The relation of the humanist to this religious traditionalist can
scarcely be defined too carefully. Between the humanist and the
humanitarian, I have said, there is a clash of first principles.
Between the humanist and the authentic Christian, on the other hand,
there is room for important co-operation. To be sure, many of the
leaders of the early Church were satisfied with nothing short of a
stark supernaturalism and inclined to reject the genuinely humanistic
elements of the ancient civilisation along with its naturalistic
errors. But the orthodox attitude has, in spite of the difficulties
of reconciling otherworldliness with a merely secular wisdom, come
to be one of friendliness to the classical humanities.[13] Mr. T.
S. Eliot is probably close to this attitude when he maintains that
humanism is of very great value, but only in subordination to the
historical Church. As an independent doctrine, at least in any large
way, it is, he maintains, ineffective. A broad survey of the past
does not, however, confirm the view that humanism is thus either
precarious or parasitical. The two most notable manifestations of the
humanistic spirit that the world has seen, that in ancient Greece and
that in Confucian China, did not have the support of Christianity
or any other form of revealed religion. Take again the humanism of
seventeenth-century France: the ideal of the finely poised gentleman
who “does not plume himself on anything” was often allied with
Christianity (“devout humanism”), but it was also found among the
free-thinkers (“libertines”) who were hostile to every form of belief
in the supernatural.
In general, why should not the humanist, it may be asked, devote
himself quietly to his own task--that of effecting an adjustment
between the law of measure and the ever-novel emergencies of actual
living, and at the same time refuse to take sides too decisively in
the great debate between the naturalists and the supernaturalists? If
pressed too hard by the supernaturalists in particular, why should he
not reply in the words of Pope:
“Presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man”?
One must, however, admit an element of truth in the assertion of
Plato that things human cannot be properly known without a previous
insight into things divine. Another thinker, Pascal, who had this
religious insight in a high degree, though combined with a form of
dogma peculiarly alien to most modern men, declared that unless man
has the support of the supernatural, unless in short he attains to
true humility, he will fall fatally either into the stoic pride or
else, through the intermediary stage of scepticism, into the epicurean
relaxation. The whole question bristles with difficulties: one thinks
of the immense and, on the whole, salutary influence that two Roman
humanists, Cicero and Horace, have exercised on occidental culture,
though, to adopt Pascal’s classification, the humanism of Cicero leaned
unduly to the stoical side, that of Horace to the epicurean. Yet I
believe that the humanist will finally be forced to recognise that
there is truth in Pascal’s contention, that he will have to take sides
in the debate between naturalists and supernaturalists, however much he
may deplore the frequent failure of both of these fell antagonists to
do justice to the immense range of human experience that is subject
primarily to the law of measure.
For my own part, I range myself unhesitatingly on the side of the
supernaturalists. Though I see no evidence that humanism is necessarily
ineffective apart from dogmatic and revealed religion, there is, as
it seems to me, evidence that it gains immensely in effectiveness
when it has a background of religious insight. One is conscious of
such a background, for example, in Sophocles, who ranks high among
occidental humanists, as well as in Confucius, the chief exponent of
the humanistic idea in the Orient. The phrase religious insight is in
itself vague. Is it not possible to give the phrase a definite content
without departing from the critical attitude? One may be helped to
such a definition by asking oneself what element has tended to fall
out of the life of the modern man with the decline of the traditional
disciplines. According to Mr. Walter Lippmann, the conviction the
modern man has lost is that “there is an immortal essence presiding
like a king over his appetites.” But why abandon the affirmation of
such an “essence” or higher will, to the mere traditionalist? Why not
affirm it first of all as a psychological fact, one of the immediate
data of consciousness, a perception so primordial that, compared
with it, the deterministic denials of man’s moral freedom are only
a metaphysical dream? One would thus be in a position to perform a
swift flanking movement on the behaviourists and other naturalistic
psychologists who are to be regarded at present as among the chief
enemies of human nature. One might at the same time be in a fair way
to escape from the modernist dilemma and become a thoroughgoing and
complete modern.
The philosophers have often debated the question of the priority of
will or intellect in man. The quality of will that I am discussing and
that rightly deserves to be accounted superrational, has, however,
been associated in traditional Christianity not primarily with man’s
will, but with God’s will in the form of grace. The theologians have
indulged in many unprofitable subtleties apropos of grace. One cannot
afford, however, as has been the modern tendency, to discard the
psychological truth of the doctrine along with these subtleties. The
higher will must simply be accepted as a mystery that may be studied in
its practical effects, but that, in its ultimate nature, is incapable
of formulation. Herein the higher will is not peculiar. “All things,”
according to the scholastic maxim, “end in a mystery” (_Omnia exeunt in
mysterium_). The man of science is increasingly willing to grant that
the reality behind the phenomena he is studying not only eludes him,
but must in the nature of the case ever elude him. He no longer holds,
for example, as his more dogmatic forebears of the nineteenth century
inclined to do, that the mechanistic hypothesis, valuable as it has
proved itself to be as a laboratory technique, is absolutely true; its
truth is, he admits, relative and provisional.
The person who declines to turn the higher will to account until he
is sure he has grasped its ultimate nature is very much on a level
with the man who should refuse to make practical use of electrical
energy until he is certain he has an impeccable theory of electricity.
Negatively one may say of the higher will, without overstepping
the critical attitude, that it is not the absolute, nor again the
categorical imperative; not the organic and still less the mechanical;
finally, not the “ideal” in the current sense of that term. Positively
one may define it as the higher immediacy that is known in its
relation to the lower immediacy--the merely temperamental man with
his impressions and emotions and expansive desires--as a power of
vital control (_frein vital_). Failure to exercise this control is the
spiritual indolence that is for both Christian and Buddhist a chief
source, if not the chief source, of evil. Though Aristotle, after the
Greek fashion, gives the primacy not to will but to mind, the power of
which I have been speaking is surely related to his “energy of soul,”
the form of activity distinct from a mere outer working, deemed by
him appropriate for the life of leisure that he proposes as the goal
of a liberal education. Happiness, which is for him the end of ends,
is itself, he tells us, “a kind of working.” Here is a difference,
one may note in passing, between a true humanist like Aristotle and
the epicurean who also has his doctrine of moderation and so often
sets up as a humanist. It is no doubt well, as the epicurean urges,
so to indulge in present pleasures that they may not be injurious to
future ones. To employ the trivial illustration, it is well to avoid
overeating at dinner lest one impair one’s appetite for supper. But the
meaning of the Aristotelian working is that one should not be content
with transitory pleasure at all, but should be striving constantly to
rise from a lower to a higher range of satisfactions. The energy of
soul that has served on the humanistic level for mediation appears on
the religious level in the form of meditation. Religion may of course
mean a great deal more than meditation. At the same time humanistic
mediation that has the support of meditation may correctly be said to
have a religious background. Mediation and meditation are after all
only different stages in the same ascending “path” and should not be
arbitrarily separated.
This question comes up especially in connection with the rôle of
enthusiasm. Humanism is not primarily enthusiastic, whereas religion
is. There is a touch of enthusiasm even in Aristotle, in general one of
the coolest and most detached of thinkers, when he comes to the passage
from the humanistic to the religious level. “We should not,” he says,
“pay heed to those who bid us think as mortals, but should, as far as
may be, seek to make ourselves immortal.” At the same time it must be
admitted that even a true religious enthusiasm is hard to combine with
poise and that this true enthusiasm has many counterfeits. “For one
inspired, ten thousand are possessed,” wrote the Earl of Roscommon,
having in mind the religious zealots of the English seventeenth
century. The neo-classic gentleman was therefore as a rule distinctly
unfriendly to the enthusiast. The humanist, however, should not deny
enthusiasm but merely insist on defining it. He cannot afford to be
an enthusiast in Rousseau’s sense; on the other hand, he should not
neglect the truth of Rousseau’s saying that “cold reason has never done
anything illustrious.”
Though one should, in my judgment, side with the oriental as against
Aristotle and the Greeks in giving priority to the higher will over
mind,[14] especially if one attaches importance to the supreme
religious virtue, humility, it yet remains true that this will must
be exercised intelligently. Granted that the existence in man of a
power of control may be affirmed, quite apart from any dogma, as
a psychological fact, the individual must nevertheless go beyond
this fact if he is to decide rightly how far he needs to exercise
control in any particular instance: in short, he needs standards. In
getting his standards the humanist of the best type is not content
to acquiesce inertly in tradition. He is aware that there is always
entering into life an element of vital novelty and that the wisdom
of the past, invaluable though it is, cannot therefore be brought to
bear too literally on the present. He knows that, though standards
are necessary, they should be held flexibly and that, to accomplish
this feat, he must make the most difficult of all mediations, that
between the One and the Many. The chief enemies of the humanist are
the pragmatists and other philosophers of the flux who simplify this
problem for themselves by dismissing the One, which is actually a
living intuition, as a metaphysical abstraction.
Whatever reality man achieves in his dealings with either the human or
the natural order, is dependent, I have tried to show elsewhere, on the
degree to which he establishes a correct relationship between the part
of himself that perceives, the part that conceives, and the part that
discriminates. The part that conceives, that reaches out and seizes
likenesses and analogies, may be defined as imagination; the part that
discriminates and tests the unity thus apprehended from the point of
view of its truth may be defined as analytical reason; the part that
perceives is, in the case of the humanist, primarily concerned with
the something in man that is set above the phenomenal order and that I
have already defined as a power of control. One may say therefore that
standards result from a co-operation between imagination and reason,
dealing with the more specifically human aspects of experience, and
that these standards should be pressed into the service of the higher
will with a view to imposing a right direction on the emotions and
expansive desires of the natural man. The supreme goal of ethical
endeavour, as Plato pointed out long ago, is that one should come to
like and dislike the right things.