condition has led us to a paradox: we lack any standard of a good, a
noble life, yet we are amazingly standardized in our lives. Finding
no common vision of what life ought to be conducted for, we fall prey
to exceedingly powerful social suggestions. We behave, first of all,
as if the machinery of existence, the getting of a living, were an
all-important end in itself. And on the margin left free by practical
affairs we look for a good time, we try to be neighborly, we increase
our comfort.
G. R. is entangled in this paradox: at the same time he falls into the
conventional modes of American behavior, he protests against them: he
decries the lack of a common luminous standard for life and yet does
not set himself to search for one. He continues to flounder unhappily.
* * * * *
Some of G. R.’s psychological biography is now relevant. At one time
a large part of his mind was under the control of a certain view of
the world which I shall personify as “the Sunday School boy.” Later
“the Sunday School pupil” at the back of his brain was supplanted by
“the village atheist,” the personification of the world-view G. R. now
holds. Both these characters in his brain are elusive, capable of many
disguises, and below the surface. One must go stealthily to capture
them.
Every human being, even the least philosophic man, is compounded of two
attitudes, an attitude toward the world and an attitude toward himself.
The latter seems more native, less educable, than the former. Of our
picture of ourselves we are almost never aware, and even when in rare
instances we come to realize what the picture is, it seems impossible
to change it. We can only sometimes correct its influence on our
actions and feelings, but we go on habitually conceiving of ourselves
as before. Our attitude toward the world, on the other hand, seems to
derive from education and to be susceptible of change. A world-view
of some sort we must have, but the particular one we receive, often
unconsciously, is, as people say, “wished on us,” usually when we were
children. G. R. illustrates a change in world-conceptions, passing as
he did from the dominance of “the Sunday School pupil” planted early
in his mind to the later dominance of “the village atheist,” installed
there in his twenties. But let us ask some general questions first.
What attitudes toward the world are characteristic of ourselves and our
contemporaries? That is, what are our chief emotional states in regard
to that immense given object, the world? What are our imaginations of
life? An interesting enumeration of some of them was given a few years
ago by a practical psychologist. “There is,” he said, “the ‘Puritan’
picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes
the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the
stern dominie. There is the ‘Pagan’ picture of life as an orgy of Greek
gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the ‘Serious’
view of life which imagines ‘God’ to be struggling against almost
hopeless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude
evoked is one of ‘helping poor father.’ There is the ‘Scientific’
view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up but
with nowhere to go. There is the ‘Æsthetic’ view in which life is an
artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative
witness. And so on.”
But which of these and other unlisted world-conceptions are most
conspicuous in intelligent American society today? I think they are
the two that G. R. has been victimized by; one asserts the universe to
be purposive and meaningful to man, the other declares the contrary.
The first for convenience we can call the Victorian world-view, and
the second the “Scientific” view. Both when stripped bare seem pretty
absurd, yet who will say that we, even when we recognize the puerile
character of our governing conceptions, do not go on being dominated
by or at least being considerably influenced by absurdities? It is
not easy, any one who has tried will testify, to overcome our early
education.
Consider the Victorian world-view which is implanted in most people
brought up like G. R. in one of the Protestant churches. H. G. Wells
has sought for thirty-five years to shatter it. His procedure has been
to delineate its formation time and again in his novels and then show
how impotent it is to face a really hard blow from circumstance. From
_Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, for instance, I can quote a very
neat description of the present-day Protestant _Weltanschauung_ as it
is popularly held, but in this form who but a very honest man will see
that something very like it underlies much of his opinions about life?
“God began afresh with me in England,” says Mr. Blettsworthy in
reference to his boyhood, “as the confederated shadow of my uncle, a
dear English gentleman of a God, a super-Blettsworthy in control,
a God of dew and bright frosty mornings, hopeful and unresentful,
whose peculiar festivals were Easter and Christmas and the Harvest
Thanksgiving. He was the God of a world that was right way up, stern
only to smile again, and even through the solemnity and restraint of
Good Friday peeped out my uncle’s assurance that the young gentleman
would come back safe and sound on Sunday. A serious time, of course,
occasion for grave reflections, but meanwhile we had our hot cross
buns....
“He was awfully decent, was God, as his uncle displayed him, and he and
my uncle made me want to be decent too. In a world of ‘All right’ and
‘Right O’ and ‘Right you are, Sir.’...
“My uncle shook back the sleeves of his surplice and leant smiling
and persuasive over the pulpit, making everything clear and mild like
English air, and I felt that if I were given a vision sufficiently
penetrating I should see high above the blue ether another such kindly
Father, instructing his fortunate world.”
Considering the results of the recent research by Dr. Angus Hector
MacLean of Columbia University into the ideas about God of Protestant
children, Mr. Blettsworthy’s account is more than fair toward what
we learn in Sunday School. Furthermore, since most of us never give
any serious thought in later years to Religion, we never learn very
thoroughly what a travesty of the religion of Christ our instruction
has been. We take it naïvely for something like the genuine thing. We
may vary or subtilize the picture, trying to make its anthropomorphism
less crude, but in essentials it remains the same. A fatherly
personage rules the universe and we are his darling concern. At the
back of our minds there is still a “little Sunday School pupil” piping
up in adult’s language that the world runs on a benevolent principle
and that we should therefore be altruistic toward our neighbors in
imitation of the divine principle.
But it is possible for many people by an extension of their reading to
exorcise this “little Sunday School pupil” and to install in his place
what I can only designate as “the village atheist.” Once this oddity
is established there, we react to life according to the dictates of
the “Scientific” imagination of it. In this view there is only one
kind of real knowledge, and that is modern science: there is only one
sanction for knowledge and that is bestowed by the scientist. All
art, all religion, all morals, all philosophy must bow before the
final authority of science. They do not yield us other and different
knowledge of the world, valid in its own way, but they are purely
fictive unless backed up by the arch-critic of all contemporary
culture, the scientist. “This is a scientific age,” says G. R. to his
friends who still continue to speculate about religious matters.
This point, our exclusive reliance on scientific investigation and
thought for the truth about things, needs no stressing. It is one of
the preëminent signs of the modern mind. We do not take seriously the
kind of knowledge offered by art, for instance, and in fact we do not
call it knowledge at all. But it needs to be repeated again, for we
continually forget it, that modern science is carried on by intensely
specialized men whose activities are understandable to only a few
hundreds and who do not popularize their doctrines. In many cases
indeed, the various theories of quantum for one, these activities are
extraordinarily hard to render into the idiom of the world. So it comes
about that the many intelligent men who have adopted the “Scientific”
view are actually just as Victorian as those who retain a sentimental
“religious” life-picture. For their “Scientific” view is forty or
fifty years old, going back to such famous and gifted popularizers
as Huxley and Tyndall. By it they believe that the world is a vast
mechanical concern, thoroughly materialistic, orderly and eventually
knowable, but without purpose, and in this world man is an accidental
form of life. He is alien to the world, and it is indifferent to him.
How old-fashioned this is! Does it not bring to mind the discussions
of some provincial group of tight-minded atheists set on combating
the conventional propaganda of latter-day Christians? Yet, though the
advanced physicist has forsaken this world-conception, it persists in
many persons today who fancy themselves as intellectually “free.”
G. R., for instance, picks up the latest _Nation_ the postman has
brought to his door and there in a feature article of one of our most
intelligent weeklies, he reads: “It (the natural world) is a system if
not with any purpose at least with an order.... Man is a half happy
but, historically considered, quite explicable accident.” Now what is
that but saying over again to G. R. what the Victorian scientist said
in effect to G. R.’s father--the universe is all dressed up but has
no place to go? Yet these sentences are by a professor of philosophy
in a large university who is regarded as _au courant_ with the latest
developments in thought. By this you may see how beneath a considerable
surface complexity in the modern mind there may lie major assumptions
of an astonishing naïveté. There is indeed a “village atheist” in many
of us who controls our emotional state toward the world, and we shall
have a great deal of trouble to dislodge him.
The truth is that neither the Victorian world-outlook, nor the
“Scientific,” nor the “Pagan,” nor the “Æsthetic,” nor any other of
the world-outlooks subscribed to in the present time by minorities
inspires a creative emotion toward life. But of that, a creative
world-conception and its corresponding attitude, more is to be said in
a later chapter.
* * * * *
Perhaps we shall make a better case for ourselves if we examine our
chief current conceptions of man. After all, nothing obviously is
closer to us than our organisms: we may find that the world at large
is a receding object for speculation, but who can be oblivious of
the intimate bonds existing between what we call our “ego” and the
manifestations of our personality? It is a truism (which we are always
trying to forget) that we are attached by self-love to the strange
being that bears our name, and it is furthermore known that self-love
falls into a certain number of stock forms or attitudes toward oneself.
Into these we need not go now: they fall more logically into the
psychologist’s province. But it is pertinent for us to take up certain
large conceptions of man which have a great hold on us, and deeply
color our self-attitudes.
To begin with, a very large party, probably the most numerous in fact,
thinks of man as existing wholly within Nature. By this its members
mean that man contains naught of the supernatural: on the contrary, his
psychology belongs as much to Nature as does his physiology. He rises
out of Nature, but does not transcend it. There is no special law for
man as distinct from law for thing: man is utterly material: the old
doctrine of the soul’s immortality is a delusion. Browning has sung for
them:
Let us not always say,
“Spite of this flesh today
I strove, made head, gained ground, upon the whole!”
As the bird wings and sings,
Let us cry, “All good things
Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”
But this party which as a whole denies the existence of any radical
discontinuity between Nature and Man is itself divided into a
sentimental and a scientific faction, and both have representatives
in the schools of psychology. The Freudian psycho-analyst will do
very well as a spokesman for the sentimental naturalists, and for the
scientific naturalists the Behaviorist is perfectly ready to offer his
conclusions.
It happens that G. R. belongs to the former persuasion: he has been
twice psycho-analysed and the stock he takes in the process can be
gauged by the considerable expense he has put himself to. He is
convinced that we have a kind of bastard soul, the “unconscious” or
as most people prefer to call it, the subconscious, which is a basic
conception in the teachings of the Freudians. This bastard soul is
dynamic, not merely the residue of the impressions which we have
either forgotten or received unawares, and it works its will deviously
upon us. The important thing is to become aware of its modes of
operating and to keep them from being perverted by false education
and false social notions. Repressions and suppressions are, on the
whole, mischievous, though sometimes necessary. The mind furthermore
is suspect. It fools us by rationalizations: it oftentimes aids in
unhealthy sublimations.
G. R. therefore seeks to free his impulses and to follow them
spontaneously. He has turned anti-intellectual and tries to establish
himself upon his instincts and his feelings without interference from
his mind. He trusts in his “unconscious” which he believes to be
innocent and naturally good in the old sense of Rousseau. That is why
we may term G. R. a sentimental naturalist, for the mark of the breed
is its faith in the essential goodness of man and its contention that
the environment alone is to blame for the spoiling of man.
At the present time, G. R. is hostile to the scientific naturalist,
not on the fundamental ground that man is entirely within Nature,
but because the Behaviorist drives out sentiment about the inherent
goodness of man. To the Behaviorist man is a doomed creature. He is
the product solely of biology and sociology, will-less, an automaton,
purely a response-mechanism. His consciousness is doubted, though his
complexity is granted. But it is the complexity of a machine. G. R.
finds it difficult to refute the Behaviorist’s laboratory experiments,
but his “mystic” faith in the “unconscious” insulates him against the
terrible conclusions of Dr. Watson and his co-workers.
Nor does he like the phrase, “the indignity of man,” which the New
Humanists use for the conceptions of psycho-analyst and Behaviorist
alike.
* * * * *
It may seem to some readers that I have overdrawn this portrait of
a typical child of our age. But we must not mistake complexity of
thinking for thought itself. An elaborate superstructure may rest upon
a few naïve assumptions. I have tried to get below the superstructure
and there I find a man who leads a standardized life due to the
manipulations of Society, who either returns to his mother’s knee when
he looks at the world or else regurgitates the stale conclusions of
Victorian materialism, who conceives of himself as being naturally good
if only he can return to the state of Nature or else he conceives of
himself as purely mechanical--and it is impossible to exaggerate either
this man’s ignorance of what life may mean or his lack of creative
emotion toward the world and himself. His leaders, for all I can see,
only subtilize his blindness, but they are stricken in the same way.
It is true, one can confidently affirm of our epoch at least, that as
A. N. Whitehead observes, “The mentality of an epoch springs from the
view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections
of the communities in question.” Our leaders and this poor stock figure
G. R. live in the same climate of opinion: they have shaped him, it is
obvious, but what is not so immediately clear is that they have also
sprung from him.
This at any rate is incontestable. Our age is not rich in individuality
as the Renascence was. The Renascence type--the master of many arts,
the all-round or universal man--does not flourish with us. And the
reason? Once we peer well inside our psychology, it is apparent that
we are aimless and uncreative, and that, I think, is sufficient
explanation.
The New Humanist is against the psychology of modernity. He stands for
another kind of man which I shall try to portray in the next chapter.
III
THE MAN OF POISE
_“The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s
humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is
poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles
succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The
difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving
toward poise and the man who is moving away from it.”_--Irving
Babbitt in _Humanism and America_.
One turns to dictionaries sometimes to find out what sense certain
terms have had for large bodies of men. There are always several
definitions of Humanism that have been widely accepted, including one
that covers the meaning of the word as used by American Humanists.
No follower of Irving Babbitt could take exception, for example, to
the definition in _Webster’s New International Dictionary_, where it
is stated that Humanism is “a system, mode, or attitude of thought
or action centering upon distinctively human interests or ideals,
especially as contrasted with naturalistic or religious interests.”
A more interesting definition occurs in the _Century Dictionary_: “A
system of thinking in which man, his interests and development, are
made central and dominant. Its tendency is to exalt the cultural and
practical rather than the scientific and speculative, and to encourage
a spirit of revolt against existing opinions.” In the preceding
chapter we glanced at some of the nowadays deeply entrenched opinions
supporting the “indignity of man” conception which American Humanism
seeks to oust, and we may add here that the New Humanist is fighting
against the raising of the scientific discipline above the literary
discipline. All of us for many years have read such sentences as these:
“The field of literature is notoriously the home of lost causes.
Almost any antique idea, no matter how rusty and fly-blown, can pass
as legitimate currency in literary circles.... Literary men, as a
class, are surprisingly ill-informed about anything but literature....
The exclusively literary discipline is one of the most narrowing
and least productive of all intellectual disciplines”: and we have
wondered under the spell of their confidence if we too should not be a
little contemptuous of the offerings of literature to the modern man,
rejoicing in them perhaps with a kind of secret shame, while we reserve
our serious attention for the latest researches in anthropology and
Gestalt psychology. Only, sotto voce, have we observed this alleged
reluctance on the part of literary men today to embrace new scientific
speculations? On the contrary, they seem, most of them, to be much
more prone than genuine scientists to accept the latest guesses as
“discoveries.” The New Humanist like the genuine scientist has not much
applauded the “guess-sciences,” such as psycho-analysis, for from his
training he has formed the stubborn conviction that the great literary
masters were _not_ naïve men but quite the opposite, and divined more
about the essential constitution of human nature than modern science
has yet been able to disentangle. The New Humanist is even prepared
to maintain in the teeth of the multitude shouting of “progress” that
perhaps modern culture is a retrogression, and we need not think that
the growth of a scientific mentality is a compensation for the decline
of commonsense, the weakening of feeling, the decay of action as an
art. In fact, the contention of numerous scientific apologists for the
inferiority of the literary discipline to the discipline of science
is a comparatively old story to the New Humanist, reminding him of
Arnold’s reply to Huxley. I have it in mind soon to introduce Arnold
as a model Humanist, one whose life and works may show us better than
any abstract discourse what contemporary Humanism aspires to be, but
it will be interesting first to look at his address on _Literature and
Science_.
In that discourse Arnold marked his agreement with Huxley up to a
certain point. “There is, therefore, really no question,” he said,
“between Professor Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great
results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as
a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature
and art.” But it is such a statement which the rabid scientific
propagandist ignores when he informs his audience that Humanism is
anti-science in its tendency. It is not so. The New Humanist objects
not to science, but to the exaggerated prestige science has acquired
in modern civilization. “Interesting, indeed, these results of science
are,” he will say with Arnold, “important they are, and we should all
be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we
are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we
are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge.” Science is taken
by the New Humanist as a great arm of the human spirit, a magnificent
intellectual weapon forged for ascertaining the _what-ness_ of things,
but still only as one of the great arms of the spirit along with
philosophy and art and religion; and now we can bring forward Arnold’s
justification for the literary discipline, the reason for his claim
that “letters will call out their (mankind’s) being at more points,
will make them live more” than an education carried on mainly in the
natural sciences.
It is because literature is not confined to the sphere of intellect
and knowledge, but is concerned with the relationship between that
sphere and the other spheres of a man’s life, the sphere of beauty,
the sphere of conduct. It is like dancing which has a regard to the
total harmonious action of the body as contrasted with exercises like
weight-lifting designed solely to increase strength. The scientific
discipline is concerned with knowing, the literary with connecting
knowing with feeling and doing. Truth is the prize of the scientist;
truth, beauty and goodness the prizes of the man of letters. Thus, it
may be said that the function of the literary culture is to sum up all
other existent cultures, to gather them in and sweeten their language,
and finally to relate their findings to the total being of man.
Arnold beautifully exemplified this relating power gained from the
study of letters when he declared that “we shall find, as a matter of
experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in
the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of
men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural
knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important
matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have
in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they
have also the power,--such is the strength and worth, in essentials,
of their author’s criticism of life,--they have a fortifying, and
elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully
helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for
conduct, our need for beauty. Homer’s conceptions of the physical
universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of
hearing from modern science that ‘the world is not subordinated to
man’s use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial,’
I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer’s line
which I quoted just now, ‘for an enduring heart have the destinies
appointed to the children of men.’”