methods of learning by objective experimentation and by personal
experience.... In a general way, we may say that the scientist should
follow in his investigations the phenomena of the objective world
only until their special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous
system. It is the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of
the subjective world after these stimuli have been translated into
emotion and thought ... the false pretensions of science must be wholly
abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise
judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and
humanistic philosophy.”
Here we can stop with some assurance that the main position toward
which the New Humanists gravitate has been disclosed. Generally
speaking, it is unfair to set forward any Humanist as an “official
spokesman” and perhaps I should not have assigned L. T. More to that
rôle. But his brother, P. E. More, and Robert Shafer have, I believe,
been fertilized by his reflections on science, and I cannot detect in
the writings of the other New Humanists any radical divergence from
the Cartesian scheme. The question is, is the Cartesian world-picture
integral to American Humanism or is it simply one of the possible views
that might be adopted by American Humanists and held by them in common
with members of various other schools of thought? Also, it is evident
there are a number of difficulties which L. T. More’s statements
immediately raise, and which no doubt the reader feels should be dealt
with. In the next section I shall put forward these difficulties myself
and at the same time try to formulate what I think the modern man’s
attitude should be toward scientific world-building.
* * * * *
It seems to me that the truly modern man will first of all strive to
free himself from the great spell cast by science in our epoch. He
will try to overcome his own suggestibility upon which propagandists
for science from Huxley and Spencer to the present have played, so
that he may answer himself frankly when he wonders if our hopes in
science have not deceived us. Furthermore, as was earlier suggested,
he will try to arrive at some conception of the external world which
is not irrational, not violable by the teachings of science, and is
at the same time dynamic and humanizing in its influence. This demand
the world symbolized as a gymnasium, an immense Academy or Lyceum or
Institute of Crotona, appears to meet perfectly. It makes no difference
whether one adheres to a materialist or an organic or an idealistic
philosophy: the world as a gymnasium for the strengthening of human
fiber is a valid imagination under any of the three types of philosophy
named. The question then becomes: picturing life as a gymnasium for
the development of men, what values can be extracted from science by
the man who does not propose to train himself to be a professional
scientist?
Such a man, aiming at a general coördinated culture, must come to
regard science in the same way he regards art and philosophy--with
respect, but not sentimentally or superstitiously. No divinity
surrounds any of the three: each subject is man-made and therefore
fallible. But each is primarily to be enjoyed for its own sake. We
accept this principle in art, not so fully in philosophy, and still
less in science. Yet science provides a manipulation and stretching of
mental muscles that is highly enjoyable for the sake of exercise alone.
It provides adventures and perils of thought of a kind differing from
philosophy and art. A case should in fact be made out for science as a
humane discipline, though I think of no one in America who is a shining
example of such a discipline. I mean that we do not seem to produce
men of the type of J. W. N. Sullivan in England, who are exquisitely
cultivated both in the arts and sciences, who are supple-minded,
adventurous in thought, thoroughly skeptical, at home with Einstein as
with Beethoven or Dostoyevsky or Plato. We need cryingly more gifted
amateurs among our laymen who study science and fewer intolerant
“gospellers” of the type of Harry Elmer Barnes. I am reminded of some
sagacious things about the _use_ of philosophy for human beings which
T. S. Eliot has recently written, because they apply equally well to
the _use_ of science.
“When we study philosophy as a humane discipline we do not do so merely
in order to pick out one which we shall adopt as ‘true,’ or either
to confect a philosophy of our own out of all philosophies. We do so
largely for the exercise in assumption or entertaining ideas; for the
enlargement and exercise of mind we get by trying to penetrate a man’s
thought and think it after him, and then passing out of that experience
to another. Only by the exercise of understanding without believing,
so far as that is possible, can we come in full consciousness to some
point where we believe _and_ understand.” Eliot adds, “Similarly
with the experience of poetry,” and I would add, similarly with the
experience of science.
The blunt truth is that the grounds of the attack on the New Humanists’
statements about science have been mistaken. They were accused of
hostility to the workings of science. But they should have been
accused of lukewarmness toward science as a humane discipline.
Excepting L. T. More, P. E. More and Robert Shafer, the New Humanists
may be said to lack zeal for that kind of development of their minds
which science is most able to confer. Mildness of interest in a subject
and active hostility to it are so different that not even blind
partizanship would seem to be a sufficient excuse for identifying them.
But let not this argument for science as a humane discipline by
which one flexes and enlarges the mind be construed as advocacy of
dilettantism in the current debased sense of that word. The end in view
is to become an alert critic of world-theories. And here I will say
that I believe there is no essential connection between Humanism as a
philosophy of conduct and the Cartesian materialistic theory of the
universe. They are joined in the minds of the New Humanists, but that
I think is a fortuitous juncture. Nor can I see that Humanism depends
in any way soever upon a defence of Newtonian physics against later
modifications and developments. The Christian cosmogony and cosmology
constitute to most of us a mythology. The mythology may be profoundly
true, more true than modern science, but we are in the position of not
being able to verify its statements by an exact procedure. The means
of individual verification may once have existed, but where are they
now? We may assent to the Christian mythology, but it is assent based
on faith, a very different thing from the _faith based on reason_
of the great doctors of the Middle Ages. Add to this the fact that
the materialistic, mechanistic world-view has been shaken by the
tremendous blows of mathematical physicists like A. N. Whitehead.
It has got into the epicyclic state which presages a breakdown.
Alternative world-schemes, imposing, daring, almost sublimely
intuitive, are now being put forward. In other words, the problem of a
world-theory has been reopened on a scale not dreamed of for centuries.
“The eighteenth century,” observes Whitehead, “opened with the quiet
confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. Today we are at
the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may
not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.”
Now it appears to me that the New Humanists, by and large, retain
something of the eighteenth century attitude in the face of the new
physical problem. But a problem of this kind calls for the suspension
of belief, for all the skepticism one can summon, for the complete
willingness to run down any turning of thought, for the surprise
attack, for an attitude best described as adventurous. The law for
thing and the law for man, as they work out in human experience, do
not depend on Cartesianism. At the present time, in fact, the law for
man may be said to dictate the extrication of one’s self from grooves
of thought about the world: it lays an obligation upon one to be
provisional in one’s acceptances of world-theories: it requires that
the problem be recognized and faced in the spirit appropriate to a
mystery. Not to be a farranging agile critic of theories of the world
is, in the twentieth century, not to be in key with one of its major
trends in thought.
To illustrate the point, compare your feelings while traversing the
familiar way home and while threading your route out of a labyrinth.
The difference is like the difference between our take-it-for-granted
psychology in handling a solved problem and our active searching
psychology in moving about in a new problem. We are the same person
but the intellectual environment has altered. It seems to me that
most of the New Humanists have yet to adapt their psychology to the
labyrinth of modern physics. Note, however, that I do not urge upon
them any recommended way out: I do not ask them to adopt Eddington’s
world-theory but to tackle it in a different spirit.
For it may well be that this intense critical search for a tenable
conscious world-view will not meet with complete success in our
century. But not to make the search is not, in my judgment, to be
humanistic, since the problem is the problem of any one who aspires
toward completeness. The final personal reward of a maximum use of
our critical powers on classical physics and the new physics is that
we at least shall know with the utmost clarity what we believe and
understand, and what we do not believe and find insoluble. That is,
we shall be as conscious as we can possibly be of the nature of the
external world, even if that consciousness consists but of alternative
possibilities, doubts, queries and speculations, and perhaps a few
certitudes.
There is another large fact to be grasped, toward which our psychology
must make adjustment. It is that modern science is stranded on a
“plateau” and its giants are making their greatest efforts to raise
it, to initiate a new curve of development. The analogy is with those
curious graphs of learning processes, which show that one learns
rapidly at first, then comes to a period of little or no progress (“a
plateau”), then mounts again, arriving later at another “plateau,” and
so on. To get off a “plateau” a special effort, produced either by
some external incentive such as the offer of a reward or by a renewed
determination, is required. Now it has for some time been recognized
by advanced minds that modern science was in just such a condition
of arrest. It was able to refine upon what it had already done, but
not able to initiate any great rising movement. There is material for
novel reflections in the description Whitehead gives of the state of
science at the end of the nineteenth century. “Almost suddenly, a pause
occurred; and in its last twenty years the century closed with one of
the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade.
It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the
reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient,
dull and half-hearted.” The cause? We may venture to say that it was
because, as Whitehead elsewhere notes, science for two centuries had
been running on the accumulated capital of ideas of the seventeenth
century, “the century of genius.” A pause, a blocking, was bound to
come. And today science, as Whitehead and Eddington recognize, is at
a crucial turning point. It seeks to discover the elements that will
make for another period of development, and discovery of the necessary
elements Whitehead tells us requires more genius than to exploit them
when found.
Who can fail to be stirred by this tremendous drama of the human mind?
And yet it appears that many are unmoved, anti-Humanists as well as
Humanists. The scientist, going about his business, discovers that his
personal limitations, the usual habits of scientists, are retarding
the progress of science itself. Science properly is concerned with
the what-ness of things. From the why-ness of things (philosophy)
and the æsthetic and other emotional imports of things (values) it
has resolutely cut itself off. It has, every one knows, discounted
the intuitive, discounted other forms of knowledge. But now see: the
scientist is discovering that his exclusive interest in _what_ and his
impatience with _why_ and with value is ultimately stultifying. He
feels the basic need to fertilize himself by considering other reports
on reality than his own, he struggles to escape the bondage of his
traditional habits. It is a situation that should call forth the full
interest and sympathy of the humanistically inclined.
For what it emphasizes is the desperate need for a coördination of all
our knowledges. A knowledge of “porous atoms” does not destroy our
practical knowledge of a table, nor take away the table’s æsthetic
properties. The world exists as a source of ideas, of emotions, of
actions; it is simultaneously a field of practical affairs, an object
of feeling, an intellectual feast. Reality is threefold, but our
reports upon reality seldom harmonize. The rationalist underrated two
of these reports and trusted fully to one only. The scientist now shows
a disposition to admit the validity of all three and to bring about
a _rapprochement_ of the practical, emotional and mental worlds. A
very faint glimmer still comes across the centuries, elusive witness
to the grandeur of the Pythagorean synthesis. Who knows but what the
twentieth century, treasuring the glimmer, may not succeed eventually
in reflecting it back with an unexpected glory?
“Know thyself,” said Pythagoras, and the recollection of that
injunction points to our greatest stumbling-block. To me it is a little
Canute-like of L. T. More to forbid to science the subjective world.
And I say this with full awareness of the inadequacy and faultiness
of introspection as a method. But if introspection is of little use
to psychology as a science, it is equally of little use to Humanism.
Is it impossible, however, that a better method cannot be devised, is
it impossible to put self-study on a scientific basis? The rise of
Behaviorism is too impressive for any fiats to be delivered now against
the further endeavors to found psychology on a really substantial
basis. The Behaviorist has cleared the ground, he has come to the
threshold, but it is a question of the key to the subjective world. I
do not think the New Humanist need dread the search for the key.
IX
EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP
_“Tradition is the experience of society. It is stored up for use
by what may be called the objective memory. The chief function of
education is to transfer the wealth of a selective tradition from
society to the individual.”_--Paul Elmer More in _The Drift of
Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series_.
Insufficient attention has been paid by intelligent unacademic people
to the educational ideas and constructive suggestions for academic
reform offered by the New Humanists. Only one commentator in the
flurry of debate that ensued on the issuance of _Humanism and America_
wrote with gratitude of the salutary effect on literary scholarship
produced by the unremitting efforts of American Humanists, and he
was Henry Seidel Canby, who has known at first hand the _literae
inhumaniores_ that flourish rankly in our universities. Nowhere better,
it seems to me, than in their dissertations on the teaching of the
humanities--nowhere better than in such books as Babbitt’s _Literature
and the American College_ and Foerster’s _The American Scholar_--can we
witness the law of measure being applied to current problems. Moreover,
if anything calls for the most tactful mediatory treatment, it is the
tendencies and objectives of our colleges and universities.
It is right, I think, to regard American Humanism, when one refers
to the _movement_ rather than the doctrine and discipline, as being
primarily an educational force. Many of its adherents are actively
engaged in teaching and therefore the problems of education possess a
personal urgency for them. They do not dream at present of marching on
the literary citadels of the country and subduing their garrisons to
standards they have foresworn, but the teacher-classicists definitely
do propose to wrest education from the control of humanitarians. There,
in the field of education, the New Humanist affirms “the battle that
is to determine the fate of American civilization will be fought out
first of all.” For this reason I am giving a chapter to the members of
the movement as educators rather than as literary critics. As literary
critics, they consider the prevalent impressionism to be a low form
of criticism and seek to restore criticism to its former acknowledged
business, judgment by humane standards. But I feel no regret in
neglecting in this book the numerous important ideas for contemporary
literary critics which stud the works of Babbitt and More. With such
writers as T. S. Eliot and F. McEachran in England, Robert Shafer and
Seward Collins in America lifting them up and weighing them, they
are certain of a distinguished attention. So my conscience does not
trouble me because in the present interpretation only incidentally do
I visit the purely literary front of the New Humanist campaign. The
most serious fighting is on the educational front, and the enemy is
educational impressionism.
We can divide the educational front into three sectors,--the lower
schools, the college, and the university with its graduate schools. On
the first the New Humanists are not very active, on the second they
take a very determined stand. If they can hold the college to its
function, as they conceive it, they are willing to make concessions
in the graduate schools. The leading ideas they put at stake in each
sector are very easy to state. In the lower schools, where it is
granted that the humanitarian tinge is not undesirable, the pupil
should be acquisitive and receptive. In college the student should
be assimilative and reflective. In the university the scholar may
be productive, investigatory, original on the basis of his humane
discipline in the college. Reception when young, assimilation in
college years, productive research in graduate school--these are the
functions that should underlie our educational system. But the college
is being ground out between the encroachments of preparatory schools
and the invasion of university ideals of research. And there is where
the situation is most tense and critical. We shall begin, however, with
the lower schools and the theory of John Dewey, arch-foe of American
Humanism in education as well as in philosophy.
* * * * *
No one can be insensible to the value of Dewey’s correction of certain
evils in our public school system. He has perceived the dangers of too
much abstractness in its curriculum, and the need for more education by
doing. It is largely through his influence that the Project Method, as
it is now called, the method of teaching by correlating school subjects
around some social activity of the children, around weaving, for
example, has been given its present vogue. But it is the leading ideas
of Dewey that are at issue, and not any desirable modification of the
elementary school curriculum.
We live in a democratic society: therefore, say the disciples of
Dewey, education should adapt itself to the needs and the condition
of the many children, not of the few exceptional ones. We live in an
industrial society: therefore education should be closely connected
with the major actualities of an industrial society. Going to school
is not “a preparation for life.” It is experience as much as any other
phase of life. The gap between life in school and life in the family
and on the playground should be decreased as much as possible. In a
sentence, education should be socialized. It should be thoroughly
democratic. It should develop the virtue of coöperation to the highest
degree.
To these guiding ideas every one must in some measure give assent,
but many people feel that their limited assent must be combined with
a great deal of criticism. Robert Shafer, for one, looking over the
records of educational experiments along the lines mapped out by Dewey,
has repeated the old proverb: one swallow does not make a summer. The
experiments have been made with picked children and picked teachers.
But, Shafer asks, can conclusions be drawn that will be valid for the
educational system as a whole, since in the whole system the children
are unpicked, the coöperation of the majority of parents cannot be
secured, and the quality of the teachers must inevitably sink far below
the standard of the experimental school enthusiasts. Waiving every
other consideration, are the new lower-school ideas feasible for a
wide application? But presupposing practicality, those other waived
considerations become the very important ones, and the New Humanist
cannot satisfy his strong doubts of the ideals of the Dewey reform.
Others, besides New Humanists, have come to experience like doubts,
and some of these are persons who at one time were wholly convinced
or almost convinced of the soundness of Dewey’s proposals. One of
them is a woman who, to my belief, is the most brilliant of all the
contemporary pioneering spirits in the “new education.” I mean Margaret
Naumburg, the founder and for eight years (1914-1922) the director
of the Walden School in New York city. In 1928 a book from her pen
appeared, _The Child and the World_, a series of dialogues on modern
education, in which she summed up the results of her thinking and
experience in her special field. In spite of the author’s reputation,
the book was not, as a rule, thoroughly reviewed. One surmises that
this was in part due to Miss Naumburg’s having abandoned and criticized
the positions so many other new educators were still clinging to.
However it happened, the central point of the book was overlooked:
very little attention was paid to the clash she staged between Dewey’s
program for socialized education and Whitehead’s views on education
which stress the encouragement of individual development.
Our immediate interest lies, of course, not in Miss Naumburg’s partial
advocacy of Whitehead, but in her critique of Dewey. Naturally, as
who would not, she speaks of Rousseau as the common ancestor of the
new school movement in America, approving of his praise of learning
by doing; to Rousseau she links Dewey as the immediate parent of
present-day experiments. But Rousseau’s general influence on the new
school movement, she emphasizes, has had very unfortunate consequences.
This is due to establishing so many experiments on “Rousseau’s
romantic hope that maladjusted human functions could right themselves
by a return to the simple life of nature ... the belief that we can
right ourselves by simply removing certain limiting trammels of
civilization.” Miss Naumburg, her book makes clear, has shed all her
illusions about so naïve a belief. Her counts against Dewey are four:
(1) he underestimates emotional culture in his educational plans, (2)
he has framed these plans too closely in accord with his own bias as
a psychological type, being particularly unfair to the possibilities
of the training of intuition, (3) he is too chary of the inner, the
subjective life, and (4) his socialized education completely neglects
individual psychology.
She holds up for close scrutiny a quotation from Dewey’s _Democracy and
Education_ which the New Humanist would certainly agree is an amazing
piece of sophistry. It is the concentration of all the arguments for
socialized education. “From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a
power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is
always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease
the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant
it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and
indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his
relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to
stand and act alone--an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible
for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.”