II

Where is the bottom of the well into which discipline--vaunted so

highly by both humanist and modernist--is poured? Discipline, as

distinguished from any guise of propaganda, is a delicate affair. Its

concern is not for the specific ideas with which perforce it must do

its deed, and which it pours into the depths in an unremitting stream.

Its subtle task is to enrich and enhance the powers of thought and yet

leave them free--free to think, and free to judge even the ideas by

which they are enriched.

The bottom lies deeper, therefore, than the level at which the Huxleys,

the Spencers, the Eliots placed the controversy--the relative merits

of two sorts of knowledge, of Homer and Sophocles, of Plato’s Ideas

and Cæsar’s battles, of _Jerusalem Recovered_ and _Paradise Lost_,

as against the constitution of matter and the laws of nature. These

relative merits are themselves matters of judgment, as the controversy

witnesses. And it is precisely the quality of such judgment that is

momentously at stake.

Of course the Hellenist must know his Greek and the astronomer his

physics. They are specialists, and the question is not of them.

It is a question of that common humanity of which Hellenist and

astronomer, poet and chemist, man of leisure and man of affairs are

alike responsible members. As between humanist and modernist a sort of

official decision has already been rendered, and the common discipline,

together with the faith that animates it, has gone over to the

sciences. Is it ill-humoured to point out that the decision itself has

been arrived at and progressively confirmed in that field of judgment

from which discipline has been progressively withdrawn? At all events,

it is toward that deeper level that I am delving, to get at the roots

of that common humanity.

The Darwinian hypothesis of the descent of man is a biological way

of dealing with a reflection old in the tradition of humanism.

From Plato down, curiosity has toyed with theories of the origin

of language. Language is patently artificial, a device, a product

of human ingenuity. That a child is born without speech might mean

nothing, since there are instincts that emerge only in the course of

development. But language differs from language; every term in every

language is arbitrary; the child, whatever his blood, picks up the

speech of his community; individuals differ in the extent and character

of their deliberate acquisition. All these considerations point to its

artificiality. One speaks, indeed, before one’s mind is mature enough

to reflect upon the accomplishment. But that is the very point, as will

appear in a moment.

Whatever the theory, the origin of speech implies ancestors before

speech. And those ancestors--is it fantastic to identify them, in

a slightly modified version of our evolutionary history, with the

prehuman race of the Darwinian rendering? We should not, I think, have

called them men. For bound up with language is all that we think of

as human--the power of communication, the fixation and tradition of

thought, the comparison and criticism of ideas, co-operation on the

basis of common principles, all history and philosophy, all literature

and science, the very process of reason itself prior to its expression.

I say reason, not intelligence. Intelligence itself--a primary

mystery--is scarcely the monopoly of men. The cat here on the hearth

has a share of it, and the mouse of which she is apparently dreaming.

It is not intelligence that distinguishes the human species sweepingly

from the brute, but a particular deployment of it, a way of using it or

managing it, that we call _reason_.

To linger in imagination over this moment of evolution is to linger

over a transition from the dumb fluidity of animal consciousness to

its articulation by the use of language. Sheer animal consciousness

may alight, perhaps, upon any imaginable concept. Its rational defect

is its inability to return after departure to the same spot. Who by

taking pains could return again to precisely the number 91 but for the

articulating, identifying, stabilising symbol? The rational use of the

native intelligence thus hangs upon an ability to identify particles of

consciousness arbitrarily shaped, to quit them, and then to return. And

speech serves this end; so far as it is carried it precipitates fluid

consciousness into stable, negotiable blocks for the architectural

structures of thought.

Now it is true that what is original, what is new, what is invented or

discovered by the thinking mind itself emerges, not in the articulate

particles--they are perforce old stuff--but in the perception by the

intelligence of relations between them. This spontaneous perception

of relationships is the play of reason; thought is a sort of creative

miracle.

On the other hand--and this is the point I am driving at--just because

thought is the perception of relationships between particles of old

stuff, the particles themselves condition these perceptions. I see only

such relationships as hold between the particles I happen to possess;

certainly I can see none between such as I do not possess. And those I

have are none of my own creation. They are handed down to me. In this

sense the power of thought the “faculty” of reason, is a _tradition_.

In fancy I may picture a Romulus--abandoned on a hillside and suckled

by a wolf--inventing for himself a system of symbols with which to

articulate his own fluid consciousness, conning them into spontaneity,

and building them into thought. But in reality he would not--he could

not. The actual articulations with which one thinks are not native to

the consciousness. Who of us can count more than a stray one or two of

his own invention, even with the hint and model of a whole armory of

them already in possession? They are, on the contrary, a heritage. And

what one can think is conditioned by that heritage--such items of it as

through hap or care one has previously acquired.

All that I, for instance, can think in the field of chemistry is

sharply limited to what I can construe with the articulate particles in

that area of my consciousness. In my actual experience that area has

been poorly endowed. All that I can think there I could say in a bad

quarter of an hour. And what I can think there is cabined and cribbed

by the special particles I happen to possess.

This analysis, so obviously valid in any special field of thought in

which one is aware of one’s ignorance, holds no less, it seems to me,

for that universal ignorance in which all of us are born. If it does

hold there, it may stand as one version of the hypothesis of human

evolution--rational mind out of animal consciousness, man out of brute.

The change that effected this evolution was not accomplished, however,

once for all in some remote past. The outer device was transmissible,

and hence became a racial characteristic. But the change itself

must still be re-enacted in every growing child. Something of it is

re-enacted in the emergence of every idea in the rational mind. How far

it is carried and how complete the evolution depends upon deliberate

cultivation.

Intelligence is pure gift, the prior condition and animating agent

of all thought. Whether intelligence itself may be increased by

exercise is a matter of faith or doubt, as one chooses. In face of a

primary mystery one can only be humble and dumb. But of that ingenious

artifice, the arbitrary articulation of the consciousness into stable

particles, there can be no doubt. It is a human invention in human

hands. What can be done with these particles by way of thought depends

in a given mind upon their range, the richness of their substance,

their stability, and their clarity. And they can, with care, be

extended, enriched, stabilised, clarified.

That there are larger units, whole structures of thought, with which

discipline may be occupied goes without saying. Not all the heritage

of the civilised mind is deposited in these particles. But the larger

units are themselves built of the smaller, and what any mind makes of

them hangs on its prior possession of the elements of which they are

built, and the quality of those elements. In childhood one may have

read, say, _Gulliver_, or _Through the Looking Glass_, with delight,

and in maturity may still read them with delight. The outer symbols are

the same now as then, but the responsive thoughts are not. In response

to each symbol now there rises richer substance than the mind then

possessed, grounds for relationships which then escaped detection.

The two, indeed--particle and structure--are inseparable in practice.

It is in use that the particles have accumulated their substance

and quality; it is by finding them in use that the mind identifies

and enriches and clarifies them for itself. But it is they, I

think--the ultimate premisses of all thought and the basis of all

understanding--that lie at the bottom of the well into which discipline

is poured.

For in the first place they lie at the deepest level to which

discipline can go. That is something. But by a happy fortuity there,

at the very node between animal consciousness and rational thought,

they occupy a strategic position. Through them the fluid streams of

consciousness, rising from below, are articulated for thought--and

one thinks what he can with the shapes thus formed. And through these

same shapes come the chief enrichments of the consciousness from above.

For in reality what I apprehend of the thoughts of others is not

their thoughts but my own. It is what I build in my own mind with the

particles of my own consciousness called up by the symbols they have

used. They are the determinants, coming and going, and a discipline

that thickens and deepens and clarifies them enhances at one stroke

both the give and the take of the mind, its power to think and its

power to learn.

They lie at a strategic point, moreover, in another and no less

momentous transaction. They not only articulate the individual mind

for thinking; coming from a common tradition they tend, in the measure

in which that tradition is mastered, to articulate disparate minds

alike. Only so can two minds think the same thought. It is here that

mind comes together with mind--or forever fails to come together.

And situated between two realms of freedom--the wild realm of animal

consciousness and the cultivated realm of reason--they alone are

amenable to coercion. Arbitrary agreements, sheer conventions,

subsequent to all native idiosyncrasies and prior to all conflict of

prejudice or opinion, they are open to utter community. And since in

relation to all thinking they are the ultimate premisses, they afford

the unquestioned common grounds imperative for mutual understanding and

community of idea.

Discipline can thus bring its pressures to bear upon them with a clear

conscience, assured that here it can do its essential task without

violating its own principles--cultivate the individual judgment without

infringing upon its freedom, and bring mind into community with mind

without the weakness of assumption or the affront of dogmatism.

Assured, too, that in a sort of beneficent circle community itself

breeds both mind and further community. For given a broad community in

these particles, the common legacy comes the purer to its inheritors;

recurrence of each particle confirms and enriches and clarifies it in

the experience of each mind. In a community without community, on the

other hand, occurrence and recurrence tend rather to lead it astray and

confuse it; and though men talk in common symbols, they build them into

tacit obliquities of mutual incomprehension.

Is it too much to suggest, in passing, that the phenomenon of the

brilliant period, the curious clustering of great names in the

bead-roll of history, may be explained as a moment when by a community

of mind with mind, here at the basis of all thought, a fine individual

clarity and a lively spontaneity of mutual understanding have lifted

the current of ideas to a high level? At all events, by such community

the capacity of the mind both to think and to learn is heightened and

the ardour of thought is stimulated, expression meeting comprehension,

and comprehension quickening the impulse to think.