
vanish were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not that it
loves to falsify anything. That to the worm the landscape might possess
no light and shade, that the mountain’s atomic structure should be
unpicturable, cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet; what
concerns them is the effect such things may produce in the human fancy,
so that the soul may live in a congenial world.
Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own;
each is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if he
takes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what the world
would be if not foreshortened in that particular manner. This special
interpretation is nevertheless precious and shows up the world in that
light in which it interests naturalists or prophets to see it. Their
figments make their chosen world, as the painter’s apperceptions are
the breath of his nostrils.
[Sidenote: Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.]
While the symbol’s applicability is essential to its worth—since
otherwise science would be useless and religion demoralising—its power
and fascination lie in its acquiring a more and more profound affinity
to the human mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering its
relevance to practice. Thus natural science is at its best when it is
most thoroughly mathematical, since what can be expressed mathematically
can speak a human language. In such science only the ultimate material
elements remain surds; all their further movement and complication can
be represented in that kind of thought which is most intimately
satisfactory and perspicuous. And in like manner, religion is at its
best when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritual
religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man,
overflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the place
usually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities. The human heart
is lifted above misfortune and encouraged to pursue unswervingly its
inmost ideal when no compromise is any longer attempted with what is not
moral or human, and Prometheus is honestly proclaimed to be holier than
Zeus. At that moment religion ceases to be superstitious and becomes a
rational discipline, an effort to perfect the spirit rather than to
intimidate it.
[Sidenote: Summary of this book.]
We have seen that society has three stages—the natural, the free, and
the ideal. In the natural stage its function is to produce the
individual and equip him with the prerequisites of moral freedom. When
this end is attained society can rise to friendship, to unanimity and
disinterested sympathy, where the ground of association is some ideal
interest, while this association constitutes at the same time a personal
and emotional bond. Ideal society, on the contrary, transcends
accidental conjunctions altogether. Here the ideal interests themselves
take possession of the mind; its companions are the symbols it breeds
and possesses for excellence, beauty, and truth. Religion, art, and
science are the chief spheres in which ideal companionship is found. It
remains for us to traverse these provinces in turn and see to what
extent the Life of Reason may flourish there.
*** End of Volume Two ***
REASON IN RELIGION
Volume Three of “The Life of Reason”
GEORGE SANTAYANA
hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê
CONTENTS
REASON IN RELIGION
CHAPTER I
HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON
Religion is certainly significant, but not literally true.—All religion
is positive and particular.—It aims at the Life of Reason, but largely
fails to attain it.—Its approach imaginative.—When its poetic method
is denied its value is jeopardised.—It precedes science rather than
hinders it.—It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages 3-14
CHAPTER II
RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION
Felt causes not necessary causes.—Mechanism and dialectic ulterior
principles.—Early selection of categories.—Tentative rational
worlds.—Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.—A miracle, though
unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.—Superstitions
come of haste to understand.—Inattention suffers them to
spread.—Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages
15-27
CHAPTER III
MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER
Fear created the gods.—Need also contributed.—The real evidences of
God’s existence.—Practice precedes theory in religion.—Pathetic,
tentative nature of religious practices.—Meanness and envy in the gods,
suggesting sacrifice.—Ritualistic arts.—Thank-offerings.—The
sacrifice of a contrite heart.—Prayer is not utilitarian in
essence.—Its supposed efficacy magical.—Theological puzzles.—A real
efficacy would be mechanical.—True uses of prayer.—It clarifies the
ideal.—It reconciles to the inevitable.—It fosters spiritual life by
conceiving it in its perfection.—Discipline and contemplation are their
own reward. Pages 28-48
CHAPTER IV
MYTHOLOGY
Status of fable in the mind.—It requires genius.—It only half
deceives.—Its interpretative essence.—Contrast with
science.—Importance of the moral factor.—Its submergence.—Myth
justifies magic.—Myths might be metaphysical.—They appear ready made,
like parts of the social fabric.—They perplex the
conscience.—Incipient myth in the Vedas.—Natural suggestions soon
exhausted.—They will be carried out in abstract fancy.—They may become
moral ideals.—The Sun-god moralised.—The leaven of religion is moral
idealism. Pages 49-68
CHAPTER V
THE HEBRAIC TRADITION
Phases of Hebraism.—Israel’s tribal monotheism.—Problems
involved.—The prophets put new wine in old bottles.—Inspiration and
authority.—Beginnings of the Church.—Bigotry turned into a
principle.—Penance accepted.—Christianity combines optimism and
asceticism.—Reason smothered between the two.—Religion made an
institution. Pages 69-82
CHAPTER VI
THE CHRISTIAN EPIC
The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.—A universal
religion must interpret the whole world.—Double appeal of
Christianity.—Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.—Hebrew philosophy
of history identified with Platonic cosmology.—The resulting orthodox
system.—The brief drama of things.—Mythology is a language and must be
understood to convey something by symbols. Pages 83-98
CHAPTER VII
PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY
Need of paganising Christianity.—Catholic piety more human than the
liturgy.—Natural pieties.—Refuge taken in the supernatural.—The
episodes of life consecrated mystically.—Paganism chastened, Hebraism
liberalised.—The system post-rational and founded on despair.—External
conversion of the barbarians.—Expression of the northern genius within
Catholicism,—Internal discrepancies between the two.—Tradition and
instinct at odds in Protestantism.—The Protestant spirit remote from
that of the gospel.—Obstacles to humanism.—The Reformation and
counter-reformation.—Protestantism an expression of character.—It has
the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.—Its
emancipation from Christianity. Pages 99-126
CHAPTER VIII
CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH
Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.—But myth is confused
with the moral values it expresses.—Neo-Platonic revision.—It made
mythical entities of abstractions.—Hypostasis ruins ideals.—The Stoic
revision.—The ideal surrendered before the physical.—Parallel
movements in Christianity.—Hebraism, if philosophical, must be
pantheistic.—Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.—Truly
divine action limited to what makes for the good.—Need of an opposing
principle.—The standard of value is human.—Hope for happiness makes
belief in God. Pages 127-147
CHAPTER IX
THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE
Suspense between hope and disillusion.—Superficial solution.—But from
what shall we be redeemed?—Typical attitude of St. Augustine.—He
achieves Platonism.—He identifies it with Christianity.—God the
good.—Primary and secondary religion.—Ambiguous efficacy of the good
in Plato.—Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.—The
Manicheans.—All things good by nature.—The doctrine of creation
demands that of the fall.—Original sin.—Forced abandonment of the
ideal.—The problem among the Protestants.—Pantheism accepted.—Plainer
scorn for the ideal.—The price of mythology is superstition. Pages
148-177
CHAPTER X
PIETY
The core of religion not theoretical.—Loyalty to the sources of our
being.—The pious Æneas.—An ideal background required.—Piety accepts
natural conditions and present tasks.—The leadership of instinct is
normal.—Embodiment essential to spirit.—Piety to the gods takes form
from current ideals.—The religion of humanity.—Cosmic piety. Pages
178-192
CHAPTER XI
SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS
To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.—Spirituality
natural.—Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.—Spirit crossed by
instrumentalities.—One foe of the spirit is worldliness.—The case for
and against pleasure.—Upshot of worldly wisdom.—Two supposed escapes
from vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.—Both are irrational.—Is there a
third course?—Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable
values.—For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard. Pages 193-213
CHAPTER XII
CHARITY
Possible tyranny of reason.—Everything has its rights.—Primary and
secondary morality.—Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.—The doom
of ancient republics.—Rational charity.—Its limits.—Its mythical
supports.—There is intelligence in charity.—Buddhist and Christian
forms of it.—Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural. Pages
214-228
CHAPTER XIII
THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE
The length of life a subject for natural science.—“Psychical”
phenomena.—Hypertrophies of sense.—These possibilities affect physical
existence only.—Moral grounds for the doctrine.—The necessary
assumption of a future.—An assumption no evidence.—A solipsistic
argument.—Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.—Or to
a divine principle in all beings.—In neither case is the individual
immortal.—Possible forms of survival.—Arguments from retribution and
need of opportunity.—Ignoble temper of both.—False optimistic
postulate involved.—Transition to ideality. Pages 229-250
CHAPTER XIV
IDEAL IMMORTALITY
Olympian immortality the first ideal.—Its indirect attainment by
reproduction.—Moral acceptance of this compromise.—Even vicarious
immortality intrinsically impossible.—Intellectual victory over
change.—The glory of it.—Reason makes man’s divinity and his
immortality.—It is the locus of all truths.—Epicurean immortality,
through the truth of existence.—Logical immortality, through objects of
thought.—Ethical immortality, through types of excellence. Pages 251-273
CHAPTER XV
CONCLUSION
The failure of magic and of mythology.—Their imaginative value.—Piety
and spirituality justified.—Mysticism a primordial state of
feeling.—It may recur at any stage of culture.—Form gives substance
its life and value. Pages 274-279
REASON IN RELIGION
CHAPTER I
HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON
[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant.]
Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s,
that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” In every age the
most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and
country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that
religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the
heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a
while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against
is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident,
and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they
yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a
world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that
their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of
their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world’s faith
was that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the
enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who
plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of
religion—something which the blindest half see—is not nearly
enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with
religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of
thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and
their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face
with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him
understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so
profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in
an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the
chief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the
best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is “so malapert as a
splenetic religion,” a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.
[Sidenote: But not literally true.]
At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he
forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s
minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges
them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better
conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time,
where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together.
Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the
poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by
the philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it
sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that
has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and
probably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a
historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In
the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some
difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new
convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which
is essentially as arbitrary as the old.
[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular.]
The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not
more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no
religion in particular. A courier’s or a dragoman’s speech may indeed be
often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture
of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning
only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and
its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to
another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often
retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may
egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they
remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which
a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment’s probing of the
conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but
vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all
dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first
unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be
found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves
spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some
faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a
converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked
idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message
and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens
and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another
world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or
no—is what we mean by having a religion.
[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason.]
What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call
religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two
is close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is
the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us
that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain
the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion.
Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational
life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the
Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be
subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and
makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same
thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and
transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of
Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of
emancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways
religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A
supernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon
earth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by
repeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in
the absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration
in the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved
may be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in
its way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common
objects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may lose
what is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what is
rational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may be
to those whose spirit can still live in their country and in their
ideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternal
objects of thought.
Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is
philosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if the
function of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is
performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many,
reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms,
and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer.
Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on
which, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideally
only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not
conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotions
on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects
which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings
some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to
the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into
them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution which
experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience
itself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate
principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this
struggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man toward
something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the
soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the soul
depends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and
direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art.
For these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and
piecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate
justification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has an
instinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chance
practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the
heart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the
direction of the ultimate.
[Sidenote: But largely fails to attain it.]
Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of
Reason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each
religion may prevail upon themselves to express satisfaction with its
results, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous
draughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various
religions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason
requires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have
one and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer
imaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable
essentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed
effort. The Greek oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our natural
ignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the
Christian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural
death, the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and
conditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for
the real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate
sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing
happiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a
one-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When
these come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed
vitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits
untrained in any natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches
the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to
fulfil.
[Sidenote: Its approach imaginative.]
What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to
rationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and
in its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationality
through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it
gives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts,
insinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginative
substitute for wisdom—I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit
of all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in
religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal
truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the
depth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its
contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that
of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked
poetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion to
their original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports of
objective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed upon
the world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if not
in space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religion
comes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering of
that moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks to
elucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding which
clings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merely
representations of experience as it is or should be, but are rather
information about experience or reality elsewhere—an experience and
reality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed by
reality and experience here.
[Sidenote: When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised.]
Thus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has;
only poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure value
to existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poetic
value of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself,
because religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sides
of life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and ideal
interpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinary
poetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part by
the abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightness
is taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world only
by imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition to
the mind’s furniture—an addition which might be useful and
ennobling—it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuading
mankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as that
rather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfaction
is naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul has
infinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems and
sentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomes
equivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic
representation of moral reality which may have a most important function
in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the
lessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous
incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is
strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and
in the conscience.
[Sidenote: It precedes science rather than hinders it.]
On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken
the place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve
situations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely
worse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical
slavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it.
Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may
happen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it.
We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and
natural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must
rather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative
insight which it has introduced into the world.
[Sidenote: It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human.]
We may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the function
which religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguising
or in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allow
ourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its various
conceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of many
sages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have lived
steadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself be
treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which
alone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to be
intolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religions
display. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would have
to be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with the
poetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety,
and variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approach
to total adequacy.
If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by
taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the
Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and
when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and
justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a
rabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for instance, was a
terrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping a
god who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in
recognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the
Greeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous,
monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. To
say God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the same
influence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all
existence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, in
nature, or in history. So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics
meets us at every step—the combination of monotheism with
polytheism—is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of
phrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral
things. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and
controversies lose all their bitterness. Each doctrine will simply
represent the moral plane on which they live who have devised or adopted
it. Religions will thus be better or worse, never true or false. We
shall be able to lend ourselves to each in turn, and seek to draw from
it the secret of its inspiration.