I have gone a long way about and brought up with a conclusion that
on its own showing should be as valid for modernism as for humanism.
That, indeed, is my own sense of it--that here is the organic economy
of thought in whatever field. And in fact, as I have intimated, its
application is likely to be most obvious in the sciences, which we
come upon after the mind is in some measure formed. Each science has a
special articulation and nomenclature outside our normal experience,
without which we can think but meagrely and vaguely in that area. The
part they play there is evident. To these articulate particles it gives
precise definition, at once for the sake of accuracy of calculation
and for the sake of mutual understanding and wide co-operation among
those who pursue it. Incidentally by its technology it escapes the
loose corruptions with which lay usage always threatens a vernacular.
The extraordinary results of the discipline which establishes these
articulations, these precisions, and these communities need no bush.
It is perhaps less obvious that discipline is even more imperative
in that other area which the casual, voluble experience of living
begins to articulate before we are aware, laying the premisses of that
common mind which we tend to take for granted as a native gift. Though
it is not a native gift, no man feels deficient in it, as Descartes
pointed out. What it yields him is life as he knows it; it is his
apprehension of reality. In one sense this trust is his intellectual
virtue. It marks his faith in the judgments of reason--the best reason
he knows. He may be aware of his ignorance in this or that field of
knowledge--know that he knows nothing of astronomy, of Homer, of
plumbing, of torts. But no one knows everything; these ignorances are
comparable to those of other men; by turning his mind to them he could
master them.
By turning his mind! This contrast between _mind_, on the one hand, and
on the other hand specific knowledge to which a _mind_ may be turned,
is the very heart of the conflict between humanist and modernist. To
the modernist, justifiably proud of his special methods, that mind
which comes to him unaware is a casual and amateur affair. As a process
of reason it is the way fools think, and asses, and the cohorts of
stupidity. Well, it is.
To the humanist, however, this liability is precisely its momentous
importance. Here is mind itself by which man becomes human out of
brute, mind in symmetry as it develops by confronting life and carrying
on the adventure. According to its competence it apprehends the scene,
the play, and the players, conceives the significance of the plot,
exercises its judgment, lays its guiding principles, and conducts
its affairs in wisdom or unwisdom, justice or injustice, harmony or
inharmony. That it may be the mind of a fool is always its tragic
possibility.
In shifting the basic common discipline from humane letters to natural
science, then, modernism has, in so far, _abandoned the mind_. I say
this in conscious enjoyment of hyperbole. There remains just so much
of mind as develops in casual experience--that corrupting casual
experience which science so sedulously avoids in its technology. But
the point at issue is one of discipline, the conscious extension of
mental competence beyond the limits of casual experience. Plainly the
discipline of natural science neglects much of the mind as irrelevant.
For natural science is an attempt to picture and understand the
material universe as it still would be if the knower were not in
it--things and their relations to each other. The virtue sought by the
man of science is the ability to ignore what he, by the accident of
his conscious existence, thrusts into the situation. Obviously this
discipline will articulate the consciousness for thought only here
within this field of knowledge--among things and their relations, to
the rigid exclusion of the knower and his affairs.
Humane letters, on the other hand, make no such exclusion. They too
deal with things and their relations. But they include what natural
science ignores--the knower and his responsive evaluation of what
he knows. Literature looks out from the common centre at which the
experience of life itself places us. It is an imaginative, reflective
extension of that experience. And it does directly what experience
itself does only indirectly if at all, for being articulate or
nothing--symbol and meaning forever hand in glove--it specifically
articulates the reader’s mind, enriching and clarifying the premisses
of consciousness with which in turn that mind thinks in the field of
common human responsibility. Here is the telling difference between the
literate and the empiric mind--not in intelligence, not in specific
knowledge, but in the substance and quality of the premisses of thought.
Literature uses the unprecise vernacular, it is true; but that is its
virtue. For the vernacular, in contrast with any and all technologies,
is the idiom of the mind itself, its fundamental humanising tradition.
It is the essential historic feat of any civilisation, not so much
perhaps to have conceived its guiding ideas--ideas change--as, in
conceiving them, to have slowly evolved the articulate elements by
which its heritors may conceive their own. Nature cares nothing for
them or for what is made of them. They are none of hers. We come by
them only through familiar contact with the tradition which has shaped
and accumulated them.
Here, then, is the great human task--now for the first time in the
history of the West abandoned to the mercies of casual experience. Man
is a social being in more than his habits and his institutions. His
humanity itself hangs on his sociability. Deprive him of his social
legacy of articulations and he is once again the sub-human animal.
It was the essence of humanism as a discipline that it attempted,
not to inculcate a doctrine, but to carry on and on this ultimate
humanising process. And in this it served three ends, distinct but
interdependent--mind, community, and the tradition on which both mind
and community depend.