The humanities are the ordinary universal feelings, such as family
affection, aversion to cruelty, love of justice and of liberty.
The ideals are the so-called big enthusiasms, as religion, patriotism,
reform, and the like.
The humanities are sometimes called the red passions; the ideals the
white passions.
The great institutions of the race have been formed and kept alive by
the white passions. These include churches, political parties, nations,
and various societies and associations, secret and public.
The progress of mankind has been made through institutions, embodying
ideals, which we may call the centrifugal force. The humanities have
always pulled against this, and may be termed the centripetal force.
Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet
in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and
tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the
influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.
Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human
feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.
The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious
ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. Plain pity
and sympathy battered down the monstrous structure of iron idealism. The
horrors of the medieval inquisition and the dark intolerance of
puritanism had to yield to the humanities.
Most of the great tragedies have been the crushing out of human and
natural feeling by some ideal which, once helpful, has become monstrous.
Such were the Greek tragedies, where men were the victims of the gods.
War is the colossal force of an ideal, patriotism, where the check of
the humanities has been entirely cut off.
It is supposed to ennoble men and states. It has always been the
preferred occupation of the noble class, kings and courtiers, because
the contempt of personal feelings and the merciless sacrifice of the
humanities have seemed grand and royal.
But by and by war must yield to the eternal humanities. Sheer human
sympathies will abolish it.
The humanities are peculiarly of the common people. Therefore they find
expression and come into political effect quickly in democracies. In the
United States, for instance, the rule of a religious party or the
program of patriotic militarism is impossible. We have too much red
passion to permit the ascendency of white passions.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book of red passion, sympathy for the negro,
overthrew the “white” ideals of the slave oligarchy.
The cry of a starving mother, the protest of wronged workmen, can defeat
the apparently resistless power of massed capital.
One drop of blood outweighs the most splendid scheme of the theorist.
The history of the world is the unceasing struggle of the humanities
against great ideals which, crystallized into institutions, have become
inhuman.