present social philosophy that wishes to sacrifice the individual to
the good of the group is nothing but instinctive herd psychology,
translated into modern terms.... I’m sure the world now needs more
complete individuals so that group life can become integrated on a
higher plane. Dewey places emphasis on the individual’s living for the
group rather than for himself and suggests that his failure to do so
is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. But to me it seems that
the failure of the individual to know himself remains the cause of his
ineffectual adaptation to a positive and adequate social existence.”
This is pointed criticism from the inside of a movement whose advanced
minds are now beginning to realize that they have envisaged their
problems far too simply,--that self-expression is not the magic
formula, that psycho-analysis produces as much trouble as it dissolves,
that socialized education too much disregards the individual gifted
pupil, that liberty is a hard concept to understand aright. The New
Humanist on the outside phrases his criticism differently. It is that
Dewey offers no contribution to the urgent problem of producing leaders
of quality in a democratic society. For the New Humanist makes no
fetich of democracy, as does Dewey, nor does he stand for an unmixed
aristocracy either. To him the social problem is the blending of the
two, the securing of an aristocratic and selective democracy, and he
would like to see education from the kindergarten upwards organized for
the furtherance of that aim.
* * * * *
Dewey is a Baconian philosopher with an admixture of Rousseauism. I am
here making use of the Babbittean classification of modern naturalists
into two types, those prefigured by Francis Bacon who are known as
scientific naturalists, and those prefigured by Rousseau and known as
sentimental naturalists. The classification causes so much resentment
among present-day intellectuals, it is so hotly repudiated, that I
am led to wonder if Babbitt has not again probed to the bottom of
our era’s mind and located basic trends we have not known we were
exemplifying. Certainly, his two types, however petty many of the
exemplars today may be, are of epical stature. The drama of the last
three centuries is no mean one, and requires as its leading characters
personages to fit the scale of the action.
Of course, we must discriminate between Babbitt’s estimates of Bacon
and Rousseau as personages and his description of the types of men he
names after them. In the character of Bacon, for instance, he notes
the presence of traditional Christianity and Renascence humanistic
elements. Babbitt does not, to my mind, allow sufficiently for the
enigmatic in Bacon--hardly any one today is cautious enough for
that--and he accounts for the Lord Chancellor’s fall, which is still
inexplicable when all is said, on too general grounds. But, to get his
types, Babbitt does not simplify either Bacon or Rousseau: he merely
extracts from them the large formative elements which released into the
world have created the Baconian and the Rousseauist. It is undeniable
that Bacon was, in Whitehead’s words, “one of the great builders who
constructed the mind of the modern world.” He was the prophet of the
Kingdom of Man, Babbitt declares. He foresaw man’s dominion over the
earth, he made efficient the impulse to unlock Nature with the keys of
Science, he stimulated men to the astounding utilitarian triumphs which
the centuries since Bacon have achieved. It was his genius that made
the idea of progress so potent.
The Baconians have gone forth and conquered the earth. If most of them
lack the slightest touch of Bacon’s dignity as a human being, they
nevertheless partake of the majesty of numbers and are not unworthy of
a mass-part in a planetary drama. But it has been a mass with notable
leaders down to John Dewey in our day. The mass firmly believes in
technological advance, material progress, the pragmatic life. For it
the “law for thing” is supreme. The leaders subtilize and rationalize
these beliefs.
The Baconians and Rousseauists are often superficially hostile to each
other. We all know the contempt the scientific analyst frequently
expresses for the dreamer, and in turn the dreamer’s horror of the
analyst. But Babbitt demonstrates that the two types are in close
accord underneath. Both deny the “law for man.” Both subscribe
fervently to the doctrine of progress. And oftentimes in the same
person you will find prominent strains of both types, happy in each
other’s company.
It scarcely needs saying that the Rousseauist is in a much greater
emotional ferment. The Baconian exalts practical intelligence,
strenuous deeds accompanied by acute if narrow thought: the Rousseauist
exalts sympathy, revery, spontaneity and liberty. His idea of liberty
is summed up in the popular expression, “doing as one likes,” which
means, Matthew Arnold labored to show, doing as one’s ordinary self
likes. “Do what thou wilt,” the injunction over the Abbey of Theleme,
is a far sterner permission and closer to the true idea of liberty.
It is, I think it necessary to repeat, not claimed by the New Humanist
that contemporary Baconians and Rousseauists have been directly
influenced by the remarkable men they are named after. The actual
matter is very complex, as you will see by recourse to Babbitt’s
books, but what is maintained is that unconsciously we breathe in the
widespread gaseous elements of the teachings of Rousseau and Bacon and
are profoundly modified in our entire outlook on civilization by the
fact that they once lived.
In recent years the American college has been overrun by the Baconian
scientific hustlers and by the Rousseauistic relaxed dilettantes--both
menaces to humanistic education.
* * * * *
In college circles the Baconian is usually a specialist eager to
advance learning in his branch of research but applying quantitative
tests to his department and to the college in general. He is strenuous
and imbued with the spirit of change. When he invades the arts,
he is scientific rather than artistic. To give a concrete example,
in the literature department the Baconian is the philologist,
engaged in original and minute research, but usually lacking in
æsthetic appreciation or in general ideas. He is supposed to teach
the humanities: he has prepared for his vocation by composing a
dissertation on the use of the present participle in some minor
Elizabethan.
His colleague in the literature department is often a Rousseauist,
a gelatinous æsthete, incapable of hard mental labor, who utilizes
literature only as an agreeable source of sensations and impressions.
The philologist, taking his cue from Herbert Spencer, is inclined to
think of purely literary studies as a form of play, a relaxation,
after the exacting labors of scientific analysis: the æsthete-teacher
confirms him in the notion.
Against these men in the colleges the New Humanist fights. He opposes
the quantitative and dynamic standards the Baconian would introduce,
and he scorns the shallow impressionism of the dilettante teacher.
His program calls for the continued teaching of the classics and the
intimate relating of the classics to modern life. He insists that
literature in the colleges should be taught as a vital subject bearing
in countless important ways on the formation of character.
Instances abound of the contrary feeling that the classics cannot
hold much import for the forming of modern character, and as one
instance is as good as another, I will take the most recent to come to
my notice. “Shakespeare No Benefit to This Age” is the heading of a
newspaper column written by a former college professor, Harry Elmer
Barnes, in which he declares that much might be said in support of the
argument that “the beauty of Shakespeare’s diction and the shrewdness
of his analysis are more than offset by the influence he exerts in
keeping alive ancient superstitions like witchcraft, ghost-walking,
devil-lore and the like. In short, Shakespeare does more harm than good
to the twentieth century intellect.” It is grotesque narrow views of
literature like this that the contemporary Humanist deplores in the
ranks of teachers.
A succinct way of summing up the American Humanist’s educational
program is to say that he favors the imitation of French scholarship
rather than German. The latter of course reigns in our universities,
and in these octopus-institutions, but not in the colleges, the
Humanist grants it plenty of room, for the university may well exist
for the advancement of learning, even if it is only the digging up
of a trivial fact concerning some Alexandrian grammarian. But on the
whole, “might we not advisedly turn now to France, where, to be sure,
the scientific study of literature has also had a marked influence,
but where other traditions of scholarship have offered a resistance
wholly wanting with us? French reflection, French lucidity, French
finesse, French moderation, the French concern for humane assimilation,
the French devotion to general ideas, the French insistence upon taste
and style, the French interest in criticism--these qualities, all but
absent from our own work, I take to be worthy of emulation.” The words
are from Norman Foerster’s _The American Scholar_, a lucid diagnosis
of the ills of our literary scholarship:--its tendencies to be absorbed
into linguistics, into history, into psychology, to become one of the
lesser and dismal sciences.
By the way, the conditions analyzed by Foerster and the practical
remedies he proposes at the end of his monograph ought to receive
very thoughtful attention from the professional men of letters. The
sufficient reason is contained in the following quotation: “Modern
American scholarship is in a way to becoming a veritable Polyphemus,
choicely nourished on human food yet endowed with one eye only. We
must set about restoring the traditional alliance of scholarship
and criticism, the divorce of which has worked injury to both and
played havoc with education. It has made American scholarship
narrowly mechanical and progressively tangential. It has encouraged
an American criticism that can only be characterized as ignorant and
aimlessly impressionistic, for the lamentable state of our critical
journals is largely the consequence of academic failure to uphold the
past as a school of judgment. And it has played a major rôle in the
disintegration of American education, for it has made the study of
the humanities scientific in an age already blinded with excess of
scientific light, an age that is groping in vain for such other light
as literature could shed if it were rightly studied.”
But my purpose precludes entering upon the details of the New
Humanist’s criticism of college instruction or upon the concrete plans
he presents for honors degrees and doctorate reforms. The broad idea
is that the university may exist for the advancement of learning,
but the college should stand for the assimilation of learning and the
perpetuation of culture. It should train for wisdom and character by
the processes of assimilation and reflection. It needs teachers of
quality--not linguistic Dryas-dusts or quivering dilettanti. What
is wanted, says the Humanist, is the teacher who has expended his
originality (in our age it _is_ originality) in grasping the “constant
mind of man,” who has disciplined himself on the best models of
literature and formed from them a wise appreciation of the normal and
representative, who has approximated to that type almost extinct in a
civilization dominated by the Baconian specialist and the Rousseauistic
thrill-monger, the _honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien_.
* * * * *
The full significance of the educational program of the American
Humanists comes out best in a comparison of the policies advocated by
Charles W. Eliot and Irving Babbitt. Eliot was President of Harvard
University from 1869 to 1909. In that position he became famous as the
father of the free-elective system, and until his death in 1926 ranked
as America’s most ardent crusader for educational reform. He was highly
esteemed for his character, a late flowering of the Puritan tradition,
and he was immensely influential through his theories which were not
Puritan: the theories were derived from Rousseau and therefore at
variance with the Puritan tradition in its most vigorous state.
It is ironical that teaching under President Eliot for fourteen or
fifteen years was his best weaponed and fearless critic, and that today
this critic who condemned Eliot’s theories and influence should be
acknowledged as the greatest mind at Harvard. Yet it is the case that
Babbitt with his great strength for rending fallacies apart matured to
power within the very baliwick of President Eliot.
The first clash was over the free-elective system. Eliot with his trust
in human nature had reasoned that each student had a pronounced bent,
some special aptitude, some absorbing interest which he was eager to
follow, and that this interest or bent or aptitude was thwarted by
a fixed curriculum. He was also impressed by the half-truth which
he took to be a whole truth, namely, every person is unique and the
college should therefore give full play to his uniqueness. To this
Babbitt replied in substance that there is quality in subjects as
well as quality in teaching. The free-elective system tends to deny
quality in subjects and makes higher education miscellaneous. And he
replied further that men have constant elements coexisting with their
variability, and that it was the constant in man, not the diverse and
fluctuating, which education should reckon with.
Facts have refuted President Eliot’s optimism about the free-elective
system. It was found that students followed in choosing their courses
not the line of their aptitudes, of which often they were unaware, but
the line of least resistance. It was found that their uniquenesses
were not so precious after all. The result was a partial retreat from
the free-elective stand in favor of a compromise between the old
restricted curriculum and the new unlimited one.
But the issue comes to a clearer head when the formulæ of the champions
of utilitarian-humanitarian education and of humanistic-religious
education are put side by side. “Training for power and service,”
said President Eliot. Babbitt answered in words I have already used:
“Training for wisdom and character.” Obviously President Eliot’s is a
Bacon-Rousseau formula. How does it work? Power in our society means
material efficiency, and service means, not the traditional service
of God, but the service of man. The assumption is that “the material
efficiency promoted by utilitarian effort will be used altruistically.”
But after the Great War this assumption looks tragically ludicrous.
These are the conventions established by the age President Eliot
represented so faithfully: self-expression as a value (or falling
in the direction one’s character leans, an unfriendly critic
might mutter), strenuousness (the pursuit of happiness by intense
outer activity), the “religion of service” (nowadays satirized by
the _American Mercury_ and Sinclair Lewis as only a veneer for
commercialism), and complete faith in the natural man (in religious
language, the hope of salvation without conversion). These conventions
Babbitt has wrenched to pieces in his analysis and now proposes a
return to the old humanistic-religious conventions.
In so far as the movement called American Humanism has a definite
program of action, this is it. First, that “a considerable number of
persons get at least within hailing distance of one another as to
the definition of the word humanism itself and the nature of the
discipline that this definition entails.” Next, that they then proceed
“in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term, to work out
a convention.” And next, that they concern themselves with education.
By setting up a convention is meant the thorough agreement among the
members of a considerable group on certain fundamentals, the complete
conviction of truth concerning certain underlying statements about
life. The conventions that the New Humanists wish to reëstablish are:
(1) that “happiness is a kind of working” (inner, not outer, working,
according to Aristotle, who is here quoted), (2) that man needs to be
disciplined in his natural self to some standard (that is, to undergo
conversion or turning away from the natural self, such conversion to
be accomplished in the Aristotelian way by the gradual formation from
childhood of right habits), and (3) that education should culminate
in the idea of leisure (also Aristotelian, since according to the New
Humanist leisure is valuable for supplying a background of meditation
to life).
Now I imagine that when the policy is thus reduced to essentials, many
people will wonder why there is any opposition to American Humanism
in the field of education. Yet the fact is that the principal forces
in education move, blindly most of them, directly counter to the
fundamental views of Humanism. It is an against-the-current struggle
that the New Humanists undertake. They are fighting for quality of
teaching in the humanities, and the current sweeps down upon them a
horde of linguistic specialists. They are fighting for quality of
subjects, and the classical subjects are steadily being submerged.
Finally, they are fighting for quality of students, and the colleges
and universities in their competition for big enrollments flood them
with quantities of the less fit for the intellectual life. For the
New Humanist declares flatly that the college should exist for the
intellectually best of each generation. Humanitarian coddling in the
colleges he denounces as a danger to democracy, pointing out that in
a quantitative age the college must make its great purpose to be the
production of men of quality. In fine, the educational problem is
closely associated with the problem of leadership, and the problem of
leadership leads us straight into the subject of the next chapter--the
political problems of a democracy.
X
HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS
_“We have the naked question to answer: How shall a society, newly
shaking itself free from a disguised plutocratic régime, be guided
to suffer the persuasion of a natural aristocracy which has none of
the insignia of an old prescription to impose its authority? Shall
the true justice prevail, which by a right discrimination would
confer power and influence in accordance with inner distinction;
or shall that so-called justice prevail--for no man acknowledges
open injustice--which recommends itself as equality of opportunity,
but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age, sex, and
character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might makes
right, whether that might be the material strength of money or the
jealous tyranny of numbers?”_--Paul Elmer More in _Aristocracy and
Justice: Shelburne Essays, Ninth Series_.
The educational theories of the New Humanists, I think it must be
granted, are thoroughly consonant with the premises of the New
Humanism. Education, at least through the college, ought to be
dominated by the spirit of conservation. In the university and
afterwards, the spirit of change ought to have full opportunity, for
by that time presumably the student is safeguarded against that mere
“passage from nothing to nothing” which Whitehead tells us happens
when there is “change without conservation.” The college is the place
for the assimilation of the traditional wisdom, which acts as a check
on the wisdom of any particular age. It is the place where today it
is most disastrous not to temper liberty with restraint, and it seems
to me that the New Humanist has most admirably mediated between pure
restraint and pure liberty in his educational program. A contempt for
antiquity, Tocqueville sagely remarked, is a chief danger of democracy,
and for that reason the study of the classics has a special value in a
democratic community--the New Humanist goes with Tocqueville and not
with the contemporary poet who has shouted, “The past is a bucket of
ashes.”
But how is it with the excursions of the New Humanists into the
disputed territory of economics and politics? Are their known views on
these subjects the views that must inevitably be adopted if one accepts
their primary teaching of a psychological dualism and a discipline
based on the law of measure? Or are there several views which might
with equal consistency be taken up? Or can we say that they are good
Humanists but bad economists? The question has come up at least once
before. Referring to historical Humanism, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.,
has written, “We might say that the humanistic attitude was to seek a
fine worldly wisdom through direct study of man in thought and action,
such study being powerfully reënforced from those precedents of great
living contained in the literature of Greece and Rome--a fresh research
balanced and somewhat directed and measured by a great tradition. I
can find no stricter formula that seems to fit the case. The attitude
adumbrated above seems compatible with many other attitudes, indeed
with almost any attitude that is not dogmatic or fanatical, or
life-denying. For example, today one might be an agnostic humanist,
a Catholic humanist; a royalist humanist, a socialist humanist; a
utilitarian humanist, an idealist humanist; conceivably a Mormon
humanist or a liberal hard-shell Baptist humanist. That is, a quest
of a fine worldly wisdom nurtured by tradition might in theory be
compatible with any of these policies, philosophies or faiths. Nor does
this divest the notion of humanism of any real meaning if the main
thing be the attitude, for the humanistic attitude may be after all
simply a leaven which is potent in the most various materials.” In this
statement the attitude of Humanism is pretty dilute for our exposition,
but in any case the question of strictly relating attitude to views is
effectively opened up for discussion. Perhaps Humanism as a creative
conception of man does not dictate any one economic or political theory
as its logical choice? Perhaps it is the _spirit_ with which More and
Babbitt have studied the problems of economics that is criticizable?
The obvious danger of the New Humanist when doubtful matters are
debated is to drop into an acceptance of the status quo just because it
is the status quo. He is proof against the temptation of the “radical”
which is novelty for the sake of novelty, but it is easily possible
that where an obdurate social problem exists, he may justify the status
quo instead of wholeheartedly throwing himself _into_ the problem.
This in effect is what in the chapter on _Science and the Modern Man_
I accused him of doing: it seems to me he adheres to the outmoded
Cartesian world-view when he should instead plunge into the problem
of reconstructing a world-view. And I am inclined to think that Paul
Elmer More, whose views on property and law, aristocracy and justice I
shall glance at before taking up Babbitt’s political theory, has fallen
into this error of identifying the status quo or commonly accepted
position with a truly conservative solution. It is conceivable, I
mean, that both the status quo of social organization and the current
schemes for reforming it might be equally objectionable to a profoundly
conservative mind.
* * * * *