PART I

THE MOTIVES OF MEN

BY

GEORGE A. COE

AUTHOR OF “WHAT AILS OUR YOUTH,” “A SOCIAL THEORY OF

RELIGIOUS EDUCATION,” ETC.

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Copyright, 1928, by

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Published October, 1928

Reprinted March, 1929

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

Now that the long labor of writing this book is done, what does it all

amount to? Only the reader can answer this question; but perhaps the

reader’s labor can be facilitated by knowing what moved the author to

write. This, then, as nearly as I can tell the story, is the way it all

happened.

Imagine yourself to be the following kind of polyglot being: Your daily

occupation is teaching the principles of education with particular

reference to the formation of moral and religious character; you have

taken some part in developing the psychology of religion, and you teach

a class in this subject also; you are likewise keenly interested in the

movements of the religious and social life of our time.

On each of these three sides of you there emerges one and the same

problem--the dynamics of mind, specifically the human mind. As teacher

of education you must consider what motives are in operation in both

adult life and child life, how selection among them is made, and how

some can be caused to grow, and others not to grow. As student of

the psychology of religion you must inquire what it is that allures

men into their enormous involvement in religious practices and

institutions. As churchman and as citizen of the world you pause before

the waning influence of churches upon civilization, and before the

waxing influence of industrialism; and you cannot ignore either the

large-scale ignoble conduct that we are witnessing or the cynical

explanations of it that are rife.

Thus the task of identifying the good and the evil at the springs

of conduct forces itself upon you. Scientific psychology meets your

curiosity only half way, or less than half way. Until recently it has

been too little interested in mental dynamics; it has felt a compulsion

to generalize the human and sub-human, the mental and the biological,

the biological and the physical, with no corresponding concentration

upon the specific performances of the human mind; it has been, that is

to say, _self-forgetting_; and, even now that the dynamic problem is

coming to the fore, the question what we human beings specifically are,

dynamically considered, has only begun to be asked.

But, surrounding the uncertainties of technical psychology, there

is a world of certainties, or at least assumptions, on the part of

“practical” men. The nature of “human nature” has become everybody’s

concern. From our sex-tangles up through our industrial and economic

tangles to our international tangles, some notion of human motives is

a controlling factor in thought and policy. Literature is, of course,

saturated with assumptions concerning the springs of action. With great

frequency in recent years exposition of such assumptions has been the

theme of fiction and of drama. The schools and the churches, on their

part, make one or another view of our motives the base-line of all

their planning.

A general survey of this partly technical but mostly untechnical mass

of opinions appears to be worth undertaking. It is doubly needed just

now because there is extensive and growing dissent from assumptions

concerning the inherent nobility of our nature that were taken for

granted not so long ago. We have entered upon a period of spiritual

depression. The opinion may be ventured, moreover, that some view of

human motives is going to be the turning point of every perilous issue

in modern life and civilization.

This is the area that I have surveyed. I have done it with any critical

apparatus that I could lay my hands upon, not scrupling to place side

by side considerations drawn from psychology, biology, current history,

education, and common experience.

Throughout my treatment of this theme I have freely applied valuational

terms such as “good,” “bad,” “high,” and “low” to facts of conduct and

to motives, and I have treated various experiences as desirable or

undesirable. This involves an assumption, of course. For it is possible

to entertain a view of motivation that forbids us to think that

anything is better than anything else.

I bring to life; I bring to death.

I know no more.

It has seemed unnecessary to confront this view with a theory of

valuation; rather, I have taken for granted--as even the exponents of

a-morality do when their theory has to be defended--that better and

worse have objective meaning. Further, I have assumed the validity of

the general trend of valuations that has already put the common good

above egoistic satisfactions, and that would add to physiological

welfare a growing experience of knowledge, beauty, and fellowship.

An invitation to give the Nathaniel Taylor lectures at the Divinity

School of Yale University in the spring of 1926 jogged me into the

present effort to systematize problems and considerations that long

had made my roof their habitation. The interest that was shown in

the problem of the lectures--for which, as well as the jogging just

mentioned I am deeply indebted--instead of making me ready to print,

drove me to further study. As a consequence, though the general

organization of the discussion still follows the course of the four

lectures, additional problems have been attacked, the material has been

multiplied, and further solutions have been offered.

George A. Coe.

_In the Sunshine,

Glendora, California,

May, 1928._

CONTENTS

PAGE

Preface v

INTRODUCTION

I On Having a Good Supply of Wants 3

PART I

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO

HIMSELF CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II Our Belief in Man Yesterday and Today 7

III What the War Did to Our Belief in Man 12

IV Has the Theory of Evolution Degraded Us in Our Own Eyes? 21

V The Irrationality of Man as a Literary Motif 27

VI Has Psychology Undermined Our Self-Respect? 36

VII According to Industrialism, “What Is Man?” 47

VIII The Dilemma of Christianity 56

PART II

THIS DISILLUSIONMENT IS ITSELF ILLUSORY

IX The Precise Nature of the Issue 69

X “Human Nature Being What It Is” 73

XI Some Notes on the Psychology of Motivation 80

XII Childhood as a Revealer of Human Capacities 95

XIII Capacities Revealed by New Types of Education 104

XIV Smallness in Great Men and Greatness in Small Men 112

XV The Mixed Motives of Business 120

XVI Motives of the Workingman 129

XVII Economic Production as a Mode of Self-Realization 135

XVIII The Motive That Is in All and Through All 143

PART III

YET OUR CAPACITIES ARE IN BONDAGE

XIX The Cynic Interjects a Question 151

XX Our “Lower” Nature Does Not Explain Our Bondage 156

XXI How Reason Itself Binds Us to the Irrational 164

XXII The Deep Depravity of Our Respectable Faults 170

XXIII Even Our Passions Are Precedent-Ridden 178

XXIV Free Men Fear Their Freedom. Why? 185

XXV The Motives of Youth Compared with Those of Age 196

PART IV

HOW CAN THEY BE RELEASED?

XXVI The Inescapable Task 209

XXVII The Function of Minorities 216

XXVIII Release Through Cooperative Thinking 230

XXIX My Intractable Self 242

XXX The Realm of Free Spirits 252

Index 261

INTRODUCTION

I

ON HAVING A GOOD SUPPLY OF WANTS

Man wants but little here below,

Nor wants that little long.

So runs an old hymn. If it were true, we should be in a bad fix.

A savage, indeed, wants little; this is what makes him a savage. You

cannot pry him loose from his savagery except by the lever of increased

desires, whether for a rifle, or for a piece of calico, or for a house

with windows.

Whatever keeps us going in any direction, together with whatever makes

us select a new direction from time to time--in other words, our

motivation--is what we are. Meagre wants, meagre manhood; enlarging

wants, enlarging manhood. The man of heroic mold makes outreaching

demands upon life, unabashed by the difficulty of supplying them.

Even the Stoics who, superficially considered, practised renunciation

of wants, in reality withdrew from smaller wants into larger ones.

They did not forego but cultivated the cravings of intellect; in human

relations magnanimity was their standard, with dignified friendship as

an experience fit for a philosopher. It was this expansiveness of their

motives that made possible their serenity of spirit.

A generation that has a large supply of narrow-range wants, together

with plenty of corresponding narrow-range goods, easily becomes

self-deceived. Because it gets what it wants, it believes that it is

efficient. It fancies that if one only enlarges one’s barns and fills

them full one will live more largely, whereas, to live in the human

way is to manipulate our wants, and to live largely is to expand,

diversify, and re-create them.

The excuse for saying so obvious a thing is that, in spite of its

obviousness, people do not believe it. If they did, the state of

education and of religion, both of which have specifically to do with

the ends of living, would be different from what it is. Churches and

schools are peddling the wares that they already possess instead of

stimulating a demand for better goods than we have in stock.

Dr. Faustus, in his meditative search for the foundation of existence,

rejects the Johannine dictum, “In the beginning was the Word” (or

universal Reason), substituting for it, “In the beginning was the Act.”

He might well have said, “In the beginning was the Want.”

What then, are the motives of men? In particular, what are we capable

of wanting, and what are we capable of doing with our wants? After

moving some little distance from the wants of savages, must we pause

and merely repeat our wantings henceforth? Or, indeed, are our desires

in any significant way different from those of our savage ancestors?

If we are able to manage our desires to any degree, what is the main

problem of management, and how is it to be solved?

PART I

DISILLUSIONMENT WITH RESPECT TO HIMSELF

CREEPS UPON TWENTIETH-CENTURY MAN

II

OUR BELIEF IN MAN YESTERDAY AND TODAY

A lumber-jack resolved that he would build himself a home, and settle

down. Selecting a piece of timberland, he proceeded to clear it. Day

after day, week after week, his great muscles worked with axe and saw,

and with chain and reins until the trees were felled and burned, and

the time for grubbing and planting had come. Then he looked at his

cleared land, and behold, the ground was so rocky that it was not worth

cultivating. For he was a specialist in subduing mighty forests, not in

nurturing food-plants.

The western world, having found a key to the knowledge that is

power--the key of scientific method--has been engaged for a few

generations in unprecedented exploits in the mastery of nature. Her

resources have been discovered and seized; processes of control have

been devised; tools have been invented; hitherto intractable areas of

the universe have been subdued; and power and possessions beyond all

the dreams of our fathers are in our hands.[1]

The result is, of course, a changed position of man in the physical

universe; but it is not merely this. Man’s position in relation to man

has changed likewise. For we have been at work upon mankind as well

as upon wood and iron. The occupations of men, and their possessions

also, have silently wrought within the mind, the servant fashioning

his master as well as the master the servant. Our inlooks as well as

our outlooks have undergone a metamorphosis. Here, in men’s attitudes

toward one another, and in what they think of themselves, we come upon

the most significant product of modern science, invention, and industry.

The chief output of mines is miners and mine operators; the

chief product of factories is operatives, managers, and absentee

shareholders; the goods mainly dealt in by department stores are

salespeople and customers; the outstanding contribution of finance in

the modern world does not appear in the profit-and-loss account of

any bank, for it is the banker himself and his clients. If we would

estimate the efficiencies of the industrial age, we must study the men,

women and children all about us, and among other things we must take

account of what they think of one another.

Some of the things that are happening to us can readily be discerned.

This high-strung humanity of ours is awake on some sides of its mind

if not on others; it is highly organized, industrially focalized,

scientifically managed, psychologically analyzed; it is rich in things,

but it is distracted and ethically upset. At the moment when enormous

power to work our will is added to us, we become partly unsure as

to what we want, but mostly a sense of disillusionment pervades our

powers. Disillusionment, that is, with respect to the genuine worth of

all our motives and all our straining and striving and organizing.

The signs of this depression are unmistakable. In the last quarter of

the nineteenth century our youth were nurtured upon Tennyson’s smooth

confidence that “Nothing walks with aimless feet”; upon Browning’s

morning song, “All’s well with the world”; upon Emerson’s apothegm that

when two neighbors converse across a fence, “Jove nods to Jove over

the head of each.” A divinity within man seemed to be attested by his

conquest of nature, by his place in the system of evolution, by the

progress of knowledge, by the developmental character of religions,

and by the growth of philanthropy. Under the widely-heralded doctrine

of divine immanence all creation was meaningful, and the human mind,

in particular, was taken to be the point at which the otherwise

hidden meanings of the universe blossomed forth. Even in the strain

of economic life there was a certain lushness of belief in human

capacity. Corresponding to the feeling that our natural resources were

exhaustless, there was a prevalent assumption that success was within

the reach of anyone who chose to be industrious and enterprising.

An enormous increase of immigration was welcomed. Having purged

ourselves of slavery, we believed that the United States had reached

its political maturity, and that it was destined to be the political

light of the whole world. The capacity of men to govern themselves was

taken for granted. Thus, in America, at least, human kind felt itself

to be young, growing, destined to high achievement; and these were

taken to be simply human qualities that manifest themselves wherever

environmental conditions are favorable.

At none of these points does the old confidence in man remain

unimpaired. We are not so sure that progress is inherently provided

for in the nature of man; we are far more sure of something old,

crude, and of pine-stump quality in our make-up. Tacitly, if not

overtly, men assume that irrational desires are the dominant forces

within us, and that conflict has precedence in human motives. There is

a growing skepticism of the worth of the common man. It is becoming

almost popular to sneer at democracy. We rely--increasingly, it

appears--upon force and cunning, or upon the automatic working of

social mechanisms, instead of trusting to open eyes and to reason. We

are afraid to use our freedom, or to let others enjoy the liberties

that we have guaranteed in our laws and constitutions. We are putting

up walls of many kinds to protect ourselves from our fellows. A partly

blatant, partly furtive nationalism has displaced the bland and

expansive political consciousness of the last generation, and both at

home and abroad our policies are governed by an ungenerous caution.

In all our history were we ever moved by fears as much as now? Were

forward-looking proposals ever so regularly confronted with “Human

nature being what it is, you cannot do it”?

A child with lots of playthings, but fidgeting, and dissatisfied with

himself--here is a motif for a cartoonist who would depict the present

condition of the western world.

How is this clouding of our sky to be accounted for, and what does

it signify concerning the immediate tasks of our civilization? Is

this depreciation of man simply a phase of the depression that always

follows a great war? Is it a by-product of modern science, which

reveals on the one hand the baffling immensity of nature, and on the

other hand our blood-relationship with the lowest orders of living

things? Is it a consequence of scientific psychology in general; or

of behaviorism in particular; or, perchance, of psychoanalysis? Has

it been “put over” on the populace by dramatists and fiction-mongers

who find it remunerative to exaggerate the selfish and sensual aspects

of life in the name of realism? Even if all these have combined to

push us in the same direction, are they sufficient to account for

what has happened? To what degree are they symptoms, and to what

degree causes? May not the everyday conduct of all of us have had some

influence in determining what we think of one another? If so, how does

it happen that we have so behaved ourselves as to lower our estimate

of human motives in general? What have we done to produce the present

disillusionment?

III

WHAT THE WAR DID TO OUR BELIEF IN MAN

If the term “war” includes, as well it may, what goes on in the minds

of men when nations cross swords, then the hardest battles, the

greatest victories, and the greatest defeats of the Great War occurred,

not upon the soil of France, but within our sense of the meaning and

value of life. Looked at in this most profound and tragic way, the War

is still going on. For in our own souls kindly and trustful sentiments

are engaged in mortal combat with a powerful urge towards distrust

and contempt, if not hate; and--what is of the utmost consequence--in

_this_ battle national boundaries disappear altogether. We are to win

or to lose for mankind as a whole; our respect for ourselves, with all

that this implies, will go up or down with our respect for those that,

nationalistically considered, have been or yet may be our enemies.

The psychological history of the War proves this. During the years

that immediately preceded the outbreak of hostilities something like

a mild, cosmopolitan humanitarianism prevailed in the mass of the

people, even though it did not prevail and never had done so in the

offices of state where, as a regular part of the day’s work, wars are

forecast and prepared for. Surprise at the thunderous onset of the

storm was followed immediately by desire to fix upon somebody the

blame for it. This natural impulse was abetted directly and of policy

by the various governments involved in order to enlist moral sentiment,

or what the people felt to be moral sentiment, against the enemy. The

truth concerning the causes of the War was not the concern of any of

the warring states; rather, regimenting, militarizing the consciences

of the people so that they would fight more bitterly and obey their

commanders more unquestioningly, was the all-dominating policy.

Next came the exposition and interpretation of battlefield experience.

Again it was in the nature of the situation that the people should

spontaneously abhor the enemy--was he not killing and maiming our

boys? Under these conditions two things were certain to happen:

Combatants on both sides were bound to grow ruthless, and on both

sides the ruthlessness of the enemy was bound to be exaggerated even

without intent to deceive, while the ruthlessness of our own soldiers

(whichever side we were on) was not described to us; it was a technical

military detail.

Then was added deception of our own people as an apparently necessary

military measure. To work up the whole people into one consuming fury,

yet a fury utterly obedient to military command, seemed to be the

dictate of mere efficiency. Hence tales of atrocities, in which fact,

honest error, and deliberate lies were inextricably mixed, were fed to

the populace by marvellously organized departments of propaganda. It

happened that psychologists had just then worked out various problems

of effective advertising, salesmanship, and personnel management, so

that an instrument of enormous potentiality was available. Its power

was at a maximum now, because the authorities of the state were able

to close all competing channels of public information.

The first result of this psychic campaign was the arousal of much

of the desired fury. It involved and evolved great simplicity of

conviction: The enemy state is totally bad; then, the enemy people are

totally bad, one and all; then, the racial stock is totally bad, so

that even the children of the enemy are unfit to live; conversely, we,

taken in our governmental capacity, are above criticism; yes, we belong

to an innately superior stock, and our allies are about as good as we

are.

Let us keep our eyes upon our main question, and not be diverted into

the other lines of thought that are here near the surface. Our sole

present concern is to see what effect the total War experience had

upon our respect for human nature. At the culmination of the mental

hostilities extreme contempt for a part of mankind was married to

extreme approval of another part.

Here was, of course, unstable equilibrium; there was bound to be some

sort of tip-over, perhaps a succession of tip-overs. Effort followed

to prevent a radical reversal of this type of judgment, it is true,

by hunting for innate superiorities and inferiorities of race. It is

a safe guess that the future historian of science will smile at the

nursing bottles that were offered to our self-esteem directly following

the War! Such feeding was peculiarly inept in the United States. Here,

where many races both mingle and intermarry, the notion of racial

virtues and racial defects could not bolster up our national pride or

our contempt for any other people.

Even if this race-discrimination that calls itself scientific were

well established and agreed upon by experts, it could not protect

our self-respect against calamities that came to it directly from the

War. For the nature of governmental propaganda was found out. Citizens

learned that they had been deliberately, systematically, and grossly

deceived by their own virtue-professing governments. This of itself

would have been sufficient to take away both the glamour of our assumed

superiority and the hideousness of the enemy’s depravity. But this

revelation of the real nature of the modern state was only one of

several experiences that focussed at the same point. Dissatisfaction

with the terms of the peace and with the post-bellum tactics of our

allies; the realization that more wars are now in the making, and that

even one more war may wreck civilization; the financial costs and the

financial entanglements entailed by our martial exploit; revelations

concerning the profits of patriotism; finally, analyses of the

intelligence tests that were given to our soldiers--all these worked

directly against the high-flown self-esteem that buoyed us up during

the clash of arms.

But the bursting of the bubble has not produced the humility of the

penitent or of the learner. Instead of being stimulated to a reasonable

re-assessment of our national needs, we are irritated, we fall

a-scrambling among ourselves, our life as a people lacks meaning to us

ourselves--unless, indeed, this meaning be economic imperialism, of

which more later.

Thus it is that, in the by and large, our estimate of the motives

of men, our own motives included, has shifted by reason of our

war-experience in the direction of what we believed the enemy to be

while we were fighting him in the field. It is true that our estimate

of him has been modified, for the most part grudgingly, yet “In the War

you see what human nature really is” comes painfully close to being

the net average judgment of the whole psychic tragedy. It is not only

the cynic who says this; it is not only an occasional psychologist who

thinks that man is by nature a fighting animal; the statesman, the

financier, the industrialist, and the “man in the street” are more on

guard against man as such.

But this is not the whole story; the “inside of the cup” still requires

examination. What if the War itself sprang from causes that were

already undermining man’s confidence in man? What if the silliness of

our views of man in 1918 were merely a pustule through which a systemic

social disease poured itself? Certainly the current “There you see

what human nature really is” is less a discovery than a confirmation

of an antecedent opinion; it is an “I told you so.” It is patent to

all who think about such matters that the Great War was no meteorite,

dropping upon us from outside our system of everyday life, but a

direct and entirely to-be-expected growth within this system. Society

did not suddenly change its habits, or suddenly get sick. Conflict

was already here under other names--the language was industrial,

commercial, economic, but the hand was the hand of Jacob. We shall have

occasion, a little later in our inquiry, to ask somewhat in detail what

motives industrialism has been bringing to the fore, and what part,

accordingly, industrialism has had in bringing about the present sense

of disillusionment. Certainly the roots of the modern war-system derive

their chief sustenance from economic desires; and just as certainly we

were judging men before the War by these desires and by the conduct

that they produced.

This mind-set, already present when hostilities started, helps explain

several items in the psychic history of the War. Take, for example,

the grotesque psychic compound, patriotism plus profiteering. How

was it possible, it has been said, for citizens to profess intense

patriotism and utter devotion to winning the War at the very moment

when they extorted high payment for their support of it? Did they want

the War merely for the sake of the profits it brought them? No, for

they gave their sons with alacrity. The human-nature puzzle that we

have to work out is that of a sincere patriotism that could be at the

same time (as far as the profiteer’s consciousness is concerned) an

eager, self-regarding, profit-making business enterprise. The solution

of the puzzle, apart from the general principle of mixed motives, is

to be found in the habitual meaning that life already had acquired.

Of course one must make profits from every move; why not? The irony

of the situation--unperturbed and sincere devotion to a way of life

that produces wars that sacrifice one’s own offspring in battle--is

obvious to anyone who stands outside industrialism as an observer and

critic of it. To some extent, the people have begun to see it; the

emotional color of the term “war profiteer” is evidence; but we shall

not appreciate the whole truth until we realize that in and through the

accepted ways of industrialism a degraded view of “what we are here

for” had come to be taken for granted.

It is partly because men did not assume nobility in man, and were

therefore unready to look for it or notice it, and therefore did not

tell others of it when it did break forth, that we heard so little

concerning the finest conduct of the soldiers of all the belligerent

powers, friend and foe alike. Think of the sportsmanlike treatment of

enemies while the fighting was still going on; the magnanimity that

was taken for granted in individual relations between warriors; the

countless deeds of mercy both within the area of hostilities and round

about, both during and after the conflict; the half dumb, and wholly

blind, belief of many a soldier that he was doing his utmost for an

ideal cause; and do not forget the sincere response of the mass of the

American people to the idealism of the “Fourteen Points.” Weigh all

this, and then add to it the fact that war-makers cannot get their

own people to fight without first deceitfully frightening them or

artificially working up hatred by means of propaganda.

Here, as in the case of the war-profiteer, we behold moral confusion,

but on the whole a downward trend in our regard for our own qualities.

Our returning soldiers, voicing the slogan “Treat ’em rough!” and

applying it alike to former enemies and to citizens who made moral

distinctions with respect to former enemies, gave us a hint of the

extent to which belief in force as the arbiter of human relations was

spreading. Taken simply and without qualification, this belief means,

among other things, that men are bound to fight, and that when they

fight they will be ruthless butchers on the field and smug profiteers

at home. This is not quite true, but why do we constantly drift towards

a belief that it is? Why do we not counteract it by bringing into the

foreground the generosity that men actually exhibit, and even the fact

that lower and higher motives are struggling within them? A war does

not suddenly create such beliefs. They were here before 1914; they

helped make the world-catastrophe possible, but they have now been

accelerated by their own work.

We now have the clue to certain incidents and phases of the

peace-making. It was a peace-making only in the relatively superficial

sense of pausing in the use of explosives. It was not reconciliation;

it was external, not psychic; and it was external because all the

peacemakers assumed that the conventionally accepted motives are

fundamental in human nature and are to be dominant “world without end.”

Underneath all the instability of the peace and all the insincerity of

such measures as the mandates is a low conception of what we are, what

we want, and what we are capable of becoming--a conception that was not

created by the War.

Why is it that the universal horror of this War does not lead to

repentance for war-making? Repentance, that is, for the habitual

indulgence of motives and methods of daily living that make armies

and navies, secretaries of war (actually normal in times of peace),

international animosities, and finally war itself a characteristic

phase of nationalism? Why don’t we turn over a new leaf? Made-to-order

psychology which attributes the climax of fighting to a fighting

instinct, ignoring the actual antecedents of every actual war, does

not get us far toward an explanation, even if it has within itself a

fragment of truth. We must go back to our everyday living if we are

to explain our reluctance to repent for war-making, and we must see

our everyday living in terms primarily of our wants and our notions

about them. Practically nobody wants war; we are not exactly tigers

and vultures; but something prevents us from having robust confidence

in our ability to avoid the fatal steps. Fortunately, we are not

consistently depreciative of ourselves. Even at Versailles, much more

in the League of Nations (with all its handicaps and timidities), still

more, possibly, in the World Court, an inextinguishable hope, a living

shoot of real confidence in human nature, is perceptible. What shall

come of it will depend, in some measure, upon stopping to consider what

we want, and then thinking straight.

IV

HAS THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION DEGRADED US IN OUR OWN EYES?

What keeps alive the notion that the theory of evolution derogates from

the dignity of man? One would suppose, offhand, that nothing but our

own conduct could either disgrace or dignify us except to minds that

judge by perverted standards. In a period of history in which society

has begun to shake off artificial class-distinctions, and to permit

men to rise or fall by virtue of their own individual force or lack of

force, how can we revert to an exaggerated pride or shame of ancestry?

A third of a century ago a college student, for the first time coming

to close quarters with the biological view of man, asked, “Professor,

what becomes of our respect for man if he is a blood-relative of the

beasts?” I replied, mindful of the fact that this student and his

family were new Americans, “Does the worth of an individual depend

upon what his grandfather was, or rather upon what he himself is?” The

student, with a laugh, promptly took the position of all believers in

democracy--“A man’s a man for a’ that!”

Even Ezekiel of old, with few democratic traditions, but deeply

reflecting upon the ways of God, rejected the doctrine that worth

or desert depends upon membership in any ancestral or other group.

The people expressed their traditional view in the aphorism, “The

fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are on edge,”

but the prophet declared that God judges “everyone according to his

ways.” One would expect those who are not only heirs of the democratic

tradition but also lovers of the Bible to take the same point of

view. Yet it is chiefly persons versed in the Bible who complain that

belief in evolution must degrade us in our own eyes. Perhaps “versed

in the Bible” is not the best designation, for the persons in question

are those who are most inclined to a literal interpretation of the

biblical story of creation, which declares that man was made “out of

the dust of the ground.” How, one wonders, does this text affect the

Fundamentalist’s notion of human dignity?

Evidently there is something in the background of the objector’s

mind that is not specified in his argument. What is this unmentioned

premise? Is the complaint that the dignity of man is affronted by the

theory of evolution a case of “rationalization,” that is, the invention

of a reason that for some cause is more convenient than the facts--an

invention that may not be realized to be thus artificial?

The objection does not rest upon any alleged letting-down of conduct

that can be traced to a belief in evolution. It may very well

have happened that, by the roundabout way of a different sort of

rationalization, consciousness of our evolutionary origin has promoted

loose living. For example, those whose philosophy of life already was,

“Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” might have

said, “We are animals anyway; let us live as such.” This would have

been self-sophistication, of course, for no evolution-theory ever said

that we are not, _qua_ human, different from other animals; moreover,

the “Let us” was not derived or derivable from the theory. At most,

we have here a rationalizing excuse by which to maintain one’s “face”

to oneself or to others. But anti-evolutionists fail to give specific

evidence that even in this indirect and sophistical way the theory has

produced a letting down.

It is possible that the mistaken identification of evolution with a

single theory of its process, struggle for existence and survival of

the fittest, has aided and abetted selfishness and ruthlessness in

competitive business and competitive nationalism. But this kind of

competition does not wait for scientific justification, and when it

alleges evolution as an excuse, it indulges in self-sophistication just

as do the sybarites who have been mentioned. For “existence” does not

mean the same thing for man and his animal ancestors, and therefore

“fittest” does not. In pre-human species there is no precedent for the

alternatives between which the business man and the statesman have to

choose. Rationalization again!

It is scarcely necessary to inquire whether academic ethical theory

has been seduced by the evolutionary aspect of life. Little more is

needed than to recall a name and a circumstance or two. The name is

that of Huxley, rigorous evolutionist, who with all the emphasis that

he could command insisted that the tooth-and-claw principle does not

apply to the human species. An important circumstance is the blossoming

of humanitarian service during this period, with its inevitable

reverberation in ethical thinking. The ethical life is now almost

universally understood to be the life of mutual helpfulness. This view

is strongly backed up by sociology, theoretical and practical, with

its continual reminder of the solidarity of men, and by the parallel

development of social psychology, which finds that personal existence

as such is a mutual affair.

All the more reason, then, for asking why anybody supposes that

our respect for ourselves depends at all upon our holding or not

holding the evolution theory. If, in order to answer this question,

I must flail some old straw, the excuse is that the search for the

sources of our twentieth-century depreciation of man is worthy of

some thoroughness. Well, then, it is clear that there is no logical

thoroughfare between our disillusionment and the theory of descent.

As far as the logic of the theological anxiety is concerned, Huxley’s

retort to Wilberforce in the famous sitting of the British Association

is final. If we were logical, it would be far more derogatory to our

_amour propre_ to be related to a human scoundrel, or even, as Huxley

so crushingly said, to an evasive, only half-honest debater, than to

reckon ape-like creatures in our ancestry.

As a matter of fact, we do retain our regard for ourselves in the full

light of our blood-relationship with men of all sorts of evil traits,

even brutish ones. Fox, tiger, serpent, viper, shark, blood-sucker,

vulture--all these epithets--some of them actually biblical--have long

been applied to members of our species. Within the consanguinity of the

most convinced Fundamentalist there are thieves, murderers, ravishers,

maniacs, and idiots. One whose self-respect remains intact in the

presence of this truth is simply self-deceived if he imagines that

his sense of human dignity would be affronted by admitting that the

anthropoids are his distant cousins. No, each of us readily asserts his

superiority to his relatives, so readily that the theory of evolution

simply cannot have had the effect supposed. At the most, advantage has

been taken of it to emphasize or reinforce notions that have their

source elsewhere. In the case of the Fundamentalists, antagonism to the

concept of evolution upon this ground is a cloak that is employed, more

or less unconsciously, to cover some other reason for the opposition.

The more one looks into the course of religious thought, and of

popular thought in general, since Darwin, the more certain becomes

this conclusion. Biologists and biological psychologists, as far as I

am aware, never claimed to add a single item to the already recognized

list of beast-like qualities in men, and theologians never attacked

evolution upon any such ground. Rather, what the new view of us added

was an explanation of “how we got that way,” and the explanation--mark

this--constituted a partial excuse (not justification, but excuse)

for much of our bad conduct. It actually lifted from us a part of the

condemnation that was inherent in the theological view of special

creation.

It is a fact, moreover, that--whether logically or not--from the

evolutionary view of the past men gathered confidence in their own

capacity for progress. Today we are actually embarrassed by the

too-easy identification of evolution with progress. Men’s self-esteem

was too much enhanced and soothed.

What is not less interesting from the theological point of view is

that the previously current views of the nature and work of God

were ennobled. Whether logically or not, men thought that they saw

more meanings, or saw them more clearly, in the system of nature.

“Star-dust, and star-pilgrimages,” to use Emerson’s phrase, were not

just “there”; they were getting ready to be the home of living things;

and the lower forms of life were regarded as pointers-forward to

higher forms. Again to borrow from the Concord “prophet of the soul,”

And the poor worm shall plot and plan

What it will do when it is man.

A recent declaration by a number of eminent men, some of them on the

highest round of the scientific ladder, that the evolutionary view of

nature ennobles the thought of God is historically true at least; the

event has occurred. In short, the atmospheric change was not toward

the depression of a sultry day but toward the invigoration of a fresh,

appetite-creating breeze.

The sophistic that turned this into an alleged depletion of our moral

vim is not far to seek. The reason why certain persons did not rejoice

at the excuses that evolution provides for much of our faultiness is

that they did not want us to be excused, but condemned. They wanted

this, not because they were vicious, but because they held a theology

that required them to think so. And because this authoritative theology

had settled upon one way as the only one whereby man could be released

from the sins that beset him, it could not rejoice to discover that

there are other openers of prison doors.

If many of the dogmatically faithful did not think their way into

quite all this detail, they realized at least that to accept at the

hands of evolution an ennobled view of man or of God would involve

admitting inadequacy and lack of true authority in the dogmatic

system. The dogmas never were complimentary to human nature, but--O

droll self-delusion--when science offered us a real compliment, dogma

insisted that it was an insult to our exalted dignity!

V

THE IRRATIONALITY OF MAN AS A LITERARY MOTIF

“What a noble work is man!” is a characteristic sentiment of classical

English literature. “What a work is man!” is the burden of the most

distinctive literature of our day. The difference between the two

exclamations is the difference between sunshine with clouds and clouds

without sunshine.

Our literature always has had rogues and villains galore, hypocrites

and egotists, folly in good people and goodness in bad people. Human

life and human nature have been pictured as spotted and mixed-up,

and strife and confusion have not always been cleared up in the

dénouement. But this was a mixture, a confusion, and a strife, of

genuine opposites. That there are truly noble motives was not doubted;

it was, indeed, the entanglements of nobility in a world that contains

also stupidity, selfishness, sensuality, and cruelty that furnished

the main dramatic situations, whether between individuals or within an

individual’s own soul.

The same objective material receives in our day a fundamentally

different treatment. That we have fewer “happy endings” is not the main

point, and it is not necessarily significant. What is significant is a

shift of the main basis of dramatic contrasts and oppositions, and the

insertion of a new set of tensions, together with the assumption, or

the mood, that lies back of the change.

Whereas, our classical tradition opposed moral ugliness or weakness to

moral beauty or strength, the new mode is not certain that there are

any such dividing lines in our experience. It finds in life, rather,

a mêlée of impulses in which there intermingles more or less policing

that imagines itself to be of superior quality but is actually part

and parcel of the mêlée. In the instincts a literary bonanza has been

discovered. Pit them against one another; tangle them up; make them

intense and ruthless to the point of savagery or beastliness, or

make them crafty and adroitly unscrupulous; ignore the presence in

the world of religious aspiration, or, better still, expose it as a

self-deceived servitor of the powers that it would rule--in short, play

irrationality against irrationality, some of it deceiving itself by its

own camouflage, and you will be up to date.

If this literature cannot paint with epic strokes because its theme,

man, lacks heroic proportions, it does create a complicated and

many-patterned chiaroscuro that, I am ready to believe, is a real

contribution to literary technic. But whatever virtues or vices of

technical art one may find here (which is not my concern), the inlooks

are disillusioning. Even if the lines do not say so, you will find

it between the lines. It permeates the assumptions of the characters

or, if it does not, it suffuses the plot, governing the choice of

characters, situations, incidents, developments; it is testified to

by atmosphere, perspective, and very effectively by silences. If, as

sometimes happens in current plots as well as in classic tragedy, Fate

is the chief actor, it is not sublimely grand or even mysterious,

giving the spectator a feeling that even the irremediable ills of life

are a tribute to the greatness and dignity of existence, but a mean

Fate (rather, fate), a mere mechanical determinism in the sphere of

desire. The spectator goes away unawed, unadmiring, untrustful toward

his species. Life is a mole that burrows under the garden of our

ideals, nipping off at the roots one plant after another. Or, life is a

firecracker; a glittering splutter, then an explosion or a fizzle, then

fragments of smoking refuse--nothing but combustion.

It is far from the purpose of this characterization to indulge in any

general literary criticism, or completely to assess the movement now

in question. The only reason for alluding to it is that here, in a

clearly influential portion of current writing, the disillusionment now

under consideration is a ruling presence. The spirit of it is displayed

in fiction, drama, poetry, and biography. It is bent upon stripping

off the disguises of men, puncturing their pride, and revealing them

as creatures of elemental, a-moral, not-to-be-denied impulses. Now

and then an impression of power is conveyed by the sheer intensity or

explosiveness of an instinctive desire, but anon human wants appear

narrow, mean, vulgar, or sordid. “Spoon River” and “Main Street!”

Authors psychologizing, just as diplomats do, with hard cynicism.

And this cynicism is not intended as caricature, with its precious

privilege of telling the truth by exaggeration, nor satire, isolating

foibles in order to put them into the pillory; the literature in

question intends to present the actuality of human life as against the

conventionalized dreaming of the Victorian period.

Two or three examples may be adduced for the sake of concreteness. A

reviewer gives the following exposition of the philosophy of life that

actuates Mr. Dreiser’s novels: “To him it seemed ... that novelists,

... enamoured of moral delicacy and psychological subtleties, ... had

forgotten the simple motives by which the vast majority of mankind are

moved; so with a single shrug he sloughed off once and for all the

implications of the theory that man is primarily a moral animal, and he

did this much as the behaviorists in psychology sloughed off the soul.

He adopted, instead, what he called ‘a theory of animal conduct.’” The

leading character in Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” the reviewer goes

on to say, “is not unaware of the moral precepts which his parents have

inculcated, nor is he unmoved by the thought of another’s pain. But

these things are pale shadows in comparison with needs and lusts which

are nourished, not by ideas and habits, but by blood. They may go forth

to battle but they never win; they may haunt the mind like overtones or

like ghosts but they never direct a crucial action.... At no point in

all the vast and closely woven story does any motive based upon moral,

social, or religious abstractions count” (Joseph Wood Krutch in the

_Nation_, Feb. 10, 1926, p. 152).

The same writer of analytic reviews calls Eugene O’Neill’s “The Great

God Brown” a “passionate attempt to expound the mystery of the artist’s

maladjustment and of that perpetual tendency of his to slide into the

mud while aspiring toward the stars. Its hero, ... unhappy himself,

... has been the cause of unhappiness in others, and when he dies he

knows no more than that he has lived.... He has not seen the face of

either God or Devil clearly enough to know which was which, and it

is with curses that he has uttered the sincerest of his prayers....

The thirteen scenes ... are thirteen dancing stars still molten and

fluid like the chaos from which they sprung. They are moments in the

life of a man described in a brilliantly poetic sentence as one who

‘had looked into his own dark and was afraid’; and they are thus,

it is difficult not to believe, fragmentary confessions from that

dramatist who has peered more intently than any of his countrymen at

the fantastic shadows cast by reality upon the walls of the dark cavern

which is the self” (Same number of the _Nation_, pp. 164 f.).

A less tempestuous form of disillusionment appears in the

(would-be-bestowed) Pulitzer Prize novel, Sinclair Lewis’s

“Arrowsmith.” The main action takes place upon the plane, not of

brawling passions, but of the supposably rational life. Most persons

of intelligence assume that, however mixed or fragile the values of

other undertakings may be, scientific research is a truly noble and

profoundly worthwhile type of human conduct. Very well, says the author

of “Arrowsmith,” let us look at the thing in actual operation in our

present world. Are you carried away by the researcher’s dispassionate

objectivity and his passionate devotion to truth? In fact, this

dispassionate passion is in a constantly losing fight with enemies both

within and without the researcher.

For, first, since research must be cooperative and organized,

institutionalism seizes the opportunity to lay the long fingers of

its dead hand upon every condition and plan. Next, vulgar utility,

because it purveys the physical sustenance of science, craftily opens

and closes the doors through which the researcher has to walk. Then,

the mixed motives of the individuals with whom the researcher must

be associated--the desire for recognition in the scientific world,

the desire for quick results, or for official position--insinuate

themselves like sand in the cogwheels of a fine mechanism.

Humanitarianism, with its well-meaning desire promptly to relieve

distress, throws its arms around the neck of plain truth-seeking and

drags it under the waves of popular clamor or applause. Even within

the mind of the researcher, there is no real peace nor unity. Anger

and impatience, plain sex-instinct, and even domestic virtues entangle

his interests and divert him from the straight line of loyalty to his

scientific aspirations. At times uncertainty seizes him as to whether

the near-by values of efficiency as the world measures it be not

greater, in fact, than the far values of fundamental truth.

Thus is pictured the life of reason at its intellectual climax. This

is the focus of the story, but not the whole of it. Around the central

character cluster varied types of life-history, but every type is

either self-contradictory, or consistently shallow, or inadequate

because of its unwise goodness. Not less than in the rabble of

instincts in O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms,” but only in a different

manner, and on a more refined level, man is the victim of himself. The

idea is pursued with both continuity and subtlety. With continuity

because it pervades the minor as well as the major characters and

incidents of the plot; with subtlety because over-simplification of

motives is skilfully avoided. The finer qualities are presented as fine

and sincere even though the life within which they occur be smitten

with ultimate futility. There is, indeed, biting cynicism for virtues

that are cold and calculating, but not for warm, impulsive goodness.

But nobody arrives at any destination. As reason fails to

guide the researcher to his desired haven, so also instinctive

wholesomeness fails of its goal. The one deeply lovable person

in the entire story would have demonstrated, if anyone could do

it under the presuppositions of the author, that life can achieve

a worth-while destiny otherwise than through knowledge. Leora is

natural, spontaneous, affectionate; she makes adjustments by simple

directness of feeling without artifice or ambition; though she has

no discernible philosophy of life, she is dependable; on the whole,

she seems to be contented. But her simplicity is that of narrowness,

not of comprehension; she achieves adaptation but not mastery of her

situations, and in the end her lack of any real understanding of the

scientific habits and standards of her husband overwhelms them both in

a needless tragedy.

Everywhere is frustration by inherent, unchangeable defects; yet no

tears, no pathos (for there is no “might have been”); the irrational

is both foreground and background. A surd in every experience would

not necessarily mean defeat if there were any self-sustaining meanings

also. But if our supposed meanings turn out to be surds!

There shines in the earlier parts of the story the steady brilliance

of one ideal, that of unswerving devotion to pure science--wanting

to know the exact truth at all costs. This ideal is incarnated in a

sturdy-willed, growly old priest of the laboratory from whom young

men of science catch the holy flame. They, one and all, allow it to

flicker and smolder; some of them let it go out; but for a long time

the old priest’s light burns steadily on. The reader half believes

that here, for just once, rationality is to vindicate itself. At last

there comes to the veteran researcher an opportunity to guard research,

and to extend it, by administering a research institution that

possesses abundant funds. Unknowing that his motives are mixed and

contradictory, he accepts the fatal advancement, becomes compromised,

and is lost. As a symbol of his descent the novelist makes him sink

into senile dementia. “Vanity of vanities!... All is vanity.”

How much has this literary exploitation of the irrational in man had

to do with the disillusionment that has been spreading among us? Have

we here chiefly a cause, or chiefly an effect? If a cause, is it a

major or a minor one? In any case we have a symptom or diagnostic fact.

Disillusionment has gone far enough to be represented in a considerable

body of literature that cannot be ignored. Whatever much-read novels

and much-witnessed plays reveal concerning a people or an age is here

revealed; whatever they do to people is being done here and now.

The suggestibleness of human beings is too great to leave them

unaffected by such presentations of the supposed realities of life;

this literature certainly is furthering disillusionment. But as a

secondary cause. The primary cause is something actual that sets these

literary workers going and then provides the popular applause. The

applauders have had some sort of experience that makes the picture seem

to have some verisimilitude. Thus we are forced back to the question,

What makes this literature plausible? What has gotten into our common

life that tends to make us think meanly of ourselves, and that causes

us, particularly, to take our wants as a continuous and never to be

resolved squabble among our desires?

Whatever it is, undoubtedly it is the same thing that we came upon in

the “I told you so” of the war psychology. In all probability it is so

commonplace that ordinarily it is not noticed, or if it is noticed, is

taken as a to-be-expected expression of the nature of things. When a

world-catastrophe shakes us, we begin to wake up to the assumptions

that we have so easily fallen into, and when they appear in a new

literature, we say that it is revealing--as it is. But of just what?

The professed derivation of this interpretation of life from psychology

suggests that we look in this direction for further light upon our

problem.

VI

HAS PSYCHOLOGY UNDERMINED OUR SELF-RESPECT

The Sphinx attends a meeting of the Psychological Sodality.

The Chairman of the Meeting:

Brothers--er, er, Brothers and Sisters: We have the pleasure, I may say

even the honor, of having as our guest this evening a most venerable

member, if not of our inmost circle (which is not yet venerable

itself, having the age of only a generation), yet a member of the

long and honorable succession of inquirers into what is, perhaps, the

most difficult problem that has engaged the scientific intellect--the

problem of the nature of man. I say “perhaps” the most difficult

problem, for we who have observed the reactions of the white rat are

aware how, under the rub of exact research, man disappears, like

vanishing cream, in the pores of “the organism.” I am reminded of this

with peculiar force upon the present occasion because our distinguished

guest, like our laboratories, combines the human and the sub-human in a

single synthesis. Renowned for her cautious judgment, she is yet more

illustrious for her skill in the formulation of problems. Let me assure

her that the members of this Sodality will have open ears for her

questions, and that we shall be glad to focus upon them the combined

and unified results of our respective lines of research. Fellow

Members, I present The Sphinx!

The Sphinx:

Your Chairman does me too great honor when he says that I combine the

upper and the lower part of me in a single synthesis. The fact is that

the two parts of me never have lived together in harmony. The trouble

is with my head. It’s forever saying, “I’m human, but what is it to be

human?” and this keeps the whole of me in turmoil. I’ve been asking

this question for thousands of years, and asking it is as far as ever

I get. Tough luck; but not as bad as trying to answer questions that

you don’t know how to ask. Believe me, asking the right question is

the greatest discovery anybody ever makes; it’s the high-trapeze act

of the whole scientific circus. It makes me tired--I’ve been too tired

to stir for as much as five thousand years--to hear philosophers, and

preachers, and guides of youth “explain” the mystery of human existence

by prating of ghosts, and souls, and faculties that always are just

around the corner and never where you can get your eyes upon them

(Applause). It all comes about from asking the wrong question. In this

instance, it’s the mud-pie question: What’s it made of? This question

plays the very deuce. By the way, all of you guys are done with mud

pies, I suppose? I haven’t seen the last number of your Annals.

A Practicing Psychologist:

May I introduce myself to our distinguished speaker by explaining

that I am a certified practicing psychologist? From the point of view

of my profession the question that has been put to us is readily

answered: We are done with mud pies. We are not at all concerned to

know whether man is made out of the dust of the ground or out of the

breath of divinity. Our job is simply to enable men to control, manage,

and manipulate themselves and one another so as to get what they want

with the greatest certainty and the least expense. And we have had no

mean success in this job. If a child is backward in school, we find

out why, and we tell the teacher what to do. We have evolved technics

for advertising that increase sales, whip up competition, and compel

combination. We can tell you how to manage salespeople or factory

operatives so that both they and their foremen will be happier, the

output will increase, and dividends will grow. It was a technic that

we devised that enabled our officials at Washington to do the people’s

thinking for them during the War while the people supposed all the time

that they were doing their own thinking. Psychology is what psychology

does.

The Sphinx:

You’re just the pin in a haymow that I’ve been looking for ever since

Bacchus went on his first spree! Nothing else has puzzled me half as

much as this phase of my old question, namely: What do human beings

want? Since the management of minds is your specialty, practice on me;

tell me how I can manage my head or the minds of men so as to find out

what would really satisfy a human being.

Practicing Psychologist:

I did not say that the practicing psychologist knows the whole anatomy

of man’s desires. For the most part he takes the word of his clients

as to what they want, and then goes ahead. I simply do not ask what

other demands of human nature may possibly exist. At the same time I

must admit that, in order to find the economical way to handle the

human factor in any situation, I must always take account of a complex

of instincts. The farther I go in my work, too, the more complicated

the instincts appear to be. For example, we are discovering that the

workman wants out of his work a great many things besides wages, even

things that wages won’t buy. As yet, however, we are not sure that

the capitalist (except a queer one now and then) desires anything but

profits. The acquisitive instinct seems completely to explain the

conduct of business.

A Biological Psychologist:

What has just been said illustrates the need of an inclusive point of

view from which to approach the problem of the instincts. Biology,

in its concept of adjustment, presents us with such a point of view.

All living beings exhibit a push towards the maintenance and the

reproduction of themselves. Thus, there are two great trunk-roots of

behavior, the demand for self-maintenance (at base the requirement of

food), and the demand for reproduction. Where reproduction is sexual,

we may say that food and sex, broadly considered, contain the clue to

all behavior. It is necessary, of course, to perceive that each of

these trunk-roots divides into branches and subdivides into rootlets.

Thus, food-getting includes accumulation for future use, and so it

founds what is sometimes called the acquisitive instinct. Rivalry,

jealousy, and pugnacity belong to the same trunk-root. On the other

hand, the reproductive drive differentiates into complex activities of

courtship, the care of offspring, the family organization, and all the

social institutions that have sprung from it.

The Sphinx:

You puzzle me. I haven’t been hungry or amorous since the pyramids were

built, and I know I never wanted offspring. The only thing I’ve really

wanted for these thousands of years is to know what man is--that is,

what he really wants. At this minute I’m all excited about a particular

aspect of this general question of mine: Does man himself, or only this

queer head of mine, want to know what he wants? And if so, of which of

the two trunk-roots of instinct is this a rootlet?

An Analytical Psychologist:

The question just asked by our venerable friend reinforces a

consideration that I have many times presented in our Sodality.

Psychology cannot be satisfied to work within the very broad categories

of biology; she must find her categories within the specific material

with which she deals, and she must pursue her analyses to the end--that

is, until the simple elements are laid bare. Pursuing this truly

scientific procedure, she finds that mind is a general term for

aggregates of sense-elements on the one hand and elementary drives on

the other. These drives, inherited, of course, and having biological

significance, are more numerous than we once supposed. Each of the

so-called trunk-roots is in reality a cluster of roots, and there are

others not contained in either cluster. The sex-instinct knows nothing

of offspring; does not look forward to progeny nor provide care for the

young--often quite the opposite. These things are managed by another

set of instincts. Moreover, food-getting is not the only sort of

instinctive getting. Curiosity, the prime root of science, is obviously

instinctive. Therefore we may affirm that the trouble with The Sphinx’s

head is the unrest of an unsatisfied instinct.

A Single-Track Behaviorist:

This makes me as tired as it must make The Sphinx. Instincts, forsooth!

An instinct is nothing but a name for a class of responses; it does

not do anything nor explain anything. You can have as many or as few

instincts as you like by choosing your method of classifying behavior.

In fact, the whole notion that desires, instinctive or other, explain

the occurrence of anything is simply a leftover from the belief in

flitting ghosts who did things in the dark but never where you could

see just what was happening. Bring the facts into the light, and what

do you see (for I know nothing but what I see and touch)? You behold

in our behavior nothing whatever but a few reflex movements modified

in numerous ways by the conditions, purely physical, under which they

occur. Behavior, which is change of place, has to be explained from

within its own genus, which is, change of place. This is the last

mountain height of psychology; climb up here, and you shall see that

there are no desires, no wants. Men don’t want anything; a want is

nothing but a bit of vocal or sub-vocal behavior.

The Sphinx:

Professor, you are a man after my own heart. You make things so simple.

From what you say I get a hunch that maybe I have been foolish to be so

inquisitive. For thousands of years I have believed that I was asking

my big question about man because I wanted an answer. You make it clear

that I didn’t ask because I desired an answer, or anything else, but

only because I liked to ask questions. Come to think of it--it’s plain

as a wart on a nose--I couldn’t ask a question _because_ of anything.

In fact, it was not questions, but movements of my lips, that occurred.

I’ve just been kidding myself, and I don’t need to worry any more about

what goes on in this head of mine. I really don’t want an answer, and I

don’t want to ask questions. Still, I should like to know what the rest

of you fellows think about this.

A Gestalt-Psychologist:

The latest experiments upon both men and lower animals fail to justify

any of the theories that man’s mind or his behavior is a composite of

elements. The behavior of men, of chimpanzees, and even of domestic

hens displays types of organization that cannot be explained as

conditioned reflexes, or instinctive pushes, or associations of

sense-elements. The organization is there when the response first

occurs, not merely afterwards, and new organizations appear within new

responses. The unit for psychology is the configuration, which is not

a simple element. We are not composites of any kind of elements; we do

not merely repeat and recombine old reactions; our behavior, through

and through, looks forward to the organized world in which we live.

I find the question of The Sphinx, therefore, not only rational, but

inevitable. The supreme problem of psychology is: Whither? What are

these already organized wholes that we recognize as mind? How and in

what direction do they grow, and what are they going towards? Applied

to man, the question is, What does this species really want?

A Self-Psychologist:

The circle is returning into itself! Psychology took its start--it

always does so--from the experience of being a conscious self. This

is the prime datum; it is the concrete actuality, from which all

your alleged “elements,” sensory, affective, or instinctive, are

derived by abstraction. Mind, as the Gestalt-Psychologist says, is

a self-organizing object. Its activity, wherever you find it, is

purposive striving. I should say that what ails the Sphinx’s head is

simply the painful effort to become a complete self.

The Sphinx:

Thank you! You have saved my self-respect, and ...

A Psychoanalyst:

Pardon me, not too fast! Don’t respect yourself until you find out

whether you are respectable, and above all, don’t rationalize. I am

sure that you will welcome this interruption when I tell you that I am

dealing daily with the dynamics of human conduct in its most intimate

phases, so intimate that people cannot even recognize them as their

own without my help. I walk among the mud-geysers and the volcanoes

that show what’s really inside. What men think they want--in fact,

most of what you psychologists think they want--isn’t what they really

want, for the most part, but a lot of deceptive substitutes for what

men really want and have failed to get. Dig down into the Unconscious,

and you shall find libido, the simple spring that turns all the wheels

of the machine. It is sex-desire broadly considered, though some

would say desire to exalt the ego, or desire just to live (of which

sex-desire is, of course, the chief constituent). Because these desires

are repressed by social conventions, they seek outlets in strange and

deceptive ways, and thus what we call our character becomes chiefly

a mass of self-deluded virtues and self-deluded faults. Now, this

restless longing of The Sphinx, which she thinks is a genuine desire to

know what man is, conceals ...

Several Voices:

Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman, I ...

The Chairman:

Brethren, every member of this Sodality knows exactly what every other

member is about to say. Would it not be well, instead of listening to

ourselves, to hear the comments of our honored guest?

The Sphinx:

I won’t admit, no I won’t, that this discussion has given me a

headache. I want you to think me more hard-headed than that, and

moreover I might unwittingly reveal something in my insides that would

shock the Psychoanalyst. All I can say, in view of your hospitality, is

this: When you find out what you want, I hope you’ll one and all get

what you want, provided you care to have that kind of want. As for me,

the next steamer back to Egypt, where I shall brood over these things,

perhaps, for a few more thousand years.[2]

* * * * *

To the question whether modern psychology has undermined our

self-respect a partial reply would be, as we now see, Which modern

psychology? One psychology is pitted against another whenever the

nature of our motives is in question. Here science has problems rather

than solutions, points of view rather than a point of view.

Only a small proportion of the populace, moreover, reads scientific

psychology. Not by any logical use of established conclusions of

research, then, has the present disillusionment reached its wide

extent. We are dealing with a mood or sentiment and a habit into

which men have slipped, not with insight that they have achieved by

intellectual labor.[3]

Undoubtedly psychological rumors that have trickled into town have

had an influence. Everybody who has an articulate desire to be modern

is thinking about human nature in terms that he supposes to be those

of the psychologist. In particular, three propositions have attained

some vogue: That men are moved by the same instincts as the lower

species; that instinctive conduct is mechanically determined; and that

the reasons conventionally given for conduct are mostly sophistical

“rationalizations” (that is, merely supposed reasons for that which

in reality is determined by emotion rather than thought). These ideas

give support to the current mood, but they cannot have had much to do

with creating it. As here used, they are themselves “rationalizations.”

The basis of the mood is some form of common or at least wide-spread

experience. No great ground-swell of popular sentiment ever originated

from anything else.

Indeed, can we reasonably assume that the wind blows in only one

direction--from psychology to popular opinion, but not from the popular

mood into the psychology laboratory? Surely psychologists are human,

which is to say that we need a psychology of their psychologizing. Here

is an item of it: (1) The area that one chooses for investigation; (2)

The questions that one asks; (3) The facts that one notices or fails

to notice; (4) The values that are noticed in the work of another; and

(5) The apparent size of the sphere within which one acts--all these

are influenced by some interest then and there present. Now, interest

can be awakened in all sorts of ways. The spirit of the times can shunt

research onto this track or that, and it can make this datum or that

prominent in the mind of the researcher.

It is easy, in fact, to trace to their origin several of the dominant

interests of psychology. Thus it struggled for scientific standing at a

period when “science” connoted, most clearly of all, physical science;

at a time when the biological concept of evolution filled the sky; at

a time when it was necessary, in order to be let alone, to seem not

to meddle with theological interests; and, above all, at a time when

industrialism was rushing swiftly towards its present climax. We shall

do no despite to science nor to any of its devotees if we say that

there is a subtle connection between the dominance of machinery in our

civilization, the prominence of a machine-like view of motivation in

the many works on psychology, and the predilection of the popular mood

for just this idea of human nature.

VII

ACCORDING TO INDUSTRIALISM, WHAT IS MAN?

An ancient poet celebrated the greatness of man in the following

glowing words:

O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth! Who

hast set thy glory above the heavens....

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and

the stars, which thou hast ordained,

What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that

thou visitest him?

For thou hast made him a little lower than the gods, and hast

crowned him with glory and honor.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou

hast put all things under his feet:

All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field;

The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea.

“Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands.”

Simple-minded poet, son of herdsman, hunter, or fisherman, you think

man is great because he domesticates sheep and oxen, and is successful

in his hunting and fishing--so great that even the maker of the heavens

regards him as important! What would you say if you could witness

the conquests of nature that have followed upon modern science and

invention? You might ride in a car that is propelled, heated, and

lighted by a river a hundred miles away; you might speak in your

natural voice at Jerusalem and be heard in Egypt; with a turn of a

hand you could start moving a mass that a thousand of your Palestinian

oxen could not budge.

How is it that this enormous increase in our dominion over nature

adds so little to our appreciation of man? Nay, that it makes us less

appreciative than this rustic?

The answer will be found in some phase of the process of securing this

dominion, or in some use made of it. Outside of industrialism, in fact,

the obvious trend of history is towards a higher and higher estimate

of human nature. The growth of civil and political liberty; the spread

of popular education; emancipation from many superstitious fears; the

increase of humanitarianism--what a truly glorious period in human

evolution do these witness. And yet, in spite of them all, a depressed

view of ourselves hangs heavy in the atmosphere. We have canvassed all

the more obvious partial causes of it, only to be pointed in every

instance towards our everyday occupations as the more important source.

What is industrialism doing to us, then? Under this term may be

included for convenience the entire system by which, in the period of

steam and electric power--still a short one--goods are produced and

distributed, and commerce and finance are carried on. This system,

originating in the West but now spreading to the Orient, reorganizes

human relationships in a manner that is almost revolutionary. It

shifts populations from place to place; it dissolves old connections,

and creates new ones, separating men who were together, and bringing

together those who were strangers; it produces a large-scale

consciousness of one another--ultimately, it seems, an almost feverish

consciousness--but without ever making the reorganization of human

relations any part of its main business. That is, the all-absorbing

industrial system is not organized and run with reference to its main

output, a changed humanity; we are not in business, as has been said,

for our health; and this inversion of values, at first not clearly

foreseen, or intended as a philosophy of life (but only practised), is

now becoming a clearly conscious and, in the Western world, a generally

accepted interpretation of our own worth. We are taking our occupations

seriously.

It is hard for us who are most close to the facts to see them in

perspective. We are rarely conscious of the human movement in the

large because the whole immediate human environment moves with us.

But Oriental observers like Tagore and Gandhi perceive that Western

civilization is developing towards a world-tragedy--pigmy purposes

wielding the power of giants. It may be that we shall be jarred into

something wiser by the jolts that are occurring within the machine

itself. For the human factor is increasingly the problem-setting item

in the industrial system. All the other sources of difficulty--the

weather, the changes of the seasons, the supply of raw materials, the

chemistry of industrial processes, the control of elemental forces--all

these taken together occasion less anxious thought than the question,

What can we rely upon in the sphere of human conduct? The puzzle of

organization is personnel; the nightmare of the employer is labor; the

riddle of labor is organized capital and its instrument, the manager

and the boss; at the spear-point of practically every enterprise

appears the opposing spearhead of sharper and sharper competition.

Experience of friction is leading to modifications of mechanical

processes and some improvements in human relations. But meantime,

there goes on, by virtue of the inner logic of the system as a whole,

an increasing depression of spirit, an increasing skepticism of the

worth of human motives in their totality.

Let not our question be confused with others. We are not asking whether

the industrial system breeds injustice; not even what sorts of men

it produces by this or that particular method of “handling” men. Our

sole interest at this point is in the notions concerning the motives

of men that spring up, or receive emphasis and currency, by virtue of

the general characteristics of the system. Some wariness is advisable

here, for the field is not entirely homogeneous, and (as we shall see

more fully in a later section) motives are mixed and more or less

misunderstood. That industrialism is producing, and, until it becomes

greatly modified, must produce, a depressed view of man, however, is a

safe proposition. For no one will question that there is in it a kind

of gravitation towards the following specific judgments:

(_a_) That in the organization and the use of capital the dominant

motive, almost invariably taken for granted, is not the glory of God

(however this be understood), nor the improvement of human life (one’s

own or others’), nor supplying the wants of men, but accumulation of

profits and of power for the enjoyment of the possessor, or of the

possessor and his family.

(_b_) That among the employed classes the dominant attitude with

respect to the relations between employer and employe is to get the

most possible for the least return; and that a corresponding attitude

on the part of employers is taken as a matter of course.

(_c_) That, since conflict is of the essence of

industrialism--competition of capitalist with capitalist, of laborer

with laborer, and chronic strains between capital and labor--an

essentially pugnacious self-interest is fundamental to human nature;

consequently, that the natural, to-be-expected policy of all concerned

is to obtain compulsory power over others.

(_d_) That insincerity permeates the whole--insincerity in that, though

every one is for himself, everybody endeavors to make it appear that

what he wants is for the good of the others. Thus, men actually ascribe

virtue to themselves because their occupation supplies some human want,

though these same men confess that their motive is profits, and that

they ignore wants that it is less profitable to supply. “The public

good” is known to be a continual excuse for economic partizanship

in laws, administration, and politics generally. Under the guise of

patriotism, self-interest pursues world-policies that make for economic

imperialism, unfairness to weaker peoples, and war. Each struggling

class, laborers and employers alike, conceals from the public the

narrower, more partizan phases of its activities. It is not necessary

to suppose that all this is entirely conscious, or that all men are

equally paralysed in their moral nature by this poison. Let us give the

benefit of the doubt wherever we can. But indubitably our industrial

system creates a belief that our life is thus honeycombed with

insincerity.

These, let it be repeated, are not a portrait, but only certain

selected features; they do not fully describe any situation; they do

not constitute an accusation of depravity. But no one who impartially

surveys the human relationships that most characterize industrialism

can deny that the impressions that have been described are being made

by it, and are being believed with increasing generality.

If we ask how this factor in the present disillusionment compares with

the others--the Great War, the belief in evolution, the literature of

irrationality, general psychology, behaviorism, and psychoanalysis--we

shall conclude that it is more influential than all of them put

together. The reason is not merely that the War covered only a few

short years, whereas experience with the industrial system is more than

a century old; and not merely that science and literature reach only

a portion of the population; there is a still deeper reason for the

profound influence of industrialism upon our conception of ourselves.

Wherever our voluntary activities, our efforts and struggles, are

chiefly expended, there we get our deepest impressions as to the

nature of reality. Men who through life spend from eight to ten of

their freshest hours each day in the economic struggle tend to become

conformed in their personal attitudes to the facts and forces with

which and against which they work. They surely become conformed unless

they take part in efforts to change the system. We do not understand

even the pleasures of the people until we inspect their labor; the same

is true of family life, and--more than we suspect--of religion.

Not only is industrialism the chief of several sources of our

disillusionment; it is the background source that either produces or

gives popular plausibility to the others. It produced the War; it

aggravates all the general problems of the family and of sex-life;

it intensifies everything that makes us distrust one another and

everything that makes us content to be selfish. Industrial efficiency

practically identifies itself with a mechanization of life that leaves

the least possible scope for the exercise of thought, and choice, and

personality. When release from work comes, the imprisoned vitality of

the worker gushes into a kind of freedom that gives one an impression

that the real basis of life is simply instinct. If, as some suppose, a

flood of sexuality has descended upon us, the reason will be found, not

chiefly in psychoanalysis, but in such conditions of modern life as the

industrial city. Granted industrialism, ramifying into the home, the

people’s recreations, politics and law; industrialism, growing more and

more efficient according to its self-secreted standard of efficiency,

what should one expect but disillusionment as to the worth of human

motives? “Gentlemen,” said a college president to some students who

were bibulously inclined, “there is one thing in this world that you

can rely upon--the morning head!”

If one cares to listen for a coda to the harsh symphony of

industrialism, one can discern it in many sorts of effort to reassure

oneself of one’s goodness. Promoters of one of our enormous wastes,

competitive advertising, will tell you that strict truth-telling is one

of the standards of their profession; and one can see them measuring

the moral worth of the profession by this one minor consideration.

When big business is under fire because of its exploitation of both

employe and consumer, we are told that business is growing more moral

because competitors treat one another more honorably. We need not

scent hypocrisy in the welfare work of great factories, but why should

kindness to dependents be offered as an offset to objections to this

very sort of dependence? Rotarians are helping their communities in

various ways from unquestionably good motives; I should be sorry if

any word of mine discounted their interest, say, in boys; but why

should business men think that such extra-business activities reflect

any credit upon the system or have any claim to soften the criticisms

that are directed against it? What we perceive here is men who are

better, and want to be counted as better, than the system that has

caught them and victimized them.

But these “rationalizations,” if such they be, are less portentous

than the infiltration of the principles of industrialism into the

ethics that is generally recognized as obligatory. The major emphases

in current practical ethics are the emphases that will not hurt the

system. They center chiefly about two poles, property and contracts. It

is well recognized that the American system of law is organized chiefly

around property as the basic right, and at least one eminent public man

has declared that unless we can somehow amend this foundation-principle

it will get us into no end of trouble. Now, this assumption as to basic

legal obligation has passed insensibly into an assumption as to moral

obligation and moral character, with ironic results in our current

moral judgments. Compare, for example, the intense reprobation of an

embezzler with the entire respectability of a manufacturer who grows

wealthy out of factory labor by children. He has not stolen property

from children! Compare, again, our attitude toward dishonesty in making

and fulfilling a contract with our attitude toward employers who have

resisted with might and main every measure, whether proposed by a

labor union or in a legislature, to safeguard the health of factory

operatives. They are men of their word! Ask the next hundred men you

meet what are the ethical obligations of business, or of employers, or

of employees, or of buyers and sellers; you will not hear from five

of them, probably not from one, a word about obligations other than

the formal ones of honesty, respect for property, and fulfilment of

contracts. The main issues--what property is for, what the main aim of

production is, what constitutes success, the fundamental immorality of

treating persons as mere means rather than ends--will not be mentioned.

You may possibly receive from some church member a Scripture verse,

“Love your neighbor as yourself”; but what do you think he will mean by

it? Will he mean governing the main aims and processes of the economic

life by this principle? Do you really think he will?

VIII

THE DILEMMA OF CHRISTIANITY

The relation of the dominant religion of the West--the garden-plot of

industrialism--to these depressed views of the motives of men is as

odd as it is complicated. The tradition of official Christianity has

run to the effect that the heart of man is desperately wicked; that it

is selfish, sensual, and self-deceived; and that it is incapable of

improving itself until an infusion of divine power has made possible,

first repentance, then a new life.

Like the melancholy tolling of a bell, our War experience, our popular

psychologies, our popular literature, and our everyday economic

occupations repeat after religion that, under the surface, we are a

madhouse of clamant impulses, and that we have no power to become

anything else. How, we may ask, does theology like this confirmation of

itself?

Not too well! And for interesting reasons. Within the memory of men now

living the evangelical churches were strenuously combating the notion

that man is naturally good; today, when popular thought is inclined to

classify human nature with that of the beasts, the same churches are

exerting themselves to assert the natural nobility and dignity of the

human race, and its unique significance in the order of nature. Just

what has brought about this change of front? And how deep down does it

go?

Secondary reasons for this change need not here be enumerated, as,

for example, the modification of theological thought from within by

its own re-examination of its historical bases. For a great about-face

of popular religious consciousness never takes place at the command

of historical scholarship but only at the command of a pervasive

experience. In this instance, the pervasive experience that dominates

religious thought lies precisely in the area that we already have had

under consideration.

The doctrine that man’s nature is evil had as its counterpart and

counterweight (partly relieving it of its gruesomeness) the dogma that

divine grace, acting through the Scriptures and the church, is able

(and some said, is ever ready,) to take away the evil desires and fill

their place with good. Now, it would be intolerable to the churches

to think so ill of man’s original nature unless the actuality of

regeneration also could be believed in. But--here is the rub--living

belief in regeneration could not be maintained upon biblical grounds or

upon authority alone; it had to be made manifest in the common life to

common men.

In order to retain the doctrine of depravity under such modern

conditions as freedom of thought, popular education, and greatly

widened acquaintance with humanity, a three-fold demonstration would

have been necessary:

_First_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a great and

evident contrast between the daily lives of those who experienced

and those who did not experience the asserted special infusion of

divine power. If the doctrine was true, some experience here and

now, not merely in the hereafter, had to separate men into sheep

and goats.

_Second_, it would have been necessary to exhibit a regenerate

church as an organ of world-regeneration. Not necessarily an

infallible church; not necessarily an organization perfect in its

constitution and free from foibles in its administration, but at

least one clearly discriminable from all other social institutions

by the intensity, the continuity, and the independence of a

superior motive.

_Third_, it would have been necessary to demonstrate the reversal

of human nature’s evil traits socially as well as individually,

and outside the church as well as inside it. In particular, the

“new creature” would have had to appear within the structure of the

industrial order. Not that any sudden or complete conversion of the

industrial order is here implied, but at least some recognizable

beginning, some certain evidence that the process of industrial

regeneration is starting. Feeding those who are left hungry by the

economic machine, or binding up the wounds of those who have been

hurt by it, or soothing the asperities of the industrial warfare,

is not enough; the required demonstration had to reach and modify

the central motives that give to the system its specific character.

Unless objective evidence could be adduced that the kingdom of

property, profits, wealth, and wages can be transformed into a

Kingdom of God--not, of course, by charitable distribution of a

surplus, but by shifting the main direction--then nothing could

keep alive the doctrine of regeneration.

In not one of these directions have the churches made a convincing

showing to the world at large or even to themselves. It is true that

evangelism has turned many an individual permanently from evil ways--a

fact that is today strangely understressed by the churches, and not

sufficiently followed up in work with individuals. But evangelism at

its best has always left us in a condition of strain, with evangelism’s

own chosen problem not really solved. For the converted man turns out

to be, like his unregenerate neighbor, a mixture of yeses and noes;

and, with dismaying frequency--dismaying, that is, for the doctrine of

depravity-removed-by-regeneration--the fruits of the Spirit have been

abundant in the supposably unregenerate and scanty in the supposably

regenerate. The point is not that conversion, if it is to back up the

doctrine, must make a man perfect at a clip, but that it must make him

sufficiently different to enable observers to identify him as actually

different, in point of dominant motives, from men who have been trained

otherwise than by the church.

In the current sense of evangelism, of conversion, of regeneration,

or--most generally--of being a Christian, there is no generally

recognized implication of incongruity with the accepted motivation

of industrialism. I do not say that being a Christian even in the

conventional sense does not somewhat moderate the selfishness of this

motivation; sometimes a Christian industrialist is made superbly

inconsistent by his religion. The point is that Christians, like

anybody else, are expected to live out their workaday lives within

industrialism upon its own terms. And industrialism is playing

spiritual havoc!

A regenerate church, accordingly, is non-existent. This means, not that

unregenerate individuals slip into membership; not that a united church

is still merely hoped for; not that there is no insurance against

corruption in any ecclesiastical body, local or general. It means,

rather, that no church is definitely committed institutionally to the

extirpation of the causes that degrade man in his own eyes. What is the

motivation of the churches as such? What is the official motivation

of the select number of their members to whom is committed the

spiritual oversight of the flock? What does the word “ecclesiasticism”

mean? When is a church successful, or healthily growing? In terms of

motives operating from within the churches upon the causes of our

disillusionment, what is the real meaning of church statistics? Compare

what the churches do to able ministers who preach the Rotarian type

of idealism with what they do to equally able or more able ministers

who preach unequivocally that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. Ask

leaders of industry who hold that its principles are inviolable whether

the churches are allies of the system or makers of trouble for it. The

answer that you will receive is that, though individual ministers are

breeders of discontent, the churches as a whole are an asset to the

system. No; there is no regenerate church.

We now have the groundwork for an explanation of the decay of belief in

depravity even among those who have regarded themselves as faithful to

the traditions of the elders. The doctrine, taken by itself, unrelieved

by a counterbalancing doctrine of regeneration through the intervention

of a merciful God, is too dreadful, too accusing of the Creator, to

be endured. Therefore, when the doctrine of regeneration fails to be

convincing in practice, the conviction grows that men are not so bad,

after all. Natural amiability becomes more impressive, more suggestive

of the hand of God in the creation of man, and natural unamiability

actually gets overlooked or slurred over! The preaching of repentance

loses its bite, too. An odd swing of the pendulum, this. For, whereas

the thunders of the law broke forth against the natural depravity of

man, which he couldn’t help, the bad conduct of naturally good men is

not found particularly exciting!

Is it possible, then, that the churches are becoming a fellowship of

natural amiability, and that, failing to regenerate the industrial

system, they are being assimilated to it? This would involve

topsy-turvydom with respect to ecclesiastical views of the motives of

men, it is true. For it would mean, on the one hand, accommodation

to industrialism’s assumptions regarding our innate selfishness and

the conflicts by which it enforces itself, but, on the other hand,

the giving up, or shoving into the background, of the one Christian

doctrine, depravity, with which these assumptions at all harmonize. The

practical outcome of this confused drifting would be either a sharing

by the churches in the current disillusionment, or an evasion of it by

fellowship in thinking about more pleasant things, and a fellowship in

doing good things that do not bring the issue to the fore.

The anti-Christian movement in China bases itself to a considerable

extent upon the proposition that the Christian churches of the Occident

are in alliance, conscious or unconscious, with the industrialism

that exploits weaker peoples and disrupts the world. What truth is

there in this judgment? If we of the churches are acquiescing in the

interpretation of human motives that is the spiritual essence of the

present industrial order, then we cannot wholly escape the accusation,

no matter how generally amiable and innocent-minded our piety is.

And there is only one way to prove that we are not acquiescing, and

that is to attack. We must attack either by making a demonstration of

regeneration (industrialism’s low estimate of motives being accepted),

or by exposing the falsity of this low estimate, in either case

calling for repentance and for a reversal of the main direction of our

organized conduct.

A significant body of historical study is bringing to light an amazing

array of evidence that Christianity has, in fact, adopted the ethical

fundamentals of the industrial consciousness. The anti-spiritual

presuppositions of an acquisitive system have actually been baptized

into the name of Christ, and taught as virtues. Even Catholicism,

in spite of its reverence for tradition, shies at--more than shies,

objurgates--social aspirations that reflect an early Christian

attitude towards property and towards the organization of society.

Moreover, the dominant Catholic conception of loyalty to the State

obligates the laity to follow industrialism, whenever it so commands,

onto the field of carnage. Rome has the grit to teach her children

when to disobey the powers of this world, but she has not had the

spiritual clarity to see that the kind of docility and contentedness

that she inculcates plays into the hands of Mammon, the chief enemy

of the Christ. Protestants often marvel at the adaptability that this

ancient, stiffly authoritarian church has shown in its adjustments to

the modern secular State and to popular government. What makes this

adaptability possible is the restricted limits of the sphere within

which Catholicism actually exercises authority. This sphere is not

coextensive with the forces that make or mar personality, bestowing

dignity or throwing contempt upon it. According to the decree of the

Vatican Council, the Pope may speak with infallible authority upon any

and all questions of both faith and morals; but he does not speak upon

all of them. If he did speak, in specific and understandable terms,

of the meaning of Jesus’ teachings as applied to present spiritual

conditions, the position of Catholicism in industrial society would be

far less comfortable than it now is.

The historical studies just referred to maintain that Protestantism,

particularly Puritanism, has to a significant extent assimilated its

conception of both the sphere and the method of the spiritual life to

the economic process. That is, instead of insisting that this process

be brought up to the standards implied in the teachings of Jesus,

Protestantism has _first_, acquiesced in the doctrine that the economic

order somehow secretes from within itself its own rules, standards of

value, and grounds of self-justification; _second_, assumed that what

the economic system counts as virtues really are virtues, and that here

the spiritual life gets its discipline, and character its solidity;

_finally_, persuaded itself that the function of the anti-Mammon

teachings of Jesus is to prevent excesses such as sacrificing integrity

to cupidity, taking undue advantage of the weak, pride of wealth,

forgetting the poor, and losing the sense of dependence upon God. Nay,

prosperity in the sense of mere accumulation (not in the sense of wants

of personality actually met) becomes a sign of God’s kindness or even

approval.

Hence austere industriousness (without regard to one’s place in the

economic scale) has been valued above play; above the enjoyment of

nature, literature, or the fine arts; above even the joys of human

fellowship. The habit of saving so as to accumulate a surplus has been

almost identified with strength of character. A serious life has been

evidenced by intense devotion to business, and winning a competence

by working the system hard has been one of the surest guarantees of

general respect even within the religious circle. As to the relation of

God to the system, consider the tone and contents of Thanksgiving Day

proclamations and of prayers and sermons upon this festival day. For

what do people give thanks? And does it not appear that God himself is

contented with the system?

In short, here are clear tendencies towards making Christianity into

a bourgeois religion--the sanctification of the struggles of the

middle class within a _given_ industrial order. Such a religion has

difficulty in understanding either the discontent of the laborer,

or the necessarily disintegrating effect of private wealth upon

personality (yes, the necessarily disintegrating effect, as Jesus

unqualifiedly declared), or the spiritual significance of freedom in

thinking and in the development of ethical principles.

This is not intended to be a statement of the whole situation in

Protestantism, but of a drift within it. If a debit and credit judgment

were in order, one would have to study carefully the upspringing

within both Protestantism and Catholicism (and Judaism, too) of a

social movement that to some extent opposes this drift. But our

concern here is simply to discover the relation between Christianity

and the disillusionment with respect to himself that is creeping upon

twentieth-century man. This is what we find: Both Catholicism and

Protestantism are entangled with industrialism, both its practice

and its philosophy--entangled, that is to say, with the force that

has most to do with lowering us in our own eyes. Christianity in the

western world is therefore in a dilemma of the most vital kind. If it

affirms the greatness and nobility of the human person (whether innate

or achievable by a special infusion of divine grace), it must demand

fundamental reconstruction of the industrial order because in theory

this order denies and in practice it thwarts every such affirmation. On

the other hand, if Christianity continues to compromise as it is now

doing, it cannot maintain even such spiritual values as it now hugs to

its breast. Its faith in God will decline--it is now declining--with

its inability to see or produce the Christlike in the common man

engaged in the common occupations of the day. Its continuity with Jesus

will grow thinner and thinner because of growing inability to speak

or understand the plainest of his language. The Protestant churches

will more and more become clubs for the enjoyment of conventional and

uncreative idealisms, and the Catholic church will protect itself from

the advancing spiritual disintegration of Western society by immuring

the sacramental life more and more in places of worship and in the

esthetic appeal of symbolism. In both Protestantism and Catholicism,

mystical experiences will have the character of a flight from life

instead of being “the practice of the presence of God” not only in our

kitchens but also in our factories, our department stores, and our

offices of finance. Such a mystical flight has begun, in fact, not

guessing its actual route, innocent of the possibility that it may even

be another instrument whereby Mammon conceals the fact that it is--just

Mammon.