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WINDS OF DOCTRINE
STUDIES IN
CONTEMPORARY OPINION
BY
G. SANTAYANA
LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
FIRST PRINTED IN 1913
CONTENTS
I. THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
II. MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
III. THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON
IV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL--
i. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM
ii. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE
iii. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM
iv. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS
V. SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES
VI. THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY
WINDS OF DOCTRINE
I
THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE
The present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The
civilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet
another civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand
the value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of
our forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,
sculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and
aristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which
rested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of
the family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,
cling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the
other hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind
of the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future
confront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is
saturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an
emancipated, atheistic, international democracy.
These epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is
something positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our
animal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every
vital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we
deprecate it; it has possession of us already through our
propensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs
are at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries
are hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they
devote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has
hold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as
disquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our
day, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what
Goethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see
the moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.
Meantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often
comfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours
long enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not
particularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama
and (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The
nations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known
history. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight
and believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;
the history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,
and loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few
demands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge
together, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.
The whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the
observer. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and
hearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.
A chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not
limited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,
but that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average
individual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided
within themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different
classes of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a
magnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their
respective principles. These militant believers have been keenly
conscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to
them, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank
negative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life
difficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to
understand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless
under compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against
their will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy
blows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his
side, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and
exclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that
his faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a
clear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or
incompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his
garden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.
When men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to
count them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was at
its height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what
persons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not
doubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories
and defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth
century it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau
might be alienating from Bossuet and Fénelon. But how shall we satisfy
ourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?
Who can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself
Christianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical
theologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,
too, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for
philosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,
and is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its
accredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly
conventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be
as impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in
acquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not
been lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their
science and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological
scepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid
speculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to
abstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been
supposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still
call themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over
property, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,
and in a truly advanced country like France control over education and
religion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore
eugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who
speak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how
many people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is
the annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather
lie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and
better men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now
preparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,
to the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of
masters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, "the greatest
happiness of the greatest number," has not lost whatever was just or
generous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the
largest possible population.
Nationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It
had seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,
an age whose real achievements were of international application, was
destined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.
The idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there
is an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion
does not carry it the other way--believes in international
brotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally
excluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and
political ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of
late an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be
everywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be
galvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,
religion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and
denounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,
when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to
occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and
hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and
discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that
the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part
is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal
business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.
It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I
mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for
of course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language
and are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own
is spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to
which they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of
shocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant
people the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to
them in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural
for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without
a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to
feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.
But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;
like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis
of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a
flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.
Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,
perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.
Anomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people
accustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a
deaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:
namely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,
collateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may
therefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the
principles that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or
irrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,
on any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect
enough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control
the organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our
practice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion
palæozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have
been all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated
with Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and
to-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or
revolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work
allied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth
century might well cry with Faust: "Two souls, alas, dwell in my
bosom!" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it
fall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because
they were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were
historical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote
forms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,
and to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This
sympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely
sentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking
ahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and
bloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several
incompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in
the world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic
sympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an
adventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with
dramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the
philosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least
idealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)
were also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like
Ruskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and
Oscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double
preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know
what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to
hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived
immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The
imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was
intent on reform.
Reform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform
means to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of
the act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.
Usually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and
people break down some established form, without any qualms about the
capacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may
be needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,
intended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious
forms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre
and the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be
laid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the
creation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that
diffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should
render it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust
Mr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,
or at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort
to organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of
barbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a
danger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an
organism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not
buttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised
world. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its
existence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different
scale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble
within the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped
intellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the
harmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and
life was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of
reason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or
moral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves
unstable, and forces us to a new experiment.
Perhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution
the pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction
of negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of
reform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced
political parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a
clear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love
of nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical
attitude towards all the passions.
In the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are
still in full career towards disintegration. It might have been
thought that a germ of rational order would by this time have
penetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous
constructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and
mathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little
sign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and
sculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each
naturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half
lurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,
and a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism
had a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and
despair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a
display of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all
their attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of
execution, the highway of technical tradition having long been
abandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they
have no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be
some danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the
artists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to
religious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to
barbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic
climaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better
convey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful
observation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,
and to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the
crudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think
their life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;
no need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any
moral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less
talent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often
interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in
their works.
In philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are
always the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and
both sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.
Yet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and
endowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh
movement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its
various hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or
pure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of
any organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic
anarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle
upon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for
these three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.
Berkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that
experience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself
the only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the
second generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even
those worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had
inadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present
experience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our
mind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest
prophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental
principles are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our
imagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and
the ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have
nothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in
the fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by
enriching the flying moment æsthetically, or helping it to slip
prosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,
is the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not
reproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they
evidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the
word, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of
reality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the
letters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor
the sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they
lead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.
Bergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often
scatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable
form, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the "meaning
of truth." Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions
which prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on
the other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or
discourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because
imposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,
must be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it
are identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is
denaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor
human being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his
Babylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by
practical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can
live happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and
those of the universe.
With this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration
and self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything
in oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious
theory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that
goal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of
its pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be
knowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.
There can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in
memory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you
will; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or
alien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the
evident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted
with this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never
been troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the
uninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave
of the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to
be so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,
that oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to
arise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well
have the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of
yourself.
[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am
not trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained
anything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify
a denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may
actually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they
existed, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did
not appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless
both were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,
idealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences
lying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,
according to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a
human method of approach into a charter for existence and
non-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.
When the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the
stars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy
consists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of
activity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite
proficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he
knows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars
except his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It
is true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me
and say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of
himself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is
himself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really
the higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]
This explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes
and confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea
of yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world
that is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded
to solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of
the lady has to be changed.
Nevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither
possible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the
philosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite
pole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of
action and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had
ever dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in
general, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless
contributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of
the immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate
there is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs
consciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a
good reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to
the contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,
creation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the
unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.
The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and
evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
could ever be.
Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really
inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power
is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and
philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb
religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or
life are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is
mighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,
however, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not
afford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,
according to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;
but according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and
credulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate
the individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary
to declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.
In Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute
creator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a
new earth, and a new God. In America, however, the mind is recommended
rather as an unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and
making it do double work.
Trustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are
characteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be
consistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less
characteristic of it. Human intelligence is certainly a product, and
a late and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently
to be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants.
And if life is better the more intense and concentrated it is,
intelligence would seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of
intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable
that, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs
for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly
distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as
theology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_. It was only, M. Bergson
tells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to
become intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it
touches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it
sweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom
in some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an
effort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and
stimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which
it brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion
has vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business
and society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a
mean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their
intelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is
essentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not
free enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety
and partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached
contemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;
they revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct
or dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the
ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing
to be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To
be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was
really vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one
seemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by
the incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.
Life was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to
enjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of
living consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was
loved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its
beauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own
fragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a
substance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in
sentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more
indestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to
which it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the
anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with
any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit
with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men
recognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet
those were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.
Only when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive
and ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,
and more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking
of the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged
to regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us
from somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must
bathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives
in their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the
mountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince
us that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of
being alive.
When chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they
can hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be
virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a
distinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,
something must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he
clarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in
the rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we
were too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in
humanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a
mere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation
admirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it
conforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as
when a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when
nature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or
perhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing
before, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great man for
this latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his
multiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by
harnessing all those instincts together, through memory and
imagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is
what we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you
have strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that
sway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to
one attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do
the same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr
destroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the
rest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,
the tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act
before any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is
spontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are
essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the
direction of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave
behind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there
be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in
an age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,
in an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness
has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and
perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.
There is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of
mind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current
phases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth
of a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But
such largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,
comprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany
were not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of
things the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,
and by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his
part. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of
everything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not
disconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are
chemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the
Babel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may
be incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in
their places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without
feeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths
are obscure. Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they
might merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding
of them to know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the
most chaotic age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored
limpidly in a great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works
of Raphael and Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be
single, his style unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he
depicts frank and supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness
too is impossible in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when
characters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of
what is not congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a
word, thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.
Without great men and without clear convictions this age is
nevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,
inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite
openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has
gained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these
circumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive
achievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are
the _Wanderjahre_ of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face,
which might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after
any engaging stranger; it even turns up again from time to time at
home, full of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But to
settle down would be impossible now. The intellect, the judgment are
in abeyance. Life is running turbid and full; and it is no marvel that
reason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should
abdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the
sport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal passions, stock
sentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon
it, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers
seem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes
reason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by
proving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,
instinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and
the philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the
freehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the
region of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable
conquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way
which I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)
although their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to
perceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals
and mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,
perhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the
sphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb
all the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to
clearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its
own moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.
These are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not
dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows
which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the
coming age steadily before it?
II
MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Prevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the
cloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of
history and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the
present age; and under the name of modernism they have made their
appearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most
stable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective
memory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after
this church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by
the gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than
explicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or
spirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics
to share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to
reconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these
cross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was
changed frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;
but even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds
of each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the
_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of
foppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with
the maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the
system of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric
and moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was
accepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;
but it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet
lodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal
Catholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,
too much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too
weak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern
liberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say
intelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt
that this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress
not an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless
and heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,
was an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly
life as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the
nations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,
each man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported
a ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,
but favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain
enlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private
passions and tastes could be gratified without encountering
persecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation
of society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so
self-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been
thought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,
in baptism, involves renouncing the world, might well astonish us,
had we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which
from our birth they have been making in our ears.
But this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to
turn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons
to do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the
conviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that
mercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the
direct path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against
which St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of
destruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the
ancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend
on it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be
overthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the
remnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life
in the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to
fast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the
kingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take
thought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a
new earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that
very generation.
There was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,
and expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism
possessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,
pity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.
But the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and
governmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,
and they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some
of them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and
moral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the
church altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the
English church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply
aristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should
remain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable
measure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were
liberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such
persons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from
the tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they
were nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of
any sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a
sweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost
everything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for
nationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in
nation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are
scattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were
willing to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its
vitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent
before the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism
which they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of
national life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is
fast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less
power to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan
society in which they are forced to live.