in which American Humanism fits. I deem it, however, premature and
over-enthusiastic to perceive in this field the beginnings of a new
renascence, and likewise I do not think the parallel between the living
asserters of classical ideals and the Humanists of the Renascence
should be stressed. True enough, the modern revivalists have entered
into a gigantic battle to overthrow the preëminence of the dogma of
Naturalism, just as the Renascence men assaulted the preëminence of
petrified theological dogma, and true enough the moderns catch their
vision, as did their brothers in the fifteenth century, from the
ancient literatures. But it is yet to be seen whether they can do more
than _defend_ the ancestral treasures, whether they can be more than a
corrective force to the excesses and barbarisms of our era. Have they
the potency to initiate a real transformation of modern society? Can
they even arrest its downward plunge, let alone reverse its direction?
Have they the hidden strength to work a miracle? The questions
discourage all desires to prophesy. The only thing that can be said
is that the traditionalist thinkers are making a supremely important
contribution to the thought of today, that by their contribution they
tend to improve the general intellectual situation, and the first step
is the production of a more favorable situation, in itself a huge task,
for diamond ideas about the “good life.” Meanwhile, the most that can
be said about any notion of a coming renascence is that it may have the
energizing value of a myth: it is perhaps akin in its tonic effect on
the spirit to the conception of the general strike which Georges Sorel
proclaimed should be the heroic myth of the proletariat in its long
struggle.
Now if we compare the theory of American Humanists with the theories
or partly worked out theories of their allies in Europe, we shall see
that we have at home not the least developed and least positive form
of conservatism. The Europeans either come to rest on Catholicism
(Chesterton, Belloc, Massis, Maritain), which for many Americans
seems impossible, involving an act of too much faith, and furthermore
they feel too _psychologically_ distant from Rome; or the Europeans
dedicate themselves to some political movement such as French
royalism (Maurras and his disciples) which to some extent perverts
their classical attitude; or finally they fall back on some personal
philosophy, scarcely more than a strong predisposition in favor of
the disinterested activity of the mind (Benda) or else very much in
the forming and full of idiosyncrasies (Wyndham Lewis). American
Humanism has not complicated itself by theological alliances, nor
subordinated itself to the pursuit of definite political aims. What
is striking is the extent to which it has freed itself from the
personal and idiosyncratic. It exists apart from the personalities
of More and Babbitt. Here is a body of general ideas, substantial
yet pliable, to which all who seize the few underlying principles may
resort and from which all may take a working experimental outlook on
the problems of their own lives. Here is a system for the guidance
of one’s thought, not for its repression and confinement. Here is an
ideology too definite to be treated whimsically, but not so rigid as to
be unadaptable to the taste of the individual. It has a completeness
wanting in the personal philosophies of Lewis and Benda, and it does
not appear to many so arbitrary as the doctrines of the Church. _Its
great recommendation is that it is founded on the positive critical
experimental spirit of modern times._ This in the remainder of the book
I shall try to demonstrate.
VI
A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN
_“Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human
happiness_ uncomplicated _by naturistic dogmas on the one side and
religious dogmas on the other.”_--G. R. Elliott in _Humanism and
America_.
Humanism is a term that has been defined, and well defined, many times.
Yet there persists in the public mind the feeling that Humanism is a
portmanteau word and the New Humanists have failed to make it denote
anything precise. The public is not to blame for this feeling, nor
are the New Humanists responsible. Several causes may be alleged,
the first being the romanticizing of the word by writers like Walter
Pater. “For the essence of humanism,” Pater once wrote, “is that belief
of which he (Pico della Mirandola) seems never to have doubted, that
nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly
lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside
which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been
entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever
been passionate, or expended time and zeal.” This is to make Humanism
denote simply an all-embracing curiosity, an insatiable appetite for
everything, no matter how trivial. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_
(I consider nothing human alien to me)--this widely quoted line is
the motto of those who take Pater’s definition too seriously. But the
line is spoken in Terence’s play as an excuse for meddling, and Babbitt
comments drily that it “might serve appropriately enough as a motto for
the humanitarian busybody with whom we are all so familiar nowadays,
who goes around with schemes for reforming almost everything--except
himself.” No, Humanism means more than a universal curiosity about
one’s fellow creatures, and it does not mean humanitarianism. The
humanitarians, however, have claimed the gracious word, and this is the
second cause of confusion as to definition.
It is essential to see that Humanism and humanitarianism are quite
distinct. “A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” to quote
from Babbitt, “faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the
great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but
a humanitarian.” Such a person--he is legion!--exalts sympathy, and
expects that somehow in the coming years man’s altruistic impulses will
triumph over his egoism. He is an optimist, an ardent believer in the
dogma of progress, and usually a superstitious worshipper of modern
science. _Exempli gratia_: Auguste Comte, Rousseau and Herder have
at one time or another been hailed as “humanists,” whereas, Babbitt
asserted in his first book, they are properly called humanitarian
enthusiasts. So today we sometimes read in our newspapers that certain
former Unitarian preachers are Humanists, despite the fact that their
sermons upon examination prove to be almost pure humanitarianism,
or we hear writers like the American historian, Harry Elmer Barnes,
referred to as a Humanist. But Barnes, we may say in passing, would
have seemed to Matthew Arnold the propagandist for a “spurious and
degenerated sub-form” of Hellenism. Arnold would doubtless have dubbed
this very vocal rationalist simply a Millite, a word he coined from the
name of England’s famous utilitarian philosopher. Humanism, properly
understood, is in fact the stern critic of philanthropic rationalists
like Barnes or sentimental enthusiasts like the Reverend John Haynes
Holmes. _For Humanism is a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic
in temper, selective in practice, which makes its first concern, the
self-perfecting of the individual._
There is still a third cause which must be touched on to explain
the confusion that blankets the public mind. In the literary
campaign staged against the New Humanists in the spring of 1930, the
naturalistic writers employed an old debating trick:--to pretend
bewilderment at the definitions offered and to press for closer and
closer definitions. The aim apparently was to force the New Humanists
at last into some utterly rigid statement of their creed, if not into
some ultimate banality; therefore anything short of a completely rigid
definition was called an inadequate one. But the New Humanist is
too awake to the dangers of Neo-Classicism to yield to this type of
pressure. Humanism lays the stress on the inner life, Neo-Classicism
on the external conventions. The New Humanist maintains the seat
of authority in himself: he studies with zeal the wisdom stored in
tradition, but he insists on his internal corroboration of that
wisdom as the all-important thing. He does not, that is, set up an
authority, as the Neo-Classicist does, which is completely exterior to
himself. Above all, he perceives the folly of an Age of Rules, which
happens whenever Neo-Classicism gains ascendency. In short, if the New
Humanism could be set forth in a perfectly dry detailed code, you may
be certain that it would not be Humanism, but only another recurrence
of Neo-Classicism. A true definition of Humanism must breathe with the
vitality inherent in its subject.
The New Humanist, then, disassociates himself from the impoverishment
of Neo-Classicism, from excessive purism, as consciously as he
separates himself from indiscriminate humanitarianism and the mere
inquisitiveness of the æsthetic type. As was said above, Humanism is
a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic in temper, selective in
practice, which makes its first concern, the self-perfecting of the
individual. This sense for the term is not new or perverse; it has, in
fact, long been emphasized as the following passage from a late Latin
writer, Aulus Gellius, will show. Gellius was of a somewhat crabbed
and pedantic temper: Babbitt admits this and adds that he was too much
inclined to leave sympathy out altogether; but what is interesting
is that in the decadence of Rome Gellius made complaint about the
corruption of the term _humanitas_ to give it a humanitarian flavor.
Here is his protest--it might have been written yesterday--against the
confusion of humanism with humanitarianism.
“Those who created the Latin language,” the passage occurs in the
_Noctes Atticae_, “and those who spoke it well do not give the word
_humanitas_ the vulgar meaning which is synonymous with the Greek word
_philanthropia_, which means an active kindness, a tender benevolence
for all men. But they give the word the meaning which the Greeks attach
to _paideia_, which we call education, knowledge of the fine arts.
Those who show the most taste and disposition for these studies are
the most worthy to be called _humanissimi_. For man alone among all
living beings is able to devote himself to cultivating a study which
for that reason has been called _humanitas_. Such is the meaning given
to this by the ancients, particularly by Varro and Cicero. Almost all
their works show examples, so I shall content myself with quoting one
only. I have chosen the opening of the first book of Varro ‘Concerning
Human Things’: _Praxiteles, qui propter artificium egregium nemini est
paulum modo humaniori ignotus_ (Praxiteles, whose excellent talent as
an artist has made him known to every man at all skilled in the arts).
Here _humanior_ does not bear the vulgar meaning of easy, tractable,
benevolent, even though lacking in knowledge of letters. That meaning
would not express the author’s thought. It means an educated, a learned
man, one who is acquainted with Praxiteles through books and history.”
* * * * *
What is the doctrine of the New Humanism? The most compact statement
I have found was written by Robert Shafer in the course of a powerful
polemical article in the _Bookman_. It deserves the most careful study
by the reader, for from it can be extracted almost the whole of
Humanism. It is a remarkably comprehensive formulation: despite its
brevity it manages to imply all that a New Humanist has to say about
his conception of man.
“Against romanticism, humanitarian sympathy, mechanistic or vitalistic
determinism, the doctrine of progress and the like, has been opposed a
skeptical criticism of life and letters which rests ultimately on the
proposition that man differs not alone in complexity of organization,
but in kind, from the animal, and that his happiness depends upon his
recognition and cultivation of that element in his being which is
distinctive of him. This is held to be possible; man is held to be,
within limits, capable of responsible choice. This capacity is regarded
as the core of the distinctively human element in man’s constitution,
which is thus dual--‘animal,’ one may roughly say, united inexplicably
with ‘something more,’ or the unlimited chaos of impressions and
spontaneous desires united with the potential capacity of control and
reduction to ordered activity. No conclusion is necessarily implied for
or against the doctrine of grace, but insistence is steady that without
a wisely directed educational discipline and a strict inner discipline
man’s fulfilment of his proper end is certainly impossible. To choose
is to discriminate, and, for this, habituation to self-restraint is
essential; it is, indeed, the foundation on which the whole structure
of distinctively human life rests.
“It is recognized that this general position is not susceptible of
rational proof--reason itself being the organ of discrimination, and
acting, when it acts legitimately, in a purely instrumental capacity.
But none the less his position is, the humanist adds, irrefutable and
soundly based. It concerns a realm of being into which ‘modern science’
simply does not enter. Exact science, so-called, is concerned with
quantity--how much?--but about quality--how good?--it has nothing to
say. The humanist is concerned, not with physical existence taken by
itself, but with distinctively human excellence, or self-fulfilment,
or, in a word, happiness. Here the one possible appeal is to actual
human experience--the recorded experience of past generations and
the inner experience of the individual disciplined and formed in the
light of selective tradition. The strength of humanism lies in its
positive experiential basis, which affords it, not an absolute, but a
sufficient, authority.”
Could the sum and substance of Humanism be put more plainly than the
above? The topic can be expanded, explained, illustrated, but in the
end when it is boiled down again, we shall find that Robert Shafer has
given the candid and accurate summary of its meaning. Greater rigidity
would be inexact--remember that words like “idealism,” “skepticism,”
“deism,” even “pragmatism” offer a similar necessary fluidity to the
definer--for the thing defined has flowing contours and is alive with
movement. What then is the difficulty many inquirers about Humanism
confess to experiencing when it comes to seizing its import? Well,
our difficulties with understanding definitions are not entirely with
words; they are of two kinds: verbal and psychological. The first
is more easily overcome: it requires simply a clear statement and
attentive reading. In view of the fulness with which More and Babbitt,
Foerster and Shafer and many others have written about the meaning of
Humanism, there is no excuse whatever for any failure to grasp verbally
what they are driving at. A college student could write it out on an
examination paper. But the other kind of difficulty, the psychological
obstacle to understanding, is the one that takes real effort to remove.
By understanding a definition psychologically, I mean experiencing
the definition. I mean relating it to one’s own experience or lack
of experience. I mean filling the verbal signs with living personal
content.
I will give one simple illustration of the gap between verbal
understanding and psychological comprehension. A good deal of the
vocabulary of warfare is used by both soldiers and civilians. The
counters are the same, but what the soldier has experienced as the
meaning of these words--“No-man’s Land,” “trenches,” “battle,” etc.--is
radically different from the mere verbal associations the civilian
makes with them. The soldier and the civilian try to converse: it is
well known that the returned soldier quickly gives up and refuses
to talk about his war experiences except to those who have had an
actual taste of battle. The civilian wonders why the soldier is
uncommunicative about the war and never guesses that it is partly
because the soldier has become aware that what to him are signs of
experience are to the civilian simply words, as we say.
Now in the case of Humanism this disparity in experience between
the expounder and the listener does not exist. There is a ground of
human experience common to all that can be appealed to. But how to
reach it? Here the reader must exercise his good will, must be honest
with himself, must make an effort to carry the interpretation over
from words to experience, to take it out of the verbal forest of the
mind and apply it to all his psychology. This means in many cases an
effort against the habits of education we have received, for the latest
reformers in education are correct in telling us that our civilization
is too exclusively verbal, that we trust too much in words cut off
from things. Such a psychological translation of the perfectly clear
verbal answers already given to the question, what is twentieth century
Humanism, I now propose to attempt.
* * * * *
_The final object of the New Humanist is happiness._ If he is asked,
why discipline oneself, why try to live in a certain way, his candid
reply is, to attain happiness. All his system-making is directed toward
that end, and that end, happiness, happens to be one of the very few
values unquestioned by human beings, for who in a state of happiness
could conceivably question his own happiness?
Here there is practically no barrier to what I have called the
psychological understanding or, perhaps better, realization of
humanistic doctrine. For every one knows at first hand the state of
happiness: it has come to him accidentally, it has been fleeting, but
brief and chance as its visitations have been, the impression of them
is indelible. We long all our lives to re-experience happiness, and
we are incredibly ingenious in trying to find it. The cynical are no
exception: their cynicism about happiness arises from repeated failures
to rediscover it, and their real wish is still for that on which they
pour (why so bitter?) ridicule.
Mankind universally hopes for happiness. It flees from the unhappy
state and looks everywhere for the acknowledged good thing, the state
of being happy. The sad platitude is that mankind fails first to find
as much happiness as it wants, second, to maintain the state when it
is experienced, and third, to gain an insight into the secrets of
producing happiness. Not on happiness as the ultimate human value,
but on the way to happiness, the means of procuring it, is there
disagreement.
The majority--a fact that has always struck wise men with
astonishment--have always depended on distractions and pleasures. They
have situated the source of happiness in the world around them. They
have felt that a change in the environment was what was needed. Make
the world an Eden, say the reformers, and man will be happy. But the
Garden of Eden, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is within, has been the
retort of the sage.
The New Humanism commits itself first of all to a serious study of the
principles of happiness. It does not dream of a geographical Paradise,
but says, look to human nature! What is the constitution of human
nature? How ought man to live according to this constitution? For in no
other way but by obeying the laws of his being can he win an enduring
happiness.
But here is where an apparent paradox deludes so many. Man is not
born free, as Rousseau claimed, but born slave to things. Things are
in the saddle and ride mankind, and mankind expects to be happy under
those conditions. To change the conditions, to come out from servitude
to things to a command over them--the aim of the religious and the
humanistic alike--is so arduous and perilous a revolt that it looks
like anything but the way to happiness. Man’s _inclination_ is to
remain enslaved to things the while he hopes they will not ride him
harshly. His _wish_ is to oppose his inclination to servitude, and
to fight his way to psychological freedom. He cannot however imagine
that he can be happy warring against his attachment to things. And yet
Thoreau speaks for all the sagacious reflecters on life when he says:
“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon
ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called
necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up
treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through
and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the
end of it, if not before.”
* * * * *
_The New Humanist maintains that human consciousness is dual._ This is
the primary fact to be recognized, he says, in any quest of happiness.
He expresses this fact by speaking of our two selves, which he calls
the natural self and the human self, or the animal and human selves or
the lower and higher self. In respect to this terminology, admittedly
crude, it must be kept in mind that the New Humanist writes as a
practical psychologist, not as a theoretical one who also has to drop
technical language and speak in the world’s tongue when it comes to
practical psychology, and it must be still more kept in mind that no
moral connotations are meant by the terms. If I say that plants are
a lower form of life than animals, I do not imply that plants are
reprehensible for their lesser development--nor does the New Humanist
regard the life of the body as morally inferior to, let us say, the
life of the mind. The grading is made in the scientific spirit: it
is based on measurement of life, not on moral requirements. The
discrimination between lower and higher is psychological, and nothing
else.
Surely, no elaborate documentation is needed to establish the fact that
there is an overwhelming crowd of witnesses from antiquity onwards to
the existence of a practical dualism in human psychology. Two eloquent
writers will stand for the multitude: Cicero in antiquity and Matthew
Arnold in the nineteenth century. They can be combined in a single
quotation from the latter’s _Literature and Dogma_. “Man alone of
living creatures, Cicero says, goes feeling after ‘the discovery of an
_order_, a law of _good taste_, a _measure_ for his words and actions.’
Other creatures submissively follow the law of their nature; man alone
has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent
of his nature.” That is, a goldfish or a wren or a crocodile or a cat
is always true to its species. Nature looks to it that they obey, as
it were, the conscience of their species. They behave strictly as they
should, being what they are. They are loyal to themselves. But man is
not so completely cared for. He belongs to a very elastic species: his
behavior can vary enormously and fall far away from the norm of the
race. We have words to indicate this drop from what we instinctively
feel man should be, such words as “bestial,” “sub-human,” “inhuman,”
“unmanly,” and the like. Nature apparently is interested in man only
up to a certain point, giving him a human form, the capacity to feel,
the ability to think, but for all Nature cares, he may be as disordered
as he pleases in his emotional and mental life. An idiot, from the
standpoint of Nature, is as good as a genius. From this arises man’s
sense of division in himself. He is a natural creature; true; but add
that in comparison with the beasts and their constant observance of
their laws he appears a crazed natural creature. But, a strange thing,
he has the intuition that he also has the possibility of becoming a
sane creature. Only--he himself must learn what sanity is, what its
laws are and how to follow them.