RACIAL AND CULTURAL CONTINUITY
That the history of the race is an unbroken continuum goes
without saying. What this means in the way of transmission
of the arts, the sciences, the religion, the ideas, the customs of
one generation to the next, we shall presently see. Cultural
continuity is made possible by the more fundamental fact of
the actual biological continuity of the race. This biological
continuity extends back, as far as we can infer from the scientific
evidence, unbrokenly through the half million years
since man has left traces of his presence on earth. The continuity
of life itself goes back to that still more remote time
when man and ape were indistinguishable, indeed to that
postulated epoch when life as it existed on earth was no more
complex than it is as it now appears in the one-celled animal.
Evolution has taught us that life, however it started, has been
one long continuous process which has increased in complexity
from the unicellular animals to man.
The continuity of the human race is a contrivance of nature
rather than of man. It is, as it were, a by-product of the sex
instinct. Man is endowed natively with a powerful desire for
sex gratification, and though offspring are the chief utility of
this instinct, desire for reproduction is not normally its primary
stimulus. But while the production of offspring may
thus be said to be an incidental result of the sex instinct, human
reproduction may be subjected to rational consideration
and control, according as offspring are or are not considered
desirable.
The sense of the desirability of offspring may, in the first
place, be determined by social rather than individual considerations.
To the group or the state a large birth-rate, a
steady increase of the number of births over the number of
deaths, may be made desirable by the need of a large population
for agriculture, herding, or war. In primitive tribes,
superiority in numbers must have been, under conditions of
competitive warfare, a pronounced asset. In any imperialistic
régime, where military conquest is highly regarded, the
maintenance and replenishment of large armies is a factor that
has entered into reflection on the question of population.
In cases where a small ruling class is benefited by the labor
of a slave or serf class, there is, at least for the ruling classes,
a marked utility in the increase in population. It means just
so much opportunity for increase of wealth on the part of
landowning and slaveholding or serf-controlling classes. In
any country, increase in the labor supply means just so much
more human energy for the control of natural resources, so
many more units of energy for the production of national
wealth.
Offspring may come to be reflectively desired by the individual
as a means of perpetuating property, family, or fame.
A man cannot nonchalantly face the prospect of obliteration,
and the biological fact of death may be circumvented by the
equally real fact of reproduction. A man's individuality, we
have already had occasion to see, is enhanced by his possessions,
and if his fortune or estate is handed down he shall not
altogether have been obliterated from the earth. Similarly,
where a family has become a great tradition, there may be a
deliberate desire on the part of an individual to have the
name and tradition carried on, to keep the old lineage current
and conspicuous among men. A man may think through his
children to keep his own fame alive in posterity. At least his
name shall be known, and if, as so often happens, a son follows
in his father's profession, carries on his father's business,
farm, or philanthropies, the individual attains at least some
measure of vicarious immortality. His own ways, habits,
traditions are carried on.
A man may, moreover, come to desire offspring for the
pleasures and responsibilities of domesticity and parenthood.
There is a parental instinct as such, certainly very strong in
most women, and not lacking to some degree in most men.
The joys of caring for and rearing a child have too often been
celebrated in literature and in life by parents both young and
old to need more explicit statement here.
RESTRICTION OF POPULATION. But reproduction has been in
human history promiscuous, and increase of population has
been less a problem to moralists and economists than has its
restriction. The danger of over-increase in population was
first powerfully stated by Malthus in his _Essay on Population_.
Malthus contended in effect that population always tends to
increase up to the limit of subsistence, and gives indications,
unless increase is checked, of increasing beyond it. In its
extreme form, as it appeared in Malthus's first edition of his
_Essay_, it ran somewhat as follows:
As things are now, there is a perpetual pressure by population on
the sources of food. Vice and misery cut down the number of men
when they grow beyond the food. The increase of men is rapid and
easy; the increase of food is in comparison, slow, and toilsome. They
are to each other as a geometrical increase to an arithmetical; in
North America, the population double their number in twenty years.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bonar: _Philosophy and Political Economy in their
Historic Relations_, p. 205.]
Malthus's pessimistic prophecy of the increase of population
beyond the means of subsistence has been subjected to
refutation by various causes. For one thing, among civilized
races at least, the birth-rate is declining. Again, intensive
agriculture has vastly increased the possibilities of our natural
resources. On this point, writes Kropotkin, who is better
acquainted with agricultural conditions than are most social
reformers:
They [market gardeners] have created a totally new agriculture.
They smile when we boast about the rotation system having permitted
us to take from the field one crop every year, or four crops
each three years, because their ambition is to have six and nine crape
from the very same plot of land during the twelve months. They
do not understand our talk about good and bad soils, because they
make the soils themselves, and make it in such quantities as to be
compelled yearly to seed some of it; otherwise it would raise up the
levels of their gardens by half an inch, every year. They aim at
cropping, not five or six tons of grass on the acre as we do, but from
fifty to one hundred tons of various vegetables on the same space;
not 51 pounds worth of hay, but 100 pounds worth of vegetables of
the plainest description, cabbages and carrots.[1]
[Footnote 1: Kropotkin: _Fields, Factories, and Workshops_, p. 74.]
Of intensive industry the same might be said. Where formerly
a man could produce only enough for one man's consumption,
under conditions of machine production one man's
work can supply quantities sufficient for many. With a
declining birth-rate and the vastly increased productivity of
industry and agriculture, there is a greatly reduced danger of
the population growing beyond their possible sustenance by
the available food supply.
Under certain economic and social conditions there are
marked variations in the birth-rate. This may be due to
various causes which are, by different writers, variously
assigned. The variation of the birth-rate among different
classes is again a matter of common observation and statistical
certainty. Higher standards of living are found regularly
to be correlated with a decrease in the number of children in
a family. An important factor in the voluntary restriction of
population is the desire to give children that are brought
into the world adequate education, environment, and social
opportunity.
CULTURAL CONTINUITY. To the very young the world seems an
unprecedented novelty. It seems scarcely older than their
own memories, which are few and short, and their own experience,
which is necessarily limited and confined. Through
education our experience becomes immeasurably widened; we
can vicariously live through the experiences of other people
through hearing or reading, and can acquire the racial memory
which goes back as far as the records of history, or
anthropological research. As we grow older we come to learn
that our civilization has a history; that our present has a past.
This past extends back through the countless æons before
man walked upright. The past of human life on earth goes
back itself over nearly half a million years. With this long
past, the present is continuous, being as it were, additional
pages in process of being written.
The physical continuity of the race is insured, as we have
just seen, by a mechanism, which, though it may be subjected
to rational consideration, is instinctive in its operation. The
human beings that people the earth to-day are offspring of
human ancestors reaching back to the appearance of the
human animal in the long process of the evolution of life on
earth. So far as we can see, posterity will be for countless
generations physically similar to ourselves, as they certainly
will, unless all records or evidences of the fact are obscured,
trace their ancestry continuously back to us.
Not only is there continuity of physical descent, however,
but continuity of cultural achievement. The past, in any
literal temporal sense, is over and done with. The Romans
are physically dead, as are the generations of barbarians of
the Dark Ages, and all the inhabitants of mediæval and
modern Europe, save our own contemporaries. Yesterdays
are irrevocably over. The past, in any real sense, exists
only in the form of achievements that have been handed down
to us from previous generations. The only parts of the past
that survive physically are the actual material products and
achievements of bygone generations, the temples and the
cathedrals, the sculptures and the manuscripts, the roads
and the relics of earlier civilizations. Even these exist in the
present; they are evidences, memorials, mementos of the
past. These heritages from past civilizations may be interesting,
intrinsically, as in the case of paintings and statues, or
useful, as in the case of roads, reservoirs, or harbors.
But we inherit the past in a more vital sense. We inherit
ways of thought and action, social systems, scientific and
industrial methods, manners and morals, educational bequests
and ideals, all that we have and are. Without these, each
generation would have to start anew. If the whole of existing
society were destroyed, and a newborn generation could be
miraculously preserved to maturity, its members would have
to start on the same level, with the same ignorances, uncertainties,
and impotences as primitive savages.
In order to make the nature and variety of our abject dependence
on the past clear, we have only to consider our language, our laws,
our political and social institutions, our knowledge and education,
our view of this world and the next, our tastes and the means of
gratifying them. On every hand the past dominates and controls
us, for the most part unconsciously and without protest on our part.
We are in the main its willing adherents. The imagination of the
most radically-minded cannot transcend any great part of the ideas
and customs transmitted to him. When once we grasp this truth,
we shall, according to our mood, humbly congratulate ourselves
that ... we are permitted to stand on the giant's shoulders, and
enjoy an outlook that would be quite hidden to us, if we had to trust
to our own short legs; or we may resentfully chafe at our bonds and,
like Prometheus, vainly strive to wrest ourselves from the rock of the
past, in our eagerness to bring relief to the suffering children of men.
In any case, whether we bless or curse the past, we are inevitably
its offspring, and it makes us its own long before we realize it. It is,
indeed, almost all that we can have.[1]
[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, pp. 256-57.]
The cultural achievements of the past, which we inherit
chiefly as social habits, are obviously not transmitted to us
physically, as are the original human traits with which this
volume has so far been chiefly concerned. They are not in our
blood; they are acquired like other habits, through contact
with others and through repeated practice.
We are thus to a very large extent conditioned by the past.
It is as if we had inherited a fortune composed of various kinds
of properties, houses, books, automobiles, warehouses, musical
instruments, and in addition, trade concessions, business
secrets, formulæs, methods, and good-will. Our activities will
be limited in measure by the extent of the property, its constituent
items, and the repair in which we keep it. We may
squander or misinvest our principal, as when we use scientific
knowledge for dangerous or dubious aims, for example, for
conquest or rapine. We may add to it, as in the development
of the sciences and industrial arts. We may, so to speak, live
on the income. Such is the case when a society ceases to be
progressive, and fails to add anything to a highly developed
traditional culture, as happened strikingly in the case of
China. Again we may have inherited "white elephants,"
which may be of absolutely no use to us, encumbrances of
which we cannot easily rid ourselves, influential ideas which
are no longer adequate to our present situation, obsolete
emotions, methods, or institutions. We may allow our cultural
inheritance, through bad education, to fall into disrepair and
decay.
Since we are so dependent on the past, our attitude toward
it, which in turn determines the use we make of it, is of the most
crucial significance. The several characteristic and varying
attitudes toward the past which are so markedly current are
not determined solely by logical considerations. For individuals
and social groups particular features of their heritage have
great emotional associations. The living past is composed of
habits, traditions, values, which are vivid and vital issues to
those who practice them. Traditions, customs, or social
methods come to have intrinsic values; they become the center
of deep attachments and strong passion. They are a rich
element of the atmosphere of the present; they are woven into
the intimate fabric of our lives. The awe which we feel in
great cathedrals is historical as well as religious. Those vast
solemn arches are the voices of the past speaking to us. The
moral appeal of tradition appears with beautiful clarity in the
opening chapter of Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_.
A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or
displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily
life--that _conscience_, of which the old Roman religion was a formal,
habitual recognition, had become in him a powerful current of feeling
and observance. The old-fashioned, partly Puritanic awe, the power
of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern
peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he
passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had
struck dead an aged laborer in the field: an upright stone, still with
moldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that
system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him further,
a great seriousness, an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life
and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship--of such
gifts to men as fire, water, the earth from labor on which they live,
really understood by him as gifts--a sense of religious responsibility
in the reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear,
of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms.[1]
[Footnote 1: Walter Pater: _Marius the Epicurean_ (A. L. Burt
edition), pp. 3-4.]
To the past, as it is made familiar to us through song, study,
and traditional practice, we may experience a piety amounting
almost to religious devotion. In some individuals and in
some nations, this sense for tradition is very strong.
Every one has felt more or less keenly this sense of being a
link in a great tradition, whether of a college, family, or country.
Sometimes this sense for tradition takes an æsthetic form,
as in the case of ritual, whether social or religious. Old streets,
ivied towers, ancient rooms, become symbols of great and
dignified achievements; ceremonies come to be invested with
a serious beauty and memorable charm. They become reminders
of a "torch to be carried on," of a spirit to be cherished
and kept alive, of a history to be carried on or a purpose
or an ideal to be fulfilled. As we shall see in a moment, this
sense for the past, which, as Santayana says, makes a man
loyal to the sources of his being, has both its virtues and vices.
It is of immense value in preserving continuity and cultural
integration, in keeping many men continuously moving toward
a single fixed end. It may also wrap dangerously irrelevant
habits and institutions in a saving--and illusive--halo.
There are, on the other hand, individuals with very little
sense for tradition. This may be accounted for in some cases
by a marked æsthetic insensibility, which sees in ritual, ceremony,
or habit, merely the literal, without any appreciation
at all of its symbolic significance.[1] In other cases, individuals
are unsusceptible and hostile to tradition, because they
have themselves been socially disinherited. This is illustrated
not infrequently in the case of foreigners who, for one reason
or another, have left and lost interest in their native land, and
become men without a country.
[Footnote 1: This is illustrated by the crass excesses of certain
radical satirists of religious forms. Those who are the enemies of
religion for economic, social, or intellectualistic reasons combine
a singular sense of the literal absurdities of religious forms
with a marked insensibility to their symbolic values. One may find
interesting examples, from Voltaire to Robert Ingersoll.]
There are others by temperament rebellious and iconoclastic,
who combine a keen sense of present difficulties and problems
with small reverence, use for, or interest in the past, and
small imaginative sympathy with it. The past is to them a
"sea of errors." They regard all past achievements as bad
scribblings which must be erased, so that we may start with
a clean slate. There have been included among such, great
historical reformers. Bentham's enthusiasm for progress led
him into most intemperate attacks on history and historical
method. The most noted of the eighteenth-century philosophers
saw nothing but evil in tradition. Such sentiments
were echoed in the early nineteenth century by Shelley, Godwin,
and their circle, as expressed, for example, in Shelley's
"Hellas":
"The world's great age begins anew,
The golden years return,
The earth doth like a snake renew
Her winter weeds outworn;
Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.
. . . . . . . . .
"Another Athens shall arise,
And to remoter time
Bequeath, like sunset to the skies,
The splendor of its prime;
And leave, if nought so bright can live,
All earth can take or Heaven can give."
It is not surprising that men with an eye fixed on the future
should develop a contempt or an obliviousness of the past.
Utopians nearly always start with "a world various and beautiful
and new."
Perhaps the chief ingredient in such discounting of all past
history is the rebel temperament which wants to break away
from what it regards as the chains, the dead weight, the ruts of
tradition. It cheerfully says, "Nous changerons tout cela,"
and does not stop to discriminate between the _roads_ and the
_ruts_ that have been made by people in the past.
These two temperaments,[1] play a large part in determining
attitudes toward the past. The one regards with awe and
reverence past achievement, and rests his faith on the
experiments which have been tested and proved by time. The
other, to state the position extremely, regards each day as the
possible glorious dawn of a completely new world. The first
attitude, when intemperately preached and practiced, becomes
an uncritical veneration of the past; the second, an uncritical
disparagement. We shall briefly examine each.
[Footnote 1: One is reminded of the song of the sentry before the
House of Parliament in Gilbert and Sullivan's "Iolanthe";
"'T is strange how Nature doth contrive
That every little boy or gal,
That's born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!"]
UNCRITICAL VENERATION OF THE PAST. The extreme form of
uncritical veneration of the past may be said to take the position
that old things are good simply because they are _old_; new
things are evil simply because they are _new_. Institutions,
Ideas, Customs are, like wines, supposed to attain quality
with age. A custom, a law, a code of morals is defined or
maintained on the ground of its ancient--and honorable--history,
of the great span of years during which it has been
current, of the generation after generation that has lived
under its auspices. The ways of our fathers, the old time-tested
ways, these, we are told, must be our ways.
The psychological origins of this position have in part been
discussed. There is in some individuals a highly developed
sentiment and reverence for tradition as such, and an æsthetic
sensibility to the mellowness, ripeness, and charm that so often
accompany old things.[1] The new seems, as it often is, loud,
brassy, vulgar, and hard. But there are other and equally
important causes. Men trust and cherish the familiar in
ideas, customs, and social organization, just as they trust and
cherish old friends. They know what to expect from them;
they have their well-noted excellences, and, while they have
their defects, these also are definitely known and can be
definitely reckoned with. The old order may not be perfect, but
it is an order, and an order whose outlines and possibilities
are known and predictable. Change means change to the
unaccustomed and the unfamiliar. And the unaccustomed
and the unfamiliar, as already pointed out, normally arouse
fear. One of the conventional phrases (which has become
conventional because it is accurate) with which changes have
been greeted is the _cliché_, "we view with alarm." No small
part of genuine opposition to change comes from the cautious
and conscientious types of mind which will not sanction the
reckless taking of chances, especially where the interests of
large groups are concerned, which want to know precisely
where a change will lead. Such a mind holds off from committing
society to making changes that will put a situation
beyond control and lead to unforeseen and uncontrollable
dangers. Especially is this felt by the administrator, by the
man who has experience with the difficulties of putting ideas
in practice, who knows how vastly more difficult it is to
operate with people than with paper.[2] The man of affairs knows
how easy it is to check and change ideas in one's mind, but
knows also the uncontrollable momentum of ideas when they
are acted upon by vast numbers of men.
[Footnote 1: "Oxford," said a distinguished visitor to that
venerable institution, "looks just as it ought to look." And
one is reminded of the story of the American lady who, admiring
the smooth lawns at Oxford, asked a gardener how they managed
to give them that velvet gloss. "We roll them, madam," he said,
"for eight hundred years."]
[Footnote 2: Thus writes Catharine II, in a letter to Diderot,
the French philosopher and humanitarian: "M. Diderot, in all
your schemes of reform, you entirely forget the difference in
our position; you work only on paper, which endures all things;
it offers no obstacle, either to your pen or your imagination.
But I, poor Empress that I am, work on a far more delicate and
irritable substance, the human skin."]
Again, the maintenance of ways that have been practiced
in the past has a large hold over people, for reasons already
discussed in the chapter on Habit. The old and the accustomed
are comfortable and facile; change means inconvenience
and frustration of habitual desires. This is in part
the explanation of the increasing conservatism of men as
they grow older. Not only do they have a keener sense of
the difficulty of introducing changes, but their own fixed
habits of mind and emotion make part of the difficulty.
They like the old ways and persist in them just as they like
and keep old books, old friends, and old shoes.
ROMANTIC IDEALIZATION OF THE PAST. Reverence for the past
may also be due to a romantic idealization of it. In such
cases, it is not an interest in maintaining the present order;
it is rather a contempt for the present and wistful yearning
for the "good old days." Everyone indulges more or less
in such idealization. Such halos are made possible because
we retain the pleasant rather than the painful and dreary
aspects of our past experience. The college alumnus returning
to the campus tells of the since unsurpassed intellectual
and athletic feats of the freshman class of which he was a
member. The elderly gentleman sighs over his newspaper
at the bad ways into which the world is degenerating, and
yearns for the old days when the plays were better,
conversation more interesting, houses more comfortable, and
men more loyal. In similar trivial instances we are all
inclined to indulge in such mythology. The universality and
age of this tendency has been well described by a student of
Greek civilization.
This is the belief of the old school of every age--there was once a
"good" time; and it matters not at all in the study of moral ideals
that no such time can be shown to have existed. The men of the
fourth century [B.C.] say that it was in the fifth; those of the fifth
say it was in the sixth; and so on infinitely. The same ideal was at
work when William Morris looked to the thirteenth century, forgetting
that Dante looked to a still earlier period; and both forgot that
the men of that earlier period said the same--"not now, indeed,
but before us men were happy." So simpler men incline to say that
their grandfathers were fine fellows, but the "old college is going to
the dogs," or "the House of Commons is not what it was once," for
reverence and faith and manliness once ruled the world. The old
school lives upon an ignorance of history; it is genuinely moved by
a simple moral ideal of life and character which its own imagination
has created. And when evil becomes obvious, it is the new-fangled
notions that are to blame. "Trying new dodges" has brought
Athens down in the world--as Aristophanes in 393 B.C. makes his
protagonist say:
"And would it not have saved the Athenian state,
If she kept to what was good, and did not try
Always some new plan?"[1]
[Footnote 1: C. Delisle Burns: _Greek Ideals_, pp. 118-19.]
On a large scale the romantic idealization of the past has
been made into a philosophy of history. The "golden age,"
instead of being put in a roseate and remote future, is put in an
equally remote and roseate past. The Greek legends were
fond of a golden age when the gods moved among men. The
Garden of Eden is the Christian apotheosis of the world's
perfections. Various philosophers have pointed out the
fallacy of finding such a mythological locus for our ideals, and
evolution and the general revelations of history have indicated
the completely mythical character of the golden age. History
may, in general, be said to reveal that, whatever the
imperfections of our own age, we have immeasurably improved
in many pronounced respects over conditions earlier
than our own. The idealized picture of the Middle Ages with
its guardsmen and its courtly knights and ladies, is coming,
with increasing historical information, to seem insignificant
and untrue in comparison with the unspeakable hardships of
the mass of men, the evil social and sanitary conditions, the
plagues and pestilences which were as much a part of it. The
picture of the ideally gentle and benevolent attitude of the
master to his slaves is by no means regarded as a typical picture
of conditions of slave labor in the South. We know,
positively, on the other hand, that our medicine and surgery,
our scientific and industrial methods, our production and our
resources are incomparably greater than those of any earlier
period in history, as are the possibilities of the control of
Nature still unrealized.
If there were time I might try to show that progress in knowledge
and its application to the alleviation of man's estate is more rapid
now than ever before. But this scarcely needs formal proof; it is so
obvious. A few years ago an eminent French _littérateur_, Brunetière,
declared science bankrupt. This was on the eve of the discoveries
in radio-activity which have opened up great vistas of possible human
readjustments if we could but learn to control and utilize the
inexhaustible sources of power that lie in the atom. It was on the eve
of the discovery of the function of the white blood corpuscles, which
clears the way for indefinite advance in medicine. Only a poor
discouraged man of letters could think for a moment that science was
bankrupt. No one entitled to an opinion on the subject believes
that we have made more than a beginning in penetrating the secrets
of the organic and inorganic worlds.[1]
[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, p. 262.]
Even in the face of these facts, reverence for the past may
amount to such religious veneration that change may come
literally to be regarded as sacrilegious. In primitive tribes
the reasons for this insistence are clear. Rites and rituals are
used to secure the favor of the gods and any departure from
traditional customs is looked upon as fraught with actual danger.
But the past, as it lives in established forms and practices,
is still by many, and in highly advanced societies, almost
religiously cherished, sustained, and perpetuated. Every
college, religion, and country has its traditional forms of life
and practice, any infringement of which is regarded with the
gravest disapproval.[2] In social life, generally, there are fixed
forms for given occasions, forms of address, greeting, conversation,
and clothes, all that commonly goes under the name of
the "conventions" or "proprieties." In law, as is well known,
there is developed sometimes to an almost absurd degree a
ritual of procedure. In religion, traditional values become
embodied in fixed rituals of music, processional, and prayer.
In education, especially higher education, there has developed
a fairly stable tradition in the granting of degrees, the
elements of a curriculum, the forms of examination, and the
like. To certain types of mind, fixed forms in all these fields
have come to be regarded as of intrinsic importance. Love
of "good form," the classicist point of view at its best, may
develop into sheer pedantry and Pharisaism, an insistence on
the fixed form when the intent is changed or forgotten, a regard
for the letter rather than the spirit of the law. In a large
number of cases, the fixed modes of life and practice which
are our inheritance come to be regarded as symbols of eternal
and changeless values. Thus many highly intelligent men
find ritual in religion and traditional customs in education
or in social life freighted with symbolic significance, and any
infringement of them as almost sacrilegious in character.
[Footnote 2: It has been said that a custom repeated on a college
campus two years in succession constitutes a tradition.]
CHANGE SYNONYMOUS WITH EVIL. Change, again, may be discouraged
by those who hold, with more or less sincerity, that
no good can come of it. Such a position may, and frequently
is, maintained by those in whom fortunate accident of birth,
favored social position, exuberant optimism, or a stanch and
resilient faith, induces the belief that the social order and
social practices, education, law, customs, economic conditions,
science, art, _et al._, are completely satisfactory. Like
Pippa, in Browning's poem, they are satisfied that "God's
in His Heaven; all's right with the world." That there
are no imperfections, in manners, politics, or morals, in
our present social order, that there are no improvements
which good-will, energy, and intelligence can effect, few will
maintain without qualification. To do so implies, when sincere,
extraordinary blindness to the facts, for example, of
poverty and disease, which, though they do not happen to
touch a particular individual, are patent and ubiquitous
enough. In the face of undeniable evils the position that the
ways we have inherited are completely adequate to our
contemporary problems cannot be ingenuously maintained.
The position more generally expounded by the opponents of
change is that our present modes of life give us the best
possible results, considering the limitations of nature and human
nature, and that the customs, institutions, and ideas we now
have are the fruits of a ripe, a mellow, and a time-tested
wisdom, that any radical innovations would, on the whole, put
us in a worse position than that in which we find ourselves.
Persons taking this attitude discount every suggested
improvement on the ground that, even though intrinsically
good, it will bring a host of inevitable evils with it, and that,
all things considered, we had better leave well enough alone.
Some extreme exponents of this doctrine maintain, as did
some of the Hebrew prophets, that whatever evils are ours are
our own fault, that fault consisting in a lapse from the
accustomed ancient ways. To continue without abatement the
established ways is the surest road to happiness. Education,
social customs, political organization, these are sound and
wholesome as they are; and modification means interference
with the works and processes of reason.
"All Nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good;
And spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right."[1]
[Footnote 1: Pope: _Essay on Man_, epistle I, lines 289 ff.]
Later Hegel developed an elaborate philosophy of history
in which he tried to demonstrate that the history of the past
was one long exemplification of reason; that each event that
happened was part of the great cosmic scheme, an indispensable
syllable of the Divine Idea as it moved through history;
each action part of the increasing purpose that runs through
the ages. That these contentions are, to say the least, extreme,
will appear presently in the statement of the opposite
position which sees nothing in the past but a long succession
of blunders, evils, and stupidities.
"ORDER" _VERSUS_ CHANGE. Finally, genuine opposition to
change arises from those who fear the instability which it implies.
Continuation in established ways makes for integration,
discipline, and stability. It makes possible the converging
of means toward an end, it cumulates efforts resulting
in definite achievement. In so far as we do accomplish anything
of significance, we must move along stable and determinate
lines; we must be able to count on the future.[1] It has
already been pointed out that it is man's docility to learning,
his long period of infancy[2] which makes his eventual achievements
possible. But it is man's persistence in the habits
he has acquired that is in part responsible for his progress.
In individual life, the utility of persistence, and concentration
of effort upon a definite piece of work, have been sufficiently
stressed by moralists, both popular and professional.
"A rolling stone gathers no moss," is as true psychologically
as it is physically. Any outstanding accomplishment,
whether in business, scholarship, science, or literature,
demands perseverance in definite courses of action. We are
inclined, and usually with reason, to suspect the effectiveness
of a man who has half a dozen professions in half as
many years. Such vacillations produce whimsical and scattered
movements; but they are fruitless in results; they literally
"get nowhere."
[Footnote 1: The uncertainty that business men feel during a
presidential campaign is an illustration.]
[Footnote 2: See _ante_, p. 10.]
Just as, in the case of individuals, any significant achievements
require persistent convergence of means toward a definite
end, so is it in the case of social groups. No great business
organizations are built up through continual variations
of policy. Similarly, in the building up of a university, a
government department, a state, or a social order, consecutive
and disciplined persistence in established ways is a requisite
of progress. Without such continuous organization of efforts
toward fixed goals, action becomes frivolous and fragmentary,
a wind along a waste. The history of the English people has
elicited the admiration of philosophers and historians because
it has been such a gradual and deliberate movement, such a
measured and certain progress toward political and social
freedom. To those who appreciate the value of unity of
action, of the assured fruits of cumulative and consistent
action along a given path, change as such seems fraught with
danger. Nor is it specific dangers they fear so much as the
loss of moral fiber, the scattering of energies, the waste and
futility that are frequently the net result of casual driftings
with every wind that blows. No one has more eloquently
expressed this view than Edmund Burke in his _Reflections on
the French Revolution:_
But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth
and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors
and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received
from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act
as if they were the entire masters; that they should think it among
their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance,
by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their
society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin
instead of a habitation--and teaching these successors as little to
respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the
institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of
changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways, as
there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity
of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could
link with the other. Men would be little better than the flies of a
summer.
* * * * *
To avoid, therefore, the evils of inconstancy and versatility, ten
thousand times worse than those of obstinacy and the blindest prejudice,
we have consecrated the state, that no man should approach
to look into its defects or corruptions, but with due caution; that he
should never dream of beginning its reformation by its subversion;
that he should approach to the faults of the state as to the wounds
of a father, with pious awe and trembling solicitude.[1]
[Footnote 1: Edmund Burke: _Reflections on the French Revolution_
(George Bell & Sons, 1888), pp. 366-68.]
PERSONAL OR CLASS OPPOSITION TO CHANGE. Sincere fear of the
possible evils of novelty in the disorganization which it promotes,
habituation to established ways, or a sentimental and
æsthetic allegiance to them--all these are factors that determine
genuine opposition to change. But aversion to change
may be generalized into a philosophical attitude by those who
have special personal or class reasons for disliking specific
changes. The hand-workers in the early nineteenth century
stoned the machinists and machines which threw them out of
employment. Every change does discommode some class or
classes of persons, and part of the opposition to specific
changes comes from those whom they would adversely affect.
It is not surprising that liquor interests should be opposed to
prohibition, that theatrical managers should have protested
against a tax on the theater, or those with great incomes
against an excess profits tax. Selfish opposition to specific
changes is, indeed, frequently veiled in the disguise of plausible
reasons for opposition to change in general. Those who
fear the results to their own personal or class interests of some
of the radical social legislation of our own day may disguise
those more or less consciously realized motives under the form
of impartial philosophical opposition to social change in general.
They may find philosophical justification for maintaining
unmodified an established order which redounds to their
own advantage.
UNCRITICAL DISPARAGEMENT. The other extreme is represented
by the position that old things are bad because they
are _old_, and new things good because they are _new_. This is
illustrated in an extreme though trivial form by faddists of
every kind. There are people who chiefly pride themselves
on being up-to-the-minute, and exhibit an almost pathological
fear of being behind the times. This thirst for the novel is
seen on various levels, from those who wear the newest styles,
and dine at the newest hotels, to those who make a point of
reading only the newest books, hearing only the newest music,
and discussing the latest theories. For such temperaments,
and more or less to most people, there is an intrinsic glamour
about the word "new." The physical qualities that are so
often associated with newness are carried over into social and
intellectual matters, where they do not so completely apply.
The new is bright and unfrayed; it has not yet suffered senility
and decay. The new is smart and striking; it catches the
eye and the attention. Just as old things are dog-eared, worn,
and tattered, so are old institutions, habits, and ideas. Just
as we want the newest books and phonographs, the latest
conveniences in housing and sanitation, so we want the latest
modernities in political, social, and intellectual matters.
Especially about new ideas, there is the freshness and infinite
possibility of youth; every new idea is as yet an unbroken
promise. It has not been subjected to the frustrations,
disillusions, and compromises to which all theory is subjected in
the world of action.[1] Every new idea is an experiment, a
possibility, a hope. It may be the long-awaited miracle; it
may be the prayed-for solution of all our difficulties.
[Footnote 1: "Real life is, to most men, a long second-best, a
perpetual compromise between the ideal and the possible; but the
world of pure reason knows no compromise, no practical limitations,
no barrier to the creative activity embodying in splendid edifices
the passionate aspiration after the perfect from which all great
work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even from the
pitiful facts of nature, the generations have gradually created
an ordered cosmos, where pure thought can dwell as in its natural
home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can escape
from the dreary exile of the actual world." (Bertrand Russell:
_Mysticism and Logic_, pp. 60-61.)]
This susceptibility to the novel is peculiarly displayed by
those who see nothing but evil in the old. Against the outworn
past with its disillusions, its errors, its evils, and its
hypocrisies, the new shines out in glorious contrast. There
are persons who combine a very genuine sense of present evils
with a resilient belief in the possibilities of change. The
classic instance of this is seen in the Messianic idea. Even in
the worst of times, the pious Jew could count on the saving
appearance of the Messiah. Every Utopian is as sure of the
salvation promised by his prize solution as he is of the evils
which it is intended to rectify. The ardent Socialist may
equally divide his energies between pointing out the evils of
the capitalist system, and the certain bliss of his Socialist
republic. The past is nothing but a festering mass of evils;
industry is nothing but slavery, religion nothing but superstition,
education nothing but dead traditional formalism, social
life nothing but hypocrisy.
Where the past is so darkly conceived, there comes an uncritical
welcoming of anything new, anything that will take
men away from it. Nothing could be worse than the present
or past; anything as yet untried may be better. As Karl
Marx told the working classes: "The proletarians have
nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
The past is, by its ruthless critics, conceived not infrequently
as enchaining or enslaving. Particularly, the radical
insists, are men enslaved by habits of thought, feeling, and
action which are totally inadequate to our present problems
and difficulties. War-like emotions, he points out, may have
been useful in an earlier civilization, but are now a total
disutility. Belief in magic may have been an asset to primitive
man in his ignorance; it is not to modern man with his science.
The institution of private property may have had its values
in building up civilization; its utility is over. We still make
stereotyped and archaic reactions where the situation has
utterly changed. The institutions, ideas, and habits of the
past are at once so compelling and so obsolete that we must
make a clear break with the past; we must start with a clean
slate. To continue, so we are told, is merely going further
and further along the wrong paths; it is like continuing with
a broken engine, or without a rudder.
CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE PAST. That both positions just
discussed are extreme, goes without saying. The past is
neither all good nor all bad; it has achieved as well as it has
erred. But it is, in any case, all we have. Without the
knowledge, the customs, the institutions we have inherited,
we should have no advantage at all over our ancestors of ten
thousand years ago. Biologically we have not changed. The
past is our basic material. Each generation starts with
what it finds in the way of cultural achievement, and builds
upon that.
Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should take a stand
thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the
discovery is well-taken, then to make progression. And to speak truly,
_antiquitas soeculi iuventus mundi_. These times are the ancient times,
when the world is ancient, and not those which we account ancient
_ordine retrogrado_, by a computation backwards from ourselves.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bacon: _The Advancement of Learning_,
Collected Works, vol. I, p. 172.]
The past, save what we discover in our generation, is our
sole storehouse of materials. And a very small part of our
useful knowledge in the industrial arts, in science, in social
organization and administration does come from our own
generation. It is the accumulated experience of generations
of men. We can, out of this mass of materials, select whatever
is useful in clarifying the issues of the present, whatever
helps us to accomplish those purposes which we have, after
critical consideration, decided to be useful and serviceable.
If, for example, we decide to build a bridge, it is of importance
that we know all that men have in the past discovered of
mechanical relations and industrial art which will enable us to
build a bridge well. If we want to establish an educational
system in some backward portion of the world, it is useful for
us to know what methods men have used in similar situations.
Whatever we decide to do, we are so much the better off, if
we know all that men before us have learned in analogous
instances.
But to use the inheritance of the past implies an analysis
of present problems, and an acceptance of the course to be
pursued. The experience of the past, the heritage of knowledge
that has come down to us, is so various and extensive
that choices must be made. The historian in writing even
a comprehensive history of a country must still make choices
and omissions. Similarly, in using knowledge inherited from
the past as materials, we must have specific problems to
govern our choice. The statistician could collect innumerable
statistics; he collects only those which have a bearing on his
subject. The lawyer searches out that part of the legal tradition
which is applicable to his own case. Without some lead
or clue we should lose ourselves in the multifariousness of
transmitted knowledge at our disposal.
To use the past as an instrument for furthering present
purposes implies neither veneration nor disparagement of it.
We neither condemn nor praise the past as a whole; we regard
specific institutions, customs, or ideas, as adequate or
inadequate, as serviceable or disserviceable. In general, it may be
said that the value of any still extant part of the past, be it a
work of art, a habit, a tradition, has very little to do with its
origin. The instinct of eating is still useful though it has a
long history. The works of the Old Masters are not really
great because they are old, nor are the works of contemporaries
either good or bad because they are new. Man himself is
to be estimated no differently, whether he is descended from
the angels or the apes.
If we would appreciate our own morals and religion we are often
advised to consider primitive man and his institutions. If we would
evaluate marriage or property, we are often directed to study our
remote ancestors.... Such considerations as these have diverse
effects according to our temperaments. They quite uniformly produce,
however, disillusionment and sophistication.... This exaltation
of the past, as the ancestral home of all that we are, may make
us regret our loss of illusions and our disconcerting enlightenment....
We may break with the past, scorn an inheritance so redolent of
blood and lust and superstition, revel in an emancipation unguided
by the discipline of centuries, strive to create a new world every day,
and imagine that, at last, we have begun to make progress.[1]
[Footnote 1: Woodbridge: _The Purpose of History_, p. 72.]
The standards of value of the things we have or do or say,
the approvals or disapprovals we should logically accord them,
are determined not by their history, not by their past, but by
their uses in the living present in which we live. An institution
may have served the purposes of a bygone generation; it
does not follow that it thereby serves our own. The reverse
may similarly be true. For us the specific features of our
social inheritance depend upon the ends or purposes which we
reflectively decide upon and accept. Whether capital punishment
is good or evil; whether private property is an adequate
or inadequate institution for social welfare; whether marriage
is a perfect or an imperfect institution; whether collective
bargaining, competitive industry, old age insurance, income
taxes, nationalization of railroads are useful or pernicious
depends neither on their age nor their novelty. Their value
is determined by their relevancy to our own ideals, by the
extent to which they hinder or promote the results which we
consciously desire.
The past may be studied with a view to clarifying present
issues. In the first place, we may study past successes and
failures in order to guide our actions in present similar situations.
A man setting out to organize and administer a newspaper
will benefit by the experiences others have had in the
same situation. In the same way, we can learn from past
history something, at least, bearing on present political and
social issues. It is true enough that history has been much
misused for the drawing of lessons and guidance. As Professor
Robinson says:
To-day, however, one rarely finds a historical student who would
venture to recommend statesmen, warriors, and moralists to place
any confidence whatsoever in historical analogies and warnings, for
the supposed analogies usually prove illusive on inspection, and the
warnings impertinent. Whether or no Napoleon was ever able in his
own campaigns to make any practical use of the accounts he had
read of those of Alexander and Cæsar, it is quite certain that Admiral
Togo would have derived no useful hints from Nelson's tactics at
Alexandria or Trafalgar. Our situation is so novel that it would
seem as if political and military precedents of even a century ago
could have no possible value. As for our present "anxious morality,"
as Maeterlinck calls it, it seems equally clear that the sinful
extravagances of Sardanapalus and Nero, and the conspicuous public virtue
of Aristides and the Horatii, are alike impotent to promote it.[1]
[Footnote 1: Robinson: _The New History_, p. 36.]
But situations are, within limits, duplicated in historical
processes, and it is illuminating at least to see wherein men
failed and wherein they succeeded in the things they set themselves
to do. The history of labor legislation certainly testifies
to the effectiveness of "collective bargaining" in securing
improved labor conditions, as the history of strikes does also
to the public loss and injury incident to this kind of industrial
warfare. If compulsory arbitration has been a successful
method of dealing with labor difficulties in Australia in the
past, we can, by a careful study and comparison of conditions
there and conditions current in our country at the present,
illuminate and clarify our own problems. A campaign manager
in one presidential campaign does not forget what was
effective in the last, nor does he hesitate to profit by his
mistakes or those of others.
An impartial survey of the heritage of the past undertakes
critically to examine institutions, customs, ideas still current
with a view to determining their relevancy and utility to our
present needs. This demands, on the one hand, clarity as to
what those needs are, and, on the other hand, freedom from
prejudice for or against existing modes of life simply because
they have a history. A critical examination of the past
amounts practically to a taking stock, a summary of our
social assets and liabilities. We shall find our ideas, for
example, and our customs, a strange mixture of useful preservations,
and absurd or positively harmful relics of the past.
Ideas which were natural and useful enough in the situation
in which they originated, live on into a totally changed situation,
along with other ideas, like that of gravitation, which are
as true and as useful now as when they were first enunciated.
Many customs and institutions which may be found to have
as great utility now as when they were first practiced generations
ago, the customs and institutions, let us say, of family
life, may be found persisting along with customs and institutions,
like excess legal formalism (or, as their opponents claim,
a bi-cameral legislative system or a two-party system) which
may come generally to be regarded as impediments to progress.[1]
The unprejudiced observer, scientifically interested in
preserving those forms and mechanisms of social life which
are of genuine service to his own generation, will not condemn
or applaud "the past" _en masse_. He will, rather, examine it
in specific detail. He will not, for example, dismiss classical
education, because it is classical or old. He will rather try
experimentally to determine the actual consequences in the
case of those who study the classics. He will examine the
claims made for the study, try in specific cases to find out
whether those claims are fulfilled, and condemn or approve
the study, say, of Latin and Greek, according to his estimate
of the desirability or undesirability of those consequences.
If he finds, for example, that the study of Latin does promote
general literary appreciation, his decision that it should or
should not be continued will depend on his opinion of the value
of general literary appreciation as compared with other values
in an industrial civilization. Similarly, with "freedom of contract,"
"freedom of the seas," military service, bi-cameral
systems, party caucuses, presidential veto, and all the other
political and social heritages of the past.
[Footnote 1: The situation in the case of outworn social
institutions is paralleled in the case of the human appendix,
once possessing a function in the digestive system of primitive
man, but now useless and likely on occasion to become a
positive disutility.]
But a man who impartially examines the past will usually
exhibit also an appreciation of its attainments and a sense of
the present good to which it has been instrumental. He will
not glibly dismiss institutions, habits, methods of life that
are the slow accumulations of centuries. He will have a
sense of the continuous efforts and energies that have gone
into the making of contemporary civilization. He will have,
in suggesting ruthless innovations, a sobering sense of the
gradual evolution that has made present institutions, habits,
ideas, what they are.
The student of the past knows, moreover, that the present
without its background of history is literally meaningless.
In the words of a well-known student of the development of
human culture:
Progress, degradation, survival, modification, are all modes of the
connection that binds together the complex network of civilization.
It needs but a glance into the trivial details of our own daily life to
set us thinking how far we are really its originators, and how far
but the transmitters and modifiers of the results of long past ages.
Looking round the rooms we live in, we may try here how far he who
knows only his own time can be capable of rightly comprehending
even that. Here is the honeysuckle of Assyria, there the fleur-de-lis
of Anjou, a cornice with a Greek border runs round the ceiling, the
style of Louis XIV and its parent the Renaissance share the looking
glass between them. Transformed, shifted or mutilated, such elements
of art still carry their history plainly stamped upon them....
It is thus even with the fashion of the clothes men wear. The ridiculous
little tails of the German postilion's coat show of themselves
how they came to dwindle to such absurd rudiments; but the English
clergyman's bands no longer so convey their history to the eye, and
look unaccountable enough till one has seen the intermediate stages
through which they came down from the more serviceable wide
collars, such as Milton wears in his portrait, and which gave their
name to the "band-box" they used to be kept in. In fact, the books
of costume showing how one garment grew or shrank by gradual
stages and passed into another, illustrate with much force and
clearness the nature of the change and growth, revival and decay, which
go on from year to year in more important matters of life. In books,
again, we see each writer not for and by himself, but occupying his
proper place in history; we look through each philosopher, mathematician,
chemist, poet, into the background of his education--through
Leibnitz into Descartes, through Dalton into Priestly,
through Milton into Homer.[1]
[Footnote 1: Tylor, Edward B.: _Primitive Culture_, vol. I. pp. 17 ff.]
Besides understanding the present better in terms of its
history, there is much in the heritage of the past, especially
of its finished products, that the citizen of contemporary
civilization will wish preserved for its own sake. The works
of art, of music, and of literature which are handed down to us
are "possessions forever." Whatever be the limitations of
our social inheritance, as instruments for the solution of our
difficulties, those finished products which constitute the "best
that has been known and thought" in the world are beyond
cavil. They may not solve our problems, but they immensely
enrich and broaden our lives. They are enjoyed because they
are intrinsically beautiful, but also because they widen men's
sympathies and broaden the scope of contemporary purposes
and ideals.
The culture that this transmission of racial experience makes possible,
can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and, indeed,
may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who
bears within himself the dreams and ideas and feelings of myriad
generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional
impulse obscure. And who is the true man of culture, if not he in
whom fine scholarship and fastidious rejection... develops that
spirit of disinterested curiosity which is the real spirit, as it is the
real fruit of the intellectual life, and thus attains to intellectual
clarity; and having learned the best that is known and thought in the
world, lives--it is not fanciful to say so--among the Immortals.[1]
[Footnote 1: Oscar Wilde: _Intentions_, pp. 192-93.]
The student of Greek life knows that the Greeks in their
view of Nature and of morals, in their conception of the way
life should be lived, in their discrimination of the beautiful,
have still much to teach us. He knows, however much we
may have outlived the hierarchy of obedience which constitutes
mediæval social and political life, we should do well to
recover the humility in living, the craftsmanship in industry,
and precision in thinking which constituted so conspicuous
features of mediæval civilization. He knows that progress
is not altogether measured by flying machines and wireless
telegraphy. He is aware that speed and quantity, the key
values in an industrial civilization, are not the only values
that ever have been, or ever should be cherished by mankind.
LIMITATIONS OF THE PAST. Along with a sensitive appreciation
of the achievements and values of the past, goes, in
the impartial critic, an acknowledgment of its limitations.
We can appreciate the distinctive contributions of Greek culture
without setting up Greek life as an ultimate ideal. We
know that with all the beauty attained and expressed in
their art and, to a certain extent, in their civilization, the
Athenians yet sacrificed the majority to a life of slavery in
order that the minority might lead a life of the spirit, that
their religion had its notable crudities and cruelties, that
their science was trivial, and their control of Nature negligible.
In the words of one of their most thoroughgoing
admirers:
The harmony of the Greeks contained in itself the factors of its
own destruction. And in spite of the fascination which constantly
fixes our gaze on that fairest and happiest halting place in the secular
march of man, it was not there, any more than here, that he was
destined to find an ultimate reconciliation and repose.[1]
[Footnote 1: G. Lowes Dickinson: _Greek View of Life_, p. 248.]
Again, we know the many beautiful features of mediæval
life through its painting and poetry and religion. We know
Saint Francis and are familiar with the heroic records of
saintliness and renunciation. We know, the great cathedrals,
the pageantry and splendor, the exquisite handicraft, the
tapestries and illuminated manuscripts, the vast learning
and the incomparable dialectic. We know also the social
injustices, the misery and squalor the ignorance in which
the mass of the people lived.
We can stop, therefore, neither in perpetual adoration of nor
perpetual caviling at the past. Each age had its special excellences
and its special defects, both from the point of view
of the ideals then current, and those current in our own day.
In so far as the past is dead and over with, we cannot legitimately
criticize it with standards of our own day. We cannot
blame the Greeks for sanctioning slavery, nor criticize James I
because he was not a thoroughgoing democrat. But in so far
as the past still lives, it is open to critical examination and
revision. Traditions, customs, ideas, and institutions inherited
from the past, which still control us, are subject to
modification. We are justified in welcoming changes and
modifications which, after careful inquiry, seem clearly to
promise betterment in the life of the group. Thus to welcome
changes which upon experimental evidence show clearly the
benefits that will accrue to the group, is not radicalism. Nor
is opposition to changes on the ground that upon critical
examination they give promise of harmful consequences, conservatism.
Verdicts for or against change reached on such a
basis reflect the spirit and technique of experimental science.
They reflect the desire to settle a course of action on the basis
of its results in practice rather than on any preconceived
prejudices in favor either of stability or change. To the critical
mind, neither stability nor change is an end in itself.
There is no hypnotism about "things as they are"; no lure
about things as they have not yet been. The problem is
shifted to a detailed and thoroughgoing inquiry into the
consequences of specific changes in social habits, ideas and
institutions, education, business, and industry. Whether changes
should or should not win critical approval depends on the kind
of ideals or purposes we set ourselves and, secondly, on the
practicability of the proposed changes. Change may thus
be opposed or approved, in a given case, on the grounds of
desirability or feasibility. Whether a change is or is not
desirable depends on the ideals of the individual or the group.
Whether it is or is not feasible is a matter open increasingly to
scientific determination. Thus a city may hire experts to
discover what kind of transportation or educational system
will best serve the city's needs. But whether it will or will not
spend the money necessary depends on the social interests
current.
EDUCATION AS THE TRANSMITTER OF THE PAST. Education is the
process by which society undertakes the transmission of its
social heritage. Indeed the main function of education in
static societies is the initiation of the young into already
established customs and traditions. It is the method used
to hand down those social habits which the influential and
articulate classes in a society regard as important enough to
have early fixed in its young members. The past is simply
transmitted, handed down _en masse_. It is a set of patterns
to be imitated, of ideals to be continued, of mechanisms for
attaining the fixed purposes which are current in the group.
In progressive societies education may be used not simply
to hand down habits of doing, feeling, and thinking, from the
older generation to the younger, but to make habitual in the
young reflective consideration of the ends which must be
attained, and reflective inquiry into the means for attaining
them. The past will not be handed down in indiscriminate
completeness. The present and its problems are regarded as
the standard of importance, and the past is considered as an
incomparable reservoir of materials and methods which may
contribute to the ends sought in the present. But there is so
much material and so little time, that selection must be made.
Many things in the past, interesting on their own merits, must
be omitted in favor of those habits, traditions, and recorded
files of knowledge which are most fruitful and enlightening in
the attainment of contemporary purposes. What those purposes
are depends, of course, on ideals of the group in control
of the process of education. But these purposes of ideals may
be derived from present situations and not taken merely because
they have long been current in the group. Thus, in a
predominantly industrial civilization, it may be found more
advisable and important to transmit the scientific and technical
methods of control which men have acquired in recent
generations than the traditional liberal arts. Science may be
found more important than the humanities, medicine than
moral theory. Even such education that tends to call itself
"liberal" or "cultural" is effective and genuine education
just in so far as it does illuminate the world in which we live.
The religion and art, the literature and life of the past broaden
the meaning and the background of our lives. They are valuable
just because they do enrich the lives of those who are
exposed to their influence. If studying the great literature
and the art of the past did not clarify the mind and emancipate
the spirit, enabling men to live more richly in the present,
they would hardly be as studiously cherished and transmitted
as they are. We are, after all, living in the present.
The culture of the past either does or does not illuminate it.
If it does not it is a competing environment, a shadow world
in which we may play truant from actuality, but which
brings neither "sweetness nor light" to the actual world in
which we live.
PART II
THE CAREER OF REASON
The foregoing analysis of human behavior might thus be
briefly summarized. We found that man is born a creature
with certain tendencies to act in certain definite ways,
tendencies which he largely possesses in common with the lower animals.
We found also that man could learn by trial and error,
that his original instinctive equipment could be modified.
Thus far in his mental life man is indistinguishable from the
beasts. But man's peculiar capacity, it appeared, lay in his
ability to think, to control his actions in the light of a future,
to choose one response rather than another because of its
consequences, which he could foresee and prefer. This capacity
for reflection, for formulating a purpose and being able to
obtain it, we found to be practical in its origins, but persisting
on its own account in the disinterested inquiry of philosophy
and science and the free imaginative construction of art. And
in all man's behavior, whether on the plane of instinct, habit,
or reflection, we found action to be accompanied by emotion,
by love and hate, anger and awe, which might at once impede
action by confusing it, or sustain it by giving it a vivid and
compelling motive.
The second part of the book was devoted to an analysis of
the various specific traits which human beings display and the
consequences that these have in men's relations with one
another. Under certain conditions, one or another of these
may become predominant; in particular historical conditions,
one or another of them may have a high social value or the
reverse. These traits vary in different individuals; in any of
them, a man may be totally defective or abnormally developed.
But taken in general, they constitute the changeless pattern
of human nature, and fix the conditions and the limits of
action.
But while these universal traits determine what man may
do, and fix definitively the boundaries of human possibility,
within these limits the race has a wide choice of ideals and
attainments. The standards of what man will and should do,
within the boundaries of the nature which is his inheritance,
are to be found not in his original impulses, but in his mind
and imagination. The human being is gifted with the ability
to imagine a future more desirable than the present, and to
contrive ingeniously in behalf of anticipated or imagined
goods.
These anticipated goods we call ideals, and these ideals
arise, in the last analysis, out of the initial and inborn hungers
and cravings of men. "Intellect is of the same flesh and blood
with all the instincts, a brother whose superiority lies in his
power to appreciate, harmonize, and save them all." The
function of reason is not to set itself over against men's original
desires, but to envisage ideals and devise instruments
whereby they may all, so far as nature allows, be fulfilled.
Man's reason, then, which has its roots in his instincts, is
the means of their harmonious fulfillment. It attempts, in
the various fields of experience, to effect an adjustment
between man's competing desires, and between man and his
environment. If instincts were left each to its own free course,
they would all be frustrated; if man did not learn reflectively
to control his environment, and to make it subserve his own
ends, he would be a helpless pygmy soon obliterated by the
incomparably more powerful forces of Nature.
These various attempts of man to effect an adjustment of
his passions with one another, and his life to his environment,
may be described as the "Career of Reason." In this career
man has formulated many ideals, not a small number of which
have led him into error, disillusion, and unhappiness.
Sometimes they have misled him by promising him fulfillments
that were in the nature of things unattainable. They have
added to the real evils of life a longing after impossible goods,
goods which an informed intelligence would early have dismissed
as unattainable. Man has disappointed himself by
counting on joys which, had he been less incorrigibly addicted
to imaginative illusions, he should never have expected.
Sometimes he has framed ideals which could be fulfilled, but
only at the expense of a large proportion of natural and
irrepressible human desires. Such, for example, have been the
one-sided ascetic ideals of Stoicism or Puritanism, which in
their attempt to give order and form to life, crush and distort
a considerable portion of it. The same is true of mysticism
which seeks frequently to attain life by altogether denying its
instinctive animal basis. Yet though reason has led men
astray, it is the only and ultimate hope of man's happiness.
It is responsible for whatever success man has had in mastering
the turmoil of his own passions and the obstacles of an
environment "which was not made for him but in which he
grew." It has given point and justice to Swinburne's exultant
boast:
"Glory to man in the highest! For man is the master of things!"
This Career of Reason has taken various parallel fulfillments,
and in each of them man has in varying degrees attained
mastery. Religion arose as one of the earliest ways by
which man attempted to win for himself a secure place in the
cosmic order. Science, in its earliest forms hardly distinguishable
from religion, is man's persistent attempt to discover the
nature of things, and to exploit that discovery for his own
good. Art is again an instance of man's march toward mastery.
Beginning, in the broadest sense, in the industrial arts,
in agriculture and handicrafts, it passes, as it were by
accident, from the necessary to the beautiful. Having in his
needful business fortuitously created beautiful objects, man
comes to create them intentionally, both for their own sake
and for the sheer pleasure of creation.
Finally in morals men have endeavored to construct for
themselves codes of conduct, ideals of life, in which no possible
good should be needlessly or recklessly sacrificed, and in which
men might live together as happily as is permitted by the
nature which is at once their life and their habitation. The
Career of Reason in these various fields we shall briefly trace
and describe. We must expect to find, as in any career, however
successful, failures along with the triumphs, and, as in
any notable career still unfinished, possibility and great
promise. Man's reason and imagination have a long past;
they have also an indefinite future. Man has in the name of
reason made many errors; but to reason he owes his chief
success, and with increasing experience he may be expected
to attain continually to a more certain and effective wisdom.
With these provisos, let us address ourselves to the Career of
Reason, beginning with religion.
CHAPTER XII
RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Since human nature remains
constant in its essential traits, despite the variations it exhibits
among different individuals, it is to be expected that certain
experiences should be fairly common and recurrent among
all human beings. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, jubilance
and despair, disillusion and rapture, triumph and frustration,
these occur often, and to every man. They are, as it were,
the sparks generated by the friction of human desires with the
natural world in which they must, if anywhere, find fulfillment.
Just such a normal, inevitable consequence of human
nature in a natural world is the religious experience. It is
common in more or less intense degree to almost all men, and
may be studied objectively just as may any of the other universal
experiences of mankind.
There are, however, certain peculiar difficulties in the study
of the religious experience. Most men are by training emotionally
committed to one particular religious creed which it is
very difficult for them impartially to examine or to compare
with others. In the second place, there is a confusion in the
minds of most people between the personal religious experience,
and the formal and external institution we commonly
have in mind when we speak of "religion." When we ordinarily
use the term, we imply a set of dogmas, an institution,
a reasoned theology, a ritual, a priesthood, all the apparatus
and earmarks of institutionalized religion. We think of
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, the whole welter
of churches and creeds that have appeared in the history of
mankind. But these are rather the outward vehicles and
vestments of the religious experience than the experience
itself. They are the social expressions and external instruments
of the inner spiritual occurrence. But the latter is
primary. If man had not _first been religious_, these would
never have arisen. In the words of William James:
In one sense at least, the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches
when once established live at second hand upon tradition, but the
_founders_ of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of
their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the
superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all
the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; so personal
religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those who
esteem it incomplete.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 30.]
Before we examine the social institutions and fixed apparatus
of ritual and of reasoned theology in which the religious
experience has become variously embodied, we must pause to
analyze the experience itself. To be religious, as a personal
experience, is, like being philosophical, to take a total attitude
toward the universe. But the religious attitude is one of a
somewhat specific kind. It is, one may arbitrarily but also
somewhat fairly say, to sense or comprehend one's relation to
the divine, however the divine be conceived. It is to have this
sense and comprehension not only deeply, as one might in a
poetic or a philosophical mood, but to have it suffused with
reverence. We shall presently see that the objects of veneration
have had a different meaning for different individuals,
groups, and generations. But whatever be the conception of
the divine object, the religious attitude seems to have this
stable feature. It is always an awed awareness on the part
of the individual of his relation to that "something not himself,"
and larger than himself, with whom the destinies of the
universe seem to rest. This somehow sensed relation to the
divine appears throughout all the varieties of religion that
have appeared in the world, and among many individuals not
popularly accounted religious.
It is just such an experience, for example, that Wordsworth
expresses when he says in the "Lines Written Above Tintern
Abbey":
"... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."
It is the same sense that comes over so-called worldly people
when oppressed suddenly by a great sorrow, or uplifted
by a sudden great joy, an awareness of a divine power that
moves masterfully and mysteriously through the events of
life, provoking on the part of finite creatures a strange and
compelling reverence. This "divinity that shapes our ends"
may be variously conceived. It may be an intimately realized
personal God, "Our Father which art in Heaven." It
may be such an abstract conception as the Laws of Nature or
Scientific Law, such a religion as is expounded by the
Transcendentalists, in particular by Emerson:
These laws execute themselves. They are out of time, out of
space, and not subject to circumstance: thus in the soul of man there
is a justice whose retributions are instant and entire.... If a man is
at heart just, then, in so far is he God; the safety of God, the
immortality of God, the majesty of God, do enter into that man with
justice.... For all things proceed out of the same spirit, which is
differently named, love, justice, temperance, in its different applications,
just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which
it washes.... The perception of this law awakens in the mind a
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes
our highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to
command. It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world.
It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the
stars is it. It is the beatitude of man. It makes him illimitable.[1]
[Footnote 1: Emerson: _Miscellanies_, quoted by James in
_Varieties_, pp. 32-33.]
It may be conceived as Nature itself, as it was by Spinoza,
for whom Nature was identical with God. It may be the
World-Soul which Shelley sings with such rapture:
"That Light whose smile kindles the universe,
That beauty in which all things work and move,
That benediction which the eclipsing curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining love,
Which through the web of being, blindly wove,
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst--now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality."[1]
[Footnote 1: From _Adonais_.]
In all these conceptions it still seems to be a hushed sense of
reverential relationship to the divine power that most specifically
constitutes the religious experience. The latter exhibits
certain recurrent elements, any of which may be present
in a more intense degree in some individuals than in others,
but all of which appear in some degree in most of the phenomena
of personal life that we call religious.
"THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN." In the first place may be
noted the sense of the actuality and nearness of the divine
power, what James calls the "reality of the unseen," and
what is frequently spoken of by religious men as "the presence
of God." James quotes in this connection an interesting
letter of James Russell Lowell's:
I had a revelation last Friday evening.... Happening to say
something of the presence of spirits of whom, as I said, I was often
dimly aware, Mr. Putnam entered into an argument with me on
spiritual matters. As I was speaking, the whole system seemed to
rise up before me, like a vague destiny looming from the abyss. I
never before felt the spirit of God so keenly in me, and around me.
The whole room seemed to me full of God. The air seemed to waver
to and fro with the presence of something I knew not what. I spoke
with the calmness and clearness of a prophet.[2]
[Footnote 2: Lowell: _Letters_, I, p. 75.]
The archives of the psychology of religion are crowded
with instances of men who have felt deeply, intimately, and
irrefutably the near and actual presence of God. This sense
of the reality of an unseen Thing or Power is not always identified
with God. There come moments in the lives of normal
men and women when the world of experience seems alive
with something that is apprehended through none of the five
senses. There are times when things unseen, unheard, and
untouched seem to have, nay, for those concerned, do have,
a clearer and more unmistakable reality than the things we
can touch, hear, and see. Sometimes, in the hearing of
beautiful music, we sense a transcendent beauty which is
something other than, something more real than, the specific
harmonies which we physically hear. In rare moments of
rapture, when the imagination or the affections are intensely
stirred, we become intensely aware of this reality which is
made known to us through none of the ordinary avenues of
experience. The Unseen is not only vividly felt, but is deeply
felt and regarded as a thing of deep significance, and is
experienced in most cases with great inexplicable joy. And, not
infrequently, this significant and beautiful Unseen Somewhat
is identified with God.
The sense of the reality of the divine, is, however, as it were,
only the prerequisite of the religious experience. When an
individual does have this sense, what interests the student of
the psychology of religion is the attitude it provokes and the
satisfactions it gives. These we can the better understand if
we examine the conditions in an individual's experience which
make this longing for the divine presence acute, and the
general circumstances of human life which make it a continuous
desire in many people.
There are, to begin with, constant facts of experience which
make the realization of the divine presence not only a satisfaction,
but the indispensable "staff of life" for certain human
beings. In their unfaltering faith in God's enduring and proximate
actuality lies their sole source of security and trust.
For such persons a lapse or a lack of faith is the prelude to
utter collapse. A vague general assurance of the dependability
of the future is, for most people, a prerequisite for a
sane and untroubled existence. Even those who live in unreflective
satisfaction with the fruits of the moment would
find these moments less satisfactory were they not set in a
background of reasonably fair promise. The exuberant optimist,
when he stops to reflect, has a buoyant and inclusive
faith in the essential goodness of man and the universe.
Whitman stands out in this connection as the classic type.
Evil and good were to him indifferently beautiful. He maintained
an incredibly large-hearted and magnanimous receptivity
to all things great or small, charming or ugly, that
lightened or blackened the face of the planet.
While the average man accepts the universe with a less
wholesale and indiscriminate appreciation, yet he does feel
vaguely assured that the nature of things is ordered, harmonious,
dependable, and regular, that affairs are, cosmically
speaking, in a sound state. He feels a vast and comfortable
solidity about the frame of things in which his life is set; he
can depend on the familiar risings and settings of the sun, the
recurrent and assured movement of the seasons. Were this
trust suddenly removed, were the cosmic guarantee withdrawn,
to live would be one long mortal terror. That this is
precisely what does happen under such circumstances, the
voluminous literature of melancholia sufficiently proves.
The sense of insecurity takes various forms. Sometimes
the patient experiences a profound and intimate conviction
of the unreality of the world about him. His whole physical
environment comes to seem a mere phantasy and a delusion.
In some cases he finds himself unmoved by the normal interests
and excitements of men, unable to find any stimulus,
value, or significance in the world.
Esquirol observed the case of a very intelligent magistrate....
Every emotion appeared dead within him. He manifested neither
perversion nor violence, but a complete absence of emotional reaction.
If he went to the theater, which he did out of habit, he could find no
pleasure there. The thought of his house, of his home, of his wife,
and of his absent children, moved him as little, he said, as a theorem
of Euclid.[1]
[Footnote 1: Ribot: _Psychology of the Emotions_, p. 54.]
The sense of futility, of the flatness, staleness, and unprofitableness
of the world, which is felt in such extreme forms by
pronounced melancholiacs, is experienced sometimes, though
to a lesser degree, by every sensitive mind that reflects much
upon life. Such an attitude, it is true, arises principally during
moments of fatigue and low vitality, and is undoubtedly
organic in its origins, as for that matter is optimism. Again
such a sense of world-weariness comes often in moments of
personal disappointment and disillusion, when friends have
proved false, ambitions empty, efforts wasted. At such times
even the normal man echoes Swinburne's beautiful melancholy:
"We are not sure of sorrow,
And joy was never sure,
To-day will die to-morrow,
Time stoops to no man's lure;
And love grown faint and fretful,
With lips but half regretful,
Sighs, and with eyes forgetful,
Weeps that no loves endure.
"From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving,
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives, forever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river,
Winds somewhere safe to sea."[1]
[Footnote 1: From _A Garden of Proserpine_.]
Even the eager and exuberant, if sufficiently philosophical
and generous-minded, may come, despite their own success,
to a deep realization of the utter futility, meaninglessness, and
stupidity of life, of the essential blindnesses, cruelties, and
insecurities which seem to characterize the nature of things.
Unless against this dark insight some reassuring faith arises,
life may become almost unbearable. In extreme cases it has
driven men to suicide. Take, for example, the picture of the
universe as modern materialism presents it:
Purposeless... and void of meaning is the world which science
reveals for our belief.... That man is the product of causes that had
no prevision of the end they were achieving, that his origin, his
growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome
of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no
intensity of thought or feeling can preserve an individual life beyond
the grave, that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the
inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined
to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the
whole temple of man's achievements must inevitably be buried beneath
the débris of a universe in ruins--all these things if not quite
beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which
rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these
truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the
soul's habitation henceforth be safely built.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, pp. 60-61
("The Free Man's Worship").]
Such a prospect to the serious-minded and sensitive-spirited
cannot but provoke the profoundest melancholy. There is,
even for the most healthy-minded of us, sufficient ground for
pessimism, bitterness, insecurity. Even if we personally--largely
through the accidents of circumstance--happen to
be successful, "our joy is a vulgar glee, not unlike the snicker
of any rogue at his success." The utter futility and evanescence
of earthly goods, beauties, and achievements is sensed
at least sometimes by normally complacent souls. And so
patent and ubiquitous are the evidences of decay, disease, and
death at our disposal, that they may easily be erected into a
thoroughgoing philosophy of life:
Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanity of vanities, all is
vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the
sun?...
All things come alike to all: there is one event to the righteous and
to the wicked; to the good and to the clean, and to the unclean; to
him that sacrificeth and to him that sacrificeth not: as is the good so
is the sinner; and he that sweareth as he that feareth an oath....
For the living know that they shall die; but the dead know not
anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of
them is forgotten.
Also their love and their hatred and their envy is now perished;
neither have they any more a portion forever in anything that is
done under the sun.[1]
[Footnote 1: _Ecclesiastes_.]
Religion offers solace to those perturbed and passionate
souls, among others, to whom these futilities have become a
rankling, continuous torment and depression. When life on
earth appears fragmentary and disordered, not only nonsense
but terrifying nonsense, full of hideous injustices, sickening
uncertainties, and cruel destructions, men have not infrequently
found a refuge in the divine. "Come unto me all
ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."
In the religious experience man finds life to be made clear,
complete, and beautiful. What seems a contradictory fragment
finds its precise niche in the divine scheme, what seems
dark and cruel shines out in a setting of eternal beneficence
and wisdom. The experience of the individual, even the happiest,
is always partial, broken, and disordered. No ideal is
ever completely realized, or if realized leaves some perfection
to be desired. Men living in a natural existence imagine
values and ideals which can never be realized there. In religion,
if anywhere, men have found perfection, and ultimate
sufficiency.
This perfection, completion, and clarification of life has been
attained in various ways. The religious experience itself,
when intense, may give to the individual apart from a reasoned
judgment, or from any actual change in his physical
surroundings, a translucent insight during which he sees
deeply, calmly, joyously into the beautiful eternal order of
things. This mystic insight has been experienced on occasion
by quite normal and prosaic men and women. While it lasts,
reality seems to take on new colors and dimensions. It becomes
vivid, luminous, and intense. The mystic seems to
rise to a higher level of consciousness, in which he experiences
a universe more significant, ordered, and unified than any
commonly experienced through the senses. One may take,
as an example, such an instance autobiographically and anonymously
reported a few years ago, and well documented:
It was not that for a few keyed-up moments I _imagined_ all
existence as beautiful, but that my inner vision was cleared to the truth
so that I _saw_ the actual loveliness which is always there, but which
we so rarely perceive; and I knew that every man, woman, bird, and
tree, every living thing before me, was extravagantly beautiful, and
extravagantly important. And as I beheld, my heart melted out of
me in a rapture of love and delight. A nurse was walking past; the
wind caught a strand of her hair and blew it out in a momentary
gleam of sunshine, and never in my life before had I seen how
beautiful beyond all belief is a woman's hair. Nor had I ever guessed
how marvelous it is for a human being to walk. As for the internes
in their white suits, I had never realized before the whiteness of
white linen; but much more than that, I had never so much as
dreamed of the beauty of young manhood. A little sparrow chirped
and flew to a near-by branch, and I honestly believe that only "the
morning stars singing together, and the sons of God shouting for
joy" can in the least express the ecstasy of a bird's flight. I cannot
express it, but I have seen it.
Once out of all the gray days of my life I have looked into the
heart of reality; I have witnessed the truth; I have seen life as it
really is--ravishingly, ecstatically, madly beautiful, and filled to
overflowing with a wild joy, and a value unspeakable. For those
glorified moments I was in love with every living thing before me--the
trees in the wind, the little birds flying, the nurses, the internes,
the people who came and went. There was nothing that was alive
that was not a miracle. Just to be alive was in itself a miracle. My
very soul flowed out of me in a great joy.[1]
[Footnote 1: "Twenty Minutes of Reality," _The Atlantic
Monthly_, vol. 117, p. 592.]
The mystic experience is important in the study of religion
because it has so frequently given those who have had it a
very real feeling of "cosmic consciousness." The individual
feels "for one luminously transparent conscious moment," at
one with the universe; he has a realization at once rapturous
and tranquil of the passionate and wonderful significance of
things. He has moved "from the chill periphery to the radiant
core." All the discrepancies which bestrew ordinary life
are absent. All the negations of disappointment, all conflicts
of desire disappear. The mystic lives perfection at first
hand:
"The One remains, the many change and pass,
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly,
Life, like a dome of many colored glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity."
This sense of splendid unity in which all the divisive and
corroding elements of selfhood are obliterated has "to those
who have been there" no refutation. "It is," writes William
James, "an open question whether mystic states may not be
superior points of view, windows through which the mind
looks out on a more extensive and inclusive world."
Whatever be the logical validity of the intense mystical
insight, of his singular gift for a vivid and intimate union with
eternity which has been known by so many mystics, the fruits
of this insight are undeniable. During such a vision the world
is perfect. There is no fever or confusion, but rapture and
rest. And to some degree, at a religious service, a momentous
crisis, joy at deliverance or resignation at calamity, during
beatific interludes of friendship or of love, men have felt a
clear enveloping oneness with divinity.
Such states of intense religious experience, however, are as
transient as they are ineffable. Though they recur, they are
not continuous, and something more than occasional vivid
unions with the divine enter into the constant perfection with
which the world, as it appears to the religious man, is endowed.
He feels himself, in the first place, to be part of a world scheme
in which ultimate perfection is secured. It has already been
pointed out that any individual human life is characterized
by negation, conflict, and disappointment. Our lives seem
largely to be at the mercy of circumstance. Our inheritance
is fixed for us without our connivance in the matter; accident
determines in which social environment we happen to be born.
And these two facts are the chief determinants of our careers.
Even when successful we realize either the emptiness of the
prize we had desired, or the distance we are in reality from
the goal we had set ourselves. Generalizing thus from his
own experience, the individual notes the similar disheartening
discrepancies throughout human life. He sees the good
suffer, and the wicked prosper; the innocent die, and the
guilty escape. Disease is no respecter of persons, and death
comes to the just and the unjust alike.
Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?
Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring
before their eyes.
Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.
Their bull gendereth and faileth not; their cow calveth and casteth
not her calf.
They send forth their little ones like a flock, and their children dance.
They take the timbrel and harp, and rejoice at the sound of the organ.
They spend their days in wealth, and in a moment go down to the grave.
Therefore they say unto God; depart from us, for we desire not the
knowledge of thy ways.
What is the Almighty that we should serve him? And what profit
should we have if we pray unto him?[1]
[Footnote 1: Job, chap. XXI.]
In contrast, in the religious experience man feels himself to
be a part of a world scheme in which justice and righteousness
are assured by an incontestable and invulnerable power;
"God's in his Heaven; all's right with the world." Despite
the grounds he has for doubt, Job robustly avers: "Though
he slay me, yet will I trust in him." Calamities are but
temporary; God will bring all things to a beautiful fruition.
Or a man may feel that the evils he or others experience
here are not real evils, that, seen _sub specie oeternitatis_, they
would cease to be regarded as such. He may feel that God
moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, that
"somehow good may come of ill." He may feel, as does the
Christian believer, that all the evils and pains unjustly
experienced in this world will be adjusted in the next. Whatever
be my privations from earthly good, "in my Father's house
are many mansions." Immortality is, indeed, the religious
man's faith in a second chance. The surety of a world to
come, in which the blessed shall live in eternal bliss, is a
compensation and a redress for the ills and frustrations of life in
this world. Whatever be the seeming ills or injustices of life,
there is eventual retribution, both to the just and the unjust.
Once more to quote Emerson:
And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the
understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation,
a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems
at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years
reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death
of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but
privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for
it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an
epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks
up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and
allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of
character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances,
and the reception of new influences that prove of the first
importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would
have remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and
too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the
neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding
shade and fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men.[1]
[Footnote 1: Emerson: _Essay on Compensation_.]
On a larger scale, from the cosmic rather than from the
personal point of view, an individual, gifted with a large and
charitable interest in the future of mankind, is secured and
sustained by the feeling that he is a part of that procession
headed to the "one far-off divine event to which the whole
creation moves." The lugubrious picture of an utterly meaningless
world, blind, purposeless, and heartless, which materialistic
science reveals, is sufficient to wreck the equanimity
of a sensitive and thoughtful mind.
That is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic
weather, though many a jewelled shore appears, and many an enchanted
cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even
as our world now lingers for our joy--yet when these transient
products are gone, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ remains. Dead and
gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being.
Without an echo, without a memory; without an influence on aught
that may come after, to make it care for similar ideals. This utter
wreck and tragedy is of the essence of scientific materialism, as at
present understood.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Pragmatism_, p. 105.]
A belief that a divine power governs the universe, that all
these miscellaneous and inexplicable happenings will be
gathered up into a smooth and ultimate perfection, gives
faith, comfort, and solace. We are on the side of the angels, or
rather the angels are on our side. Human passion, purpose,
and endeavor are not wasted. They are small but not altogether
negligible contributions to eventual cosmic good. And
good is eventual. Perfection may be long delayed, but God's
presence assures it. "Weeping may endure for a night, but
joy cometh in the morning."
A world with a God in it to say the last word may indeed burn up
or freeze, but we then think of Him as still mindful of the old ideals,
and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that where He is,
tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution
not the absolutely final things.[2]
[Footnote 2: _Ibid._, p. 106.]
Amid tragic errors and pitiful disillusions, men have yearned
for "a benediction perfect and complete where they might
cease to suffer and desire." This perfection religion has, as
we have seen, accorded them in various ways. Some have
found it in the immediate vision, the ecstatic union with the
divine that, in intense degree, is peculiarly the mystic's. Some
have found it in the assured belief that evil is itself an illusion,
and, if rightly conceived, a beautiful dark shadow to set
off by contrast the high lights of a divinely ordered cosmos, a
minor note giving lyric and lovely poignancy to the celestial
music. Some have rested their faith in a perfect world not
here, but hereafter, "where the blessed would enter eternal
bliss with God their master." Thus man has in religion found
the fulfillment of his ideals, which always outrun the actualities
amid which he lives. In the religious experience, in all of
its forms throughout the ages, man has had the experience
of perfection at first hand, in the immediate and rich
intensity of the mystic ecstasy, in the serene faith of a lifelong
intuition or of a reasoned belief in the ultimate divinely
assured rightness of things.
Besides experiencing perfection, man has, in the sense of
security and trust afforded by the religious experience, found
release from the fret, the fever, the compulsion, and constriction
under which so much of life must be lived. Whatever
happens, the truly devout man has no fears or qualms. He
has attained equanimity; the Lord is his shepherd; he shall
not want. There is a serenity experienced by the genuinely
faithful that the faithless may well envy. God is the believer's
eternal watcher; a wise and merciful Providence, his infinite
guarantee.
Whoever not only says but feels, "God's will be done" is mailed
against every weakness; and the whole historic array of martyrs,
missionaries and religious reformers is there to prove the
tranquil-mindedness, under naturally agitating or distressing circumstances,
which self-surrender brings.[1]
[Footnote 1: James; _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 285.]
But peace is attained not only through faith in the fulfillment
of desire, but in a marked lessening in the tension of
desire itself, in a large and spacious freedom attained through
release from the confinement of self. We saw in the chapter
on the Consciousness of Self how much exertion and energy
may be devoted to the enhancement of Self through fame,
achievement, social distinction, power, or possession. We
saw how, in the frustration of self, the germ of great tragedy
lay. From the tragedy and bitterness of such frustration
men have often been reassured by a genuine conversion to
the religious life. Through the negation of self rather than
through its fulfillment men have found solace and rest. And
this negation, when it takes religious form, has consisted in
a rapturous submission to the will of God.
"Outside, the world is wild and passionate.
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate,
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.
"Calm, sad, secure, with faces worn and mild,
Surely their choice of vigil is the best.
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there beside the altar there is rest."[1]
[Footnote 1: Ernest Dawson: _Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration._]
EXPERIENCES WHICH FREQUENTLY FIND RELIGIOUS EXPRESSION.
The religious experience, as pointed out in the beginning of
this discussion, has its roots in the same impulses which cause
men to love and to hate, to be jubilant and sorrowful, exalted
and depressed. All these human experiences sometimes take
a religious form, that is, their expressions have some reference
to the supernatural and the divine. We find, in surveying the
history of religion, that certain experiences more than others
tend to find religious expression. We shall examine a few of
the chief of these.
NEED AND IMPOTENCE. An awed, almost frightened sense of
dependence overcomes even the most robust and healthy-minded
man when he sees the forces of Nature suddenly unloosed
on a magnificent scale. A terrific peal of thunder, an
earthquake or a cyclone will send thrills of terror through the
normally calm and self-sufficient. Even apart from such
vivid and terrifying examples of the range and scale of non-human
power, there comes to the reflective a sense of the
frailty of human life, of the utter dependability of all human
purposes and plans on conditions beyond human control. In
our most fundamental industry, agriculture, an untimely frost
can undo the work of the most ingenious industry and thrift.
A tornado or a snowstorm can disorganize the cunning and
subtle, swift mechanisms of communication which men have
invented. In the field of humanly built-up relations, again, a
fortune or a friendship may depend on some chance meeting;
a man's profession and ideals are fixed by a single fortuitous
conversation, by a chance encouragement, opportunity or
frustration.
There is thus a psychological though perhaps not literal
truth in the figure of Fate, or in the metaphor that speaks of
human destiny as lying on the knees of the gods. Action so
often wanders from intent, so much in the best-laid plans is at
the mercy of external circumstance! A creature whose being
can be snuffed out in a moment, whose life is less than an
instant in the magnificent perspective of eternity, comes not
unnaturally to be aware of his own insignificance as compared
with those vast forces, some auspicious and some terrible,
which are patently afoot in the world.
But as patent a fact as man's impotence is his desire. The
individual realizes how powerless is a human being to fulfill,
independently of external forces, those impulses with which
these same inexplicable forces have launched him into the
world. Thus do we feel even to-day when we have learned
that the forces of Nature, obdurate to the ignorant, yet
become flexible and fruitful under the knowing manipulation
of science. We realize that despite our cunning and contrivance,
our successes are, as it were, largely matters of grace;
the changes we can make in Nature are as nothing to the slow,
gradual processes by which Nature makes mountains into
molehills, builds and destroys continents, develops man out of
the lower animals, and, by varying climates and topographies,
affects the destinies of nations.
To primitive man the sense of impotence and need were not
derived from any general reflections upon the insecurity of
man's place in the cosmos, but rather from the sharp pressure
of practical necessity.
The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe
of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home
to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast
workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery
working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable
of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can
wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery,
is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing
and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further,
primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test:
he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is
conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle.
Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism
long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing
and his action must be immediate.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jevons: _An Introduction to the History of Religion_, p. 17.]
The very food of primitive man was to him as precarious as
it was essential. His life was practically at the mercy of wind
and rain and sun. His food and shelter were desperately
lucky chances. Not having attained as yet to a conception of
the impersonality of Nature, he regarded these forces which
helped and hindered him as friendly and alien powers which
it was in the imperative interests of his own welfare to placate
and propitiate. It was in this urgent sense of helplessness and
need that there were developed the two outstanding modes of
communication with the supernatural, _sacrifice_ and _prayer_.
Primitive man conceived his universe to be governed by
essentially human powers; powers, of course, on a grand scale,
but human none the less, with the same weaknesses, moods,
and humors as human beings themselves. They could be
flattered and cajoled; they could be bribed and paid; they
could be moved to tenderness, generosity, and pity. "Holiness,"
says Socrates in one of Plato's dialogues, "is an art in
which gods and men do business with each other, ... Sacrifice
is giving to the gods, prayer is asking of them."[2] In
Frazer's _Golden Bough_ one finds the remarkably diverse
sacrificial rites by which men have sought to win the favor of the
divine. Primitive man believed literally that the universe
was governed by superhuman personal powers; he believed
literally that these are human in their motives. He believed
in consequence that sacrifices to the gods would help him to
control the controlling powers of Nature for his own good,
just as modern man believes that an application of the laws of
electricity and mechanics will help him to control the natural
world for his own purposes. The sacrifices of primitive man
were immensely practical in character; they were made at the
crucial moments and pivotal crises of life, at sowing and at
harvest time, at the initiation of the young into the responsibilities
of maturity, at times of pestilence, famine, or danger.
The gods were given the choice part of a meal; the prize calf;
in some cases, human sacrifices; the sacrifice, moreover, of the
beautiful and best. The chief sacrificial rites of almost all
primitive peoples are connected with food, the sustainer, and
procreation or birth, the perpetuator, of life.
[Footnote 2: See Plato's _Euthyphro_.]
As Jane Harrison puts it:
If man the individual is to live, he must have food; if his race is to
persist, he must have children. To live and to cause to live, to eat
food and beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the
past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future, so
long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and
beautify life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity
itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, were what
men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites
for the regulation of the seasons.... What he realizes first and foremost
is that at certain times the animals, and still more the plants,
which form his food, appear, at certain others they disappear. It is
these times that become the central points, the focusses of his interest,
and the dates of his religious festivals.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Ancient Art and Ritual_, p. 31.]
Sacrifice is only one way primitive man contrives of winning
the favor of the gods toward the satisfaction of his desires.
Another common method is prayer. In its crudest form
prayer is a direct petition from the individual to divinity for
the grant of a specific favor. The individual seeks a kindness
from a supernatural power whose motives are human, and
who may, therefore, be moved by human appeals; whose
power is superhuman and can therefore fulfill requests.
Prayer may become profoundly spiritualized, but in its primitive
form it is, like sacrifice, a certain way of getting things
done. They are both to primitive man largely what our
science is to us.
Both prayer and sacrifice arise in primitive man's need and
helplessness and terror before mysterious supernatural powers,
but they may rise, in the higher form of religion, to genuine
nobility, from this crass commerce with divinity, this religion
of bargaining and _quid pro quo_. Sacrifice may change from a
desperate reluctant offering made to please a jealous god, to a
thanksgiving and a jubilation, an overflowing of happiness,
gratitude, and good-will.
Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of
an attitude toward religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joy
and confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is
but a high festival for man. In Homer, sacrifice is but, as it were,
the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we
hear nothing of fasting, cleansing, and atonement. This we might
explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the Greek saga,
but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit.
Thucydides is by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him, in the
main, a rest from toil. He makes Pericles say of the Athenians:
Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities
of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout
the year.[1]
[Footnote 1: Jane Harrison: _Prolegomena to Greek Religion_, p. 1.]
Sacrifice may become spiritualized, as it is in Christianity,
"instead of he-goats and she-goats, there are substituted offerings
of the heart for all these vain oblations." The sacrificial
heart has at all times been accounted germane to nobility.
There is something akin to religion in the laying down of a
life for a cause or a country or a friend, in surrendering one's
self for others. It is this power and beauty of renunciation
that is the spiritual value behind all the rituals of sacrifice
that still persist, as in the sacraments of Christianity. It is
the tragic necessity of self-negation that haloes, even in secular
life, the sacrificial attitude:
But there is in resignation a further good element. Even real
goods when they are attainable ought not to be fretfully desired.
To every man comes sooner or later the great renunciation. For
the young there is nothing unattainable; a good thing desired with
the whole force of a passionate will, and yet unattainable, is to them
not credible. Yet by death, by illness, by poverty, or, by the voice
of duty, we must learn, each one of us, that the world was not made
for us, and that, however beautiful may be the things we crave,
Fate may nevertheless forbid them. It is the part of courage, when
misfortune comes, to bear without repining the ruin of our hopes,
to turn away our thoughts from vain regrets. This degree of submission
to power is not only just and right; it is the very gate of wisdom.[1]
[Footnote 1: Bertrand Russell: _Philosophical Essays_, p. 65.]
The spiritual meaning and value of sacrifice is thus seen to
lie in self-surrender. The human being, born into a world
where choices must be made, must make continual abnegation.
And when the temporary good is surrendered in the
maintenance of an ideal, sacrifice becomes genuinely spiritual
in character.
Prayer, also, becomes genuinely spiritual in its values when
one ceases to believe in its practical efficacy and comes to
think it shameful to traffic with the divine. Prayer beautifully
illustrates a point previously noted, how speech oscillates
between the expression of feeling and the conveyance of ideas.
Beginning in primitive religion as a crude and cheap petition
for favors, it becomes in more spiritual religious experience, a
lyric cry of emotion, a tranquil and serene expression of the
soul's desire. Prayer is, moreover, "religion in act." That
deep sense of an awed relationship to divine power which was,
in the beginning of this discussion, noted as constituting
certainly one of the outstanding characteristics of the religious
experience, finds its most adequate emotional expression in
prayer.