During some twenty‐five years—from about 1885 to 1910—there was at
Harvard College an interesting congregation of philosophers. Why at
Harvard in particular? So long as philosophy is the free pursuit of
wisdom, it arises wherever men of character and penetration, each with
his special experience or hobby, look about them in this world. That
philosophers should be professors is an accident, and almost an anomaly.
Free reflection about everything is a habit to be imitated, but not a
subject to expound; and an original system, if the philosopher has one,
is something dark, perilous, untested, and not ripe to be taught, nor is
there much danger that any one will learn it. The genuine philosopher—as
Royce liked to say, quoting the Upanishads—wanders alone like the
rhinoceros. He may be followed, as he may have been anticipated; and he
may even be accompanied, though there is as much danger as stimulus to
him in flying with a flock. In his disputations, if he is drawn into
them, he will still be soliloquising, and meeting not the arguments
persuasive to others, but only such a version of them as his own thought
can supply. The value of his questions and answers, as Socrates knew so
well, will lie wholly in the monition of the argument developing within
him and carrying him whithersoever it will, like a dream or like a god.
If philosophers must earn their living and not beg (which some of them
have thought more consonant with their vocation), it would be safer for
them to polish lenses like Spinoza, or to sit in a black skull‐cap and
white beard at the door of some unfrequented museum, selling the
catalogues and taking in the umbrellas; these innocent ways of earning
their bread‐card in the future republic would not prejudice their
meditations and would keep their eyes fixed, without undue affection, on
a characteristic bit of that real world which it is their business to
understand. Or if, being mild and bookish, it is thought they ought to
be teachers, they might teach something else than philosophy; or if
philosophy is the only thing they are competent to teach, it might at
least not be their own, but some classic system with which, and against
which, mankind is already inoculated—preferably the civilised ethics and
charming myths of Plato and Aristotle, which everybody will be the
better for knowing and few the worse for believing. At best, the true
philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot
himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves
in the same boat. It is not easy for him to shout, or address a crowd;
he must be silent for long seasons; for he is watching stars that move
slowly and in courses that it is possible though difficult to foresee;
and he is crushing all things in his heart as in a winepress, until his
life and their secret flow out together.
The tendency to gather and to breed philosophers in universities does
not belong to ages of free and humane reflection: it is scholastic and
proper to the Middle Ages and to Germany. And the reason is not far to
seek. When there is a philosophical orthodoxy, and speculation is
expected to be a reasoned defence of some funded inspiration, it becomes
itself corporate and traditional, and requires centres of teaching,
endowment, and propaganda. Fundamental questions have been settled by
the church, the government, or the Zeitgeist, and the function of the
professor, himself bred in that school, is to transmit its lore to the
next generation, with such original touches of insight or eloquence as
he may command. To maintain and elucidate such a tradition, all the
schools and universities of Christendom were originally founded; and if
philosophy seemed sometimes to occupy but a small place in them—as for
instance in the old‐fashioned American college—it was only because the
entire discipline and instruction of the place were permeated with a
particular system of faith and morals, which it was almost superfluous
to teach in the abstract. In those universities where philosophical
controversy is rife, its traditional and scholastic character is no less
obvious; it lives less on meditation than on debate, and turns on
proofs, objections, paradoxes, or expedients for seeming to re‐establish
everything that had come to seem clearly false, by some ingenious change
of front or some twist of dialectic. Its subject‐matter is not so much
what is known of the world, as what often very ignorant philosophers
have said in answer to one another; or else, when the age is out of
patience with scholasticism, orthodoxy may take refuge in intuition, and
for fear of the letter without the spirit, may excuse itself from
considering at all what is logical or probable, in order to embrace
whatever seems most welcome and comforting. The sweet homilies of the
professors then become clerical, genteel, and feminine.
Harvard College had been founded to rear puritan divines, and as
Calvinism gradually dissolved, it left a void there and as it were a
mould, which a philosophy expressing the same instincts in a world
intellectually transformed could flow into and fill almost without
knowing it. Corporate bodies are like persons, long vaguely swayed by
early impressions they may have forgotten. Even when changes come over
the spirit of their dream, a sense of the mission to which they were
first dedicated lingers about them, and may revive, like the antiquarian
and poetic Catholicism of Oxford in the nineteenth century. In academic
America the Platonic and Catholic traditions had never been planted; it
was only the Calvinistic tradition, when revived in some modern
disguise, that could stir there the secret cord of reverence and
enthusiasm. Harvard was the seminary and academy for the inner circle of
Bostonians, and naturally responded to all the liberal and literary
movements of which Boston was the centre. In religion it became first
Unitarian and afterwards neutral; in philosophy it might long have been
satisfied with what other New England colleges found sufficient, namely
such lofty views as the president, usually a clergyman, could introduce
into his baccalaureate sermons, or into the course of lectures he might
give for seniors on the evidences of Christianity or on the theory of
evolution. Such philosophical initiation had sufficed for the
distinguished literary men of the middle of the century, and even for so
deep a sage as Emerson. But things cannot stand still, and Boston, as is
well known, is not an ordinary place. When the impulse to domestic
literary expression seemed to be exhausted, intellectual ambition took
other forms. It was an age of science, of philology, of historical
learning, and the laurels of Germany would not let Boston sleep. As it
had a great public library, and hoped to have a great art museum, might
it not have a great university? Harvard in one sense was a university
already, in that the college (although there was only one) was
surrounded by a group of professional schools, notably those of law and
medicine, in which studies requisite for the service of the community,
and leading potentially to brilliant careers, were carried on with
conspicuous success. The number of these professional schools might have
been enlarged, as has been actually done later, until training in all
the professions had been provided. But it happens that the descriptive
sciences, languages, mathematics, and philosophy are not studies useful
for any profession, except that of teaching these very subjects over
again; and there was no practical way of introducing them into the
Harvard system except to graft them upon the curriculum of the college;
otherwise neither money nor students could have been found for so much
ornamental learning.
This circumstance, external and irrelevant as it may seem, I think had a
great influence over the temper and quality of the Harvard philosophers;
for it mingled responsibility for the education of youth, and much
labour in it, with their pure speculation. Teaching is a delightful
paternal art, and especially teaching intelligent and warm‐hearted
youngsters, as most American collegians are; but it is an art like
acting, where the performance, often rehearsed, must be adapted to an
audience hearing it only once. The speaker must make concessions to
their impatience, their taste, their capacity, their prejudices, their
ultimate good; he must neither bore nor perplex nor demoralise them. His
thoughts must be such as can flow daily, and be set down in notes; they
must come when the bell rings and stop appropriately when the bell rings
a second time. The best that is in him, as Mephistopheles says in
_Faust_, he dare not tell them; and as the substance of this possession
is spiritual, to withhold is often to lose it. For it is not merely a
matter of fearing not to be understood, or giving offence; in the
presence of a hundred youthful upturned faces a man cannot, without
diffidence, speak in his own person, of his own thoughts; he needs
support, in order to exert influence with a good conscience; unless he
feels that he is the vehicle of a massive tradition, he will become
bitter, or flippant, or aggressive; if he is to teach with good grace
and modesty and authority, it must not be he that speaks, but science or
humanity that is speaking in him.
Now the state of Harvard College, and of American education generally,
at the time to which I refer, had this remarkable effect on the
philosophers there: it made their sense of social responsibility acute,
because they were consciously teaching and guiding the community, as if
they had been clergymen; and it made no less acute their moral
loneliness, isolation, and forced self‐reliance, because they were like
clergymen without a church, and not only had no common philosophic
doctrine to transmit, but were expected not to have one. They were
invited to be at once genuine philosophers and popular professors; and
the degree to which some of them managed to unite these contraries is
remarkable, especially if we consider the character of the academic
public they had to serve and to please. While the sentiments of most
Americans in politics and morals, if a little vague, are very
conservative, their democratic instincts, and the force of
circumstances, have produced a system of education which anticipates all
that the most extreme revolution could bring about; and while no one
dreams of forcibly suppressing private property, religion, or the
family, American education ignores these things, and proceeds as much as
possible as if they did not exist. The child passes very young into a
free school, established and managed by the municipal authorities; the
teachers, even for the older boys, are chiefly unmarried women,
sensitive, faithful, and feeble; their influence helps to establish that
separation which is so characteristic of America between things
intellectual, which remain wrapped in a feminine veil and, as it were,
under glass, and the rough business and passions of life. The lessons
are ambitious in range, but are made as easy, as interesting, and as
optional as possible; the stress is divided between what the child likes
now and what he is going to need in his trade or profession. The young
people are sympathetically encouraged to instruct themselves and to
educate one another. They romp and make fun like young monkeys, they
flirt and have their private “brain‐storms” like little supermen and
superwomen. They are tremendously in earnest about their college
intrigues and intercollegiate athletic wars. They are fond, often
compassionately fond, of their parents, and home is all the more sacred
to them in that they are seldom there. They enjoy a surprising
independence in habits, friendships, and opinions. Brothers and sisters
often choose different religions. The street, the school, the young
people’s club, the magazine, the popular novel, furnish their mental
pabulum. The force of example and of passing custom is all the more
irresistible in this absence of authority and tradition; for this sort
of independence rather diminishes the power of being original, by
supplying a slenderer basis and a thinner soil from which originality
might spring. Uniformity is established spontaneously without
discipline, as in the popular speech and ethics of every nation. Against
this tendency to uniformity the efforts of a cultivated minority to
maintain a certain distinction and infuse it into their lives and minds
are not very successful. They have secondary schools for their boys in
which the teachers are men, and even boarding‐schools in the country,
more or less Gothic in aspect and English in regimen; there are other
semi‐foreign institutions and circles, Catholic or Jewish, in which
religion is the dominant consideration. There is also the society of the
very rich, with cosmopolitan leanings and a vivacious interest in
artistic undertakings and personalities. But all these distinctions,
important as they may seem to those who cultivate them, are a mere
shimmer and ripple on the surface of American life; and for an observer
who sees things in perspective they almost disappear. By a merciful
dispensation of nature, the pupils of these choice establishments, the
moment they plunge into business or politics, acquire the protective
colouring of their environment and become indistinguishable from the
generic American. Their native disposition was after all the national
one, their attempted special education was perfunctory, and the
influence of their public activities and surroundings is overwhelming.
American life is a powerful solvent. As it stamps the immigrant, almost
before he can speak English, with an unmistakable muscular tension,
cheery self‐confidence and habitual challenge in the voice and eyes, so
it seems to neutralise every intellectual element, however tough and
alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good‐will, complacency,
thoughtlessness, and optimism.
Consider, for instance, the American Catholics, of whom there are
nominally many millions, and who often seem to retain their ancestral
faith sincerely and affectionately. This faith took shape during the
decline of the Roman empire; it is full of large disillusions about this
world and minute illusions about the other. It is ancient, metaphysical,
poetic, elaborate, ascetic, autocratic, and intolerant. It confronts the
boastful natural man, such as the American is, with a thousand denials
and menaces. Everything in American life is at the antipodes to such a
system. Yet the American Catholic is entirely at peace. His tone in
everything, even in religion, is cheerfully American. It is wonderful
how silently, amicably, and happily he lives in a community whose spirit
is profoundly hostile to that of his religion. He seems to take stock in
his church as he might in a gold mine—sure it is a grand, dazzling,
unique thing; and perhaps he masks, even to himself, his purely
imaginative ardour about it, with the pretext that it is sure to make
his fortune both in this life and in the next. His church, he will tell
you, is a first‐rate church to belong to; the priests are fine fellows,
like the policemen; the Sisters are dear noble women, like his own
sisters; his parish is flourishing, and always rebuilding its church and
founding new schools, orphan asylums, sodalities, confraternities,
perpetual adoration societies. No parish can raise so much money for any
object, or if there are temporary troubles, the fact still remains that
America has three Cardinals and that the Catholic religion is the
biggest religion on earth. Attachment to his church in such a temper
brings him into no serious conflict with his Protestant neighbours. They
live and meet on common ground. Their respective religions pass among
them for family matters, private and sacred, with no political
implications.
Such was the education and such the atmosphere of intellectual innocence
which prevailed in the public—mostly undergraduates—to which the Harvard
philosophers adapted their teaching and to some extent their philosophy.
The students were intelligent, ambitious, remarkably able to “do
things”; they were keen about the matters that had already entered into
their lives, and invincibly happy in their ignorance of everything else.
A gentle contempt for the past permeated their judgements. They were not
accustomed to the notion of authority, nor aware that it might have
legitimate grounds; they instinctively disbelieved in the superiority of
what was out of reach. About high questions of politics and religion
their minds were open but vague; they seemed not to think them of
practical importance; they acquiesced in people having any views they
liked on such subjects; the fluent and fervid enthusiasms so common
among European students, prophesying about politics, philosophy, and
art, were entirely unknown among them. Instead they had absorbing local
traditions of their own, athletic and social, and their college life was
their true education, an education in friendship, co‐operation, and
freedom. In the eighteen‐eighties a good deal of old‐fashioned
shabbiness and jollity lingered about Harvard. Boston and Cambridge in
those days resembled in some ways the London of Dickens: the same dismal
wealth, the same speechifying, the same anxious respectability, the same
sordid back streets, with their air of shiftlessness and decay, the same
odd figures and loud humour, and, to add a touch of horror, the
monstrous suspicion that some of the inhabitants might be secretly
wicked. Life, for the undergraduates, was full of droll incidents and
broad farce; it drifted good‐naturedly from one commonplace thing to
another. Standing packed in the tinkling horse‐car, their coat‐collars
above their ears and their feet deep in the winter straw, they jogged in
a long half‐hour to Boston, there to enjoy the delights of female
society, the theatre, or a good dinner. And in the summer days, for
Class Day and Commencement, feminine and elderly Boston would return the
visit, led by the governor of Massachusetts in his hired
carriage‐and‐four, and by the local orators and poets, brimming with
jokes and conventional sentiments, and eager not so much to speed the
youngsters on their career, as to air their own wit, and warm their
hearts with punch and with collective memories of youth. It was an
idyllic, haphazard, humoristic existence, without fine imagination,
without any familiar infusion of scholarship, without articulate
religion: a flutter of intelligence in a void, flying into trivial play,
in order to drop back, as soon as college days were over, into the
drudgery of affairs. There was the love of beauty, but without the sight
of it; for the bits of pleasant landscape or the works of art which
might break the ugliness of the foreground were a sort of æsthetic
miscellany, enjoyed as one enjoys a museum; there was nothing in which
the spirit of beauty was deeply interfused, charged with passion and
discipline and intricate familiar associations with delicate and noble
things. Of course, the sky is above every country, and New England had
brilliant sunsets and deep snows, and sea and woods were at hand for the
holidays; and it was notable how much even what a homely art or accident
might have done for the towns was studied and admired. Old corners were
pointed out where the dingy red brick had lost its rigidity and taken on
a mossy tinge, and where here and there a pane of glass, surviving all
tenants and housemaids, had turned violet in the sunlight of a hundred
years; and most precious of all were the high thin elms, spreading
aloft, looped and drooping over old streets and commons. And yet it
seemed somehow as if the sentiment lavished on these things had been
intended by nature for something else, for something more important. Not
only had the mind of the nation been originally somewhat chilled and
impoverished by Protestantism, by migration to a new world, by
absorption in material tasks, but what fine sensibility lingered in an
older generation was not easily transmitted to the young. The young had
their own ways, which on principle were to be fostered and respected;
and one of their instincts was to associate only with those of their own
age and calibre. The young were simply young, and the old simply old, as
among peasants. Teachers and pupils seemed animals of different species,
useful and well‐disposed towards each other, like a cow and a milkmaid;
periodic contributions could pass between them, but not conversation.
This circumstance shows how much American intelligence is absorbed in
what is not intellectual. Their tasks and their pleasures divide people
of different ages; what can unite them is ideas, impersonal interests,
liberal arts. Without these they cannot forget their mutual inferiority.
Certainly those four college years, judged by any external standard,
were trivial and wasted; but Americans, although so practical in their
adult masculine undertakings, are slow to take umbrage at the elaborate
playfulness of their wives and children. With the touching humility of
strength, they seem to say to themselves, “Let the dear creatures have
their fling, and be happy: what else are we old fellows slaving for?”
And certainly the joy of life is the crown of it; but have American
ladies and collegians achieved the joy of life? Is that the summit?
William James had a theory that if some scientific widower, with a child
about to learn to walk, could be persuaded to allow the child’s feet to
be blistered, it would turn out, when the blisters were healed, that the
child would walk as well as if he had practised and had many a fall;
because the machinery necessary for walking would have matured in him
automatically, just as the machinery for breathing does in the womb. The
case of the old‐fashioned American college may serve to support this
theory. It blistered young men’s heads for four years and prevented them
from practising anything useful; yet at the end they were found able to
do most things as well, or twice as well, as their contemporaries who
had been all that time apprenticed and chained to a desk. Manhood and
sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort
them. The college liberated the young man from the pursuit of money,
from hypocrisy, from the control of women. He could grow for a time
according to his nature, and if this growth was not guided by much
superior wisdom or deep study, it was not warped by any serious
perversion; and if the intellectual world did not permanently entice
him, are we so sure that in philosophy, for instance, it had anything to
offer that was very solid in itself, or humanly very important? At least
he learned that such things existed, and gathered a shrewd notion of
what they could do for a man, and what they might make of him.
When Harvard was reformed—and I believe all the colleges are reformed
now—the immediate object was not to refine college life or render it
more scholarly, though for certain circles this was accomplished
incidentally; the object was rather to extend the scope of instruction,
and make it more advanced. It is natural that every great city, the
capital of any nation or region, should wish to possess a university in
the literal sense of the word—an encyclopædic institute, or group of
institutes, to teach and foster all the professions, all the arts, and
all the sciences. Such a university need have nothing to do with
education, with the transmission of a particular moral and intellectual
tradition. Education might be courteously presupposed. The teacher would
not be a man with his hand on a lad’s shoulder, his son or young
brother; he would be an expert in some science, delivering lectures for
public instruction, while perhaps privately carrying on investigations
with the aid of a few disciples whom he would be training in his
specialty. There would be no reason why either the professors or the
auditors in such an institution should live together or should have much
in common in religion, morals, or breeding, or should even speak the
same language. On the contrary, if only each was competent in his way,
the more miscellaneous their types the more perfect would these render
their _universitas_. The public addressed, also, need not be restricted,
any more than the public at a church or a theatre or a town library, by
any requirements as to age, sex, race, or attainments. They would come
on their own responsibility, to pursue what studies they chose, and so
long as they found them profitable. Nor need there be any limit as to
the subjects broached, or any division of them into faculties or
departments, except perhaps for convenience in administration. One of
the functions of professors would be to invent new subjects, because
this world is so complex, and the play of the human mind upon it is so
external and iridescent, that, as men’s interests and attitude vary,
fresh unities and fresh aspects are always discernible in everything.
As Harvard University developed, all these characteristics appeared in
it in a more or less marked degree; but the transformation was never
complete. The centre of it remained a college, with its local
constituency and rooted traditions, and its thousand or two thousand
undergraduates needing to be educated. Experts in every science and
money to pay them were not at hand, and the foreign talent that could be
attracted did not always prove morally or socially digestible. The
browsing undergraduate could simply range with a looser tether, and he
was reinforced by a fringe of graduates who had not yet had enough, or
who were attracted from other colleges. These graduates came to form a
sort of normal school for future professors, stamped as in Germany with
a Ph.D.; and the teachers in each subject became a committee charged
with something of the functions of a registry office, to find places for
their nurslings. The university could thus acquire a national and even
an international function, drawing in distinguished talent and youthful
ambition from everywhere, and sending forth in various directions its
apostles of light and learning.
I think it is intelligible that in such a place and at such a crisis
philosophy should have played a conspicuous part, and also that it
should have had an ambiguous character. There had to be, explicit or
implicit, a philosophy for the college. A place where all polite Boston
has been educated for centuries cannot bely its moral principles and
religious questionings; it must transmit its austere, faithful,
reforming spirit. But at the same time there had now to be a philosophy
for the university. A chief part of that traditional faith was the faith
in freedom, in inquiry; and it was necessary, in the very interests of
the traditional philosophy, to take account of all that was being said
in the world, and to incorporate the spirit of the times in the spirit
of the fathers. Accordingly, no single abstract opinion was particularly
tabooed at Harvard; granted industry, sobriety, and some semblance of
theism, no professor was expected to agree with any other. I believe the
authorities would have been well pleased, for the sake of completeness,
to have added a Buddhist, a Moslem, and a Catholic scholastic to the
philosophical faculty, if only suitable sages could have been found,
house‐trained, as it were, and able to keep pace with the academic
machine and to attract a sufficient number of pupils. But this official
freedom was not true freedom, there was no happiness in it. A slight
smell of brimstone lingered in the air. You might think what you liked,
but you must consecrate your belief or your unbelief to the common task
of encouraging everybody and helping everything on. You might almost be
an atheist, if you were troubled enough about it. The atmosphere was not
that of intelligence nor of science, it was that of duty.
In the academic life and methods of the university there was the same
incomplete transformation. The teaching required was for the most part
college teaching, in college subjects, such as might well have been
entrusted to tutors; but it was given by professors in the form of
lectures, excessive in number and too often repeated; and they were
listened to by absent‐minded youths, ill‐grounded in the humanities, and
not keenly alive to intellectual interests. The graduates (like the
young ladies) were more attentive and anxious not to miss anything, but
they were no better prepared and often less intelligent; and there is no
dunce like a mature dunce. Accordingly, the professor of philosophy had
to swim against rather a powerful current. Sometimes he succumbed to the
reality; and if, for instance, he happened to mention Darwin, and felt a
blank before him, he would add in a parenthesis, “Darwin, Charles,
author of the _Origin of Species_, 1859; epoch‐making work.” At other
times he might lose himself altogether in the ideal and imagine that he
was publishing immortal thoughts to the true university, to the world at
large, and was feeling an exhilarating contact with masses of mankind,
themselves quickened by his message. He might see in his mind’s eye rows
of learned men and women before him, familiar with every doubt, hardened
to every conflict of opinion, ready for any revolution, whose minds
nothing he could say could possibly shock, or disintegrate any further;
on the contrary, the naked truth, which is gentle in its austerity,
might come to them as a blessed deliverance, and he might fancy himself
for a moment a sort of hero from the realms of light descending into the
nether regions and throwing a sop of reason into the jaws of snarling
prejudice and frantic error. Or if the class was small, and only two or
three were gathered together, he might imagine instead that he was
sowing seeds of wisdom, warmed by affection, in the minds of genuine
disciples, future tabernacles of the truth. It is possible that if the
reality had corresponded more nearly with these dreams, and Harvard had
actually been an adult university, philosophers there might have
distilled their doctrines into a greater purity. As it was, Harvard
philosophy had an opposite merit: it represented faithfully the complex
inspiration of the place and hour. As the university was a local puritan
college opening its windows to the scientific world, so at least the two
most gifted of its philosophers were men of intense feeling, religious
and romantic, but attentive to the facts of nature and the currents of
worldly opinion; and each of them felt himself bound by two different
responsibilities, that of describing things as they are, and that of
finding them propitious to certain preconceived human desires. And while
they shared this double allegiance, they differed very much in temper,
education, and taste. William James was what is called an empiricist,
Josiah Royce an idealist; they were excellent friends and greatly
influenced each other, and the very diversity between them rendered
their conjunction typical of the state of philosophy in England and
America, divided between the old British and the German schools. As if
all this intellectual complication had not been enough, they were
obliged to divide their energies externally, giving to their daily tasks
as professors and pedagogues what duty demanded, and only the remainder
to scholarship, reflection, and literary work. Even this distracting
circumstance, however, had its compensations. College work was a human
bond, a common practical interest; it helped to keep up that circulation
of the blood which made the whole Harvard school of philosophy a vital
unit, and co‐operative in its freedom. There was a general momentum in
it, half institutional, half moral, a single troubled, noble, exciting
life. Every one was labouring with the contradiction he felt in things,
and perhaps in himself; all were determined to find some honest way out
of it, or at least to bear it bravely. It was a fresh morning in the
life of reason, cloudy but brightening.