would be possible to choose almost at random passages to justify what
is said above. Take, for instance, his dogmatic assertions concerning
faith and works. He frantically condemns the doctrine of salvation
by works and frantically exalts the doctrine of salvation by faith.
Much that he says about both doctrines must be taken in so mystical
and involved a sense that it contains little real meaning to ordinary
men. Yet he is also capable of expressing, on this very subject, noble
thought in a lofty manner. In one of his sudden lapses into brilliant
sanity he emphasizes the fact that Saint Francis of Assisi was faith
incorporate and yet the special apostle of good works; and that Martin
Luther, the advocate of redemption by faith, consecrated his life and
revealed to others the secret of good works--“free works done only to
please God, not for the sake of piety.”
Unfortunately, these brilliant lapses into sanity are fixed in a
matrix of fairly bedlamite passion and non-sanity. Mr. Chamberlain
jeers with reason at the Roman Curia because until 1822 it kept on
the Index all books which taught that the earth went round the sun;
but really such action is not much worse than that of a man professing
to write a book like this at the outset of the twentieth century
who takes the attitude Mr. Chamberlain does toward the teaching of
Darwin. The acceptance of the fundamental truths of evolution are
quite as necessary to sound scientific thought as the acceptance of
the fundamental truths concerning the solar system; and the attempt
that Mr. Chamberlain in one place makes to draw a distinction between
them is fantastic. Again, take what Mr. Chamberlain says of Aryans and
Teutons. He bursts the flood-gates of scorn when he deals with persons
who idealize humanity, or, as he styles it, “so-called humanity”; and
he says: “For this humanity about which man has philosophized to such
an extent suffers from the serious defect that it does not exist at
all. History reveals to us a great number of various human beings, but
no such thing as humanity”; yet on this very page he attributes the
history of the growth of our civilization to its “Teutonic” character,
and he uses the word “Teuton” as well as the word “Aryan” with as utter
a looseness and vagueness as ever any philanthropist or revolutionist
used the word “humanity.” All that he says in derision of such a forced
use of the word “humanity” could with a much greater percentage of
truthfulness be said as regards the words and ideas symbolized by
Teutonism and Aryanism as Mr. Chamberlain uses these terms. Indeed,
as he uses them they amount to little more than expressions of his
personal likes and dislikes. His statement of the raceless chaos into
which the Roman Empire finally lapsed is, on the whole, just, and, to
use the words continually coming to one’s mind in dealing with him,
both brilliant and suggestive. But in his anxiety to claim everything
good for Aryans and Teutons he finally reduces himself to the position
of insisting that wherever he sees a man whom he admires he must
postulate for him Aryan, and, better still, Teutonic blood. He likes
David, so he promptly makes him an Aryan Amorite. He likes Michael
Angelo, and Dante, and Leonardo da Vinci, and he instantly says that
they are Teutons; but he does not like Napoleon, and so he says that
Napoleon is a true representative of the raceless chaos. The noted
Italians in question, he states, were all of German origin, descended
from the Germans who had conquered Italy in the sixth century. Now,
of course, if Mr. Chamberlain is willing to be serious with himself,
he must know perfectly well that even by the time of Dante seven or
eight centuries had passed, and by the time of the other great Italians
he mentions eight or ten centuries had passed, since the Germanic
invasion. In other words, these great Italians were separated from
the days of the Gothic and Lombard invasions by the distance which
separates modern England from the Norman invasion; and his thesis has
just about as much substance as would be contained in the statement
that Wellington, Nelson, Turner, Wordsworth, and Tennyson excelled in
their several spheres because they were all pure-blood descendants of
the motley crew that came in with William the Conqueror. The different
ethnic elements which entered into the Italy of the seventh century
were in complete solution by the thirteenth, and it would have been
quite as impossible to trace them to their several original strains
as nowadays to trace in the average Englishman the various strains of
blood from his Norman, Saxon, Celtic, and Scandinavian ancestors. Nor
does Mr. Chamberlain mind believing two incompatible things in the
quickest possible succession if they happen to suit his philosophy of
the moment. Generally, when he speaks of the Teuton he thinks of the
tall, long-headed man of the north; although, because of some crank
in his mind, he puts in the proviso that he may have black as well as
blond hair. The round-skulled man of middle Europe he usually condemns;
but if his mind happens to run with approbation toward the Tyrolese,
for instance, he at once forgets what ethnic division of Europeans
it is to which they belong, and accepts them as typical Teutons. He
greatly admires the teaching of the Apostle Paul, and so he endeavors
to persuade himself that the Apostle Paul was not really a Jew; but
he does not like the teachings of the Epistle of James on the subject
of good works (teachings for which I have a peculiar sympathy, by the
way), and accordingly he says that James was a pure Jew.
Fundamentally, very many of Mr. Chamberlain’s ideas are true and
noble. I admire the morality with which he condemns the intolerance
of Calvin and Luther no less strongly than the intolerance of their
Roman opponents, and yet his acceptance of the fact that they could not
have done their great work if there had not been in their characters
an alloy which made it possible for actual humanity to accept their
teaching. But even his sense of morality is as curiously capricious
as that of Carlyle himself, and as little trustworthy. He glories in
the pointless and wanton barbarity of the destruction of Carthage in
the Third Punic War as saving Europe from the Afro-Asiatic peril--pure
nonsense, of course, for Carthage was then no more dangerous to Rome
than Corinth was, and the sacks of the two cities stand on a par as
regards any importance in their after effects. Perhaps his attitude
toward Byron is more practically mischievous, or at least shows a
much less desirable trait of character. He says that the personality
of Byron “has something repulsive in it for every thorough Teuton,
because we nowhere encounter in it the idea of duty,” which makes him
“unsympathetic, un-Teutonic”; but he adds that Teutons do not object
in the least to his licentiousness, and, on the contrary, see in it “a
proof of genuine race”! Really, this reconciliation of a high ideal
of duty with gross licentiousness would be infamous if it were not so
unspeakably comic. On the next page, by the way, Mr. Chamberlain says
that Louis XIV was anti-Teutonic in his persecution of the Protestants,
but a thorough Teuton when he defended the liberties of the Gallican
church against Rome! Now such intellectual antics as these, and the
haphazard use of any kind of a name (without the least reference to
its ordinary use, provided Mr. Chamberlain has taken a fancy to it)
to represent or symbolize any individual or attribute of which he
approves, makes it very difficult to accept the book as having any
serious merit whatever. Yet interspersed with innumerable pages which
at best are those of an able man whose mind is not quite sound, and at
worst lose their brilliancy without their irrationality, there are many
pages of deep thought and lofty morality based upon wide learning and
wide literary and even scientific knowledge. There could be no more
unsafe book to follow implicitly, and few books of such pretensions
more ludicrously unsound; and yet it is a book which students and
scholars, and men who, though neither students nor scholars, are yet
deeply interested in life, must have on their book-shelves. Much
the same criticism should be passed upon him that he himself passes
upon John Fiske, to whose great work, “The History of the Discovery
of America,” he gives deserved and unstinted praise, but at whom he
rails for solemnly, and, as Mr. Chamberlain says, with more than Papal
pretensions to infallibility, setting forth complete patent solutions
for all the problems connected not merely with the origin but with
the destiny of man. Mr. Chamberlain differentiates sharply between
the admirable work Fiske did in such a book as that treating of the
discovery of America and the work he did when he ventured to dogmatize
loosely, after the manner of Darwin’s successors in the ’70s and ’80s,
upon a scanty collection of facts very imperfectly understood. But Mr.
Chamberlain himself would have done far better if in his book he had
copied the methods and modesty of Fiske at his best--the methods and
modesty of such books as Sutherland’s “Origin and Growth of the Moral
Instinct”--and had refrained from taking an attitude of cock-sureness
concerning problems which at present no one can more than imperfectly
understand. He is unwise to follow Brougham’s example and make
omniscience his foible.
Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful
and solemn appreciation of true Christianity, of true acceptance of
Christ’s teachings and personality, as Mr. Chamberlain has done, a man
who can sketch as vividly as he has sketched the fundamental facts of
the Roman empire in the first three centuries of our era, a man who can
warn us as clearly as he has warned about some of the pressing dangers
which threaten our social fabric because of indulgence in a morbid and
false sentimentality, a man, in short, who has produced in this one
book materials for half a dozen excellent books on utterly diverse
subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to
be taken into account.
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH IN A REVERENT SPIRIT
There is superstition in science quite as much as there is superstition
in theology, and it is all the more dangerous because those suffering
from it are profoundly convinced that they are freeing themselves from
all superstition. No grotesque repulsiveness of mediæval superstition,
even as it survived into nineteenth-century Spain and Naples, could
be much more intolerant, much more destructive of all that is fine in
morality, in the spiritual sense, and indeed in civilization itself,
than that hard dogmatic materialism of to-day which often not merely
calls itself scientific but arrogates to itself the sole right to use
the term. If these pretensions affected only scientific men themselves,
it would be a matter of small moment, but unfortunately they tend
gradually to affect the whole people, and to establish a very dangerous
standard of private and public conduct in the public mind.
This tendency is dangerous everywhere, but nowhere more dangerous
than among the nations in which the movement toward an unshackled
materialism is helped by the reaction against the deadly thraldom of
political and clerical absolutism. The first of the books mentioned
below[10] is written by a Montevideo gentleman of distinction. Under
the rather fanciful title of “The Death of the Swan” it deals with
the shortcomings of Latin civilization, accepts whole-heartedly the
doctrines of pure materialism as a remedy for these shortcomings, and
draws lessons from the success of the Northern races, and especially
of our own countrymen, which I, for one, am unwilling to have drawn.
The author feels that the civilization of France, Italy, and Spain is
going down, and that it owes its decadence to submission to an outworn
governmental and ecclesiastical tyranny, and especially to the futility
of its ideals in government, religion, and the whole art of living, a
futility so wrong-headed and far-reaching as to have turned aside the
people from all that makes for real efficiency and success. In his
revolt against sentimentality, mock humanitarianism, and hypocrisy the
author advocates frank egotism and brutality as rules of conduct for
both individuals and nations; and in his revolt against the theological
tyranny and superstition from which the Spanish peoples in the Old and
New Worlds have suffered so much in the past he advocates implicit
obedience to the revolting creed which would treat gold and force as
the true and only gods for human guidance; and this he does in the
name of science and enlightenment and of exact and correct thinking.
He speaks with admiration of certain American qualities, confounding
in curious fashion the use and abuse of great but dangerous traits.
He fails to see that the line of separation between the school of
Washington and of Lincoln and the school of the prophets of brutal
force, as expressed in the deification of either Mars or Mammon, is
as sharp as that which distinguishes both of these schools from the
apostles of the silly sentimentalism which he justly condemns. He sees
that the really great Americans were thoroughly practical men; but
he is blind to the fact that they were also lofty idealists. It was
precisely because they were both idealists and practical men that they
made their mark deep in history. He sees that they abhorred bigotry
and superstition; he does not see that they were sundered as far from
the men who attack all religion and all order as from the men who
uphold either governmental or religious tyranny. It was the fact that
Washington and Lincoln refused to carry good policies to bad extremes,
and at the same time refused to be frightened out of supporting good
policies because they might lead to bad extremes, that made them of
such far-reaching usefulness.
[10] “La Mort du Cygne.” By Carlos Reyles. Translation from
Spanish into French by Alfred de Bengoechea.
“Thoughts of a Catholic Anatomist.” By Thomas Dwight, M.D.
“The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.” By Henry Osborn
Taylor.
“Some Neglected Factors in Evolution.” By Henry M. Bernard.
“The World of Life.” By Alfred Russel Wallace.
“William James.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science et Religion.” By Émile Boutroux.
“Science and Religion.” By Émile Boutroux. Translation into
English by Jonathan Nield.
“Creative Evolution.” By Henri Bergson. Authorized translation
by Arthur Mitchell.
“The Varieties of Religious Experience.” By William James.
“Time and Free Will.” By Henri Bergson. Translation by F. L.
Pogson.
“From Epicurus to Christ.” By William De Witt Hyde.
“The Sixth Sense.” By Bishop Charles H. Brent.
I need hardly say that I am not attempting to review these
books in even the briefest and most epitomized fashion. I use
them only to illustrate certain phases, good and bad, in the
search for truth; as, for instance, the harm that comes from
seeking to apply, universally, truth as apprehended by the
mere materialist, the futility of trying to check this harm
by invoking the spirit of reactionary mediævalism, and the
fundamental agreement reached by truth-seekers of the highest
type, both scientific and religious.
Dr. Dwight’s book is very largely a protest against the materialistic
philosophy which has produced such conceptions of life, and against
these conceptions of life themselves. With this protest we must all
heartily sympathize; unfortunately, it is impossible to have such
sympathy with the reactionary spirit in which he makes his protest.
There is much that is true in the assault he makes; but in his zeal
to show where the leaders of the modern advance have been guilty of
shortcomings he tends to assume positions which would put an instant
stop to any honest effort to advance at all, and would plunge us back
into the cringing and timid ignorance of the Dark Ages. Apparently
the ideal after which Dr. Dwight strives is that embodied in the man
of the Middle Ages of whom Professor Henry Osborn Taylor in one of
his profound and able studies has said: “The mediæval man was not
spiritually self-reliant, his character was not consciously wrought by
its own strength of mind and purpose. Subject to bursts of unrestraint,
he yet showed no intelligent desire for liberty.”
Dr. Dwight holds that there is an ominous parallelism between the lines
of thought of the materialistic scientists of to-day and those of
the French Revolution. Strongly though he disapproves of much of the
thought of modern science, he disapproves even more strongly of the
Revolution. In speaking of the similarities between them he says:
“Among the characters of the Revolution we meet all kinds of company.
There are the honest men anxious for reform, the protesters against
what they conceived to be religious oppression, the dreamy idealists
without definite plan, the ranting orators of the ‘mountain,’ fanatics
and demagogues at once, the wily ones who make a living from the more
or less sincere promulgation of revolutionary doctrines and who find
legalized plunder very profitable, the army of those who for fear or
for favor prefer to be on the winning side and follow the fashionable
doctrines without an examination which most of them are incompetent
to make, and finally the mob of the _sans-culottes_ rejoicing in the
overthrow of law, order, and decency.”
This is true, although it does not contain by any means the whole
truth; moreover, the parallelism with the scientific movement of the
present day undoubtedly in part obtains. Yet the saying which Dr.
Dwight quotes with approval from Herbert Spencer applies to what he
himself attempts; to destroy the case of one’s opponents and to justify
one’s own case are two very different things. At present we are in
greater danger of suffering in things spiritual from a wrong-headed
scientific materialism than from religious bigotry and intolerance;
just as at present we are threatened rather by what is vicious among
the ideas that triumphed in the Revolution than we are from what is
vicious in the ideas that it overthrew. But this is merely because
victorious evil necessarily contains more menace than defeated evil;
and it will not do to forget the other side, nor to let our protest
against the evil of the present drive us into championship of the
evil of the past. The excesses of the French Revolution were not only
hideous in themselves, but were fraught with a menace to civilization
which has lasted until our time and which has found its most vicious
expression in the Paris Commune of 1871 and its would-be imitators
here and in other lands. Nevertheless, there was hope for mankind in
the French Revolution, and there was none in the system against which
it was a protest, a system which had reached its highest development
in Spain. Better the terrible flame of the French Revolution than the
worse than Stygian hopelessness of the tyranny--physical, intellectual,
spiritual--which brooded over the Spain of that day. So it is with the
modern scientific movement. There is very much in it to regret; there
is much that is misdirected and wrong; and Dr. Dwight is quite right
in the protest he makes against Haeckel and to a less extent against
Weismann, and against the intolerant arrogance and fanatical dogmatism
which the scientists of their school display to as great an extent as
ever did any of the ecclesiastics against whom they profess to be in
revolt. The experience of our sister republic of France has shown us
that not only scientists but politicians, professing to be radical in
their liberalism, may in actual fact show a bigoted intolerance of
the most extreme kind in their attacks on religion; and bigotry and
intolerance are at least as objectionable when anti-religious as when
nominally religious. But in his entirely proper protest against these
men and their like Dr. Dwight is less than just to Darwin and to many
another seeker after truth, and he fails to recognize the obligation
under which he and those like him have been put by the fearless
pioneers of the new movement. The debt of mankind to the modern
scientific movement is incalculable; the evil that has accompanied it
has been real; but the good has much outweighed the evil. It is only
the triumph of the movement led by the men against whom Dr. Dwight
protests that has rendered it possible for books such as Dr. Dwight’s
to be published with the approval--as in his case--of the orthodox
thought of the church to which the writer belongs.
The most significant feature of his book is the advance it marks in
the distance which orthodoxy has travelled. He grudgingly admits the
doctrine of evolution, although--quite rightly, and in true scientific
spirit, by the way--he insists most strongly upon the fact that we
are as yet groping in the dark as we essay to explain its causes or
show its significance; and he is again quite right in holding up as
an example to the dogmatists of modern science what Roger Bacon said
in the thirteenth century: “The first essential for advancement in
knowledge is for men to be willing to say, ‘We do not know.’” He,
of course, treats of the solar system, the law of gravitation, and
the like as every other educated man now treats of them. Now, all of
this represents a great advance. A half-century ago no recognized
authorities of any church would have treated an evolutionist as an
orthodox man. A century ago Dr. Dwight would not have been permitted to
print his book as orthodox if it had even contained the statement that
the earth goes round the sun. In the days of Leonardo da Vinci popular
opinion sustained the church authorities in their refusal to allow that
extraordinary man to dissect dead bodies, and the use of antitoxin
would unquestionably have been considered a very dangerous heresy from
all standpoints. In their generations Copernicus and Galileo were held
to be dangerous opponents of orthodoxy, just as Darwin was held to be
when he brought out his “Origin of Species,” just as Mendel’s work
would have been held if Darwin’s far greater work had not distracted
attention from him. The discovery of the circulation of the blood was
at the time thought by many worthy people to be in contradiction of
what was taught in Holy Writ; and the men who first felt their way
toward the discovery of the law of gravitation made as many blunders
and opened themselves to assault on as many points as was the case with
those who first felt their way to the establishment of the doctrine
of evolution. The Dr. Dwights of to-day can write with the freedom
they do only because of the triumph of the ideas of those scientific
innovators of the past whom the Dr. Dwights of their day emphatically
condemned.