Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the
Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist,
on the shore of the Lake of Neuchatel, in the excavation of a site where
one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by
fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had
been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of
the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of
the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later
structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too,
that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their
worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other
hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber
beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their
flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in
West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules
that represented the _ne plus ultra_ of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must
have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case
of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes
with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a
rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous
neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which
he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The
Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of
barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating
medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.
When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary
sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic
conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion
better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the
cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the
scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times
to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life
to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that
the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close
with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of
hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at
almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not
think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate
abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier
history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual
activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend.
Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will
finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.
The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a
millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric
record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the
pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even on this hasty
showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond
question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both
physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the
inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the
corresponding gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men of the
Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the work of
race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt
is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our
share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not
allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education
that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so
far as it depends on culture.
Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I
believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to
be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason
to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of
an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving
grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that
one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages
will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not
born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of
such a working principle in my New Republic.
So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to
Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from
such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not
hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the
general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective.
Cultivate the eagle's faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that
one can get the values right--see right and wrong, truth and error,
beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects. Analytic
studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of
received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We
must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But
historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas
turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and
sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own
opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood almost
exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited,
it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a
single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the
scales and assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never
acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History
worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all
become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long
and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to
be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives_, 2nd
edition, 1915.
E. A. Parkyn, _Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art_.
R. R. Marett, _Anthropology_ (Home University Library).
J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_ (Home University).
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891,
p. 9.
III
PROGRESS AND HELLENISM
F. MELIAN STAWELL
To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary
to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so
many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite
truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about
Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and
the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of
a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it,
that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the
Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine
is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that
faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place,
do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes,
but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot
indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any
better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the
life of the South Sea Islander--content if only he has enough bananas to
eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a
Tamberlaine--exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or,
indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a
vegetable?
Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above
the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard
implies.
And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is
going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some
connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What
is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this
goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?
The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with
extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of
sadness and hope.
They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the
greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of
preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical
Greeks,--and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical
Greek culture,--the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the
island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from
neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they
could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the
less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great
discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a
new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in
the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new
line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends
supreme over national in the State.'[6]
But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up
by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and
it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis
and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about
progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may
say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things,
namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2)
a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a
persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two
and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato
and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there
really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really
apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it
was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as
it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to
be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day.
Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in
modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them
are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in
progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they
did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards
perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver
man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor
even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of
the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle,
was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise
definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of
discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in
Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of thought, and to
understand it we ought to take account of all.
1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt more keenly than
he felt the desire for an absolute standard of truth, especially in
matters of right and wrong, if only to decide between the disputes of
men. And, in Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that there
was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion in any 'dogmatic
slumber'. Thus Plato is always asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi
Ben Ezra',--
Now, who shall arbitrate?
Ten men love what I hate,
Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
Ten who in ears and eyes
Match me: we all surmise,
They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?
In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro', Plato puts the
question almost in so many words. What is it, he asks (7 A-E), that men
quarrel over most passionately when they dispute? Is it not over the
great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the
like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply
because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned
standard, a standard measure, let us say.
If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man
is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense,
Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct,
or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (_Theaet._ 161 C-E).
2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness
and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of space and time,
compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we
have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend
something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as
yet appeared? (_Phaedo_, 74 E).
This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so
dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own,
that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an
exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's
Anthology, _The Spirit of Man_ (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is
the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and
the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the
same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of
this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at
all:--
'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and
has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and
rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will
suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the
absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not
growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be
fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to
others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful
things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither
increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (_Symp._
211).
All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythological
fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we had seen it once before in
another life, before our souls were born into this world, 'that blissful
sight and spectacle' (_Phaedrus_, 250 B) when we followed Zeus in his
winged car and all the company of the gods, and went out into the realm
beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no mortal poet has ever sung or ever
will sing worthily'.
3. But, beside this passion for the ideal, Plato was intensely
interested in our knowledge of the actual world of appearances around
us. And one of the prime questions with which he was then concerned was
the question, what we mean when we talk about the nature or character
of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man. We must mean
something definite, otherwise we could not recognize, for example, that
a plant _is_ a plant through all its varieties and all the different
stages of its growth. Plato's answer was, that in all natural things
there is a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type
or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some sense it is this
Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the particular thing into being.
4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had
in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that
this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each
other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could
feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes
his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is
that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he
could only see that the thing was there because something had put it
there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there.
Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book
by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of
all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so--if Mind is the orderer,
it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that
is best for it'.[8]
It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis
about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was good'. And there is no
doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we
could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual
satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come
about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in
contemplating their goodness.
5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous
imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in
his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in
an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow--he does not
say exactly how--influencing the structure of things in this world. But
he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium
which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of
Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history--and therefore
history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in
the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its
evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a
tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.
This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man
might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:
'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he
appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been
cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned,
for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and
strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so
that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to
us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we
ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We
should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what
company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and
Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed
after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of
the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real
nature.' (_Republic_, 611.)
Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The
Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with
no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a
living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as
glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the
Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only
it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the
life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.
None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be
significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated
with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether.
Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this
world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he
says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out
of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there
what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._).
The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end
of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a
Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime
importance to man and helps him to advance.
Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of
history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for
Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may
learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not
that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope
for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better
and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at
one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and
then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it
gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and
from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save
it from utter destruction (_Polit._ 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of
cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this
feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply
rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and
there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have
sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it
they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his
sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of
spatial and temporal matter (_Theaet._ 176 A).
It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul
as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another,
Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons
of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and
growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in
modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long
Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last
through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its
true home lies.
And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our
modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal
unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception
of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at
least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the
experience of History, implies something of permanent value running
through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies
that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of
each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as
good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble
passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which
was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing
thing:--'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which
went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another
thing--but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he
writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true
'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not
live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of
progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions,
more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is
entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think
not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of
rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this
most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of
Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal,
and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous,
but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them
ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they
cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more,
we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them,
any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may
desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is
the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks
to us most plainly of the eternal realities.
This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art,
and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the
tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of
perfect types.