CHAPTER VI

TRUE AND FALSE LIBERALS

The choice to which the modern man will finally be reduced, it has

been said, is that of being a Bolshevist or a Jesuit. In that case

(assuming that by Jesuit is meant the ultramontane Catholic) there

does not seem to be much room for hesitation. Ultramontane Catholicism

does not, like Bolshevism, strike at the very root of civilization.

In fact, under certain conditions that are already partly in sight,

the Catholic Church may perhaps be the only institution left in the

Occident that can be counted on to uphold civilized standards. It may

also be possible, however, to be a thoroughgoing modern and at the same

time civilized. Before considering this possibility more in detail, it

will be helpful to trace the process by which the present situation has

grown up, a situation that seems, at least superficially, to impose the

extreme choice I have just mentioned.

In tracing this process everything will be found to hinge ultimately

on the idea of liberty in its relation to the principle of control.

Under the old order, spiritual control, I have said, had its final

source and sanction in the doctrine of grace. We need, therefore, to

follow to some extent the fortunes of this doctrine as affected by the

progressive emancipation, since the Renaissance, of the individual

from outer authority and by the concomitant growth of naturalistic

tendencies. Certain groups within the Church itself, notably

the Jansenists, sought to revive, in opposition to the incipient

naturalistic movement, the doctrine of grace in its full Augustinian

rigor. This doctrine originally marked the very apex of Christian

otherworldliness, whereas, at the time of the Jansenist revival, men

were turning more and more resolutely to this world. Saint-Evremond

estimates that there were not ten men in France who could satisfy

the Jansenist test of holiness. All other Frenchmen the Jansenists

seemed to consign to outer darkness. In standing for a more moderate

interpretation of grace the Catholic Church simply showed its good

sense. What was more dubious was its tendency to substitute for the

inner dependence of man on God that the Jansenist desired, his outer

dependence on the priest. My present subject does not require me

to consider the truth of the charge that the Church, in the effort

to induce the individual to submit to its authority, dissimulated

unduly the austerity of Christian doctrine; that, in short, it gave

countenance to a casuistical relaxation, the upshot of which was,

in Bossuet’s phrase, to put “cushions under the elbows of sinners.”

All I need to point out here is that the reply of the Church to

individualistic tendencies of every kind has been an ever-increasing

papal centralization. It may be said of the ultramontane Catholic, as

of the extreme partisan of grace, though in a very different sense,

that he has simply repudiated self-reliance.

If one wishes to understand the types of individualism to which

ultramontane Catholicism is such an uncompromising answer, one

needs to study also the doctrine of grace in its relation to the

Protestant Reformation. Both Luther and Calvin, it is scarcely

necessary to say, put prime emphasis on this doctrine, though not

quite the same emphasis. Now the Reformation is, by its underlying

postulates, a critical movement; it sought to recover the authentic

Christian doctrine that seemed to it to have been perverted by the

Roman theocracy. It urged the individual to take a critical attitude

towards this theocracy, or, what amounts to the same thing, it urged

him to exercise the right of private judgment, which is only another

way of encouraging him to be self-dependent and self-reliant. But the

Protestant was involved in peculiar difficulties as soon as he set

out to be self-reliant and at the same time to defend the doctrine

of grace; for the doctrine, in the Pauline and Augustinian form that

a Luther and a Calvin sought to revive, was the very negation of

self-reliance; it was designed to make man feel his utter and helpless

dependence on the divine will. If a man is to be self-reliant, two

things, it should seem, are necessary: he must have sound standards

and must then be free to act on them. To secure the standards he needs

intellect and to act on them he needs will. Luther, for his part,

wishes to be an individualist and at the same time to follow the early

Christian obscurantists in flouting the intellect and denying the

freedom of the will. Since the “covenant of work” was abrogated by the

Fall, man’s will is in helpless bondage to sin,[79] so that God alone

is capable of any salutary working; man’s only hope, therefore, is in

the covenant of grace and the scheme of redemption. To hold any other

view is subversive of humility. Luther’s extreme hostility to work is,

of course, due also to the identification of work with the performance

of rites and ceremonies, especially in connection with penance

(_satisfactio operis_).

Luther and the other reformers had by their separation from the Church

cut themselves off more or less from the traditional symbols by which

the truths of humility and of the higher will were interpreted to the

imagination; so that, in their defence of these truths, they were

thrown back, almost in spite of themselves, on reason. Erasmus with

his fine psychological tact felt in the Reformation, almost from the

outset, an element of intellectual presumption. If the impression

that Calvin produces in his preaching of man’s utter dependence on

the divine will is not precisely that of humility, one suspects that

the explanation is that he presumes to know too much about that will.

Jonathan Edwards, again, in his anxiety to justify rationally God’s

absolute and arbitrary will, finally seems to have insinuated himself

as a fourth into the council chamber of the Trinity.

It is fair to say that the difficulty that confronted a Calvin and an

Edwards and has led to at least a partial breakdown of Protestantism

is no slight one: it must confront in some measure any one who seeks

to combine a free play of the critical spirit with the acceptance of

traditional Christianity. If one starts, as the traditional Christian

has been wont to start, with the hypothesis of an omnipotent God with

“foreknowledge absolute,” the question almost inevitably arises why

such a being has permitted evil at all. Furthermore, strict logic would

seem to impose the conclusion that this being has doomed a multitude

of his creatures to everlasting torments simply for doing what, in

the last analysis, he himself has willed.[80] In short, the critical

crux at the heart of historical Christianity is how to reconcile God’s

omnipotence and omniscience with his justice and mercy. The portion of

the world that piques itself on its modernity has simply turned its

back on this theological nightmare. Unfortunately, in getting rid of

the nightmare, it has also tended to get rid of the inner life, of the

truth, namely, that man needs in his natural self (which includes the

intellect) to look up to some higher will in awe and humility. With the

decline of the inner life, there has been a weakening of control over

the expansive lusts of the natural man--whether the lust of knowledge

or the lust of sensation or the lust of power.

In the development I have been following, the idea of work in

the spiritual sense is either very much subordinated to grace or

else is more or less identified with the performance of rites and

ceremonies.[81] We need to trace at this point the rise of a very

different doctrine of work. The last scholastics, notably Duns Scotus,

inclined to divorce religious truth from reason and to identify it with

absolute, arbitrary will and unintelligible theological mysteries.

A man like Francis Bacon takes theologians of this type at their

word and, after a more or less sincere obeisance to a spiritual truth

that is immeasurably beyond man’s grasp, he turns an intellect that

is left without other occupation to a study of the natural order. He

aims to establish upon this order a philosophy, not of vain words, but

of works and fruits. The Baconian conception of work can be followed

down through the utilitarian movement. It appears, for example, in

an extreme form in Locke’s second “Treatise of Government.” Work is

practically identified by Locke with physical effort and is made the

sole legitimate source of property. Adam Smith tends to a very similar

conception of work in its relation to property. In thus reducing the

idea of work to its lowest terms, the orthodox political economy opened

the way for political economy of the unorthodox type. Karl Marx was

especially influenced in his definition of work by Ricardo. Why should

not the man who, on the showing of the orthodox political economists

themselves, does the real work, get all the reward? Why should he turn

over such a large part of this reward to that mere idler and parasite,

the capitalist? Though the orthodox economist makes work in an unduly

restricted sense the source of wealth, he does not, to do him justice,

fall, like the Marxian, into the further fallacy of identifying work

with value. That, he insists, is largely determined by the law of

supply and demand and by competition. The extreme Marxian not only

takes a purely quantitative view of work, so much so that he tends, as

has been said, to put the work of a Raphael and that of a common sign

painter on the same level, but in evaluating the product of work he

aims to eliminate the competitive element. Recent Marxians have come to

take a somewhat less quantitative view of work, but the fallacies that

result from a total or partial suppression of competition are built

into the very foundations of socialism.

One should note at this point that in their views as to the nature of

work there is much underlying agreement between the Rousseauist and the

Baconian. Rousseau himself tends to reduce work to the lowest terms and

to identify it with manual labor. All who do not work in this outward

and visible sense are, it would seem, hangers-on and parasites and not

worthy to live.[82] The attempt to apply the utilitarian-sentimental

conception of work and at the same time to eliminate competition has

resulted in Russia in a ruthless despotism, on the one hand, and in a

degrading servitude, on the other.

A conception of work that means practically a return to barbarism

evidently suffers from some serious flaw. The man who wishes to be

at once modern and civilized will not oppose to the Baconian or

Rousseauistic one-sidedness a mere appeal to the past, but a more

accurate definition. Aristotle was, according to Bacon, the “vile

plaything of words.” As a matter of fact, the surest way to become the

vile plaything of words is, like both Bacon and Rousseau, to look on

visible and concrete objects as “real” and on words, in contrast with

these objects, as unreal. Words, especially abstract words, have such

an important relation to reality because they control the imagination

which in turn determines action and so “governs mankind.” The way to

escape from the tyranny of words is not to dismiss them as unreal in

favor of objects of sense, but to submit them to a searching Socratic

dialectic. The only way, for instance, not to be the dupe of the

general term “work” is to divide or “dichotomize” it Socratically and

so become aware of the different meanings of which it is susceptible.

The fallacies involved in a purely quantitative definition of work are

almost too gross to need refuting. As Mencius remarked long ago, it is

both proper and inevitable that the man who works with his mind should

hold sway over the man who works only with his hands. As a result of

the concentrated mental effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed

either in invention or else in organization and management, the common

laborer may to-day enjoy comforts that were out of the reach even of

the opulent only two or three generations ago. If the laborer wishes to

add to these comforts or even to keep them, he should not listen to the

agitator who seeks to stir up his envy of every form of superiority.

He should be the first to recognize that exceptional capacity should

receive exceptional rewards.

The laborer, to be sure, has a grievance: this grievance is that

those who have been set over him have concentrated so exclusively in

their mental working on the material order. The real problem is to

subordinate to some adequate end the enormous mass of machinery of

power and comfort that has been the fruit of working of the utilitarian

type; and here a specifically ethical type of working is needful. Now

this specifically ethical working has been associated traditionally

in the Occident with the doctrine of grace; for man to substitute his

work for that of God seemed to be subversive of humility. Yet thus to

emphasize God’s working led, I have tried to show, to an impossible

theological dilemma; so that men tended, in getting rid of the dilemma,

to get rid of the true work of the spirit in favor of a merely Baconian

working. The problem would seem to be to recover the truths of grace

in some individualistic form. We may be aided in this task by turning

for a moment to the Far-Eastern teacher who combined humility with the

ultimate degree of spiritual self-reliance. The word _karma_ (work)

has come to have in the Occident a sort of mystical glamour. But it

is well to remember that this word is employed by Buddha himself in

the most business-like fashion. The man who wishes, he says, to be a

carpenter must do the work of a carpenter; the man who wishes to be

a king must do the work of a king; the man who wishes to be a saint

must do the work of a saint. One simply passes, as one mounts in the

scale, from an outer to an inner working. The individual is to impose

progressively his ethical will, affirmed as an immediate fact of

consciousness, upon his outgoing desires. He is to perform this work of

the spirit with a view to his own happiness, or, what amounts to the

same thing in the eyes of the Buddhist, with a view to his own peace.

“By rousing himself,” says Buddha, “by strenuousness, by restraint and

control, the wise man may make for himself an island which no flood can

overwhelm.” The supreme contrast in this faith is always that between

the spiritually strenuous person and the spiritual idler.

Though probably no other teacher of the past has dealt with the idea

of work so thoroughly as Buddha, the Buddhist emphasis does not seem

just what we need to-day. Buddha was, like Christ, very otherworldly.

The work in which he was primarily interested was of the type that

leads to saintliness. It may show a lack of imagination on my part,

but I cannot imagine my contemporaries in the rôle of saints. Perhaps

no age was ever more lacking in otherworldliness or showed a greater

incomprehension of religion. We have converted Buddha into a sort

of heavy-eyed pessimistic dreamer, and, following Rousseau, have

sentimentalized the figure of Christ. It might be well, therefore,

for us to undertake something more within our capacity than religion.

In general, for one person who has even an inkling of the nature of

a genuinely religious working and of the strenuous peace at which

religion aims, at least a hundred persons can be found who can grasp

to some extent the type of work that has its fruition in the mediatory

or humanistic virtues. Now humanism must, like religion, rest on the

recognition, in some form or other, of the inner life, or, what amounts

to the same thing, on the opposition between a law of the spirit and a

law of the members. It must also, like religion, subordinate intellect

to the ethical will and so put its ultimate emphasis on humility. In

this matter of humility the Western humanist has something to learn, as

I have already hinted, from Confucian China.

Though religion and the best type of humanism are at one in stressing

humility, they diverge widely in their attitude towards the expansive

desires. In its pursuit of the otherworldly virtue of peace, religion

tends to renounce these desires completely, whereas humanism would

simply moderate and harmonize them with a view to living to the best

advantage in this world. As a result of his particular confusion of the

things of God and the things of Cæsar, the humanitarian would have us

set up peace as a primary good in the secular order. He hopes to secure

this peace by some form of machinery (such as a league of nations) or

else by an appeal to emotion. “Peace is my passion,” exclaimed the

expansive Thomas Jefferson. But the person who turns peace into a

passion is not entering upon the pathway of peace either within himself

or in the outer world. It is possible to show that the pacifist is not

only a materialist, but a very objectionable type of materialist. In

the name of the fairest of virtues, he is actually engaged in breaking

down ethical standards. It is a matter of common sense and everyday

experience that there can be no peace with the unrighteous and the

unrighteous always have been and are extremely numerous. As another

instance of the humanitarian confusion of values, one may cite the

assertion of Woodrow Wilson that a nation may be “too proud to fight.”

An individual may be too _humble_ to fight, but a nation that is too

proud to fight may, in a world like this, be too proud to survive as a

nation. The virtue that sums up all other virtues in the secular order

is, as every thinker worthy of the name has always seen, not peace but

justice. Now any one who deals positively with the idea of justice will

almost inevitably be led to define it: To every man according to his

works; and the adequacy of this definition will depend in turn on the

adequacy of one’s definition of work.

The humanitarians, I have pointed out, from Bacon down, are

extraordinarily superficial in their definition of work. Even when

they do not fall into the cruder quantitative fallacies, they conceive

of work in terms of the natural law and of the outer world and not in

terms of the inner life.[83] They do not take account of that form of

work which consists in the superimposition of the ethical will upon the

natural self and its expansive desires. The very notion of this form

of work has, I have said, tended to disappear with the decline of the

doctrine of grace.

If we grant, then, that what is needed just now is a revival of the

ethical will on the secular level, where it is felt as a will to

justice, rather than on the religious level, where it is felt as a will

to peace, and if we grant further that justice, positively defined,

consists in giving to every man according to his works, let us seek

to restore to the idea of work the elements that have been omitted

by the humanitarians. We may be aided in such a restoration by Greek

philosophy, even though we do not agree with the tendency of the

Socratic group to identify right reason and right will. The Platonic

definition of justice as doing one’s own work or minding one’s own

business has perhaps never been surpassed. It brings one straight back

to the truths of the inner life. Justice results when every part of a

man is performing its proper function and especially when his higher

self is performing its proper function of coördinating and controlling

the inferior parts of his nature. An echo of this Platonic conception

is found in the Senecan definition of justice: _Animus quodam modo se

habens._ Justice in the outer world must, in the last analysis, be only

a reflection of the harmony and proportionateness that have resulted in

certain individuals from the working of the spirit upon itself.

Aristotle’s view of justice has much in common with the Platonic

view. In defining justice he starts, not from society, but from the

individual who limits desires that are in themselves insatiable and

imposes upon them the law of measure. A State in which such individuals

are sufficiently numerous to set the tone is a just State. Justice,

whether retributive or distributive, must be proportionate in its

rewards and penalties, and it can be thus proportionate only by

taking account of the higher form of working. The disciplining of the

expansive desires to the law of measure which constitutes this higher

form of working must, to be effective, begin early and become habitual.

The necessary basis, therefore, of an ethical type of State is an

ethical type of education.

Aristotle makes not only justice but happiness depend on what he calls

“energizing according to virtue.” He finally carries his conception

of work from the humanistic to the religious level, from mediation

to meditation or the life of “vision,” defining God himself as pure

act. It has seemed to some that the activity the individual displays

in the life of vision is so disassociated from the activity that he

displays in his relations with his fellow men as to encourage the

ascetic excess of the Middle Ages. The altruist, indeed, would maintain

that both the Platonic and Aristotelian definitions of justice,

encouraging a man as they do to put his own work before the world’s

work, are selfish and anti-social. A man should renounce self and give

himself up to sympathy and service. But there is something, we should

remind the altruist, that the world needs even more than our service,

and that is our example. “Example,” as Burke says, “is the school

of mankind; it will learn at no other.” Now a man becomes exemplary

only as the result of either a religious or a humanistic working. The

man who works religiously helps the world, one is tempted to affirm,

by the very act of renouncing it. He sets his fellow men the most

important of all examples--that of unworldliness. If Buddha has dealt

profoundly with the form of work by which one becomes exemplary on the

religious level, Confucius has shown, even more adequately, perhaps,

than Aristotle, the benefits that accrue to society and civilization

from a humanistic working. Confucius has summed up his teaching in a

sentence: Loyalty to oneself and charity towards one’s neighbor. The

altruist might accept this formula provided he were allowed to give

the first place to the charity towards one’s neighbor. But to do so is

entirely un-Confucian. The individual must first of all look up to

something higher than either himself or his neighbor in order that he

may be worthy to be looked up to in turn. Of his ideal ruler, Shun,

Confucius says: “Shun was one who did nothing, yet governed well. For

what, in effect, did he do? Religiously self-observant, he sat gravely

on his throne, and that is all.” All that Confucius means to affirm by

this passage is the superiority of inner over outer action (of which,

as we learn from other passages, his monarch was also capable). Shun

was, in short, minding his own business in the Platonic sense, and

such was the persuasiveness of his example that others were led to do

likewise; whereas, with the present trend towards “social justice,” the

time is rapidly approaching when everybody will be minding everybody

else’s business. For the conscience that is felt as a still small voice

and that is the basis of real justice, we have substituted a social

conscience that operates rather through a megaphone. The busybody, for

the first time perhaps in the history of the world, has been taken at

his own estimate of himself. We are in fact, as some one remarked,

living in the Meddle Ages; inasmuch as the meddling is itself only an

outcome of our confused definition of justice, the cynic might suggest,

as an even more correct description of the time, the Muddle Ages.

Perhaps, indeed, the meddling and the muddling are not quite so

widespread as one is at times tempted to suppose. There are probably

still a few persons left who realize the importance of minding their

own business, even though not in the full Platonic or Confucian sense.

There is probably an element of exaggeration in a recent assertion

that to the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” the whole American

people had replied in an “ecstatic affirmative.” One should note in

passing the intolerable dilution of the principle of obligation that is

implied in extending to men indiscriminately what one owes to one’s own

brother. At all events, no small issues are involved in the question

whether one should start with an expansive eagerness to do something

for humanity or with loyalty to one’s self. There may be something

after all in the Confucian idea that if a man only sets himself right,

the rightness will extend to his family first of all, and finally in

widening circles to the whole community.

One’s definition of work and of justice in terms of work will be found

to be inseparably bound up with one’s definition of liberty. The only

true freedom is freedom to work. All the evidence goes to show that

there is no safety in the nature of things for the idler and that the

most perilous of all forms of idling is spiritual idling. The failure

to take account of the subtler forms of working is what vitiates

the attempts of the utilitarian to define liberty--for example, the

attempt of J. S. Mill. If a man is only careful not to injure his

fellow men, he should then, according to Mill, be free to cultivate

his idiosyncrasy. One cannot grant in the first place that any such

sharp division between the altruistic and the self-regarding elements

in human nature is possible; and even if one did grant it, one should

have to insist that the self-regarding virtues are the most important

even from the point of view of society; for it is only by the exercise

of these virtues that one becomes exemplary and so, as I have tried to

show, truly helpful to others.

If society should in its own interests encourage those who work with

their minds as compared with those who work with their hands, how much

more should it give recognition to those who are engaged in a genuinely

ethical working. It is in fact the quality of a man’s work that should

determine his place in the hierarchy that every civilized society

requires. In short, from the positive point of view, work is the only

justification of aristocracy. “By work,” says Buddha, “a man is noble,

by work he is an outcast.”[84] The principle, though sound, is not,

one must confess, altogether easy to apply. Though justice require

that every man receive according to the quantity and the quality of

his work, there is in this competition a manifest inequality from the

start. One man has an innate capacity that another cannot acquire by

any amount of effort. God, according to the Platonic myth, has mingled

lead with the nature of some and with the nature of others silver

and gold. Stress unduly the initial differences between men and one

will tend to fall into some system of caste, as Plato himself tends

to do, or else one will incline to fatalism, whether naturalistic or

predestinarian. On the other hand, deny these differences in favor of

some equalitarian theory and one runs counter to the most palpable

facts. Genuine justice seems to demand that men should be judged,

not by their intentions or their endeavors, but by their actual

performance; that in short the natural aristocrat, as Burke terms him,

should receive his due reward, whether one attribute his superiority,

with the man of science, to heredity, or, with the Christian, to grace,

or, with the Buddhist, to his past working.

One’s view of work and of the rewards that it deserves will determine

necessarily one’s attitude towards property. From the point of view

of civilization, it is of the highest moment that certain individuals

should in every community be relieved from the necessity of working

with their hands in order that they may engage in the higher forms of

working and so qualify for leadership. If the civilization is to be

genuine, it must have men of leisure in the full Aristotelian sense.

Those who in any particular community are allowed to enjoy property

that is not the fruit of their own outer and visible toil cannot,

therefore, afford to be idlers and parasites. An aristocratic or

leading class, however the aristocratic principle is conceived, must,

if it hopes in the long run to preserve its property and privileges,

be in some degree exemplary. It is only too clear that the members

of the French aristocracy of the Old Régime failed, in spite of many

honorable exceptions, to measure up to this test. Some have argued

from the revelations of recent writers like Colonel Repington and

Mrs. Asquith that the English aristocracy is also growing degenerate.

People will not consent in the long run to look up to those who are not

themselves looking up to something higher than their ordinary selves.

A leading class that has become Epicurean and self-indulgent is lost.

Above all it cannot afford to give the first place to material goods.

One may, indeed, lay down the principle that, if property as a means

to an end is the necessary basis of civilization, property as an

end in itself is materialism. In view of the natural insatiableness

of the human spirit, no example is more necessary than that of the

man who is setting limits to his desire for worldly possessions.

The only remedy for economic inequality, as Aristotle says, is “to

train the nobler sort of natures not to desire more”;[85] this remedy

is not in mechanical schemes for dividing up property; “for it is

not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be

equalized.”[86] The equalization of desire in the Aristotelian sense

requires on the part of individuals a genuinely ethical or humanistic

working. To proclaim equality on some basis that requires no such

working will result ironically. For example, this country committed

itself in the Declaration of Independence to the doctrine of natural

equality. The type of individualism that was thus encouraged has led to

monstrous inequalities and, with the decline of traditional standards,

to the rise of a raw plutocracy. A man who amasses a billion dollars

is scarcely exemplary in the Aristotelian sense, even though he then

proceeds to lay out half a billion upon philanthropy. The remedy for

such a failure of the man at the top to curb his desires does not lie,

as the agitator would have us believe, in inflaming the desires of the

man at the bottom; nor again in substituting for real justice some

phantasmagoria of social justice. As a result of such a substitution,

one will presently be turning from the punishment of the individual

offender to an attack on the institution of property itself; and a

war on capital will speedily degenerate, as it always has in the

past, into a war on thrift and industry in favor of laziness and

incompetence, and finally into schemes of confiscation that profess

to be idealistic and are in fact subversive of common honesty. Above

all, social justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total

suppression of competition. Without competition it is impossible that

the ends of true justice should be fulfilled--namely, that every man

should receive according to his works. The principle of competition

is, as Hesiod pointed out long ago, built into the very roots of the

world;[87] there is something in the nature of things that calls for a

real victory and a real defeat. Competition is necessary to rouse man

from his native indolence; without it life loses its zest and savor.

Only, as Hesiod goes on to say, there are two types of competition--the

one that leads to bloody war and the other that is the mother of

enterprise and high achievement. He does not perhaps make as clear as

he might how one may have the sound rivalry and, at the same time,

avoid the type that degenerates into pernicious strife. But surely

the reply to this question is found in such sentences of Aristotle as

those I have just been quoting. The remedy for the evils of competition

is found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and the

successful, and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the

underdog. The mood of unrest and insurgency is so rife to-day as to

suggest that our leaders, instead of thus controlling themselves, are

guilty of an extreme psychic unrestraint.

One should note a certain confusion on the part of the advocates of

social justice as to the nature of capital. Dr. Johnson is reported to

have said at the sale of Thrale’s brewery: “We are not here to sell a

parcel of boilers and vats, but the potentiality of growing rich beyond

the dreams of avarice.” The realizing of the potentiality depended, of

course, on the ability of the management, and this ability was not only

a part, but the essential part, of the capital of the brewery. It is

being assumed at present that the capital invested in our railways may

be measured by what one may term their junk value. As a result of this

and similar fallacies, both the owners and managers of the railways

have been so treated of recent years as to discourage enterprise in

this field of industry. It seems easy to convince the public that the

railways are suffering from watered stock when what they are really

suffering from is watered labor. If our apostles of service and social

justice have their way, that considerable portion of the savings of

the middle class that is now invested in the railways, either directly

or indirectly through the insurance companies and savings banks, may

undergo partial or total confiscation.

Every form of social justice, indeed, tends to confiscation and

confiscation, when practised on a large scale, undermines moral

standards and, in so far, substitutes for real justice the law of

cunning and the law of force. To be on one’s guard against these perils

of social justice, one needs that coöperation of keen analysis and

imagination that can alone produce genuine vision; whereas a great

number of persons are weak in analysis, and idyllic rather than ethical

in their imagining. Not being able, as a result, to get at underlying

causes, they are prone to doctor symptoms and to resort to what Burke

calls “tricking short-cuts, and little fallacious facilities.” The

apparent good turns out to be evil in its secondary consequences, and

the apparent evil turns out to be the necessary condition of some

good. Things often change their aspect, not once but several times,

when thus traced in their ultimate effects. The ordinary laboring man,

for instance, may not be able to see that the “levy upon capital,”

for which he is urged to vote in the name of social justice, will

finally recoil upon himself. It is not yet clear that it is going to

be possible to combine universal suffrage with the degree of safety

for the institution of property that genuine justice and genuine

civilization both require. Taxation without representation was the main

grievance of the American revolutionists; but that is precisely what an

important section of the community has to submit to to-day. Can those

who tax in the name of the sovereign people be counted on to tax more

equitably than those who alleged the royal prerogative?

Among all the forms of dishonesty that assume the idealistic mask,

perhaps none is more diabolically effective in unsettling the bases of

civilized life than those that involve a tampering with the monetary

standard. If property stands for work in some sense or other of the

word, and if money is the conventional symbol of property, the ends of

justice tend to be subverted if this symbol fluctuates wildly; thrift

and foresight become meaningless; no man can be sure that he will

receive according to his works. Inflation of the currency amounts in

practice to an odious form of confiscation, whether it is supposed, as

in Germany, to promote national interests or, as in Russia, to advance

internationalism. The radical, it has been pointed out, often errs in

confounding money with property and in supposing that a division of

money would be the same as a division of actual wealth. Though money is

only a conventional token, the nature of this token is, nevertheless,

not a matter of indifference. The reason for the gold standard is

simple: gold involves in its production an amount of work equal

approximately to the work involved in producing the various commodities

for which it may be exchanged. If for any reason gold is produced more

abundantly and with less effort, or if the reverse takes place, the

monetary standard fluctuates; and this is an evil, but a trifling evil

(human nature being what it is), compared with that which results from

the substitution for gold of paper or some other medium of exchange

that when, tested in terms of work, has little intrinsic value.

The modern man is as a matter of fact being whipsawed between two

contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, he is being involved

nationally and internationally in an ever more complex network of

material relationships which rest in turn on an extraordinarily

delicate mechanism of credit and exchange. On the other hand, the

various idealistic schemes that are being put forward as a substitute

for common honesty, or, again, the schemes, whether economic or

political, that are openly imperialistic, are undermining the

confidence that is the necessary basis of credit and exchange: so that

the whole elaborate structure that has been reared by the industrial

revolution is in danger of collapse. The political economists who

promoted this revolution were, according to Carlyle, in favor of making

cash payment the sole nexus between man and man. Cash payment, however,

cannot serve as a nexus between men who are spiritually centrifugal. In

various parts of eastern Europe, men have already become so suspicious

of cash payment that they have been forced to revert in their economic

contacts to barter.

The evils I have been enumerating derive in no small degree from

the one-sided notion of work that has prevailed in the utilitarian

movement. The interests of property itself require that at least some

members of a community should work in a very different sense, that

they should limit in short their own acquisitive instincts and so

serve society by setting it a good example. It does not follow that

the best way to secure such work from a man is to urge upon him the

interests of society. Leslie Stephen, himself a utilitarian, says that

“the doctrine that each man can only care for his own happiness is

terribly plausible, and fits in admirably with individualism.” It does

indeed; so much so that the wisest way of reaching the individual may

be to point out to him, not how his conduct will affect the happiness

of others, but how it will affect his own happiness. Only in that case

one must be careful to define happiness, not like the utilitarian and

the Epicurean, in terms of pleasure, but like an Aristotle or a Buddha,

in terms of work. One may apply this method not merely to the reining

in of the acquisitive instincts, but to the control of the instinct

of sex. Sexual unrestraint has wrought and is wreaking fearful havoc

to society. The resultant diseases are, even more than alcoholism, a

menace to the future of the white race. To approach the subject from

another angle, there is an undoubted connection between a certain type

of centrifugal and self-indulgent individualism and an unduly declining

birth-rate. The French and also the Americans of native descent are,

if we are to trust statistics, in danger of withering from the earth.

Where the population is increasing, it is, we are told, at the expense

of quality. The stocks to which the past has looked for its leaders are

dying out and the inferior or even degenerate breeds are multiplying.

The humanitarian remedies for evils of this order seem especially

doubtful. Such schemes for regulating the relations of sex as have

been put forward by the believers in eugenics are likely to lead to

a tyranny at once grotesque and ineffectual. On the other hand, the

evidence is slight that the individual can be induced to control

himself on such general grounds as the good of country or the good of

humanity or the good of the white race menaced by “the rising tide

of color.” Religion may be right after all in dealing with the whole

question of sex in terms of the inner life. According to a French

moralist, man is made up in his natural self of a little vanity and

a little voluptuousness. The Christian would substitute chastity and

humility. Though the humanist would moderate rather than deny entirely

the most imperious form of the _libido sentiendi_, he agrees with the

Christian in starting with the struggle between vital impulse and

vital control. He would have the individual exercise the control not

primarily for the good of society, but for his own good. Nowhere

indeed is the opposition between pleasure and happiness more visible

than in matters of sex.

The more one considers our modern emancipation, the more it becomes

clear that it has been at the expense of what I have termed the

centripetal element in liberty; and without this centripetal element or

ethical will any genuine working of the spirit becomes impossible. How,

one may ask, have men been able to deceive themselves as to the gravity

of the error? One way in which they have deceived themselves, it may

be replied, has been to offer work according to the natural law as a

substitute for work according to the human law. As good an example as

any is that of Faust who is supposed to make up for moral delinquencies

by reclaiming marshlands from the sea. Carlyle, who professes to be a

follower of Goethe, is even more defective in his idea of work. Instead

of the Socratic “Know thyself,” he would adopt as his gospel: “Know thy

work and do it.”[88] Thus to disparage the effort at self-knowledge

because man, as Carlyle goes on to say, is in the abstract and

metaphysical sense unknowable, is simply, under existing conditions, to

discredit the inner life in favor of a mere outer working. Work when

conceived in this one-sided fashion degenerates into mere efficiency.

Carlyle, as a matter of fact, exalts not only the efficiency of the

“captain of industry” (a phrase that he apparently originated), but the

military efficiency of a Frederick the Great or even of a Dr. Francia.

In spite of his desperate efforts to prove to himself and others the

contrary, he, therefore, tends in his philosophy to be imperialistic

rather than genuinely ethical. His “hero” is at the very least a first

cousin of the Nietzschean superman; they both have an authentic descent

from the “original genius” of the eighteenth century.

A point worth considering is the position not merely of the “captain”

but of the private in the modern army of industry. It is true that,

like the rest of us, this private must find his happiness in work or

not at all. One may, however, raise the question whether he may be

expected to find his happiness in the type of efficiency that has

been developed by the industrial revolution. This efficiency has been

achieved by an endless subdivision of effort until the individual

worker has tended to become a mere cog in a gigantic machine. He works

with only an infinitesimal portion of himself. At times, indeed, he

can scarcely be said to work at all; the machine does the working and

seems to lead a less automatic life than the person who tends it. A

workman in one of Henry Ford’s factories is reported to have replied,

when asked his name, that he was “bolt No. 29.” A multitude of men are

thus mechanized in order that the captain of industry may be “vital”

and “dynamic,” or, what amounts to the same thing as the words are now

used, may live in a state of psychic unrestraint. For one may affirm

with some confidence that a man who thinks it worth while to pile up an

income said to be greater than that of J. D. Rockefeller is not engaged

in a very energetic humanistic or religious working. If the ordinary

industrial private follows the example of the “captain” and sets out

to be “vital” and “dynamic” in his turn, either in his own person or

through his unions and their leaders, the result will be chaos; for he

will thus disturb the nice adjustment of parts on which the successful

functioning of the whole mechanism depends.

I am not, indeed, affirming that the multiplication of machines is an

unmixed evil. This multiplication has made it possible for one man to

do work that would formerly have required a dozen or even a hundred

men, and so has lifted a load of drudgery from the shoulders of many

and opened up to them the opportunities of leisure. “No man,” says

Aristotle, “can practise virtue who is living the life of a mechanic

or laborer.” But the laborer now has opportunities such as have never

before existed to become something more. Unfortunately, as we all

know, he is not using his relief from drudgery to enjoy leisure in

the Aristotelian sense, but to seek amusements, in which he is almost

as much subordinated to machines as he is in his working moments

(automobiles, phonographs, moving pictures and the like). Perhaps the

fault is not so much in the laborer himself as in the pattern that is

being offered him by the man “higher up.”

The very unexemplary type of individualism I have been discussing can

be shown to derive not only from the utilitarian conception of life in

general, but from the political economy of the school of Adam Smith

in particular. Let the State stand aside, says Adam Smith, and give

the individual free swing (_laisser faire_). He will not abuse this

freedom, for he will be guided by an enlightened self-interest. Now the

doctrine of enlightened self-interest is not in itself superficial. It

has been held by really profound thinkers like Aristotle and Buddha.

But the self that these thinkers have in mind is not the self that

makes the pursuit of wealth its first aim, but the ethical self that

exercises control over this acquisitive self. Leave the acquisitive

self without this control and the right kind of competition will

degenerate into the wrong kind, the ruthless kind which was actually

encouraged by the Manchester School of economics and in which mill

operatives become mere “cannon-fodder” in the industrial warfare.

Nor will competition of this sort have a sufficient counterpoise in

sympathy or altruism. The efficiency of sympathy as a substitute

for the ethical will is at all events the crucial issue in this

whole movement. Everything will be found to hinge ultimately on this

point in our current gospel of “service,” a gospel in which most men

seem to believe as unquestioningly nowadays as they once did in the

Trinity. Yet the foundations of this gospel can be shown, on strictly

psychological grounds, to be highly precarious.

In the first place the idea of “service” as now understood is not

Christian. The Christian serves not man but God, and this service, as

we learn from the Prayer Book, is “perfect freedom.” Service in the

humanitarian sense has, on the other hand, important points of contact

with Stoicism. The Stoic sought, like the humanitarian, to regulate his

conduct with reference to the general welfare of mankind. Important

differences need, however, to be noted between the humanitarian and the

Stoic. The Stoic did not hold at all or held only in very rudimentary

form the doctrine of progress; he did not think of men in the mass

as moving forward almost automatically towards “a far-off divine

event.” Progress of this automatic type, when subjected to severe

psychological scrutiny, will be found to resolve itself either into

a delight in change for its own sake or a delight in change for the

sake of power and comfort. The confusion between moral and material

progress that the utilitarian has promoted can be shown to involve a

tampering with general terms similar to that which I have already noted

in speaking of Rousseau and the sentimentalists. Disraeli says that

the English-speaking peoples have been unable to distinguish between

comfort and civilization. The word comfort itself is an excellent

example of the illegitimate transfer of a general term from one scheme

of values to another. “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be

comforted.” The American of the present day wishes to get his comfort

without any preliminary mourning.

As a result of the confusion between moral and material progress the

modern man has developed an inordinate confidence in organization and

efficiency and in general in machinery as a means for the attainment of

ethical ends. If he is told that civilization is in danger, his first

instinct is to appoint a committee to save civilization. The League of

Nations is itself only a super-committee.

Progress in the utilitarian sense is, however, an even less essential

element in the idealistic creed than sympathy. In this matter of

sympathy one must note again a difference between the Stoic and the

humanitarian. If, on the one hand, the Stoic had less confidence in

machinery than the humanitarian, he was, on the other hand, less

emotionally expansive. Interesting questions of this kind come up, as

I have already noted, in dealing with Shaftesbury and his influence.

The Stoical derivation of one whole side of Shaftesbury’s philosophy

is so manifest that some have sought to present him as a pure disciple

of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. But the fact remains that the Stoics

were not sentimentalists and that Shaftesbury can be shown to be a

main source of sentimentalism in England and even more perhaps in

Germany. The right reason of the Stoics is indeed already taking on

an emotional coloring in an English precursor of Shaftesbury like

Cumberland. In their tendency to identify happiness and pleasure the

utilitarians remind us less of the Stoics than of the Epicureans. The

Epicurean “ataraxy,” however, did not any more than the Stoic “apathy”

encourage effusiveness; neither Stoic nor Epicurean was prone to “let

his feelings run in soft luxurious flow” and then call the result

“virtue.” Of Rousseau’s exaltation of impulsive pity as a sufficient

offset to egoistic impulse and the source of all the other virtues, I

have already spoken. Of almost equal importance is Hume’s assertion,

professedly on strictly psychological grounds, of an element of

sympathy in the natural man, anterior to reason and independent of

self-love. Sympathy becomes in turn the basis of Hume’s definition

of justice. The just man for Hume is not the man who minds his own

business in the Platonic sense, but the altruist.[89]

The crucial question, of course, is not whether a man in his

spontaneous and natural self will sympathize with another’s pleasure,

but whether he will sympathize with another’s pain,[90] at least to

a degree that will be an adequate counterpoise to egoistic impulse.

The confidence of the eighteenth-century moralist on this point is

already beginning to seem to us singularly naïve. Rousseau, it will be

remembered, not only attempts to rear the whole edifice of ethics on

the basis of man’s innate pitifulness, but asserts that this quality

increases in almost direct ratio as one descends in the social scale

and so gets closer to “nature.” When asked why, if the plain people

were so pitiful, they crowded eagerly to see men broken on the wheel,

he replied that pity is such a delicious emotion that they did not wish

to miss any opportunity of experiencing it! It was no doubt for this

reason that Chateaubriand’s house porter, as he narrates, regretted

Robespierre and the spectacles in the Place Louis XV, where women

mounted the guillotine who had “necks as white as chicken’s flesh.”

For a similar reason doubtless the Spanish populace frequents the

bull-ring and the ancient Roman populace flocked to the gladiatorial

arena. The truth is that the psychology of the plain people in matters

of this kind is not ethical at all, but Epicurean. It is pleasant, as

the Epicurean Lucretius pointed out some time ago, to witness another’s

dire peril of shipwreck from a safe position on the shore. In much

the same way, the misery of the world, when properly dished up in the

headlines, merely serves to give the ordinary citizen an agreeable

fillip at his breakfast table. With the help of the sensational

press, the men of to-day are indeed constantly lined up on the shore,

witnessing an endless series of shipwrecks.

The outstanding trait, in short, of a populace that is “natural” in

Rousseau’s sense is its irresponsible quest of thrills. The success of

the whole attempt to base ethics directly on the emotions has been due

in no small measure to the fact that it seemed to offer an equivalent,

not only for Christian charity, but for grace, a grace that did not,

like the old variety, involve humility and the conviction of sin;

inasmuch as the man who transgresses does so, not through any survival

of the “old Adam” in him, but because of society and its institutions.

The man who has not fallen from the grace of nature into social

sophistication is spontaneously virtuous. “Heaven’s rich instincts in

him grew,” says Lowell of a beautiful soul of this kind, “as effortless

as woodland nooks send violets up and paint them blue.” The difference

between the new and the old grace is here obvious: the old grace

involved a working, even though the recipient of it maintained that not

he but God did the working. The fact of the working was in any case

indubitable, so much so that it often imposed a severe and even ascetic

control upon the natural man. Goodness by the grace of nature, on the

other hand, does not require on the part of the recipient anything more

than a “wise passiveness.”

Another striking contrast between Christian love and grace and

the parody of these doctrines by the Rousseauist should be noted.

The love and grace of the Christian lead to sharp exclusions

and discriminations; whereas the Rousseauist tends to blur all

distinctions in pantheistic revery. Contrast the “vision” of a Dante,

for example, with its clear-cut scale of moral values from the peak

of heaven to the pit of hell with the “vision” of a Walt Whitman in

which not merely men and women, good, bad, and indifferent, but “elder,

mullein, and poke-weed” are all viewed on the same level in virtue

of what the pantheist calls love. Dante speaks of the “highest love”

that built the walls of hell. We shudder at the mediæval grimness. The

opposite and more dangerous extreme is to lavish what Bossuet calls a

“murderous pity” upon human nature and, under cover of promoting love,

to be ready to subvert justice.

An unselective love joined to a “wise passiveness” and a return to

“nature” might, indeed, be justified if, as their votaries maintain,

they tend to draw men to a common centre; but it can be shown that this

communion is achieved, not in the real world, but in dreamland. Let

us consider from this point of view the “simple life” that Rousseau

and other primitivists have proposed as a remedy for the luxury and

self-indulgence that have tended to increase with the breakdown of

traditional standards. True simplicity of life must, it would seem, be

attained by the limitation of desire; whereas the luxurious life is one

in which, as Montesquieu says, “the desires have become immense.” Now

the “nature” of the primitivist can be shown to be only a nostalgia

of the romantic imagination so that the attempt to return to it not

only expands desire instead of limiting it, but makes it infinite and

indeterminate. Rousseau speaks of that “devouring but barren fire

with which from my childhood up I have felt myself vainly consumed.”

Chateaubriand makes his René actually flee from European civilization

to the American wilderness and take an Indian bride. René speaks

for Chateaubriand himself when he writes to her: “There issue forth

from this heart flames ... which might devour creation without being

satisfied.” Chateaubriand posed as the champion of Christianity. Yet

nothing is more certain than that Christian love makes for peace and

communion, whereas nostalgic “love” of the type Chateaubriand has just

described makes for restlessness and solitude. The ironical contrast

between the ideal and the real appears even more clearly, perhaps,

in Shelley than in Chateaubriand, inasmuch as Shelley did not, like

Chateaubriand, pose as a traditionalist, but came out uncompromisingly

for the new ethics. “The great secret of morals,” he says, “is love.” A

characteristic note of his poetry, on the other hand, perhaps the most

characteristic note is that of an acute spiritual isolation.

Many of the partisans of the new liberty, a liberty based, not upon

work (in the sense of inner control), but upon “love” in the sense

of expansive emotion, were severely disillusioned by the French

Revolution. Chateaubriand is himself one of the best types of the

disillusioned Rousseauist. In his “Essay on Revolutions” he still looks

upon romantic nostalgia as the true badge of the superior spirit,

though he admits that the aspiration towards the “infinite” that it

inspires is especially prevalent in epochs of moral decline. As a

result of this nostalgia, at all events, man is never satisfied with

what he has. He shatters one political form after another from sheer

satiety and ennui. The movement of mankind is not steadily forward

in a straight line, as the apostles of perfectibility maintain, but

circular, like that of a squirrel in a cage. From the point of view of

the lover of liberty society is hopeless. “If it is political truth we

are looking for, it is easy to find. Here a despotic minister gags me

and casts me into the depths of a dungeon where I remain for twenty

years without knowing why: having escaped from the Bastille, I plunge

indignantly into democracy; an anthropophagus awaits me there at the

foot of the guillotine.” As we should say nowadays, overthrow the Czar

and the Bolshevist has you by the throat.

Is there, then, no such thing as liberty? “Yes, there is a delicious,

a celestial liberty, that of nature.” Let a man betake himself to

the “religious forest.” In very similar fashion, Coleridge, after

discovering that the French Revolution, theoretically a crusade for

universal brotherhood, was imperialistic in its essence, abandoned hope

of finding liberty among men. If a man wishes to find true liberty, he

says in substance, let him go out and listen to what the wild waves

are saying. Liberty is not to be found in any human form. But if one

“shoots his being through earth, sea, and air” and “possesses all

things with intensest love,” liberty will be revealed to him.[91]

It may be, however, that a man should look for true liberty neither

in society nor in nature, but in himself--his ethical self; and the

ethical self is experienced, not as an expansive emotion, but as an

inner control. Liberty is associated, therefore, not primarily with

“love,” but with work. “It is work,” as Buddha says, and not love,

as the Western sentimentalist would have it, “that makes the world

go round.”[92] The man who works ethically grows more at one with

himself and at the same time tends to enter into communion, not indeed

with mankind at large, but with those who are submitting to a similar

ethical discipline, and so are, in Confucian phrase, moving towards

the “universal centre.” So that even from the point of view of the

man who desires love, the great secret of morals is work. Love is the

fulfilment of the law and not, as the sentimentalist would have us

believe, a substitute for it. The psychological truth at the basis of

the Christian doctrine of charity is that men cannot come together

expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The attempt to

do so results, as we have seen in the case of a Rousseau and a Shelley,

in an extreme psychic isolation.

Rousseau says that he founded “an indomitable spirit of liberty” on an

“indolence that is beyond belief.” True liberty, it is hardly necessary

to say, cannot be founded on indolence; it is something that must be

won by high-handed struggle, a struggle that takes place primarily in

oneself and not in the outer world. Possibly the ultimate distinction

between the true and the false liberal, as I have suggested elsewhere,

is that between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer. If true

liberty is to survive, it is important that ethical idling should

not usurp the credit due only to ethical effort. This usurpation

takes place if we accept the programme of those who would substitute

expansive emotion for the activity of the higher will. In the real

world, as I have tried to show, the results of an expansion of this

kind are not fraternal but imperialistic.

The confusion between true and false liberals, between the ethically

strenuous and the ethically indolent, has also been promoted by the

doctrine of natural rights. A liberty that is asserted as an abstract

right, something anterior to the fulfilment of any definite obligation,

will always, so far as the inner life is concerned, be a lazy liberty.

From this point of view, all other “natural” rights are in a way summed

up in the title of a book written by a grandson of Karl Marx: “The

Right to Idleness.” We have heard asserted in our own time the abstract

right of whole populations to self-determination as something anterior

to their degree of moral development. To put forward a supposed right

of this kind as a part of a programme for world peace is to sink to the

ultimate depth of humanitarian self-deception.

To be sure, the dogma of natural rights, though it still controls the

popular imagination, has been disavowed by the political theorists

themselves. Unfortunately, some of these theorists, while disavowing

the dogma, have retained the underlying fallacy. For example, Mr.

Harold J. Laski says that, though we no longer believe in the rights of

man in any abstract and metaphysical sense, we still accept them as a

convenient expression of the truth that what men want corresponds in

a rough way to what they need.[93] The first and very elementary step

in any effective knowledge of human nature, a step that “liberals” of

the type of Mr. Laski have failed to take, is the discovery of the lack

of coincidence between man’s wants and his needs. What man needs, if

we are to believe the Lord’s Prayer, is bread and wisdom. What man, at

least Roman man, wanted about the time this prayer was uttered, was

bread and the circus. The gap between man’s wants and his needs has not

diminished greatly, if at all, since Roman times. Whatever we may think

of Christian theology, the Christian insight remains true that man

suffers from a divided will: he needs to follow the law of the spirit

and wants to follow the law of the members, so that he is a thoroughly

paradoxical creature, for the most part at war with his own happiness.

Our endeavor at the present time, I have said, should be to deal with

the law of the spirit positively and so be able to meet on their own

ground those who have professed to be positive and are not. Let us take

a glance from this point of view at the professional philosophers.

Hume, for example, set up as a pure positivist: he was in favor of

getting rid of all apriorism and planting himself on what Bergson calls

the “immediate data of consciousness.” Strictly speaking, indeed,

mere rationalism died with Hume. Unfortunately, Kant galvanized the

corpse. His “pure reason” does not, as the reason of Descartes and the

other great system-builders of the seventeenth century was supposed

to do, give reality, but only empty categories. In opposition to

this pure reason Kant sets up a practical reason that is led to make

certain affirmations that cannot be shown to correspond with the

“thing-in-itself.” By the divorce that is thus established between

practice and reality, the way is opened for pragmatism which, instead

of testing utility by truth, would test truth by utility; likewise for

the closely allied theory of “useful fiction” and other philosophical

vagaries of recent times.

Let us return from the insubstantial transcendence of Kant to Hume and

his claim to be purely experimental. This claim cannot be allowed for

two reasons: first, as I have already remarked, he asserts something

that cannot be experimentally established--namely, an element of

spontaneous sympathy in the natural man, strong enough to cope unaided

with egoistic impulse. Secondly, he fails to assert something that is,

nevertheless, one of the “immediate data of consciousness”--namely,

an ethical will that is felt as a power of control over the natural

man and his expansive desires. Deny this ethical will and the inner

life disappears; assert it and one may dispense with numerous other

assertions, or at least give them minor emphasis. Many other things

are true, no doubt, in addition to what one may affirm positively; and

“extra-beliefs” are in any case inevitable. It is desirable, however,

under existing circumstances, to get at humanistic or religious truth

with the minimum of metaphysical or theological complications. It is

not even clear that, in order to preserve the integrity of the inner

life, one needs to set up a world of entities, essences, or “ideas”

above the flux. Much of the loftiest spirituality of the Occident has

been associated with this Platonic idealism. On the other hand, the

early Buddhists saw in a somewhat similar doctrine in India an obstacle

rather than an aid to the achievement of the fruits of religion.

Kant, again, has from a strictly experimental point of view, gone too

far in asserting “God, freedom, immortality”; and at the same time,

from another point of view, he has not gone far enough, for the freedom

of his “categorical imperative” is primarily a freedom to do, and not,

like that of the ethical will, a freedom to refrain from doing. The

first step surely is to plant oneself on the psychological fact of an

opposition between a law of the spirit and a law of the members, a

living and present fact that one neglects at one’s peril in favor of

what may seem superficially more useful and agreeable. Some persons, it

may be urged, are conscious of no such opposition in themselves. Some

persons are also color-blind, and spiritual vision is subject to even

more infirmities than physical vision.

The higher will in the dualism I have been sketching has, as I

have tried to show, been very much bound up historically with the

doctrine of grace and has tended to be obscured with the decline of

this doctrine. It would be possible to go through the chief modern

philosophers one after the other from Descartes down and show that they

are least satisfactory in their treatment of the will.[94] Any one who

wishes to recover the true dualism must begin by exalting the ethical

will to the first place. Any attempt to give the primacy to “reason” in

any sense of the word will result in the loss of humility and lead to

a revival, in some form, of the Stoical error. One must in this matter

not only side with the Christian against the Stoic, but in general

with the Asiatic against the European intellectual. It does not follow

because one gives the first place to will that one is to identify it

with the absolute or, like Schopenhauer, with the “thing-in-itself”;

for this is to fall from positive psychological observation into

metaphysics; nor, because one insists that intellect is, as compared

with will, secondary, need one conclude with Wordsworth and other

romantic obscurantists that it is therefore “false.”

To give the first place to the higher will is only another way of

declaring that life is an act of faith. One may discover on positive

grounds a deep meaning in the old Christian tenet that we do not know

in order that we may believe, but we believe in order that we may know.

What follows almost inevitably when the intellect ceases to be the

servant of the higher will and sets up as an independent power is a

lapse into the metaphysical illusion--the illusion of having confined

the ocean in a cup. The most familiar form of this illusion in recent

times is that of the pure mechanist or determinist. If the determinist

is told in the words of the poet that “our wills are ours, we know not

how; our wills are ours to make them thine,” he answers in substance

that our wills are not ours and that he knows how. But his knowledge

on this point is only a conceit of knowledge. He is trying with finite

faculties to grasp factors that are at bottom infinite, or, what

amounts to the same thing, trying to subject the higher element in

human nature to the lower. The proper reply to the determinist is not

to appeal to some dogma or other, but to experience. The decisive word

here has been uttered by Dr. Johnson, who has claims to be regarded

as the most sensible person of recent times: “All theory,” he says,

“is against the freedom of the will, all experience for it.” Plant

oneself firmly on this fact of experience and the way is open at one

essential point for a return to common sense. We escape at once from

the vast web of intellectual and emotional sophistry in which the

naturalistic moralists have sought to enmesh us. The answer to the

enigma of life, so far as there is any, is not for the man who sets up

some metaphysical theory, but for the man who, in some sense or other

of the word, acts. Now to act according to the ethical will is, so far

as the natural man is concerned, to pull back, limit, and select. This

supremely human act of selection the rationalistic naturalist would

turn over to physical nature. The emotional naturalist, refusing to be

mechanized along either Cartesian or Darwinian lines, emphasizes his

vital uniqueness, his spontaneous and temperamental “me,” and its right

to get itself uttered. The natural will that is thus released from

control is conceived by Nietzsche as a will to power, and this would

seem to have some relation to the facts. On the other hand, the notion

of a Rousseau or a Whitman, that “liberty” of this type is compatible

with fraternity, is very far from being experimental.

A French writer, M. Léon Daudet, has won a certain notoriety by

applying to the nineteenth century the epithet “stupid.” If the century

deserves the epithet at all, it is surely because of the aspect of it

that I have just been discussing. The determinist tends to mechanize

man and deny him genuine moral choice. The partisans of romantic

spontaneity from Rousseau to Bergson have hoped to escape from this

naturalistic fatalism by setting up some cosmic urge or _élan vital_

as a substitute for moral effort. Yet a multitude of men during the

past century, who acquiesced in either one or the other of these two

main forms of ethical passiveness, held at the same time a firm faith

in “progress.” They were drifting, to be sure, but drifting towards

a “far-off divine event,” usually conceived as a paradise of peace

and brotherhood. But if it is a question of drifting, there is only

one direction in which one can drift and that is towards barbarism.

Civilization is something that must be deliberately willed; it is

not something that gushes up spontaneously from the depths of the

unconscious. Furthermore, it is something that must be willed first

of all by the individual in his own heart. Men who have thus willed

civilization have never been any too numerous; so that civilization

always has been and, in the very nature of the case, always must remain

something precarious. In the words of Rivarol, barbarism is always as

close to the most refined civilization as rust is to the most highly

polished steel.

As a result of the denial or dissimulation of the forms of inner action

on which civilization finally depends, the naturalistic era in which

we are living has been especially rich in dubious moralists, from

the “beautiful souls” of the eighteenth century to the Freudians and

behaviorists of our own day. If the behaviorist deserves censure for

seeing only matter and material causes, the tendency that appears in

Berkeleyan idealists and, in much cruder form, in the exponents of

various brands of “new thought,” to deny matter in favor of what they

conceive to be spirit is also open to grave objection. As a result of

this denial, they tend to lose their sense of the reality of the “civil

war in the cave,” and so to fall into materialism from the other side.

The Freudian corruption of ethics illustrates interestingly another

main naturalistic fallacy. Because outer and mechanical repression of

desire may work injury, it is insinuated that the repression of desire

is bad _per se_. If one says that what is needed is not outer control

but inner control, even philosophers of some standing will reply that

inner control or the ethical will is only the brake on personality;

and that a vehicle cannot, after all, be propelled by its brake. The

metaphor, however, is utterly misleading; the ethical will is nothing

external and mechanical like a brake. The man who imposes this will

upon the outgoing desires is moving away from what is peripheral in

himself to what is central, to what is indeed at the very centre. The

humanist would not go beyond disciplining the “lusts” of the natural

man to the law of measure. However, if one goes still further and

“dies” entirely to the natural self and its impulses, what follows, if

we are to believe the great religious teachers, is not mere emptiness,

but the peace that passeth understanding.

The man who does not impose either religious or humanistic control upon

his ordinary self does not usually avow that he is a mere materialist.

The ethical problem would be comparatively simple if he did. The

egocentric individualist is, however, prone to give fine names to

his own unrestraint. As Plato says, he will call insolence breeding,

anarchy liberty, and waste magnificence; and may even go to the point

of deifying his own impulses. There are times when one must reply in

the affirmative to the question of Virgil “whether each man’s god is

but his own fell desire.” There is a sense in which one must agree with

the scoffer that an honest God is the noblest work of man. We recognize

readily that the God whom the Kaiser and many Germans worshipped

during the War was only a projection into the religious realm of their

own will to power. We are loath, however, to admit any equivalent of

this imperialistic error in the champions of democracy. And yet it is

not difficult to point out such an equivalent, for example, in the

humanitarian illusionist, Victor Hugo. Monckton Milnes relates that

when he called on Hugo at Paris, “he was shown into a large room, with

women and men seated in chairs against the walls, and Hugo at one end

throned. No one spoke. At last Hugo raised his voice solemnly and

said: ‘Quant à moi, je crois en Dieu.’ Silence followed. Then a woman

responded as if in deep meditation: ‘Chose sublime! un Dieu qui croit

en Dieu.’”[95] The sublimity diminishes somewhat when one observes to

what an extent the God in whom Hugo believes reflects his ordinary self

so that he is thus enabled to worship this self on a sort of cosmic

scale. A man also frequently calls what is at bottom only an hypostasis

of his ordinary self in its dominant desire either progress or

justice. Thus Mr. Samuel Gompers complained that the New York Assembly

of 1919 did not pass a single “progressive or forward-looking act.” We

all know what this means. The far-off divine event towards which the

whole creation moves is for Mr. Gompers the domination of the laboring

class, with the understanding that the laboring class itself is to be

dominated by Mr. Gompers or his kind. As a result of the cowardice of

our politicians, this more or less divine event has at times not seemed

so far off as one might wish. The attempt to bestow the word justice on

personal or class interests is too familiar to need illustration.

We are dealing here with the most ancient and still the most successful

form of camouflage. During the War, the French did not fail to quote

a passage of Tacitus to the general effect that the Germans give fine

names to what is at bottom only their own lawlessness and love of

plunder. But there is in this trait nothing specifically German. The

barbaric Briton, the same Tacitus narrates, complained of his Roman

conquerors that “they make a desolation and call it peace.” This human

proclivity, though universal, is especially marked in periods of

individualistic emancipation. It is especially at such a period that

one needs to remind oneself with Hobbes that words are the counters

of wise men and the coin of fools, and that one is not to suppose, on

hearing a fine phrase, that it coincides necessarily with a fine thing.

We are put here on the track of the true office of the intellect in

such a period. To set out like Rousseau to be an individualist and at

the same time to disparage intellect is to enter upon the pathway of

madness. In direct ratio, indeed, to the completeness of one’s break

with the past must be the keenness of one’s discrimination. Otherwise

one runs the risk of setting up as an “ideal” and decking out with

fair phrases some unsubstantial dream--the mere ballooning out of the

imagination into the void.

The imagination must, to be sure, be supreme, but it should be an

imagination disciplined to the facts. If the imagination is not

present, the facts will not be unified; they will remain inert and

isolated. But the intellect must also be present--and by intellect I

mean the power in man that analyzes and discriminates and traces causes

and effects; for this power alone can determine whether the unity the

imagination has established among the facts is real or whether it

exists rather only in some “realm of chimeras.” The genuine man of

science is not, on the one hand, a metaphysical theorist nor, on the

other, a mere fact-grubber. His eminence is measured by the gift he

possesses for true vision in connection with some field of facts on

which he has long been fixing his attention. What may have come to him

originally in a flash of intuition he is careful to check up and test

experimentally by every means in his power; and at this stage he is not

synthetic but analytic. His success is due to the correct relation he

has established between the part of himself that perceives, the part

that conceives, and the part that discriminates.

Now the true humanist deals with his facts in a somewhat similar

fashion: only the facts on which he is fixing his attention are of an

entirely different order. His imagination is disciplined to law, but

this law is not the “law for thing.” He is tracing cause and effect,

but these causal sequences are not the ones that occur in physical

nature. Because there is in us, in Lowell’s phrase, something that

refuses to be “Benthamized,” the romantic idealist looks with suspicion

on a cause-and-effect philosophy and the keen analysis by which it

can be established; but any other than a cause-and-effect philosophy

is likely to fall into sheer unreality; inasmuch as reality means

practically the reality of law, and law in turn means that as a matter

of positive observation there is a constant association between certain

phenomena either in time or space--an association that exists quite

apart from the desires or opinions of the individual. If there is not

a human law that is thus objective, so that the person who violates it

exposes himself to certain consequences in much the same way that the

person who puts his finger into the fire exposes himself to certain

consequences, then the human law is not worth going in search of. A

sceptic of the type of Hume would affirm, indeed, that the very idea

of cause and effect is not objective but subjective, that it arises

from man’s “propensity to feign.” But even if we go to the extreme of

scepticism and look on life merely as a “dream whose shapes return,”

it remains true that these returning shapes bear a certain constant

relationship to one another; so that they are susceptible of study from

the point of view of the only problem that finally matters--the problem

of happiness or unhappiness. Of cause and effect in any abstract and

metaphysical sense, the critical humanist is willing to avow his

ignorance; just as the true man of science admits that he cannot grasp

the ultimate essence behind the phenomenal relationships he is busy in

tracing.

The foregoing analysis, if it is correct, suggests that the type of

material progress on which the Occident has been expending its main

effort for some time past, so far from promoting moral progress, is

likely rather to make against it. This type of progress has resulted

from imaginative concentration on facts of an entirely different order

from those of the moral law. The keen analytical discrimination in

the service of actual perception that gives reality--such reality as

man has access to--has become the more and more exclusive monopoly

of the man of science or of the utilitarian who has been organizing

scientific discovery into a vast machinery of material efficiency. In

the mean while, in the distinctively human realm, the imagination has

been left more or less free to roam at large. It has set up a unity,

as I remarked at the outset, that has not been sufficiently tested

from the point of view of its reality. The unity that the humanitarian

hopes to achieve among men hinges almost entirely, I have tried to

show, on the idea of “service.” Men are to be brought together, one

finds on analyzing this idea of service, by means that are either

rationalistic and mechanical or else emotional. In either case, the

humanitarian assumes that men can meet expansively and on the level of

their ordinary selves. But if this notion of union should prove to be

illusory, if men can really come together only in humble obeisance to

something set above their ordinary selves, it follows that the great

temple to humanity that has been in process of erection for several

generations past is the modern equivalent of the Tower of Babel; and so

we should not be surprised if it is being stricken with a confusion of

tongues.

With the progressive weakening of traditional standards, the inability

of the humanitarian to supply any adequate substitute is becoming

apparent. The whole of the Occident seems to be at an _impasse_. The

mere rationalist and the mere emotionalist are about equally bankrupt.

It may be that our only hope is a return to the truths of the inner

life. If we ourselves are unable to see the need of such a return, it

is perhaps because we have reached the stage of the decadent Romans

who, according to Livy, were unable to endure the evils from which they

were suffering and also the remedies for those evils.

The loss of the truths of the inner life in their traditional form has

involved, I have tried to show, a profound alteration in the idea of

liberty. Liberty has come more and more to be conceived expansively,

not as a process of concentration, as a submission or adjustment to a

higher will. My whole argument thus far has been that we should seek to

recover in some critical form the centripetal element in liberty that

the modernist has allowed to drop out and so become thoroughgoing and

complete moderns. It is a matter of no small importance in any case to

be defective in one’s definition of liberty; for any defect here will

be reflected in one’s definitions of peace and justice; and the outlook

for a society which has defective notions of peace and justice cannot

be regarded as very promising.

A good deal of the confusion about liberty, as I have endeavored to

show, has been promoted by the pantheistic dreamers who have sought

a substitute for the grace of God in the grace of nature, and so

have obscured the distinction between the man for whom liberty is an

ethical working and the man who, like Rousseau, seeks to found an

indomitable spirit of liberty on an indolence that is beyond belief.

The pure traditionalist, the Catholic, for example, not only avoids a

particular confusion of this kind, but is in general relieved of the

task of defining liberty that is imposed upon the individualist. The

Church will supply him with his definition: liberty, he will be told,

is submission to the will of God; and the Church will not only supply

him with the general principle, but also give him guidance in the

innumerable “cases” that arise in the application of it. Inasmuch as

the Pope is infallible (since 1870), at least in religion and morals,

submission to the will of God tends to coincide practically, though not

of course in theory, with submission to the Pope.

Though the sound individualist must also have standards, it is plain

that he cannot get at them in this way--not, namely, by leaning on

outer authority, but rather by the coöperation of intellect and

imagination I have tried to describe. The standards he has thus

secured he will proceed to press into the service of the ethical

will. A programme of this kind, in which imagination, intellect, and

will coöperate, instead of flying asunder, as they tend to do in

Pascal, for example, is, it must be confessed, easier to outline than

to accomplish. Yet it is hard to see that our modern experiment can

be carried through safely on any other terms. If this experiment

shows signs of breaking down, the explanation is surely that it has

failed thus far to achieve adequate equivalents for the traditional

controls. Instead of setting up genuine standards and then selecting

with reference to them, the man who professes to be modern has turned

selection over to “nature” and sought to substitute for the working

of the ethical will a diffuse, unselective sympathy. This tendency to

put on sympathy a burden that it cannot bear and at the same time to

sacrifice a truly human hierarchy and scale of values to the principle

of equality has been especially marked in the democratic movement,

nowhere more so perhaps than in our American democracy. It remains,

therefore, to discuss democracy in its relation to standards. I shall

attempt in the course of this discussion to elucidate still further,

with the aid of a Socratic dialectic, my distinction between the true

and the false liberal.