The lapidary precedes the historian, and the sound of the mallet is
heard in the land chipping _Hic Jacet_ on the monuments which humanism
has erected, with an epitaph which runs blithely thus:
“Humanism enjoyed four hundred years of prosperity in the later
world and then gave way to Modernism. From Mid-Fifteenth to
Mid-Nineteenth Century, Humanism traced the patterns of the
Occident. Then, with a dramatic flourish comparable to that of the
Renaissance, a new pattern was superimposed on the palimpsest of
the West, based on the concepts and methods of Natural Science.”
Meantime, while the historian waits for a deeper perspective, I am
writing in the belief that there is more vitality in humanism than
the lapidaries have given it credit for. Humanity, at all events, is
perennial, and men are not likely to forget for long that science is
not ineluctable nature itself, but only human knowledge, and that all
knowledge, even knowledge of nature, is pursued at will for whatever
it is worth to them in their own esteem--that behind the pursuit of
natural science lies the authority of the evaluating mind.
The human worth of the sciences, I ardently echo, is beyond compare.
They have, it is true, played a sardonic trick on their pursuers,
and have seemed for the moment honestly to nullify any significant
worth in human existence. But men may still recollect that it is they
themselves who have made the nullifying discovery. They are worth at
least what that discovery implies--an intelligence, a power to think
and judge, and an impulse to act selectively on the basis of a sense
of values--or why have they pursued the sciences at all? With these
resources to start with, and science in their scrip, they may also have
the humour to see that there remains to them, as of old, the eternal
task of making the best of it--the very task to which science itself is
a contribution. When this perception shall have grown lively enough,
humanism will again come into its own.
Granted a will to return to humanism, however, the return itself will
not be simple. Something, we shall find, has been lost in the meantime.
Value and significance are not handed to us on a platter; they are
themselves products of thought. If life, then, has seemed to be emptied
of them by the findings of natural science, it is equally possible
to suppose that this bathos is due to a diluted capacity for thought
in precisely the field of thought where value and significance are
conceived.
This is the possibility that I have set out to examine. The broad
hint of it lies on the surface. If discipline of the mind has any
virtue--and modernism itself with its austere regimen is its current
champion--that virtue has been lifted from the field of thought where
human values are explicitly involved, to a field of thought from which
they are explicitly banned. By every calculation, therefore, the minds
thus affected should have lost something of their capacity to think in
the undisciplined area, and should have lost something of their powers
to conceive or discover the values that, under happier auspices, give
life its significance.
I
In imagination we dramatise the Renaissance as a sweeping revolution.
Whether humanists or modernists, we look upon it as a beginning,
or a resumption, at all events as the turning-point from which we
are the continuators in a straight line. Historians of philosophy,
of letters, of politics, of science all concur. More impressively
still the men of the Renaissance themselves were quite conscious of
the change--Bessarion, Aldus, Erasmus, da Vinci, Galileo, Bruno, to
take names at random. The shift of curiosity from the divine to the
secular, and the responsive shift of discipline from scholasticism to
humanism opened out new vistas to the voyaging mind. It would be hard
to exaggerate the almost theatric reversals which the times witnessed
and welcomed.
Sweeping as it was, however, the revolution of the Renaissance was
less radical than that of the second half of the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the latter the changes wrought by the Renaissance were
on the level of explicit ideas. The essential stuff of thought was
unchanged. New ideas were astir, but the elements of which they were
built were the old elements. Theology gave way to humanism; God as
the centre gave way to man as the centre. But after all, God had been
conceived as a father and man as a child of God, and, God or man,
their psychology was the same. The very literature which had laid the
premisses of mediæval thought--the Bible--permeated the consciousness
of the humanistic period yet more deeply.
The shift of discipline from sacred to profane letters, as a
consequence, made no profound break in the consciousness itself.
The major impulses of the two periods blended easily and naturally.
The religious impulse of the Middle Ages lent itself triumphantly
to literary expression; there was the _Divine Comedy_. The literary
impulse of the Renaissance lent itself no less triumphantly to
religious themes; there was _Paradise Lost_. Natural science, indeed,
began its modern course under the impulse of the Renaissance. Still,
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, while the common
discipline of the West was humanistic, natural science did not
profoundly alter the minds of men. It was an incident, a special play
of curiosity and thought on the part of men whose minds were formed and
informed in the medium of humane letters. Even Doctor Johnson had his
chemical apparatus.
Not until the latter half of the nineteenth century did the common
discipline of letters begin to give way. Up to that time, therefore,
there had been a basic continuity in the cultivated consciousness of
the West, not only from the Middle Ages but from high antiquity itself.
For the Renaissance was avowedly a resumption of the broken threads
of ancient thought. And its humanism, however loosely it spliced the
break, was evidence that here too the essential elements of its reason
were the same. What so intoxicated the Renaissance mind was the very
spontaneity of its grasp of ancient ideas. And this affinity has been
the mark of humanism ever since.
Now continuity is not necessarily a virtue. Nothing, alas, is so
persistent as error and evil. One aspect of the shift to modernism,
however, seems to me itself an evil, promising persistence--a rupture
at the basis of reason. Modernism, indeed, also had its dramatic
confrontations, its moments of intense self-consciousness. New
conceptions came into tragic conflict with old, yielding many a Robert
Elsmere, and many a family cleavage like that between the elder and the
younger Gosse. Such conflicts are disconcerting and painful, and for a
generation or two terribly impressive. It is not to such overt changes,
however, that I refer. They belong to the normal life of the mind.
It is the very function of intellect to incur and mediate them. One
is inclined to bid the intellect be a man and face the frank hazards
of the life of reason. I refer rather to a change, not in ideas, but
prior to ideas, among the ultimate premisses of thought, in the
discipline by which the powers of the mind and the fortunes of ideas
are themselves in a large measure disposed. And this change, it seems
to me, has proved a scotching of the goose that lays the golden egg.