WALTER LIPPMANN
A
PREFACE
TO
MORALS
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK MCMXXIX
Copyright, 1929.
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped.
Published May, 1929.
_First printing_
_All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form._
_Printed in the United States of America by_
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YORK
CONTENTS
PART I
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Problem of Unbelief 3
1. Whirl is King 3
2. False Prophecies 5
3. Sorties and Retreats 10
4. Deep Dissolution 14
II. God in the Modern World 21
1. Imago Dei 21
2. An Indefinite God 23
3. God in More Senses Than One 25
4. The Protest of the Fundamentalists 30
5. In Man’s Image 35
III. The Loss of Certainty 37
1. Ways of Reading the Bible 37
2. Modernism: Immortality as an Example 40
3. What Modernism Leaves Out 48
IV. The Acids of Modernity 51
1. The Kingly Pattern 51
2. Landmarks 56
3. Barren Ground 61
4. Sophisticated Violence 63
5. Rulers 65
V. The Breakdown of Authority 68
1. God’s Government 68
2. The Doctrine of the Keys 71
3. The Logic of Toleration 74
4. A Working Compromise 76
5. The Effect of Patriotism 78
6. The Dissolution of a Sovereignty 82
VI. Lost Provinces 84
1. Business 84
2. The Family 88
3. Art 94
a. The Disappearance of Religious Painting 94
b. The Loss of a Heritage 96
c. The Artist Formerly 98
d. The Artist as a Prophet 101
e. Art for Art’s Sake 104
f. The Burden of Originality 106
VII. The Drama of Destiny 112
1. The Soul in the Modern World 112
2. The Great Scenario 115
3. Earmarks of Truth 118
4. On Reconciling Religion and Science 121
5. Gospels of Science 125
6. The Deeper Conflict 131
7. Theocracy and Humanism 133
PART II
THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM
Introduction 143
VIII. Golden Memories 145
IX. The Insight of Humanism 152
1. The Two Approaches to Life 152
2. Freedom and Restraint 153
3. The Ascetic Principle 158
4. Oscillation between Two Principles 164
5. The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties 166
6. The Matrix of Humanism 171
7. The Career of the Soul 175
8. The Passage into Maturity 183
9. The Function of High Religion 191
X. High Religion and the Modern World 194
1. Popular Religion and the Great Teachers 194
2. The Aristocratic Principle 197
3. The Peculiarity of the Modern Situation 200
4. The Stone Which the Builders Rejected 203
PART III
THE GENIUS OF MODERNITY
XI. The Cure of Souls 213
1. The Problem of Evil 213
2. Superstition and Self-Consciousness 217
3. Virtue 221
4. From Clue to Practice 226
XII. The Business of the Great Society 232
1. The Invention of Invention 232
2. The Creative Principle in Modernity 235
3. Naive Capitalism 241
4. The Credo of Old-Style Business 244
5. Old-Style Reform and Revolution 247
6. The Diffusion of the Acquisitive Instinct 252
7. Ideals 257
XIII. Government in the Great Society 260
1. Loyalty 260
2. The Evolution of Loyalty 263
3. Pluralism 267
4. Live and Let Live 269
5. Government in the People 272
6. Politicians and Statesmen 279
XIV. Love in the Great Society 284
1. The External Control of Sexual Conduct 284
2. Birth Control 288
3. The Logic of Birth Control 293
4. The Use of Convention 299
5. The New Hedonism 301
6. Marriage and Affinity 307
7. The Schooling of Desire 311
XV. The Moralist in an Unbelieving World 314
1. The Declaration of Ideals 314
2. The Choice of a Way 320
3. The Religion of the Spirit 326
Appendix: Acknowledgments and Notes 331
Index 339
PART I [p001]
THE DISSOLUTION OF THE ANCESTRAL ORDER
_“Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.”_
Aristophanes.
A PREFACE TO MORALS [p003]
CHAPTER I
THE PROBLEM OF UNBELIEF
1. _Whirl is King_
Among those who no longer believe in the religion of their fathers,
some are proudly defiant, and many are indifferent. But there are also
a few, perhaps an increasing number, who feel that there is a vacancy
in their lives. This inquiry deals with their problem. It is not
intended to disturb the serenity of those who are unshaken in the faith
they hold, and it is not concerned with those who are still exhilarated
by their escape from some stale orthodoxy. It is concerned with those
who are perplexed by the consequences of their own irreligion. It deals
with the problem of unbelief, not as believers are accustomed to deal
with it, in the spirit of men confidently calling the lost sheep back
into the fold, but as unbelievers themselves must, I think, face the
problem if they face it candidly and without presumption.
When such men put their feelings into words they are likely to say
that, having lost their faith, they have lost the certainty that their
lives are significant, and that it matters what they do with their
lives. If they deal with young people they are likely to say that
they know of no compelling reason which certifies the moral code they
adhere to, and that, therefore, their own preferences, when tested by
the ruthless curiosity of their children, seem to have no [p004] sure
foundation of any kind. They are likely to point to the world about
them, and to ask whether the modern man possesses any criterion by
which he can measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any
standard he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon
that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created
so much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern
civilization.
These are, perhaps, merely the rationalizations of the modern man’s
discontent. At the heart of it there are likely to be moments of blank
misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a
part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many
things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure they are
worth doing. He has been much preoccupied; but he is no longer sure he
knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of pleasures;
and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to
believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing,
or, in fact, that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs
to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, and that even in
the best of lives the thrills are few and far between. He begins more
or less consciously to seek satisfactions, because he is no longer
satisfied, and all the while he realizes that the pursuit of happiness
was always a most unhappy quest. In the later stages of his woe he not
only loses his appetite, but becomes excessively miserable trying to
recover it. And then, surveying the flux of events and the giddiness
of his own soul, he comes to feel that Aristophanes must have been
thinking of him when he declared that “Whirl is King, having driven out
Zeus.” [p005]
2. _False Prophecies_
The modern age has been rich both in prophecies that men would at
last inherit the kingdoms of this world, and in complaints at the
kind of world they inherited. Thus Petrarch, who was an early victim
of modernity, came to feel that he would “have preferred to be born
in any other period” than his own; he tells us that he sought an
escape by imagining that he lived in some other age. The Nineteenth
Century, which begat us, was forever blowing the trumpets of freedom
and providing asylums in which its most sensitive children could
take refuge. Wordsworth fled from mankind to rejoice in nature.
Chateaubriand fled from man to rejoice in savages. Byron fled to an
imaginary Greece, and William Morris to the Middle Ages. A few tried
an imaginary India. A few an equally imaginary China. Many fled to
Bohemia, to Utopia, to the Golden West, and to the Latin Quarter, and
some, like James Thomson, to hell where they were
gratified to gain
That positive eternity of pain
Instead of this insufferable inane.
They had all been disappointed by the failure of a great prophecy. The
theme of this prophecy had been that man is a beautiful soul who in the
course of history had somehow become enslaved by
Scepters, tiaras, swords, and chains, and tomes
Of reasoned wrong, glozed on by ignorance,
and they believed with Shelley that when “the loathsome mask has
fallen,” man, exempt from awe, worship, degree, the king over himself,
would then be “free from guilt or [p006] pain.” This was the orthodox
liberalism to which men turned when they had lost the religion of their
fathers. But the promises of liberalism have not been fulfilled. We are
living in the midst of that vast dissolution of ancient habits which
the emancipators believed would restore our birthright of happiness. We
know now that they did not see very clearly beyond the evils against
which they were rebelling. It is evident to us that their prophecies
were pleasant fantasies which concealed the greater difficulties that
confront men, when having won the freedom to do what they wish—that
wish, as Byron said:
which ages have not yet subdued
In man—to have no master save his mood,
they are full of contrary moods and do not know what they wish to do.
We have come to see that Huxley was right when he said that “a man’s
worst difficulties begin when he is able to do as he likes.”
The evidences of these greater difficulties lie all about us: in the
brave and brilliant atheists who have defied the Methodist God, and
have become very nervous; in the women who have emancipated themselves
from the tyranny of fathers, husbands, and homes, and with the
intermittent but expensive help of a psychoanalyst, are now enduring
liberty as interior decorators; in the young men and women who are
world-weary at twenty-two; in the multitudes who drug themselves with
pleasure; in the crowds enfranchised by the blood of heroes who cannot
be persuaded to take an interest in their destiny; in the millions, at
last free to think without fear of priest or policeman, who have made
the moving pictures and the popular newspapers what they are. [p007]
These are the prisoners who have been released. They ought to be very
happy. They ought to be serene and composed. They are free to make
their own lives. There are no conventions, no tabus, no gods, priests,
princes, fathers, or revelations which they must accept. Yet the result
is not so good as they thought it would be. The prison door is wide
open. They stagger out into trackless space under a blinding sun. They
find it nerve-wracking. “My sensibility,” said Flaubert, “is sharper
than a razor’s edge; the creaking of a door, the face of a bourgeois,
an absurd statement set my heart to throbbing and completely upset me.”
They must find their own courage for battle and their own consolation
in defeat. They complain, like Renan after he had broken with the
Church, that the enchanted circle which embraced the whole of life is
broken, and that they are left with a feeling of emptiness “like that
which follows an attack of fever or an unhappy love affair.” Where is
my _home_? cried Nietzsche: “For it do I ask and seek, and have sought,
but have not found it. O eternal everywhere, O eternal nowhere, O
eternal in vain.”
To more placid temperaments the pangs of freedom are no doubt less
acute. It is possible for multitudes in time of peace and security
to exist agreeably—somewhat incoherently, perhaps, but without
convulsions—to dream a little and not unpleasantly, to have only now
and then a nightmare, and only occasionally a rude awakening. It is
possible to drift along not too discontentedly, somewhat nervously,
somewhat anxiously, somewhat confusedly, hoping for the best, and
believing in nothing very much. It is possible to be a passable
citizen. But it is not possible to be wholly at peace. For serenity of
soul requires [p008] some better organization of life than a man can
attain by pursuing his casual ambitions, satisfying his hungers, and
for the rest accepting destiny as an idiot’s tale in which one dumb
sensation succeeds another to no known end. And it is not possible
for him to be wholly alive. For that depends upon his sense of being
completely engaged with the world, with all his passions and all the
faculties in rich harmonies with one other, and in deep rhythm with the
nature of things.
These are the gifts of a vital religion which can bring the whole of
a man into adjustment with the whole of his relevant experience. Our
forefathers had such a religion. They quarrelled a good deal about the
details, but they had no doubt that there was an order in the universe
which justified their lives because they were a part of it. The acids
of modernity have dissolved that order for many of us, and there are
some in consequence who think that the needs which religion fulfilled
have also been dissolved. But however self-sufficient the eugenic
and perfectly educated man of the distant future may be, our present
experience is that the needs remain. In failing to meet them, it is
plain that we have succeeded only in substituting trivial illusions
for majestic faiths. For while the modern emancipated man may wonder
how anyone ever believed that in this universe of stars and atoms and
multitudinous life, there is a drama in progress of which the principal
event was enacted in Palestine nineteen hundred years ago, it is not
really a stranger fable than many which he so readily accepts. He does
not believe the words of the Gospel but he believes the best advertised
notion. The older fable may be incredible to-day, but when it [p009]
was credible it bound together the whole of experience upon a stately
and dignified theme. The modern man has ceased to believe in it but he
has not ceased to be credulous, and the need to believe haunts him. It
is no wonder that his impulse is to turn back from his freedom, and to
find someone who says he knows the truth and can tell him what to do,
to find the shrine of some new god, of any cult however newfangled,
where he can kneel and be comforted, put on manacles to keep his hands
from trembling, ensconce himself in some citadel where it is safe and
warm.
For the modern man who has ceased to believe, without ceasing to be
credulous, hangs, as it were, between heaven and earth, and is at
rest nowhere. There is no theory of the meaning and value of events
which he is compelled to accept, but he is none the less compelled to
accept the events. There is no moral authority to which he must turn
now, but there is coercion in opinions, fashions and fads. There is
for him no inevitable purpose in the universe, but there are elaborate
necessities, physical, political, economic. He does not feel himself
to be an actor in a great and dramatic destiny, but he is subject to
the massive powers of our civilization, forced to adopt their pace,
bound to their routine, entangled in their conflicts. He can believe
what he chooses about this civilization. He cannot, however, escape
the compulsion of modern events. They compel his body and his senses
as ruthlessly as ever did king or priest. They do not compel his mind.
They have all the force of natural events, but not their majesty, all
the tyrannical power of ancient institutions, but none of their moral
certainty. Events are there, and they overpower [p010] him. But they
do not convince him that they have that dignity which inheres in that
which is necessary and in the nature of things.
In the old order the compulsions were often painful, but there was
sense in the pain that was inflicted by the will of an all-knowing
God. In the new order the compulsions are painful and, as it were,
accidental, unnecessary, wanton, and full of mockery. The modern man
does not make his peace with them. For in effect he has replaced
natural piety with a grudging endurance of a series of unsanctified
compulsions. When he believed that the unfolding of events was a
manifestation of the will of God, he could say: Thy will be done.... In
His will is our peace. But when he believes that events are determined
by the votes of a majority, the orders of his bosses, the opinions of
his neighbors, the laws of supply and demand, and the decisions of
quite selfish men, he yields because he has to yield. He is conquered
but unconvinced.
3. _Sorties and Retreats_
It might seem as if, in all this, men were merely going through once
again what they have often gone through before. This is not the
first age in which the orthodox religion has been in conflict with
the science of the day. Plato was born into such an age. For two
centuries the philosophers of Greece had been critical of Homer and
of the popular gods, and when Socrates faced his accusers, his answer
to the accusation of heresy must certainly have sounded unresponsive.
“I do believe,” he said, “that there are gods, and in a higher sense
than that in which [p011] my accusers believe in them.” That is all
very well. But to believe in a “higher sense” is also to believe in a
different sense.
There is nothing new in the fact that men have ceased to believe in the
religion of their fathers. In the history of Catholic Christianity,
there has always existed a tradition, extending from the authors of the
Fourth Gospel through Origen to the neo-Platonists of modern times,
which rejects the popular idea of God as a power acting upon events,
and of immortality as everlasting life, and translates the popular
theology into a symbolic statement of a purely spiritual experience.
In every civilized age there have been educated and discerning men who
could not accept literally and simply the traditions of the ancient
faith. We are told that during the Periclean Age “among educated men
everything was in dispute: political sanctions, literary values, moral
standards, religious convictions, even the possibility of reaching any
truth about anything.” When the educated classes of the Roman world
accepted Christianity they had ceased to believe in the pagan gods,
and were much too critical to accept the primitive Hebraic theories of
the creation, the redemption, and the Messianic Kingdom which were so
central in the popular religion. They had to do what Socrates had done;
they had to take the popular theology in a “higher” and therefore in a
different sense before they could use it. Indeed, it is so unusual to
find an age of active-minded men in which the most highly educated are
genuinely orthodox in the popular sense, that the Thirteenth Century,
the age of Dante and St. Thomas Aquinas, when this phenomenon is
reputed to have occurred, is regarded [p012] as a unique and wonderful
period in the history of the world. It is not at all unlikely that
there never was such an age in the history of civilized men.
And yet, the position of modern men who have broken with the religion
of their fathers is in certain profound ways different from that of
other men in other ages. This is the first age, I think, in the history
of mankind when the circumstances of life have conspired with the
intellectual habits of the time to render any fixed and authoritative
belief incredible to large masses of men. The dissolution of the
old modes of thought has gone so far, and is so cumulative in its
effect, that the modern man is not able to sink back after a period
of prophesying into a new but stable orthodoxy. The irreligion of
the modern world is radical to a degree for which there is, I think,
no counterpart. For always in the past it has been possible for new
conventions to crystallize, and for men to find rest and surcease of
effort in accepting them.
We often assume, therefore, that a period of dissolution will
necessarily be followed by one of conformity, that the heterodoxy of
one age will become the orthodoxy of the next, and that when this
orthodoxy decays a new period of prophesying will begin. Thus we say
that by the time of Hosea and Isaiah the religion of the Jews had
become a system of rules for transacting business with Jehovah. The
Prophets then revivified it by thundering against the conventional
belief that religion was mere burnt offering and sacrifice. A few
centuries passed and the religion based on the Law and the Prophets
had in its turn become a set of mechanical rites manipulated by the
Scribes and the Pharisees. As against this system Jesus and Paul
[p013] preached a religion of grace, and against the “letter” of
the synagogues the “spirit” of Christ. But the inner light which can
perceive the spirit is rare, and so shortly after the death of Paul,
the teaching gradually ceased to appeal to direct inspiration in the
minds of the believers and became a body of dogma, a “sacred deposit”
of the faith “once for all delivered to the saints.” In the succeeding
ages there appeared again many prophets who thought they had within
them the revealing spirit. Though some of the prophets were burnt,
much of the prophesying was absorbed into the canon. In Luther this
sense of revelation appeared once more in a most confident form. He
rejected the authority not only of the Pope and the clergy, but even of
the Bible itself, except where in his opinion the Bible confirmed his
faith. But in the establishment of a Lutheran Church the old difficulty
reappeared: the inner light which had burned so fiercely in Luther
did not burn brightly or steadily in all Lutherans, and so the right
of private judgment, even in Luther’s restricted use of the term, led
to all kinds of heresies and abominations. Very soon there came to be
an authoritative teaching backed by the power of the police. And in
Calvinism the revolt of the Reformation became stabilized to the last
degree. “Everything,” said Calvin, “pertaining to the perfect rule of
a good life the Lord has so comprehended in His law that there remains
nothing for man to add to that summary.”
Men fully as intelligent as the most emancipated among us once believed
that, and I have no doubt that the successors of Mr. Darrow and Mr.
Mencken would come to believe something very much like it if conditions
permitted them to obey the instinct to retreat from the chaos [p014]
of modernity into order and certainty. It is all very well to talk
about being the captain of your soul. It is hard, and only a few
heroes, saints, and geniuses have been the captains of their souls for
any extended period of their lives. Most men, after a little freedom,
have preferred authority with the consoling assurances and the economy
of effort which it brings. “If, outside of Christ, you wish by your
own thoughts to know your relation to God, you will break your neck.
Thunder strikes him who examines.” Thus spoke Martin Luther, and there
is every reason to suppose that the German people thought he was
talking the plainest commonsense. “He who is gifted with the heavenly
knowledge of faith,” said the Council of Trent, “is free from an
inquisitive curiosity.” These words are rasping to our modern ears, but
there is no occasion to doubt that the men who uttered them had made
a shrewd appraisal of average human nature. The record of experience
is one of sorties and retreats. The search for moral guidance which
shall not depend upon external authority has invariably ended in the
acknowledgment of some new authority.
4. _Deep Dissolution_
This same tendency manifests itself in the midst of our modern
uneasiness. We have had a profusion of new cults, of revivals, and of
essays in reconstruction. But there is reason for thinking that a new
crystallization of an enduring and popular religion is unlikely in the
modern world. For analogy drawn from the experience of the past is
misleading.
When Luther, for example, rebelled against the authority [p015] of
the Church, he did not suppose the way of life for the ordinary man
would be radically altered. Luther supposed that men would continue
to behave much as they had learned to behave under the Catholic
discipline. The individual for whom he claimed the right of private
judgment was one whose prejudgments had been well fixed in a Catholic
society. The authority of the Pope was to be destroyed and certain
evils abolished, but there was to remain that feeling for objective
moral certainties which Catholicism had nurtured. When the Anabaptists
carried the practice of his theory beyond this point, Luther denounced
them violently. For what he believed in was Protestantism for good
Catholics. The reformers of the Eighteenth Century made a similar
assumption. They really believed in democracy for men who had an
aristocratic training. Jefferson, for example, had an instinctive fear
of the urban rabble, that most democratic part of the population. The
society of free men which he dreamed about was composed of those who
had the discipline, the standards of honor and the taste, without the
privileges or the corruptions, that are to be found in a society of
well-bred country gentlemen.
The more recent rebels frequently betray a somewhat similar inability
to imagine the consequences of their own victories. For the smashing of
idols is in itself such a preoccupation that it is almost impossible
for the iconoclast to look clearly into a future when there will not
be many idols left to smash. Yet that future is beginning to be our
present, and it might be said that men are conscious of what modernity
means insofar as they realize that they are confronted not so much with
the [p016] necessity of promoting rebellion as of dealing with the
consequences of it. The Nineteenth Century, roughly speaking the time
between Voltaire and Mencken, was an age of terrific indictments and
of feeble solutions. The Marxian indictment of capitalism is a case
in point. The Nietzschean transvaluation of values is another; it is
magnificent, but who can say, after he has shot his arrow of longing
to the other shore, whether he will find Caesar Borgia, Henry Ford, or
Isadora Duncan? Who knows, having read Mr. Mencken and Mr. Sinclair
Lewis, what kind of world will be left when all the boobs and yokels
have crawled back in their holes and have died of shame?
The rebel, while he is making his attack, is not likely to feel the
need to answer such questions. For he moves in an unreal environment,
one might almost say a parasitic environment. He goes forth to destroy
Caesar, Mammon, George F. Babbitt, and Mrs. Grundy. As he wrestles
with these demons, he leans upon them. By inversion they offer him
much the same kind of support which the conformer enjoys. They provide
him with an objective which enables him to know exactly what he thinks
he wants to do. His energies are focussed by his indignation. He does
not suffer from emptiness, doubt, and division of soul. These are the
maladies which come later when the struggle is over. While the rebel is
in conflict with the established nuisances he has an aim in life which
absorbs all his passions. He has his own sense of righteousness and his
own feeling of communion with a grand purpose. For in attacking idols
there is a kind of piety, in overthrowing tyrants a kind of loyalty,
in ridiculing stupidities [p017] an imitation of wisdom. In the heat
of battle the rebel is exalted by a whole-hearted tension which is
easily mistaken for a taste of the freedom that is to come. He is
under the spell of an illusion. For what comes after the struggle is
not the exaltation of freedom but a letting down of the tension that
belongs solely to the struggle itself. The happiness of the rebel is as
transient as the iconoclasm which produced it. When he has slain the
dragon and rescued the beautiful maiden, there is usually nothing left
for him to do but write his memoirs and dream of a time when the world
was young.
What most distinguishes the generation who have approached maturity
since the debacle of idealism at the end of the War is not their
rebellion against the religion and the moral code of their parents,
but their disillusionment with their own rebellion. It is common for
young men and women to rebel, but that they should rebel sadly and
without faith in their own rebellion, that they should distrust the
new freedom no less than the old certainties—that is something of a
novelty. As Mr. Canby once said, at the age of seven they saw through
their parents and characterized them in a phrase. At fourteen they saw
through education and dodged it. At eighteen they saw through morality
and stepped over it. At twenty they lost respect for their home towns,
and at twenty-one they discovered that our social system is ridiculous.
At twenty-three the autobiography ends because the author has run
through society to date and does not know what to do next. For, as Mr.
Canby might have added, the idea of reforming that society makes no
appeal to them. They have seen through all that. They cannot adopt any
of [p018] the synthetic religions of the Nineteenth Century. They have
seen through all of them.
They have seen through the religion of nature to which the early
romantics turned for consolation. They have heard too much about
the brutality of natural selection to feel, as Wordsworth did, that
pleasant landscapes are divine. They have seen through the religion
of beauty because, for one thing, they are too much oppressed by the
ugliness of Main Street. They cannot take refuge in an ivory tower
because the modern apartment house, with a radio loudspeaker on the
floor above and on the floor below and just across the courtyard,
will not permit it. They cannot, like Mazzini, make a religion of
patriotism, because they have just been demobilized. They cannot make
a religion of science like the post-Darwinians because they do not
understand modern science. They never learned enough mathematics and
physics. They do not like Bernard Shaw’s religion of creative evolution
because they have read enough to know that Mr. Shaw’s biology is
literary and evangelical. As for the religion of progress, that is
pre-empted by George F. Babbitt and the Rotary Club, and the religion
of humanity is utterly unacceptable to those who have to ride in the
subways during the rush hour.
Yet the current attempts to modernize religious creeds are inspired
by the hope that somehow it will be possible to construct a form of
belief which will fit into this vacuum. It is evident that life soon
becomes distracted and tiresome if it is not illuminated by communion
with what William James called “a wider self through which saving
experiences come.” The eager search for new religions, [p019] the
hasty adherence to cults, and the urgent appeals for a reconciliation
between religion and science are confessions that to the modern man
his activity seems to have no place in any rational order. His life
seems mere restlessness and compulsion, rather than conduct lighted by
luminous beliefs. He is possessed by a great deal of excitement amidst
which, as Mr. Santayana once remarked, he redoubles his effort when he
has forgotten his aim.
For in the modern age, at first imperceptibly with the rise of the
towns, and then catastrophically since the mechanical revolution, there
have gone into dissolution not only the current orthodoxy, but the
social order and the ways of living which supported it. Thus rebellion
and emancipation have come to mean something far more drastic than
they have ever meant before. The earlier rebels summoned men from one
allegiance to another, but the feeling for certainty in religion and
for decorum in society persisted. In the modern world it is this very
feeling of certainty itself which is dissolving. It is dissolving not
merely for an educated minority but for everyone who comes within the
orbit of modernity.
Yet there remain the wants which orthodoxy of some sort satisfies. The
natural man, when he is released from restraints, and has no substitute
for them, is at sixes and sevens with himself and the world. For in the
free play of his uninhibited instincts he does not find any natural
substitute for those accumulated convictions which, however badly
they did it, nevertheless organized his soul, economized his effort,
consoled him, and gave him dignity in his own eyes because he was part
of some greater whole. The acids of modernity are so powerful that they
do not [p020] tolerate a crystallization of ideas which will serve as
a new orthodoxy into which men can retreat. And so the modern world
is haunted by a realization, which it becomes constantly less easy to
ignore, that it is impossible to reconstruct an enduring orthodoxy, and
impossible to live well without the satisfactions which an orthodoxy
would provide.