In an increasing proportion as time goes on, the anthropomorphic
cult, with its code of devout observations, suffers a progressive
disintegration through the stress of economic exigencies and the decay
of the system of status. As this disintegration proceeds, there come to
be associated and blended with the devout attitude certain other motives
and impulses that are not always of an anthropomorphic origin, nor
traceable to the habit of personal subservience. Not all of these
subsidiary impulses that blend with the habit of devoutness in the later
devotional life are altogether congruous with the devout attitude or
with the anthropomorphic apprehension of the sequence of phenomena. The
origin being not the same, their action upon the scheme of devout
life is also not in the same direction. In many ways they traverse the
underlying norm of subservience or vicarious life to which the code of
devout observations and the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal institutions
are to be traced as their substantial basis. Through the presence of
these alien motives the social and industrial regime of status gradually
disintegrates, and the canon of personal subservience loses the support
derived from an unbroken tradition. Extraneous habits and proclivities
encroach upon the field of action occupied by this canon, and it
presently comes about that the ecclesiastical and sacerdotal structures
are partially converted to other uses, in some measure alien to the
purposes of the scheme of devout life as it stood in the days of the
most vigorous and characteristic development of the priesthood.
Among these alien motives which affect the devout scheme in its
later growth, may be mentioned the motives of charity and of social
good-fellowship, or conviviality; or, in more general terms, the various
expressions of the sense of human solidarity and sympathy. It may
be added that these extraneous uses of the ecclesiastical structure
contribute materially to its survival in name and form even among
people who may be ready to give up the substance of it. A still more
characteristic and more pervasive alien element in the motives
which have gone to formally uphold the scheme of devout life is that
non-reverent sense of aesthetic congruity with the environment, which is
left as a residue of the latter-day act of worship after elimination
of its anthropomorphic content. This has done good service for the
maintenance of the sacerdotal institution through blending with the
motive of subservience. This sense of impulse of aesthetic congruity
is not primarily of an economic character, but it has a considerable
indirect effect in shaping the habit of mind of the individual for
economic purposes in the later stages of industrial development;
its most perceptible effect in this regard goes in the direction of
mitigating the somewhat pronounced self-regarding bias that has been
transmitted by tradition from the earlier, more competent phases of the
regime of status. The economic bearing of this impulse is therefore seen
to transverse that of the devout attitude; the former goes to qualify,
if not eliminate, the self-regarding bias, through sublation of the
antithesis or antagonism of self and not-self; while the latter, being
and expression of the sense of personal subservience and mastery, goes
to accentuate this antithesis and to insist upon the divergence between
the self-regarding interest and the interests of the generically human
life process.
This non-invidious residue of the religious life--the sense of communion
with the environment, or with the generic life process--as well as the
impulse of charity or of sociability, act in a pervasive way to shape
men's habits of thought for the economic purpose. But the action of
all this class of proclivities is somewhat vague, and their effects are
difficult to trace in detail. So much seems clear, however, as that the
action of this entire class of motives or aptitudes tends in a direction
contrary to the underlying principles of the institution of the leisure
class as already formulated. The basis of that institution, as well
as of the anthropomorphic cults associated with it in the cultural
development, is the habit of invidious comparison; and this habit is
incongruous with the exercise of the aptitudes now in question. The
substantial canons of the leisure-class scheme of life are a conspicuous
waste of time and substance and a withdrawal from the industrial
process; while the particular aptitudes here in question assert
themselves, on the economic side, in a deprecation of waste and of
a futile manner of life, and in an impulse to participation in or
identification with the life process, whether it be on the economic side
or in any other of its phases or aspects.
It is plain that these aptitudes and habits of life to which they give
rise where circumstances favor their expression, or where they assert
themselves in a dominant way, run counter to the leisure-class scheme of
life; but it is not clear that life under the leisure-class scheme, as
seen in the later stages of its development, tends consistently to the
repression of these aptitudes or to exemption from the habits of
thought in which they express themselves. The positive discipline of the
leisure-class scheme of life goes pretty much all the other way. In its
positive discipline, by prescription and by selective elimination, the
leisure-class scheme favors the all-pervading and all-dominating primacy
of the canons of waste and invidious comparison at every conjuncture
of life. But in its negative effects the tendency of the leisure-class
discipline is not so unequivocally true to the fundamental canons of the
scheme. In its regulation of human activity for the purpose of
pecuniary decency the leisure-class canon insists on withdrawal from
the industrial process. That is to say, it inhibits activity in the
directions in which the impecunious members of the community habitually
put forth their efforts. Especially in the case of women, and more
particularly as regards the upper-class and upper-middle-class women
of advanced industrial communities, this inhibition goes so far as to
insist on withdrawal even from the emulative process of accumulation by
the quasi-predator methods of the pecuniary occupations.
The pecuniary or the leisure-class culture, which set out as an
emulative variant of the impulse of workmanship, is in its latest
development beginning to neutralize its own ground, by eliminating
the habit of invidious comparison in respect of efficiency, or even
of pecuniary standing. On the other hand, the fact that members of the
leisure class, both men and women, are to some extent exempt from the
necessity of finding a livelihood in a competitive struggle with
their fellows, makes it possible for members of this class not only to
survive, but even, within bounds, to follow their bent in case they are
not gifted with the aptitudes which make for success in the competitive
struggle. That is to say, in the latest and fullest development of the
institution, the livelihood of members of this class does not depend
on the possession and the unremitting exercise of those aptitudes are
therefore greater in the higher grades of the leisure class than in the
general average of a population living under the competitive system.
In an earlier chapter, in discussing the conditions of survival of
archaic traits, it has appeared that the peculiar position of the
leisure class affords exceptionally favorable chances for the survival
of traits which characterize the type of human nature proper to an
earlier and obsolete cultural stage. The class is sheltered from the
stress of economic exigencies, and is in this sense withdrawn from
the rude impact of forces which make for adaptation to the economic
situation. The survival in the leisure class, and under the
leisure-class scheme of life, of traits and types that are reminiscent
of the predatory culture has already been discussed. These aptitudes
and habits have an exceptionally favorable chance of survival under the
leisure-class regime. Not only does the sheltered pecuniary position of
the leisure class afford a situation favorable to the survival of such
individuals as are not gifted with the complement of aptitudes
required for serviceability in the modern industrial process; but
the leisure-class canons of reputability at the same time enjoin the
conspicuous exercise of certain predatory aptitudes. The employments
in which the predatory aptitudes find exercise serve as an evidence of
wealth, birth, and withdrawal from the industrial process. The survival
of the predatory traits under the leisure-class culture is furthered
both negatively, through the industrial exemption of the class, and
positively, through the sanction of the leisure-class canons of decency.
With respect to the survival of traits characteristic of the
ante-predatory savage culture the case is in some degree different.
The sheltered position of the leisure class favors the survival also of
these traits; but the exercise of the aptitudes for peace and good-will
does not have the affirmative sanction of the code of proprieties.
Individuals gifted with a temperament that is reminiscent of the
ante-predatory culture are placed at something of an advantage within
the leisure class, as compared with similarly gifted individuals outside
the class, in that they are not under a pecuniary necessity to
thwart these aptitudes that make for a non-competitive life; but such
individuals are still exposed to something of a moral constraint
which urges them to disregard these inclinations, in that the code of
proprieties enjoins upon them habits of life based on the predatory
aptitudes. So long as the system of status remains intact, and so long
as the leisure class has other lines of non-industrial activity to take
to than obvious killing of time in aimless and wasteful fatigation,
so long no considerable departure from the leisure-class scheme of
reputable life is to be looked for. The occurrence of non-predatory
temperament with the class at that stage is to be looked upon as a case
of sporadic reversion. But the reputable non-industrial outlets for
the human propensity to action presently fail, through the advance of
economic development, the disappearance of large game, the decline of
war, the obsolescence of proprietary government, and the decay of the
priestly office. When this happens, the situation begins to change.
Human life must seek expression in one direction if it may not in
another; and if the predatory outlet fails, relief is sought elsewhere.
As indicated above, the exemption from pecuniary stress has been
carried farther in the case of the leisure-class women of the advanced
industrial communities than in that of any other considerable group of
persons. The women may therefore be expected to show a more pronounced
reversion to a non-invidious temperament than the men. But there is also
among men of the leisure class a perceptible increase in the range and
scope of activities that proceed from aptitudes which are not to be
classed as self-regarding, and the end of which is not an invidious
distinction. So, for instance, the greater number of men who have to do
with industry in the way of pecuniarily managing an enterprise take
some interest and some pride in seeing that the work is well done and
is industrially effective, and this even apart from the profit which
may result from any improvement of this kind. The efforts of
commercial clubs and manufacturers' organizations in this direction of
non-invidious advancement of industrial efficiency are also well know.
The tendency to some other than an invidious purpose in life has worked
out in a multitude of organizations, the purpose of which is some work
of charity or of social amelioration. These organizations are often of
a quasi-religious or pseudo-religious character, and are participated in
by both men and women. Examples will present themselves in abundance
on reflection, but for the purpose of indicating the range of the
propensities in question and of characterizing them, some of the
more obvious concrete cases may be cited. Such, for instance, are the
agitation for temperance and similar social reforms, for prison reform,
for the spread of education, for the suppression of vice, and for the
avoidance of war by arbitration, disarmament, or other means; such
are, in some measure, university settlements, neighborhood guilds, the
various organizations typified by the Young Men's Christian Association
and Young People's Society for Christian Endeavor, sewing-clubs, art
clubs, and even commercial clubs; such are also, in some slight measure,
the pecuniary foundations of semi-public establishments for charity,
education, or amusement, whether they are endowed by wealthy individuals
or by contributions collected from persons of smaller means--in so far
as these establishments are not of a religious character.
It is of course not intended to say that these efforts proceed entirely
from other motives than those of a self-regarding kind. What can be
claimed is that other motives are present in the common run of cases,
and that the perceptibly greater prevalence of effort of this kind under
the circumstances of the modern industrial life than under the unbroken
regime of the principle of status, indicates the presence in modern life
of an effective scepticism with respect to the full legitimacy of an
emulative scheme of life. It is a matter of sufficient notoriety to have
become a commonplace jest that extraneous motives are commonly present
among the incentives to this class of work--motives of a self-regarding
kind, and especially the motive of an invidious distinction. To such an
extent is this true, that many ostensible works of disinterested public
spirit are no doubt initiated and carried on with a view primarily to
the enhance repute or even to the pecuniary gain, of their promoters. In
the case of some considerable groups of organizations or establishments
of this kind the invidious motive is apparently the dominant motive both
with the initiators of the work and with their supporters. This last
remark would hold true especially with respect to such works as lend
distinction to their doer through large and conspicuous expenditure; as,
for example, the foundation of a university or of a public library
or museum; but it is also, and perhaps equally, true of the more
commonplace work of participation in such organizations. These serve
to authenticate the pecuniary reputability of their members, as well as
gratefully to keep them in mind of their superior status by pointing
the contrast between themselves and the lower-lying humanity in whom the
work of amelioration is to be wrought; as, for example, the university
settlement, which now has some vogue. But after all allowances and
deductions have been made, there is left some remainder of motives of
a non-emulative kind. The fact itself that distinction or a decent good
fame is sought by this method is evidence of a prevalent sense of
the legitimacy, and of the presumptive effectual presence, of a
non-emulative, non-invidious interest, as a consistent factor in the
habits of thought of modern communities.
In all this latter-day range of leisure-class activities that proceed
on the basis of a non-invidious and non-religious interest, it is to
be noted that the women participate more actively and more persistently
than the men--except, of course, in the case of such works as require
a large expenditure of means. The dependent pecuniary position of the
women disables them for work requiring large expenditure. As regards
the general range of ameliorative work, the members of the priesthood
or clergy of the less naively devout sects, or the secularized
denominations, are associated with the class of women. This is as the
theory would have it. In other economic relations, also, this clergy
stands in a somewhat equivocal position between the class of women and
that of the men engaged in economic pursuits. By tradition and by the
prevalent sense of the proprieties, both the clergy and the women of
the well-to-do classes are placed in the position of a vicarious leisure
class; with both classes the characteristic relation which goes to form
the habits of thought of the class is a relation of subservience--that
is to say, an economic relation conceived in personal terms; in both
classes there is consequently perceptible a special proneness to
construe phenomena in terms of personal relation rather than of causal
sequence; both classes are so inhibited by the canons of decency from
the ceremonially unclean processes of the lucrative or productive
occupations as to make participation in the industrial life process
of today a moral impossibility for them. The result of this ceremonial
exclusion from productive effort of the vulgar sort is to draft a
relatively large share of the energies of the modern feminine
and priestly classes into the service of other interests than the
self-regarding one. The code leaves no alternative direction in which
the impulse to purposeful action may find expression. The effect of a
consistent inhibition on industrially useful activity in the case of the
leisure-class women shows itself in a restless assertion of the impulse
to workmanship in other directions than that of business activity. As
has been noticed already, the everyday life of the well-to-do women and
the clergy contains a larger element of status than that of the average
of the men, especially than that of the men engaged in the modern
industrial occupations proper. Hence the devout attitude survives in a
better state of preservation among these classes than among the common
run of men in the modern communities. Hence an appreciable share of the
energy which seeks expression in a non-lucrative employment among these
members of the vicarious leisure classes may be expected to eventuate in
devout observances and works of piety. Hence, in part, the excess of
the devout proclivity in women, spoken of in the last chapter. But it
is more to the present point to note the effect of this proclivity
in shaping the action and coloring the purposes of the non-lucrative
movements and organizations here under discussion. Where this
devout coloring is present it lowers the immediate efficiency of
the organizations for any economic end to which their efforts may be
directed. Many organizations, charitable and ameliorative, divide their
attention between the devotional and the secular well-being of the
people whose interests they aim to further. It can scarcely be doubted
that if they were to give an equally serious attention and effort
undividedly to the secular interests of these people, the immediate
economic value of their work should be appreciably higher than it is.
It might of course similarly be said, if this were the place to say it,
that the immediate efficiency of these works of amelioration for the
devout might be greater if it were not hampered with the secular motives
and aims which are usually present.
Some deduction is to be made from the economic value of this class of
non-invidious enterprise, on account of the intrusion of the devotional
interest. But there are also deductions to be made on account of the
presence of other alien motives which more or less broadly traverse
the economic trend of this non-emulative expression of the instinct
of workmanship. To such an extent is this seen to be true on a closer
scrutiny, that, when all is told, it may even appear that this general
class of enterprises is of an altogether dubious economic value--as
measured in terms of the fullness or facility of life of the individuals
or classes to whose amelioration the enterprise is directed.
For instance, many of the efforts now in reputable vogue for the
amelioration of the indigent population of large cities are of the
nature, in great part, of a mission of culture. It is by this means
sought to accelerate the rate of speed at which given elements of the
upper-class culture find acceptance in the everyday scheme of life of
the lower classes. The solicitude of "settlements," for example, is in
part directed to enhance the industrial efficiency of the poor and to
teach them the more adequate utilization of the means at hand; but it
is also no less consistently directed to the inculcation, by precept and
example, of certain punctilios of upper-class propriety in manners and
customs. The economic substance of these proprieties will commonly be
found on scrutiny to be a conspicuous waste of time and goods. Those
good people who go out to humanize the poor are commonly, and advisedly,
extremely scrupulous and silently insistent in matters of decorum and
the decencies of life. They are commonly persons of an exemplary life
and gifted with a tenacious insistence on ceremonial cleanness in the
various items of their daily consumption. The cultural or civilizing
efficacy of this inculcation of correct habits of thought with respect
to the consumption of time and commodities is scarcely to be overrated;
nor is its economic value to the individual who acquires these higher
and more reputable ideals inconsiderable. Under the circumstances of
the existing pecuniary culture, the reputability, and consequently
the success, of the individual is in great measure dependent on his
proficiency in demeanor and methods of consumption that argue habitual
waste of time and goods. But as regards the ulterior economic bearing
of this training in worthier methods of life, it is to be said that
the effect wrought is in large part a substitution of costlier or
less efficient methods of accomplishing the same material results, in
relations where the material result is the fact of substantial economic
value. The propaganda of culture is in great part an inculcation of
new tastes, or rather of a new schedule of proprieties, which have been
adapted to the upper-class scheme of life under the guidance of the
leisure-class formulation of the principles of status and pecuniary
decency. This new schedule of proprieties is intruded into the
lower-class scheme of life from the code elaborated by an element of
the population whose life lies outside the industrial process; and this
intrusive schedule can scarcely be expected to fit the exigencies of
life for these lower classes more adequately than the schedule already
in vogue among them, and especially not more adequately than the
schedule which they are themselves working out under the stress of
modern industrial life.
All this of course does not question the fact that the proprieties
of the substituted schedule are more decorous than those which they
displace. The doubt which presents itself is simply a doubt as to the
economic expediency of this work of regeneration--that is to say, the
economic expediency in that immediate and material bearing in which the
effects of the change can be ascertained with some degree of confidence,
and as viewed from the standpoint not of the individual but of the
facility of life of the collectivity. For an appreciation of the
economic expediency of these enterprises of amelioration, therefore,
their effective work is scarcely to be taken at its face value, even
where the aim of the enterprise is primarily an economic one and where
the interest on which it proceeds is in no sense self-regarding or
invidious. The economic reform wrought is largely of the nature of a
permutation in the methods of conspicuous waste.
But something further is to be said with respect to the character of the
disinterested motives and canons of procedure in all work of this
class that is affected by the habits of thought characteristic of the
pecuniary culture; and this further consideration may lead to a further
qualification of the conclusions already reached. As has been seen in
an earlier chapter, the canons of reputability or decency under the
pecuniary culture insist on habitual futility of effort as the mark of a
pecuniarily blameless life. There results not only a habit of disesteem
of useful occupations, but there results also what is of more decisive
consequence in guiding the action of any organized body of people that
lays claim to social good repute. There is a tradition which requires
that one should not be vulgarly familiar with any of the processes or
details that have to do with the material necessities of life. One may
meritoriously show a quantitative interest in the well-being of the
vulgar, through subscriptions or through work on managing committees and
the like. One may, perhaps even more meritoriously, show solicitude in
general and in detail for the cultural welfare of the vulgar, in the
way of contrivances for elevating their tastes and affording them
opportunities for spiritual amelioration. But one should not betray an
intimate knowledge of the material circumstances of vulgar life, or of
the habits of thought of the vulgar classes, such as would effectually
direct the efforts of these organizations to a materially useful end.
This reluctance to avow an unduly intimate knowledge of the lower-class
conditions of life in detail of course prevails in very different
degrees in different individuals; but there is commonly enough of
it present collectively in any organization of the kind in question
profoundly to influence its course of action. By its cumulative action
in shaping the usage and precedents of any such body, this shrinking
from an imputation of unseemly familiarity with vulgar life tends
gradually to set aside the initial motives of the enterprise, in favor
of certain guiding principles of good repute, ultimately reducible to
terms of pecuniary merit. So that in an organization of long standing
the initial motive of furthering the facility of life in these classes
comes gradually to be an ostensible motive only, and the vulgarly
effective work of the organization tends to obsolescence.
What is true of the efficiency of organizations for non-invidious
work in this respect is true also as regards the work of individuals
proceeding on the same motives; though it perhaps holds true with more
qualification for individuals than for organized enterprises. The habit
of gauging merit by the leisure-class canons of wasteful expenditure and
unfamiliarity with vulgar life, whether on the side of production or of
consumption, is necessarily strong in the individuals who aspire to do
some work of public utility. And if the individual should forget his
station and turn his efforts to vulgar effectiveness, the common sense
of the community-the sense of pecuniary decency--would presently
reject his work and set him right. An example of this is seen in the
administration of bequests made by public-spirited men for the single
purpose (at least ostensibly) of furthering the facility of human life
in some particular respect. The objects for which bequests of this class
are most frequently made at present are
are schools, libraries, hospitals, and asylums for the infirm or
unfortunate. The avowed purpose of the donor in these cases is the
amelioration of human life in the particular respect which is named
in the bequest; but it will be found an invariable rule that in
the execution of the work not a little of other motives, frequency
incompatible with the initial motive, is present and determines the
particular disposition eventually made of a good share of the means
which have been set apart by the bequest. Certain funds, for instance,
may have been set apart as a foundation for a foundling asylum or a
retreat for invalids. The diversion of expenditure to honorific waste in
such cases is not uncommon enough to cause surprise or even to raise a
smile. An appreciable share of the funds is spent in the construction
of an edifice faced with some aesthetically objectionable but expensive
stone, covered with grotesque and incongruous details, and designed, in
its battlemented walls and turrets and its massive portals and strategic
approaches, to suggest certain barbaric methods of warfare. The interior
of the structure shows the same pervasive guidance of the canons of
conspicuous waste and predatory exploit. The windows, for instance,
to go no farther into detail, are placed with a view to impress their
pecuniary excellence upon the chance beholder from the outside, rather
than with a view to effectiveness for their ostensible end in the
convenience or comfort of the beneficiaries within; and the detail of
interior arrangement is required to conform itself as best it may to
this alien but imperious requirement of pecuniary beauty.
In all this, of course, it is not to be presumed that the donor would
have found fault, or that he would have done otherwise if he had taken
control in person; it appears that in those cases where such a personal
direction is exercised--where the enterprise is conducted by direct
expenditure and superintendence instead of by bequest--the aims and
methods of management are not different in this respect. Nor would the
beneficiaries, or the outside observers whose ease or vanity are not
immediately touched, be pleased with a different disposition of the
funds. It would suit no one to have the enterprise conducted with a view
directly to the most economical and effective use of the means at hand
for the initial, material end of the foundation. All concerned, whether
their interest is immediate and self-regarding, or contemplative only,
agree that some considerable share of the expenditure should go to
the higher or spiritual needs derived from the habit of an invidious
comparison in predatory exploit and pecuniary waste. But this only goes
to say that the canons of emulative and pecuniary reputability so far
pervade the common sense of the community as to permit no escape or
evasion, even in the case of an enterprise which ostensibly proceeds
entirely on the basis of a non-invidious interest.
It may even be that the enterprise owes its honorific virtue, as a means
of enhancing the donor's good repute, to the imputed presence of this
non-invidious motive; but that does not hinder the invidious interest
from guiding the expenditure. The effectual presence of motives of an
emulative or invidious origin in non-emulative works of this kind
might be shown at length and with detail, in any one of the classes of
enterprise spoken of above. Where these honorific details occur, in such
cases, they commonly masquerade under designations that belong in the
field of the aesthetic, ethical or economic interest. These special
motives, derived from the standards and canons of the pecuniary culture,
act surreptitiously to divert effort of a non-invidious kind from
effective service, without disturbing the agent's sense of good
intention or obtruding upon his consciousness the substantial futility
of his work. Their effect might be traced through the entire range
of that schedule of non-invidious, meliorative enterprise that is so
considerable a feature, and especially so conspicuous a feature, in the
overt scheme of life of the well-to-do. But the theoretical bearing is
perhaps clear enough and may require no further illustration; especially
as some detailed attention will be given to one of these lines of
enterprise--the establishments for the higher learning--in another
connection.
Under the circumstances of the sheltered situation in which the leisure
class is placed there seems, therefore, to be something of a reversion
to the range of non-invidious impulses that characterizes the
ante-predatory savage culture. The reversion comprises both the sense of
workmanship and the proclivity to indolence and good-fellowship. But
in the modern scheme of life canons of conduct based on pecuniary or
invidious merit stand in the way of a free exercise of these impulses;
and the dominant presence of these canons of conduct goes far to divert
such efforts as are made on the basis of the non-invidious interest to
the service of that invidious interest on which the pecuniary culture
rests. The canons of pecuniary decency are reducible for the present
purpose to the principles of waste, futility, and ferocity. The
requirements of decency are imperiously present in meliorative
enterprise as in other lines of conduct, and exercise a selective
surveillance over the details of conduct and management in any
enterprise. By guiding and adapting the method in detail, these canons
of decency go far to make all non-invidious aspiration or effort
nugatory. The pervasive, impersonal, un-eager principle of futility is
at hand from day to day and works obstructively to hinder the effectual
expression of so much of the surviving ante-predatory aptitudes as is to
be classed under the instinct of workmanship; but its presence does not
preclude the transmission of those aptitudes or the continued recurrence
of an impulse to find expression for them.
In the later and farther development of the pecuniary culture, the
requirement of withdrawal from the industrial process in order to
avoid social odium is carried so far as to comprise abstention from
the emulative employments. At this advanced stage the pecuniary culture
negatively favors the assertion of the non-invidious propensities
by relaxing the stress laid on the merit of emulative, predatory,
or pecuniary occupations, as compared with those of an industrial
or productive kind. As was noticed above, the requirement of such
withdrawal from all employment that is of human use applies more
rigorously to the upper-class women than to any other class, unless the
priesthood of certain cults might be cited as an exception, perhaps
more apparent than real, to this rule. The reason for the more extreme
insistence on a futile life for this class of women than for the men
of the same pecuniary and social grade lies in their being not only an
upper-grade leisure class but also at the same time a vicarious
leisure class. There is in their case a double ground for a consistent
withdrawal from useful effort.
It has been well and repeatedly said by popular writers and speakers who
reflect the common sense of intelligent people on questions of social
structure and function that the position of woman in any community
is the most striking index of the level of culture attained by the
community, and it might be added, by any given class in the community.
This remark is perhaps truer as regards the stage of economic
development than as regards development in any other respect. At the
same time the position assigned to the woman in the accepted scheme of
life, in any community or under any culture, is in a very great degree
an expression of traditions which have been shaped by the circumstances
of an earlier phase of development, and which have been but partially
adapted to the existing economic circumstances, or to the existing
exigencies of temperament and habits of mind by which the women living
under this modern economic situation are actuated.
The fact has already been remarked upon incidentally in the course of
the discussion of the growth of economic institutions generally, and
in particular in speaking of vicarious leisure and of dress, that the
position of women in the modern economic scheme is more widely and
more consistently at variance with the promptings of the instinct of
workmanship than is the position of the men of the same classes. It
is also apparently true that the woman's temperament includes a larger
share of this instinct that approves peace and disapproves futility.
It is therefore not a fortuitous circumstance that the women of modern
industrial communities show a livelier sense of the discrepancy
between the accepted scheme of life and the exigencies of the economic
situation.
The several phases of the "woman question" have brought out in
intelligible form the extent to which the life of women in modern
society, and in the polite circles especially, is regulated by a body of
common sense formulated under the economic circumstances of an earlier
phase of development. It is still felt that woman's life, in its civil,
economic, and social bearing, is essentially and normally a vicarious
life, the merit or demerit of which is, in the nature of things, to
be imputed to some other individual who stands in some relation of
ownership or tutelage to the woman. So, for instance, any action on the
part of a woman which traverses an injunction of the accepted schedule
of proprieties is felt to reflect immediately upon the honor of the man
whose woman she is. There may of course be some sense of incongruity
in the mind of any one passing an opinion of this kind on the woman's
frailty or perversity; but the common-sense judgment of the community in
such matters is, after all, delivered without much hesitation, and few
men would question the legitimacy of their sense of an outraged tutelage
in any case that might arise. On the other hand, relatively little
discredit attaches to a woman through the evil deeds of the man with
whom her life is associated.
The good and beautiful scheme of life, then--that is to say the scheme
to which we are habituated--assigns to the woman a "sphere" ancillary
to the activity of the man; and it is felt that any departure from the
traditions of her assigned round of duties is unwomanly. If the
question is as to civil rights or the suffrage, our common sense in the
matter--that is to say the logical deliverance of our general scheme
of life upon the point in question--says that the woman should be
represented in the body politic and before the law, not immediately in
her own person, but through the mediation of the head of the
household to which she belongs. It is unfeminine in her to aspire to a
self-directing, self-centered life; and our common sense tells us that
her direct participation in the affairs of the community, civil or
industrial, is a menace to that social order which expresses our habits
of thought as they have been formed under the guidance of the traditions
of the pecuniary culture. "All this fume and froth of 'emancipating
woman from the slavery of man' and so on, is, to use the chaste and
expressive language of Elizabeth Cady Stanton inversely, 'utter rot.'
The social relations of the sexes are fixed by nature. Our entire
civilization--that is whatever is good in it--is based on the home."
The "home" is the household with a male head. This view, but commonly
expressed even more chastely, is the prevailing view of the woman's
status, not only among the common run of the men of civilized
communities, but among the women as well. Women have a very alert sense
of what the scheme of proprieties requires, and while it is true that
many of them are ill at ease under the details which the code imposes,
there are few who do not recognize that the existing moral order, of
necessity and by the divine right of prescription, places the woman in
a position ancillary to the man. In the last analysis, according to her
own sense of what is good and beautiful, the woman's life is, and in
theory must be, an expression of the man's life at the second remove.
But in spite of this pervading sense of what is the good and natural
place for the woman, there is also perceptible an incipient development
of sentiment to the effect that this whole arrangement of tutelage and
vicarious life and imputation of merit and demerit is somehow a mistake.
Or, at least, that even if it may be a natural growth and a good
arrangement in its time and place, and in spite of its patent aesthetic
value, still it does not adequately serve the more everyday ends of life
in a modern industrial community. Even that large and substantial body
of well-bred, upper and middle-class women to whose dispassionate,
matronly sense of the traditional proprieties this relation of status
commends itself as fundamentally and eternally right-even these, whose
attitude is conservative, commonly find some slight discrepancy in
detail between things as they are and things as they should be in this
respect. But that less manageable body of modern women who, by force of
youth, education, or temperament, are in some degree out of touch with
the traditions of status received from the barbarian culture, and
in whom there is, perhaps, an undue reversion to the impulse of
self-expression and workmanship--these are touched with a sense of
grievance too vivid to leave them at rest.
In this "New-Woman" movement--as these blind and incoherent efforts to
rehabilitate the woman's pre-glacial standing have been named--there
are at least two elements discernible, both of which are of an economic
character. These two elements or motives are expressed by the double
watchword, "Emancipation" and "Work." Each of these words is recognized
to stand for something in the way of a wide-spread sense of grievance.
The prevalence of the sentiment is recognized even by people who do not
see that there is any real ground for a grievance in the situation as
it stands today. It is among the women of the well-to-do classes, in the
communities which are farthest advanced in industrial development, that
this sense of a grievance to be redressed is most alive and finds most
frequent expression. That is to say, in other words, there is a demand,
more or less serious, for emancipation from all relation of status,
tutelage, or vicarious life; and the revulsion asserts itself especially
among the class of women upon whom the scheme of life handed down from
the regime of status imposes with least litigation a vicarious life, and
in those communities whose economic development has departed farthest
from the circumstances to which this traditional scheme is adapted. The
demand comes from that portion of womankind which is excluded by the
canons of good repute from all effectual work, and which is closely
reserved for a life of leisure and conspicuous consumption.
More than one critic of this new-woman movement has misapprehended its
motive. The case of the American "new woman" has lately been summed
up with some warmth by a popular observer of social phenomena: "She is
petted by her husband, the most devoted and hard-working of husbands in
the world.... She is the superior of her husband in education, and
in almost every respect. She is surrounded by the most numerous and
delicate attentions. Yet she is not satisfied.... The Anglo-Saxon 'new
woman' is the most ridiculous production of modern times, and destined
to be the most ghastly failure of the century." Apart from the
deprecation--perhaps well placed--which is contained in this
presentment, it adds nothing but obscurity to the woman question. The
grievance of the new woman is made up of those things which this typical
characterization of the movement urges as reasons why she should be
content. She is petted, and is permitted, or even required, to consume
largely and conspicuously--vicariously for her husband or other
natural guardian. She is exempted, or debarred, from vulgarly useful
employment--in order to perform leisure vicariously for the good repute
of her natural (pecuniary) guardian. These offices are the conventional
marks of the un-free, at the same time that they are incompatible with
the human impulse to purposeful activity. But the woman is endowed
with her share-which there is reason to believe is more than an even
share--of the instinct of workmanship, to which futility of life or of
expenditure is obnoxious. She must unfold her life activity in response
to the direct, unmediated stimuli of the economic environment with which
she is in contact. The impulse is perhaps stronger upon the woman
than upon the man to live her own life in her own way and to enter the
industrial process of the community at something nearer than the second
remove.
So long as the woman's place is consistently that of a drudge, she is,
in the average of cases, fairly contented with her lot. She not only
has something tangible and purposeful to do, but she has also no time or
thought to spare for a rebellious assertion of such human propensity to
self-direction as she has inherited. And after the stage of universal
female drudgery is passed, and a vicarious leisure without strenuous
application becomes the accredited employment of the women of the
well-to-do classes, the prescriptive force of the canon of pecuniary
decency, which requires the observance of ceremonial futility on their
part, will long preserve high-minded women from any sentimental leaning
to self-direction and a "sphere of usefulness." This is especially true
during the earlier phases of the pecuniary culture, while the leisure
of the leisure class is still in great measure a predatory activity, an
active assertion of mastery in which there is enough of tangible
purpose of an invidious kind to admit of its being taken seriously as an
employment to which one may without shame put one's hand. This condition
of things has obviously lasted well down into the present in some
communities. It continues to hold to a different extent for different
individuals, varying with the vividness of the sense of status and with
the feebleness of the impulse to workmanship with which the individual
is endowed. But where the economic structure of the community has so
far outgrown the scheme of life based on status that the relation of
personal subservience is no longer felt to be the sole "natural" human
relation; there the ancient habit of purposeful activity will begin
to assert itself in the less conformable individuals against the more
recent, relatively superficial, relatively ephemeral habits and views
which the predatory and the pecuniary culture have contributed to our
scheme of life. These habits and views begin to lose their coercive
force for the community or the class in question so soon as the habit of
mind and the views of life due to the predatory and the quasi-peaceable
discipline cease to be in fairly close accord with the later-developed
economic situation. This is evident in the case of the industrious
classes of modern communities; for them the leisure-class scheme of life
has lost much of its binding force, especially as regards the element of
status. But it is also visibly being verified in the case of the upper
classes, though not in the same manner.
The habits derived from the predatory and quasi-peaceable culture are
relatively ephemeral variants of certain underlying propensities and
mental characteristics of the race; which it owes to the protracted
discipline of the earlier, proto-anthropoid cultural stage of peaceable,
relatively undifferentiated economic life carried on in contact with a
relatively simple and invariable material environment. When the habits
superinduced by the emulative method of life have ceased to enjoy the
section of existing economic exigencies, a process of disintegration
sets in whereby the habits of thought of more recent growth and of a
less generic character to some extent yield the ground before the more
ancient and more pervading spiritual characteristics of the race.
In a sense, then, the new-woman movement marks a reversion to a more
generic type of human character, or to a less differentiated
expression of human nature. It is a type of human nature which is to be
characterized as proto-anthropoid, and, as regards the substance if not
the form of its dominant traits, it belongs to a cultural stage that may
be classed as possibly sub-human. The particular movement or evolutional
feature in question of course shares this characterization with the rest
of the later social development, in so far as this social development
shows evidence of a reversion to the spiritual attitude that
characterizes the earlier, undifferentiated stage of economic
revolution. Such evidence of a general tendency to reversion from the
dominance of the invidious interest is not entirely wanting, although it
is neither plentiful nor unquestionably convincing. The general decay
of the sense of status in modern industrial communities goes some way as
evidence in this direction; and the perceptible return to a disapproval
of futility in human life, and a disapproval of such activities as serve
only the individual gain at the cost of the collectivity or at the
cost of other social groups, is evidence to a like effect. There is a
perceptible tendency to deprecate the infliction of pain, as well as to
discredit all marauding enterprises, even where these expressions of the
invidious interest do not tangibly work to the material detriment of
the community or of the individual who passes an opinion on them. It
may even be said that in the modern industrial communities the average,
dispassionate sense of men says that the ideal character is a character
which makes for peace, good-will, and economic efficiency, rather than
for a life of self-seeking, force, fraud, and mastery.
The influence of the leisure class is not consistently for or against
the rehabilitation of this proto-anthropoid human nature. So far
as concerns the chance of survival of individuals endowed with an
exceptionally large share of the primitive traits, the sheltered
position of the class favors its members directly by withdrawing them
from the pecuniary struggle; but indirectly, through the leisure-class
canons of conspicuous waste of goods and effort, the institution of a
leisure class lessens the chance of survival of such individuals in the
entire body of the population. The decent requirements of waste absorb
the surplus energy of the population in an invidious struggle and leave
no margin for the non-invidious expression of life. The remoter, less
tangible, spiritual effects of the discipline of decency go in the same
direction and work perhaps more effectually to the same end. The
canons of decent life are an elaboration of the principle of invidious
comparison, and they accordingly act consistently to inhibit all
non-invidious effort and to inculcate the self-regarding attitude.
Chapter Fourteen ~~ The Higher Learning as an Expression of
the Pecuniary Culture
To the end that suitable habits of thought on certain heads may be
conserved in the incoming generation, a scholastic discipline is
sanctioned by the common sense of the community and incorporated into
the accredited scheme of life. The habits of thought which are so
formed under the guidance of teachers and scholastic traditions have
an economic value--a value as affecting the serviceability of the
individual--no less real than the similar economic value of the habits
of thought formed without such guidance under the discipline of everyday
life. Whatever characteristics of the accredited scholastic scheme and
discipline are traceable to the predilections of the leisure class or to
the guidance of the canons of pecuniary merit are to be set down to the
account of that institution, and whatever economic value these features
of the educational scheme possess are the expression in detail of the
value of that institution. It will be in place, therefore, to point out
any peculiar features of the educational system which are traceable to
the leisure-class scheme of life, whether as regards the aim and method
of the discipline, or as regards the compass and character of the body
of knowledge inculcated. It is in learning proper, and more particularly
in the higher learning, that the influence of leisure-class ideals is
most patent; and since the purpose here is not to make an exhaustive
collation of data showing the effect of the pecuniary culture upon
education, but rather to illustrate the method and trend of the
leisure-class influence in education, a survey of certain salient
features of the higher learning, such as may serve this purpose, is all
that will be attempted.
In point of derivation and early development, learning is somewhat
closely related to the devotional function of the community,
particularly to the body of observances in which the service rendered
the supernatural leisure class expresses itself. The service by which it
is sought to conciliate supernatural agencies in the primitive cults is
not an industrially profitable employment of the community's time and
effort. It is, therefore, in great part, to be classed as a vicarious
leisure performed for the supernatural powers with whom negotiations
are carried on and whose good-will the service and the professions of
subservience are conceived to procure. In great part, the early learning
consisted in an acquisition of knowledge and facility in the service of
a supernatural agent. It was therefore closely analogous in character to
the training required for the domestic service of a temporal master. To
a great extent, the knowledge acquired under the priestly teachers of
the primitive community was knowledge of ritual and ceremonial; that
is to say, a knowledge of the most proper, most effective, or most
acceptable manner of approaching and of serving the preternatural
agents. What was learned was how to make oneself indispensable to these
powers, and so to put oneself in a position to ask, or even to require,
their intercession in the course of events or their abstention from
interference in any given enterprise. Propitiation was the end, and this
end was sought, in great part, by acquiring facility in subservience.
It appears to have been only gradually that other elements than those
of efficient service of the master found their way into the stock of
priestly or shamanistic instruction.
The priestly servitor of the inscrutable powers that move in the
external world came to stand in the position of a mediator between these
powers and the common run of unrestricted humanity; for he was possessed
of a knowledge of the supernatural etiquette which would admit him into
the presence. And as commonly happens with mediators between the vulgar
and their masters, whether the masters be natural or preternatural, he
found it expedient to have the means at hand tangibly to impress upon
the vulgar the fact that these inscrutable powers would do what he might
ask of them. Hence, presently, a knowledge of certain natural processes
which could be turned to account for spectacular effect, together with
some sleight of hand, came to be an integral part of priestly lore.
Knowledge of this kind passes for knowledge of the "unknowable", and
it owes its serviceability for the sacerdotal purpose to its recondite
character. It appears to have been from this source that learning, as an
institution, arose, and its differentiation from this its parent stock
of magic ritual and shamanistic fraud has been slow and tedious, and is
scarcely yet complete even in the most advanced of the higher seminaries
of learning.
The recondite element in learning is still, as it has been in all ages,
a very attractive and effective element for the purpose of impressing,
or even imposing upon, the unlearned; and the standing of the savant in
the mind of the altogether unlettered is in great measure rated in terms
of intimacy with the occult forces. So, for instance, as a typical case,
even so late as the middle of this century, the Norwegian peasants have
instinctively formulated their sense of the superior erudition of such
doctors of divinity as Luther, Malanchthon, Peder Dass, and even so late
a scholar in divinity as Grundtvig, in terms of the Black Art. These,
together with a very comprehensive list of minor celebrities, both
living and dead, have been reputed masters in all magical arts; and a
high position in the ecclesiastical personnel has carried with it,
in the apprehension of these good people, an implication of profound
familiarity with magical practice and the occult sciences. There is
a parallel fact nearer home, similarly going to show the close
relationship, in popular apprehension, between erudition and the
unknowable; and it will at the same time serve to illustrate, in
somewhat coarse outline, the bent which leisure-class life gives to
the cognitive interest. While the belief is by no means confined to the
leisure class, that class today comprises a disproportionately large
number of believers in occult sciences of all kinds and shades. By those
whose habits of thought are not shaped by contact with modern industry,
the knowledge of the unknowable is still felt to the ultimate if not the
only true knowledge.
Learning, then, set out by being in some sense a by-product of the
priestly vicarious leisure class; and, at least until a recent date,
the higher learning has since remained in some sense a by-product or
by-occupation of the priestly classes. As the body of systematized
knowledge increased, there presently arose a distinction, traceable
very far back in the history of education, between esoteric and exoteric
knowledge, the former--so far as there is a substantial difference
between the two--comprising such knowledge as is primarily of no
economic or industrial effect, and the latter comprising chiefly
knowledge of industrial processes and of natural phenomena which were
habitually turned to account for the material purposes of life.
This line of demarcation has in time become, at least in popular
apprehension, the normal line between the higher learning and the lower.
It is significant, not only as an evidence of their close affiliation
with the priestly craft, but also as indicating that their activity to
a good extent falls under that category of conspicuous leisure known
as manners and breeding, that the learned class in all primitive
communities are great sticklers for form, precedent, gradations of rank,
ritual, ceremonial vestments, and learned paraphernalia generally.
This is of course to be expected, and it goes to say that the higher
learning, in its incipient phase, is a leisure-class occupation--more
specifically an occupation of the vicarious leisure class employed in
the service of the supernatural leisure class. But this predilection for
the paraphernalia of learning goes also to indicate a further point of
contact or of continuity between the priestly office and the office of
the savant. In point of derivation, learning, as well as the priestly
office, is largely an outgrowth of sympathetic magic; and this magical
apparatus of form and ritual therefore finds its place with the learned
class of the primitive community as a matter of course. The ritual and
paraphernalia have an occult efficacy for the magical purpose; so
that their presence as an integral factor in the earlier phases of the
development of magic and science is a matter of expediency, quite as
much as of affectionate regard for symbolism simply.
This sense of the efficacy of symbolic ritual, and of sympathetic effect
to be wrought through dexterous rehearsal of the traditional accessories
of the act or end to be compassed, is of course present more obviously
and in larger measure in magical practice than in the discipline of the
sciences, even of the occult sciences. But there are, I apprehend,
few persons with a cultivated sense of scholastic merit to whom the
ritualistic accessories of science are altogether an idle matter. The
very great tenacity with which these ritualistic paraphernalia persist
through the later course of the development is evident to any one
who will reflect on what has been the history of learning in our
civilization. Even today there are such things in the usage of the
learned community as the cap and gown, matriculation, initiation,
and graduation ceremonies, and the conferring of scholastic degrees,
dignities, and prerogatives in a way which suggests some sort of a
scholarly apostolic succession. The usage of the priestly orders is
no doubt the proximate source of all these features of learned ritual,
vestments, sacramental initiation, the transmission of peculiar
dignities and virtues by the imposition of hands, and the like; but
their derivation is traceable back of this point, to the source from
which the specialized priestly class proper came to be distinguished
from the sorcerer on the one hand and from the menial servant of
a temporal master on the other hand. So far as regards both their
derivation and their psychological content, these usages and the
conceptions on which they rest belong to a stage in cultural development
no later than that of the angekok and the rain-maker. Their place in the
later phases of devout observance, as well as in the higher educational
system, is that of a survival from a very early animistic phase of the
development of human nature.
These ritualistic features of the educational system of the present and
of the recent past, it is quite safe to say, have their place primarily
in the higher, liberal, and classic institutions and grades of learning,
rather than in the lower, technological, or practical grades, and
branches of the system. So far as they possess them, the lower and less
reputable branches of the educational scheme have evidently borrowed
these things from the higher grades; and their continued persistence
among the practical schools, without the sanction of the continued
example of the higher and classic grades, would be highly improbable,
to say the least. With the lower and practical schools and scholars, the
adoption and cultivation of these usages is a case of mimicry--due to
a desire to conform as far as may be to the standards of scholastic
reputability maintained by the upper grades and classes, who have
come by these accessory features legitimately, by the right of lineal
devolution.
The analysis may even be safely carried a step farther. Ritualistic
survivals and reversions come out in fullest vigor and with the freest
air of spontaneity among those seminaries of learning which have to
do primarily with the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
Accordingly it should appear, and it does pretty plainly appear, on
a survey of recent developments in college and university life, that
wherever schools founded for the instruction of the lower classes in the
immediately useful branches of knowledge grow into institutions of the
higher learning, the growth of ritualistic ceremonial and paraphernalia
and of elaborate scholastic "functions" goes hand in hand with
the transition of the schools in question from the field of homely
practicality into the higher, classical sphere. The initial purpose of
these schools, and the work with which they have chiefly had to do at
the earlier of these two stages of their evolution, has been that of
fitting the young of the industrious classes for work. On the higher,
classical plane of learning to which they commonly tend, their dominant
aim becomes the preparation of the youth of the priestly and the leisure
classes--or of an incipient leisure class--for the consumption of
goods, material and immaterial, according to a conventionally accepted,
reputable scope and method. This happy issue has commonly been the fate
of schools founded by "friends of the people" for the aid of struggling
young men, and where this transition is made in good form there is
commonly, if not invariably, a coincident change to a more ritualistic
life in the schools.
In the school life of today, learned ritual is in a general way best at
home in schools whose chief end is the cultivation of the "humanities".
This correlation is shown, perhaps more neatly than anywhere else, in
the life-history of the American colleges and universities of recent
growth. There may be many exceptions from the rule, especially among
those schools which have been founded by the typically reputable and
ritualistic churches, and which, therefore, started on the conservative
and classical plane or reached the classical position by a short-cut;
but the general rule as regards the colleges founded in the newer
American communities during the present century has been that so long
as the constituency from which the colleges have drawn their pupils
has been dominated by habits of industry and thrift, so long the
reminiscences of the medicine-man have found but a scant and precarious
acceptance in the scheme of college life. But so soon as wealth begins
appreciably to accumulate in the community, and so soon as a given
school begins to lean on a leisure-class constituency, there comes
also a perceptibly increased insistence on scholastic ritual and on
conformity to the ancient forms as regards vestments and social and
scholastic solemnities. So, for instance, there has been an approximate
coincidence between the growth of wealth among the constituency
which supports any given college of the Middle West and the date of
acceptance--first into tolerance and then into imperative vogue--of
evening dress for men and of the décolleté for women, as the scholarly
vestments proper to occasions of learned solemnity or to the seasons
of social amenity within the college circle. Apart from the mechanical
difficulty of so large a task, it would scarcely be a difficult matter
to trace this correlation. The like is true of the vogue of the cap and
gown.
Cap and gown have been adopted as learned insignia by many colleges of
this section within the last few years; and it is safe to say that this
could scarcely have occurred at a much earlier date, or until there had
grown up a leisure-class sentiment of sufficient volume in the community
to support a strong movement of reversion towards an archaic view as to
the legitimate end of education. This particular item of learned ritual,
it may be noted, would not only commend itself to the leisure-class
sense of the fitness of things, as appealing to the archaic propensity
for spectacular effect and the predilection for antique symbolism;
but it at the same time fits into the leisure-class scheme of life as
involving a notable element of conspicuous waste. The precise date at
which the reversion to cap and gown took place, as well as the fact that
it affected so large a number of schools at about the same time,
seems to have been due in some measure to a wave of atavistic sense
of conformity and reputability that passed over the community at that
period.
It may not be entirely beside the point to note that in point of time
this curious reversion seems to coincide with the culmination of a
certain vogue of atavistic sentiment and tradition in other directions
also. The wave of reversion seems to have received its initial impulse
in the psychologically disintegrating effects of the Civil War.
Habituation to war entails a body of predatory habits of thought,
whereby clannishness in some measure replaces the sense of solidarity,
and a sense of invidious distinction supplants the impulse to equitable,
everyday serviceability. As an outcome of the cumulative action of these
factors, the generation which follows a season of war is apt to witness
a rehabilitation of the element of status, both in its social life and
in its scheme of devout observances and other symbolic or ceremonial
forms. Throughout the eighties, and less plainly traceable through the
seventies also, there was perceptible a gradually advancing wave of
sentiment favoring quasi-predatory business habits, insistence on
status, anthropomorphism, and conservatism generally. The more direct
and unmediated of these expressions of the barbarian temperament, such
as the recrudescence of outlawry and the spectacular quasi-predatory
careers of fraud run by certain "captains of industry", came to a
head earlier and were appreciably on the decline by the close of the
seventies. The recrudescence of anthropomorphic sentiment also seems to
have passed its most acute stage before the close of the eighties. But
the learned ritual and paraphernalia here spoken of are a still remoter
and more recondite expression of the barbarian animistic sense; and
these, therefore, gained vogue and elaboration more slowly and reached
their most effective development at a still later date. There is reason
to believe that the culmination is now already past. Except for the new
impetus given by a new war experience, and except for the support which
the growth of a wealthy class affords to all ritual, and especially to
whatever ceremonial is wasteful and pointedly suggests gradations of
status, it is probable that the late improvements and augmentation of
scholastic insignia and ceremonial would gradually decline. But while it
may be true that the cap and gown, and the more strenuous observance
of scholastic proprieties which came with them, were floated in on this
post-bellum tidal wave of reversion to barbarism, it is also no doubt
true that such a ritualistic reversion could not have been effected in
the college scheme of life until the accumulation of wealth in the
hands of a propertied class had gone far enough to afford the requisite
pecuniary ground for a movement which should bring the colleges of the
country up to the leisure-class requirements in the higher learning. The
adoption of the cap and gown is one of the striking atavistic features
of modern college life, and at the same time it marks the fact that
these colleges have definitely become leisure-class establishments,
either in actual achievement or in aspiration.
As further evidence of the close relation between the educational system
and the cultural standards of the community, it may be remarked that
there is some tendency latterly to substitute the captain of industry in
place of the priest, as the head of seminaries of the higher learning.
The substitution is by no means complete or unequivocal. Those heads of
institutions are best accepted who combine the sacerdotal office with
a high degree of pecuniary efficiency. There is a similar but less
pronounced tendency to intrust the work of instruction in the higher
learning to men of some pecuniary qualification. Administrative ability
and skill in advertising the enterprise count for rather more than
they once did, as qualifications for the work of teaching. This applies
especially in those sciences that have most to do with the everyday
facts of life, and it is particularly true of schools in the
economically single-minded communities. This partial substitution of
pecuniary for sacerdotal efficiency is a concomitant of the modern
transition from conspicuous leisure to conspicuous consumption, as
the chief means of reputability. The correlation of the two facts is
probably clear without further elaboration.
The attitude of the schools and of the learned class towards the
education of women serves to show in what manner and to what extent
learning has departed from its ancient station of priestly and
leisure-class prerogatives, and it indicates also what approach has
been made by the truly learned to the modern, economic or industrial,
matter-of-fact standpoint. The higher schools and the learned
professions were until recently tabu to the women. These establishments
were from the outset, and have in great measure continued to be, devoted
to the education of the priestly and leisure classes.
The women, as has been shown elsewhere, were the original subservient
class, and to some extent, especially so far as regards their nominal
or ceremonial position, they have remained in that relation down to the
present. There has prevailed a strong sense that the admission of
women to the privileges of the higher learning (as to the Eleusianin
mysteries) would be derogatory to the dignity of the learned craft. It
is therefore only very recently, and almost solely in the industrially
most advanced communities, that the higher grades of schools have
been freely opened to women. And even under the urgent circumstances
prevailing in the modern industrial communities, the highest and most
reputable universities show an extreme reluctance in making the move.
The sense of class worthiness, that is to say of status, of a honorific
differentiation of the sexes according to a distinction between superior
and inferior intellectual dignity, survives in a vigorous form in these
corporations of the aristocracy of learning. It is felt that the woman
should, in all propriety, acquire only such knowledge as may be classed
under one or the other of two heads: (1) such knowledge as conduces
immediately to a better performance of domestic service--the domestic
sphere; (2) such accomplishments and dexterity, quasi-scholarly and
quasi-artistic, as plainly come in under the head of a performance of
vicarious leisure. Knowledge is felt to be unfeminine if it is knowledge
which expresses the unfolding of the learner's own life, the acquisition
of which proceeds on the learner's own cognitive interest, without
prompting from the canons of propriety, and without reference back to a
master whose comfort or good repute is to be enhanced by the employment
or the exhibition of it. So, also, all knowledge which is useful as
evidence of leisure, other than vicarious leisure, is scarcely feminine.
For an appreciation of the relation which these higher seminaries of
learning bear to the economic life of the community, the phenomena which
have been reviewed are of importance rather as indications of a general
attitude than as being in themselves facts of first-rate economic
consequence. They go to show what is the instinctive attitude and
animus of the learned class towards the life process of an industrial
community. They serve as an exponent of the stage of development, for
the industrial purpose, attained by the higher learning and by the
learned class, and so they afford an indication as to what may fairly be
looked for from this class at points where the learning and the life of
the class bear more immediately upon the economic life and efficiency
of the community, and upon the adjustment of its scheme of life to
the requirements of the time. What these ritualistic survivals go
to indicate is a prevalence of conservatism, if not of reactionary
sentiment, especially among the higher schools where the conventional
learning is cultivated.
To these indications of a conservative attitude is to be added another
characteristic which goes in the same direction, but which is a symptom
of graver consequence that this playful inclination to trivialities
of form and ritual. By far the greater number of American colleges
and universities, for instance, are affiliated to some religious
denomination and are somewhat given to devout observances. Their
putative familiarity with scientific methods and the scientific point
of view should presumably exempt the faculties of these schools
from animistic habits of thought; but there is still a considerable
proportion of them who profess an attachment to the anthropomorphic
beliefs and observances of an earlier culture. These professions
of devotional zeal are, no doubt, to a good extent expedient and
perfunctory, both on the part of the schools in their corporate
capacity, and on the part of the individual members of the corps of
instructors; but it can not be doubted that there is after all a very
appreciable element of anthropomorphic sentiment present in the
higher schools. So far as this is the case it must be set down as the
expression of an archaic, animistic habit of mind. This habit of
mind must necessarily assert itself to some extent in the instruction
offered, and to this extent its influence in shaping the habits of
thought of the student makes for conservatism and reversion; it acts
to hinder his development in the direction of matter-of-fact knowledge,
such as best serves the ends of industry.
The college sports, which have so great a vogue in the reputable
seminaries of learning today, tend in a similar direction; and, indeed,
sports have much in common with the devout attitude of the colleges,
both as regards their psychological basis and as regards their
disciplinary effect. But this expression of the barbarian temperament
is to be credited primarily to the body of students, rather than to the
temper of the schools as such; except in so far as the colleges or the
college officials--as sometimes happens--actively countenance and foster
the growth of sports. The like is true of college fraternities as
of college sports, but with a difference. The latter are chiefly
an expression of the predatory impulse simply; the former are more
specifically an expression of that heritage of clannishness which is
so large a feature in the temperament of the predatory barbarian. It is
also noticeable that a close relation subsists between the fraternities
and the sporting activity of the schools. After what has already been
said in an earlier chapter on the sporting and gambling habit, it
is scarcely necessary further to discuss the economic value of this
training in sports and in factional organization and activity.
But all these features of the scheme of life of the learned class,
and of the establishments dedicated to the conservation of the higher
learning, are in a great measure incidental only. They are scarcely
to be accounted organic elements of the professed work of research and
instruction for the ostensible pursuit of which the schools exists. But
these symptomatic indications go to establish a presumption as to the
character of the work performed--as seen from the economic point of
view--and as to the bent which the serious work carried on under their
auspices gives to the youth who resort to the schools. The presumption
raised by the considerations already offered is that in their work also,
as well as in their ceremonial, the higher schools may be expected to
take a conservative position; but this presumption must be checked by a
comparison of the economic character of the work actually performed, and
by something of a survey of the learning whose conservation is
intrusted to the higher schools. On this head, it is well known that
the accredited seminaries of learning have, until a recent date, held
a conservative position. They have taken an attitude of depreciation
towards all innovations. As a general rule a new point of view or a new
formulation of knowledge have been countenanced and taken up within the
schools only after these new things have made their way outside of
the schools. As exceptions from this rule are chiefly to be mentioned
innovations of an inconspicuous kind and departures which do not bear
in any tangible way upon the conventional point of view or upon the
conventional scheme of life; as, for instance, details of fact in the
mathematico-physical sciences, and new readings and interpretations of
the classics, especially such as have a philological or literary bearing
only. Except within the domain of the "humanities", in the narrow sense,
and except so far as the traditional point of view of the humanities has
been left intact by the innovators, it has generally held true that the
accredited learned class and the seminaries of the higher learning
have looked askance at all innovation. New views, new departures in
scientific theory, especially in new departures which touch the theory
of human relations at any point, have found a place in the scheme of
the university tardily and by a reluctant tolerance, rather than by
a cordial welcome; and the men who have occupied themselves with such
efforts to widen the scope of human knowledge have not commonly been
well received by their learned contemporaries. The higher schools have
not commonly given their countenance to a serious advance in the methods
or the content of knowledge until the innovations have outlived their
youth and much of their usefulness--after they have become commonplaces
of the intellectual furniture of a new generation which has grown
up under, and has had its habits of thought shaped by, the new,
extra-scholastic body of knowledge and the new standpoint. This is true
of the recent past. How far it may be true of the immediate present it
would be hazardous to say, for it is impossible to see present-day
facts in such perspective as to get a fair conception of their relative
proportions.
So far, nothing has been said of the Maecenas function of the
well-to-do, which is habitually dwelt on at some length by writers
and speakers who treat of the development of culture and of social
structure. This leisure-class function is not without an important
bearing on the higher and on the spread of knowledge and culture. The
manner and the degree in which the class furthers learning through
patronage of this kind is sufficiently familiar. It has been frequently
presented in affectionate and effective terms by spokesmen whose
familiarity with the topic fits them to bring home to their hearers the
profound significance of this cultural factor. These spokesmen, however,
have presented the matter from the point of view of the cultural
interest, or of the interest of reputability, rather than from that of
the economic interest. As apprehended from the economic point of view,
and valued for the purpose of industrial serviceability, this function
of the well-to-do, as well as the intellectual attitude of members of
the well-to-do class, merits some attention and will bear illustration.
By way of characterization of the Maecenas relation, it is to be noted
that, considered externally, as an economic or industrial relation
simply, it is a relation of status. The scholar under the patronage
performs the duties of a learned life vicariously for his patron, to
whom a certain repute inures after the manner of the good repute imputed
to a master for whom any form of vicarious leisure is performed. It is
also to be noted that, in point of historical fact, the furtherance of
learning or the maintenance of scholarly activity through the Maecenas
relation has most commonly been a furtherance of proficiency in
classical lore or in the humanities. The knowledge tends to lower rather
than to heighten the industrial efficiency of the community.
Further, as regards the direct participation of the members of the
leisure class in the furtherance of knowledge, the canons of reputable
living act to throw such intellectual interest as seeks expression among
the class on the side of classical and formal erudition, rather than
on the side of the sciences that bear some relation to the community's
industrial life. The most frequent excursions into other than classical
fields of knowledge on the part of members of the leisure class are made
into the discipline of law and the political, and more especially the
administrative, sciences. These so-called sciences are substantially
bodies of maxims of expediency for guidance in the leisure-class office
of government, as conducted on a proprietary basis. The interest with
which this discipline is approached is therefore not commonly the
intellectual or cognitive interest simply. It is largely the practical
interest of the exigencies of that relation of mastery in which the
members of the class are placed. In point of derivation, the office of
government is a predatory function, pertaining integrally to the archaic
leisure-class scheme of life. It is an exercise of control and coercion
over the population from which the class draws its sustenance. This
discipline, as well as the incidents of practice which give it its
content, therefore has some attraction for the class apart from all
questions of cognition. All this holds true wherever and so long as
the governmental office continues, in form or in substance, to be a
proprietary office; and it holds true beyond that limit, in so far as
the tradition of the more archaic phase of governmental evolution has
lasted on into the later life of those modern communities for whom
proprietary government by a leisure class is now beginning to pass away.
For that field of learning within which the cognitive or intellectual
interest is dominant--the sciences properly so called--the case is
somewhat different, not only as regards the attitude of the leisure
class, but as regards the whole drift of the pecuniary culture.
Knowledge for its own sake, the exercise of the faculty of comprehensive
without ulterior purpose, should, it might be expected, be sought by
men whom no urgent material interest diverts from such a quest. The
sheltered industrial position of the leisure class should give free
play to the cognitive interest in members of this class, and we should
consequently have, as many writers confidently find that we do have, a
very large proportion of scholars, scientists, savants derived from
this class and deriving their incentive to scientific investigation and
speculation from the discipline of a life of leisure. Some such result
is to be looked for, but there are features of the leisure-class
scheme of life, already sufficiently dwelt upon, which go to divert the
intellectual interest of this class to other subjects than that causal
sequence in phenomena which makes the content of the sciences. The
habits of thought which characterize the life of the class run on
the personal relation of dominance, and on the derivative, invidious
concepts of honor, worth, merit, character, and the like. The casual
sequence which makes up the subject matter of science is not visible
from this point of view. Neither does good repute attach to knowledge of
facts that are vulgarly useful. Hence it should appear probable that the
interest of the invidious comparison with respect to pecuniary or other
honorific merit should occupy the attention of the leisure class, to the
neglect of the cognitive interest. Where this latter interest asserts
itself it should commonly be diverted to fields of speculation or
investigation which are reputable and futile, rather than to the quest
of scientific knowledge. Such indeed has been the history of priestly
and leisure-class learning so long as no considerable body of
systematized knowledge had been intruded into the scholastic discipline
from an extra-scholastic source. But since the relation of mastery and
subservience is ceasing to be the dominant and formative factor in the
community's life process, other features of the life process and other
points of view are forcing themselves upon the scholars. The true-bred
gentleman of leisure should, and does, see the world from the point of
view of the personal relation; and the cognitive interest, so far as
it asserts itself in him, should seek to systematize phenomena on this
basis. Such indeed is the case with the gentleman of the old school, in
whom the leisure-class ideals have suffered no disintegration; and such
is the attitude of his latter-day descendant, in so far as he has fallen
heir to the full complement of upper-class virtues. But the ways of
heredity are devious, and not every gentleman's son is to the manor
born. Especially is the transmission of the habits of thought which
characterize the predatory master somewhat precarious in the case of a
line of descent in which but one or two of the latest steps have lain
within the leisure-class discipline. The chances of occurrence of a
strong congenital or acquired bent towards the exercise of the cognitive
aptitudes are apparently best in those members of the leisure class who
are of lower class or middle class antecedents--that is to say, those
who have inherited the complement of aptitudes proper to the industrious
classes, and who owe their place in the leisure class to the possession
of qualities which count for more today than they did in the times when
the leisure-class scheme of life took shape. But even outside the range
of these later accessions to the leisure class there are an appreciable
number of individuals in whom the invidious interest is not sufficiently
dominant to shape their theoretical views, and in whom the proclivity to
theory is sufficiently strong to lead them into the scientific quest.
The higher learning owes the intrusion of the sciences in part to these
aberrant scions of the leisure class, who have come under the dominant
influence of the latter-day tradition of impersonal relation and who
have inherited a complement of human aptitudes differing in certain
salient features from the temperament which is characteristic of
the regime of status. But it owes the presence of this alien body of
scientific knowledge also in part, and in a higher degree, to members of
the industrious classes who have been in sufficiently easy circumstances
to turn their attention to other interests than that of finding daily
sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic point of
view does not dominate their intellectual processes. As between
these two groups, which approximately comprise the effective force of
scientific progress, it is the latter that has contributed the most. And
with respect to both it seems to be true that they are not so much
the source as the vehicle, or at the most they are the instrument of
commutation, by which the habits of thought enforced upon the community,
through contact with its environment under the exigencies of modern
associated life and the mechanical industries, are turned to account for
theoretical knowledge.
Science, in the sense of an articulate recognition of causal sequence in
phenomena, whether physical or social, has been a feature of the Western
culture only since the industrial process in the Western communities has
come to be substantially a process of mechanical contrivances in which
man's office is that of discrimination and valuation of material forces.
Science has flourished somewhat in the same degree as the industrial
life of the community has conformed to this pattern, and somewhat in
the same degree as the industrial interest has dominated the community's
life. And science, and scientific theory especially, has made headway
in the several departments of human life and knowledge in proportion
as each of these several departments has successively come into closer
contact with the industrial process and the economic interest;
or perhaps it is truer to say, in proportion as each of them has
successively escaped from the dominance of the conceptions of personal
relation or status, and of the derivative canons of anthropomorphic
fitness and honorific worth.
It is only as the exigencies of modern industrial life have enforced the
recognition of causal sequence in the practical contact of mankind with
their environment, that men have come to systematize the phenomena of
this environment and the facts of their own contact with it in terms
of causal sequence. So that while the higher learning in its best
development, as the perfect flower of scholasticism and classicism, was
a by-product of the priestly office and the life of leisure, so modern
science may be said to be a by-product of the industrial process.
Through these groups of men, then--investigators, savants, scientists,
inventors, speculators--most of whom have done their most telling work
outside the shelter of the schools, the habits of thought enforced
by the modern industrial life have found coherent expression and
elaboration as a body of theoretical science having to do with the
causal sequence of phenomena. And from this extra-scholastic field of
scientific speculation, changes of method and purpose have from time to
time been intruded into the scholastic discipline.
In this connection it is to be remarked that there is a very perceptible
difference of substance and purpose between the instruction offered in
the primary and secondary schools, on the one hand, and in the higher
seminaries of learning, on the other hand. The difference in point
of immediate practicality of the information imparted and of the
proficiency acquired may be of some consequence and may merit the
attention which it has from time to time received; but there is more
substantial difference in the mental and spiritual bent which is favored
by the one and the other discipline. This divergent trend in discipline
between the higher and the lower learning is especially noticeable as
regards the primary education in its latest development in the advanced
industrial communities. Here the instruction is directed chiefly to
proficiency or dexterity, intellectual and manual, in the apprehension
and employment of impersonal facts, in their casual rather than in their
honorific incidence. It is true, under the traditions of the earlier
days, when the primary education was also predominantly a leisure-class
commodity, a free use is still made of emulation as a spur to diligence
in the common run of primary schools; but even this use of emulation as
an expedient is visibly declining in the primary grades of instruction
in communities where the lower education is not under the guidance
of the ecclesiastical or military tradition. All this holds true in
a peculiar degree, and more especially on the spiritual side, of such
portions of the educational system as have been immediately affected by
kindergarten methods and ideals.
The peculiarly non-invidious trend of the kindergarten discipline, and
the similar character of the kindergarten influence in primary education
beyond the limits of the kindergarten proper, should be taken in
connection with what has already been said of the peculiar spiritual
attitude of leisure-class womankind under the circumstances of the
modern economic situation. The kindergarten discipline is at its
best--or at its farthest remove from ancient patriarchal and pedagogical
ideals--in the advanced industrial communities, where there is a
considerable body of intelligent and idle women, and where the system of
status has somewhat abated in rigor under the disintegrating influence
of industrial life and in the absence of a consistent body of
military and ecclesiastical traditions. It is from these women in easy
circumstances that it gets its moral support. The aims and methods of
the kindergarten commend themselves with especial effect to this class
of women who are ill at ease under the pecuniary code of reputable life.
The kindergarten, and whatever the kindergarten spirit counts for
in modern education, therefore, is to be set down, along with the
"new-woman movement," to the account of that revulsion against futility
and invidious comparison which the leisure-class life under modern
circumstances induces in the women most immediately exposed to its
discipline. In this way it appears that, by indirection, the institution
of a leisure class here again favors the growth of a non-invidious
attitude, which may, in the long run, prove a menace to the stability
of the institution itself, and even to the institution of individual
ownership on which it rests.
During the recent past some tangible changes have taken place in the
scope of college and university teaching. These changes have in the main
consisted in a partial displacement of the humanities--those branches
of learning which are conceived to make for the traditional "culture",
character, tastes, and ideals--by those more matter-of-fact branches
which make for civic and industrial efficiency. To put the same thing
in other words, those branches of knowledge which make for efficiency
(ultimately productive efficiency) have gradually been gaining ground
against those branches which make for a heightened consumption or a
lowered industrial efficiency and for a type of character suited to the
regime of status. In this adaptation of the scheme of instruction the
higher schools have commonly been found on the conservative side; each
step which they have taken in advance has been to some extent of
the nature of a concession. The sciences have been intruded into
the scholar's discipline from without, not to say from below. It is
noticeable that the humanities which have so reluctantly yielded ground
to the sciences are pretty uniformly adapted to shape the character
of the student in accordance with a traditional self-centred scheme of
consumption; a scheme of contemplation and enjoyment of the true,
the beautiful, and the good, according to a conventional standard of
propriety and excellence, the salient feature of which is leisure--otium
cum dignitate. In language veiled by their own habituation to the
archaic, decorous point of view, the spokesmen of the humanities have
insisted upon the ideal embodied in the maxim, fruges consumere nati.
This attitude should occasion no surprise in the case of schools which
are shaped by and rest upon a leisure-class culture.
The professed grounds on which it has been sought, as far as might be,
to maintain the received standards and methods of culture intact
are likewise characteristic of the archaic temperament and of the
leisure-class theory of life. The enjoyment and the bent derived from
habitual contemplation of the life, ideals, speculations, and methods of
consuming time and goods, in vogue among the leisure class of classical
antiquity, for instance, is felt to be "higher", "nobler", "worthier",
than what results in these respects from a like familiarity with the
everyday life and the knowledge and aspirations of commonplace humanity
in a modern community, that learning the content of which is an
unmitigated knowledge of latter-day men and things is by comparison
"lower", "base", "ignoble"--one even hears the epithet "sub-human"
applied to this matter-of-fact knowledge of mankind and of everyday
life.
This contention of the leisure-class spokesmen of the humanities
seems to be substantially sound. In point of substantial fact, the
gratification and the culture, or the spiritual attitude or habit of
mind, resulting from an habitual contemplation of the anthropomorphism,
clannishness, and leisurely self-complacency of the gentleman of an
early day, or from a familiarity with the animistic superstitions
and the exuberant truculence of the Homeric heroes, for instance, is,
aesthetically considered, more legitimate than the corresponding results
derived from a matter-of-fact knowledge of things and a contemplation
of latter-day civic or workmanlike efficiency. There can be but little
question that the first-named habits have the advantage in respect of
aesthetic or honorific value, and therefore in respect of the "worth"
which is made the basis of award in the comparison. The content of the
canons of taste, and more particularly of the canons of honor, is in the
nature of things a resultant of the past life and circumstances of
the race, transmitted to the later generation by inheritance or by
tradition; and the fact that the protracted dominance of a predatory,
leisure-class scheme of life has profoundly shaped the habit of mind and
the point of view of the race in the past, is a sufficient basis for an
aesthetically legitimate dominance of such a scheme of life in very much
of what concerns matters of taste in the present. For the purpose in
hand, canons of taste are race habits, acquired through a more or less
protracted habituation to the approval or disapproval of the kind
of things upon which a favorable or unfavorable judgment of taste is
passed. Other things being equal, the longer and more unbroken the
habituation, the more legitimate is the canon of taste in question. All
this seems to be even truer of judgments regarding worth or honor than
of judgments of taste generally.
But whatever may be the aesthetic legitimacy of the derogatory judgment
passed on the newer learning by the spokesmen of the humanities, and
however substantial may be the merits of the contention that the
classic lore is worthier and results in a more truly human culture and
character, it does not concern the question in hand. The question in
hand is as to how far these branches of learning, and the point of
view for which they stand in the educational system, help or hinder an
efficient collective life under modern industrial circumstances--how
far they further a more facile adaptation to the economic situation
of today. The question is an economic, not an aesthetic one; and
the leisure-class standards of learning which find expression in the
deprecatory attitude of the higher schools towards matter-of-fact
knowledge are, for the present purpose, to be valued from this point of
view only. For this purpose the use of such epithets as "noble", "base",
"higher", "lower", etc., is significant only as showing the animus
and the point of view of the disputants; whether they contend for the
worthiness of the new or of the old. All these epithets are honorific or
humilific terms; that is to say, they are terms of invidious comparison,
which in the last analysis fall under the category of the reputable or
the disreputable; that is, they belong within the range of ideas that
characterizes the scheme of life of the regime of status; that is, they
are in substance an expression of sportsmanship--of the predatory and
animistic habit of mind; that is, they indicate an archaic point of view
and theory of life, which may fit the predatory stage of culture and of
economic organization from which they have sprung, but which are,
from the point of view of economic efficiency in the broader sense,
disserviceable anachronisms.
The classics, and their position of prerogative in the scheme of
education to which the higher seminaries of learning cling with such a
fond predilection, serve to shape the intellectual attitude and lower
the economic efficiency of the new learned generation. They do this
not only by holding up an archaic ideal of manhood, but also by the
discrimination which they inculcate with respect to the reputable and
the disreputable in knowledge. This result is accomplished in two ways:
(1) by inspiring an habitual aversion to what is merely useful, as
contrasted with what is merely honorific in learning, and so shaping the
tastes of the novice that he comes in good faith to find gratification
of his tastes solely, or almost solely, in such exercise of the
intellect as normally results in no industrial or social gain; and (2)
by consuming the learner's time and effort in acquiring knowledge which
is of no use except in so far as this learning has by convention become
incorporated into the sum of learning required of the scholar, and has
thereby affected the terminology and diction employed in the useful
branches of knowledge. Except for this terminological difficulty--which
is itself a consequence of the vogue of the classics of the past--a
knowledge of the ancient languages, for instance, would have no
practical bearing for any scientist or any scholar not engaged on work
primarily of a linguistic character. Of course, all this has nothing to
say as to the cultural value of the classics, nor is there any intention
to disparage the discipline of the classics or the bent which their
study gives to the student. That bent seems to be of an economically
disserviceable kind, but this fact--somewhat notorious indeed--need
disturb no one who has the good fortune to find comfort and strength in
the classical lore. The fact that classical learning acts to derange
the learner's workmanlike attitudes should fall lightly upon the
apprehension of those who hold workmanship of small account in
comparison with the cultivation of decorous ideals: Iam fides et pax et
honos pudorque Priscus et neglecta redire virtus Audet.
Owing to the circumstance that this knowledge has become part of the
elementary requirements in our system of education, the ability to use
and to understand certain of the dead languages of southern Europe
is not only gratifying to the person who finds occasion to parade his
accomplishments in this respect, but the evidence of such knowledge
serves at the same time to recommend any savant to his audience, both
lay and learned. It is currently expected that a certain number of
years shall have been spent in acquiring this substantially useless
information, and its absence creates a presumption of hasty and
precarious learning, as well as of a vulgar practicality that is
equally obnoxious to the conventional standards of sound scholarship and
intellectual force.
The case is analogous to what happens in the purchase of any article of
consumption by a purchaser who is not an expert judge of materials or
of workmanship. He makes his estimate of value of the article chiefly
on the ground of the apparent expensiveness of the finish of those
decorative parts and features which have no immediate relation to the
intrinsic usefulness of the article; the presumption being that some
sort of ill-defined proportion subsists between the substantial value of
an article and the expense of adornment added in order to sell it. The
presumption that there can ordinarily be no sound scholarship where
a knowledge of the classics and humanities is wanting leads to a
conspicuous waste of time and labor on the part of the general body of
students in acquiring such knowledge. The conventional insistence on a
modicum of conspicuous waste as an incident of all reputable scholarship
has affected our canons of taste and of serviceability in matters of
scholarship in much the same way as the same principle has influenced
our judgment of the serviceability of manufactured goods.
It is true, since conspicuous consumption has gained more and more on
conspicuous leisure as a means of repute, the acquisition of the dead
languages is no longer so imperative a requirement as it once was,
and its talismanic virtue as a voucher of scholarship has suffered a
concomitant impairment. But while this is true, it is also true that the
classics have scarcely lost in absolute value as a voucher of scholastic
respectability, since for this purpose it is only necessary that
the scholar should be able to put in evidence some learning which is
conventionally recognized as evidence of wasted time; and the classics
lend themselves with great facility to this use. Indeed, there can be
little doubt that it is their utility as evidence of wasted time and
effort, and hence of the pecuniary strength necessary in order to
afford this waste, that has secured to the classics their position of
prerogative in the scheme of higher learning, and has led to their being
esteemed the most honorific of all learning. They serve the decorative
ends of leisure-class learning better than any other body of knowledge,
and hence they are an effective means of reputability.
In this respect the classics have until lately had scarcely a rival.
They still have no dangerous rival on the continent of Europe, but
lately, since college athletics have won their way into a recognized
standing as an accredited field of scholarly accomplishment, this latter
branch of learning--if athletics may be freely classed as learning--has
become a rival of the classics for the primacy in leisure-class
education in American and English schools. Athletics have an obvious
advantage over the classics for the purpose of leisure-class learning,
since success as an athlete presumes, not only waste of time, but also
waste of money, as well as the possession of certain highly unindustrial
archaic traits of character and temperament. In the German universities
the place of athletics and Greek-letter fraternities, as a leisure-class
scholarly occupation, has in some measure been supplied by a skilled and
graded inebriety and a perfunctory duelling.
The leisure class and its standard of virtue--archaism and waste--can
scarcely have been concerned in the introduction of the classics into
the scheme of the higher learning; but the tenacious retention of the
classics by the higher schools, and the high degree of reputability
which still attaches to them, are no doubt due to their conforming so
closely to the requirements of archaism and waste.
"Classic" always carries this connotation of wasteful and archaic,
whether it is used to denote the dead languages or the obsolete or
obsolescent forms of thought and diction in the living language, or to
denote other items of scholarly activity or apparatus to which it is
applied with less aptness. So the archaic idiom of the English language
is spoken of as "classic" English. Its use is imperative in all speaking
and writing upon serious topics, and a facile use of it lends dignity to
even the most commonplace and trivial string of talk. The newest form
of English diction is of course never written; the sense of that
leisure-class propriety which requires archaism in speech is present
even in the most illiterate or sensational writers in sufficient
force to prevent such a lapse. On the other hand, the highest and
most conventionalized style of archaic diction is--quite
characteristically--properly employed only in communications between an
anthropomorphic divinity and his subjects. Midway between these extremes
lies the everyday speech of leisure-class conversation and literature.
Elegant diction, whether in writing or speaking, is an effective means
of reputability. It is of moment to know with some precision what is
the degree of archaism conventionally required in speaking on any given
topic. Usage differs appreciably from the pulpit to the market-place;
the latter, as might be expected, admits the use of relatively new and
effective words and turns of expression, even by fastidious persons. A
discriminative avoidance of neologisms is honorific, not only because it
argues that time has been wasted in acquiring the obsolescent habit of
speech, but also as showing that the speaker has from infancy habitually
associated with persons who have been familiar with the obsolescent
idiom. It thereby goes to show his leisure-class antecedents. Great
purity of speech is presumptive evidence of several lives spent in other
than vulgarly useful occupations; although its evidence is by no means
entirely conclusive to this point.
As felicitous an instance of futile classicism as can well be found,
outside of the Far East, is the conventional spelling of the English
language. A breach of the proprieties in spelling is extremely annoying
and will discredit any writer in the eyes of all persons who are
possessed of a developed sense of the true and beautiful. English
orthography satisfies all the requirements of the canons of reputability
under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and
ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to
acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore it is the first and readiest
test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is
indispensable to a blameless scholastic life.
On this head of purity of speech, as at other points where a
conventional usage rests on the canons of archaism and waste, the
spokesmen for the usage instinctively take an apologetic attitude. It
is contended, in substance, that a punctilious use of ancient and
accredited locutions will serve to convey thought more adequately and
more precisely than would be the straightforward use of the latest form
of spoken English; whereas it is notorious that the ideas of today are
effectively expressed in the slang of today. Classic speech has the
honorific virtue of dignity; it commands attention and respect as being
the accredited method of communication under the leisure-class scheme
of life, because it carries a pointed suggestion of the industrial
exemption of the speaker. The advantage of the accredited locutions lies
in their reputability; they are reputable because they are cumbrous and
out of date, and therefore argue waste of time and exemption from the
use and the need of direct and forcible speech.