to be made accessible to the influence of the Zeitgeist. There is a
difficulty, no doubt, in discovering by what signs we may recognise the
utterances of the Zeitgeist; and distinguish between loyalty to the
real intellectual leaders and a simple desire to be arrayed in the last
new fashion in philosophy. There is no infallible sign; and, yet, a
genuine desire to discover the true lines in which thought is
developing, is not of the less importance. Arnold, like others, pointed
the moral by a contrast between England and Germany. The best that has
been done in England, it is said, has generally been done by amateurs
and outsiders. They have, perhaps, certain advantages, as being less
afraid to strike into original paths, and even the originality of
ignorance is not always, though it may be in nine cases out of ten, a
name for fresh blundering. But if sporadic English writers have now and
then hit off valuable thoughts, there can be no doubt that we have had
a heavy price to pay. The comparative absence of any class, devoted,
like German professors, to a systematic and combined attempt to spread
the borders of knowledge and speculation, has been an evil which is the
more felt in proportion as specialisation of science and familiarity
with previous achievements become more important. It would be very easy
to give particular instances of our backwardness. How different would
have been the course of English church history, said somebody, if
Newman had only known German! He would have breathed a larger air, and
might have desisted--I suppose that was the meaning--from the attempt
to put life into certain dead bones. And with equal truth, it may be
urged, how much better work might have been done by J. S. Mill if he
had really read Kant! He might not have been converted, but he would
have been saved from maintaining in their crude form, doctrines which
undoubtedly require modification. Under his reign, English thought was
constantly busied with false issues, simply from ignorance of the most
effective criticism. It is needless to point out how much time is
wasted in the defence of positions that have long been turned by the
enemy from sheer want of acquaintance with the relevant evidence, or
with the logic that has been revealed by the slow thrashing out of
thorough controversy. It would be invidious perhaps to insist too much
upon another obvious result: the ease with which a man endowed with a
gift of popular rhetoric, and a facility for catching at the current
phrases, can set up as a teacher, however palpable to the initiated may
be his ignorance. Scientific thought has perhaps as much to fear from
the false prophets who take its name as from the open enemies who try
to stifle its voice. I would rather emphasise another point, perhaps
less generally remarked. The study has its idols as well as its
market-place. Certain weaknesses are developed in the academical
atmosphere as well as in the arenas of public discussion. Freeman used
to say that English historians had avoided certain errors into which
German writers of far greater knowledge and more thorough scholarship
had fallen, simply because points were missed by a professor in a
German university which were plain to those who, like many Englishmen,
had to take a part in actual political work. I think that this is not
without a meaning for us. We have learnt, very properly, to respect
German research and industry; and we are trying in various directions
to imitate their example. Perhaps it would be as well to keep an eye
upon some German weaknesses. A philosophy made for professors is apt to
be a philosophy for pedants. A professor is bound to be omniscient; he
has to have an answer to everything; he is tempted to construct systems
which will pass muster in the lecture-room, and to despise the rest of
their applicability to daily life. I confess myself to be old-fashioned
enough to share some of the old English prejudices against those
gigantic structures which have been thrown out by imposing
philosophers, who evolved complete systems of metaphysics and logic and
religion and politics and æsthetics out of their own consciousness. We
have multiplied professors of late, and professors are bound to write
books, and to magnify the value of their own studies. They must make a
show of possessing an encyclopædic theory which will explain everything
and take into account all previous theories. Sometimes, perhaps, they
will lose themselves in endless subtleties and logomachies and
construct cobwebs of the brain, predestined to the rubbish-heap of
extinct philosophies. It is enough, however, to urge that a mere
student may be the better for keeping in mind the necessity of keeping
in mind real immediate human interests; as the sentimentalist has to be
reminded of the importance of strictly logical considerations. And I
think too that a very brief study of the most famous systems of old
days will convince us that philosophers should be content with a more
modest attitude than they have sometimes adopted; give up the
pretensions to framing off-hand theories of things in general, and be
content to puzzle out a few imperfect truths which may slowly work
their way into the general structure of thought. I wish to speak humbly
as befits one who cannot claim any particular authority for his
opinion. But, in all humility, I suggest that if we can persuade men of
reputation in the regions where subtle thought and accurate research
are duly valued, we shall be doing good, not only to ourselves, but, if
I may whisper it, to them. We value their attainments so highly that we
desire their influence to spread beyond the narrow precinct of
university lecture-rooms; and their thoughts be, at the same time,
stimulated and vitalised by bringing them into closer contact with the
problems which are daily forced upon us in the business of daily life.
A divorce between the men of thought and the men of action is really
bad for both. Whatever tends to break up the intellectual stupor of
large classes, to rouse their minds, to increase their knowledge of the
genuine work that is being done, to provide them even with more of such
recreations as refine and invigorate, must have our sympathy, and will
be useful both to those who confer and to those who receive
instruction. So, after all, a philosopher can learn few things of more
importance than the art of translating his doctrines into language
intelligible and really instructive to the outside world. There was a
period when real thinkers, as Locke and Berkeley and Butler and Hume,
tried to express themselves as pithily and pointedly as possible. They
were, say some of their critics, very shallow: they were over-anxious
to suit the taste of wits and the town: and in too much fear of the
charge of pedantry. Well, if some of our profounder thinkers would try
for once to pack all that they really have to say as closely as they
can, instead of trying to play every conceivable change upon every
thought that occurs to them, I fancy that they would be surprised both
at the narrowness of the space which they would occupy and the
comparative greatness of the effect they would produce.
An ethical society should aim at supplying a meeting-place between the
expert and specialist on one side, and, on the other, with the men who
have to apply ideas to the complex concretes of political and social
activity. How far we can succeed in furthering that aim I need not
attempt to say. But I will conclude by reverting to some thoughts at
which I hinted at starting. You may think that I have hardly spoken in
a very sanguine or optimistic tone. I have certainly admitted the
existence of enormous difficulties and the probabilities of very
imperfect success. I cannot think that the promised land of which we
are taking a Pisgah sight is so near or the view so satisfactory as
might be wished. A mirage like that which attended our predecessors may
still be exercising illusions for us; and I anticipate less an
immediate fruition, than a beginning of another long cycle of
wanderings through a desert, let us hope rather more fertile than that
which we have passed. If this be something of a confession you may
easily explain it by personal considerations. In an old controversy
which I was reading the other day, one of the disputants observed that
his adversary held that the world was going from bad to worse. "I do
not wonder at the opinion," he remarks; "for I am every day more
tempted to embrace it myself, since every day I am leaving youth
further behind." I am old enough to feel the force of that remark.
Without admitting senility, I have lived long enough, that is, to know
well that for me the brighter happiness is a thing of the past; that I
have to look back even to realise what it means; and to feel that a
sadder colouring is conferred upon the internal world by the eye "which
hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." I have watched the brilliant
promise of many contemporaries eclipsed by premature death; and have
too often had to apply Newton's remark, "If that man had lived, we
might have known something". Lights which once cheered me have gone
out, and are going out all too rapidly; and, to say nothing of
individuals, I have also lived long enough to watch the decay of once
flourishing beliefs. I can remember, only too vividly, the confident
hope with which many young men, whom I regarded as the destined leaders
of progress, affirmed that the doctrines which they advocated were
going forth conquering and to conquer; and though I may still think
that those doctrines had a permanent value, and were far from deserving
the reproaches now often levelled at them, I must admit that we greatly
exaggerated our omniscience. I am often tempted, I confess, to draw the
rather melancholy moral that some of my younger friends may be destined
to disillusionment, and may be driven some thirty years hence to admit
that their present confidence was a little in excess.
I admit all this: but I do not admit that my view could sanction
despondency. I can see perhaps ground for foreboding which I should
once have rejected. I can realise more distinctly, not only the amount
of misery in the world, but the amount of misdirected energy, the
dulness of the average intellect, and the vast deadweight of
superstition and dread of the light with which all improvement must
have to reckon. And yet I also feel that, if a complacent optimism be
impossible, the world was never so full of interest. When we complain
of the stress and strain and over-excitement of modern society we
indicate, I think, a real evil; but we also tacitly admit that no one
has any excuse for being dull. In every direction there is abundant
opportunity for brave and thoughtful men to find the fullest occupation
for whatever energy they may possess. There is work to be found
everywhere in this sense, and none but the most torpid can find an
excuse for joining the spiritually unemployed. The fields, surely, are
white for the harvest, though there are weeds enough to be extirpated,
and hard enough furrows to be ploughed. We know what has been done in
the field of physical science. It has made the world infinite. The days
of the old pagan, "suckled in some creed outworn," are regretted in
Wordsworth's sonnet; for the old pagan held to the poetical view that a
star was the chariot of a deity. The poor deity, however, had, in fact,
a duty as monotonous as that of a driver in the Underground Railway. To
us a star is a signal of a new world; it suggests universe beyond
universe; sinking into the infinite abysses of space; we see worlds
forming or decaying and raising at every moment problems of a strange
fascination. The prosaic truth is really more poetical than the old
figment of the childish imagination. The first great discovery of the
real nature of the stars did, in fact, logically or not, break up more
effectually than perhaps any other cause, the old narrow and stifling
conception of the universe represented by Dante's superlative power;
and made incredible the systems based on the conception that man can be
the centre of all things and the universe created for the sake of this
place. It is enough to point to the similar change due to modern
theories of evolution. The impassable barriers of thought are broken
down. Instead of the verbal explanation, which made every plant and
animal an ultimate and inexplicable fact, we now see in each a movement
in an indefinite series of complex processes, stretching back further
than the eye can reach into the indefinite past. If we are sometimes
stunned by the sense of inconceivable vastness, we feel, at least, that
no intellectual conqueror need ever be affected by the old fear. For
him there will always be fresh regions to conquer. Every discovery
suggests new problems; and though knowledge may be simplified and
codified, it will always supply a base for fresh explanations of the
indefinite regions beyond. Can that which is true of the physical
sciences be applied in any degree to the so-called moral sciences? To
Bentham, I believe, is ascribed the wish that he could fall asleep and
be waked at the end of successive centuries, to take note of the
victories achieved in the intervals by his utilitarianism. Tennyson, in
one of his youthful poems, played with the same thought. It would be
pleasant, as the story of the sleeping beauty suggested, to rise every
hundred years to mark the progress made in science and politics; and to
see the "Titanic forces" that would come to the birth in divers climes
and seasons; for we, he says--
For we are Ancients of the earth,
And in the morning of the times.
Tennyson, if this expressed his serious belief, seems to have lost his
illusions; and it is probable enough that Bentham's would have had some
unpleasant surprises could his wish have been granted. It is more than
a century since his doctrine was first revealed, and yet the world has
not become converted; and some people doubt whether it ever will be.
If, indeed, Bentham's speculations had been adopted; if we had all
become convinced that morality means aiming at the greatest happiness
of the greatest number; if we were agreed as to what is happiness, and
what is the best way of promoting it,--there would still have been a
vast step to take, no less than to persuade people to desire to follow
the lines of conduct which tend to minimise unhappiness. The mere
intellectual conviction that this or that will be useful is quite a
different thing from the desire. You no more teach men to be moral by
giving them a sound ethical theory, than you teach them to be good
shots by explaining the theory of projectiles. A religion implies a
philosophy, but a philosophy is not by itself a religion. The demand
that it should be is, I hold, founded upon a wrong view as to the
relation between the abstract theory and the art of conduct. To convert
the world you have not merely to prove your theories, but to stimulate
the imagination, to discipline the passions, to provide modes of
utterance for the emotions and symbols which may represent the
fundamental beliefs--briefly, to do what is done by the founders of the
great religions. To transmute speculation into action is a problem of
tremendous difficulty, and I only glance in the briefest way at its
nature. We, I take it, as members of Ethical Societies, have no claim
to be, even in the humblest way, missionaries of a new religion: but
are simply interested in doing what we can to discuss in a profitable
way the truths which it ought to embody or reflect. But that is itself
a work of no trifling importance; and we may imagine that a Bentham,
refreshed by his century's slumber, and having dropped some of his
little personal vanities, would on the whole be satisfied with what he
saw. If Bacon could again come to life, he too would find that the
methods which he contemplated and the doctrines which he preached were
narrow and refutive; yet his prophecies of scientific growth have been
more than realised by his successors, modifying, in some ways,
rejecting his principles. And so Bentham might hold to-day that,
although his sacred formula was not so exhaustive or precise as he
fancied, yet the conscious and deliberate pursuit of the happiness of
mankind had taken a much more important place in the aspirations of the
time. He would see that the vast changes which have taken place in
society, vast beyond all previous conception, were bringing up ever new
problems, requiring more elaborate methods, and more systematic
reasoning. He would observe that many of the abuses which he denounced
have disappeared, and that though progress does not take place along
the precise lines which he laid down, there is both a clearer
recognition of the great ends of conduct, and a general advance in the
direction which he desired. That this can be carried on by promoting a
free and full discussion of first principles; that the great social
evils which still exist can be diminished, and the creed of the future,
however dim its outlines may be to our perception, may be purified as
much as possible from ancient prejudice and superstition, is our faith;
and however little we can do to help in carrying out that process, we
desire to do that little.
SCIENCE AND POLITICS.[2]
It is with great pleasure that I address you as president of this
Society. Your main purpose, as I understand, is to promote the serious
study of political and social problems in a spirit purged from the
prejudice and narrowness of mere party conflict. You desire, that is,
to promote a scientific investigation of some of the most important
topics to which the human mind can devote itself. There is no purpose
of which I approve more cordially: yet the very statement suggests a
doubt. To speak of science and politics together is almost to suggest
irony. And if politics be taken in the ordinary sense; if we think of
the discussions by which the immediate fate of measures and of
ministries is decided, I should be inclined to think that they belong
to a sphere of thought to which scientific thought is hardly
applicable, and in which I should be personally an unwarrantable
intruder. My friends have sometimes accused me, indeed, of indifference
to politics. I confess that I have never been able to follow the
details of party warfare with the interest which they excite in some
minds: and reasons, needless to indicate, have caused me to stray
further and further away from intercourse with the society in which
such details excite a predominant--I do not mean to insinuate an
excessive--interest. I feel that if I were to suggest any arguments
bearing directly upon home rule or disestablishment, I should at once
come under that damnatory epithet "academical," which so neatly cuts
the ground from under the feet of the political amateur. Moreover, I
recognise a good deal of justice in the implied criticism. An active
politician who wishes to impress his doctrines upon his countrymen,
should have a kind of knowledge to which I can make no pretension. I
share the ordinary feelings of awful reverence with which the human
bookworm looks up to the man of business. He has faculties which in me
are rudimentary, but which I can appreciate by their contrast to my own
feebleness. The "knowledge of the world" ascribed to lawyers, to
politicians, financiers, and such persons, like the "knowledge of the
human heart" so often ascribed to dramatists and novelists, represents,
I take it, a very real kind of knowledge; but it is rather an instinct
than a set of definite principles; a power of somehow estimating the
tendencies and motives of their fellow-creatures in a mass by rule of
thumb, rather than by any distinctly assignable logical process; only
to be gained by long experience and shrewd observation of men and
cities. Such a faculty, as it reaches sound results without employing
explicit definitions and syllogisms and inductive processes, sometimes
inclines its possessors to look down too contemptuously upon the closet
student.
[2] Address to the Social and Political Education League, 29th
March, 1892.
While, however, I frankly confess my hopeless incapacity for taking any
part in the process by which party platforms are constructed, I should
be ashamed to admit that I was not very keenly interested in political
discussions which seem to me to touch vitally important matters. And
fully recognising the vast superiority of the practical man in his own
world, I also hold that he should not treat me and my like as if we,
according to the famous comparison, were black beetles, and he at the
opposite pole of the universe. There exists, in books at least, such a
thing as political theory, apart from that claiming to underlie the
immediate special applications. Your practical man is given to
appealing to such theories now and then; though I confess that he too
often leaves the impression of having taken them up on the spur of the
moment to round a peroration and to give dignity to a popular cry; and
that, in his lips, they are apt to sound so crude and artificial that
one can only wonder at his condescending to notice them. He ridicules
them as the poorest of platitudes whenever they are used by an
antagonist, and one can only hope that his occasional homage implies
that he too has a certain belief that there ought to be, and perhaps may
somewhere be, a sound theory, though he has not paid it much attention.
Well, we, I take it, differ from him simply in this respect, that we
believe more decidedly that such theory has at least a potential
existence; and that if hitherto it is a very uncertain and ambiguous
guide, the mere attempt to work it out seriously may do something to
strengthen and deepen our practical political convictions. A man of real
ability, who is actively engaged in politics without being submerged by
merely political intrigues, can hardly fail to wish at least to
institute some kind of research into the principles which guide his
practice. To such a desire we may attribute some very stimulating books,
such, for example, as Bagehot's _Physics and Politics_ or Mr. Bryce's
philosophical study of the United States. What I propose to do is to
suggest a few considerations as to the real value and proper direction
of these arguments, which lie, as it were, on the borderland between the
immediate "platform" and the abstract theory.
Philosophers have given us the name "Sociology"--a barbarous name, say
some--for the science which deals with the subject matter of our
inquiries. Is it more than a name for a science which may or may not
some day come into existence? What is science? It is simply organised
knowledge; that part of our knowledge which is definite, established
beyond reasonable doubt, and which achieves its task by formulating
what are called "scientific laws". Laws in this sense are general
formulæ, which, when the necessary data are supplied, will enable us to
extend our knowledge beyond the immediate facts of perception. Given a
planet, moving at a given speed in a given direction, and controlled by
given attractive forces, we can determine its place at a future moment.
Or given a vegetable organism in a given environment, we can predict
within certain limits the way in which it will grow, although the laws
are too obscure and too vague to enable us to speak of it with any
approach to the precision of astronomy. And we should have reached a
similar stage in sociology if from a given social or political
constitution adopted by a given population, we could prophesy what
would be the results. I need not say that any approximation to such
achievements is almost indefinitely distant. Personal claims to such
powers of prediction rather tend to bring discredit upon the embryo
science. Coleridge gives in the _Biographia Literaria_ a quaint
statement of his own method. On every great occurrence, he says, he
tried to discover in past history the event that most nearly resembled
it. He examined the original authorities. "Then fairly subtracting the
points of difference from the points of likeness," as the balance
favoured the former or the latter, he conjectured that the result would
be the same, or different. So, for example, he was able to prophesy the
end of the Spanish rising against Napoleon from the event of the war
between Philip II. and the Dutch provinces. That is, he cried, "Heads!"
and on this occasion the coin did not come down tails. But I need
hardly point out how impossible is the process of political arithmetic.
What is meant by adding or subtracting in this connection? Such a rule
of three would certainly puzzle me, and, I fancy, most other observers.
We may say that the insurrection of a patriotic people, when they are
helped from without, and their oppressors have to operate from a
distant base and to fight all Europe at the same time, will often
succeed; and we may often be right; but we should not give ourselves
the airs of prophets on that account. There are many superficial
analogies of the same character. My predecessor, Professor Dicey,
pointed out some of them, to confirm his rather depressing theory that
history is nothing but an old almanac. Let me take a common one, which,
I think, may illustrate our problem. There is a certain analogy between
the cases of Cæsar, Cromwell, and Napoleon. In each case we have a
military dictatorship as the final outcome of a civil war. Some people
imagined that this analogy would apply to the United States, and that
Washington or Grant would be what was called the man on horseback. The
reasoning really involved was, in fact, a very simple one. The
destruction of an old system of government makes some form of
dictatorship the only alternative to chaos. It therefore gives a chance
to the one indisputable holder of power in its most unmistakable shape,
namely, to the general of a disciplined army. A soldier accordingly
assumed power in each of the three first cases, although the
differences between the societies ruled by the Roman, the English and
the French dictators are so vast that further comparison soon becomes
idle. Neither Washington nor Grant had the least chance of making
themselves dictators had they wished, because the civil wars had left
governments perfectly uninjured and capable of discharging all their
functions, and had not produced a regular army with interests of its
own. In this and other cases, I should say that such an analogy may be
to some extent instructive, but I should certainly deny that there was
anything like a scientific induction. We, happily, can reason to some
extent upon political matters by the help of simple common sense before
it has undergone that process of organisation, of reduction to precise
measurable statements, which entitles it to be called a scientific
procedure. The resemblance of Washington to Cromwell was of the
external and superficial order. It may be compared to those analogies
which exist between members of different natural orders without
implying any deeper resemblance. A whale, we know, is like a fish in so
far as he swims about in the sea, and he has whatever fishlike
qualities are implied in the ability to swim. He will die on land,
though not from the same causes. But, physiologically, he belongs to a
different race, and we should make blunders if we argued from the
external likeness to a closer resemblance. Or, to drop what may be too
fanciful a comparison, it may be observed that all assemblies of human
beings may be contrasted in respect of being numerous or select, and
have certain properties in consequence. We may therefore make some true
and general propositions about the contrasts between the action of
small and large consultative bodies which will apply to many widely
different cases. A good many, and, I think, some really valuable
observations of this kind have been made, and form the substance of
many generalisations laid down as to the relative advantages of
democracy and aristocracy. Now I should be disposed to say that such
remarks belong rather to the morphology than the physiology of the
social organism. They indicate external resemblances between bodies of
which the intimate constitution and the whole mode of growth and
conditions of vitality, may be entirely different. Such analogies,
then, though not without their value, are far from being properly
scientific.