CHAPTER VII

DEMOCRACY AND STANDARDS

Judged by any quantitative test, the American achievement is

impressive. We have ninety per cent of the motors of the world and

control seventy-five per cent of its oil; we produce sixty per cent of

the world’s steel, seventy per cent of its copper, and eighty per cent

of its telephones and typewriters. This and similar statistical proof

of our material preëminence, which would have made a Greek apprehensive

of Nemesis, seems to inspire in many Americans an almost lyrical

complacency. They are not only quantitative in their estimates of our

present accomplishment, but even more so if possible in what they

anticipate for the future. Now that we have fifteen million automobiles

they feel, with Mr. Henry Ford, that we can have no higher ambition

than to expand this number to thirty million. Our present output of

fifty million tons of steel a year is, according to Mr. Schwab, a

mere trifle compared with our probable output of twenty years hence.

In short, an age that is already immersed in things to an unexampled

degree is merely to prepare the way for an age still more material in

its preoccupations and still more subservient to machinery. This, we

are told, is progress. To a person with a proportionate view of life it

might seem rather to be full-blown commercial insolence.

The reasons for the quantitative view of life that prevails in America

are far from being purely political. This view has resulted in a

large measure from the coming together of scientific discovery with

the opening up of a new continent. It has been possible with the aid

of science to accomplish in a hundred years what even the optimistic

Thomas Jefferson thought might take a thousand. The explanation, it has

been said, of much that is obscure to us in the Chinese may be summed

up in the words “lack of elbow-room.” We in this country, on the other

hand, have received a peculiar psychic twist from the fact that we have

had endless elbow-room. A chief danger both to ourselves and others

is that we shall continue to have a frontier psychology long after we

have ceased to have a frontier. For a frontier psychology is expansive,

and expansiveness, I have tried to show, is, at least in its political

manifestations, always imperialistic.

If quantitatively the American achievement is impressive, qualitatively

it is somewhat less satisfying. What must one think of a country,

asks one of our foreign critics, whose most popular orator is W. J.

Bryan, whose favorite actor is Charlie Chaplin, whose most widely read

novelist is Harold Bell Wright, whose best-known evangelist is Billy

Sunday, and whose representative journalist is William Randolph Hearst?

What one must evidently think of such a country, even after allowing

liberally for overstatement, is that it lacks standards. Furthermore,

America suffers not only from a lack of standards, but also not

infrequently from a confusion or an inversion of standards. As an

example of the inversion of standards we may take the bricklayer who,

being able to lay two thousand bricks a day, is reduced by union rules

to laying five hundred. There is confusion of standards, again, when we

are so impressed by Mr. Henry Ford’s abilities as organizer and master

mechanic that we listen seriously to his views on money; or when,

simply because Mr. Edison has shown inventive genius along certain

lines, we receive him as an authority on education. One is reminded of

the story of the French butcher who, having need of legal aid, finally,

after looking over a number of lawyers, selected the fattest one.

The problem of standards, though not identical with the problem of

democracy, touches it at many points and is not therefore the problem

of any one country. Europeans, indeed, like to look upon the crudity

and chaotic impressionism of people who are no longer guided by

standards as something specifically American. “America,” says the

“Saturday Review,” “is the country of unbalanced minds, of provincial

policies and of hysterical Utopias.” The deference for standards has,

however, been diminished by a certain type of democracy in many other

countries besides America. The resulting vulgarity and triviality

are more or less visible in all of these countries;--for example, if

we are to believe Lord Bryce, in New Zealand. If we in America are

perhaps preëminent in lack of distinction, it is because of the very

completeness of our emancipation from the past. Goethe’s warning as

to the retarding effect of the commonplace is well known (_Was uns

alle bändigt, das Gemeine_). His explanation of what makes for the

commonplace is less familiar: “Enjoyment,” he says, “makes common.”

(_Geniessen macht gemein._) Since every man desires happiness, it

is evidently no small matter whether he conceives of happiness in

terms of work or of enjoyment. If he work in the full ethical sense

that I have attempted to define, he is pulling back and disciplining

his temperamental self with reference to some standard. In short,

his temperamental self is, in an almost literal sense, undergoing

conversion. The whole of life may, indeed, be summed up in the words

diversion and conversion. Along which of these two main paths are most

of us seeking the happiness to the pursuit of which we are dedicated

by our Declaration of Independence? The author of this phrase, Thomas

Jefferson, remarks of himself: “I am an Epicurean.”[96] It cannot be

gainsaid that an increasing number of our young people are, in this

respect at least, good Jeffersonians. The phrase that reflects most

clearly their philosophy of life is perhaps “good time.” One might

suppose that many of them see this phrase written in great blazing

letters on the very face of the firmament. As “Punch” remarked, the

United States is not a country, but a picnic. When the element of

conversion with reference to a standard is eliminated from life,

what remains is the irresponsible quest of thrills. The utilitarian

and industrial side of the modern movement comes into play at this

point. Commercialism is laying its great greasy paw upon everything

(including the irresponsible quest of thrills); so that, whatever

democracy may be theoretically, one is sometimes tempted to define

it practically as standardized and commercialized melodrama. This

definition will be found to fit many aspects of our national life

besides the moving-picture industry. The tendency to steep and saturate

ourselves in the impression of the moment without reference to any

permanent pattern of human experience is even more marked, perhaps,

in our newspapers and magazines. It was said of the inhabitants of a

certain ancient Greek city that, though they were not fools, they did

just the things that fools would do. It is hard to take a glance at

one of our news-stands without reflecting that, though we may not be

fools, we are reading just the things that fools would read. Our daily

press in particular is given over to the most childish sensationalism.

“The Americans are an excellent people,” Matthew Arnold wrote from

Boston in 1883, “but their press seems to me an awful symptom.” This

symptom was not so awful then as now; for that was before the day of

the scarehead and the comic supplement. The American reading his Sunday

paper in a state of lazy collapse is perhaps the most perfect symbol of

the triumph of quantity over quality that the world has yet seen. Whole

forests are being ground into pulp daily to minister to our triviality.

One is inclined, indeed, to ask, in certain moods, whether the net

result of the movement that has been sweeping the Occident for several

generations may not be a huge mass of standardized mediocrity; and

whether in this country in particular we are not in danger of producing

in the name of democracy one of the most trifling brands of the human

species that the world has yet seen. To be sure, it may be urged that,

though we may suffer loss of distinction as a result of the democratic

drift, by way of compensation a great many average people will, in

the Jeffersonian sense at least, be made “happy.” If we are to judge

by history, however, what supervenes upon the decline of standards and

the disappearance of leaders who embody them is not some equalitarian

paradise, but inferior types of leadership. We have already been

reminded by certain developments in this country of Byron’s definition

of democracy as an “aristocracy of blackguards.” At the very moment

when we were most vociferous about making the world safe for democracy

the citizens of New York City refused to reëlect an honest man

as their mayor and put in his place a tool of Tammany, an action

followed in due course by a “crime wave”; whereupon they returned the

tool of Tammany by an increased majority. The industrial revolution

has tended to produce everywhere great urban masses that seem to

be increasingly careless of ethical standards. In the case of our

American cities, the problem of securing some degree of moral cohesion

is further complicated by the presence of numerous aliens of widely

divergent racial stocks and cultural backgrounds.[97] In addition

our population is not only about half urban, but we cannot be said,

like most other countries, to have any peasantry or yeomanry. Those

Americans who actually dwell in the country are more and more urban

in their psychology. The whole situation is so unusual as to suggest

doubts even from a purely biological point of view. “As I watch the

American nation speeding gaily, with invincible optimism down the road

to destruction,” says Professor William McDougall, an observer of the

biological type, “I seem to be contemplating the greatest tragedy in

the history of mankind.”

We are assured, indeed, that the highly heterogeneous elements that

enter into our population will, like various instruments in an

orchestra, merely result in a richer harmony; they will, one may reply,

provided that, like an orchestra, they be properly led. Otherwise the

outcome may be an unexampled cacophony. This question of leadership

is not primarily biological, but moral. Leaders may vary in quality

from the man who is so loyal to sound standards that he inspires right

conduct in others by the sheer rightness of his example, to the man

who stands for nothing higher than the law of cunning and the law of

force, and so is, in the sense I have sought to define, imperialistic.

If democracy means simply the attempt to eliminate the qualitative and

selective principle in favor of some general will, based in turn on a

theory of natural rights, it may prove to be only a form of the vertigo

of the abyss. As I have tried to show in dealing with the influence

of Rousseau on the French Revolution, it will result practically,

not in equality, but in a sort of inverted aristocracy. One’s choice

may be, not between a democracy that is properly led and a democracy

that hopes to find the equivalent of standards and leadership in the

appeal to a numerical majority, that indulges in other words in a

sort of quantitative impressionism, but between a democracy that is

properly led and a decadent imperialism. One should, therefore, in the

interests of democracy itself seek to substitute the doctrine of the

right man for the doctrine of the rights of man.

The opposition between traditional standards and an equalitarian

democracy based on the supposed rights of man has played an important

part in our own political history, and has meant practically the

opposition between two types of leadership. The “quality” in the older

sense of the word suffered its first decisive defeat in 1829 when

Washington was invaded by the hungry hordes of Andrew Jackson. The

imperialism latent in this type of democracy appears in the Jacksonian

maxim: “To the victors belong the spoils.” In his theory of democracy

Jackson had, of course, much in common with Thomas Jefferson. If we

go back, indeed, to the beginnings of our institutions, we find that

America stood from the start for two different views of government that

have their origin in different views of liberty and ultimately of human

nature. The view that is set forth in the Declaration of Independence

assumes that man has certain abstract rights; it has therefore

important points of contact with the French revolutionary “idealism.”

The view that inspired our Constitution, on the other hand, has much in

common with that of Burke. If the first of these political philosophies

is properly associated with Jefferson, the second has its most

distinguished representative in Washington. The Jeffersonian liberal

has faith in the goodness of the natural man, and so tends to overlook

the need of a veto power either in the individual or in the State.

The liberals of whom I have taken Washington to be the type are less

expansive in their attitude towards the natural man. Just as man has

a higher self that acts restrictively on his ordinary self, so, they

hold, the State should have a higher or permanent self, appropriately

embodied in institutions, that should set bounds to its ordinary self

as expressed by the popular will at any particular moment. The contrast

that I am establishing is, of course, that between a constitutional and

a direct democracy. There is an opposition of first principles between

those who maintain that the popular will should prevail, but only

after it has been purified of what is merely impulsive and ephemeral,

and those who maintain that this will should prevail immediately

and unrestrictedly. The American experiment in democracy has,

therefore, from the outset been ambiguous, and will remain so until

the irrepressible conflict between a Washingtonian and a Jeffersonian

liberty has been fought to a conclusion. The liberal of the type of

Washington has always been very much concerned with what one may term

the unionist aspect of liberty. This central preoccupation is summed up

in the phrase of Webster: Liberty and union, one and inseparable. The

liberty of the Jeffersonian, on the other hand, makes against ethical

union like every liberty that rests on the assertion of abstract

rights. Jefferson himself proclaimed not only human rights, but also

state rights.[98] Later the doctrine of state rights was developed with

logical rigor by Calhoun, whereas the doctrine of human rights was

carried through no less uncompromisingly by the abolitionists. The

result was two opposing camps of extremists and fire-eaters; so that

the whole question of union, instead of being settled on ethical lines,

had to be submitted to the arbitrament of force.

The man who has grasped the full import of the conflict between the

liberty of the unionist and that of the Jeffersonian has been put in

possession of the key that unlocks American history. The conflict

between the two conceptions is not, indeed, always clear-cut in

particular individuals. There is much in Jefferson himself that

contradicts what I have been saying about Jefferson. A chief business

of criticism, however, is to distinguish, in spite of peripheral

overlappings, between things that are at the centre different. For

example, to link together in a common admiration Jefferson and John

Marshall, our most eminent unionist after Washington himself, is proof

of lack of critical discrimination rather than of piety towards the

fathers. Jefferson and Marshall knew perfectly that they stood for

incompatible things,[99] and it is important that we should know it

also. “Marshall,” says John Quincy Adams in his Diary, “has cemented

the Union which the crafty and quixotic democracy of Jefferson had a

perpetual tendency to dissolve.”

By his preoccupation with the question of the union, Lincoln became

the true successor of Washington and Marshall. In making of Lincoln

the great emancipator instead of the great unionist, in spite of his

own most specific declarations on this point, we are simply creating

a Lincoln myth, as we have already created a Washington myth.[100]

We are sometimes told that the good democrat needs merely to be like

Lincoln. But to be like Lincoln one must know what Lincoln was like.

This is not only a task for the critic, but, in view of the Lincoln

myth, a more difficult task than is commonly supposed. It is especially

easy to sentimentalize Lincoln because he had a strongly marked vein of

sentimentalism. Nevertheless, in spite of the peripheral overlappings

between the democracy of Lincoln and that of Jefferson[101] or even

between that of Lincoln and Walt Whitman, one should insist on the

central difference. One has only to read, for example, the Second

Inaugural along with the “Song of Myself” if one wishes to become aware

of the gap that separates religious humility from romantic egotism. We

should be careful again, in spite of peripheral overlappings, not to

confound the democracy of Lincoln with that of Roosevelt. What we feel

at the very centre in Roosevelt is the dynamic rush of an imperialistic

personality. What we feel at the very centre in Lincoln, on the other

hand, is an element of judicial control; and in close relation to this

control a profound conception of the rôle of the courts in maintaining

free institutions. The man who has studied the real Lincoln does not

find it easy to imagine him advocating the recall of judicial decisions.

The Jeffersonian liberal is, as a rule, much more ostentatiously

fraternal than the liberal in the other tradition. Yet he is usually

inferior in human warmth and geniality to the unionist. Washington and

Marshall and Lincoln at their best combined practical sagacity with

a central benignity and unselfishness. Jefferson, on the other hand,

though perhaps our most accomplished politician, did not show himself

especially sagacious in dealing with specific emergencies. Furthermore,

it is hard to read his “Anas” and reflect on the circumstances of its

composition without concluding that what was central in his personality

was not benignity and unselfishness but vindictiveness.

Statesmen who deserve the praise I have bestowed on our unionist

leaders are, as every student of history knows, extremely rare. The

type of constitutional liberty that we owe to these men before all

others is one of the greatest blessings that has ever been vouchsafed

to any people. And yet we are in danger of losing it. The Eighteenth

Amendment is striking proof of our loss of grasp, not only on the

principles that underlie our own Constitution, but that must underlie

any constitution, as such, in opposition to mere legislative enactment.

Our present drift away from constitutional freedom can be understood

only with reference to the progressive crumbling of traditional

standards and the rise of a naturalistic philosophy that, in its

treatment of specifically human problems, has been either sentimental

or utilitarian. The significant changes in our own national

temper in particular are finally due to the fact that Protestant

Christianity, especially in the Puritanic form, has been giving way to

humanitarianism. The point is worth making because the persons who

have favored prohibition and other similar “reforms” have been attacked

as Puritans. Genuine Puritanism was, however, a religion of the inner

life. Our unionist leaders, Washington, Marshall, and Lincoln, though

not narrowly orthodox, were still religious in the traditional sense.

The struggle between good and evil, as they saw it, was still primarily

not in society, but in the individual. Their conscious dependence on a

higher or divine will could not fail to be reflected in their notion

of liberty. Jefferson, on the contrary, associated his liberty, not

with God, but with “nature.” He admired, as is well known, the liberty

of the American Indian.[102] He was for diminishing to the utmost the

rôle of government, but not for increasing the inner control that

must, according to Burke, be in strict ratio to the relaxation of

outer control. When evil actually appears, the Jeffersonian cannot

appeal to the principle of inner control; he is not willing again to

admit that the sole alternative to this type of control is force;

and so he is led into what seems at first sight a paradoxical denial

of his own principles: he has recourse to legislation. It should be

clear at all events that our present attempt to substitute social

control for self-control is Jeffersonian rather than Puritanical.

So far as we are true children of the Puritans, we may accept the

contrast established by Professor Stuart P. Sherman[103] between our

own point of view and that of the German: “The ideal of the German

is external control and ‘inner freedom’; the Government looks after

his conduct and he looks after his liberty. The ideal of the American

is external freedom and inner control; the individual looks after his

conduct and the Government looks after his liberty. Thus _Verboten_ in

Germany is pronounced by the Government and enforced by the police. In

America _Verboten_ is pronounced by public opinion and enforced by the

individual conscience. In this light it should appear that Puritanism,

our national principle of concentration, is the indispensable check

on democracy, our national principle of expansion. I use the word

Puritanism in the sense given to it by German and German-American

critics: _the inner check upon the expansion of natural impulse_.”

Professor Sherman’s contrast has been true in the past and still has

some truth--at least enough for the purposes of war-time propaganda.

But what about our main drift at present? It is plainly away from the

point of view that Professor Sherman ascribes to the Puritan[104] and

towards the point of view that he ascribes to the German. “The inner

check upon the expansion of natural impulse” is precisely the missing

element in the Jeffersonian philosophy. The Jeffersonian has therefore

been led to deal with the problem of evil, not vitally and in terms

of the inner life, but mechanically. Like the Jesuit he has fallen

from law into legalism. It has been estimated that for one _Verboten_

sign in Germany we already have a dozen in this country; only, having

set up our _Verboten_ sign, we get even by not observing it. Thus

prohibition is pronounced by the Government, largely repudiated by the

individual conscience, and enforced (very imperfectly) by the police.

The multitude[105] of laws we are passing is one of many proofs that we

are growing increasingly lawless.

There are, to be sure, peripheral overlappings between the point of

view of the Puritan and that of the humanitarian legalist. The Puritan

inclined from the start to be meddlesome, as any one who has studied

the activities of Calvin at Geneva will testify. But even here one

may ask whether the decisive arguments by which we have been induced

to submit to the meddling of the prohibitionist were not utilitarian

rather than puritanical. “Booze,” says Mr. Henry Ford, “had to go out

when modern industry and the motor car came in.” The truth may be that

we are prepared to make any sacrifice to the Moloch of efficiency,

including, apparently, that of our federal Constitution.

The persons who have been carrying on of late a campaign against the

Puritans like to look on themselves as “intellectuals.” But if the

primary function of the intellect is to make accurate distinctions, it

is plain that they do not deserve the title. For in dealing with this

whole subject they have fallen into a twofold confusion. So far as they

identify with Puritanism the defence of the principle of control in

human nature, they are simply attacking under that name the wisdom of

the ages and all its authentic representatives in both East and West.

To bestow, on the other hand, the name of Puritans on the humanitarian

legalists who are now sapping our spiritual virility is to pay them an

extravagant and undeserved compliment. Let us take as a sample of the

attacks on the Puritans that of Mr. Theodore Dreiser, culminating in

the grotesque assertion regarding the United States: “No country has

such a peculiar, such a seemingly fierce determination to make the Ten

Commandments work.” We are murdering one another at the rate of about

ten thousand a year (with very few capital convictions)[106] and are

in general showing ourselves more criminally inclined than any other

nation that is reputed to be civilized.[107] The explanation is that

we are trying to make, not the Ten Commandments, but humanitarianism

work--and it is not working. If our courts are so ineffective in

punishing crime, a chief reason is that they do not have the support of

public opinion, and this is because the public is so largely composed

of people who have set up sympathy for the underdog as a substitute for

all the other virtues, or else of people who hold that the criminal is

the product of his environment and so is not morally responsible. Here

as elsewhere there is a coöperation between those who mechanize life

and those who sentimentalize it.

The belief in moral responsibility must be based on a belief in

the possibility of an inner working of some kind with reference to

standards. The utilitarian, as I have sought to show, has put his

main emphasis on outer working. The consequence of this emphasis,

coinciding as it has with the multiplication of machines, has been the

substitution of standardization for standards. The type of efficiency

that our master commercialists pursue requires that a multitude of men

should be deprived of their specifically human attributes, and become

mere cogs in some vast machine. At the present rate even the grocer in

a remote country town will soon not be left as much initiative as is

needed to fix the price of a pound of butter.

Standardization is, however, a less serious menace to standards than

what are currently known as “ideals.” The person who breaks down

standards in the name of ideals does not seem to be impelled by base

commercial motives, but to be animated, on the contrary, by the purest

commiseration for the lowly and the oppressed. We must have the courage

to submit this humanitarian zeal to a close scrutiny. We may perhaps

best start with the familiar dictum that America is only another name

for opportunity. Opportunity to do what? To engage in a scramble for

money and material success, until the multimillionaire emerges as the

characteristic product of a country dedicated to the proposition that

all men are created equal? According to Napoleon, the French Revolution

was also only another name for opportunity (_la carrière ouverte aux

talents_). Some of our commercial supermen have evidently been making

use of their opportunity in a very Napoleonic fashion. In any case,

opportunity has meaning only with reference to some true standard.

The sentimentalist, instead of setting up some such standard by way

of protest against the wrong type of superiority, inclines rather to

bestow an unselective sympathy on those who have been left behind in

the race for economic advantage. Even when less materialistic in his

outlook, he is prone to dodge the question of justice. He does not ask

whether a man is an underdog because he has already had his opportunity

and failed to use it, whether, in short, the man that he takes to

be a victim of the social order is not rather a victim of his own

misconduct[108] or at least of his own indolence and inattention. He

thus exposes himself to the penalties visited on those who set out to

be kinder than the moral law.

At bottom the point of view of the “uplifter” is so popular because it

nourishes spiritual complacency; it enables a man to look on himself as

“up” and on some one else as “down.” But there is psychological if not

theological truth in the assertion of Jonathan Edwards that complacent

people are a “particular smoke” in God’s nostrils. A man needs to look,

not down, but up to standards set so much above his ordinary self as

to make him feel that he is himself spiritually the underdog. The man

who thus looks up is becoming worthy to be looked up to in turn, and,

to this extent, qualifying for leadership. Leadership of this type,

one may add, may prove to be, in the long run, the only effectual

counterpoise to that of the imperialistic superman.

No amount of devotion to society and its supposed interests can take

the place of this inner obeisance of the spirit to standards. The

humanitarian would seem to be caught here in a vicious circle. If

he turns from the inner life to serve his fellow men, he becomes a

busybody. If he sets out again to become exemplary primarily with

a view to the benefit of others, he becomes a prig. Nothing will

avail short of humility. Humility, as Burke saw, is the ultimate root

of the justice that should prevail in the secular order, as well as

of the virtues that are specifically religious. The modern problem,

I have been insisting, is to secure leaders with an allegiance to

standards, now that the traditional order with which Burke associated

his standards and leadership has been so seriously shaken. Those

who have broken with the traditional beliefs have thus far shown

themselves singularly ineffective in dealing with this problem of

leadership, even when they have admitted the need of leaders at all.

The persons who have piqued themselves especially on being positive

have looked for leadership to the exponents of physical science.

Auguste Comte, for example, not only regarded men of science as the

true modern priesthood, but actually disparaged moral effort on the

part of the individual. I scarcely need to repeat here what I have

said elsewhere--that the net result of a merely scientific “progress”

is to produce efficient megalomaniacs. Physical science, excellent in

its proper place, is, when exalted out of this place, the ugliest and

most maleficent idol before which man has as yet consented to prostrate

himself. If the essence of genuine science is to face loyally all the

facts as they present themselves without dogmatic prepossessions,

one is justified in asking whether the man who forgets that physical

science is, in Tennyson’s phrase, the second, not the first, is

genuinely scientific; whether the very sharpest discrimination does

not need to be established between science and utilitarianism.

Aristotle, for example, was a true man of science; he was not a

utilitarian.[109] Francis Bacon, on the other hand, is the prophet

of the whole utilitarian movement, but one may doubt his eminence as

a man of science. Quite apart from the fact that he failed to make

important scientific discoveries, one may question the validity of the

Baconian method. His failure to do justice to deduction as part of a

sound scientific method has often been noted. A more serious defect is

his failure to recognize the rôle of the imagination, or, what amounts

to the same thing, the rôle of exceptional genius in the making of

scientific discoveries.[110]

One cannot grant that an aristocracy of scientific intellectuals or

indeed any aristocracy of intellect is what we need. This would mean

practically to encourage the _libido sciendi_ and so to put pride in

the place of humility. Still less acceptable would be an aristocracy

of artists; as the word art has come to be understood in recent times,

this would mean an aristocracy of æsthetes who would attempt to base

their selection on the _libido sentiendi_. The Nietzschean attempt,

again, to found the aristocratic and selective principle on the sheer

expansion of the will to power (_libido dominandi_) would lead in

practice to horrible violence and finally to the death of civilization.

The attempts that were made during the past century to establish a

scale of values with reference to the three main lusts of the human

heart often took on a mystical coloring. Man likes to think that he

has God as an ally of his expansive conceit, whatever this conceit

may chance to be. When, indeed, one has passed in review the various

mysticisms of the modern movement, as they are set forth, for example,

in the volumes of M. Seillière, one is reminded of the saying of

Bossuet: “True mysticism is so rare and unessential and false mysticism

is so common and dangerous that one cannot oppose it too firmly.”

If one discovers frequently a pseudo-mystical element in the claims

to leadership of the æsthetes, the supermen and the scientific

intellectuals, this element is even more visible in those who would,

in the name of democracy, dispense with leadership altogether. Thus

Walt Whitman, as we have seen, would put no check on his “spontaneous

me”; he would have every one else indulge his “idiocrasy” to the

same degree, be a “genius,” in short, in the full romantic sense

of the term. A liberty thus anarchical is to lead to equality and

fraternity. If one tells the democrat of this type that his programme

is contrary to common sense and the facts of experience, he is wont

to take refuge in mystical “vision.” One needs in effect to be very

mystical to suppose that men can come together by flying off each on

his temperamental tangent. Whitman does not admit the need of the

leader who looks up humbly to some standard and so becomes worthy to be

looked up to in turn. The only leadership he contemplates apparently

is that of the ideal democratic bard who flatters the people’s pride

and chants the divine average.[111] He represents in an extreme

form the substitution for vital control of expansive emotion under

the name of love. Pride and self-assertion, when tempered by love,

will not, he holds, endanger the principle of union.[112] The Union,

though “always swarming with blatherers, is yet,” he says, “always

sure and impregnable.” The records of the past are not reassuring as

to the maintenance of ethical union in a community that is swarming

with “blatherers.” At all events, the offset to the blatherers will be

found, not in any divine average, but in the true leader--the “still

strong man in a blatant land.” We come here to another opposition that

is one of first principles and is not therefore subject to mediation

or compromise--the opposition, namely, between the doctrine of the

saving remnant and that of the divine average. If one deals with

human nature realistically one may find here and there a person who

is worthy of respect and occasionally one who is worthy of reverence.

Any one, on the other hand, who puts his faith in the divinity of

the average is destined, if we are to trust the records of history,

to pass through disillusion to a final despair. We are reaching the

stage of disillusion in this country at the present moment. According

to the author of “Main Street,” the average is not divine but

trivial; according to the author of the “Spoon River Anthology,” it

is positively hideous. It can scarcely be gainsaid that contemporary

America offers an opening for satire. A great many people are gradually

drifting into materialism and often cherishing the conceit at the same

time that they are radiant idealists. But satire, to be worth while,

must be constructive. The opposite of the trivial is the distinguished;

and one can determine what is distinguished only with reference to

standards. To see Main Street on a background of standards would be

decidedly helpful; but standards are precisely what our so-called

realists lack. They are themselves a part of the disease that they are

attempting to define.

The democratic idealist is prone to make light of the whole question of

standards and leadership because of his unbounded faith in the plain

people. How far is this appeal to the plain people justified and how

far is it merely demagogic? There is undoubted truth in the saying that

there is somebody who knows more than anybody, and that is everybody.

Only one must allow everybody sufficient time to sift the evidence and

add that, even so, everybody does not know very much. Burke told the

electors of Bristol that he was not flattering their opinions of the

moment, but uttering the views that both they and he must have five

years thence. Even in this triumph of the sober judgment of the people

over its passing impression, the rôle of the true leader should not

be underestimated. Thus in the year 1795 the plain people of America

were eager to give the fraternal accolade to the French Jacobins.

The great and wise Washington opposed an alliance that would almost

certainly have been disastrous, and as a result he had heaped upon him

by journals like the “Aurora,” the forerunner of our modern “journals

of opinion,” epithets that, as he himself complained, would not have

been deserved by a common pickpocket. In a comparatively short time

Washington and his group were seen to be right, and those who seemed

to be the spokesmen of the plain people were seen to be wrong. It is

not clear that one can have much faith even in the sober second thought

of a community that has no enlightened minority. A Haytian statesman,

for example, might not gain much in appealing from Haytian opinion of

to-day to Haytian opinion of five years hence. The democratic idealist

does not, however, mean as a rule by an appeal to the plain people

an appeal to its sober second thought. He means rather the immediate

putting into effect of the will of a numerical majority. Like the man

in the comic song the people is supposed to “want what it wants when it

wants it.” Our American drift for a number of years has unquestionably

been towards a democracy of this radical type, as is evident from the

increasing vogue of the initiative, referendum, and recall (whether of

judges or judicial decisions) as well as from popular primaries and

the direct election of Senators. The feeling that the people should

act directly on all measures has led to the appearance in certain

States of ballots thirty feet long! Yet the notion that wisdom resides

in a popular majority at any particular moment should be the most

completely exploded of all fallacies. If the plain people at Jerusalem

had registered their will with the aid of the most improved type of

ballot box, there is no evidence that they would have preferred Christ

to Barabbas. In view of the size of the jury that condemned Socrates,

one may affirm confidently that he was the victim of a “great and

solemn referendum.” On the other hand, the plain people can be shown

to have taken a special delight in Nero. But the plain people, it

will be replied, has been educated and enlightened. The intelligence

tests applied in connection with the selective draft indicate that

the average mental age of our male voters is about fourteen.[113] The

intelligence testers are, to be sure, under some suspicion as to the

quality of their own intelligence. A more convincing proof of the low

mentality of our population is found, perhaps, in the fact that the

Hearst publications have twenty-five million readers.

“There is nothing,” says Goethe, “more odious than the majority; for it

consists of a few powerful leaders, a certain number of accommodating

scoundrels and subservient weaklings, and a mass of men who trudge

after them without in the least knowing their own minds.” If there is

any truth in this analysis the majority in a radical democracy often

rules only in name. No movement, indeed, illustrates more clearly

than the supposedly democratic movement the way in which the will of

highly organized and resolute minorities may prevail over the will of

the inert and unorganized mass. Even though the mass does not consent

to “trudge” after the minority, it is at an increasing disadvantage

in its attempts to resist it. Physical science is on the side of the

tyrannical minority. The ordinary citizen cannot have a machine gun

by his fireside or a “tank” in his back yard. The most recent type of

revolutionary idealist, though his chief concern is still to bestow

benefit on the people, does not, to do him justice, hope to achieve

this benefit through the majority, but rather through the direct action

of organized minorities. He feels that he is justified in cramming his

nostrum down the throat of the people, if necessary by force.

The radical of this type is coming round to the doctrine of the saving

remnant and recognizing in his own way that everything finally hinges

on the quality of the leadership. His views, however, as to this

quality differ strangely from the traditional views. One must admit

that, whatever theories of leadership may have been held traditionally,

actual leadership has never been any too good. One scarcely suspects,

as John Selden remarked, “what a little foolery governs the world.”

Moreover, the folly which has prevailed at the top of society, and that

from the time of the Trojan War, has ever been faithfully reflected in

the rank and file (_Quidquid delirant reges--_). One who surveys the

past is at times tempted to acquiesce in the gloomy judgment of Dryden:

“No government has ever been or ever can be wherein time-servers and

blockheads will not be uppermost. The persons are only changed, but

the same juggling in state, the same hypocrisy in religion, the same

self-interest and mismanagement will remain forever. Blood and money

will be lavished in all ages only for the preferment of new faces with

old consciences.” One should note, however, a difference between the

bad leadership of the past and that of the modern revolutionary era.

The leaders of the past have most frequently been bad in violation of

the principles they professed, whereas it is when a Robespierre or a

Lenin sets out to apply his principles that the man who is interested

in the survival of civilization has reason to tremble.

Dryden’s passage seems to suggest that what is really needed is not

new faces with old consciences, but a transformation of conscience

itself. It is precisely such a transformation that a revolutionary

idealist like Robespierre hopes to effect. For the corrupt conscience

of the old type of aristocratic leader he would substitute a social

conscience. The popular will that is inspired by this conscience is

so immaculate, as we have seen, that it may safely be put in the

place not merely of the royal but of the divine will. I have already

tried to show that a leader who sets out to be only the organ of a

“general will” or “divine average,” that is conceived at times as

essentially reasonable and at other times as essentially fraternal,

will actually become imperialistic. It may be well at this point to

submit this democratic idealism to still further analysis with special

reference to its probable effect on our own international relations.

The tendency for some time past has been to treat international law,

not theoretically as an embodiment of reason, but positively as an

embodiment of will.[114] In that case, if international law is to

reflect any improvement in the relations between states, it must

be shown that the substitution of the popular will for the divine

will has actually tended to promote ethical union among men even

across national frontiers. If we analyze realistically the popular

will, we find that it means the will of a multitude of men who are

more and more emancipated from traditional standards and more and

more given over to what I have termed the irresponsible quest of

thrills. These thrills are, as we all know, supplied by sensational

newspapers and in international affairs involve transitions, often

disconcertingly sudden, from pacifism to jingoism. Any one who can

recollect the period immediately preceding our conflict with Spain

will be sufficiently aware of the rôle that this type of journalism

may play in precipitating war. Let us ask ourselves again whether the

chances of a clash between America and Japan are likely to diminish if

Japan becomes more democratic, if, in other words, the popular will is

substituted for the will of a small group of “elder statesmen.” Any

one who knows what the Japanese sensational press has already done to

foment suspicion against America is justified in harboring doubts on

this point.

A democracy, the realistic observer is forced to conclude, is likely

to be idealistic in its feelings about itself, but imperialistic

in its practice. The idealism and the imperialism, indeed, are in

pretty direct ratio to one another. For example, to be fraternal in

Walt Whitman’s sense is to be boundlessly expansive, and a boundless

expansiveness, is, in a world like this, incompatible with peace.

Whitman imagines the United States as expanding until it absorbs

Canada and Mexico and dominates both the Atlantic and the Pacific--a

programme that would almost certainly involve us in war with the

whole world. If we go, not by what Americans feel about themselves,

but by what they have actually done, one must conclude that we have

shown ourselves thus far a consistently expansive, in other words, a

consistently imperialistic, people.[115] We have merely been expanding,

it may be replied, to our natural frontiers; but we are already in the

Philippines, and manifestly in danger of becoming involved in Asiatic

adventures. Japan, a country with fifty-seven million inhabitants

(increasing at the rate of about six hundred thousand a year), on

a group of islands not as large as the State of California, only

seventeen per cent of which is arable, has at least a plausible pretext

for reaching out beyond her natural frontiers. But for us, with our

almost limitless and still largely undeveloped resources, to risk the

horrors of war under modern conditions for anything we are likely to

gain from expanding eastward, would be an extreme example of sheer

restlessness of spirit and of an intemperate commercialism. It is a

part of our psychology that each main incident in our national history

should take on a highly idealistic coloring. For example, we were on

the verge of a conflict with Mexico a few years ago as the result of

an unwarranted meddling with her sovereignty. President Wilson at once

described the incipient struggle as a war of “service.” Cicero says

that Rome gained the mastery of the world by coming to the aid of her

allies. In the same way it may be said some day of us that, as the

result of a series of outbursts of idealism, we changed from a federal

republic to a highly centralized and bureaucratic empire. We are

willing to admit that all other nations are self-seeking, but as for

ourselves, we hold that we act only on the most disinterested motives.

We have not as yet set up, like revolutionary France, as the Christ of

Nations, but during the late war we liked to look on ourselves as at

least the Sir Galahad of Nations. If the American thus regards himself

as an idealist at the same time that the foreigner looks on him as a

dollar-chaser, the explanation may be due partly to the fact that the

American judges himself by the way he feels, whereas the foreigner

judges him by what he does.

This is not, of course, the whole truth. Besides our tradition of

idealism there is our unionist tradition based on a sane moral

realism. “It is a maxim,” says Washington, “founded on the universal

experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted further than it

is bound by its interests; and no president, statesman or politician

will venture to depart from it.” All realistic observation confirms

Washington. Those who are inspired by his spirit believe that we should

be nationally prepared, and then that we should mind our own business.

The tendency of our idealists, on the other hand, is to be unprepared

and then to engage in more or less general meddling. A third attitude

may be distinguished that may properly be associated with Roosevelt.

The follower of Roosevelt wants preparedness, only he cannot, like

the follower of Washington, be counted on to mind his own business.

The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs

as part of his programme of world service. Unfortunately, it is more

difficult than he supposes to engage in such a programme without

getting involved in a programme of world empire. The term sentimental

imperialism may be applied to certain incidents in ancient Roman

history.[116] Some of the motives that we professed for entering the

Great War remind one curiously of the motives that men like Flamininus

professed for going to the rescue of Greece. Cicero, writing over a

century later and only a few months before his assassination by the

emissaries of the Triumvirs, said that he himself had once thought that

Rome stood for world service rather than for world empire, but that he

had been bitterly disillusioned. He proceeds to denounce Julius Cæsar,

the imperialistic leader _par excellence_, as a demon in human form who

did evil for its own sake. But Cæsar had at least the merit of seeing

that the Roman ethos was changing, that as the result of the breakdown

of religious restraint (for which Stoical “service” was not an adequate

substitute), the Romans were rapidly becoming unfit for republican

institutions.

Some persons, indeed, are inclined to go beyond particular comparisons

of this kind and develop a general parallel between decadent Rome and

modern America. Such a parallel is always very incomplete and must

be used with great caution. We need, in the first place, to define

with some precision what we mean by decadence. The term is often

used vaguely by persons who are suffering from what one may call the

illusion of the “good old times.”[117] Livy is surely a bit idyllic

when he exclaims: “Where will you now find in one man this modesty

and uprightness and loftiness of spirit that then belonged to a whole

people?” Yet if one compares the Rome of the Republic with the Rome

of the Empire one is conscious of a real decline. The Senate that had

seemed to Cineas, the adviser of Pyrrhus, an assembly of demigods,

had become by the time of Tiberius a gathering rather of cringing

sycophants. Horace was uttering only the sober truth when he proclaimed

the progressive degeneracy of the Romans of his time.[118] The most

significant symptom of this degeneracy seemed to Horace and other

shrewd observers to be the relaxation of the bonds of the family.

Are we witnessing a similar moral deliquescence in this country, and,

if so, how far has it gone? One of our foreign critics asserts that we

have already reached the “Heliogabalus stage”--which is absurd. But

at the same time it is not to be denied that the naturalistic notion

of liberty has undermined in no small measure the two chief unifying

influences of the past--the Church and the family. The decline in the

discipline of the family has been fairly recent. Persons are still

living who can remember the conditions that prevailed in the Puritan

household.[119] The process of emancipation from the older restraint

has not usually presented itself as a lapse into mere materialism.

Idealism in the current sense of that term has tended to take the place

of traditional religion. The descendants of the Puritans have gone in

for commercialism, to be sure, especially since the Civil War, but it

has been commercialism tempered by humanitarian crusading. As I have

pointed out, the humanitarian does not, like the genuine Puritan, seek

to get at evil in the heart of the individual, so that he is finally

forced to resort to outer regulation. The egoistic impulses that are

not controlled at their source tend to prevail over an ineffectual

altruism in the relations of man with man and class with class. The

special mark of materialism, which is to regard property, not as a

means to an end, but as an end in itself, is more and more visible.

The conservative nowadays is interested in conserving property for its

own sake and not, like Burke, in conserving it because it is an almost

indispensable support of personal liberty, a genuinely spiritual thing.

As for the progressive, his preoccupation with property and what he

conceives to be its just distribution amounts to a morbid obsession.

Orderly party government will become increasingly difficult if we

continue to move in this direction, and we shall finally be menaced by

class war, if, indeed, we are not menaced by it already. Every student

of history is aware of the significance of this particular symptom

in a democracy. One may sum up what appears to be our total trend at

present by saying that we are moving through an orgy of humanitarian

legalism towards a decadent imperialism.

The important offsetting influence is our great unionist tradition.

One should not, however, underestimate the difficulties in the way

of maintaining this tradition. The idea that the State should have a

permanent or higher self that is felt as a veto power upon its ordinary

self rests ultimately upon the assertion of a similar dualism in the

individual. We have seen that this assertion has in the Occident been

inextricably bound up with certain Christian beliefs that have been

weakened by the naturalistic movement. We are brought back here to the

problem with which we have been confronted so often in the course of

the present argument, how, namely, to get modern equivalents for the

traditional beliefs, above all some fresh basis for the affirmation

of a _frein vital_ or centripetal element in liberty. What the men

of the French Revolution wanted, according to Joubert, was not

religious liberty, but irreligious liberty. In that case, the French

modernist retorts bitterly, you would have us give up revolutionary

liberty and become Jesuits. Similarly, if one points out to an

American modernist the inanity of his idealism as a substitute for the

traditional controls, he will at once accuse you of wishing to revert

to Puritanism. Strictly speaking, however, one does not need to revert

to anything. It is a part of my own method to put Confucius behind

Aristotle and Buddha behind Christ. The best, however, that even these

great teachers can do for us is to help us to discover what is already

present in ourselves.[120] From this point of view they are well-nigh

indispensable.

Let us begin, therefore, by ridding our minds of unreal alternatives.

If we in America are not content with a stodgy commercialism, it does

not follow that we need, on the one hand, to return to Puritanism, or,

on the other, to become “liberals” in the style of “The New Republic”;

nor, again, need we evolve under the guidance of Mr. H. L. Mencken

into second-rate Nietzscheans. We do need, however, if we are to gain

any hold on the present situation, to develop a little moral gravity

and intellectual seriousness. We shall then see that the strength of

the traditional doctrines, as compared with the modernist position,

is the comparative honesty with which they face the fact of evil. We

shall see that we need to restore to human nature in some critical and

experimental fashion the “old Adam” that the idealists have been so

busy eliminating. A restoration of this kind ought not to lead merely

to a lapse from naturalistic optimism into naturalistic pessimism;

nothing is easier than such a lapse and nothing at bottom is more

futile. Both attitudes are about equally fatalistic and so undermine

moral responsibility. A survey of the facts would suggest that man

is morally responsible, but that he is always trying to dodge this

responsibility; that what he suffers from, in short, is not fate in

any sense of the word, but spiritual supineness. There may be truth in

the saying that the devil’s other name is inertia. Nothing is more

curious than to trace historically the way in which some great teaching

like that of Christ or Buddha has been gradually twisted until man has

adjusted it more or less completely to his ancient indolence. Several

centuries ago there was a sect of Japanese Buddhism known as the Way

of Hardships; shortly after there arose another sect known as the Easy

Way which at once gained great popularity and tended to supplant the

Way of Hardships. But the Japanese Way of Hardships is itself an easy

way if one compares it with the original way of Buddha. One can follow,

indeed, very clearly the process by which Buddhist doctrine descended

gradually from the austere and almost inaccessible height on which it

had been placed by its founder to the level of the prayer mill. It was

announced in the press not long ago that as a final improvement some

of the prayer mills in Thibet are to be operated by electricity. The

man who hopes to save society by turning the crank of a legislative

mill or who sets up as a “socio-religious engineer” may call himself a

Christian, but he is probably as remote from the true spirit of Jesus

as some Eastern votary of the Easy Way is from the true spirit of

Buddha.

The essence of man’s spiritual indolence, as I have already pointed

out, is that he does not wish to look up to standards and discipline

himself with reference to them. He wishes rather to expand freely along

the lines of his dominant desire. He grasps eagerly at everything that

seems to favor this desire and so tends, as the saying is, to keep him

in good conceit with himself. Disraeli discovered, we are told, that

the best way to get on with Queen Victoria was to flatter her and

not to be afraid of overdoing the flattery, but “to lay it on with a

trowel.” Demos, as was pointed out long ago, craves flattery like any

other monarch, and in his theory of popular sovereignty Rousseau has,

it must be admitted, laid this flattery on with a trowel. In general,

his notion that evil is not in man himself, but in his institutions,

has enjoyed immense popularity, not because it is true, but because it

is flattering.

Observations of the kind I have been making are likely to lay one open

to the charge of cynicism. One needs, however, to cultivate a wholesome

cynicism as the only way of avoiding the unwholesome kind--that of the

disillusioned sentimentalist. When I speak of a wholesome cynicism, I

mean that of Aristotle who says that “most men do evil when they have

an opportunity,” or that of Bossuet, expressing the moderate Christian

view, when he speaks of “the prodigious malignity of the human heart

always inclined to do evil.” There is no harm in cynicism provided

the cynic does not think of himself as viewing human nature from the

outside and from some superior pinnacle. In the sense I have just

defined, cynicism, indeed, has many points in common with religious

humility.

Let us pursue then our realistic analysis without fear of the charge

of cynicism. Man would not succumb so easily to flattery if he did not

begin by flattering himself; his self-flattery is closely related in

turn to his moral indolence. I have said that the whole of life may

be summed up in the words diversion and conversion. But man does not

want conversion, the adjustment in other words of his natural will

to some higher will, because of the moral effort it implies. In this

sense he is the everlasting trifler. But, though he wishes diversion,

he is loath at the same time to admit that he is missing the fruits of

conversion. He wills the ends, because they are plainly desirable, but

he does not will the means because they are difficult and disciplinary.

In short, he harbors incompatible desires and so listens eagerly to

those who encourage him to think that it is possible to have the good

thing without paying the appointed price.

Two main modes in which men are thus flattered may be distinguished.

First, in an age of authority and accepted standards, they are induced

to substitute for the reality of spiritual discipline some ingenious

art of going through the motions. An extreme example is that of

the fashionable lady described by Boileau who (with the aid of her

spiritual director) had convinced herself that she could enjoy all

the pleasures of hell on the way to paradise. What concerns us now,

however, is not the mode of flattery that is based on exaggerated

respect for outer authority, but the other main mode that flourishes

in an age of individualism. The cushions that, according to Bossuet,

the Jesuits put under the sinner’s elbows are as nothing compared to

the cushions that the sinner puts under his own elbows when left to

himself. In a period like the present every man is his own Jesuit.[121]

Rousseau’s sycophancy of human nature proved to be particularly suited

to the requirements of the individualistic era. By his sophistry of

feeling he satisfied in a new and fetching fashion man’s permanent

desire, especially in the realm of moral values, to have his cake and

eat it too. The self-flattery that encourages the huddling together

of incompatible desires has never been pushed further than in this

movement. When one considers, for instance, the multitude of those

who have hoped to combine peace and brotherhood with a return to

nature, one is forced to conclude that an outstanding human trait is a

prodigious and pathetic gullibility.

The chief corrective of gullibility is, in an age of individualistic

emancipation, a full and free play of the critical spirit. The more

critical one becomes at such a time, the more likely one is to achieve

standards and avoid empty conceits. Now to criticize is literally to

discriminate. The student of both the natural and the human law needs

to be very discriminating; one should note, however, an important

difference between them. The discrimination of the man of science is

exercised primarily upon physical phenomena, that of the humanist

primarily upon words. “The beginning of genuine culture,” Socrates

is reported to have said, “is the scrutiny of general terms.”[122]

Socrates himself was so accomplished in this type of scrutiny that he

still deserves to be the master of those who are aiming at criticism. I

have said that the hope of civilization lies not in the divine average,

but in the saving remnant. It is plain that in an age like the present,

which is critical in every sense of the word, the remnant must be

highly Socratic.

Discrimination of the humanistic type is especially needed in the

field of political theory and practice. Confucius, when asked what

would be his first concern if the reins of government were put into

his hands, replied that his first concern would be to define his terms

and make words correspond with things. If our modern revolutionaries

have suffered disillusions of almost unparalleled severity, it is too

often because they have given their imagination to words, without

making sure that these words corresponded with things; and so they

have felt that they were bound for the promised land when they were in

reality only swimming in a sea of conceit. “The fruit of dreamy hoping

is, waking, blank despair.” The disenchantment of Hazlitt with the

French Revolution is typical of that of innumerable other “idealists.”

“The French Revolution,” he says, “was the only match that ever took

place between philosophy and experience; and, waking from the trance

of theory to the sense of reality, we hear the words _truth, reason,

virtue, liberty_ with the same indifference or contempt that the cynic,

who has married a jilt or a termagant, listens to the rhapsodies of

lovers.”

The reason that the Rousseauist often alleges for his attacks on the

analytical intellect, the necessary instrument of a Socratic dialectic,

is that it destroys unity. His disparagement of analysis may be

due, however, even less to his love of unity than to his dislike of

effort. It may be that, like Rousseau himself, he is seeking to give

to indolence the dignity of a philosophical occupation.[123] If it

is a strenuous thing to concentrate imaginatively on the facts of

the natural order, the concentration on the facts of the human order

that enables one to use one’s terms correctly is even more strenuous.

What a monstrous inequality, said Lincoln, to pay an honest laborer

seventy cents a day for digging coal and a President seventy dollars

a day for digging abstractions! The argument that Lincoln thus puts

forth ironically, a follower of Karl Marx would be capable of employing

seriously. But if the President does honest work, if he digs his

abstractions properly, instead of substituting some art of going

through the motions, he must display the utmost contention of spirit.

There have been moments in recent years when a President of this kind

would have been worth to the country many times seventy dollars a

day. Did the idealistic abstractions, one must make bold to ask, that

Mr. Woodrow Wilson poured forth so profusely when President, satisfy

the Socratic and Confucian test--did they correspond with things? The

late Mr. Walter H. Page concluded, after unusual opportunities of

observation, that Mr. Wilson was “_not_ a leader, but rather a stubborn

phrase-maker.” Fine words, according to the homely adage, butter no

parsnips. They may, however, it would seem, put a man in the White

House. Mr. Wilson, it should be remembered, was not only an ex-college

president himself, but in his main policies he had the eager support of

practically the whole corporation of college presidents. If Mr. Page’s

estimate of Mr. Wilson should prove to be correct, it would follow that

our American remnant--and college presidents should surely belong to

the remnant--is not sufficiently critical. The question is one of some

gravity, if it be true, as I said at the outset, that democracy will

in the long run have to be judged, like any other form of government,

by the quality of its leadership, and if it be true, furthermore, that

under existing conditions we must get our standards and our leadership

along Socratic rather than traditional lines. “What the Americans most

urgently require,” said Matthew Arnold, “is a steady exhibition of cool

and sane criticism.” That is precisely what they require and what they

have never had.

If we had a Socratic remnant one of its chief concerns would be to

give a civilized content to the catch-words that finally govern the

popular imagination. The sophist and the demagogue flourish in an

atmosphere of vague and inaccurate definition. With the aid of the

Socratic critic, on the other hand, Demos might have some chance of

distinguishing between its friends and its flatterers--something that

Demos has hitherto been singularly unable to do. Let one consider those

who have posed with some success as the people’s friends from Cleon of

Athens to Marat; and from Marat to William Randolph Hearst. It would

sometimes seem, indeed, that the people might do very well were it not

for its “friends.” The demagogue has been justified only too often in

his assumption that men may be led, not by their noses, but by their

ears as tenderly as asses are. The records of the past reveal that

the multitude has frequently been persuaded by a mirage of words that

the ship of state was steering a straight course for Eldorado, when

it was in reality drifting on a lee-shore; and the multitude has not

been apprized of the peril until it was within the very sound of the

breakers.

It is only too evident that we are not coping adequately with this

special problem of democracy; that we are, on the contrary, in danger

of combining the strength of giants with the critical intelligence of

children. Millions of Americans were ready not so very long ago to

hail William Jennings Bryan as a “peerless leader.” Other millions

are ready apparently to bestow a similar salute on Henry Ford--in

spite of the almost incredible exhibition he made of himself with his

“Peace Ship.” If our Socratic critics were sufficiently numerous, the

followers of such leaders would finally become conscious of something

in the air that was keen, crisp, and dangerous; they might finally be

forced to ask themselves whether the ideals with which they were being

beguiled really mean anything, or at all events anything more than

the masking in fine phrases of the desire to get one’s hand into the

other citizen’s pocket. The devil, as is well known, is a comparatively

harmless person unless he is allowed to disguise himself as an angel

of light. An unvarnished materialism is in short less to be feared

than sham spirituality. Sham spirituality is especially promoted by

the blurring of distinctions, which is itself promoted by a tampering

with general terms. A dialectical scrutiny of such terms is therefore

indispensable if one is to determine whether what a man takes to be his

idealism is merely some windy inflation of the spirit, or whether it

has support in the facts of human experience.

I have already made some application of the Socratic method to

idealism, a term that has come to be almost synonymous with

humanitarianism. I have pointed out, for instance, how the utilitarian

has corrupted the word comfort and the sentimentalist the word virtue.

The idealist may, indeed, retort that I have myself admitted that

certain elements essential to salvation are omitted in the Socratic

scheme of things, and that for these elements we need to turn from

Socrates to Christ; and he will proceed to identify the gospel of

Christ with his own gospel of sympathy and service. Humanitarian

idealism unquestionably owes much of its prestige, perhaps its

main prestige, to the fact that it has thus associated itself with

Christianity. I have sought to show, however, on strictly psychological

grounds, that humanitarian service does not involve, in either its

utilitarian or its sentimental form, the truths of the inner life

and that it cannot therefore be properly derived from Christ. The

transformation, indeed, of this great master of the inner life into a

master of “uplift” must seem to austere Christians, if there are any

left, a sort of second crucifixion. In substituting the love of man

for the love of God the humanitarian is working in a vicious circle,

for unless man has in him the equivalent of the love of God he is not

lovely. Furthermore, it is important that man should not only love but

fear the right things. The question was recently raised at Paris why

medical men were tending to usurp the influence that formerly belonged

to the clergy. The obvious reply is that men once lived in the fear of

God, whereas now they live in the fear of microbes. It is difficult to

see how one can get on humanitarian lines the equivalent of the truth

that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

Perhaps there is no better way of dealing with the humanitarian

movement than to take one’s point of departure in certain sayings of

Jesus and at the same time so to protect them by a Socratic dialectic

as to bring out their true meaning. For the present desideratum, it may

be, is not to renounce Socrates[124] in favor of Christ, but rather to

bring Socrates to the support of Christ.

Three sayings of Jesus would seem especially relevant, if we wish to

bring out the contrast between his inspired and imaginative good sense

and humanitarianism: (1) “Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s

and unto God the things that are God’s.” (2) “By their fruits ye shall

know them.” (3) One should build one’s house upon the rock.

I have already glanced at a violation of the first of these

maxims--that, namely, which has taken place in connection with the

humanitarian attempt to abolish war even at the expense of justice,

and the closely related attempt to convert the prince of peace into

a prince of pacifism. Americans often fear that the Roman Catholic

Church may use the machinery of democracy to its own ends; and in

parts of the country where Catholic voters are in the majority such

apprehensions--for example, the apprehension regarding the Catholic

domination of the schools--may not be entirely without foundation. It

was not, however, a Catholic but a Protestant who recently felt it

necessary to recall to his fellow believers that the kingdom of heaven

is within us and not at Washington. The Protestant churches seem to

be turning more and more to social service, which means that they have

been substituting for the truths of the inner life various causes and

movements and reforms and crusades. If W. J. Bryan had been born fifty

years earlier he would very likely have been a religious revivalist;

the religion of the revivalist was still in a fashion a religion of the

inner life. Bryan’s protest, however, in connection with his crusade

for free silver, against the crucifixion of the people on a cross of

gold, not only involves an unusually mawkish mixture of the things of

God and the things of Cæsar, but might have led to political action

that, so far from being religious, would have been subversive of common

honesty.

One should face frankly the question whether the crusading spirit

is in any of its manifestations genuinely Christian. The missionary

spirit, the purely spiritual appeal from man to man, is unquestionably

Christian. By the crusading spirit I mean, on the other hand, the

attempt to achieve spiritual ends collectively through the machinery

of the secular order. If one takes a long-range view, the question is

one that should be of special interest to Frenchmen, for France has

been more than any other country the crusading nation. It has been

said that the religious crusading of the Middle Ages in which France

played the leading part showed that Europe was already sloughing off

genuine Christianity. The contrast is striking in any case between

the Christianity of this period and that of the first centuries. The

more or less legendary account of the Theban Legion that was ready

to fight bravely for the Emperor when he kept within the temporal

domain, but allowed itself to be martyred to the last man unresistingly

rather than worship him as a God, reflects accurately enough the

attitude of the early Christian. The ruthless massacre that marked

the first entrance of the crusaders into Jerusalem (15 July, 1099)

is sufficient proof that they did not maintain any such distinction

between the spiritual and the temporal order.[125] It seems hardly

necessary to ask which of the two, the crusader or the member of the

Theban Legion, was nearer in spirit to the Founder. By his confusion of

the things of God with the things of Cæsar the crusader was in danger

of substituting a will to power for the will to peace that is at the

heart of genuine Christianity.[126] The emergence of the will to power

is even more obvious in the humanitarian crusader, as I attempted to

show in my study of the Rousseauistic side of the French Revolution.

The revolutionary formula, “liberty, equality, fraternity,” is in

itself only a portentous patter of words.[127] These words may, no

doubt, be so defined both separately and in their relation to one

another as to have a genuinely religious meaning. Understood in the

fashion of Rousseau, that is, as summing up the supposed results of a

return to “nature,” they encouraged one of the most virulent forms of

imperialism. The French themselves are growing more and more doubtful

about the “idealistic” side of their Revolution (it goes without saying

that the Revolution had other sides). They are growing more realistic

in temper.[128] The great problem for them as for all of us is, that,

on being disillusioned regarding this type of idealism, they should not

become merely Machiavellian realists.

At all events, France can no longer be looked upon as the crusading

nation. It is becoming the dangerous privilege of the United States to

display more of the crusading temper than any other country in both its

domestic and its foreign policies. Yet if one may properly question the

religious crusading of which the French were once so fond (_Gesta Dei

per Francos_), how much more properly may one question the activities

of our “uplifters” (_Gesta humanitatis per Americanos_). We are being

deprived gradually of our liberties on the ground that the sacrifice

is necessary to the good of society. If we attend carefully to the

psychology of the persons who manifest such an eagerness to serve

us, we shall find that they are even more eager to control us. What

one discovers, for example, under the altruistic professions of the

leaders of a typical organization for humanitarian crusading, like the

Anti-Saloon League, is a growing will to power and even an incipient

terrorism. Let one consider again Mr. Woodrow Wilson, who, more than

any other recent American, sought to extend our idealism beyond our

national frontiers. In the pursuit of his scheme for world service, he

was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and

to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power. If we refused to

take his humanitarian crusading seriously we were warned that we should

“break the heart of the world.” If the tough old world had ever had a

heart in the Wilsonian sense, it would have been broken long ago. The

truth is that this language, at once abstract and sentimental, reveals

a temper at the opposite pole from that of the genuine statesman. He

was inflexible and uncompromising in the defence of his “ideal,” the

League of Nations, which, as a corrective of the push for power on the

national scale, is under the suspicion of being only a humanitarian

chimera. At the same time he was only too ready to yield to the push

for power of the labor unions (Adamson Act), a form of the instinct

of domination so full of menace to free institutions that, rather

than submit to it, a genuine statesman would have died in his tracks.

One may contrast profitably the way in which Mr. Wilson faced this

issue with the way in which Grover Cleveland, perhaps the last of our

Presidents who was unmistakably in our great tradition, faced the issue

of free silver.

The particular confusion of the things of God and the things of Cæsar

promoted by Mr. Wilson and the other “idealists” needs to have brought

to bear on it the second of the sayings of Jesus that I have cited

(“By their fruits ye shall know them”). The idealists so plainly fail

to meet the test of fruits that they are taking refuge more and more,

especially since the war, in their good intentions. The cynic might,

indeed, complain that they already have hell paved at least twice over

with their good intentions. We can no more grant that good intentions

are enough in dealing with men than we can grant that they suffice a

chemist who is handling high explosives. Under certain conditions,

human nature itself may become one of the highest of high explosives.

Above all, no person in a position of political responsibility can

afford to let any “ideal” come between him and a keen inspection of

the facts. It is only too evident that this true vision was found

before the war in imperialists of the type of Lord Roberts rather

than in liberals of the type of Asquith and Grey. It does not follow

that the realism that one should oppose to the “idealists” need be

of a merely imperialistic type; it may be a complete moral realism.

The moral realist will not allow himself to be whisked off into any

cloud-cuckoo-land in the name of the ideal. He will pay no more

attention to the fine phrases in which an ideal of this kind is

clothed than he would to the whistling of the wind around a corner.

The idealist will, therefore, denounce him as “hard.” His hardness

is in any case quite unlike that of the Machiavellian realist. If

the moral realist seems hard to the idealist, this is because of his

refusal to shift, in the name of sympathy or social justice or on any

other ground, the struggle between good and evil from the individual

to society. If we restore the moral struggle to the individual, we

are brought back at once to the assertion in some form or other of the

truths of the inner life. The question that may properly be raised

at present is not whether this or that cause or movement or reform

is breaking down, but whether humanitarian crusading in general as a

substitute for the inner life is not breaking down. The failure of

humanitarianism might be even more manifest than it is were it not for

the survival--and that even in the humanitarians themselves--of habits

that derive from an entirely different view of life. The ethos of a

community does not disappear in a day, even when the convictions that

sustain it have been undermined. This slow decline of an ethos adds to

the difficulty of judging any particular doctrine by its fruits. These

fruits are often slow to appear. For example, no one has been more

successful in breaking down American educational tradition in favor

of humanitarian conceptions than President Eliot, who is himself an

unusually fine product of the Puritan discipline.[129] He has owed his

great influence largely to the fact that many men are sensitive to a

dignified and impressive personality, whereas very few men are capable

of weighing the ultimate tendencies of ideas. One might have more

confidence in the elective system if it could be counted on to produce

President Eliots.

Though the traditional habits survive the traditional beliefs, they

do not survive them indefinitely. With the progressive weakening, not

merely of the Puritan ethos, but of the Christian ethos of the Occident

in general, it may become harder and harder to justify humanitarianism

experimentally. This movement has from Bacon’s time stood for fruits

and, in all that concerns man’s power and material comfort and utility,

it has as a matter of fact been superlatively fruitful. But it has also

professed to give the fruits of the spirit--for example, peace and

brotherhood--and here its failure is so conspicuous as to lead one to

suspect some basic unsoundness.

At this point the third saying of Jesus that I have quoted comes into

play--the saying as to the importance of building on the rock. The

storm has come and it is not clear that our modern house is thus firmly

established. The impression one has is rather that of an immense and

glittering superstructure on insecure foundations.

The basis on which the whole structure of the new ethics has been

reared is, as we have seen, the assumption that the significant

struggle between good and evil is not in the individual but in society.

If we wish once more to build securely, we may have to recover in some

form the idea of “the civil war in the cave.” If one admits this “war,”

one may admit at the same time the need of the work of the spirit, if

one is to bring forth the fruits of the spirit. If one denies this

war, one transfers the work to the outer world or substitutes for it

a sympathy that involves neither an inner nor an outer working. A

main problem of ethics, according to Cicero, is to prevent a divorce

between the honorable (_honestum_) and the useful (_utile_). If these

terms are not sophisticated, he says, the honorable and the useful

will be found to be identical. But such a sophistication has taken

place as a result of the emphasis on an outer rather than on an inner

working about which I have already had so much to say in this volume.

The fruitful has thus come to be identified with the useful and finally

(in a narrow and doctrinal sense) with the utilitarian. The whole

problem has assumed a gravity that it did not have in the time of

Cicero because of the way in which we have got ourselves implicated, by

our one-sided pursuit of utility, in an immense mass of interlocking

machinery.

One needs, however, if one is to recover a firm basis for the spiritual

life, to get behind even the word work. The sophistication of this

word would not have been possible had it not been for the previous

sophistication of the word nature. This word should receive the first

attention of any one who is seeking to defend on Socratic lines either

humanistic or religious truth. Apply a sufficiently penetrating

dialectic to the word nature, one is sometimes tempted to think, and

the sophist will be put out of action at the start. The juggling with

this word can be traced from the ancient Greek who said that the

distinction between the honorable and the shameful has no root in

nature, but is merely a matter of convention, to Renan who said that

“nature does not care for chastity.” This juggling has always been

the main source of an unsound individualism. The contrast between the

natural and the artificial that has flourished since the eighteenth

century and underlies the romantic movement is especially inadmissible.

“Art,” as Burke says, “is man’s nature.” I have already referred to

Diderot’s dismissal of the opposition between a law of the spirit and a

law of the members as “artificial,” and have said that the proper reply

to such sophistry is not to take refuge in theology, but to insist

upon this opposition as one of the “immediate data of consciousness”;

that we shall thus get experimentally the basis we require if we are

to do the work of the spirit and bring forth its fruits. A confusion

like that of Diderot is so serious that the defining of the one word

“nature” would justify a dialectical battle along Socratic lines the

like of which has never been seen in the history of the world. When it

was over, the field of conflict would be covered thick with dead and

dying reputations; for there can be no doubt that many of the leaders

of the present time have fallen into the naturalistic error.

On one’s definition of work, which itself depends on one’s definition

of nature, will depend in turn one’s definition of liberty. One is

free to work and not to idle. Only when liberty is properly defined

according not merely to the degree, but to the quality of one’s

working, is it possible to achieve a sound definition of justice (To

every man according to his works). One’s definition of justice again

will be found to involve one’s definition of peace in the secular

order: for men can live at peace with one another only in so far as

they are just. As for religious peace, it is not subject to definition.

In the scriptural phrase, it passeth understanding.

Above all, if one is to achieve a sound philosophy of will, there must

be no blurring of the distinction between the spiritually inert and

the spiritually energetic. The point is one that should be of special

interest to Americans. The European has tended in his typical moments,

and that from the time of the Greeks, to be an intellectual. There are

signs, on the other hand, that if America ever achieves a philosophy of

its own, it will be rather a philosophy of will. We have been called

the “people of action.” Under the circumstances it is a matter of some

moment both for ourselves and for the rest of the world whether we are

to be strenuous in a completely human or in a merely Rooseveltian sense.

One may grant, indeed, that in a world like this the Rooseveltian

imperialist is a safer guide than the Jeffersonian or Wilsonian

“idealist.” But there is no reason why one should accept either horn of

this dilemma. The most effective way of dealing with the Jeffersonian

idealism is to submit to a Socratic dialectic the theory of natural

rights that underlies it. This theory rests on the sophistical contrast

between the natural and the artificial of which I have just spoken,

a contrast that encourages a total or partial suppression of the

true dualism of the spirit and of the special quality of working it

involves. With this weakening of the inner life it becomes possible

to assert a lazy or, what amounts to the same thing, an anarchical

liberty. For true liberty is not liberty to do as one likes, but

liberty to adjust oneself, in some sense of that word, to law. “The

Abbé Coigniard,” says Anatole France, “would not have signed a line

of the declaration of the rights of man because of the excessive and

unjust discrimination it establishes between man and the gorilla.”

The true objection to the declaration of the rights of man is the

exact opposite of the one stated by M. France: it does not establish

a sufficiently wide gap between man and the gorilla. This gap can be

maintained only if one insists that genuine liberty is the reward of

ethical effort; it tends to disappear if one presents liberty as a free

gift of “nature.”

It may, indeed, be urged that the theory of natural rights, though

false, may yet be justified as a “useful fiction,” that it has often

shown itself an effective weapon of attack on the iniquities of the

existing social order. One may doubt, however, the utility of the

fiction, for what it tends to oppose to the existing order is not

a better order but anarchy. No doubt the established order of any

particular time and place that the partisan of “rights” would dismiss

as conventional and artificial is, compared with true and perfect

order, only a shadow; but such as it is, it cannot be lightly abandoned

in favor of some “ideal” that, when critically examined, may turn out

to be only a mirage on the brink of a precipice. The “unwritten laws of

heaven”[130] of which the great humanist Sophocles speaks are felt in

their relation to the written law, not as a right, but as a stricter

obligation.

The tendency of the doctrine of natural rights to weaken the sense

of obligation, and so to undermine genuine liberty, may be studied in

connection with its influence on the common law which has prevailed

among the English-speaking peoples. The spirit of this law at its

best is that of a wholesome moral realism. Under the influence of the

school of rights the equity that is often in conflict with strict law

was more or less identified with a supposed law of “nature.”[131]

This identification encouraged an unsound individualism. The proper

remedy for an unsound individualism is a sound individualism, an

individualism that starts, not from rights, but from duties. The actual

reply to the unrestraint of the individual has been another doctrine

of rights, the rights of society, which are sometimes conceived almost

as metaphysically as the older doctrine of the rights of man. The

representatives of this school of legal thinking tend to identify

equity with the principle of social utility. Judges have already

appeared who have so solicited the strict letter of the law in favor of

what they deemed to be socially expedient as to fall into a veritable

confusion of the legislative and judicial functions. Unfortunately

those who represent society at any particular moment and who are

supposed to overflow with a will to service will be found by the

realistic observer (in so far at least as they are mere humanitarian

crusaders in whom there is no survival of the traditional controls)

to be developing, under cover of their altruism, a will to power. On

the pretext of social utility they are ready to deprive the individual

of every last scrap and vestige of his freedom and finally to subject

him to despotic outer control. No one, as Americans of the present day

are only too well aware, is more reckless in his attacks on personal

liberty than the apostle of “service.” He is prone in his furtherance

of his schemes of “uplift” not only to ascribe unlimited sovereignty to

society as against the individual, but to look on himself as endowed

with a major portion of it, to develop a temper, in short, that is

plainly tyrannical.

We seem, indeed, to be witnessing in a different form the emergency

faced by the early Christians. The time may come again, if indeed

it has not come already, when men will be justified in asserting

true freedom, even, it may be, at the cost of their lives, against

the monstrous encroachments of the materialistic state.[132] The

collectivistic ideal suffers, often in an exaggerated form, from the

underlying error of _laisser faire_ against which it is so largely

a protest. It does not reveal an adequate sense of the nature of

obligation and of the special type of effort it imposes. As a result

of its shallowness in dealing with the idea of work, it is in danger

of substituting for real justice the phantasmagoria of social justice.

Some of the inequalities that the collectivist attacks are no doubt the

result of the unethical competition promoted by _laisser faire_. But

the remedy for these inequalities is surely not the pursuit of such

chimeras as social or economic equality, at the risk of sacrificing the

one form of equality that is valuable--equality before the law.

Equality as it is currently pursued is incompatible with true liberty;

for liberty involves an inner working with reference to standards,

the right subordination, in other words, of man’s ordinary will to a

higher will. There is an inevitable clash, in short, between equality

and humility. Historically humility has been secured more or less at

the expense of the intellect. I have myself been trying to show that

it is possible to defend humility, and in general the truths of the

inner life, by a critical method and in this sense to put Socrates

in the service of Christ. The question of method is, in any case,

all-important if one is to heal the feud between the head and the heart

that has subsisted in the Occident in various forms from Græco-Roman

times. Intellect, though finally subordinate to will, is indispensable

in direct ratio to the completeness of one’s break with traditional

standards. It is then needed to test from the point of view of reality

the unity achieved by the imagination and so to supply new standards

with reference to which the higher will may exercise its power of veto

on the impulses and expansive desires. When will and intellect and

imagination have been brought into right relation with one another,

one arrives at last at the problem of the emotions, to which the

Rousseauist, in his misplaced thirst of immediacy, gives the first

place. To have standards means practically to select and reject; and

this again means that one must discipline one’s feelings or affections,

to use the older word, to some ethical centre. If the discipline is to

be effective, so that a man will like and dislike the right things, it

is as a rule necessary that it should become a matter of habit, and

that almost from infancy. One cannot wait until the child has reached

the so-called age of reason, until, in short, he is in a position to

do his own selecting, for in the mean while he may have become the

victim of bad habits. This is the true prison house that is in danger

of closing on the growing boy. Habit must, therefore, as Aristotle

says, precede reason. Certain other ideas closely connected with the

idea of habit, need to receive attention at this point. The ethos of a

community is derived in fact, as it is etymologically, from habit. If a

community is to transmit certain habits to its young, it must normally

come to some kind of agreement as to what habits are desirable; it

must in the literal meaning of that word achieve a convention. Here

is a chief difference between the true and the false liberal. It has

been said of our modernists that they have only one convention and

that is that there shall be no more conventions. An individualism that

is thus purely temperamental is incompatible with the survival of

civilization. What is civilized in most people is precisely that part

of them which is conventional. It is, to be sure, difficult to have a

convention without falling into mere conventionalism, two things that

the modernist confounds; but then everything that is worth while is

difficult.

The combining of convention with a due respect for the liberty of the

individual involves, it must be admitted, adjustments of the utmost

delicacy. Two extremes are about equally undesirable: first, the

convention may be so rigid and minute as to leave little scope for the

initiative of the individual. This formalistic extreme was reached, if

Occidental opinion be correct, in the China of the past, and also in

the older French convention that Rousseau attacked. At the opposite

pole is the person who is spontaneous after the fashion encouraged by

Rousseau and who, in getting rid of conventions, has also got rid of

standards and abandoned himself to the mere flux of his impressions.

The problem of standards would be simple if all we had to do was to

oppose to this anarchical “liberty” a sound set of general principles.

But so far as actual conduct is concerned, life resolves itself into a

series of particular emergencies, and it is not always easy to bridge

the gap between these emergencies or concrete cases and the general

principle. It has been held in the Occident, at least from the time of

Aristotle, and in the Orient, at least from the time of Confucius, that

one should be guided in one’s application of the general principle by

the law of measure. The person who thus mediates successfully seems,

in the phrase of Pascal, to combine in himself opposite virtues and to

occupy all the space between them. As a general principle, for example,

courage is excellent, but unless it be tempered in the concrete

instance by prudence, it will degenerate into rashness. According to

Bossuet, “Good maxims pushed to an extreme are utterly ruinous.” (_Les

bonnes maximes outrées perdent tout._) But who is to decide what is the

moderate and what the extreme application of a good maxim? The casuist

or legalist would not only lay down the general principle, but try to

deal exhaustively with all the cases that may arise in the application

of it, in such wise as to deprive the individual, so far as possible,

of his autonomy. The cases are, however, inexhaustible, inasmuch as

life is, in Bergson’s phrase, a perpetual gushing forth of novelties.

A Jesuitical casebook or the equivalent is after all a clumsy

substitute for the living intuition of the individual in determining

the right balance to strike between the abiding principle and the novel

emergency. While insisting, therefore, on the need of a convention, one

should strive to hold this convention flexibly, imaginatively, and, as

it were, progressively. Without a convention of some kind it is hard

to see how the experience of the past can be brought to bear on the

present. The unconventional person is assuming that either he or his

age is so unique that all this past experience has become obsolete.

This very illusion has, to be sure, been fostered in many by the rapid

advance of the physical sciences.

So much experience has accumulated in both the East and the West that

it should seem possible for those who are seeking to maintain standards

and to fight an anarchical impressionism, to come together, not only

as to their general principles, but as to the main cases that arise in

the application of them. This convention, if it is to be effective,

must, as I have already suggested, be transmitted in the form of habits

to the young. This is only another way of saying that the civilization

of a community and ultimately the government of which it is capable

is closely related to the type of education on which it has agreed.

(One should include in education the discipline that children receive

in the family). “The best laws,” says Aristotle, “will be of no avail

unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of

the constitution.”[133] Aristotle complains that this great principle

was being violated in his time. Is it being observed in ours? It

will be interesting in any case to make a specific application of

the Aristotelian dictum to our American education in its relation

to American government. Assuming that what we wish to preserve is a

federal and constitutional democracy, are we training up a class of

leaders whose ethos is in intimate accord with this type of government?

The older type of American college reflected faithfully enough the

convention of its time. The classical element in its curriculum was

appropriately subordinated to the religious element, inasmuch as

the leadership at which it aimed was to be lodged primarily in the

clergy. It would have been possible to interpret more vitally our

older educational convention, to give it the broadening it certainly

needed and to adapt it to changed conditions. The new education (I am

speaking, of course, of the main trend) can scarcely be said to have

developed in this fashion from the old. It suggests rather a radical

break with our traditional ethos. The old education was, in intention

at least, a training for wisdom and character. The new education

has been summed up by President Eliot in the phrase: training for

service and power. We are all coming together more and more in this

idea of service. But, though service is supplying us in a way with

a convention, it is not, in either the humanistic or the religious

sense, supplying us with standards. In the current sense of the word

it tends rather to undermine standards, if it be true, as I have tried

to show, that it involves an assumption hard to justify on strictly

psychological grounds--the assumption that men can come together

expansively and on the level of their ordinary selves. The older

education was based on the belief that men need to be disciplined to

some ethical centre. The sentimental humanitarian opposes to a definite

curriculum which aims at some such humanistic or religious discipline

the right of the individual to develop freely his bent or temperamental

proclivity. The standard or common measure is compromised by the

assertion of this supposed right, and in about the same measure the

effort and spirit of emulation that the standard stimulates disappears.

The very word curriculum implies a running together. Under the new

educational dispensation, students, instead of running together,

tend to lounge separately. Interest is transferred from the classroom

to the athletic field, where there is a standard of a kind and, with

reference to this standard, something that human nature craves--real

victory or real defeat. The sentimentalist also plays into the hands

of the utilitarian, who likewise sets up a standard with reference to

which one may strive and achieve success or failure. Anything that thus

has a definite aim tends to prevail over anything that, like a college

of liberal arts under the elective system, is comparatively aimless.

One cannot admit the argument sometimes heard that, because the older

education had a definite end, it was therefore vocational in the same

sense as the schools of business administration, for example, that have

been developing so portentously of late in our educational centres.

The older education aimed to produce leaders and, as it perceived, the

basis of leadership is not commercial or industrial efficiency, but

wisdom. Those who have been substituting the cult of efficiency for the

older liberal training are, of course, profuse in their professions of

service either to country or to mankind at large. The question I have

been raising throughout this volume, however, is whether anything so

purely expansive as service, in the humanitarian sense, can supply an

adequate counterpoise to the pursuit of unethical power, whether the

proper counterpoise is not to be sought rather in the cultivation of

the principle of vital control, first of all in the individual and

finally in the State.

I have said that one’s attitude towards the principle of control will

determine one’s definition of liberty, and that the Jeffersonians

inclining, as they did, to the new myth of man’s natural goodness,

looked askance, not merely at the traditional restraints, but at

everything that interfered with a purely expansive freedom. Jefferson

himself saw to some extent the implications of his general position

for education in particular. He is, for example, one of the authentic

precursors of the elective system.[134] The education that the

Jeffersonian liberty has tended to supplant set up a standard that

limited the supposed right of the individual to self-expression as well

as the inbreeding of special aptitudes in the interests of efficiency;

it was not, in short, either sentimental or utilitarian. There is a

real relation between the older educational standard that thus acted

restrictively on the mere temperament of the individual and the older

political standard embodied in institutions like the Constitution,

Senate, and Supreme Court, that serve as a check on the ordinary or

impulsive will of the people. It follows from all I have said that the

new education does not meet the Aristotelian requirement: it is not in

intimate correspondence with our form of government. If the veto power

disappears from our education there is no reason to anticipate that it

will long survive in the State. The spirit of the leaders will not be

that which should preside over a constitutional democracy.

The best of our elder statesmen, though they opposed a standard to

the mere flux of popular impulse and made sure that the standard

was appropriately embodied in institutions, did not associate their

standard with any theory of the absolute. Herein they showed their

sagacity. One cannot separate too carefully the cause of standards

from that of the absolute. Standards are a matter of observation

and common sense, the absolute is only a metaphysical conceit. In

political thinking this conceit has led to various theories of

unlimited sovereignty. Judged by their fruits all these theories are,

according to John Adams, “equally arbitrary, cruel, bloody, and in

every respect diabolical.” They can be shown, at all events, to be

hard to reconcile with a proper respect for personal liberty.[135]

It is a fortunate circumstance that the very word sovereignty does

not occur in our Constitution. The men who made this Constitution

were for granting a certain limited power here and another limited

power somewhere else, and absolute power nowhere. The best scheme of

government they conceived to be a system of checks and balances. They

did not, however, look on the partial powers they bestowed as being on

the same level. They were aware that true liberty requires a hierarchy

and a subordination, that there must be something central in a state to

which final appeal may be made in case of conflict. The complaint has,

indeed, been made that they left certain ambiguities in the articles of

union that had finally to be clarified on the battle-field. If they had

been more explicit, however, it is not probable that they would have

been able to establish a union at all. They were confronted with the

difficult task of gaining recognition for the centripetal element in

government in the face of the most centrifugal doctrine the world has

ever known--the doctrine that encourages men to put their rights before

their duties.

John Marshall deserves special praise for the clearness with which he

saw that the final centre of control in the type of government that

was being founded, if control was to have an ethical basis and not be

another name for force, must be vested in the judiciary, particularly

in the Supreme Court. This court, especially in its most important

function, that of interpreting the Constitution, must, he perceived,

embody more than any other institution the higher or permanent self of

the State. With a sound and independent judiciary, above all with a

sound and independent supreme bench, liberty and democracy may after

all be able to coexist. Many people are aware that personal liberty

and the security of private property, which is almost inseparable

from it, are closely bound up with the fortunes of the Supreme Court.

Their ideas are, however, often vague as to the nature of the menace

that overhangs our highest tribunal. We are familiar with the rant of

Gompers and his kind against the courts; we also know what to expect

from the radical press. We are not surprised, for example, when a

socialistic periodical, published at Girard, Kansas, devotes a special

issue of five million copies to an assault on the federal judiciary.

A menace that is perhaps more serious than this open hostility may

be defined as a sort of “boring from within.” This phrase seems to

fit the professors in our law schools who are departing from the

traditional standards of the law in favor of “social justice.” Social

justice, it is well to remind these “forward-looking” professors, means

in practice class justice, class justice means class war and class war,

if we are to go by all the experience of the past and present, means

hell.

The inadequacy of social justice with its tendency to undermine the

moral responsibility of the individual and at the same time to obscure

the need of standards and leadership may be made clearer if we consider

for a moment the problem of government with the utmost degree of

realism. Thus considered, government is power. Whether the power is to

be ethical or unethical, whether in other words it is subordinated to

true justice, must depend finally on the quality of will displayed by

the men who administer it. For what counts practically is not justice

in the abstract, but the just man. The just man is he whose various

capacities (including the intellect) are acting in right relation to

one another under the hegemony of the higher will. We are brought

back here to the problem of the remnant. Those who strive for the

inner proportion that is reflected in the outer world as justice have

always been few. The remark of Aristotle that “most men would rather

live in a disorderly than in a sober manner” remains true, at least

in the subtler psychic sense. Though one agree with Aristotle as to

the ethical unsoundness of the majority, it does not follow that

the ethical State is impossible. Human nature, and this is its most

encouraging trait, is sensitive to a right example. It is hard, indeed,

to set bounds to the persuasiveness of a right example, provided only

it be right enough. The ethical State is possible in which an important

minority is ethically energetic and is thus becoming at once just and

exemplary. Such a minority will also tend to solve the problem of

union. The soul of the unjust man is, according to Aristotle, torn by

every manner of faction.[136] The just man, on the contrary, is he who,

as the result of his moral choices based on due deliberation, choices

in which he is moved primarily by a regard for his own happiness,

has quelled the unruly impulses of his lower nature and so attained

to some degree of unity with himself. At the same time he will find

that he is moving towards a common centre with others who have been

carrying through a similar task of self-conquest. A State that is

controlled by men who have become just as the result of minding their

own business in the Platonic sense will be a just State that will

also mind its own business; it will be of service to other States,

not by meddling in their affairs on either commercial or “idealistic”

grounds, but by setting them a good example. A State of this kind may

hope to find a basis of understanding with any other State that is also

ethically controlled. The hope of coöperation with a State that has an

unethical leadership is chimerical. The value of political thinking is

therefore in direct ratio to its adequacy in dealing with the problem

of leadership. The unit to which all things must finally be referred

is not the State or humanity or any other abstraction, but the man of

character. Compared with this ultimate human reality, every other

reality is only a shadow in the mist.[137]

It follows from what I have said that ethical union, whether in the

single man or among different men or on the national or international

scale, is attainable so far as it is attainable at all, not by

expansive emotion nor by any form of machinery or organization (in

the current sense of the word), but only by the pathway of the inner

life. Some persons will remain spiritually anarchical in spite of

educational opportunity, others will acquire at least the rudiments of

ethical discipline, whereas still others, a small minority, if we are

to judge by past experience, will show themselves capable of the more

difficult stages of self-conquest that will fit them for leadership.

Our traditional education with all its defects did something to produce

leaders of this ethical type, whereas the utilitarian-sentimental

education which has been tending to supplant it is, as I have been

trying to show, lacking in the essentials of the inner life and so is

not likely to produce either religious or humanistic leaders. Most

Americans of the present day will, indeed, feel that they have refuted

sufficiently all that I have said, if they simply utter the word

“service.” One may suspect, however, that the popularity of the gospel

of service is due to the fact that it is flattering to unregenerate

human nature. It is pleasant to think that one may dispense with awe

and reverence and the inner obeisance of the spirit to standards,

provided one be eager to do something for humanity. “The highest

worship of God,” as Benjamin Franklin assures us blandly, “is service

to man.” If it can be shown experimentally--and a certain amount of

evidence on this point has accumulated since the time of Franklin--that

service in this sense is not enough to chain up the naked lusts of the

human heart, one must conclude that the supreme exemplar of American

shrewdness and practicality did not, in the utterance I have just

cited, show himself sufficiently shrewd and practical. The gospel of

service is at all events going to receive a thorough trial, if nowhere

else, then in America. We are rapidly becoming a nation of humanitarian

crusaders. The present reign of legalism is the most palpable outcome

of this crusading. It is growing only too evident, however, that the

drift towards license is being accelerated rather than arrested by the

multiplication of laws. If we do not develop a sounder type of vision

than that of our “uplifters” and “forward-lookers,” the history of

free institutions in this country is likely to be short, and, on the

whole, discreditable. Surely the first step is to perceive that the

alternative to a constitutional liberty is not a legalistic millennium,

but a triumph of anarchy followed by a triumph of force. The time

may come, with the growth of a false liberalism, when a predominant

element in our population, having grown more and more impatient of

the ballot box and representative government, of constitutional

limitations and judicial control, will display a growing eagerness for

“direct action.” This is the propitious moment for the imperialistic

leader. Though the triumph of any type of imperialistic leader is

a disaster, especially in a country like our own that has known the

blessings of liberty under the law, nevertheless there is a choice

even here. Circumstances may arise when we may esteem ourselves

fortunate if we get the American equivalent of a Mussolini; he may

be needed to save us from the American equivalent of a Lenin. Such

an emergency is not to be anticipated, however, unless we drift even

further than we have thus far from the principles that underlie our

unionist tradition. The maintenance of this tradition is indissolubly

bound up with the maintenance of standards. The democratic contention

that everybody should have a chance is excellent provided it mean that

everybody is to have a chance to measure up to high standards. If the

democratic extension of opportunity is, on the other hand, made a

pretext for lowering standards, democracy is, in so far, incompatible

with civilization. One might be more confident of the outcome of the

struggle between a true and a false liberalism that has been under way

since the founding of the Republic, if the problem of standards was

being dealt with more adequately in our education, above all in our

higher education. The tendency here, however, is, as I have noted,

to discard standards in favor of “ideals”; and ideals, as currently

understood, recognize very imperfectly, if at all, that man needs to

be disciplined to a law of his own, distinct from the law of physical

nature. One might view this idealistic development with more equanimity

if one were convinced with Professor John Dewey that the growing child

exudes spontaneously a will to service.[138] If we look, however, on

this form of spontaneity as a romantic myth, we shall be forced to

conclude that we have been permitting Professor Dewey and his kind to

have an influence on our education that amounts in the aggregate to

a national calamity; that with the progress of ideals of this kind

our higher education in particular is, from the point of view of a

genuinely liberal training, in danger of becoming a vast whir of

machinery in the void; finally, that, in the interest of our experiment

in free institutions, we need educational leaders who will have less

to say of service and more to say of culture and civilization, and who

will so use these words as to show that they have some inkling of their

true meaning.

This book has been written to no purpose unless I have made plain that

the problem of standards and leadership is by no means merely American.

The American situation can be understood only with reference to the

larger background--the slow yielding in the whole of the Occident

of traditional standards, humanistic and religious, to naturalism.

I have defined in its main aspects the movement that has supervened

upon this emancipation from the past as Baconian, Rousseauistic,

and Machiavellian; in other words, as utilitarian, sentimental, and

imperialistic. The individualist should, however, make a better use of

his liberty; the less traditional he becomes, the more he should strive

to get at standards positively and critically. The result of such

a striving would, I have tried to show, be a movement that might be

best defined as Socratic, Aristotelian, and Christian, that would, in

short, put prime emphasis in its different stages on definition, habit,

and humility. What has actually been witnessed in the Occident, as a

result of the failure to work out critical equivalents of traditional

standards, has been a series of violent oscillations between a

humanitarian idealism and a Machiavellian realism. Humanitarian

idealism is still firmly entrenched in this country, especially in

academic circles, where it seems to be held more confidently, one

is almost tempted to say more smugly, with each succeeding year.

Europeans, on the other hand, have suffered certain essential

disillusions. It is becoming increasingly difficult for them to believe

that the idealists have discovered any effective counterpoise to the

push for power. “We are much beholden,” says Bacon, “to Machiavel and

others that wrote what men do, and not what they ought to do.” The gap

between what men do and what they ought to do is turning out to be even

wider under the humanitarian dispensation than under that of mediæval

Christianity.

Yet the Machiavellian solution is in itself impossible. If the

Occident does not get beyond this type of realism, it will simply

reënact all the pagan stupidities and hasten once more to the pagan

doom. Moreover, the latter stages of the naturalistic dissolution

of civilization with which we are menaced are, thanks to scientific

“progress,” likely to be marked by incidents of almost inconceivable

horror. The danger of power without wisdom, of a constantly increasing

material organization combined with an ever-growing spiritual anarchy,

is already so manifest that unless there is a serious search for a

remedy we may conclude that the instinct for self-preservation that is

supposed to inhere in mankind is a myth. Surely the first step will

be to put in his proper subordinate place the man of science with his

poison gases[139] and high explosives, and that without a particle

of obscurantism. The tendency of physical science to bring the whole

of human nature under a single law can be shown to be at the bottom

of some of the most dangerous fallacies of the present time--for

example, the socialistic dream of “scientific” politics. “Thus the

whole of society,” says Mr. J. Ramsay MacDonald, “its organization, its

institutions, its activities, is brought within the sway of natural

law, not merely on its descriptive and historical side, but on its

experimental side, and administration and legislation become arts

pursued in the same way as the chemist works in his laboratory.”[140]

The man of science is flattered in the conceit of his own importance

by this inordinate exaltation of the “law for thing.” Yet he should,

in the interest of science itself, reject the whole point of view

as pseudo-scientific; for science needs the support of civilization

and the chief force that is now making against civilization is, next

perhaps to emotional unrestraint, pseudo-science.

Mr. MacDonald and his kind almost invariably look upon themselves

as “idealists.” This should serve to remind us that the terms

idealism and realism as now employed, however much they may clash

superficially, have at least this much in common: they are both rooted

in a naturalistic philosophy. Any one who transcends this philosophy

ceases in about the same measure to be either a humanitarian idealist

or a Machiavellian realist. He becomes aware of a quality of will

that distinguishes man from physical nature and is yet natural in the

sense that it is a matter of immediate perception and not of outer

authority. I have said that the neglect of this quality of will by

both utilitarians and sentimentalists has encouraged a sophistical

definition of liberty; that this type of liberty has owed its appeal

to its flattery of spiritual indolence, perhaps the most fundamental

human trait that is open to direct observation. Any one who has once

perceived this trait in himself and others, and followed it out in even

a few of its almost innumerable ramifications, will be in no danger

of overlooking the old Adam after the fashion of the “idealists.” The

insistence on the putting aside of spiritual indolence and the exercise

of the higher will is found in every genuinely spiritual doctrine,

above all in genuine Christianity. Traditionally the Christian has

associated his liberty and his faith in a higher will with grace.

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” I myself have been

trying to come at this necessary truth, not in terms of grace, but in

terms of work, and that on the humanistic rather than on the religious

level. I am not so arrogant as to deny the validity of other ways of

affirming the higher will, or to dismiss as obsolete the traditional

forms through which this will has been interpreted to the imagination.

I am attempting a contribution, I cannot remind the reader too often,

to a specific problem--to the distinction, namely, between a sound and

an unsound individualism. My argument should appeal primarily, so far

as it appeals to any one, to those who, as a result of having broken

with the traditional forms on grounds insufficiently critical, are in

danger of losing the truths of the higher will entirely; who are mere

modernists at a time when there is a supreme need of thoroughgoing and

complete moderns.

THE END

APPENDIX A

THEORIES OF THE WILL

I append with some hesitation a few notes on the more technical aspects

of a question the proper treatment of which would require a volume.

The whole problem of the will is inextricably bound up with that of

dualism. The true dualism I take to be the contrast in man between

two wills, one of which is felt as vital impulse (_élan vital_) and

the other as vital control (_frein vital_). The crucial point would

seem to be the proper place of intellect in its relation to the higher

will. It is hard, on the one hand, to be reasonable without becoming

rationalistic, and, on the other, to have faith without falling into

credulity. The Christian form of the difficulty grew up in connection

with the Pauline opposition between a law of the spirit and a law

of the members; if the law of the spirit is to exercise its control

effectually, it needs, according to the Christian, a greater or

lesser degree of divine coöperation. So that if one wishes to get at

a Christian’s views of man’s will the best method is frequently to

ascertain his views of God’s will.

One of the first to proclaim the superiority of the divine will

over the divine mind was Origen. The most important of Christian

voluntarists is, however, Saint Augustine. He asserts the primacy of

will in both man and God and on psychological as well as on theological

grounds. One of the arguments that he employs was influential on later

voluntarists like Duns Scotus.[141] Will, says Augustine, reveals

itself above all in the act of attention or concentration; it therefore

takes precedence of intellect because it selects the field of facts or

order of perceptions to which the intellect attends and of which it

acquires knowledge.[142]

With the influence of Aristotle from the latter part of the twelfth

century on, there was a tendency to revert to Greek intellectualism and

to reverse the Augustinian position in regard to will. Saint Thomas

Aquinas, for example, not only grants a superior dignity to man’s

intellect as compared with his will,[143] but holds that the divine

will is subordinate to the divine wisdom. It is hardly necessary to

add that Saint Thomas is far from being a pure rationalist: man’s

intellect, though superior to his will, is infinitely transcended by

the divine will.

To be sure the working of God’s will as it had been affirmed

traditionally with the support of Revelation had been felt from the

outset, especially in connection with the more extreme forms of the

doctrine of grace, to be a stumbling block to man’s reason. The central

preoccupation of the scholastic philosophy may indeed be said to have

been the reconciliation of faith in this sense with reason.[144] This

great effort culminated in Saint Thomas in whose system reason and

faith seem to coöperate harmoniously. Theological truth, he maintained,

though beyond reason, is not contrary to it.

The outstanding trait of the later scholasticism is the tendency of

reason and faith once more to separate and to appear as irreconcilable.

The “realist,” Duns Scotus, develops the thesis that “will is superior

to intellect”[145] (_Voluntas est superior intellectu_) in both man

and God. The nominalist, William of Occam, affirms in a still more

uncompromising fashion that God’s will is absolute and arbitrary. God

does not will a thing because it is just, but it is just because he

wills it. Theology may not hope to find support in reason. It must be

accepted on the authority of Revelation and the Church.

This last stage of scholasticism is the point of departure for various

movements that seem at first sight to have very little in common--for

example, Lutheranism and Jansenism as well as the philosophies of

Bacon and Descartes. The Jansenist and Lutheran exalt God’s will at

the expense of reason by an extreme interpretation of grace. Descartes

and Bacon, on the other hand, are interested, though in very different

ways, in the use that may be made of reason in the natural order. They

continue to pay more or less sincere homage to religion conceived as

indissolubly bound up with incomprehensible theological mysteries. It

is especially important to ascertain Descartes’s conception of the will

in view of his position as the father of modern philosophy. We need to

discriminate sharply between his conceptions of man’s will and God’s

will. God’s will he holds to be absolute and arbitrary and to this

extent he reminds us of Duns Scotus.[146] His ultimate temper, however,

is not that of the Christian voluntarist, inasmuch as he is interested

above all in working out a mechanical law for phenomenal nature. His

attitude towards God’s will is to be explained in two ways: first by

his extreme caution, not to say timidity; with the fate of Galileo

fresh in mind he was almost morbidly apprehensive of becoming embroiled

with the theologians. He was moved in the second place, according to M.

Gilson,[147] by the desire to get rid of final causes in the interest

of his own mechanistic hypothesis.

According to Descartes himself what he meant by his _Cogito

ergo sum_ was that one should start from the immediate data of

consciousness.[148] Practically he relegates the higher will to God (as

understood by the theologians) and gives the first place among these

data to mind or reason. He proceeds to set up a sharp dualism between

mind and matter conceived as separate substances. As for man’s will, it

is according to Descartes in itself infinite and to that extent reminds

us of the divine will.[149] On closer scrutiny, however, this infinite

liberty of the will turns out to be only a liberty to err. The will

escapes from error only in so far as it is determined by reason.[150]

In his tendency thus to make right will depend upon right reason, as

well as in his practical ethics,[151] Descartes reminds us strongly of

the Stoics.

By “reason,” it is scarcely necessary to add, Descartes means logical

and mathematical reason. The only ideas that should determine the will

and that one can follow without danger of error are clear and distinct

ideas. No tendency is more marked in the Cartesian system than to

conceive as it were mathematically of the truth and reality of both the

human and the natural order. An extreme example of the same tendency

is the geometrical form that Spinoza gives to his “Ethics.” Descartes

would make of God himself a “clear” idea and demonstrate him in almost

geometrical fashion.[152] He thus contradicts the universal experience

of mankind which is that the truths on which the inner life depends are

not clear in the logical or any other sense. These truths are rather a

matter of elusive intuition.

Perhaps the first person to assert intuition against the abstract

reasoning of Descartes was Pascal. A whole order of truths, to employ

Pascal’s own distinction, can be attained, not by _l’esprit de

géométrie_, but only by _l’esprit de finesse_. To the rationalistic

God of Descartes he opposes _Dieu sensible au cœur_. “Heart” means

practically “grace,” and grace Pascal associates with what was rapidly

becoming an impossible theology. What is conspicuous indeed in the

whole transition from the mediæval to the modern period is the failure

to disengage the truths of the higher will from theology and to deal

with them experimentally as “immediate data of consciousness.” On the

contrary, as the result of the endless disputes of Jansenists with

Jesuits, of Catholics with Protestants, and of the various Protestant

sects with one another, these truths became involved in a mass of

almost incredible theological subtleties. The final reply to these

subtleties was Voltaire. Especially significant is his article “Grâce”

in the “Dictionnaire philosophique,” the third section of which

concludes as follows: “Ah! supralapsaires, infralapsaires, gratuits,

suffisants, efficaciens, jansénistes, molinistes, devenez enfin hommes

et ne troublez plus la terre pour des sottises si absurdes et si

abominables.”

With the virtual substitution by Descartes of “reason” for what is

truly transcendent in man, namely the higher will, the genuine dualism

is compromised and the way opened for monistic developments. The

tendency towards a rationalistic pantheism is manifest in Spinoza who

reveals in many respects the Cartesian influence. Spinoza inclines to

get rid of the Cartesian dualism between mind and matter by denying to

mind any superiority of substance.[153] Man is in nature not as one

empire in another empire but as a part in a whole. Man must adjust his

will to the divine will, to be sure, but God is declared to be the

same as “nature.” When one has made an identification of this kind,

it will not be possible by any number of subsidiary distinctions--for

example, by setting up a sort of dualism in the cosmic process itself

in the form of a _natura naturans_ and a _natura naturata_--to maintain

a sound doctrine of the will and to avoid pantheistic confusion. The

God or “nature” to which Spinoza would have man conform his will is

closely related to reason of a distinctly Cartesian type; so that to

adjust one’s will to God or nature is equivalent to adjusting it to

reason. Reason and will are indeed for Spinoza identical.[154] Here as

elsewhere Spinoza revives more completely perhaps than any other modern

philosopher of the first rank the Stoical position.

Quite apart from Spinoza the followers of Descartes[155] tended to

suppress the dualism between mind and matter in favor of universal

mechanism. Descartes himself had seen in animals only automata; the

temptation proved irresistible to look on man in the same way.[156] A

parallel tendency was that of the English empiricists and utilitarians

to deny that mind is transcendent, to assert that there is “nothing

in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.” At the

same time they fail to recognize a quality of will in man that

sets him above the natural order and so incline strongly towards a

naturalistic determinism. The denial of the freedom of the will is

especially complete in Hobbes and Hume.[157] Philosophy in its main

trend from Descartes to Hume seemed to exalt analysis at the expense

of synthesis and to be ready to sacrifice spontaneity to mechanism.

Of the world as envisaged by Hume in particular one might say with

Mephistopheles: “Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band!” Among those who

sought to restore unity and freedom to philosophy, the most important

is Immanuel Kant. In the matter of the will, he asserts that in the

“noumenal” realm, the realm of the “thing-in-itself,” man is perfectly

free; as a phenomenon among other phenomena, on the contrary, man

is, he admits, as thoroughly determined as Hume had maintained. The

question arises as to the value of this purely “noumenal” liberty in

the actual emergencies of life. Huxley remarks apropos of this Kantian

conception of the will: “Metaphysicians, as a rule, are sadly deficient

in the sense of humor; or they would surely abstain from advancing

propositions which, when stripped of the verbiage in which they are

disguised, appear to the profane eye to be bare shams, naked but not

ashamed.”[158] The professional metaphysician often betrays an even

more serious lack than that of a sense of humor--a lack, namely, of

common sense. This lack appears in Huxley’s own attitude towards the

will when compared, let us say, with that of Dr. Johnson.

Kant’s views regarding the “categorical imperative,” as expounded in

his “Critique of Practical Reason,” seem especially open to objection

from the point of view of common sense. The categorical imperative

is conceived as something a priori, not as based on experience. It

is not a living intuition of a will that is set above the cosmic

process (which includes a man’s natural self) and that acts upon

this cosmic process restrictively and selectively. It is rather a

rigid metaphysical abstraction that operates without reference to the

happiness of the individual[159] or the special circumstances to which

he needs to adjust himself.[160] Moreover, it is, as I have pointed

out (p. 226), a will to act and not a will to refrain from acting. One

may therefore raise the question whether it can be counted on to quell

effectually the expansive “lusts” of the natural man--for example, the

lust of domination. As an expression of cosmic reason, the categorical

imperative reminds one of the reason-will of the Stoics. The reason,

however, that the Stoic took as his guiding principle (τὸ ἡγεμονικόν)

was conceived as one with reality; whereas the conclusions of the

“Critique of Pure Reason,” so far as the relation between reason and

reality is concerned, are largely sceptical. Kant therefore asks us

to make certain important affirmations, not as necessarily true in

themselves, but as postulates of the practical reason. He thus prepares

the way for the _Philosophie des Als Ob_ of Vaihinger. According to

Vaihinger, you do not will a thing because it is true; you merely act

_as if_ it were true on the ground that it is a “useful fiction.”[161]

The “As-if” philosophy, again, is akin to the point of view of the

pragmatist. The pragmatist does not conceive of truth as something that

already exists: he makes his truth as he goes along, in other words he

takes that to be true which seems useful or agreeable to his ordinary

self. He thus tends to eliminate both the high impersonal standard and

the ethical will that, with reference to this standard, opposes bounds

to the expansive desires.