We have seen thus far that the word humanist has two main meanings--an
historical meaning in its application to the scholars who turned away
from the Middle Ages to the Greeks and Romans, and a psychological
meaning, as one may say, that derives directly from the historical
one: humanists in this latter sense are those who, in any age, aim at
proportionateness through a cultivation of the law of measure. Keeping
this definition in mind, we should now be prepared to deal with the
confusions in the use of the word of which I spoke at the beginning.
These confusions have arisen from its misapplication to various types
of naturalists and supernaturalists, especially the former.
For example, the eminent orientalist, M. Sylvain Lévi, has in a recent
book used the term humanism in speaking of persons as far apart as
Buddha and Rousseau.[8] Buddha, it is true, had his humanistic side:
he recommended that one follow a _via media_ between asceticism and
self-indulgence. But, unlike Confucius, he is in his primary emphasis
not humanistic, but religious. The association of humanism with
Rousseau is especially unjustifiable. Rousseau was, in the current
sense of the word, a highly vital individual, but he cannot be properly
regarded as either religious or humanistic. He attacked both humanism
and religion in their traditional forms, and instead of working out
some modern equivalent for these forms, helped to usher in the era of
free naturalistic expansion in the midst of which we are still living.
He was above all for free temperamental expansion. He was himself
emotionally expansive to a degree that was incompatible not only with
artificial but with real decorum. He encouraged the humanitarian hope
that brotherhood among men may be based on emotional overflow. In
general the most serious confusion in the use of the word humanist
has arisen from its appropriation by the humanitarians. Walt Whitman
was, for instance, highly Rousseauistic in his notion of brotherhood.
We should therefore know what to think of the assertion of Mr. Lewis
Mumford that Walt Whitman was a true humanist; also of the assumption
of the term by the left-wing Unitarians and other Protestants who have
been moving towards humanitarianism.[9]
The humanitarian has favoured not only temperamental expansion; he
has also, as a rule, favoured the utmost expansion of scientific
knowledge with a view to realising the Baconian ideal. Perhaps indeed
the chief driving power behind the humanitarian movement has been the
confidence inspired in man by the progressive control physical science
has enabled him to acquire over the forces of nature. It goes without
saying that the humanist is not hostile to science as such but only
to a science that has overstepped its due bounds, and in general to
every form of naturalism, whether rationalistic or emotional, that
sets up as a substitute for humanism or religion. In the case of such
encroachments there is not only a quarrel between the naturalist and
the humanist, but a quarrel of first principles. When first principles
are involved the law of measure is no longer applicable. One should
not be moderate in dealing with error. I have pointed out elsewhere
the danger of confounding the humanistic attitude with that of the
Laodicean.[10]
The reason for the radical clash between the humanist and the purely
naturalistic philosopher is that the humanist requires a centre to
which he may refer the manifold of experience; and this the phenomenal
world does not supply. In getting his centre the humanist may appeal
primarily to tradition, or as I have said, to intuition. In the latter
case he will need to submit to a searching Socratic dialectic the word
intuition itself--to distinguish between intuitions of the One and
intuitions of the Many. Otherwise he will run the risk of not being a
modern but only a modernist. The contrast between modern and modernist
is not unlike that between Socrates and the sophists. Both modern and
modernist are under compulsion to accept in some form the ancient
maxim that man is the measure of all things.[11] Only, the measure of
the modern is based on a perception of the something in himself that
is set above the flux and that he possesses in common with other men;
whereas the perception with which the modernist is chiefly concerned,
to the subversion of any true measure whatsoever, is of the divergent
and the changeful both within and without himself. The present menace
to humanism, it has been said, is less from its enemies than from
those who profess to be its friends. Thus Mr. F. C. S. Schiller of
Oxford proclaims himself a humanist, and at the same time seeks to show
that the true humanist was not Socrates but that precursor of recent
“flowing” philosophers, Protagoras.
It should be noted that many of our votaries of change and mobility
are more emotional than Protagoras or any other Greek sophist. They
tend to make, not their own thoughts, but their own feelings the
measure of all things. This indulgence in feeling has been encouraged
by the sentimentalists who have discovered in feeling not only the
quintessentially human element, but, as I said in speaking of Rousseau,
the ultimate ground of fraternal union. In our own time, partly perhaps
as a result of the psycho-analytical probing of the sources of the
emotional life in the subconscious, there is a growing distrust of the
sentimentalist. To be sure, one may, according to the psycho-analyst,
turn the emotions to good account by a process of “sublimation.” Why
not escape still more completely from one’s complexes and infantile
survivals by adjusting oneself to the cosmic order that is revealed
to the scientific investigator in his laboratory? One may thus cease
to be ego-centric and become truly mature and disinterested. This is
the attitude that Mr. Walter Lippmann recommends in _A Preface to
Morals_, and it is this attitude that, by a flagrant misuse of the
word, he terms “humanism.” It is well that a man should adjust himself
to the reality of the natural order and, as a preliminary, should
strive to be objective in the scientific sense; but humanism calls
for an adjustment to a very different order that is also “real” and
“objective” in its own way. It insists in short that there is a “law
for man” as well as a “law for thing,” and is in this sense dualistic.
Mr. Lippmann’s attempt to base ethics on monistic postulates is,
from either a religious or humanistic point of view, a revival of the
stoical error. Yet he would have us believe that any one who has become
disinterested after the scientific fashion has got the equivalent not
only of humanism but of “high religion.” By thus dissimulating the gap
between the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the laboratory, he is
flattering some of the most dangerous illusions of the present time.
He escapes from the main humanitarian tendency to give to feeling a
primacy that does not belong to it, only to encourage its other main
tendency to accord to physical science a hegemony to which it is not
entitled.
It is self-evident that humanitarianism of the scientific or
utilitarian type, with its glorification of the specialist who is
ready to sacrifice his rounded development, if only he can contribute
his mite to “progress,” is at odds with the humanistic ideal of
poise and proportion. The religious pretensions of humanitarianism
of this type are even more inacceptable, at least if one understands
by religion anything resembling the great traditional faiths. The
Baconian has inclined from the outset to substitute an outer for an
inner working--the effort of the individual upon himself--that religion
has, in some form or other, always required. The result has been to
encourage the acquisitive life and also the pursuit of material instead
of spiritual “comfort.” A typical example of this utilitarian trend is
Professor T. N. Carver’s _Religion Worth Having_, in which he so exalts
the “productive life” that religion is all but identified with thrift.
At this rate it may soon be possible to get one’s religion securely
tucked away in a safe-deposit drawer! One should, however, be grateful
to Professor Carver for not having called himself a humanist.
It does not seem possible to supply from the sentimental or
Rousseauistic side of the humanitarian movement the elements that are,
religiously speaking, absent from its utilitarian side. The nature to
which the Rousseauist invites one to return, is, as I have sought to
show elsewhere, only a projection of the idyllic imagination. In the
state of nature or some similar state thus projected, in other words
in Arcadia, man is “good.” Practically this has meant that there is
in the natural man an altruistic impulse that may prevail over his
egoism. The upshot of this myth of man’s natural goodness has been to
discredit the traditional controls, both humanistic and religious.
Humility, conversion, decorum, all go by the board in favour of
unrestricted temperamental overflow. The crucial question is whether
the immense machinery of power that has resulted from the efforts of
the utilitarians can be made, on this basis of unlimited expansion, to
serve disinterested ends. Everything converges indeed on both sides
of the humanitarian movement upon the idea of service. If it can
be shown that there has been no vital omission in the passage from
the service of God to the service of man, one may safely side with
all the altruists from the third Earl of Shaftesbury to John Dewey.
Unfortunately a formidable mass of evidence has been accumulating (the
Great War was for many a convincing demonstration) that, in the natural
man as he exists in the real world and not in some romantic dreamland,
the will to power is more than a match for the will to service.
The benefits that have ensued from the major concentration upon the
natural order that has been under way since the Renaissance have
been numerous and dazzling. We are still celebrating these benefits
under the name of progress. It is no longer possible, however, to
allay the suspicion that the price which has been paid for progress
of this type has been a growing superficiality in dealing with the
still more important problems of the human order. “Nothing is more
certain,” says Burke in a well-known passage, “than that our manners,
our civilisation, and all the good things which are connected with
manners and with civilisation, have, in this European world of ours,
depended for ages upon two principles; and were indeed the result of
both combined; I mean the spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of
religion.” The whole debate would seem to narrow down to the question
whether it is possible to secure on utilitarian-sentimental lines a
valid equivalent for Burke’s two principles. As for the “spirit of a
gentleman,” its decline is so obvious as scarcely to admit of argument.
It has even been maintained that in America, the country in which the
collapse of traditional standards has been most complete, the gentleman
is at a positive disadvantage in the world of practical affairs; he
is likely to get on more quickly if he assumes the “mucker pose.”[12]
According to William James, usually taken to be the representative
American philosopher, the very idea of the gentleman has about it
something slightly satanic. “The prince of darkness,” says James, “may
be a gentleman, as we are told he is, but, whatever the God of earth
and heaven is, he can surely be no gentleman.”
As for the “spirit of religion,” I have already glanced at its
humanitarian substitute. The humanitarian maintains that the spirit
that appears in Christianity will, if disengaged from mere dogma, be
found to be something very similar to his own spirit of service. One
should at least be able to understand the position of the person who
has become convinced that there is a supernatural element in genuine
Christianity, lost in the passage from the old dispensation to the
new, for which mere altruism is no substitute, and who therefore takes
his stand on the side of tradition. Dogmatic and revealed religion, he
argues, was alone capable of rescuing the ancient world from a decadent
naturalism. It alone affords an avenue of escape from the analogous
situation that confronts the world to-day.