us say no more than possibly--be our own situation in regard to
the ancient ‘science’ of religion. We have inherited a few of the
textbooks once circulated among the illuminati of more or less
extinct civilizations, and we find them to contain statements of
equal exactitude and incredibility concerning things of which we have
no verifiable knowledge, as that there is a God Who is a trinity of
Persons, Who created the Universe according to Reason, and Man in
his own image, and Who placed us in the world with potentialities of
consciously becoming like unto Himself. Some of us today are disposed,
like our imagined descendants, to take these traditional statements
mystically; to repeat them as magical formulas; and to assume that
a lost faculty, the so-called religious sense, was possessed by our
ancestors of ancient Egypt, India, Persia and Syria. So relatively
powerful, in fact, are these that their attitude towards the inherited
dogmas of ancient religion is still the standard of respectability.
The weight of common sense, however, is slowly but surely making
itself felt; and the day is not far off when the intelligence of our
civilization will explicitly decline even to be interested in grandiose
statements apparently insusceptible of proof. Only a few, a very few,
will continue to suspect that perhaps the Egyptians, the Buddhists,
the Pythagoreans and the Gnostics were people very like ourselves in
respect of faculty and unlike us only in the same respect in which
we shall differ from a remote posterity without our science, namely,
in the possession, not of a lost faculty, but of a lost method or
technique. And for these few, too, the method or technique is still to
seek--or perhaps only to recognize.”
The foregoing is more than a caution against the easy specification
of what religious experience is; it also reinforces the attitude--a
strictly modern one which most of the New Humanists adopt--of wariness
toward the religious life. But can we find in our ordinary diurnal
living anything that corresponds to the humanistic way and to the
naturalistic way? Nothing is simpler than to exemplify the latter,
for we all live naturalistically most of the time. Most men, Thoreau
observed, lead lives of quiet desperation. Most men must work for
their livelihood, and the work they are driven to do holds little or
no attraction for them. (I do not speak of the increasing number of
intolerable jobs an industrial society creates, but rather of the
monotonous occupations of many members of the middle class.) The
time spent in offices each day is for many men so much time spent in
bondage, cut off from their vivid interests: they repine, but succumb
to a dull routine. Their permanent mood is one of passive endurance.
Like horses they uncomplainingly draw their loads and rejoice when at
five o’clock they are let out to pasture. This is a usual and mild
instance of merely naturalistic living. The humanistic attitude, on
the other hand, is, toward the identical necessity and circumstances,
an active one. A curb is put on futile repining: vain longings
are disciplined: the situation is faced with the minimum useless
feeling. The question for the Humanist is, granting the inescapable
circumstances, how can I make the best use of them to my advantage as
a human being? How may I bend them to suit my design in life, how may
I gather them into focus? How may I extract from my burdens values
that are not accessible to the mere beast of burden? At this point
Arnold’s triumphant converting of his drab job of school inspecting
to the main interests of his life springs to mind as an instance
of working on the humanistic level. In other words, where it is a
case of the disagreeable inevitability, the Naturalist remains under
compulsion from the outside: the Humanist, in contrast, makes an effort
to alter his attitude from mere negative endurance to a search for
positive results in the way of personal discipline and the discovery
of unsuspected values inherent in the day’s work. Is his real business
in life not the cultivation of the distinctively human, and is not
everything grist to that magical mill if one only tries to keep the
mill in operation; that is, if one maintains an active attitude toward
experience?
But, perhaps some readers are saying, you are merely balancing an
act of good sense against the case of unintelligent adjustment:
by what right do you label the former humanistic when many avowed
Naturalists--Charles Darwin in his years of invalidism, for
instance--perform feats of intelligent and heroic overcoming of
difficulties? The answer is that the Naturalist often rises above his
doctrine just as the Humanist often fails in his discipline, but it
still remains true that it is the Humanist who assigns himself the
task of organizing a life based on good sense, while the Naturalist
puts his confidence in following, so far as he is permitted by
events, the grain of his mechanical self. Have we not inherited the
nineteenth century Romantic disparagement of good sense in favor of the
imagination?
* * * * *
The central maxim for practising the humanistic life is a
crystallization in three words of a large part of Greek
wisdom--“Nothing too much.” The New Humanists plan to do not less than
to restore to its pristine attractiveness the law of measure extolled
by Aristotle and called by Horace--so worthy of praise did it seem to
that exquisite poet and epicurean--the Golden Mean.
About this I think there is no difficulty in understanding what the New
Humanist leaders are driving at. The law of measure is not legalistic;
it cannot be codified. Negatively put, it means, avoid excesses.
Positively, it means the rule of temperance, but temperance manifested
in the mental and emotional realms as well as in the physical. The
real difficulty lies in applying measure to our deeds, our thoughts,
our feelings, and it is an immense difficulty, demanding what tact and
delicacy, what perceptiveness and reflection, what resolution and zeal.
In essays by American Humanists we often run upon certain sayings of
Pascal which not only illuminate the import of the law of measure but
should serve here to enhance the reader’s sense of what I have just
said about its difficulty in operation.
“Grandeur is not shown by being at one extremity, but in touching both
at once, and filling the whole space between,” wrote Pascal, and there
could not possibly be a better recognition of the _great scope_ for
the play of human psychology allowed for by the law of measure. “When
we would pursue the virtues to their extremes on either side, vices
present themselves, which insinuate themselves imperceptibly there,
in their insensible course towards the infinitely great, so that we
lose ourselves in vices, and no longer see virtues.” The history of
Romanticism (how often!) testifies to the weight of truth in this
saying. The following _pensée_ might well be called the essence of the
New Humanism. “Excessive or deficient mental powers are alike accused
of madness. Nothing is good save mediocrity. To leave the mean is to
leave humanity. The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how
to keep the mean. So little is it the case that greatness consists in
leaving it, that it lies in not leaving it.” That is the reply the New
Humanist can make when it is objected that his strictures on eccentric
genius are too harsh. “The greatness of the human soul consists in
knowing how to keep the mean.”
For a genius is often simply an exaggeration of one, and but one, of
the three major aspects of a man. For we may say that man is a compound
of Knowing, Being and Doing. Exaggerate his wish to know into a lust
for knowledge (_libido sciendi_), depress at the same time his wish for
Being and Doing, and you get the Gargantuan hungerer for knowledge, the
monstrous head and the starved heart and impotent faculty for doing,
you get an encyclopædist, a Diderot (whose heart was active, however)
or a Herbert Spencer. Again exaggerate a man’s wish for Being, let him
despise the acquisition of knowledge and the doing of deeds, and you
have the lust for feeling (_libido sentiendi_): you have a genius like
Rousseau or Schiller. There is also an inordinate lust for power, for
doing (_libido dominandi_), which like the lusts for knowledge and
for feeling is all-consuming and warps the development of character,
and this time you get a monstrous man of action like Napoleon or like
some great industrialists of the present era that any one can name.
These incarnations of the three great lusts of human nature excite our
wonder and admiration: they fascinate us by their “divine madness.”
But we remind ourselves that there is also a “divine sanity,” and it
seems in the character of Plato or Buddha a finer touch of divinity.
Babbitt transcribes for us in his argument directed against the _libido
sciendi_, the _libido sentiendi_, and the _libido dominandi_ the
Buddhist proverb: “If one man conquer in battle ten thousand men and
another man conquer his own self, he is the greatest of conquerors,”
and to this he subjoins his own belief that “that man is most human
who can check his faculty, even if it be his master-faculty, and his
passion, even his ruling passion, in its mid-career, and temper it by
its opposite.”
In one phrase, then, the Humanist method is mediation between extremes.
It is the finding of the middle way, and I hasten to add that the
middle way is never found mechanically, never by merely striking an
average between two extremes. It is a strait and narrow way, obvious
when it is recognized, but hard to recognize. Finding it is a call
upon all of one’s experience: effort, thought, observation, a scale of
values, spiritual agility, all are needed to make the discovery of the
Golden Path.
* * * * *
But useless is all writing about the Golden Mean if man has no power
of choice, or potentiality of acquiring a power of choice. As well
exhort a beggar to buy a palace! Nothing could be vainer than the
formulation of a discipline based on selection, selection and again
selection, if there is in man no capability for selecting. According
to the Mechanists there is not. They have much truth on their side.
In the sense that man is self-ignorant and therefore uncontrolled
(for who can control what he does not know?), man _is_ a machine. But
here is something to ponder on: there is a wide uninvestigated region
of man which we may term his potential psychology. Psychology as a
science--described truly by its leaders as an infant science--has not
yet given us a norm for human psychology, which includes both our
actualities and our latencies. An honest worker like Dr. J. B. Watson
speaks frankly for all his profession when he says that we have seen
no norm, and adds that in his opinion it would be infinitely desirable
to find one. The New Humanist, weighing the evidence and testimony of
the past, concludes that man has at least the potentialities of gaining
self-knowledge and self-control. He therefore seeks to actualize
them. He challenges the Mechanists and appeals to our sense of latent
psychology. In his effort to build up a working system of psychology
based upon potentialities (our human self) as well as upon actualities
(our mechanical self), the New Humanist has been more grotesquely
misunderstood than at any other point.
We approach now the meaning of the phrases he uses so often,--“a
principle of restraint,” “a power of vital control,” “_frein vital_”
as against “_élan vital_,” “the inner check.” I have been through the
mass of writings directed against Babbitt’s theory, and these terms
are harped on with so much irritation that I can only conclude the
vocabulary of Babbitt is highly offensive to our age. “Now why the
deuce,” peevishly writes one of the younger critics, speaking for
all of them, “is virtue, with the Humanists, always made to reside
exclusively in what Babbitt calls the ‘will to refrain’?” In the
petulance of that question there is perhaps a clue to the psychology
of our age, a psychology so extraordinarily blind that it fails to see
that a principle of restraint is only another way of saying a principle
of selection, as indeed in Babbitt’s writings the two expressions are
interchangeable from his first book wherein he spoke of “a humane
principle of selection, or what amounts to the same thing, a true
principle of restraint.” But a very vocal part of our age is infuriated
by the very notion of restraint, and we have to interpret this strange
fact. Can it be that, as is sometimes charged, this is really an age
of weaklings in the arts and philosophies? It is noticeable that men
of strength are usually the very men who most feel the need of curbing
themselves, that men of rich and powerful personalities are the ones
who try hardest to purge themselves of the merely gratuitous and
“temperamental,” that men of real passion are the first to acknowledge
need of canalizing it. These men are not afraid that a little
discipline will take away their precious personalities: they have so
much personality that it is precisely discipline they look for. But
what is this outcry on the part of so many of our formative writers
against the negative admonition? What feebleness of energy and passion
is it that is afraid of being strangled by a “power of vital control”?
I am driven to think of the reports of sexologists who say that it is
the poorly sexed man whose erotic life is one of excessive indulgence,
whereas the powerfully sexed are sensible of the need for some
moderation of their desires, and I wonder if many a writer in our day,
determined to let nothing stop the expression of his soul (the size of
an emmet, alas, in so many cases) is not comparable to the unrestrained
man of poor sexual powers.
However that may be, the American intellectuals and artists as a body
have totally failed to perceive what may be fairly termed the gallantry
of the Humanist conception of “a will to refrain.” For if we could, as
it were, put our ordinary selves under a glass and gaze coolly at them,
we should see very numerous and complicated phenomena, a flux subject
to endless change and relativity, which except for an infinitesimal
fraction we are not aware of at all. This world of impressions, and
bodily changes, and variations in feeling goes its own way, and we
are, it seems, at its mercy. Have most of us any more control of our
mental processes than we have of our glandular secretions? But against
this imperious self the Humanist dares to assert his very deepest
self. He dares to say no to its impulsions. He dares to say, though
these phenomena _arise_ in me, I yet shall deal with these arisings,
denying some and permitting others to run their natural course. And
it is this assertion that I call gallant. The odds are all against
the assertion being made good: the attraction of the ordinary self is
almost irresistible; and yet man will struggle to assert his freedom of
the ebb and flow of his ordinary life. In positive language, the “will
to refrain” is an attempt to strike a blow for freedom.
The principle of restraint is dramatized by Babbitt when he calls it
the inner check. It is less metaphorical than many terms appropriated
by, let us say, psycho-analysts who speak of a “censor,” for example,
but still it is only a metaphor. What does it stand for? I find it very
difficult to say, for it seems to be on the outskirts of a tremendous
conception, a conception that is excessively hard to put into words.
Many opponents of American Humanism have thought the inner check to
be merely an inhibition, or some streak of puritanism, or in one case
an equivalent to what the psycho-analyst means by the censor. As if
More and Babbitt were naïve men of limited experience! As if, though
trained in skepticism for a lifetime, they would make an error that any
fledgeling reviewer could see! No; the meaning of the inner check must
be sought in a deeper way if it is to be elicited, and in plumbing for
it we must first of all divest ourselves of our usual notions about
inhibitions.
Both Babbitt and More have, as a matter of fact, clearly indicated
that they held no ordinary conception when they spoke of the inner
check.[6] The phrase is probably Babbitt’s, who derived it from Emerson
in whose writings it appeared as the inward check; the inward check was
referred by Emerson to Hindu scriptures where the meaning was an inward
guide or control. This in itself is sufficient to put us on guard
against a quick assumption that we understand what it is all about.
But there is another reason, equally strong: Babbitt has several times
linked up his sense of an inner check with the dæmon of Socrates, who
is made to say in the _Phædrus_: “My divine monitor’s wonted sign--now
it never occurs save to deter me from something or other I am intending
to do.” This is why I said above that the More-Babbitt conception of
the inner check appears to me to be on the fringe of a tremendous
conception, for I have not the effrontery to regard Socrates as naïve
in matters of his own psychology. At the same time, what was meant by
the ancient idea of a deterring monitor in one’s breast and what is now
meant by the Babbitt-More derivation? The difficulties of an answer are
at once visible.
Something like this may be modestly ventured, however. Neither
ancient nor modern had or has in mind, when speaking of a dæmon or an
inner check, what we may call a sociologically formed conscience. By
education we have all had instilled in us a kind of pseudo-conscience:
in our childhood and youth older people told us definitely what was
right and wrong, they traded on our susceptibility, and now that we
have grown critical, we learn that these deeply stamped notions of
wrong and right are purely relative, often silly, and in some instances
downright harmful. Take anything you please--our sense of sexual
shame, for one--and any intelligent person today can riddle much of it
by simply showing how arbitrarily we have been conditioned. So much
depends on social custom! But the inner check and the Socratic dæmon
are not, I feel confident, the products of respectable training.
For, to continue with the case of sexual shame, is there not a true
shame as well as a pseudo-shame? Is there not a shame so deep, so
primitive, that it seems biological, owing nothing to sociology, a
shame that when it is violated seems to overthrow the whole being?
Pseudo-shame can be almost painlessly removed, but this organic
shame, if corrupted, is corrupted only by a violent wrench to one’s
whole character. It is as though something died in one, whereas when
sociological shame is taken away, one feels liberated and even gay.
By my line of reasoning, the inner check conception is to be taken as
the faint shadow cast down the ages by the Socratic dæmon, and this
dæmon in turn I am half-guessing to be a figure of Conscience. But not
conscience in our sense, the pseudo-function that Society sets going
in us, but--how shall I put it?--some abiding developed sense of how it
is fitting that the being Man should conduct himself in a life that may
be a school of experience, but certainly reveals no easily accessible
master of the school.
For fluid as is the nature of man--and few recent writers have better
displayed man’s fluidity than Joseph Wood Krutch in an essay entitled
_The Paradox of Humanism_--there does yet seem to be buried in the
creature something, almost non-functioning, which we may agree to call
a conscience, since it is independent of social conditioning, and this
something, this conscience, sometimes says no in emphatic command. Who
is there who, on sincere self-examination, does not find there are
a few things he knows with absolute certitude he could never do? No
power on earth, no conceivable circumstances, he declares to himself,
would make me do thus-and-so. And yet why not do them? There may be no
consequences that inspire fear, there may even be strong incentives to
take the detested course of action. But something internal says Veto so
powerfully that there is no possibility of committing the action. _The
action would seem like a betrayal of the species one belongs to!_
The interpretation is here offered then that the inner check works in
the interests of some essential humanity in us. It seeks to counteract
that fluidity of our nature whereby men become beasts or go mad. It
warns us when we are about to desert our adult human standards and
retrogress to the puerile or infantile or sub-human.
And now I think of the life of Socrates as we have it: the simple
dignity, the steadiness of his passion for self-perfection, the
courage of his behavior, and all the multitude of other points of
homage the world has paid him. And I see his life as a drama of the
true conscience: in his illustrious example, a conscience developed,
sensitized, responsive, a marvellous monitor surely directing him as to
how it was fit that a member of the human species should live.
* * * * *
The technique of the New Humanism, to sum it up, is mediation under the
guidance of the vestiges of true conscience still in our psychology.
It is as simple as that, and, I am tempted to add, as tremendous as
that. To repeat Pascal’s profound words: “To leave the mean is to leave
humanity.” The inner check or as I take it the vestige of conscience
in modern man warns us when we veer toward barbarous extremes. The
activity of the inner check is the very heart of the method, but
dependent from the principal technique are several lesser techniques
which may now be taken up rapidly and schematically. The New Humanist
calls them (a) the right use of illusion, (b) the imitation of nature,
and (c) decorum.
(a). The Right Use of Illusion. The quotations are from Babbitt’s
_Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Life does not here give an element of
oneness and there an element of change. It gives a _oneness that is
always changing_. The oneness and the change are inseparable. Now if
what is stable and permanent is felt as real, the side of life that
is always slipping over into something else or vanishing away entirely
is, as every student of psychology knows, associated rather with the
feeling of illusion ... The problem of the One and the Many, the
ultimate problem of thought, can therefore be solved only by a right
use of illusion ... failure (with the problem of the One and the Many)
can be retrieved only by a deeper insight into the imagination and its
all-important rôle in both literature and life.”
In the above I think we may detect the hand of Joubert who reflected
deeply on _illusion et sagesse_. “Joubert,” Paul Elmer More says,
“conceives it to be the rôle of the imagination, mediating as it does
between sense and reason, to lend its magic and glamour to the latter,
to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion over some essential
truth.... The imagination must be really free and spontaneous, and the
truth itself must not be too precisely formulated, if we are to arrive
at that vital fusing of illusion and insight with the accompanying
sense of infinitude that is found in the true symbol.”
In the ideal Humanist then the Imagination coöperates with Reason. Its
rôle is not debased in order to exalt good sense as happened in the
Neo-Classicism of the eighteenth century, nor is it made antagonistic
to good sense as was done in the romantic recoil from Pope and other
eighteenth century men. Something like the play of Imagination in
behalf of Reason as we behold it in Plato is what Babbitt and More
contend is the Imagination’s highest function.