CHAPTER VII [p112]

THE DRAMA OF DESTINY

1. _The Soul in the Modern World_

The effect of modernity, then, is to specialize and thus to intensify

our separated activities. Once all things were phases of a single

destiny: the church, the state, the family, the school were means to

the same end; the rights and duties of the individual in society, the

rules of morality, the themes of art, and the teachings of science

were all of them ways of revealing, of celebrating, of applying the

laws laid down in the divine constitution of the universe. In the

modern world institutions are more or less independent, each serving

its own proximate purpose, and our culture is really a collection of

separate interests each sovereign within its own realm. We do not put

shrines in our workshops, and we think it unseemly to talk business

in the vestibule of a church. We dislike politics in the pulpit and

preaching from politicians. We do not look upon our scholars as priests

or upon our priests as learned men. We do not expect science to sustain

theology, nor religion to dominate art. On the contrary we insist with

much fervor on the separation of church and state, of religion and

science, of politics and historical research, of morality and art, of

business and love. This separation of activities has its counterpart

in a separation of selves; the life of a modern man is not so much

the [p113] history of a single soul; it is rather a play of many

characters within a single body.

That may be why the modern autobiographical novel usually runs to two

volumes; the author requires more space to explain how his various

personalities came to be what they were at each little crisis of

adolescence and of middle age than St. Augustine, St. Thomas à Kempis,

and St. Francis put together needed in order to describe their whole

destiny in this world and the next. No doubt we are rather long-winded

and tiresome about the complexities of our souls. But from the

knowledge that we are complex there is no escape.

The modern man is unable any longer to think of himself as a single

personality approaching an everlasting judgment. He is one man to-day

and another to-morrow, one person here and another there. He does not

feel he knows himself. He is sure that no one else knows him at all.

His motives are intricate, and not wholly what they seem. He is moved

by impulses which he feels but cannot describe. There are dark depths

in his nature which no one has ever explored. There are splendors which

are unreleased. He has become greatly interested in his moods. The

precise nuances of his likes and dislikes have become very important.

There is no telling just what he is or what he may become, but there

is a certain breathless interest in having one of his selves watch and

comment upon the mischief and the frustrations of his other selves.

The problems of his character have become dissociated from any feeling

that they involve his immortal destiny. They have become dissociated

from the feeling that they deeply matter. From the feeling that [p114]

they are deeply his own. From the feeling that there is any personality

to own them. There they are: his inferiority complex and mine, your

sadistic impulse and Tom Jones’s, Anna’s father fixation, and little

Willie’s pyromania.

The thoroughly modern man has really ceased to believe that there is

an immortal essence presiding like a king over his appetites. The

word ‘soul’ has become a figure of speech, which he uses loosely,

sometimes to mean his tenderer aspirations, sometimes to mean the

whole collection of his impulses, sometimes, when he is in a hurry,

to mean nothing at all. It is certainly not the fashion any longer to

think of the soul as a little lord ruling the turbulent rabble of his

carnal passions; the constitutional form in popular psychology to-day

is republican. Each impulse may invoke the Bill of Rights, and have

its way if the others will let it. As Bertrand Russell has put it: “A

single desire is no better and no worse, considered in isolation, than

any other; but a group of desires is better than another group if all

of the first group can be satisfied, while in the second group some are

inconsistent with others,” but since, unhappily as is usually the case,

desires are extremely inconsistent, the uttermost that the modern man

can say is that the victory must go to the strongest desires. Morality

thus becomes a traffic code designed to keep as many desires as

possible moving together without too many violent collisions. When men

insist that morality is more than that, they are quickly denounced, in

general correctly, as Meddlesome Matties, as enemies of human liberty,

or as schemers trying to get the better of their fellow men. Morality,

conceived as a discipline [p115] to fit men for heaven, is resented;

morality, conceived as a discipline for happiness, is understood by

very few. The objective moral certitudes have dissolved, and in the

liberal philosophy there is nothing to take their place.

2. _The Great Scenario_

The modern world is like a stage on which a stupendous play has just

been presented. Many who were in the audience are still spellbound,

and as they pass out into the street, the scenario of the drama still

seems to them the very clue and plan of life. In the prologue the earth

was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Then at the command of God the sun, the moon, the stars, the earth, its

plants and its animals, then man, and after him woman, were created.

And in the epilogue the blessed were living in the New Jerusalem, a

city of pure gold like clear glass, with walls laid on foundations of

precious stones. Between the darkness that preceded creation and the

glory of this heavenly city which had no need of the sun, a plot was

unfolded which constitutes the history of mankind. In the beginning man

was perfect. But the devil tempted him to eat the forbidden fruit, and

as a punishment God banished him from paradise, and laid upon him and

his descendants the curse of labor and of death.

But in meting out this punishment, God in his mercy promised ultimately

to redeem the children of Adam. From among them he chose one tribe who

were to be the custodians of this promise. And then in due time he

sent his Son, born of a Virgin, to teach the gospel of salvation, and

to expiate the sin of Adam upon a cross. [p116] Those who believed

in this gospel and followed its commandments, would at the final day

of reckoning enter into the heavenly Jerusalem; the rest would be

consigned to the devil and his everlasting torments.

Into this marvelous story the whole of human history and of human

knowledge could be fitted, and only in accordance with it could they

be understood. This was the key to existence, the answer to doubt,

the solace for pain, and the guarantee of happiness. But to many who

were in the audience it is now evident that they have seen a play, a

magnificent play, one of the most sublime ever created by the human

imagination, but nevertheless a play, and not a literal account of

human destiny. They know it was a play. They have lingered long enough

to see the scene shifters at work. The painted drop is half rolled

up; some of the turrets of the celestial city can still be seen, and

part of the choir of angels. But behind them, plainly visible, are the

struts and gears which held in place what under a gentler light looked

like the boundaries of the universe. They are only human fears and

human hopes, and bits of antique science and half-forgotten history,

and symbols here and there of experiences through which some in each

generation pass.

Conceivably men might once again imagine another drama which was as

great as the epic of the Christian Bible. But like _Paradise Lost_

or _Faust_, it would remain a work of the imagination. While the

intellectual climate in which we live is what it is, while we continue

to be as conscious as we are of how our own minds work, we could not

again accept naively such a gorgeous fable of our destiny. Yet only

five hundred years ago the whole [p117] of Christendom believed that

this story was literally and objectively true. God was not another

name for the evolutionary process, or for the sum total of the laws of

nature, or for a compendium of all noble things, as he is in modernist

accounts of him; he was the ruler of the universe, an omnipotent,

magical King, who felt, who thought, who remembered and issued his

commands. And because there was such a God, whose plan was clearly

revealed in all its essentials, human life had a definite meaning,

morality had a certain foundation, men felt themselves to be living

within the framework of a universe which they called divine because it

corresponded with their deepest desires.

If we ask ourselves why it is impossible for us to sum up the meaning

of existence in a great personal drama, we have to begin by remembering

that every great story of this kind must assume that the universe

is governed by forces which are essentially of the same order as

the promptings of the human heart. Otherwise it would not greatly

interest us. A story, however plausible, about beings who had no human

qualities, a plot which unfolded itself as utterly indifferent to our

own personal fate, would not serve as a substitute for the Christian

epic. This is the trouble with the so-called religion of creative

evolution: even if it is true, which is far from certain, it is so

profoundly indifferent to our individual fate, that it leaves most men

cold. For there are very few who are so mystical as to be able to sink

themselves wholly in the hidden purposes of an unconscious natural

force. This, too, as the Catholic Church has always insisted, is the

trouble with pantheistic religion, for if everything is [p118] divine,

then nothing is peculiarly divine, and all the distinctions of good and

evil are meaningless.

The story must not only assume that human ideals inspire the whole

creation, but it must contain guarantees that this is so. There must

be no doubt about it. Science must confirm the moral assumptions; the

highest and most certain available knowledge must clinch the conviction

that the story unfolded is the secret of life.

3. _Earmarks of Truth_

Religious teachers who were close to the people have always understood

that they must perform wonders if they were to make their God

convincing and their own title to speak for him valid. The writer of

Exodus, for example, was quite clear in his mind about this:

And Moses answered and said, But, behold, they will not believe me,

nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not

appeared unto thee.

And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he

said, A rod.

And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground,

and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it.

And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by

the tail. And he put forth his hand, and caught it, and it became a

rod in his hand:

That they may believe that the Lord God of their fathers, the God

of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, hath appeared

unto thee.

Even in the wildest flights of his fancy the common man is almost

always primarily interested in the prosaic consequences. If he believes

in fairies he is not likely [p119] to imagine them as spirits

inhabiting a world apart, but as little people who do things which

affect his own affairs. The common man is an unconscious pragmatist:

he believes because he is satisfied that his beliefs change the course

of events. He would not be inspired to worship a god who merely

contemplates the universe, or a god who created it once, and then

rested, while its destiny unfolds itself inexorably. To the plain

people religion is not disinterested speculation but a very practical

matter. It is concerned with their well-being in this world and in an

equally concrete world hereafter. They have wanted to know the will of

God because they had to know it if they were to put themselves right

with the king of creation.

Those who professed to know God’s will had to demonstrate that they

knew it. This was the function of miracles. They were tangible evidence

that the religious teacher had a true commission. “Then those men, when

they had seen the miracle (of the loaves and the fishes) that Jesus

did, said, This is of a truth that prophet that should come into the

world.” When Jesus raised the dead man at the gate of the city of Nain,

“there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great

prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited his people.”

The most authoritative Catholic theologians teach that miracles “are

not wrought to show the internal truth of the doctrines, but only to

give _manifest_ reasons why we should accept the doctrines.” They are

“essentially an appeal to knowledge,” demonstrations, one might almost

say divine experiments, by which men are enabled to know the glory and

the providence of God. [p120]

The Catholic apologists maintain that God can be known by the exercise

of reason, but the miracle helps, as it were, to clinch the conviction.

The persistent attachment of the Catholic Church to miracles is

significant. It has a longer unbroken experience with human nature than

any other institution in the western world. It has adapted itself to

many circumstances, and under the profession of an unalterable creed it

has abandoned and then added much. But it has never ceased to insist

upon the need of a physical manifestation of the divine power. For with

an unerring instinct for realities, Catholic churchmen have understood

that there is a residuum of prosaic, matter-of-factness, of a need to

touch and to see, which verbal proofs can never quite satisfy. They

have resolutely responded to that need. They have not preached God

merely by praising him; they have brought God near to men by revealing

him to the senses, as one who is great enough and good enough and

sufficiently interested in them to heal the sick and to make the floods

recede.

But to-day scientists are ever so much superior to churchmen at this

kind of demonstration. The miracles which are recounted from the pulpit

were, after all, few and far between. There are even theologians who

teach that miracles ceased with the death of the Apostles. But the

miracles of science seem to be inexhaustible. It is not surprising,

then, that men of science should have acquired much of the intellectual

authority which churchmen once exercised. Scientists do not, of course,

speak of their discoveries as miracles. But to the common man they have

much the same character as miracles. They are [p121] wonderful, they

are inexplicable, they are manifestations of a great power over the

forces of nature.

It cannot be said, I think, that the people at large, even the

moderately educated minority, understand the difference between

scientific method and revelation, or that they have decided upon

reflection to trust science. There is at least as much mystery in

science for the common man as there ever was in religion; in a sense

there is more mystery, for the logic of science is still altogether

beyond his understanding, whereas the logic of revelation is the logic

of his own feelings. But if men at large do not understand the method

of science, they can appreciate some of its more tangible results.

And these results are so impressive that scientific men are often

embarrassed by the unbounded popular expectations which they have so

unintentionally aroused.

Their authority in the realm of knowledge has become virtually

irresistible. And so when scientists teach one theory and the Bible

another, the scientists invariably carry the greater conviction.

4. _On Reconciling Religion and Science_

The conflicts between scientists and churchmen are sometimes ascribed

to a misunderstanding on both sides. But when we examine the proposals

for peace, it is plain, I think, that they are in effect proposals

for a truce. There is, for example, the suggestion first put out, I

believe, in the Seventeenth Century that God made the universe like

a clock, and that having started it running he will let it alone

till it runs down. By this ingenious metaphor, which can neither be

proved nor disproved, [p122] it was possible to reconcile for a time

the scientific notion of natural law with the older notion of God as

creator and as judge. The religious conception was held to be true for

the beginning of the world and for the end, the scientific conception

was true in between. Later, when the theatre of the difficulty was

transferred from physics and astronomy to biology and history, a

variation was propounded. God, it was said, created the world and

governs it; the way he creates and governs is the way described by

scientists as ‘evolution.’

Attempts at reconciliations like these are based on a theory that it

is feasible somewhere in the field of knowledge to draw a line and

say that on one side the methods of science shall prevail, on the

other the methods of traditional religion. It is acknowledged that

where experiment and observation are possible, the field belongs to

the scientists; but it is argued that there is a vast field of great

interest to mankind which is beyond the reach of practical scientific

inquiry, and that here, touching questions like the ultimate destiny

of man, the purpose of life, and immortality, the older method of

revelation, inspired and verified by intuition, is still reliable.

In any truce of this sort there is bound to be aggression from both

sides. For it is a working policy rather than an inwardly accepted

conviction. Scientists cannot really believe that there are fields of

possible knowledge which they can never enter. They are bound to enter

all fields and to explore everything. And even if they fail, they

cannot believe that other scientists must always fail. Their essays,

moreover, create disturbance and doubt which orthodox churchmen are

forced to resent. For in [p123] any division of authority, there must

be some ultimate authority to settle questions of jurisdiction. Shall

scientists determine what belongs to science, or shall churchmen? The

question is insoluble as long as both claim that they have the right to

expound the nature of existence.

And so while the policy of toleration may be temporarily workable, it

is inherently unstable. Therefore, among men who are at once devoted

to the method of science and sensitive to the human need of religion,

the hope has arisen that something better can be worked out than a

purely diplomatic division of the mind into spheres of influence. Mr.

Whitehead, for example, in his book called _Science and the Modern

World_, argues “there are wider truths and finer perspectives within

which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science

will be found.” He illustrates what he means in this fashion. Galileo

said the earth moves and the sun is fixed; the Inquisition said the

earth is fixed and the sun moves; the Newtonian astronomers said that

both the sun and the earth move. “But now we say that any one of these

three statements is equally true, provided you have fixed your sense of

‘rest’ and ‘motion’ in the way required by the statement adopted. At

the date of Galileo’s controversy with the Inquisition, Galileo’s way

of stating the facts was beyond question the fruitful procedure for the

sake of scientific research. But at that time the concepts of relative

motion were in nobody’s mind; so that the statements were made in

ignorance of the qualifications required for the more perfect truth....

All sides had got hold of important truths.... [p124] But with the

knowledge of those times, the truths appeared to be inconsistent.”

This is reconciliation through a higher synthesis. But I cannot help

feeling that the scientist has here produced the synthesis, and that

the churchmen have merely provided one of the ideas which are to be

synthesized. Mr. Whitehead argues in effect that a subtler science

would confirm many ideas that were once taken on faith. But he holds

unswervingly to the belief of the scientist that his method contains

the criterion of truth. In his illustration the reconciliation between

Galileo, the Inquisition, and the Newtonian physicists is reached if

all three parties accept “the modern concept of relative motion.”

But the modern concept of relative motion was reached by scientific

thought, and not by apostolic revelation. To Mr. Whitehead, therefore,

the ultimate arbiter is science, and what he means by reconciliation is

a scientific view of the universe sufficiently wide and sufficiently

subtle to justify many of the important, but hitherto unverified,

claims of traditional religion. Mr. Whitehead, it happens, is an

Englishman as well as a great logician, and it is difficult to resist

the suspicion that he conceives the church of the future as enjoying

the dignities of an Indian Maharajah, with a resident scientist behind

the altar.

A reconciliation of this kind may soften the conflict for a while.

But it cannot for long disguise the fact that it is based on a denial

of the premises of faith. If the method of science has the last word,

then revelation is reduced from a means of arriving at absolute

certainty to a flash of insight which can be trusted if and when it

is verified by science. Under such terms of peace, the religious

[p125] experiences of mankind become merely one of the instruments of

knowledge, like the microscope and the binomial theorem, usable now

and then, but subject to correction, and provisional. They no longer

yield complete, ultimate, invincible truths. They yield an hypothesis.

But the religious life of most men has not, until this day at least,

been founded upon hypotheses which, when accurately stated, included a

coefficient of probable error.

5. _Gospels of Science_

Because its prestige is so great, science has been acclaimed as a new

revelation. Cults have attached themselves to scientific hypotheses

as fortune-tellers to a circus. A whole series of pseudo-religions

have been hastily constructed upon such dogmas as the laws of

nature, mechanism, Darwinian evolution, Lamarckian evolution, and

psychoanalysis. Each of these cults has had its own Decalogue of

Science founded at last, it was said, upon certain knowledge.

These cults are an attempt to fit the working theories of science to

the ordinary man’s desire for personal salvation. They do violence

to the integrity of scientific thought and they cannot satisfy the

layman’s need to believe. For the essence of the scientific method is

a determination to investigate phenomena without conceding anything to

naive human prejudices. Therefore, genuine men of science shrink from

the attempts of poets, prophets, and popular lecturers to translate

the current scientific theory into the broad and passionate dogmas

of popular faith. As a matter of common honesty they know that no

theory has the kind of absolute verity which [p126] popular faith

would attribute to it. As a matter of prudence they fear these popular

cults, knowing quite well that freedom of inquiry is endangered when

men become passionately loyal to an idea, and stake their personal

pride and hope of happiness upon its vindication. In the light of human

experience, men of science have learned what happens when investigators

are not free to discard any theory without breaking some dear old

lady’s heart. Their theories are not the kind of revelation which the

old lady is seeking, and their beliefs are relative and provisional to

a degree which must seem utterly alien and bewildering to her.

Here, for example, is the conclusion of some lectures by one of the

greatest living astronomers. I have italicized the words which the dear

old lady would not be likely to hear in a sermon:

I have dealt mainly with two salient points—the problem of the

source of a star’s energy, and the change of mass which must

occur if there is any evolution of faint stars from bright stars.

I have shown how these _appear_ to meet in the _hypothesis_ of

the annihilation of matter. I _do not hold this as a secure

conclusion_. I _hesitate even to advocate it as probable_, because

there are many details which seem to me to throw _considerable

doubt_ on it, and I have formed a strong impression that there

must be _some essential point which has not yet been grasped_.

I _simply_ tell it you as the _clue_ which at the moment we are

_trying_ to follow up—_not knowing whether it is false scent or

true_. I should have liked to have closed these lectures by leading

up to some great climax. But perhaps it is more in accordance with

the true conditions of scientific progress that they should _fizzle

out_ with a glimpse of the _obscurity_ which marks the frontiers of

present knowledge. I do not apologize for the [p127] _lameness_ of

the conclusion, _for it is not a conclusion_. I _wish I could feel

confident that it is even a beginning_.

This great climax, to which Dr. Eddington was unable to lead up, is

what the layman is looking for. We know quite well what the nature

of that great climax would be: it would be a statement of fact which

related the destiny of each individual to the destiny of the universe.

That is the kind of truth which is found in revelation. It is the kind

of truth which men would like to find in science. But it is the kind of

truth which science does not afford. The difficulty is deeper than the

provisional character of scientific hypothesis; it is not due merely to

the inability of the scientist to say that his conclusion is absolutely

secure. The layman in search of a dogma upon which to organize his

destiny might be willing to grant that the conclusions of science

to-day are as yet provisional. What he tends to misunderstand is that

even if the conclusions were guaranteed by all investigators now and

for all time to come, those conclusions would still fail to provide him

with a conception of the world of which the great climax was a prophecy

of the fate of creation in terms of his hopes and fears.

The radical novelty of modern science lies precisely in the rejection

of the belief, which is at the heart of all popular religion, that

the forces which move the stars and atoms are contingent upon the

preferences of the human heart. The science of Aristotle and of the

Schoolmen, on the other hand, was a truly popular science. It was in

its inspiration the instinctive science of the unscientific man. “They

read into the cause and goal of the universe,” as Dr. Randall has said,

“that which alone [p128] justifies it for man, its service of the

good.” They provided a conception of the universe which was available

for the religious needs of ordinary men, and in the _Divine Comedy_ we

can see the supreme example of what science must be like if it is to

satisfy the human need to believe. The purpose of the whole poem, said

Dante himself, “is to remove those who are living in this life from the

state of wretchedness, and to lead them to the state of blessedness.”

Mediæval science, which follows the logic of human desire, was such

that Dante could without violence either to its substance or its spirit

say at the summit of Paradise:

To the high fantasy here power failed; but already my desire and

will were rolled—even as a wheel that moveth equally—by the Love

that moves the sun and the other stars.

This is the great climax which men instinctively expect: the ability

to say with perfect assurance that when the truth is fully evident it

will be seen that their desire and will are rolled by the love that

moves the sun and the other stars. They hope not only to find the will

of God in the universe but to know that his will is fundamentally like

their own. Only if they could believe that on the basis of scientific

investigation would they really feel that science had ‘explained’ the

world.

Explanation, in this sense, cannot come from modern science because

it is not in this sense that modern science attempts to explain the

universe. It is wholly misleading to say, for example, that the

scientific picture of the world is mechanical. All that can properly

be said is that many scientists have found it satisfying to think

about the universe as if it were built on a mechanical model. “If

I [p129] can make a mechanical model,” said Lord Kelvin, “I can

understand it. As long as I cannot make a mechanical model all the way

through, I cannot understand it.” But what does the scientist mean by

“understanding it”? He means, says Professor Bridgman, that he has

“reduced a situation to elements with which we are so familiar that we

accept them as a matter of course, so that our curiosity rests.” Modern

men are familiar with machines. They can take them apart and put them

together, so that even though we should all be a little flustered if

we had to tell just what we mean by a machine, our curiosity tends to

be satisfied if we hear that the phenomenon, say, of electricity or of

human behavior, is like a machine.

The place at which curiosity rests is not a fixed point called ‘the

truth.’ The unscientific man, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages,

really means by the truth an explanation of the universe in terms of

human desire. What modern science means by the truth has been stated

most clearly perhaps by the late Charles S. Peirce when he said

that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all

those who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object

represented in this opinion is the real.” When we say that something

has been ‘explained’ by science, we really mean only that our own

curiosity is satisfied. Another man, whose mind was more critical,

who commanded a greater field of experience, might not be satisfied

at all. Thus “the savage is satisfied by explaining the thunderstorm

as the capricious act of an angry God.... (But) even if the physicist

believed in the existence of the angry god, he would not be satisfied

with this explanation of the thunderstorm [p130] because he is not so

well acquainted with angry gods as to be able to predict when anger

is followed by a storm. He would have to know why the god had become

angry, and why making a thunderstorm eased his ire.” But even carrying

the explanation to this point would not be carrying it to its limit.

For there is no formal limit. The next scientist might wish to know

what a god was and what anger is. And when he had been told what their

elements are, the next man might be dissatisfied until he had found the

elements of these elements.

The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no

further than to say that he is so well satisfied with this analogy that

he is through with searching any further. That is his business, as long

as he does not insist that he has reached a clear and ultimate picture

of the universe. For obviously he has not. A machine is something in

which the parts push and pull each other. But why are they pushing and

pulling, and how do _they_ work? Do they push and pull because of the

action of the electrons in their orbits within the atoms? If that is

true, then how does an electron work? Is it, too, a machine? Or is it

something quite different from a machine? Shall we attempt to explain

machines electrically, or shall we attempt to explain electricity

mechanically?

It becomes plain, therefore, that scientific explanation is altogether

unlike the explanations to which the common man is accustomed. It does

not yield a certain picture of anything which can be taken naively as

a representation of reality. And therefore the philosophies which have

grown up about science, like mechanism or [p131] creative evolution,

are in no way guaranteed by science as the account of creation in

Genesis is guaranteed by the authority of Scripture. They are nothing

but provisional dramatizations which are soon dissolved by the progress

of science itself.

That is why nothing is so dead as the scientific religion of yesterday.

It is far more completely dead than any revealed religion, because the

revealed religion, whatever may be the defects of its cosmology or its

history, has some human experience at its core which we can recognize

and to which we may respond. But a religion like scientific materialism

has nothing in it, except the pretension that it is a true account of

the world. Once that pretension is exploded, it is wholly valueless as

a religion. It has become a collection of discarded concepts.

6. _The Deeper Conflict_

It follows from the very nature of scientific explanation, then, that

it cannot give men such a clue to a plan of existence as they find

in popular religion. For that plan must suppose that existence is

explained in terms of human destiny. Now conceivably existence might

again be explained, as it was in the Middle Ages, as the drama of human

destiny. It does not seem probable to us; yet we cannot say that it

is impossible. But even if science worked out such an explanation, it

would still be radically different from the explanations which popular

religion employs.

For if it were honestly stated, it would be necessary to say first,

that it is tentative, and subject to disproof by further experiment;

second, that it is relative, in that [p132] the same facts seen from

some other point and with some other purpose in mind could be explained

quite differently; third, that it is not a picture of the world, as

God would see it, and as all men must see it, but that it is simply

one among many possible creations of the mind into which most of the

data of experience can be fitted. When the scientist had finished

setting down his qualifications, the essence of the matter as a simple,

devout man sees it, would have evaporated. Certainty, as the devout

desire it, would be gone; verity, as they understand it, would be gone;

objectivity, as they imagine it, would be gone. What would remain

would be a highly abstracted, logical fiction, suited to disinterested

inquiry, but utterly unsuited to be the vehicle of his salvation.

The difficulty of reconciling popular religion with science is far

deeper than that of reconciling Genesis with Darwin, or any statement

of fact in the Bible with any discovery by scientists. It is the

difficulty of reconciling the human desire for a certain kind of

universe with a method of explaining the world which is absolutely

neutral in its intention. One can by twisting language sufficiently

“reconcile” Genesis with “evolution.” But what no one can do is to

guarantee that science will not destroy the doctrine of evolution the

day after it has been triumphantly proved that Genesis is compatible

with the theory of evolution. As a matter of fact, just that has

happened. The Darwinian theory, which theologians are busily accepting,

is so greatly modified already by science that some of it is almost as

obsolete as the Babylonian myth in Genesis. The reconciliation which

theologians are attempting is an impossible one, because one of the

[p133] factors which has to be reconciled—namely, the scientific

theory, changes so rapidly that the layman is never sure at any one

moment what the theory is which he has to reconcile with religious

dogma.

Yet the purpose of these attempts at reconciliation is evident enough.

It is to find a solid foundation for human ideals in the facts of

existence. Authority based on revelation once provided that foundation.

It gave an account of how the world began, of how it is governed, and

of how it will end, which made pain and joy, hope and fear, desire and

the denial of desire the central motives in the cosmic drama. This

account no longer satisfies our curiosity as to the nature of things;

the authority which certifies it no longer commands our complete

allegiance. The prestige, which once adhered to those who spoke by

revelation, has passed to scientists. But science, though it is the

most reliable method of knowledge we now possess, does not provide

an account of the world in which human destiny is the central theme.

Therefore, science, though it has displaced revelation, is not a

substitute for it. It yields a radically different kind of knowledge.

It explains the facts. But it does not pretend to justify the ways of

God to man. It enables us to realize some of our hopes. But it offers

no guarantees that they can be fulfilled.

7. _Theocracy and Humanism_

There is a revolution here in the realm of the spirit. We may describe

it briefly by saying that whereas men once felt they were living under

the eye of an all-powerful spectator, to-day they are watched only by

their neighbors [p134] and their own consciences. A few, perhaps, act

as if posterity were aware of them; the great number feel themselves

accountable only to their own consciences or to the opinion of the

society in which they live. Once men believed that they would be judged

at the throne of God. They believed that he saw not only their deeds

but their motives; there was no hole deep enough into which a man could

crawl to hide himself from the sight of God; there was no mood, however

fleeting, which escaped his notice.

The moral problem for each man, therefore, was to make his will conform

to the will of God. There were differences of opinion as to how this

could be done. There were differing conceptions of the nature of God,

and of what he most desired. But there was no difference of opinion on

the main point that it was imperative to obey him. Whether they thought

they could serve God best by burnt offerings or a contrite heart, by

slaying the infidel or by loving their neighbors, by vows of poverty or

by the magnificence of their altars, they never doubted that the chief

duty of man, and his ultimate chance of happiness, was to discover and

then to cultivate a right relationship to a supreme being.

This was the major premise upon which all human choices hinged. There

followed from it certain necessary conclusions. In determining what was

a right relationship to God, the test of rightness lay in a revelation

of the putative experience of God and not in the actual experience of

His creatures. It was God alone, therefore, who really understood the

reasons for righteousness and its nature. “The procedure of Divine

Justice,” said [p135] Calvin, “is too high to be scanned by human

measure or comprehended by the feebleness of human intellect.” That was

good which man understood was good in the eyes of God, regardless of

how it seemed to men.

Thus the distinction between good and evil, including not only all

rules of personal conduct but the whole arrangement of rights and

duties in society, were laws established not by the consent of the

governed, but by a king in heaven. They were his commandments. By

obedience men could obtain happiness. But they obtained it not because

virtue is the cause of happiness but because God rewarded with

happiness those who obeyed his commandments. Men did not really know

why God preferred certain kinds of conduct; they merely professed to

know what kind of conduct he preferred. They could not really ask

themselves what the difference was between good and evil. That was a

secret locked in the nature of a being whose choices were ultimately

inscrutable. The only question was what he willed. Even Job had to be

content without fathoming his reasons.

The moral commandments based upon divine authority were, in the nature

of things, rather broad generalizations. Obviously there could not be

special revelation as to the unique aspects of each human difficulty.

The divine law, like our ordinary human law, was addressed to typical

rather than to individual cases. Nevertheless, for much the greater

part of recorded history men have accepted such law without questioning

its validity. They could not have done so if the rules of morality had

not, at least in some rough way, worked. It is not difficult to see

why they worked. They were broad rules of conduct imposed [p136] upon

people living close to the soil, upon people, therefore, whose ways of

living changed little in the course of generations. The same situations

were so nearly and so often repeated that a typical solution would on

the whole be satisfactory.

These typical solutions, such as we find in the Mosaic law or the

code of Hammurabi, were no doubt the deposits of custom. They had,

therefore, become perfected in practice, and were solidly based upon

human experience. In the society in which they originated, there was

nothing arbitrary or alien about them. When, therefore, the lawgiver

carried these immemorial usages up with him on to Sinai, and brought

them down again graven on tablets of stone, the rationality of the

revelation was self-evident. It appeared to be arbitrary only when a

radical change in the way of life dissolved the premises and the usages

upon which the authoritative code was established.

That dissolution has proceeded to great lengths within the centuries

which we call modern. The crisis was reached, it seems, during the

Eighteenth Century, and in the teaching of Immanuel Kant it was made

manifest to the educated classes of the western world. Kant argued

in the _Critique of Pure Reason_ that the existence of God cannot be

demonstrated. He then insisted that without belief in God, freedom, and

immortality, there was no valid and true morality. So he insisted that

God must exist to justify morality. This highly sophisticated doctrine

marks the end of simple theism in modern thought. For Kant’s proof of

the existence of God was nothing but a plea that God ought to exist,

and the whole temper [p137] of the modern intellect is to deny that

what ought to be true necessarily is true.

Insofar as men have now lost their belief in a heavenly king, they have

to find some other ground for their moral choices than the revelation

of his will. It follows necessarily that they must find the tests of

righteousness wholly within human experience. The difference between

good and evil must be a difference which men themselves recognize and

understand. Happiness cannot be the reward of virtue; it must be the

intelligible consequence of it. It follows, too, that virtue cannot be

commanded; it must be willed out of personal conviction and desire.

Such a morality may properly be called humanism, for it is centered not

in superhuman but in human nature. When men can no longer be theists,

they must, if they are civilized, become humanists. They must live

by the premise that whatever is righteous is inherently desirable

because experience will demonstrate its desirability. They must live,

therefore, in the belief that the duty of man is not to make his

will conform to the will of God but to the surest knowledge of the

conditions of human happiness.

It is evident that a morality of humanism presents far greater

difficulties than a morality premised on theism. For one thing, it

is put immediately to a much severer test. When Kant, for example,

argued that theism was necessary to morality, his chief reason was that

since the good man is often defeated on earth, he must be permitted to

believe in a superhuman power which is “able to connect happiness and

morality in exact harmony with each other.” Humanism is not provided

with such [p138] reserves of moral credit; it cannot claim all

eternity in which its promises may be fulfilled. Unless its wisdom in

any sphere of life is demonstrated within a reasonable time in actual

experience, there is nothing to commend it.

A morality of humanism labors under even greater difficulties.

It appears in a complex and changing society; it is an attitude

toward life to which rational men necessarily turn whenever their

circumstances have rendered a theistic view incredible. It is just

because the simpler rules no longer work that the subtler choices

of humanism present themselves. These choices have to be made under

conditions, like those which prevail in modern urban societies, where

the extreme complexity of rapidly changing human relations makes it

very difficult to foresee all the consequences of any moral decision.

The men who must make their decisions are skeptical by habit and

unsettled amidst the novelties of their surroundings.

The teachers of a theistic morality, when the audience is devout, have

only to fortify the impression that the rules of conduct are certified

by God the invisible King. The ethical problem for the common man is

to recognize the well-known credentials of his teachers. In practice

he has merely to decide whether the priest, the prince, and the

elders, are what they claim to be. When he has done that, there are no

radical questions to be asked. But the teachers of humanism have no

credentials. Their teaching is not certified. They have to prove their

case by the test of mundane experience. They speak with no authority,

which can be scrutinized once and for all, and then forever accepted.

They can proclaim no rule of conduct with certainty, for they have no

inherent personal [p139] authority and they cannot be altogether sure

they are right. They cannot command. They cannot truly exhort. They

can only inquire, infer, and persuade. They have only human insight

to guide them and those to whom they speak must in the end themselves

accept the full responsibility for the consequences of any advice they

choose to accept.

Yet with all its difficulties, it is to a morality of humanism that men

must turn when the ancient order of things dissolves. When they find

that they no longer believe seriously and deeply that they are governed

from heaven, there is anarchy in their souls until by conscious effort

they find ways of governing themselves.

PART II [p141]

THE FOUNDATIONS OF HUMANISM

_The stone which the builders rejected,

The same is become the head of the corner?_

Luke XX, 17.

INTRODUCTION [p143]

The upshot of the discussion to this point is that modernity destroys

the disposition to believe that behind the visible world of physical

objects and human institutions there is a supernatural kingdom from

which ultimately all laws, all judgments, all rewards, all punishments,

and all compensations are derived. To those who believe that this

kingdom exists the modern spirit is nothing less than treason to God.

The popular religion rests on the belief that the kingdom is an

objective fact, as certain, as definite, and as real, in spite of

its invisibility, as the British Empire; it holds that this faith

is justified by overwhelming evidence supplied by revelation,

unimpeachable testimony, and incontrovertible signs. To the modern

spirit, on the other hand, the belief in this kingdom must necessarily

seem a grandiose fiction projected by human needs and desires. The

humanistic view is that the popular faith does not prove the existence

of its objects, but only the presence of a desire that such objects

should exist. The popular religion, in short, rests on a theory which,

if true, is an extension of physics and of history; the humanistic view

rests on human psychology and an interpretation of human experience.

It follows, then, that in exploring the modern problem it is necessary

consciously and clearly to make a choice between these diametrically

opposite points of view. The [p144] choice is fundamental and

exclusive, and it determines all the conclusions which follow. For

obviously to one who believes that the world is a theocracy, the

problem is how to bring the strayed and rebellious masses of mankind

back to their obedience, how to restore the lost provinces of God the

invisible King. But to one who takes the humanistic view the problem is

how mankind, deprived of the great fictions, is to come to terms with

the needs which created those fictions.

In this book I take the humanistic view because, in the kind of world I

happen to live in, I can do no other.

CHAPTER VIII [p145]

GOLDEN MEMORIES

It will be granted, I suppose, that there would be no need for

certainty about the plan and government of the universe if, as a

matter of course, all our desires were regularly fulfilled. In a world

where no man desired what he could not have, there would be no need to

regulate human conduct and therefore no need for morality. In a world

where each man could have what he desired, there would be no need for

consolation and for reassuring guarantees that justice, mercy, and love

will ultimately prevail. In a world where there was perfect adjustment

between human desires and their environment, there would be no problem

of evil: we should not know the meaning of sin, sorrow, crime, fear,

frustration, pain, and emptiness. We do not live in such a well-ordered

world. But we can imagine it by making either of two assumptions:

that we have ceased to desire anything which causes evil, or that

omnipotence fulfills all our desires. The first of these assumptions

leads to the Nirvana of the Buddhists, where all craving has ceased and

there is perfect peace. The second leads to the heaven of all popular

religions, to some paradise like that of Mohammed perhaps where, as Mr.

Santayana says, men may “sit in well-watered gardens, clad in green

silks, drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like

glance of some young girl, all innocence and fire.” [p146]

Among educated men it has always been difficult to imagine a heaven

of fulfilled desires. For since no two persons have exactly the

same desires, one man’s imagination of heaven may not suit another

man’s. In general, the attempts which have been made to picture the

Christian heaven reflect the temperaments of highly contemplative

spirits, and it is customary nowadays to say that this heaven would

be a most uninteresting place. No doubt it would be to those who are

not contemplative. But the objectors have missed the main point, which

is that no one is supposed to pass through the pearly gates who is

not suited to dwell in Paradise. That is what St. Peter is there for,

to see that the unfit do not enter; the other places, Purgatory and

the Inferno, are available to those spirits who could not be happy in

Heaven. There are, by definition, no uncongenial spirits in Heaven.

There were once, but Satan and his followers were thrown out headlong,

and they now live in places which are suited to their temperaments. A

devout man may quite properly, therefore, advise those who do not think

they would enjoy Heaven to go to Hell.

The attempt to imagine a heaven is an attempt to conceive a world in

which the disorders of human desire no longer exist. Now it is in their

prayers that men have sought to come to terms with their disorders, and

their prayers reveal most concretely how much the hunger for certainty

and for help is a hunger for the fulfillment of desire. For prayer,

says Father Wynne, is “the expression of our desires to God whether

for ourselves or for others.” In the higher reaches of religion “the

expression is not intended to instruct or direct God what to do, but to

[p147] appeal to His goodness for the things we need; and the appeal

is necessary, not because He is ignorant of our needs or sentiments,

but to give definite form to our desires, to concentrate our whole

attention on what we have to recommend to Him, to help us appreciate

our close personal relation with Him.” But in order to know what to

pray for, we need grace, that is to say, God Himself must teach us what

to ask Him for. We can be sure that we should pray for salvation, but

in particular we need guidance from God “to know the special means that

will most help us in any particular need.” But besides the spiritual

objects of prayer “we are to ask also for temporal things, our daily

bread and all that it implies, health, strength, and other worldly or

temporal goods ...”; we are to pray also for escape from evils, “the

penalty of our sins, the dangers of temptation, and every manner of

physical or spiritual affliction.”

There has, however, always been a logical difficulty about offering

petitions to an all-wise and all-powerful Providence. Thus in the

_Dialogue of Dives and Pauper_, which was published in 1493, the

question is put: “Why pray we to God with oure mouth sithe he knowyth

alle oure thoughte, all our desire, al our wyl and what us nedeth?”

To this question the only answer which was not evasive came from the

mystics who led a life of contemplation. Prayer, they said, is not mere

petition; it is communion with God. It is not because prayer gives a

man what he wants, but because it “ones the soul to God,” that it is

rational and necessary. This, too, is the conception of prayer held by

a liberal pastor like Dr. Fosdick who looks with scorn upon “clamorous

petition to an [p148] anthropomorphic God” and says that “true prayer

... is to assimilate ... (the) spirit which is God (that) ... surrounds

our lives.” The same idea, stated in somewhat more precise language,

is set down by Mr. Santayana when he says that “in rational prayer the

soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare:

it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accommodates itself

to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives.”

But, of course, this is not the way the common man through the ages

has conceived prayer. In fact he must have prayed before he had any

clear conception of what a prayer is or of whom it is addressed to.

Thus we are told that in Arcadia the girls invoked Hera by the title of

“Hera the Girl,” the married women prayed to “Hera the Married One,”

and the widows prayed to “Hera the Widow.” Sometimes the prayer is a

spontaneous expression of sorrow or of delight, a lyrical cry which

has no ulterior purpose and is addressed to no one. Sometimes prayer

is a magical formula which compels the deity to listen and to obey.

The subject is both complicated and obscure. But this much at least is

clear: along with elements which can be described only as spontaneous

and lyrical, with traces of magic, and at times with a purely

disinterested desire to commune with God, simple people have looked

upon prayer as “an instrument for applying God’s illimitable power to

daily life.”

Popular discussion of prayer has often been extremely practical: “How

can prayer be made most efficient? Is it by ordinary Masses or by other

offices? Is it by the elaboration or the multiplication of services?”

Lady Alice [p149] West who died in 1395 ordered 4400 Masses “in the

most haste that it may be do, withynne xiiii nyght next after my

deces.” Thomas Walwayn who died in 1415 left orders for 10,000 Masses

“with oute pompe whyche may not profyt myn soule.” John Plot, however,

wished his Masses said “with solempne seruise that ys for to sayn

wyth Belle Ryngyng.” There was debate as to whether prayers were most

effective if said in Rome or in the Holy Land ... by certain priests

rather than by others ... by the friars rather than by the priests ...

whether there were more potent prayers than the _Pater_ ... whether

prayers should be addressed to the Father, the Son, or to St. Mary

... whether St. Mary could be approached best through her mother, St.

Anne....

It is not necessary to dogmatize by saying that prayer is magic, or

soliloquy, or communion, or petition for this and that, in order to

see that it is the expression of a human need. The quality of the need

varies. It may be anything from a desire for rain to a desire for

friendship with unseen spirits, but always it illustrates the saying

that “all men stand in need of God.”

If we ask ourselves what we mean by ‘need,’ we must answer, I suppose,

that the resources of our own natures and the power we are able to

exercise over events are insufficient to satisfy the cravings of our

natures. We must eat, but we cannot be sure that drought will not

destroy the crops. We are beset by enemies, and we are not sure we

can conquer them. We are threatened by earthquake, storm, and disease

against which we cannot wholly protect ourselves. We become deeply

attached to other persons. But they must die and we must die, and we

cannot stay [p150] the doom. In brief, we find ourselves in a world in

which our hopes are defeated.

Somehow we are so constituted that we demand the impossible. There is

in us somewhere an intimation that we ought not to be defeated. But

where did this intimation come from? How is it that we are not born

satisfied with our mortality, content with our fate? Why is it that the

normal fate of man seems to us abnormal? What is there in the back of

our heads which keeps telling us that life as we find it is not what it

ought to be?

The biologist might answer, I suppose, that this craving for a

different kind of world is simply our own consciousness of that blind

push of natural forces which create the variations on which natural

selection works to produce the survival of the fittest. Nature, he

might say, is wholly indifferent to the outcries of the individual;

this vast process of which each of us is so insignificant a part,

keeps going because there is in all the parts a superabundant urging

to go on. There is no human economy in it and no human order. Man, for

example, has far more sexual desire than is needed for the rational

propagation of the species. But there is no rational plan in nature. It

works here, and everywhere, on the principle that by having too much

there will surely be enough; the seeds which do not germinate, the

seedlings which perish, the desires which are left over, are no concern

of nature’s. For nature has no concern. There is no concern except that

which we ourselves feel, and that is a mere flicker on the stream of

time, and will soon go out.

While there is no way of gainsaying that this explanation is true,

it is true only if we look at life from the particular point of view

which the biologist adopts. If, however, [p151] we look inwardly

upon ourselves, instead of surveying our species from the outside, we

find, I think, that this sense that the world ought not to be what it

is seems to originate in a kind of dim memory that it once was what

we feel it ought to be. Indeed, so vivid is this memory that for ages

men took it to be an account of historical events; in absolute good

faith they constituted for themselves the picture of a Golden Age which

existed before evil came into the world. Hope was, therefore, a kind

of memory; the ideal was to achieve something which had been lost. The

memory of an age of innocence has haunted the whole of mankind. It has

been a light behind their present experience which cast shadows upon

it, and made it seem insubstantial and not inevitable. Before this

life, there had been another which was happier. And so they reasoned

that what once was possible must somehow be possible again. Having once

known the good, it was unbelievable that evil should be final.

Even after criticism has dissolved the beautiful legends in which it

was embodied, this memory of a Golden Age persists. It persists as an

intimation of our own inward experience, and like an uneasy spirit it

intrudes itself upon our most realistic efforts to accept the world

as we find it. For it takes many shapes, which sometimes deceive us,

appearing then not as the memory of a happiness we have lost, but as

the anticipation of utopia to come.

It is an intimation that man is entitled to live in the land of heart’s

desire. It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all

inquiry into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether

man can achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he

must first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.

CHAPTER IX [p152]

THE INSIGHT OF HUMANISM

1. _The Two Approaches to Life_

The land of heart’s desire is a place in which no man desires what he

cannot have and each man can have what he desires. There have been

great differences of opinion among men as to how they could best enter

this happy land.

If they thought their natural impulses were by way of being lecherous,

greedy, and cruel, they have accepted some form of the classical and

Christian doctrine that man must subdue his naive impulses, and by

reason, grace, or renunciation, transform his will. If they thought

that man was naturally innocent and good, they have accepted some one

of the many variants of liberalism, and concerned themselves not with

the reform of desire but with the provision of opportunities for its

fulfilment.

There are differences of emphasis among liberals, but they all accept

the same premise, which is that if only external circumstances are

favorable the internal life of man will adjust itself successfully.

So completely does this theory of human nature dominate the field of

contemporary thought that modern men are rarely reminded, and then only

by those whom it is the fashion to ignore, that they are challenging

the testimony not merely of their maiden aunts, but of all the greatest

teachers of wisdom. [p153] Yet if the modern man is an optimist on

the subject of his impulses, the reason is to be found less in his own

self-confidence than in his distrust of men and in his intoxication

over things.

Owing to the dissolution of the ancestral order he has learned to

distrust those who exercise authority. Owing to the progress of science

he has acquired an unbounded confidence in his capacity to create

desirable objects. He is so rebellious and so constructive that he has

still to ask himself whether the free and naive pursuit of desirable

objects can really produce a desirable world. Yet in all the books of

wisdom that is the question which confronts him. There it is written in

many languages and in the idiom of many different cultures that if man

is to find happiness, he must reconstruct not merely his world, but,

first of all, himself.

Is this wisdom dead and done with, or has it a bearing upon the deep

uneasiness of the modern man? The answer depends upon what we must

conceive to be the nature of man.

2. _Freedom and Restraint_

It is significant that fashions in human nature are continually

changing. There are, as it were, two extremes: at the one is the belief

that our naive passions are evil, at the other that they are good,

and between these two poles, the prevailing opinion oscillates. One

might suppose that somewhere, perhaps near the center, there would be

a point which was the truth, and that on that point men would reach

an agreement. But experience shows that there is no agreement, and

that there is no known point [p154] where the two views are perfectly

balanced. The fact is that the prevailing view is invariably a rebound

from the excesses of the other, and one can understand it only by

knowing what it is a reaction from.

It is impossible, for example, to do justice to Rousseau and

the romantics without understanding the dead classicism, the

conventionalities, and the tyrannies of the Eighteenth Century. It is

equally impossible to do justice to the Eighteenth Century without

understanding the licentiousness of the High Renaissance and the

political disorders resulting from the Reformation. These in their turn

become intelligible only when we have understood the later consequences

of the mediæval view of life. No particular view endures. When human

nature is wholly distrusted and severely repressed, sooner or later it

asserts itself and bursts its bonds; and when it is naively trusted, it

produces so much disorder and corruption that men once again idealize

order and restraint.

We happen to be living in an age when there is a severe reaction

against the distrust and repression practiced by those whom it is

customary to describe as Puritans. It is, in fact, a reaction against a

degenerate form of Puritanism which manifested itself as a disposition

to be prim, prudish, and pedantic. For latter-day Puritanism had become

a rather second-rate notion that less obvious things are more noble

than grosser ones and that spirituality is the pursuit of rarefied

sensations. It had embraced the idea that a man had advanced in the

realm of the spirit in proportion to his concern with abstractions, and

cults of grimly spiritual persons devoted themselves to the worship of

sonorous generalities. All this associated itself [p155] with a rather

preposterous idealism which insisted that maidens should be wan and

easily frightened, that draperies and decorations should conceal the

essential forms of objects, and that the good life had something to do

with expurgated speech, with pale colors, and shadows and silhouettes,

with the thin music of harps and soprano voices, with fig leaves and

a general conspiracy to tell lies to children, with philosophies that

denied the reality of evil, and with all manner of affectation and

self-deception.

Yet in these many attempts to grow wings and take off from the things

that are of the earth earthy, it is impossible not to recognize a

resemblance, somewhat in the nature of a caricature, to the teaching of

the sages. There is no doubt that in one form or another, Socrates and

Buddha, Jesus and St. Paul, Plotinus and Spinoza, taught that the good

life is impossible without asceticism, that without renunciation of

many of the ordinary appetites, no man can really live well. Prejudice

against the human body and a tendency to be disgusted with its habits,

a contempt for the ordinary concerns of daily experience is to be

found in all of them, and it is not surprising that men, living in an

age of moral confusion like that associated with the name of the good

Queen Victoria, should have come to believe that if only they covered

up their passions they had conquered them. It was a rather ludicrous

mistake as the satirists of the anti-Victorian era have so copiously

pointed out. But at least there was a dim recognition in this cult of

the genteel that the good life does involve some kind of conquest of

the carnal passions.

That conception of the good life has become so repulsive [p156] to the

present generation that it is almost incapable of understanding and

appreciating the original insight of which the works of Dr. Bowdler and

Mrs. Grundy are a caricature. Yet it is a fact, and a most arresting

one, that in all the great religions, and in all the great moral

philosophies from Aristotle to Bernard Shaw, it is taught that one of

the conditions of happiness is to renounce some of the satisfactions

which men normally crave. This tradition as to what constitutes the

wisdom of life is supported by testimony from so many independent

sources that it cannot be dismissed lightly. With minor variations it

is a common theme in the teaching of an Athenian aristocrat like Plato,

an Indian nobleman like Buddha, and a humble Jew like Spinoza; in

fact, wherever men have thought at all carefully about the problem of

evil and of what constitutes a good life, they have concluded that an

essential element in any human philosophy is renunciation. They cannot

all have been so foolish as Anthony Comstock. They must have had some

insight into experience which led them to that conclusion.

If asceticism in all its forms were as stupid and cruel as it is now

the fashion to think it is, then the traditions of saintliness and

of heroism are monstrously misleading. For in the legends of heroes,

of sages, of explorers, inventors and discoverers, of pioneers and

patriots, there is almost invariably this same underlying theme of

sacrifice and unworldliness. They are poor. They live dangerously. By

ordinary standards they are extremely uncomfortable. They give up ease,

property, pleasure, pride, place, and power to attain things which are

transcendent and rare. They live for ends which seem to yield them

[p157] no profit, and they are ready to die, if need be, for that

which the dead can no longer enjoy. And yet, though there is nothing

in our current morality to justify their unworldliness, we continue to

admire them greatly.

In saying all this I am not trying to clinch an argument by appealing

to great names. There is much in the teaching of all the spiritual

leaders of the past which is wholly obsolete to-day, and there is no

compulsive authority in any part of their teaching. They may have been

as mistaken in their insight into the human soul as they usually were

in their notions of physics and history. To say, then, that there is

an ascetic element in all the great philosophies of the past is not

proof that there must be one in modern philosophy. But it creates a

presumption, I think, which cannot be ignored, for we must remember

that the least perishable part of the literature and thought of the

past is that which deals with human nature. Scientific method and

historical scholarship have enormously increased our competence in

the whole field of physics and history. But for an understanding of

human nature we are still very largely dependent, as they were, upon

introspection, general observation, and intuition. There has been no

revolutionary advance here since the hellenic philosophers. That is why

Aristotle’s ethics is still as fresh for anyone who accustoms himself

to the idiom as Nietzsche, or Freud, or Bertrand Russell, whereas

Aristotle’s physics, his biology, or his zoology is of interest only to

antiquarians.

It is, then, as an insight into human nature, and not as a rule

authoritatively imposed or highly sanctioned by the prestige of great

men, that I propose now to inquire what meaning there is for us in the

fact that men in the [p158] past have so persistently associated the

good life with some form of ascetic discipline and renunciation. The

modern world, as it has emancipated itself from its ancestral regime,

has assumed almost as a matter of course that the human passions, if

thoroughly liberated from all tyrannies and distortions, would by their

fulfilment achieve happiness. All those who teach asceticism, deny

this major premise of modernity, and the result is that the prevailing

philosophy is at odds on the most fundamental of all issues with the

wisdom of the past.

3. _The Ascetic Principle_

The average man to-day, when he hears the word asceticism, is likely

to think of St. Simeon Stylites who sat on top of a pillar, of hermits

living in caves, of hair-shirts, of long fasts, chastity, strange

vigils, and even of tattooing, self-mutilation, and flagellation. Or

if he does not think of such examples, which the modern man regards as

pathological and for the psychiatrist to explain, the word asceticism

may connote some such attitude of mind as Herbert Asbury has recorded

in the biography of his kinsman, Bishop Asbury, the founder of American

Methodism, of whom a friend, who knew him well, wrote: “I never saw

him indulge in even innocent pleasantry. His was the solemnity of an

apostle; it was so interwoven with his conduct that he could not put

off the gravity of the bishop either in the parlour or the dining-room.

He was a rigid enemy to ease; hence the pleasures of study and the

charms of recreation he alike sacrificed to the more sublime work

of saving souls.... He knew nothing about pleasing the flesh at the

expense of duty; flesh [p159] and blood were enemies with whom he

never took counsel.”

If asceticism meant only this sort of thing, it might be interesting

only as a curiosity. But apart from the asceticism of primitive peoples

and of the pathological, there is a sane and civilized asceticism which

presents a quite different face. There is, for example, the argument of

Socrates in the _Phædo_ that the body is a nuisance to a philosopher in

search of truth. It is, he says, “a source of endless trouble to us by

reason of the mere requirement of food; and is liable also to diseases

which overtake and impede us in the search after true being: it fills

us full of loves, and lusts, and fears, and fancies of all kinds, and

endless foolery, and in fact, as men say, takes away from us the power

of thinking at all. Whence come wars, and fightings, and factions?

Whence but from the body and the lusts of the body? Wars are occasioned

by the love of money, and money has to be acquired for the sake and in

the service of the body; and by reason of all these impediments we have

no time to give to philosophy; and, last and worst of all, even if we

are at leisure and betake ourselves to some speculation, the body is

always breaking in upon us, causing us turmoil and confusion in our

inquiries, and so amazing us that we are prevented from seeing the

truth.”

Plato, in pursuing the argument in this particular dialogue, concludes

that because the body is such a nuisance the only pure philosopher is

a dead one. It is, perhaps, a logical conclusion. But in other places,

particularly in the _Republic_, Plato described a system of education

which he thought would produce philosophers: the neophytes [p160]

were put through a stern discipline of hard living and gymnastics and

learning, were compelled to live in tents, to own nothing which they

could call their own, and to cut themselves off from all family ties.

When the description of this regime provokes Adeimantus to remark

that “you are not making the men of this class particularly happy,”

Socrates is made to reply that while it is not his object to make any

class particularly happy, yet it would not surprise him if in the given

circumstances even this class were very happy. When we look further

for his meaning, we find it to be that the guardians are trained by

their ascetic discipline to abandon all private aims and to find their

happiness in an appreciation of a perfectly ordered commonwealth. If

we understand this we shall, I believe, understand what civilized

asceticism means. We shall have come back to the original meaning of

the word itself, which is derived from the Greek ἀσκέω, “I practice,”

and “embodies a metaphor taken from the ancient wrestling place or

palæstra, where victory rewarded those who had best trained their

bodies.” An ascetic in the original meaning of the term is an athlete;

and it was in this spirit that the early Christians trained themselves

deliberately as “athletes of Christ” to bear without flinching the

tortures of their martyrdom.

When asceticism is irrational, it is a form of totemism or fetich

worship and derives from a belief that certain things are tabu or

that evil spirits can be placated by human suffering. Or without any

coherent belief whatsoever asceticism may be merely a perversion

arising out of that ambivalence of the human passions which often makes

pain, inflicted on others or self-inflicted, an exquisite [p161]

pleasure. But when asceticism is rational, it is a discipline of the

mind and body to fit men for the service of an ideal. Its purpose

is to harden and to purify, to suppress contrary passions, and thus

to intensify the passion for the ideal. “I chastise my body,” said

St. Paul, “and bring it into subjection.” The Church, especially in

the earlier centuries, was compelled to fight continually against

irrational asceticism, and as late as the Middle Ages, the Inquisition

pursued sects which regarded marriage as the “greater adultery” and

practiced self-emasculation. The rational view was the view of St.

Jerome: “Be on your guard when you begin to mortify your body by

abstinence and fasting, lest you imagine yourself to be perfect and a

saint; for perfection does not consist in this virtue. It is only a

help; a disposition; a means, though a fitting one, for the attainment

of true perfection.”

Now when St. Paul said that he had to bring his body into subjection,

when Aristotle defined the barbarians’ ideal as “the living as one

likes,” when Plato made Socrates say that the soul is infected by

the body, when Buddha preached the extinction of all craving, when

Spinoza wrote that because we rejoice in virtue we are able to

control our lusts, they accepted a view of human nature which is

quite diametrically opposed to one which has had wide currency in our

civilization since the Renaissance.

This contrary view was undoubtedly provoked by the evils which came

from the attempt to put the ascetic principle extensively into

practice. Rabelais is by all odds the most convincing of the moderns

who revolted, for [p162] Rabelais not only talked about the natural

man but actually knew him and delighted in him. Thus when Villers

writes to Madame de Staël that in her work “primitive, incorruptible,

naive, passionate nature” is “in conflict with the barriers and

shackles of conventional life,” we feel, I think, that neither Villers

nor the lady would really have cared very much for primitive nature in

all its naivete. The natural man that they were talking about lived

in Arcady and his passions were as violent as those of a lapdog;

throughout the romantic movement, with rare exceptions, the talk about

passion and impulse and instinct has this air of unreality and of

neurotic confusion. There is not in it, as there is in Rabelais, for

example, an honest gusto for the passions that are to be liberated

from the restraints imposed by that “rabble of squint-minded fellows,

dissembling and counterfeit saints, demure lookers, hypocrites,

pretended zealots, tough friars, buskin-monks, and other such sects of

men, who disguise themselves like masquers to deceive the world.”

Rabelais advised his readers that if they desired to become good

Pantagruelists, “that is to say, to live in peace, joy, health, making

yourself always merry—never trust those men that always peep out

through a little hole.” And in establishing the Abbey of Theleme,

Gargantua furnished it magnificently and barred the gates against

bigots, hypocrites, dissemblers, attorneys, barristers, usurers,

drunkards, and cannibals; he invited in all noble blades and brisk

and handsome people, faithful expounders of the Scripture, and lovely

ladies, proper, fair, and mirthful. “Their life,” he says, “was spent

not in laws, statutes, or rules, but at their own free will and

pleasure. [p163] They rose from bed when they thought good, drank,

ate, worked, slept, when the desire came to them. None did awaken them,

none constrained them either to drink or eat, nor to do any other

thing: for so had Gargantua established it. The Rule of their order had

but one clause: _Do What Thou Wilt._”

But there was a catch in this rule. Not only had drunkards and

cannibals been excluded in the first place, but Rabelais assures us

that those who were admitted, because they were “free, well born, well

educated, and accustomed to good company, have by nature an instinct

and spur which prompts them to virtuous acts and withdraws them from

vice. This they call honor.” And in another passage Rabelais limits the

propensities of the natural man even more radically when he speaks of

“a certain gaiety of spirit _cured_ in contempt of chance and fortune.”

There is always a catch in any doctrine of the natural goodness of man.

For mere passive obedience to impulse as it comes and goes, without

effort to check it or direct it, ends in something like Alfred de

Musset’s Rolla, of whom it was said:

It was not Rolla who ruled his life,

It was his passions; he let them go

As a drowsy shepherd watches the water flow.

So even Dora Russell at the crisis of her assault upon the Christian

tradition advises us to “live by instinct _and_ intelligence,” which

must mean, if it means anything, that intelligence is to be in some

respects the master as well as the servant of instinct. That this is

what Mrs. Russell means is abundantly plain by her fury at capitalists,

imperialists, [p164] conservatives, and churchmen, whose instincts

lead them to do things of which she does not approve. For like her

distinguished husband she trusts those impulses which are creative and

beneficent, and distrusts those which are possessive and destructive.

That is to say, like every other moralist, she trusts those parts of

human nature which she trusts.

4. _Oscillation between Two Principles_

These cycles of action and reaction are disastrous to the establishment

of a stable humanism. A theocratic culture depends upon an assured

view of the way in which God governs the universe, and as long as

that view suits the typical needs of a society made stable by custom,

the theocratic culture is stable. But humanism arises in complex

and changing societies, and if it is to have any power to make life

coherent and orderly, it must hold an assured view of how man can

govern himself. If he oscillates aimlessly between the belief that he

must distrust his impulses and the belief that he may naively obey

them, it is impossible for him to fix any point of reference for

the development of his moral code, his educational plans, his human

relationships, his politics, and his personal ideals.

It is not hard to see, I think, why he oscillates in this fashion

between trust and distrust. He cannot obey every impulse, for he has

conflicting impulses within himself. There are also his neighbors with

their impulses. They cannot all be satisfied, for the very simple

reason that the sum of their demands far outruns the available supply

of satisfactions. There is not room enough, there are not objects

[p165] enough in the world to fulfill all human desires. Desires are,

for all practical purposes, unlimited and insatiable, and therefore any

ethics which does not recognize the necessity of putting restraint upon

naive desire is inherently absurd. On the other hand, it is impossible

to distrust every impulse, for the only conclusion then is to commit

suicide. Buddha did, to be sure, teach that craving was the source

of all misery, and that it must be wholly extinguished. But it is

evident from an examination of what he actually advised his disciples

to renounce, that while they were to be poor, chaste, unworldly, and

incurious about the nature of things, they were to be rewarded with

the highest of all satisfactions, and were to be “like the broad

earth, unvexed; like the pillar of the city gate, unmoved; like a

pellucid lake, unruffled.” For Nirvana meant, as Rhys Davids says, the

extinction of a sinful, grasping condition of mind.

Confronted by two opposed views of human nature, neither of which can

be taken unreservedly, moralists have had to pick and choose, deciding

how much or how little they would trust the different impulses. But

there is no measure by which they could decide how much of an impulse

is virtuous, how much more is intemperate, and how much more than

that is utterly sinful. The attempts to regulate the sexual impulse

illustrate the difficulty. Shall the moralist call the complete

absence of all conscious sexual desire virtue? Then he disobeys the

commandment to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. Shall

he then limit virtuous desire to that which is felt for a lawful

mate? That implies that man and woman must mate with the first person

for whom they feel any sexual desire. [p166] But this cannot always

be arranged. The first person may be otherwise engaged. It becomes

necessary then to permit a certain amount of promiscuous, though

unfulfilled, sexual desire in the process of sexual selection. And

then having somehow gotten past that difficulty, and with two persons

safely mated, a whole new series of problems arise out of the question

of how far sexual satisfaction depends for its virtue upon its being

the successful means to, or more subtly still, the intended means

to, procreation. I shall not pursue the matter further. The attempt

to measure the degree in which impulse is to be permitted to express

itself is obviously full of difficulties.

The moral problem remains utterly insoluble as long as men regard it as

an attempt to separate their good impulses from their bad ones, and to

decide how much their good impulses are to be encouraged. Morality, if

it is not fixed by custom and authority, becomes a mere matter of taste

determined by the idiosyncrasies of the moralist.

5. _The Golden Mean and Its Difficulties_

Aristotle faced this fundamental difficulty of humanism in the

_Ethics_. He had expounded the theory that happiness is due to virtue,

and that virtue is a mean between two extremes. There must, he said, be

neither defect nor excess of any quality. We must, in brief, go so far

but no further in obedience to our impulses. Thus between rashness and

cowardice the mean is courage; between prodigality and niggardliness

it is liberality; between incontinence and total abstinence it is

temperateness; between ostentation and meanness it is magnificence;

between empty boasting and little-mindedness it is magnanimity; between

[p167] flattery and moroseness it is friendliness; between bashfulness

and impudence it is modesty; between arrogance and false modesty, it is

truthfulness.

So runs the Aristotelian catalogue, and probably no code ever described

so well the ideal of a gentleman. But having laid down his general

precepts, Aristotle, unlike most moralists, faced the difficulty of

applying them. He recognized that it is one thing to accept the theory

of a golden mean, and quite another to know where that mean lies. “For

in each case it is difficult to find the mean ... thus it is easy, and

in every man’s power to be angry, and to give and spend money; but to

determine the person to whom, and the quantity, and the time, and the

motive, and the manner, is no longer in every man’s power, nor is it

easy; therefore excellence is rare, and praiseworthy and honorable.”

For while the mean between excess and defect is excellent, “it is easy

to miss a mark, but difficult to hit it.”

If we look at the matter more closely in order to find out why moral

codes are, as Aristotle says, so hit and miss, we must, I think, come

to the conclusion that there is an undetected fallacy in most moral

thinking which renders moral insight abortive. It is that fallacy which

I now propose to examine.

A moral code like Aristotle’s, which we may fairly regard as the

rational prototype of all humanistic codes, consists of an inventory

of good and bad appetites and of good and bad satisfactions. All

conventional moralizing, which does not rest on the sheer fiat of

public opinion, custom, or God, assumes the existence of some such

inventory of permissible desires and permissible fulfilments. But what

[p168] does the making of such inventories mean? It means that good

and evil are believed to be objective qualities of the natural world

like weight, dimension, and motion, that certain desires are inherently

good, certain others are inherently bad, and that the same is true

of the different objects of desire. But this is nothing but what is

known as the pathetic fallacy. For surely each desire and each object

as such, taken separately without relation to anything else, is as

innocent and as neutral as the forces that move the planets.

The categories of good and evil would not apply if there were no

sentient being to experience good and evil. In such a world no object

would be any better or any worse than any other object; nobody talks

about good and bad electrons. All electrons are morally alike because

no sentient being can tell them apart. Nor would the categories of

good and evil apply to a world in which each impulse was in a vacuum

of its own. In such a world all our impulses would be like our

digestive tracts on a day when we do not know we have a stomach. If

our impulses did not impinge upon each other and upon objects there

would be no problem of good and evil. Therefore the quality of good

and evil lies not in impulses as such, nor in objects as such, but in

the relationship between impulses and objects. Therefore the making of

inventories is fundamentally misleading.

There is another fallacy which is closely associated with this one.

We make lists of our impulses. A standard list which is much used

comprises the following: flight, repulsion, curiosity, pugnacity,

self-abasement, self-assertion, parental, reproductive, gregarious,

acquisitive, constructive. [p169] Whether this is a good list or not

is neither here nor there. Through the ages men have been making such

lists in the fond belief that they were analyzing the human character.

No doubt these terms describe something; we all recognize that these

words are the names of impulses that move us. But if we consider them

further, we must also recognize that these impulses do not move all

persons the same way, nor any one person the same way at all times in

his life and under all circumstances.

It is hardly necessary, I am sure, to labor the point very much. There

is the instinct to be curious: it disposes one man to measure the

diameter of Betelgeuse when he is forty years old; when he was a child

it disposed him to find out whether he could hang up a cat by its

tail; that curious child’s companion in the experiment on the cat was

disposed, when he grew up, to take much trouble in finding out how much

income tax his neighbor paid and whether his employer was faithful to

his wife. The parental instinct of one man is to launch his child on

the world as an independent human being; in another man the instinct

manifests itself as a determination to have children who will depend

upon him and cater to him all his days long. So when we make lists of

our impulses we really do not know enough about them to pass judgment.

For desires are complex, and their greatest complexity lies in the fact

that they change.

The objects of desire are no less complex. Take, for example, a jade

goddess. To a Chinese coolie it is an object with mysterious powers, a

part of the mechanism which governs the universe. But the jade goddess

is now in a Fifth Avenue shop window, and a policeman on his beat

[p170] sees it. It is a green stone figure to him. The dealer inside

knows that it is rare and is worth a thousand dollars. The collector

could enjoy it immensely if he possessed it. The connoisseur finds

intricate pleasure in it as a work of art and an elaborate interest in

it as a memento of a whole culture. The objects of desire, then, are

not simple things. We help to create them. We say that this man desires

that woman. But what, in fact, does he desire? A few moments of ecstasy

from her body, something which a thousand women could give him equally

well, or an intimate union with so much of her whole being that for

that very reason she is unique to him? The quality of his passion and

the character of his mistress will depend in a very large degree on how

much of her being he takes into account. It depends also, I hasten to

add, on how much there is to take into account.

At any moment in our lives we desire only those objects which we are

then capable of desiring and in the way we are then capable of desiring

them. But our desires do not remain fixed from the cradle to the grave.

They change. And as they change the desirability of objects about us

changes too. It is impossible, then, to make lists of good and evil

desires and of good and evil objects. For good and evil are qualities

in the relationship between variable desires and variable objects of

desire.

The attempt to construct moral codes on the basis of an inventory

is an attempt to understand something which is always in process of

change by treating it as a still life and taking snapshots of it. That

is what moralists have almost always attempted to do. They have tried

to capture the essence of a changing thing in a collection [p171] of

fixed concepts. It cannot be done. The reality of human nature is bound

to elude us if we look only at a momentary cross-section of it. To

understand it, therefore, for the purposes of moralizing, we have to

revise our intellectual apparatus, and learn to look upon each moment

of behavior not as the manifestation of certain fixed elements in human

nature, but as a stage in the evolution of human nature. We grow up,

mature, and decline; being endowed with memory and the capacity to form

habits, our conduct is cumulative. We drag our past along with us and

it pushes us on. We do not make a new approach to each new experience.

We approach new experiences with the expectations and habits developed

by previous experience, and under the impact of novelty these

expectations and habits become modified.

6. _The Matrix of Humanism_

The conception of human nature as developing behavior is, of course,

accepted by all modern psychologists. If they study the child they are

bound to consider him as potentially an adult. If they study the adult

they are bound to regard him as originally a child. Abnormal psychology

makes sense only insofar as it can be understood as an abnormal

development of the personality, regardless of whether that abnormality

is traceable to pre-natal variations, to organic disease, or to

functional disturbance. Folk psychology, whether or not one accepts the

interesting but speculative hypothesis that there is a parallel between

the development of the individual and the development of the race, is

another mode of investigating the evolution of behavior. The concept

of development [p172] is thoroughly established in psychology as the

major clue to the understanding of human nature.

The moralist, since he is concerned with human nature, is compelled

to employ this concept. But he employs it somewhat differently than

the scientist. Being a moralist, he is interested in understanding the

principles of behavior in order that he may understand the principles

of right behavior. The psychologist, as such, is interested in the

development of behavior, regardless of whether that development leads

to misery or to happiness. He studies the various processes no matter

where they lead. For in science the concept of development implies

no judgment as to whether there is a good or a bad development. The

development of an idiot and of a genius are on the same footing, and

are theoretically of equal interest. But to the moralist the study of

development is focussed on the effort to discover those processes of

development which can be made to produce right relationships between

the individual and his environment, and by a right relationship he is

bound to mean one in which there is an harmonious adjustment between

desires and the objects of desire. How often, and how nearly, it

is possible for human beings to approximate such perfection is an

unanswerable question. The proof of that pudding lies in the eating

of it, and it is not the function of the moralist under humanism to

guarantee the outcome. His function is to point out as clearly as it is

possible to do so the path which presumably leads toward the good life.

In describing that path he is bound to depend upon the best available

insight into the processes by which good and bad adjustments are made.

In the present state of [p173] our knowledge this means that he must

rely to a very large degree upon his own intuitions, commonsense, and

sense of life. Great progress has been made in scientific psychology

within the last generation, enough progress, I think, to supplement

in important ways our own unanalyzed and intuitive wisdom about life.

But it would be idle to suppose that the science of psychology is

in a stage where it can be used as a substitute for experienced and

penetrating imaginative insight. We can be confident that on the whole

a good meteorologist can tell us more about the weather than even the

most weather-wise old sea captain. But we cannot have that kind of

confidence in even the best of psychologists. Indeed, an acquaintance

with psychologists will, I think, compel anyone to admit that, if they

are good psychologists, they are almost certain to possess a gift

of insight which is unaccounted for by their technical apparatus.

Doubtless it is true that in all the sciences the difference between

a good scientist and a poor one comes down at last, after all the

technical and theoretical procedure has been learned, to some sort of

residual flair for the realities of that subject. But in the study

of human nature that residual flair, which seems to be composed of

intuition, commonsense, and unconsciously deposited experience, plays a

much greater role than it does in the more advanced sciences.

The uses of psychology to the moralist are, therefore, in confirming

and correcting, in broadening and organizing, his insight into human

nature. He is confronted, of course, with a great deal of confusion.

There is, to begin with, no agreed terminology, and therefore it is

often almost impossible to know whether two psychologists [p174]

using the same word mean the same thing. Anyone who has stumbled about

amidst words like instinct, impulse, consciousness, the unconscious,

will know how confusing it all is. Psychologists are still using a

literary language in which the connotations of words tend to overwhelm

their precise signification. To make the confusion greater there is

the elaborate system-making, the headstrong generalizing, and the

fierce dogmatism which have produced the psychological sects. But all

of this is characteristic of a young science, and if that is borne in

mind, there is nothing disconcerting about it. The Eighteenth Century

in dealing with the Newtonian physics, and the Nineteenth in dealing

with the Darwinian biology, went through a hullabaloo similar to

that which we are now going through in connection with behaviorism,

psychoanalysis, and the so-called _gestalt-theorie_. Our only concern

here is to ask whether underneath all the controversy there is not some

trustworthy common ground on which the moralist can stand.

I have already said that there was common ground in the concept of

development. We can go further than that, however, and say, I think,

that with the help of psychology we are in position now to construct

reliable and useful pictures, which confirm and correct our own

intuitive understanding, of the infantile and of the mature approach

to experience. We can, as it were, fix these two poles and regard the

history of each soul as the history of its progress from infantilism

to maturity. We are by no means able as yet to describe all the phases

of development between these two poles; we know that progress is

often temporarily interrupted, often completely [p175] arrested, and

sometimes turned into a rout. But insofar as we are able to realize

clearly what a fully matured character is like, the word progress has

a meaning because we know what we mean by the goal of moral effort.

That goal is maturity. If we knew all the stages in the development to

maturity, and how to control them, we should have an adequate science

of education, we could deal successfully with functional disorders, we

should have a very great mastery of the art of life. For the problems

of education are at bottom problems in how to lead the child from one

stage of development to another until at last he becomes an harmonious

and autonomous personality; the functional disorders of the character

are problems in the fixations and repressions on the path to maturity;

the art of living is to pass gracefully from youth to old age, and, at

last, as Montaigne said, to learn to die.

It is this progress which we have to understand and imaginatively to

conceive. For in conceiving it we conceive the matrix of humanism. In

this conception is to be found, I believe, the substitute for that

conception of divine government which gives shape and form to the

theocratic culture. To replace the conception of man as the subject of

a heavenly king, which dominates the whole ancestral order of life,

humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual

from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity.

7. _The Career of the Soul_

If our scientific knowledge of human nature were adequate, we could

achieve in the humanistic culture that which all theologies have tried

to achieve: we could found [p176] our morality on tested truths.

They would be truths about the development of human nature, and not,

as in the popular religions, truth of physics and of history. But

our knowledge of human nature is inadequate, and therefore, like the

teachers of popular religion, we have in place of exact knowledge

to invent imaginative fictions in the hope that the progress of

science will confirm and correct, but will not utterly contradict,

our hypotheses. We can claim no more than this: for our understanding

of human nature we are compelled to use our insight and the best

available psychological science of our age, exactly as Dante, for his

understanding of the divine constitution of the universe, had to use

the accepted astronomy of his day. If our psychology turns out to be

wrong, the only difference will be that we shall have to discard an

hypothesis whereas our forefathers had to discard a revealed dogma.

The sketch which I am about to make of the progress from infancy to

maturity is to be taken, then, not as tested scientific truth, but as

an imaginative construction. It will be, if you like, a modern fable

which symbolizes rather than describes, as the primitive legends of the

sun god symbolized, rather than described, the observed facts. Because

it is an imaginative construction, the same meaning might be expressed

in other ways and with many variations of detail. But though the

fiction itself is of no consequence, the meaning it conveys is of the

highest consequence, and it is confirmed, as I shall attempt to show,

not only by ordinary insight but by the deepest wisdom of the greatest

teachers.

Freud, in a famous paper, has described the passage [p177] from

infancy to maturity as a transition from the dominion of momentary

pleasure and pain to the dominion of reality. This theory is not

peculiar to psychoanalysis in any of its several schools, and it does

not depend upon the controverted points of doctrine. It is, in fact,

more or less of a commonplace in psychological thought. I am employing

it here because a distinguished colleague of Freud’s, Dr. S. Ferenczi

of Budapest, has made an attempt to indicate the chief stages in the

development between these two poles of experience. It is a most useful

bit of speculation, and while I believe it could be duplicated in terms

either of behaviorism or of the _gestalt-theorie_, I do not happen to

have come across any portrait of the idea which is as vivid as Dr.

Ferenczi’s.

The first stage of human development, says Ferenczi, takes place in

the womb where the embryo lives as a parasite of the mother’s body.

An outer world exists for it only in a very restricted degree; all it

needs for protection, warmth, and nourishment is assured by the mother.

Because everything is there which is necessary for the satisfaction

of the instincts, Ferenczi calls this the Period of Unconditional

Omnipotence.

It is, therefore, rather disagreeable and perhaps terrifying to be

born, for with the detachment from the mother and the “rude disturbance

of the wish-less tranquillity he had enjoyed in the womb,” the trouble

of living begins, and evokes feelings which might perhaps be described

as a longing to recover the perfect pre-natal adjustment. Nurses

instinctively recognize this longing, says Ferenczi, and as soon as

the infant expresses his discomfort by struggling and crying, they

deliberately create a situation [p178] which resembles as closely

as possible the one he has just left. They lay him down by the warm

body of the mother, or wrap him up in soft, warm coverings, shield his

eyes from the light and his ears from noise. The illusion is more or

less complete, for, of course, the infant is unaware of the activities

of the nurse. For all he knows “his wishes are realized simply by

imagining the satisfaction of them.” Ferenczi calls this the Period of

Magical-Hallucinatory Omnipotence.

But this period does not last very long, since the nurse is unable

to anticipate every desire that the growing infant feels. “The

hallucinatory representation of the wish-fulfilment soon proves

inadequate to bring about any longer a real wish-fulfilment.” So the

infant has to give signals, and the more complicated his wishes become

the more signals he has to give. He begins to use a gesture-language,

and if there is a willing nurse always at hand without too many

new-fangled notions, the child gets what he wants for the mere trouble

of expressing his wants. Ferenczi calls this the Period of Omnipotence

by the Help of Magic Gestures.

But as time goes on and as the number of his wants increase these

gestures lose some of their magic. The number of the conditions

increase to which he has to submit. “The outstretched hand must often

be drawn back empty.... Indeed, an invincible hostile power may

forcibly oppose itself to this gesture and compel the hand to resume

its former position.” At this point his sense of reality begins; the

sense, that is to say, of something outside himself which does not

submit to his wishes. “Till now the ‘all-powerful’ being has been

able [p179] to feel himself one with the world that obliged him

and followed his every nod, but gradually there appears a painful

discordance in his experiences.” Because all experiences are no longer

incorporated in the ego, Ferenczi calls this the Projection Phase.

But though the child has now begun to discern the existence of reality,

his sense of that reality is still quite imperfect. At first, perhaps,

he regards this outer world, though it opposes his wishes, as having

qualities like his own. Ferenczi calls this the Animistic Period.

The child then begins to talk and to substitute for gestures actual

statements of what he desires. Provided he lives in a household bent on

fulfilling his wants as soon as possible, he retains to a very great

degree the illusion that his wishes are sovereign. Ferenczi calls this

the Period of Magic Thoughts and Magic Words.

Finally, if he matures successfully, he passes into the last period

where he is no longer under the domination of the pleasure-principle:

the feeling of omnipotence gives way to the full appreciation of the

force of circumstances. Now unfortunately neither Freud nor Ferenczi,

nor, so far as I know, any other psychoanalyst, devotes much attention

to this last phase of maturity in which the sense of reality has become

perfected. They are preoccupied with pathology; that is to say, with

the problems which arise out of a failure to attain this last stage in

which the adult makes a complete adjustment with his world because his

wishes are matured to accept the conditions which reality imposes.

Yet it is this last stage which plainly constitutes the goal of moral

effect, for here alone the adult once again [p180] recovers that

harmony between himself and his environment which he lost in that

period of infancy when he first discovered that his wishes were no

longer sovereign. It is the memory of that earliest harmony which he

carries with him all his days. This is his memory of a golden age,

his intimation, as Wordsworth says, of immortality. But insofar as he

expects by an infantile philosophy to recover that heaven which lay

about him in his infancy, he is doomed to disappointment. In the womb,

and for a few years of his childhood, happiness was the gratification

of his naive desires. His family arranged the world to suit his wishes.

But as he grows up, and begins to be an independent personality, this

providence ministering to his wishes disappears. He can then no longer

hope that the world will be adjusted to his wishes, and he is compelled

by a long and difficult process of learning and training to adjust his

wishes to the world. If he succeeds he is mature. If he is mature, he

is once again harmonious with the nature of things. He has virtue. And

he is happy.

The process of maturing consists then of a revision of his desires

in the light of an understanding of reality. When he is completely

infantile there is nothing in the world but his wishes. Therefore, he

does not need and does not have an understanding of the outer world.

It exists for him merely as gratification or denial. But as he begins

to learn that the universe is not composed of his wishes, he begins to

see his wishes in a context and in perspective. He begins to acquire

a sense of space and to learn how much there is beyond his reach,

until at last he realizes how small a figure he is on this earth, and

how small a part of the universe is the solar system of which [p181]

ours is one of the smaller planets. He has learned a lot from the

days when he put out his hand and reached for the moon. He begins,

also, to acquire a sense of time and to realize that the moment in

which he feels the intense desire to seize something is an instant

in a lifetime, an infinitesimal point in the history of the race. He

acquires a sense of birth and decay and death, a knowledge that that

which he craves, his craving itself, and he himself who feels that

craving, did not have this craving yesterday and will no longer have

it to-morrow. He acquires a sense of cause and effect, a knowledge,

that is to say, that the sequences of events are not to be interrupted

by his preferences. He begins to discern the existence of other beings

beside himself, and to understand that they too have their preferences

and their wishes, that these wishes are often contrary to his own,

and that there is not room enough in the world, nor are there things

enough, to gratify all the wishes of everybody.

Thus to learn the lessons of experience is to undergo a transvaluation

of the values we bring with us from the womb and to transmute our

naive impulses. The breakdown of the infantile adjustment in which

providential powers ministered to every wish compels us either to flee

from reality or to understand it. And by understanding it we create new

objects of desire. For when we know a good deal about a thing, know how

it originated, how it is likely to behave, what it is made of, and what

is its place amidst other things, we are dealing with something quite

different from the simple object naively apprehended.

The understanding creates a new environment. The more subtle and

discriminating, the more informed and [p182] sympathetic the

understanding is, the more complex and yet ordered do the things

about us become. To most of us, as Mr. Santayana once said, music is

a pleasant noise which produces a drowsy revery relieved by nervous

thrills. But the trained musician hears what we do not hear at all; he

hears the form, the structure, the pattern, and the significance of an

ideal world. A naturalist out of doors perceives a whole universe of

related life which the rest of us do not even see. A world which is

ordinarily unseen has become visible through the understanding. When

the mind has fetched it out of the flux of dumb sensations, defined

it and fixed it, this unseen world becomes more real than the dumb

sensations it supplants. When the understanding is at work, it is as if

circumstance had ceased to mutter strange sounds and had begun to speak

our language. When experience is understood, it is no longer what it is

wholly to the infant, very largely to youth, and in great measure to

most men, a succession of desirable objects at which they instinctively

grasp, interspersed with undesirable ones from which they instinctively

shrink. If objects are seen in their context, in the light of their

origin and destiny, with sympathy for their own logic and their own

purposes, they become interesting in themselves, and are no longer

blind stimuli to pleasant and unpleasant sensations.

For when our desires come into contact with the world created by

the understanding, their character is altered. They are confronted

by a much more complex stimulus which evokes a much more complex

response. Instead of the naive and imperious lust of our infantile

natures which is to seize, to have and to hold, our lusts are offset

[p183] by other lusts and a balance between them is set up. That is

to say, they are made rational by the ordered variety with which the

understanding confronts them. We learn that there are more things in

heaven and earth than we dreamed of in our immature philosophy, that

there are many choices and that none is absolute, that beyond the

mountains, as the Chinese say, there are people also. The obviously

pleasant or unpleasant thus becomes less obviously what we felt it

was before our knowledge of it became complicated by anticipation and

memory. The immediately desirable seems not quite so desirable and the

undesirable less intolerable. Delight is perhaps not so intense nor

pain so poignant as youth and the romantics would have them. They are

absorbed into a larger experience in which the rewards are a sustained

and more even enjoyment, and serenity in the presence of inescapable

evil. In place of a world, where like children we are ministered to

by a solicitous mother, the understanding introduces us into a world

where delight is reserved for those who can appreciate the meaning and

purpose of things outside ourselves, and can make these meanings and

purposes their own.

8. _The Passage into Maturity_

The critical phase of human experience, then, is the passage from

childhood to maturity; the critical question is whether childish

habits and expectations are to persist or to be transformed. We grow

older. But it is by no means certain that we shall grow up. The human

character is a complicated thing, and its elements do not necessarily

march in step. It is possible to be a sage in some [p184] things and

a child in others, to be at once precocious and retarded, to be shrewd

and foolish, serene and irritable. For some parts of our personalities

may well be more mature than others; not infrequently we participate in

the enterprises of an adult with the mood and manners of a child.

The successful passage into maturity depends, therefore, on a breaking

up and reconstruction of those habits which were appropriate only to

our earliest experience.

In a certain larger sense this is the essence of education. For unless

a man has acquired the character of an adult, he is a lost soul no

matter how good his technical equipment. The world unhappily contains

many such lost souls. They are often in high places, men trained

to manipulate the machinery of civilization, but utterly incapable

of handling their own purposes in any civilized fashion. For their

purposes are merely the relics of an infancy when their wishes were

law, and they knew neither necessity nor change.

When a childish disposition is carried over into an adult environment

the result is a radically false valuation of that environment. The

symptoms are fairly evident. They may appear as a disposition to feel

that everything which happens to a man has an intentional relation to

himself; life becomes a kind of conspiracy to make him happy or to make

him miserable. In either case it is thought to be deeply concerned with

his destiny. The childish pattern appears also as a deep sense that

life owes him something, that somehow it is the duty of the universe to

look after him, and to listen sharply when he speaks to it. The notion

that the universe is full of [p185] purposes utterly unknown to him,

utterly indifferent to him, is as outrageous to one who is imperfectly

matured as would be the conduct of a mother who forgot to give a hungry

child its lunch. The childish pattern appears also as a disposition to

believe that he may reach out for anything in sight and take it, and

that having gotten it nobody must ever under any circumstances take

it away. Death and decay are, therefore, almost an insult, a kind of

mischief in the nature of things, which ought not to be there, and

would not be there, if everything only behaved as good little boys

believe it should. There is indeed authority for the belief that we

are all being punished for the naughtiness of our first grandmother;

that work and trouble and death would not really be there to plague us

but for her unhappy transgression; that by rights we ought to live in

paradise and have everything we want for ever and ever.