reception of Humanism has been acrimonious beyond any precedent in
American literary history. _It is because American Humanism dares to
question the unconscious assumptions of our age._ It is well known
that if you touch a man in his pocketbook, you frequently get a sudden
dramatic agitated revelation of his psychology. Or touch a person in
his sex life, and again there is the parting of the customary veils
over his behavior: you see vividly the flashing of the person’s
psychological forces. There is a third way: instead of asking for a
loan of money, or tossing a rabelaisian joke at an acquaintance, toss
an idea at him that goes beneath his customary thoughts to strike at
his latent assumptions, the thoughts he was unaware of, upon which,
nevertheless, all his opinions come to rest. _Then_ he will become
active: he jumps as if a hypodermic needle had been applied to his
mind: he bristles with defences against this idea that has irritated
his mind at its very base.
You are attacking the context of things he did not know he believed,
but instinctively he knows now that if they are threatened, all
his opinions are threatened. For it is _through_ these unconscious
assumptions that he has seen everything else. No wonder he rallies to
their defence! No wonder he strikes back! It is the very quick of his
mind you have touched.
American Humanism is a concerted assault not so much on what our age
has assumed knowingly but on what it has unconsciously assumed. That
is why it has been and will be violently opposed, fought with every
weapon, shouted at and shouted down, if possible. The outcome may be
within a decade the complete submergence of the Humanist movement.
In that event so much the worse for an age that cannot be brought to
criticize its unknown postulates once the light has been let in on them.
VIII
SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN
_“Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims
are now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name,
and it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to
expose.”_--Louis Trenchard More in _Humanism and America_.
Do you wish a vivid proof that American Humanism probes through the
crystallized portions of the modern mentality and wounds its quick
nervous base? Then consider the intense annoyance created among so many
modernists by the temperate criticism the classical party makes of the
current prestige of science. The New Humanist attempts only to moderate
the very great esteem of our time for science. Yet pained outcries
on every hand greet this effort at moderation, and this extreme
sensitivity of many holding no stake in the matter to a criticism of
the large claims made in the name of modern science surely calls for
investigation. This conclusion cannot be escaped:--the men of our age
are nowhere near so emancipated from Authority as they like to fancy.
It is true we no longer acknowledge Authority in the theological
quarter. To accept on faith the cosmology of the Bible is to be
mediæval. But are we the self-conscious rebels we picture ourselves?
In revolting from the theological fold, have we not rebelled on
command of another Authority? However we came to revolt, now the
situation is plain. We have merely transferred the seat of Authority,
planting it today in the scientific quarter. Ye have conquered, O
Galileans! To be modernistic is to be as subservient to the oracular
opinions of scientific savants as the ordinary mediæval man was to the
interpretations of his theologians. The boastful modernists are, in
fact, still looking up to something far above: they are still on their
knees before Authority as the bulk of mankind has always knelt.
What we take on authority is by definition what we cannot scrutinize or
have not troubled to scrutinize, and of course we must be uncritical
about the uninspected. Here, in the region of the authoritative, is
where _aberglaube_, extra-belief, has a chance to enter; here is
where we become superstitious. The New Humanist has never attacked
exact science in itself, and in some respects his critique of what
seem to him the mistaken pretensions of science is very mild. But he
does pierce the _aberglaube_ that in the nineteenth century attached
itself to modern science. He is the foe of those who are gullible
about science, who take it altogether on faith, who are, in short,
superstitious. The language is not too strong.
There is a very quick way to test the tenacious hold that scientific
authority exerts on us. (To repeat myself, I mean to test the existence
of what to us are pure assumptions which have been implanted in us
almost without our knowledge by contemporary science.) The quick way
is to read two extraordinary and weird books of recent years, _The
Book of the Damned_ and _New Lands_, both by an investigator of
phenomena which have been excluded by orthodox science, Charles Fort.
The author of these strange documents is acutely aware of the very
human tendency of scientific system-makers to achieve a harmony of
knowledge by excluding the inharmonious data. He has therefore turned
his attention to the “disregards” of the scientists (geographers,
geologists, astronomers, physicists, etc.), and comes forward as the
champion of the damned data--and some of the data is horrendous. A
daring writer, for he is obliged to challenge the correctness of many
elementary things we learned in grammar and secondary schools. He
adduces evidence, that is to say, totally at variance with what we
were taught in school, when we were most submissive, and which we have
_never_ questioned. The result is that in reading Fort we experience
a most peculiar sense of strain. We find that we _hate_ to have any
one argue with a show of good reasons that interstellar distances are
rather small when we have always been told and believed, most of us
without any detailed proof, that they were inconceivably immense. There
are certain things--many items in fact--about the world which we want
to regard as having been settled and learned once for all. The idea of
new learning is attractive, but the idea of re-learning in fields where
we have assumed certain things to have been thoroughly proven is most
repugnant.
Among his provisional theories or “acceptances” as he calls them,
Fort holds “that we do not really think at all; that we correlate
around super-magnets that I call Dominants--a Spiritual Dominant in
one age, and responsively to it up spring monasteries, and the stake
and the cross are its symbols: a Materialist Dominant, and up spring
laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its
ikons--that we’re nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession
of magnets that displace preceding magnets.”
To use Fort’s terminology, the New Humanist recognizes that science is
the Dominant of our civilization, and that most people, impressed by
its marvels in the field of mechanical inventions, simply correlate
around it. He invites us therefore to _think_ about this super-magnet,
to mark out its true sphere of influence, and to be conscious of
our relation to it. He urges us, in brief, to be as critical of its
magnetism as we are now able to be of the theological Dominant of
former ages.
The first step is to discriminate between real science and what the
French call _petite science_ and we call popular science. The latter is
often out-of-date, frequently over-simplified, and usually boastful.
Yet it is what the average man, and many literary men with him, browses
upon. In contrast, the scientific leaders are as a rule models of
caution and modesty. The next step is to perceive that there is a
hierarchy of sciences. It is to see with A. S. Eddington “that physical
science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which
all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of
it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the
indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much
less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also
fail to come up to his standard of methodology.” But it is notorious
that the prestige rightly won by the most perfected sciences diffuses
itself, in the eyes of the layman, over the newer and half-baked
sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and various schools of
psychology, precisely those branches of science or pseudo-science
which the literary are most attracted by the while they shirk the hard
labor involved in getting a real acquaintance with physics. Thus the
New Humanist turns out to be actually in accord with the strictest
scientific attitude in his refusal to attend with the same degree of
seriousness to, let us say, a “science of history” as that with which
he attends to the science of chemistry.
There is a third step, and once it is really accomplished, one
is released from either sentimentality or superstition about the
scientist. Ridiculously simple, yet it is hard to make. It consists in
realizing the subjectivity of men of science. Just as in a complex way,
the style is the man, so in a complicated way science is also the man.
The scientist has elaborated a method and perfected his instruments
to eliminate the “personal equation,” but it is nevertheless still
present to haunt everything he does, to color his interpretations, to
set the patterns for his theories. Science is not the voice of God but
a distinctly human product with human limitations. Science may today be
on a higher imaginative level, as A. N. Whitehead believes, but mark
that Whitehead says this is “not because we have finer imagination, but
because we have better instruments.”
After a sincere effort to understand sympathetically the anti-Humanist
viewpoint, it is still hard to see why such violent objection by
intelligent liberals should be taken to the general position adopted
by Humanism toward modern science. To sum up that position:--the New
Humanists differentiate between true science and _petite science_, they
draw attention to the differing degrees of development and stability in
the various sciences, they dwell on the imperfection of the man who is
using perfect instruments and a perfect method. It can only be that the
modernists are in no mood whatever for skepticism when it is exercised
toward their Authority.
* * * * *
We would expect, however, American Humanists to touch modern science
far more closely than the foregoing sketch of a general attitude
necessitates, and in fact they do. They take up particular attitudes:
they debate details of the scientific dogmas: they subscribe or
tend to subscribe to a given theory of the world. In their detailed
criticism of science, they suggest a number of questions that so far
as I know have not heretofore been raised about the New Humanism.
The New Humanism, we have seen, is a philosophy of conduct. The New
Humanists--note that I am discriminating between the philosophy of
conduct and the persons who enunciate it--adopt a theory of the world.
In the first place, is the theory of the world usually held by the
New Humanist the direct and necessary outcome of his philosophy of
conduct? Granting the truth of his theory of psychology, does that
theory require a cosmology to go with it, and is the cosmology of
the majority of the New Humanists in strict correspondence? We have
examined the picture of himself which the New Humanist declares is
fundamental to the “good life.” But is the picture of the world he
holds before him also fundamental? What I wish to determine is whether
the series of attitudes toward himself, the world, and the affairs of
the world which we attribute to the New Humanist is seamless or whether
we can with a sharp critical knife shear the attitudes apart where they
join each other and say of any one of the specific attitudes, this is
not essential or an alternative attitude would be just as logical in
place of this one. Can we have Newtonian Humanists and Einsteinian
Humanists?
Basically, the New Humanist endeavors to be an artist of life. He
strives to become acquainted with his medium, the shifting texture
and stuffs of daily experience. He wishes like every other artist to
dominate his material, which means, in the chaotic field he has had
the noble audacity to choose, self-conquest. It is necessary for him
to dramatize his work as the struggle of two selves, the ordinary self
being the recalcitrant material and the human self being the artist.
Finally, like other artists he requires a technique for moulding his
subject matter, and he advocates as the technique the employment
of mediation. All this is practical psychology, and stands secure
against any theoretical psychology now before the general public. For
the New Humanist can say that whatever the ultimate mystery of human
nature is, however the two selves may be attached to each other and
reconciled, whatever the secret unification of man may be, you cannot
get around the fact that he is dualistic in practice. He can develop
himself on one assumption, and one only, and that is the assumption of
dualism. This is a hard stubborn fact of experience against which the
Humanist makes his mind collide, just as Dr. Johnson kicked another
hard stubborn fact of experience, a stone, to terminate a discussion
of Berkeley’s idealism. _Why_ this should be so, _why_ man should
indubitably be in essence a struggle, the Humanist cannot say, but no
more can he doubt that it is so whenever he makes the attempt to win
moral freedom. There it is, in the path of his wish for freedom, and he
must accept it as being _practically_ true.
Undeniably--though it is seldom commented upon--the dualistic picture
of man has great emotive power. Our emotions are swayed by images, a
truism as old as ancient India, as new as Christian Science and Coué.
It is not the whole story, but in a large measure emotions do respond
to pictures. The time-worn illustration is the coil of rope in the
road which one takes to be a snake. One’s emotions form themselves
accordingly, but on discovery that the supposed snake is only a coiled
rope they change at once. So a person with a Rousseauistic image of man
feels according to that image: his emotions drag against any effort to
rouse himself from Arcadian dreams. The Humanist with his picture of a
best self conferring style and order on an impressionistic protean self
rallies his emotions to give their impulsion and sanction to the end in
view: the achievement of normality. A creative conception of man calls
forth creative emotions.
Now is there incorporated in American Humanism a clear-cut creative
conception of the world? Is the world condensed into an image that
is as powerful in its effects as the image of the two selves, as
irrefutable on the practical plane, as inspiring to human effort? I do
not find one, and this I take to be a serious shortcoming in American
Humanism as a philosophy of conduct. But in my judgment the defect
can with relative ease be remedied, and remedied in a manner most
congenial to a philosopher of conduct so Greek as the American Humanist
in his self-attitude. The reader ought to remember what was said in
the chapter, _A Portrait of Our Age_, about the various life-pictures,
the “æsthetic,” the “puritan,” the “serious,” et cetera, current among
us, and to recall the unlucky G. R. who had his imagination of life
altered from the “Victorian” to the “scientific” imagination. None of
those attitudes mentioned will do for the American Humanist, but why
should he not find, being gymnastic in his relations with his ordinary
self, aiming as he does to develop strength of character by exercises
in mediation and selection, that the external world is best figured as
a gymnasium? A vast enlargement of the ancient Lyceum which existed
for the exercise of the mind as well as the body? Why should not the
present-day Humanist revive this Greek symbol as he revives the Greek
law of measure? Let us utilize again the practical psychologist whom we
quoted in the earlier discussion of world-attitudes.
“There can be little doubt that for most of us, in the present epoch,
the image of life as a gymnasium is a greatly needed tonic. Compare
the difference in your attitude (emotional response) on entering
a gymnasium and on entering, let us say, a cabaret or a Y.M.C.A.
lecture-hall or a house of mourning. Try to realize what and how
you actually feel. You are braced up, you have the intention of
strengthening yourself, you delight in the difficulties,--provided you
choose them yourself. In short, you feel at your strongest and getting
stronger.
“The classic Greek conception of life was just that; and everybody
knows that the gymnasium was the most popular institution of
Pythagorean Greece. What is not so well known is that the gymnasium was
for the Greeks a symbol or image of life itself. Their God ran this
planet as a gymnasium for the exercise of men, and all experiences were
to be taken as movements, turns, stretches, exercises, in wrestling,
running, lifting, and so on. Moderns will find what the ancient Greeks
found in the image of life,--the evocation of a creative emotion.
“It is difficult to see in what other direction we moderns can look for
a new image and therefore attitude towards life. We have no longer the
possibility of religion in the traditional sense. Ordinary goodness--in
the sense of doing what others call good--has no intelligent appeal.
And, after the still recent Great War, the belief in world progress
is superstition. But the clean, strong idea of life as a field of
exercise for the development of all our muscles--physical, emotional
and intellectual--has still the unspoiled beauty of manly and
womanly idealism. And life lived in that attitude would certainly be
interesting as well as profitable.”
The above seems eminently fitted to be the humanistic attitude toward
the world. It involves no theology, no metaphysics, no science, being
a matter of personal psychology alone. It presupposes, of course, that
man can act as well as be acted upon, the first contention of the
Humanist, and it reinforces his wish to act. It definitely humanizes
the external world, making it a field for human beings to follow their
end of self-perfecting, but it does not sentimentalize or minimize the
world. It is, in fine, a tenable world-picture coöperating with the
main aim of Humanism. But it is not a theory of the world. That is
still to seek.
It is not far off. The theory of the world that has been joined on
to the humanistic theory of the self is Cartesian: at least so far
as one can determine from the commitments of the majority of the
New Humanists, it is Cartesian. They are not, as a rule, any more
precise than other literary men in what they say about their beliefs
concerning the nature of the physical world, but any one can hear that
they sing in chorus against the “New Physics.” They resist the thought
of A. N. Whitehead, A. S. Eddington, Albert Einstein, and re-affirm
their confidence in something like the following:--“Unless it can be
indisputably proved that man, with his infinite variety of thoughts
and emotions, is but an aggregation of mechanical atoms held together
and moved by physical forces--an hypothesis for which there is not the
slightest proof--there seems to be no necessity to deny the existence
of a spiritual world not subject to the laws of mechanical energy
or circumscribed by the space limitations of material or electrical
substances.” This means that on the one side they as a practically
united body reject deterministic psychology (Behaviorism, for example)
and on the other side they hand over the inorganic world to science,
concentrating on the faith that there are in the living organism
elements not analyzable or accountable by science. The quotation was
from _The Dogma of Evolution_ by Louis Trenchard More, the brother of
Paul Elmer More, and Dean of the Graduate School at the University
of Cincinnati. Here is another from the same source to which the New
Humanists would subscribe.
“It is no casual separation of our ideas into the physical, biological,
and psychological realms. The physical world is a combination of
substances acting according to a certain set of laws of force and
energy, the biological world is composed of the same substances, but
the laws of action are not the same. They have, however, this great
principle in common; they, both, are limited by time and space. Then,
somehow to the biological world an added principle is given that we can
call consciousness which is not material but is associated with matter
and which is not limited by time and space. To the present time, at
least, these three realms are to us incommensurable and we have made no
progress in measuring or explaining one by the other.”
Louis T. More is the scientist among the New Humanists, a thorny fact
to those who are trying to create the legend that the New Humanists
are anti-scientific. The legend is punctured by this physicist, who
has read and thought widely outside his subject; especially he has
browsed in the subject of philosophy, which is generally eschewed by
the rank-and-file scientists. The result of this wandering is that L.
T. More has equipped himself to disassociate scientific evidence from
the faith that twines so tightly around it: he is an able, diligent
critic, for example, of evolution as science and as faith. Considering
him therefore as the most conscious author among the New Humanists
when it comes to formulating a world-theory, let us look at his
essay, _The Pretensions of Science_ in the symposium, _Humanism and
America_. You will find him very restrictive. To begin with, “science
has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the phenomena
of the objective world and attempting to find law and order in the
flux of events.” But there are two classes of false claims made for
science, one by “those men of science who are not content to work in
their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a
fictitious world of the imagination made out of ethers, electrons, and
mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’
minds with the sensible world of brute fact,” and the other by “those
who are claiming that the phenomena of the subjective world also lie in
the field of science and have imposed on the age the pseudosciences of
psychology and sociology.” This is nakedly Cartesian, for as Whitehead
shows so clearly, the principles of Descartes “lead straight to the
materialistic, mechanistic nature surveyed by cogitating minds. After
the close of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the
materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating
minds.”
Let us pursue along these two lines and learn what further L. T. More
has to say of the objective world and the “cogitating mind.” On the
first track, we read that “the cosmogony of Descartes has long since
crumbled to dust, but the gap he made between the subjective and
objective worlds has never been closed in spite of incessant later
attempts ... we have more and more regarded the universe as a machine,
a combination of inert matter and moving forces, acting not as we may
desire, but according to invariable laws which we have personified as
Nature. Man was left, by the physicists, as a unique outsider who could
interpret this machine in terms of his sensations and mind, but could
neither alter nor avoid its fateful operation ... the scientific method
is limited to experimental observation and the formulation of laws ...
the inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena
quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable
machine ... exact science is first of all based on the naïve belief in
an objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly
and prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will
... the mechanistic world can, at best, only picture an objective world
as it seems to us, and not as it is.”