DEMOCRACY AND IMPERIALISM
In our recent crusade to make the world safe for democracy it was
currently assumed that democracy is the same as liberty and the
opposite of imperialism. The teachings of history are strangely
different. Democracy in the sense of direct and unlimited democracy
is, as was pointed out long ago by Aristotle, the death of liberty; in
virtue of its tyrannical temper, it is likewise, in the broad sense
in which I have been using the term, closely akin to imperialism. Now
the distinction of Rousseau is, as we have seen, to have been the most
uncompromising of all modern theorists of direct democracy. How far
have the actual results of Rousseauism justified Aristotle rather than
those who have anticipated from the diffusion of the Rousseauistic
evangel, a paradise of liberty, equality, and fraternity? The
commanding position of Rousseau in the democratic movement is at all
events beyond question, though even here it is possible to exaggerate.
“Democracy,” says M. de Vogüé, “has only one father--Rousseau.... The
great muddy stream which is submerging us flows from the writings
and the life of Rousseau like the Rhine and the Po from the Alpine
reservoirs which feed them perpetually.”[39] It is interesting to
place alongside of this and similar passages which might be multiplied
indefinitely, passages[40] from German authorities, likewise very
numerous, to the effect that Rousseau is more than any other person
the father of their _Kultur_. Here, too, one must allow for an element
of exaggeration. Much in Germany that is often ascribed to Rousseau
may be traced to English influences, the same influences that acted on
Rousseau himself.
Passages of the kind I have just cited seem to establish a first
connection between _Kultur_, which has come to be regarded as in its
essence imperialistic, and Rousseauistic democracy. _Kultur_, when
closely scrutinized, breaks up into two main elements--on the one hand,
scientific efficiency, and on the other, a nationalistic enthusiasm
to which this efficiency is made to minister. The relationship to
Rousseauism must evidently be looked for first of all in the second of
these elements, that of nationalistic enthusiasm. One needs to recall
here a saying of Renan’s that goes back to the seventies of the last
century. “The sentiment of nationalities is not a hundred years old
in the world.”[41] Renan might have said with about equal truth that
international or cosmopolitan sentiment is likewise not a hundred years
old. Both sayings are approximately true, provided sufficient emphasis
is put on the word sentiment. One scarcely needs to repeat that the
Middle Ages were cosmopolitan, and that a chief result of Protestantism
was the development of the national idea, and that the national idea
was also promoted, though on different postulates, by Machiavelli. But
with the eighteenth century, nationalism and internationalism take on
a more emotional coloring. An underlying influence here is Rousseau’s
reinterpretation of “virtue,” a reinterpretation that is itself,
as I have tried to show, the outgrowth of a considerable previous
movement. According to the new ethics, virtue is not restrictive but
expansive, a sentiment and even an intoxication. In its unmodified
natural form, it has its basis in pity which may finally develop
into the virtue of the great cosmopolitan souls of whom he speaks in
the “Second Discourse,” who transcend national frontiers and embrace
the whole of the human race in their benevolence. We are here at the
headwaters of the sentimental internationalism of the past century. But
Rousseau, as I have already said, distinguishes sharply between the
virtue of man simply as man and the virtue of the citizen. When man
is “denatured” by entering the State, his virtue is still a sentiment
and even an intoxication, but is very far from being cosmopolitan.
Rousseau oscillates between the two types of virtue, that of the man
and that of the citizen, and can scarcely be said to have attempted a
serious mediation between them. According as he wants the one or the
other type of “virtue,” he devises different systems of education. In
“Emile,” for example, he sets out to make a man, in the “Considerations
on the Government of Poland,” a citizen. The love of country and
the love of mankind are, he declares, incompatible passions.[42]
What is Rousseau’s own choice, one may ask, as between an emotional
nationalism and an emotional internationalism? On this point no doubt
is possible. The love of country he takes to be the more beautiful
passion. The virtuous intoxication of the internationalist seems to him
pale and ineffectual compared with the virtuous intoxication of the
citizen; and herein history has certainly confirmed him. The fact that
_l’ivresse patriotique_ may make the citizens of one country ruthless
in their dealings with the citizens of other countries seems to him a
matter of small moment.[43] In his schemes for inbreeding patriotic
sentiment, he seems to be looking forward to the type of nationalism
that has actually emerged during the last century, especially perhaps
in Germany. The question of war becomes acute if Europe, and possibly
the world, is thus to be made up of states, each animated by what one
is tempted to term a frenzied nationalism, without any countervailing
principle of unity. That the new nationalism is more potent than the
new internationalism was revealed in August, 1914, when millions of
socialists, in response to the call of country, marched away to the
slaughter of their fellow socialists in other lands. That Protestant
unity has likewise proved inadequate seems sufficiently clear from the
fact that the men of the two chief Protestant countries, at the same
time that they were blowing one another to pieces with high explosives,
sought to starve one another’s women and children _en masse_.
The Papacy again, representing the traditional unity of European
civilization, has also shown itself unable to limit effectively the
push of nationalism.
Furthermore, nationalities of the kind that have grown up in modern
Europe will not, as Rousseau points out, be kept from fighting with
one another by treaties and alliances. He warns the Poles that among
the Christian nations, treaties and alliances are only scraps of
paper, though the Turks, he adds, show a little more respect for their
international obligations.
Rousseau had this order of problems forced upon his attention when he
made his “Abridgment” (1761) of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre’s “Project
for Perpetual Peace” (originally published in 1712-17) and wrote
his “Judgment” on the “Project” (published in 1782). The Abbé de
Saint-Pierre sought to revive the plan for a United States of Europe
(_le Grand Dessein_) that Sully attributes to Henry IV. Rousseau
shows much shrewdness in reviewing in connection with his editing of
Saint-Pierre the problem of peace and war in Europe from the Middle
Ages down. One institution, he admits, had done much in the past to
lessen political conflicts. It is undeniable, he says, that Europe owes
to Christianity above all, even to-day, the species of union that has
survived among its members. He goes on to say, anticipating Heine and
following Hobbes, that Rome, having suffered material defeat, sent her
dogmas instead of her legions into the provinces. To this spiritual
Rome, mediæval and modern Europe has owed what small equivalent it
has enjoyed of the _Pax romana_. The ultimate binding element in the
mediæval order was subordination to the divine will and its earthly
representatives, notably the Pope. The latter Middle Ages and the
Renaissance saw a weakening of this principle of union and the rise of
great territorial nationalities. According to the school of Grotius,
the relations of these nationalities are to be regulated primarily
not by will in any sense, but by reason. The Abbé de Saint-Pierre,
perhaps the earliest complete French example of the professional
philanthropist, has a still more naïve confidence in reason. He saw
well enough, says Rousseau, how his schemes would work if they were
once established, but was childish (and herein he resembled other
“reformers” down to the present day) in his notions of the means for
getting them established. His fundamental error, Rousseau complains,
was in thinking that men are governed by their reason, when they are in
reality governed by their passions.[44]
For Rousseau the state of nature is not in any case a state of reason.
In his less idyllic moods, he inclines, so far as the relation of
nation to nation is concerned, to agree with Hobbes that it is a state
of war. As a remedy he seems to favor some such application of the
federative principle as a league of nations or a league to enforce
peace. He shows, however, a much more lively sense of the perils of
such schemes than some of their modern advocates. “It might do more
harm at a stroke,” he says of a league to enforce peace, “than it
could prevent for centuries.” Though approving of the “Grand Dessein”
of Henry IV, he saw that the driving power behind this scheme was
neither Christian, in the mediæval sense, nor again, humanitarian, but
imperialistic--the desire to abase Spain and the House of Austria,
and to exalt France to the hegemony of Europe. Henry IV was preparing
a war which was to end war, when his assassination took place, and
“banished forever the last hope of the world.” Rousseau foresees that
the states of Europe are destined to ruin themselves by their military
preparations. He leaves us, in short, without any adequate solution of
a problem, that of the centrifugal nationality, which he himself was
doing so much to intensify.
Though Rousseau can speak on occasion with positive contempt of
cosmopolitans, he can be shown to have exercised his main influence on
those who began by standing, both nationally and internationally, for
fraternity, a fraternity that was to be ideally combined with liberty
and equality. We need to trace briefly the imperialistic upshot of this
evangel, especially in the French Revolution, and then, turning away
from the more peripheral aspects of the relation between democracy
and imperialism, to try to get at the root of the whole matter in the
psychology of the individual.
Rousseau, we have seen, seeks to discredit not merely a particular
aristocracy, but the aristocratic principle in general. “The people,”
he says, “constitute the human race”: all that is not the people is
parasitic and “scarcely deserves to be counted were it not for the harm
it does.” Perhaps no doctrine has ever been more cunningly devised
to fill the poor man and the plebeian with self-righteous pride, and
at the same time to inflame him with hatred and suspicion of those
who enjoy any social or economic superiority. It is a curious fact,
known to all students of the period, that those who perhaps did the
most to promote Rousseauism, and in general the new philanthropy,
were the members of the privileged classes themselves. The causes
of this strange phenomenon are complex, but have been traced with
sufficient accuracy by Taine in his “Ancien Régime.” The members of
the French aristocracy, and that as far back as Richelieu and Louis
XIV, had largely ceased to perform the work of an aristocracy. They
had become drawing-room butterflies and hangers-on at court. Now the
enemy of those who have ceased to work, in some sense or other of the
word, has always been ennui; and in addition, the denizens of the
drawing-room suffered during the first half of the eighteenth century
from rationalistic dryness and an excess of artificial decorum. They
finally sought relief in a return to nature and the simple life. An
idyllic element had been present in the life of the drawing-room from
the start, as all know who have studied the influence of d’Urfé’s
“Astrée” on the Marquise de Rambouillet and her group; and this perhaps
made the way easier for another form of pastoralism. “The fops,” as
Taine phrases it, “dreamt between two madrigals of the happiness of
sleeping naked in the virgin forest.” Marie Antoinette milked her own
cows and lived the pastoral dream at the Petit Trianon. Many of the
nobles and higher clergy, won over to the new enthusiasm, took oath to
divest themselves of all the privileges of rank in favor of the new
equality which was itself to be only a preliminary to the golden dawn
of brotherhood. The advent of this brotherhood was actually celebrated
in the Federation of the Champ de Mars (1790) which was meant to
symbolize the melting of all Frenchmen together in a fraternal embrace.
Anacharsis Cloots, the “orator of humankind,” had representatives
of the different races and nations of the Earth, each appropriately
garbed, parade before the National Assembly as the symbol of a still
more universal fraternity. “Never,” says the Comte de Ségur, “were
more delightful dreams followed by a more terrible awakening.” Instead
of universal brotherhood there was a growing mania of suspicion. The
malady of Rousseau became epidemic, until, at the height of the Terror,
men were “suspect of being suspect.” The very persons who had rushed
into one another’s arms at the Federation of the Champ de Mars began to
guillotine one another. In the number of those who thus perished was
the “orator of humankind.” Among the earliest victims were the members
of the privileged classes who had been so zealous in promoting the new
philanthropy, just as the parlor socialists of our own day would be
among the first to suffer if the overturn they are preaching should
actually occur. As Chesterton says, if the social revolution takes
place, the streets will run red with the blood of philanthropists.
If one wishes to enter into the psychology of the later stages of the
Revolution, one should devote special attention to avowed disciples
of Rousseau like Robespierre. He adopts in a rather uncompromising
form Rousseau’s view of “virtue,” and so is led to set up an “ideal”
France over against the real France, and this “ideal” France is largely
a projection of what I have termed the idyllic imagination. The
opposition that he established between the virtuous and the vicious is
even less an opposition between virtuous and vicious individuals than
between whole classes of individuals. The judging of men by their
social grouping rather than by their personal merits and demerits,
that seemed to Burke so iniquitous, has, as a matter of fact, been
implicit in the logic of this movement from the French to the Russian
Revolution. Danton already says: “These priests, these nobles are not
guilty, but they must die, because they are out of place, interfere
with the movement of things, and will stand in the way of the future.”
Danton, so far as he was responsible for the September Massacres, made
some application of this revolutionary logic. Leaders like Robespierre
and Saint-Just, however, developed it far more than Danton into a
programme of wholesale proscription. The actual France was too rich and
populous. Robespierre and Saint-Just were ready to eliminate violently
whole social strata that seemed to them to be made up of parasites
and conspirators, in order that they might adjust this actual France
to the Sparta of their dreams; so that the Terror was far more than
is commonly realized a bucolic episode.[45] It lends color to the
assertion that has been made that the last stage of sentimentalism is
homicidal mania.
In theory, Robespierre is, like Rousseau, rigidly equalitarian. He
is not a real leader at all--only the people’s “hired man.” But at
critical moments, in the name of an ideal general will, of which he
professes to be only the organ, he is ready to impose tyrannically
_his_ will on the actual people. The net result of the Rousseauistic
movement is thus not to get rid of leadership, but to produce an
inferior and even insane type of leadership, and in any case leadership
of a highly imperialistic type. This triumph of force can be shown
to be the total outcome of liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
Rousseauistic sense. Rousseau himself, as we have seen, would force
people to be free. The attempt to combine freedom with equality led,
and, according to Lord Acton, always will lead, to terrorism. As for
Jacobinical fraternity, it has been summed up in the phrase: “Be
my brother or I’ll kill you.” Moreover, the clash of a leader like
Robespierre is not only with enemies of the Revolution, but with other
more or less sincere revolutionary fanatics whose imaginations are
projecting different “ideals.” The sole common denominator of leaders
thus obstinate, each in the pursuit of a separate dream, is force. The
movement had repudiated the traditional controls, and so far as any new
principle of cohesion was concerned, had turned out to be violently
centrifugal. The only brotherhood the Jacobinical leaders had succeeded
in founding was, as Taine puts it, a brotherhood of Cains.
Robespierre, however, was not the type of leader finally destined to
emerge from the Revolution. As early as 1790 Burke had predicted
that the Revolution would turn at last to the profit of some military
adventurer. The doctrine of popular sovereignty as developed from
the “Social Contract” had been found to encourage a sort of chronic
anarchy. Inasmuch as society cannot go on without discipline of some
kind, men were constrained, in the absence of any other form of
discipline, to turn to discipline of the military type. In the army
it was still possible to find the orderly subordination and loyalty
to acknowledged merit that the Jacobins had, on principle, been
undermining in civil France. Bonaparte is therefore no accident. He
is the true heir and executor of the Revolution. After his grenadiers
had chased members of the Cinq-Cents through the doors and out of the
windows of the Orangerie at Saint-Cloud (18 Brumaire), and when he had
revealed himself more and more nakedly as the imperialistic superman,
it is not to be supposed that the Jacobins as a body stood aloof. What
became apparent, on the contrary, was the affinity that has always
existed between an unlimited democracy and the cult of ruthless power.
No one crawled more abjectly at the feet of Napoleon than some of
the quondam Terrorists. “On the point of becoming barons and counts,
the Jacobins spoke only of the horrors of 1793, of the necessity of
punishing the proletarians and of repressing popular excesses. From day
to day there was taking place the transformation of republicans into
imperialists and of the tyranny of all into the despotism of a single
man.”[46]
Chateaubriand’s disapproval of Napoleon was ineffective, one may
note in passing, because his head was not in accord with his heart.
He was in secret sympathy with Napoleon because of a likeness that
he recognized between the Napoleonic quality of imagination and his
own. The imaginations of both men were, in a sense that I have sought
to define elsewhere, romantic: they were straining, though along
very different lines, out towards the unlimited. Victor Hugo, again,
denounced Napoleon as the author of the 18 Brumaire, and at the same
time was so fascinated by him imaginatively, that he was one of the
chief artificers of the Napoleonic legend.
I have been trying to make clear the relation between Rousseauistic
democracy and imperialism in France itself. The same relationship
appears if we study the Rousseauistic movement internationally.
Perhaps no movement since the beginning of the world has led to such
an inbreeding of national sentiment of the type that in the larger
states runs over very readily into imperialistic ambition. I have said
that the Revolution almost from the start took on the character of a
universal crusade. The first principles it assumed made practically
all existing governments seem illegitimate. The various peoples were
invited to overthrow these governments, based upon usurpation, and,
having recovered their original rights, to join with France in a
glorious fraternity. What followed is almost too familiar to need
repetition. Some of the governments whose legitimacy was thus called
into question took alarm and, having entered into an alliance, invaded
France.[47] This foreign menace moved France to the first great
burst of national enthusiasm in the modern sense. The cry of the
revolutionary army--_Vive la nation_--heard by Goethe in a pause of
the cannonading of Valmy--was rightly taken by him to mark the dawn
of a new era.[48] The beginnings of the very type of warfare we have
recently been witnessing in Europe, that is, the coming together of
whole nations for mutual massacre (_la levée en masse_), go back to
this period. The new national enthusiasm supplied France with soldiers
so numerous and so spirited that she not only repelled her invaders,
but began to invade other countries in turn, theoretically on a mission
of emancipation. In the actual stress of events, however, the will to
power turned out to be stronger than the will to brotherhood, and what
had begun as a humanitarian crusade ended in Napoleon and imperialistic
aggression. This aggression awakened in turn the new national sentiment
in various countries, and did more than all other agencies combined to
prepare the way for a powerful and united Germany.[49] France ceased
to be the “Christ of nations” and became the traitor to humankind
universally denounced by the disillusioned radicals of the time,
especially after the invasion of Switzerland (1798).[50]
Any one who rejects the humanitarian theory of brotherhood runs the
risk of being accused of a lack of fraternal feeling. The obvious
reply of the person of critical and experimental temper is that, if he
rejects the theory, it is precisely because he desires brotherhood.
After an experience of the theory that has already extended over
several generations, the world would seem at times to have become a
vast seething mass of hatred and suspicion. What Carlyle wrote of the
Revolution has not ceased to be applicable: “Beneath this rose-colored
veil of universal benevolence is a dark, contentious, hell-on-earth.”
One is finally led to the conviction that the contrast between the
ideal and the real in this movement is not the ordinary contrast
between the willingness of the spirit and the weakness of the flesh;
that on the contrary this particular ideal of union among men actually
promotes the reality of strife that it is supposed to prevent. One
might without being too fanciful establish a sort of synchronism
between the prevalence of pacifistic schemes and the actual outbreak
of war. The propaganda of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre was followed by
the wars of Frederick the Great. The humanitarian movement of the end
of the eighteenth century, which found expression in Kant’s treatise
on Perpetual Peace, was followed and attended by twenty years of the
bloodiest fighting the world has ever known. The pacifist agitation
of the early twentieth century, that found outer expression in the
Peace Palace at The Hague, was succeeded by battle lines hundreds of
miles long. The late M. Boutroux, whom no one will accuse of being a
cynic, said to a reporter of the “Temps” in 1912 that from the amount
of peace talk abroad, he inferred that the future was likely to be
“supremely warlike and bloody.” In the matter of war and peace, as
elsewhere, the humanitarian, to be sure, has an ever-ready explanation
for all the failures of his theory to work: it would, he insists, have
worked beautifully if it had not been for this or that conspiracy.
Nothing short of the suicide of the planet would avail to convince
certain humanitarians that anything is wrong with their theory--and
even then, the last surviving humanitarian would no doubt continue to
moan “conspiracy.”
From a strictly psychological point of view, the movement we are
studying had not only produced all its characteristic fruits over a
hundred years ago, but also its two outstanding and truly significant
personalities--Rousseau and Napoleon. If there had been no Rousseau,
Napoleon is reported to have said, there would have been no Revolution,
and without the Revolution, _I_ should have been impossible. Now
Rousseau may be regarded as being more than any other one person the
humanitarian Messiah. Napoleon, for his part, may be defined, in
Hardy’s phrase, as the Christ of War. So that the humanitarian Messiah
set in motion forces that led by a process that I have attempted to
sketch in rough general outline to the rise of a Christ of War.
A remarkable feature of the humanitarian movement, on both its
sentimental and utilitarian sides, has been its preoccupation with the
lot of the masses. “All institutions,” says Condorcet, for example,
“ought to have for their aim the physical, intellectual, and moral
amelioration of the poorest and most numerous class.” But on the
utilitarian no less than on the sentimental side of the movement, the
contrast between the ideal and the real is so flagrant as to suggest
some central omission in humanitarian psychology. If the Rousseauist
set up an ideal of universal brotherhood that led actually to universal
conscription, the utilitarian for his part has put prime emphasis on
material organization and efficiency and so, with the aid of physical
science, has gradually built up an enormous mass of interlocking
machinery which was, in theory, to serve humanity and promote the
greatest good of the greatest number, but has in practice been pressed
into the service of the will to power of individuals and social
groups and nationalities. As a result of the coming together of the
various factors I have enumerated, war has become almost inconceivably
maleficent. The chief victims have been the very masses whom both
Rousseauist and Baconian have professed themselves so eager to benefit.
The clashes between states and coalitions of states have, under
existing conditions, become clashes between Frankenstein monsters. One
should recollect that the Frankenstein monster was not, as is commonly
supposed, a soulless monster. On the contrary, as depicted by Mrs.
Shelley, he is, in the Rousseauistic sense, a beautiful soul--possibly
as a result of having learned to read from works like the “Sorrows of
Werther.”[51] He becomes ruthless only when the beauty of his soul and
his yearnings for sympathy are unappreciated by others and he is forced
back into psychic solitude. Here again the last stage of sentimentalism
is homicidal mania.
The whole Occident, and increasingly, indeed, the whole world, is now
faced with a similar problem as to the quality of the “soul” that
animates the vast mechanism of material efficiency, to the building up
of which the Occident has for several generations past been devoting
its main effort. Is this “soul” a Rousseauistic or a genuinely ethical
“soul”? One is tempted to define the civilization (or what we are
pleased to term such) that has been emerging with the decline of the
traditional controls as a mixture of altruism and high explosives. If
anything is amiss with the altruism, the results may prove to be rather
serious. The idealists affirm either that man is so lovely in his
natural self that he needs no control at all, or else that he can be
induced to exercise the necessary control with reference to the good of
his fellows. Everything hinges, in either case, on the presence in the
natural man of an element of love or will to service that is of itself
a sufficient counterpoise to the natural man’s will to power. Here is
the dividing line between egoists and altruists, and not merely in the
appeal to utility. The principle of the greatest good of the greatest
number is, as has been pointed out, asserted by Machiavelli himself.[52]
Now the facts in this debate as to the relative strength in the
natural man of the will to brotherhood and the will to power seem,
on an impartial survey, to favor the Machiavellians rather than the
“idealists.” Those who so pride themselves on being forward-looking
should have a special cult for Machiavelli. He has claims to be
regarded as the most successful of all the forward-lookers. In the
phrase of Gervinus, “he guessed the spirit of modern history.” The
last war has been correctly described as a “return of Machiavelli.”
But with the progress that science has made, and is constantly making
in “improving the mystery of murder,” so that it is already possible
apparently to destroy great cities in a few minutes from the air,
it should be evident even to the most obtuse that we cannot afford
to allow Machiavelli to return. One or two more such returns on a
large scale will, under existing conditions, mean the end of white
civilization, and possibly of the white race itself. A gross and
palpable error of the era that is just closing has been its confusion
of mechanical and material progress with moral progress. Physical
science is excellent in its own place, but when supreme moral issues
are involved, it is, as has been rightly remarked, only a multiplying
device.[53] If there is rightness at the centre, it will no doubt
multiply the rightness. If, on the other hand, there is any central
error, the peripheral repercussion, with men bound together as they
are at present, will be terrific. With the development of inventions
like the radio and the wireless telephone, the whole world is becoming,
in a very literal sense, a whispering-gallery. It is hardly necessary
to dilate on what is likely to follow if the words that are whispered
are words of hatred and suspicion. An increasing material union among
men who remain spiritually centrifugal means a return of Machiavelli,
a triumph in other words of the law of cunning and the law of force,
on a scale to which the past has seen no parallel. Superlatives are
dangerous things, but one is perhaps justified in describing the
present situation as one of unexampled gravity.
In dealing with democracy and the special type of fraternity it has
preached, as related to imperialism, I have thus far been confining
myself for the most part to the national and international phases of
this relationship. It is time to fulfil my promise, and, working in
from the periphery towards the centre, seek to get at the root of
the whole matter in the psychology of the individual. For behind all
imperialism is ultimately the imperialistic individual, just as behind
all peace is ultimately the peaceful individual.
I have already made a distinction of the first importance for the study
of the question of war or peace in terms of the individual, and that
is the distinction between the traditional Christian conception of
liberty, which implies spiritual subordination, and the Rousseauistic
conception which, whether we take it in the no-state of the “Second
Discourse” or the all-state of the “Social Contract,” is resolutely
equalitarian. At the end of his “Prometheus Unbound” Shelley has
portrayed in the very spirit of the “Second Discourse” the paradise
that is to result from the abolition of the traditional subordinations
and inequalities:
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed, but man
Equal, unclassed, tribeless and nationless,
Exempt from awe, worship, degree.
But on any attempt to carry out this programme, the enormous irony and
contradiction at the very heart of this movement becomes manifest. It
leads one to break down standards in the real world in favor of purely
chimerical ideals. For what actually follows the attempt to establish
equalitarian liberty, we need to turn from Shelley to Shakespeare:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.
This last line reminds one of a remark of Jeremy Taylor that, in the
absence of ethical control, “men know no good but to please a wild,
indetermined, infinite appetite.” The word infinite adds an essential
idea. Other animals have appetite, but within certain definite bounds,
whereas man is, either in the good or bad sense, the infinite animal.
Machiavelli is very metaphorical when he speaks of his prince as
combining the virtues of the lion and the fox. The lion and the fox
do not put forth their power or cunning beyond what is needed for
the satisfaction of their actual physical wants. They do not strive
to set up a vulpine or leonine empire over other animals. One cannot
truthfully say of them, as Carlyle says of his boot-black, that, if
given half the universe, they will soon be quarrelling with the owner
of the other half. To be sure, as Swift remarks,
Now and then
Beasts may degen’rate into men.
But, as a rule, the man who is infinite after the fashion of Carlyle’s
boot-black is in a fair way to become not beastly, but fiendish. As
a result of his infinitude, man is almost necessarily either better
or worse than other animals. His prime need is not, as in the case
of other animals, to satisfy certain limited physical wants, but
to keep in good conceit with himself. Now it is of the essence of
conceit, a word which, as once used, was synonymous with imagination
in general, and as now used is nearly related to the egocentric type
of imagination, to strain out towards the unlimited. This conceit is,
it is to be feared, closely associated in unregenerate man with envy
and jealousy of any one whose conceit seems to set up rival pretensions
to his own. Conceit also determines largely man’s attitude towards
the truth. Truth according to the natural law he welcomes because it
ministers to his power or comfort and in any case piques his wonder
and curiosity. Spiritual truth is less welcome because it diminishes
his conceit. Truth in this sense, as Goethe says, is less congenial to
human nature than error, because it imposes limitations, whereas error
does not. Tell the average person that some one is planning to get into
wireless communication with Mars, or to shoot a rocket at the moon, and
he is all respectful interest and attention at once. Tell him, on the
contrary, that he needs, in the interest of his own happiness, to walk
in the path of humility and self-control, and he will be indifferent,
or even actively resentful.
Man’s conceit, and the tendency towards unlimited expansion that it
gives to the impulses of the natural man, is of various types. Perhaps
as good a classification as any of the main types is that of the three
lusts distinguished by traditional Christianity--the lust of knowledge,
the lust of sensation, and the lust of power. It is interesting to
study the lust of power as it has appeared in the conquerors and
great military adventurers of history. Saint-Evremond has made some
penetrating observations on this form of imperialistic psychology
in his “Dissertation on the word Vast.” The vastness that the great
dominators have displayed in their projects and ambitions is due,
as he points out, to the quality of their imaginations. The outward
straining of the imagination towards the unlimited Saint-Evremond takes
to be the weakness and not the strength of a Pyrrhus, an Alexander
and a Richelieu. It is a pity that Saint-Evremond was not able to
extend his scrutiny to a Napoleon. Napoleon plainly displayed two
entirely different types of “vision”: in dealing with the natural
order, in planning a battle, for instance, he showed himself capable
of a tremendous concentration upon the facts; but in his political
ambitions, where factors of a more purely human order came into play,
he revealed an inability to limit his imagination that was destined
sooner or later to result in disaster. The coming together of the
two kinds of vision I have just defined gives a type with which we
have become very familiar, not only in our political and military,
but in our commercial leaders--that of the efficient megalomaniac. A
surprising number of these leaders have been, in intention at least,
supermen, and little Napoleons.
Assuming that Napoleon’s imagination is of the general type that
Saint-Evremond ascribes to various great dominators of the past,
we still have to explain, if we are to understand the triumph of
the imperialistic push for power over Rousseauistic idealism, why a
Napoleon so captivates the imagination of other men; for this sort of
leader would evidently be helpless unless he had many accomplices. The
Rousseauist, I have said, breaks down traditional controls without
setting up new ones. What emerges in the many men who have as a result
lapsed to the naturalistic level is not the will to brotherhood, but
the will to power; so that in this sense the Rousseauist is actually
promoting what he is in theory seeking to prevent. For what follows we
need to make an application of Freudian psychology to a _libido_ even
more fundamental perhaps than the _libido_ with which the Freudians
themselves have thus far been chiefly concerned--namely, the _libido
dominandi_. In a naturalistic era, the average man finds himself more
or less in the state of Carlyle’s boot-black, but is at the same
time hampered on every side and kept from expanding freely along the
lines of power, and is thus diminished in his conceit of himself. He
suffers from repressed and thwarted desire. But what he is unable to
get directly, he may secure vicariously. At this point one begins to
perceive the meaning of Hardy’s description of Napoleon as the Christ
of War. The spell that Napoleon exercised was not merely over the
former Jacobins of whom Chateaubriand speaks, but over the French
masses. Let one reflect on the way these masses rallied to him on the
return from Elba, and that, too, after he had wrought them almost
incalculable evil:
Bien, dit-on, qu’il nous ait nui,
Le peuple encore le révère, etc.
I have said that to look on the State of Burke with its ethical
leadership as merely “pooled self-esteem” is misleading. The phrase has
a certain relevancy, however, when applied to the State that is under
Napoleonic leadership. The intrusion of this imperialistic element is
strong not only in all secular establishments, but also in the churches
of the world, if only because these churches, however immaculate they
may be in theory, are administered by human beings. It is not easy to
overlook this element in the Papacy, even though one does not go so far
as to say roundly with Tyrrell: “Rome cares nothing for religion--only
for power.” The very divinities that men have set up often impress one
as being in a considerable measure their pooled self-esteem. “We are
glad,” as Dryden says, “to have God on our side to maul our enemies,
when we cannot do the work ourselves.” Jonathan Edwards has genuine
religious elevation; but the Jehovah in whose “fierceness” he plainly
rejoices, and who tramples sinners under his feet until their blood is
“sprinkled on his garments,” might lead some to dismiss Edwards as a
theological imperialist. A more unmistakable example is that of certain
members of the group of Fundamentalists that has recently been dividing
the Baptist denomination, who have depicted Christ in his second coming
in colors that make Nero and Caligula seem respectable. One scarcely
need dilate on the fact that Christ was in his first coming a deep
disappointment to the Jewish populace; the Messiah they had hoped for
was far nearer to Napoleon than to the Messiah they actually received.
It goes without saying that the imperialistic element I have noted
in religious beliefs, as well as in those who administer them, is not
the whole story. Above all, it is not the whole story in the case of
Christianity. Christianity has actually done much to curb the expansive
lusts of the human heart, and among its other lusts, the lust for
power. As Dante puts it, “men wandering wild in their bestiality,”
have need of a twofold control: “that of the highest Pontiff to lead
them according to revelation to eternal life, and that of the Emperor
to lead them according to the traditions of philosophy to temporal
felicity.”[54] Of course the reality never coincided exactly with
Dante’s ideal. From his tremendous diatribes against the self-seeking
rulers of his time, one might infer that Europe then was almost as
mad as it certainly is to-day. At the same time Christianity in its
mediæval form actually did secure for Europe no small degree of
spiritual unity and cohesion, and even when there was disunion, it was
not rendered infinitely maleficent, as it is now, by the concomitant
circumstance that those who were spiritually at variance were bound up
together materially.
Now I scarcely need repeat what I have said here and elsewhere that
the loss of this older European unity was due to the rise of what one
may describe, in the most general sense, as the critical spirit, which
has in turn been identical with the spirit of individualism. To be
modern has meant practically to be increasingly positive and critical,
to refuse to receive anything on an authority “anterior, exterior,
and superior” to the individual. With those who still cling to the
principle of outer authority I have no quarrel. I am not primarily
concerned with them. I am myself a thoroughgoing individualist, writing
for those who are, like myself, irrevocably committed to the modern
experiment. In fact, so far as I object to the moderns at all, it is
because they have not been sufficiently modern, or, what amounts to the
same thing, have not been sufficiently experimental. In the field of
the natural law, those who have gone in for modernity evidently satisfy
my test in no small measure. The substitution of positive observation
for what seemed to a Bacon, for instance, the apriorism and verbal
subtleties and servile leaning upon authority of the schoolmen has
actually led to the fruits anticipated. But the apostles of modernity
have not been content merely to minister to man’s power and utility.
They have also professed to have a substitute for the spiritual unity
of the older order, and here, when tried experimentally, that is,
according to their own principles, they have, I have tried to show,
failed disastrously. The results of the material success and spiritual
failure of the modern movement are before us. It is becoming obvious to
every one that the power of Occidental man has run very much ahead of
his wisdom. The outlook might be more cheerful if there were any signs
that Occidental man is seeking seriously to make up his deficiency
on the side of wisdom. On the contrary, he is reaching out almost
automatically for more and more power. If he succeeds in releasing the
stores of energy that are locked up in the atom--and this seems to be
the most recent ambition of our physicists--his final exploit may be to
blow himself off the planet. We are told that our means of destruction
are growing so terrible that no one will venture to use them--the same
argument that was heard before the War. But at the same time that
we are heaping up these means of destruction, the breakdown of the
traditional controls combined with the failure thus far to supply any
adequate substitute, is creating fools and madmen who will not hesitate
to use them.
It would sometimes seem, indeed, that what wisdom we still have is a
survival. One can at least understand the point of view of those who
decide to stand in the ancient ways and to assume towards much of what
is deemed progressive nowadays an attitude frankly reactionary. One
may even catch the point of view of the ultramontane Catholic, as set
forth by Pius IX in the eightieth article of the Syllabus (1864): “If
any one says that the Pope can and should be reconciled and make terms
with progress, with liberalism and modernist civilization, let him be
anathema.”
It is, however, possible to admit that some vital element dropped out
in the passage from the mediæval to the modern era, or, what amounts
to the same thing, from outer authority to individualism, and still
remain a modern. But in that case one should make clear that to be
a thoroughgoing modern is not such a simple matter as is sometimes
assumed. I am myself fond of insisting that man is subject not to one,
but to two laws; and that to be completely modern, one must be positive
and critical, not merely according to the natural, but also according
to the human law. Those who have piqued themselves on modernity
have thus far been for the most part persons who have been more or
less critical according to the natural law, and then have pieced
out their incomplete survey of the facts by various rationalistic
devices, or else by idyllic imagining. In the realm of the human law,
the nineteenth century, so far as it stood for a radical break with
tradition, was, on the one hand, an age of rationalism, on the other,
an age of romantic dreaming. He who has broken with traditions in
this fashion should, in my judgment, be called, not a modern but a
modernist. The term modern should be reserved for the person who is
seeking to be critical according to both the human and the natural
law. Any one who attempts such a task will find it necessary to give a
much wider meaning to the word experiment than has of late been usual:
it should be extended to cover not merely the kind of experimenting
that goes on in a laboratory, but also the experimenting with various
philosophies of life that has gone on in the remote as well as in
the near past. To be sure the man who turns nowadays to the past for
instruction is likely to be regarded as more or less a reactionary.
A more familiar type is that of the progressive who has repudiated
the past, barely tolerates the present, and is at home imaginatively
only in that vast, windy abode, the future. Yet Goethe speaks not as
a reactionary, but as a person of keenly experimental temper, when
he says that we should oppose to the “aberrations of the hour the
masses of universal history.” As a result of the toil of innumerable
investigators, these masses of universal history are becoming fairly
accessible to us from the era of the Fighting States in ancient China
(third century B.C.) to the era of the fighting states in contemporary
Europe. But one must grant that there are great, if not insurmountable
difficulties in turning to account these records of the past, and in
building up from them standards with which to judge the “aberrations
of the hour.” The obvious difficulty is the element of truth contained
in the saying that history never repeats itself. If this were the
whole truth, if history were only a whirl of unrelated happenings that
did not exhibit the workings of any central human law, one would have
a right to dismiss any attempt to judge the present in the light of
past experience with the dictum of Henry Ford or some more elegant
equivalent: “History is bunk.” But though it is true that history
never repeats itself, it is about equally true that history is always
repeating itself; and this is a part of the paradox of life itself
which does not give us here an element of oneness, and there an element
of change, but a oneness that is always changing. This implication of
unity in diversity is the scandal of reason, and philosophers have,
for the most part, ever since the Greeks, been seeking with the aid of
reason to abstract the unity from the diversity, or else, by similar
rationalizing processes, to stress the diversity at the expense of the
unity. Practically all the philosophers who now have the “cry” belong,
it is scarcely necessary to add, to the latter class. But the complete
positivist will insist that wisdom is found in mediation between the
constant and the variable factors in human experience. His objection to
the unity that the Rousseauist proposes to establish among men through
the diffusion of love and sympathy is that it is illusory. If it were
only possible to oppose to this unreal unity, a mere chimera of the
romantic imagination, some firm and fast unity, purged of illusion
with the aid of reason, and tucked away once for all into formulæ,
our problem would be very easy. The man who faces life as it actually
is, however, will not admit that it is possible thus to eliminate the
element of illusion. To recognize this element is not to be oneself an
illusionist, but on the contrary a keen observer. It is in the rôle
that they attribute to illusion that the wisdom of the great poets,
of a Shakespeare or a Sophocles, for example, is most manifest. I
have tried to show elsewhere[55] how closely related this problem of
illusion is to the problem of the imagination. The final contrast is
not between reason or judgment and mere illusion, but between the
imagination that is disciplined to what abides in the midst of the
changeful and the illusory, and the imagination that is more or less
free to wander wild in some “empire of chimeras.”
The true vision of the disciplined imagination is needful if one is
to profit by experience, a task that becomes increasingly difficult
according as the experience involved is one’s own experience or that
of one’s contemporaries or that of the near or remote past. Vision
of this type would seem to be depressingly rare, and yet without it
men run the risk, and that often when they are most filled with the
conceit of their own progressiveness, of simply “committing the oldest
sins the newest kind of ways.” Experience, we are told, keeps a hard
school, but fools will learn in no other; it is a rather wise fool,
one is sometimes inclined to think, who can learn even from his own
experience, not to speak of the experience of others.
But to return to our more immediate topic: evidently the type of vision
that can bring to bear the experience of the remoter past upon our
democratic-imperialistic era is not easy to attain, but seems very
necessary if one is to appeal to history at all. For one has to go
rather far back to find any close parallel to our present imbroglio.
Various persons have pointed out the analogy between the Great War
and its psychological background and the period of the Peloponnesian
War in Greece; and this analogy is helpful provided it be used with
sufficient caution. The period of the Peloponnesian War was, like our
own, a period of commercial and imperialistic expansion; and this
expansion was accompanied, especially at Athens, by an increasing trend
towards an equalitarian democracy.[56] Like our own age, it was an age
of “intellectuals” who were repudiating the traditional disciplines,
largely in virtue of the opposition they had established between nature
and convention. If negatively this cult of nature meant revolt against
everything prescriptive and established, positively it meant, on the
one hand, admiration for the superman, and on the other, sympathy for
the weak, though this latter element was far less marked in ancient
than in modern naturalism. It is hard to study the sophists of that
time without being reminded of our own philosophers of the flux, or, in
the phrase of Aristophanes, votaries of the God Whirl. Persons were
not lacking in ancient Athens who saw the perils of this anarchical
individualism. Some, like Aristophanes, were simply for getting back to
the “good old times,” and refused to distinguish between Socrates and
an ordinary sophist. Socrates, however, it is hardly necessary to say,
along with Plato and Aristotle and lesser disciples, was in reality
seeking to build up, in lieu of the crumbling traditional standards,
standards more in accord with the critical spirit. The Socratic
effort was on the whole a failure, especially in the political field.
The causes of this failure are complex. I will presently point out
what seem to me serious omissions in the Socratic philosophy itself:
and then, too, it may be maintained without paradox that Occidental
civilization is still suffering from the failure, even from the time of
the wily Odysseus, of the Greek character to measure up to the Greek
mind.[57] If the Hellenes could only get together, says Aristotle,
they might hold their own against the world. Unfortunately, they could
never get together. Even when a political tradition that was in its
essence identical with religion still bound together the citizens of
the various city-states, these states were largely centrifugal as
regards one another for the very reason that each state had different
gods. With the breakdown of these politico-religious traditions and
the failure to work out on Socratic or other lines some equivalent for
the spiritual controls they supplied, the citizens of each city-state
tended to become centrifugal not only with reference to the citizens
of other city-states, but with reference to one another. There followed
all the abominable incidents of class-war. At Miletus, for example,
the poor got the upper hand and forced the rich to flee from the city.
But afterwards, regretting that they had not been able to kill them,
they took their children, gathered them together in barns, and had them
trampled under the feet of oxen. The rich afterwards returned to the
city and became masters again. They took in their turn the children
of the poor, covered them with pitch, and burned them alive.[58] This
is the kind of thing of which our modern world has already had a
substantial first instalment from the French to the Russian Revolution.
The decadent Greeks, like those who are preaching a class-war in our
own day, employed many fine phrases, but the law that actually tended
to prevail was the law of force. This force was finally supplied, as
frequently happens in such cases, from without, first by Macedon and
then by Rome. On this final submission to an imperialistic autocrat,
the decadent Greek consoled himself for what would have seemed to a
Greek of the great period a deep degradation by the somewhat shabby
fiction that he was submitting, not to a man, but to a god.
Any summary of the kind I have been attempting is necessarily very
misleading. Nothing will take the place of a first-hand knowledge of
the sources, above all of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides. Any one
can convince himself of the startling relevancy to existing conditions
of Aristotle’s “Politics” in particular, especially now that we
have begun in this country to slip our constitutional moorings and
to drift towards a direct or unlimited democracy. There are passages
that are as modern as the morning newspaper, and at least a hundred
times more sensible. Rome later ran through a somewhat similar
cycle: a constitutional republic resting ultimately on religious
control gradually gave way with the weakening of this control to
an equalitarian democracy which in turn passed over with the usual
incidents of class-war into a decadent imperialism. The imperialistic
upshot of an unbridled individualism might also be illustrated from
the crumbling of the feudal system in ancient China and the resulting
era of the Fighting States to which I have already alluded. Some of
the philosophy of this time, that of Mei-ti,[59] for example, exhibits
a mingling of utilitarian and sentimental elements which is closer,
perhaps, to our contemporary humanitarianism than anything to be found
in Greece or Rome. Towards the end, when everything had been tried,
including the balance of power, universal brotherhood, and a “league
of nations,” and after the perpetration of horrors unspeakable, no
one apparently had any more illusions: the only question was which
imperialistic leader should first succeed in imposing his will on all
the others.
Evidently the outlook for our Western civilization, if it reaches
this last stage of the imperialistic cycle through which it is now
apparently running, is not cheerful, especially in view of the progress
that physical science is constantly making in “improving the mystery of
murder.” North America, and to a considerable degree, South America,
it is scarcely necessary to say, belong to the same cultural group as
the states of western Europe. All the states of this group are now
exhibiting in various forms and varying degrees the symptoms of an
unduly centrifugal individualism. The outside world, that frequently
has the last word under these circumstances, may, in view of the
present facilities of communication, be taken to include all the rest
of mankind, especially the great rival cultures of Asia. Now the more
powerful states of the cultural group I have just defined are not
only imperialistic in their attitude towards one another, but also
supremely imperialistic in their attitude towards the outlying peoples
and cultures. It is hard to see that the states that are supposed to be
democratically ruled are very different in this matter from the rest.
As early as 1790 Mirabeau warned the French enthusiasts that “free
peoples are more eager for war, and democracies more the slaves of
their passions than the most absolute autocracies.” This is true in the
obvious political sense not only in Europe, but in other parts of the
world. Republican France, for example, has been reaching out eagerly
for an African and Asiatic empire. But there is a type of imperialistic
expansion even more important, perhaps, than this obvious political
kind, and frequently leading up to it, and that is the imperialistic
expansion of the commercialist. It has been said that trade follows
the flag, but an even more significant truth is that the flag tends to
follow trade: let one consider the origins of the British Empire in
India. It is hardly necessary at this day to refute the notion held
by so many liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that
trade is in itself a pacific agency. Commercial interests lead to
clashes and dangerous rivalries between European nations, not merely
in Europe itself, but in other parts of the world. Thus a chief aspect
of imperialism at the present time is the international scramble for
oil. One may read in a recent issue of a responsible French publication
that “for the success of their projects, Lord Cowdray and Lord Curzon
are capable of fomenting revolutions in Mexico, of sowing civil war in
Asia, and, in order to crush a rival, of setting fire to Europe and the
World! Their imperialism is a universal danger, but is not lacking in
grandeur.”[60] In my view the leaders of contemporary England are not
quite so Machiavellian, but the view I have just cited is widely held
in France, and scarcely leads to the confidence that is the necessary
basis of harmonious relations between France and England. This issue
of oil might even under certain circumstances lead to severe tension
between England and America.
It is becoming more and more evident that the chief problem raised
by all this imperialistic expansion is that of the relations between
Asia and the Occident. There are possibilities in the present
situation that may lead to the real world war, that between the East
and West, a war to which the recent European struggle is likely to
seem in retrospect but a faint prelude. It does not on the face of
it appear probable that Europeans can hope in the long run to enjoy
the luxury of slaughtering one another by the most recent and refined
methods of scientific efficiency and at the same time inflict their
imperialism and racial swagger on about nine hundred millions of
Asiatics; especially as Asiatics have an opportunity of observing the
imperialistic rivalries and almost incurable divisions of European
powers, not only in Europe, but on the soil of Asia itself. The
possibilities of which I have spoken may not develop in a day. But
then, as Confucius remarks, “the man who does not take far views will
have near troubles,” and it is surely time to attempt this long-range
view of our relations with the Orient, especially perhaps with the land
of Confucius himself.
Now the Asiatic problem, when considered from the political point of
view, breaks up into various minor problems. There is, for example, the
problem of the Near East which has been gravely mismanaged, largely,
it would seem, as the result of the inability of England and France to
come to a decent understanding. There is again the problem of India.
There is also the problem of the United States in its relations with
the Far East, with the possibility in the offing of a gigantic struggle
for the empire of the Pacific. One encounters here the portent of
Japan, an Asiatic power that is learning to play the imperialistic game
along the most approved Occidental lines, that is even learning to
adapt to its own uses the humanitarian-imperialistic cant of the “white
man’s burden,” and is beginning to speak of China as “Japan’s burden.”
Finally, most important of all, perhaps, there is the problem of
Russia, a country geographically astride of Europe and Asia, and
psychologically, so far as a great part of its population is concerned,
at least as Asiatic as it is European. With the extermination or
impoverishment of its upper classes, the psychic gap between Russia and
western Europe is becoming more accentuated. The Bolshevist Revolution,
which can be shown to derive in its underlying principles from the
great French Revolution, has been even more virulently imperialistic
than French Jacobinism. Russia is likely to remain for some time to
come a fertile field of imperialistic intrigue, not only on the part of
Russians, but also of Germans and Japanese, and perhaps of Turks, with
the whole Moslem world in the background. Just as certain Greeks were
ready to ally themselves with the extra-Hellenic world against other
Greeks, so Germany in her desire to get even might be tempted to join
with these extra-European forces, even though such action on her part
would amount to a betrayal of the vital interests of the cultural group
to which she herself belongs.
Considerations of this kind are, however, highly speculative at best,
even though the person who indulges in them has a competency in the
political field to which I make no claim. It is, as a matter of fact,
no part of my method to deal directly with the political problem. This
method is, in intention at least, purely psychological. When one
approaches psychologically the question of Europe versus Asia, and
takes a sufficiently long-range view, a striking fact forces itself
on one’s attention: the principle of true spiritual cohesion among
men that the Græco-Roman world was unable to supply--for the Stoical
attempt to achieve such a principle was on the whole a failure--came at
last from a faith of Oriental origin--namely, Christianity. Cardinal
Newman relates in his “Apologia” that what turned him as much as
any one thing to Catholicism was a Latin maxim which affirms that
the whole world is sound in its judgments (_Securus judicat orbis
terrarum_). Now, strictly speaking, this maxim seems less favorable to
the Catholic and his ultimate appeal to outer authority than to the
man who seeks to deal with life experimentally. If one uses the maxim
in this positive spirit, one has to insist, first of all, that the
Asiatic experience that led to the rise of Christianity is only part
of the total experience of Asia. To regard Europe and a small portion
of Asia as together constituting the _orbis terrarum_ is merely a form
of our Occidental conceit and arrogance. It is to leave out of one’s
survey the experience of about half of the human race. In this age of
universal and facile communication, it would seem especially desirable
to bring together the two halves of human experience. A chief obstacle
to the right interpretation of the experience of the Far East has been
the fact that those who have undertaken the task have suffered not only
from inadequate knowledge, but have also frequently worn theological
blinders. A more serious form of narrowness to-day is that of the man
who judges the total experience of the world, both East and West,
from the point of view of a merely mechanical progress. An estimate
of this total experience that is based on adequate knowledge, and
is at the same time free from dogmatic preoccupations of any kind,
will, I believe, flash a vivid light on the predicament into which we
have been led by our one-sided naturalism. It will aid us to a purely
psychological definition of the vital factor that has plainly tended to
drop out in the passage from mediæval to modern Europe. It will thus
help us to recover and maintain this vital factor not merely in the
form of “old prejudices and unreasoned habits”--the attempt to do so
is, I said, the weakness of the method of Burke--but in a positive and
critical form, a form, in other words, in closer accord with the modern
spirit.