to a partial self, a best self to an inferior, to a momentary self
a permanent self requiring the restraint of impulses a man would
naturally have indulged;--because by _attending_ to his life, man found
it had a scope beyond the wants of the present moment.” I wish to
bring home, if I can, the nature of what is here called our partial,
inferior, momentary self, and to do so I shall call upon the studies of
the Behavioristic psychologists. What the New Humanist terms our lower
natural self is in my opinion best named our mechanical self.
The Behaviorists consider man to be a behaving mechanism. Man has
nothing to say about his heredity, his birth, his early environment,
the language and customs he is taught, and so forth. He comes into the
world with the native disposition to make certain responses (unlearned
responses) and he soon is trained on the basis of these to make
thousands of others (conditioned responses), often of a very arbitrary
character. A response-mechanism set ticking and continued in motion by
the ceaseless impact of stimuli from the environment.
Physiologically, we are, every one admits, best viewed as machines.
Our tissues repair themselves, our blood flows through an elaborate
system whose tracings we know only by hearsay (i.e., by diagram),
our nails and hair grow without our supervision, we are unaware of
the functioning of organs like the liver, unless they get out of
order,--but it is unnecessary to specify details of what every one
grants: namely, that the ceaseless movements of our bodies do not
depend very much on our accurate and intimate knowledge of them, nor
upon our directive powers. We stand toward them in the relation of
mechanician to machine, only we are rather poor mechanicians and in our
ignorance frequently harm what we are supposed merely to tend.
But the Behaviorist enormously extends the reign of mechanics: he
puts our psychology--or what we call our psychology--under mechanical
rule, going so far as to reduce our emotions to visceral tensions and
our thoughts to sub-vocal movements in the larynx. In this he is far
more right than most people think. But we do not need to argue that
out now. I refer to very obvious matters, such as the occurrence of
emotions to us. _They occur to us_: we do not as a rule induce them.
“A peculiar feeling came over me,” we say. It did! “I was seized by
anger.” I was! “I was taken by surprise.” Right! Every day long we are
swept by a succession of emotions, the majority of which clearly we had
nothing to do with. We did not choose to experience them. They came to
us.
Again there is a constant procession--better say jumble--of images,
ideas, associations, words and nonsense in our minds. Our brains
wander most of the time: they are as Arnold Bennett calls them
“gentlemen-at-large” and deucedly unreliable. They go on operating
after a fashion whether we will or not. And what is this but sheer
mechanicality?
But this is our natural self, this is as biology and sociology
have made us. We take stock of ourselves in adulthood and we find
probably that we are a pronounced type--an intellectual, a highly
emotional artist, a sportsman. Did we create our type, our particular
psychological build, any more than we colored our eyes or invented the
shoes we Westerners wear? Our temperament--did we make it or do we find
ourselves with one?
A very great deal of what we call ourselves we have to consign to the
Behaviorist and agree with him that it is determined. But the New
Humanist will not yield all to Dr. John B. Watson and his relentless
observers in the laboratory. He will not deny consciousness, nor the
will, nor higher potentialities than are manifest in the animal self.
He balances against the mechanical the human self which, he maintains,
man can develop. What, more precisely than thus far stated, is meant
by the human self? We can get at the conception if we think of our
potentialities.
Actually, we are turned out by Nature and Society as uneven-sided
human beings, not well-rounded ones. Actually, we are prejudiced and
partial, not unprejudiced and impartial. Actually, our minds are
enslaved, not free. Actually, we are nonsensical, not commonsensible.
But we have the potentiality for all these things we have not,--for
harmonious development of ourselves, for disinterestedness and
impartiality, for the free intelligence and the most esoteric of all
virtues, commonsense. Only none of these things ever comes to man as a
gift. Each must be deliberately and laboriously acquired. Man, then,
humanistically viewed, is born with a lower self but has a margin of
potentiality which he, and only he, can cultivate, and by so doing he
creates a higher self to which it is proper to give the name human.
Acquirements, not gifts--that is the sure mark of the truly human.
(Incidentally, the greatest of these acquirements is will, but of that
later.)
At the risk of seeming unable to let go of the idea of a cleft between
the natural man and self-perfected man, I will cite one illustration
of the difference between our actual psychology and our potential
psychology. Man has the possibility of simultaneous thought on
several different subjects, but this possibility is never actualized
by accident in the ordinary course of events. Ordinarily we think
in succession, following a train of thought, as we say. But we
can, by special training, learn to follow several lines of thought
at once. One begins with very simple exercises (immensely difficult
to the beginner, however), such as focussing on the movement of the
second-hand of a watch, reciting a stanza of poetry, and running
through a multiplication table at the same time, and then works up to
what appear staggering exercises in mental gymnastics. For this sort of
work, at which geniuses fail the first time as completely as the most
ungifted, the natural self is of no avail. Simultaneous thought becomes
an actuality only to those who themselves bring it to birth.
It seems strange that any one should deny on any practical basis the
selves of the New Humanist’s conception: one, largely or altogether
automatic, actual, natural, subject to the “law for thing,” the other
acquired, born out of potentiality by one’s own effort, not natural but
human, subject to the “law for man.” Yet this dualism has been fought
throughout recorded history. Many gifted men have made frenzied efforts
to deny the gap, to coalesce the two selves, to prove that man not
only theoretically but practically must be monistic. One of the latest
epical mass-movements to deny psychological dualism was Romanticism.
* * * * *
_Submission to the natural self is the Romantic attitude._ Here, I
believe, we can strike rock bottom. As sketched above, a human being
consists of three related modes of experience (sensations, emotions,
and ideas) and in these three modes everything, according to the
Behaviorist, a very great deal according to everybody, is done not by
our consent and knowledge, but, as it were, by itself. But toward such
a threefold apparatus for experiencing, an attitude may be assumed,
and this attitude is fundamental in our psychology. Given one kind of
attitude, and you get the foundation of Romanticism. Another attitude
toward the selfsame creature, and you have laid the cornerstone of
the humanistic life. Who or what takes the attitude? Whatever we mean
by the word “I.” The Romanticist glories in identifying as closely
as possible whatever the word “I” means with his mechanical self. He
resigns his Ego to his organism. He submits to the riot of his senses,
feelings and thoughts and calls the submission good.
It might be said, I suppose, that earlier in this book I scored an easy
victory by putting in contrast a composite figure, quite lacking in
“personality,” with Matthew Arnold. Of course, it might be retorted to
me, Arnold is superior to any constructed representative of modern men.
Arnold should rather be compared with some great Romantic, not with an
instructive psychological chart. Very well: in the place of that poor
G. R. we unfeelingly exposed, let us put Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
man of genius who preached so eloquently the surrender to our natural
selves.
Irving Babbitt has often been accused of “Rousseauphobia.” I cannot
find the justice in the accusation, which ignores Babbitt’s reasons
for emphasizing Rousseau’s influence. Babbitt cannot be said to have
slighted the precursors of Rousseau, such as Hutcheson and the Earl of
Shaftesbury, or not to have put a great deal of weight on Francis Bacon
as a founder of the modern world. And it is true, as Babbitt claims,
that though Rousseauistic ideas were in the world long before Rousseau,
it was the Genevan who gave them their great driving power in our era:
it was Rousseau who cast the wonderful glamor over them that made them
irresistible to modern man. Rousseau is the representative Romantic. He
is the symbolic figure, and hence he is bound to appear very large in
any treatment of Romanticism. Furthermore, the extent and depth of his
influence can hardly be minimized, as the enormous literature written
about him shows. Let it be Rousseau then to serve here, as in so many
previous expositions, as the arch-exponent of the Romantic attitude.
He accepted the contradictions in himself, saying that his heart
and his mind did not seem to belong to the same person. He scorned
the intellect, the weakest and least developed of our three modes
of experience, saying that the man who thinks is a depraved animal.
He gave the primacy to feeling, and exalted sensation. He declared
that man was corrupted by Society and that man was naturally good. He
developed on his own account, as Maritain says, “a singular doctrine
of absolute non-resistance to the impulses of sensation, a doctrine of
complete passivity as the condition of full expansion of the primitive
goodness, which is simply a natural quietism.” Yes; the “Father of the
modern world” was an irresponsible. For he loved, nay he worshipped,
that irresponsible creature, the natural self.
The natural self is innocent: that is, it is neither good nor bad.
Good or bad can only appear in the attitude taken toward the natural
self. The Romantic with all his enthusiasm follows the inclinations of
the natural self. He shirks the disciplining of it. He wants unity but
he thinks he can find unity by subsiding into the life of feeling and
sensation, stilling the mind. He goes with Nature, like a child led by
its nurse, and he calls it liberty.
At the end of Romanticism there is the pseudo-necromancer of Vienna
with his complicated method for teaching the proud spirit of Man to
stoop, to chain itself to the blind forces of his temperament, to
forget in slavery to the senses and feelings that man is in essence a
passion for perfection.
* * * * *
_Responsibility for the natural self is the Humanist attitude._ Like
the Romanticist, the Humanist discovers that whatever is signified by
the word “I”--and the determination of the signification of the word
“I” is a poser for the infant science of psychology[5]--is attached
to a surprising creature, unreasonable, expansive, changeable, an
absorbing mystery to study. He finds furthermore that the creature has
the complete upper hand so far as the “I” in it is concerned. But the
Humanist cannot acquiesce in this arrangement. It seems to him that the
creature is not wicked but certainly a fool. There is nothing wrong
with its appetites, only the organism is singularly unintelligent in
gratifying them. It is full of whims, some of them dangerous to the
organism’s life. It loves to waste time in day-dreaming, to waste
emotion in foolish anxieties, to waste energy in muscular fidgets.
Clearly, the creature itself would be happier if it were under
intelligent guidance, if it were taught to obey instead of always being
given the reins and dashing away at random. Thus, the New Humanist
feels that his real, deepest self is somewhat apart from his natural
mechanical self. He wants to be the driver of his machine, not a mere
intoxicated passenger in a runaway vehicle. He wants to be responsible
for the manifestations of his personality. In responsibility for his
natural self lies for him the dignity of man. This for him is the true
liberty.
But how to attain and exercise this liberty? For, to begin with,
the workings of the natural self are not known to the one who
wishes to master it. Hence, the humanistic stress on self-study and
self-knowledge. But further, even granting a fairly complete working
knowledge of oneself, of what one’s biases and characteristic reactions
are, what one’s defects and points of strength are, one may still
be at a total loss, powerless to alter or control the spontaneous
phenomena of the organism. Hence, the humanistic stress on the need for
developing the will.
* * * * *
_The New Humanist upholds a creative conception of man._ The word
“creative” has been so cheapened by Romantic usage in which it is
made synonymous with mere temperamental overflow that one is almost
inclined to drop the word until it loses its present indiscriminate
associations. However, no other word will do to describe the humanistic
conception of man, for in the Humanist’s view man literally creates
his manliness. Man has to find his own center, develop his own
potentialities, create his own order in his psychology.
We can put the matter thus. Every one without exception has felt that
his psychology was organized about a principle of dispersion. His
inclinations have pointed outwards; he wants to let himself go, he
yearns to express himself. “You must be yourself,” said Jean-Jacques
Rousseau over and over, and in his mouth it meant what Maritain says
it did. “You must _be_ your feeling, as God _is_ His being. Does God,
Who is all act, need forming? You must regard as a sin every attempt
to form yourself, or allow yourself to be formed, to right yourself,
to bring your discords to unity again. Every form imposed on the inner
world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a
sacrilegious wrong to nature.” This is psychology based on the Many.
But just as there is a metaphysic of the One as well as the Many,
so there is a psychology of the One. Every one without exception,
I daresay, has felt in his psychology a principle of unity. He has
experienced, that is, at various moments a strong wish to integrate
himself, to pull himself together, to become a concentrated unified
individual. It is with this wish the New Humanist identifies the human,
and he pits it against the inclination to accept the discords. The
wish for unity is the creative wish.
What could be more uncreative than the despising of the mind by Luther,
Rousseau and scores of lesser Romantics? The mind, a part of our
resources to be exploited along with the other parts--why should it
be treated puritanically any more than the body should be despised?
Again what can be more uncreative than to transfer the blame for one’s
faults to Society, or to make a cult of inaction as Rousseau did? The
New Humanist replies that the fault after all is not in our stars or
in Society but in ourselves and that we must work upon ourselves--a
genuinely creative attitude.
I direct attention again to human potentialities. Proportionateness--it
must be created. The free intelligence--it must be struggled for.
Disinterestedness--an ideal toward which no step is ever taken without
effort. Commonsense, the fusion of mental, emotional and practical
judgments--it must be striven for. Self-control--impossible without the
use of will. The will--dormant, it must be awaked. Unity--it must be
achieved.
These, according to the New Humanist, are some of our higher
possibilities. He takes the attitude that a man’s work is to bring them
towards fruition, that in so doing lies happiness, that by so doing one
is truly creative, making and strengthening a human self to oppose and
dominate the vagaries and weaknesses of the natural self.
VII
THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM
_“My whole method is experimental, or it might be less ambiguous
to say if the word were a fortunate one, experiential.”_--Irving
Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_.
It is obvious that the New Humanist does not think there is much
insight in Walt Whitman’s line, “And if the body were not the soul,
what is the soul?” We can epitomize the preceding chapter and at the
same time add a new element by extracting two sentences from Babbitt’s
_Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Like all the great Greeks Aristotle
recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary
or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known
practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man
is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but
must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in
thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure.” The new element, the
law of measure, relates to discipline. I have dealt with the major
conception in the Humanist doctrine: I have shown that the New Humanism
is primarily individualistic and for the sake of individual growth:
I described it as aristocratic in temper. The last is surely evident
from the humanistic stress on the rule of our momentary ordinary selves
by our best selves, and from the Humanist’s search in the inherited
literatures for “the best that has been thought and uttered,” and
finally from his making the question of leadership the paramount
problem for democratic nations to solve. But in the general description
of the New Humanism I noted in addition that it was a discipline and
selective in practise, and these are the matters of this chapter.
Here again we have to combat psychological obtuseness. To repeat: a
logical understanding of a text is one thing, and quite another is a
living warm apprehension, a psychological understanding, of the same
text. The first is an affair of words: the second is more real, related
to feelings and conduct as well as to the formulating intellect. Now
it so happens that it is a peculiarity of our age to be blank-minded
whenever there is question of a psychological method to realize
in practice the ideas and ideals we adopt. We think that the mere
entertaining of the ideas and ideals we are attracted by is sufficient,
we think that we shall naturally grow to embody them completely without
the need of any special discipline or “way of life.” In short, never do
we inquire into “ways of life” at all, never do we exercise the kind of
thought Arnold employed when he sought in the Biblical texts for the
_method_ and _secret_ of Jesus. In dealing with the New Humanism in
its aspect of a technique for living intelligently, we must therefore
make a special and unusual effort to see the theory in terms of actual
practice.
There is no initial difficulty in feeling the spirit of the New
Humanist discipline, for though it derives from Aristotle, it is as
thoroughly modern as the laboratory spirit. No one could in fact be
a stauncher supporter of the modern spirit defined by Irving Babbitt
as “the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take
things on authority” than Babbitt himself. Only, he adds, you must be
a complete positivist. He then goes on to exhort his readers to be
individualists: “the man who plants himself, not on outer authority but
on experience, is an individualist.” Aristotle, Babbitt takes to be the
arch-type of the positive and critical Humanist, for Aristotle teaches
us “how to have standards and at the same time not to be immured in
dogma.” All this, as I say, is quite in the modern spirit and goes to
explain the appeal Babbitt exercises on many young Americans who cannot
be accused of yearning for some long-gone age and whose defection from
the banners of Menckenism has puzzled some people.
At this point should be brought up the Babbittean distinguishing
of three levels on which life may be experienced: the religious,
the humanistic, and the naturalistic. The naturalistic we have seen
exemplified by a host of Rousseauists and Baconians, of sentimentalists
and utilitarians, of all those who in one way or another submerge Man
into Nature. The religious level is occupied by the great systems of
Buddhism and Christianity. Here the supernatural enters, here the
consuming search is for the Absolute, here there is dying to this world
and here there is the life more abundant that comes through rebirth
into a world of greater consciousness. The _via media_ is alleged to
be the humanistic life, represented in the past by Confucianism in
the Orient and by Aristotelianism in the Occident. The middle way has,
as outlined by Babbitt, its special methodology, its special virtues,
and its special attitudes. For example, we have already noticed its
hostile attitude toward Naturalism, its clash with Naturalism on first
principles. On the other hand, its attitude toward those who work on
the religious plane is sympathetic. Quotations bearing on this could be
accumulated but a recent utterance by Irving Babbitt will do for all.
“For my own part,” he said in _Humanism and America_, “I range myself
unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists. Though I see no
evidence that humanism is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic
and revealed religion, there is, it seems to me, evidence that it
gains immensely in effectiveness when it has a background of religious
insight.”
But to the New Humanist the reasons for risking one’s life on the
religious level do not, one judges, seem overwhelming. Here is one of
Babbitt’s statements on that point, a statement on which I reserve
comment for the present. “I have been struck,” he says cannily, “in
my study of the past by the endless self-deception to which man is
subject when he tries to pass too abruptly from the naturalistic to
the religious level. The world, it is hard to avoid concluding, would
have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human
before setting out to be superhuman; and this consideration would seem
to apply with special force to a generation like the present that is
wallowing in the trough of naturalism. After all to be a good humanist
is merely to be moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier
for a man to deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural
lights than it is regarding the degree to which he is moderate and
sensible and decent.”
Though Babbitt seems to emphasize here the fear of self-deception as
the main ground for preferring the humanistic plane to the religious,
the New Humanist can actually make out a very strong case based on hard
commonsense. A. R. Orage, the finest living English literary critic,
has suggested what the sensible attitude, in the present state of our
knowledge, should be toward religion. So interesting a point of view
justifies a rather lengthy quotation.
“Suppose that a remote posterity, unversed in mathematics and the
scientific research equipment of our age, should inherit one of our
current science manuals. There they would read or, rather decipher,
such statements as that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a
second; that the sun is 92 million miles distant from the earth, and
that the light of the nearest star takes four and a half light years to
reach us. What would they make of it all? Some of them, it is probable,
would hold that their forerunners must have possessed a faculty lost
to themselves and in consequence would attach a mystical significance
to the unverifiable dogmas; they might even repeat these dogmas as
possibly magical formulas. But undoubtedly the best common sense of
the day, in the absence of the means of verification, would dismiss
the statements as being childish guesses or, at best, as barbarous
abracadabra. Only a very few would suspect that perhaps we were not
such fools as we appeared, and give us suspended credit for a method
behind our madness. But our method itself and the instruments we employ
would be still to seek.