consequences, not all of which are equally fortunate. America is a
young country with an old mentality: it has enjoyed the advantages of
a child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been
a wise child. But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always
has a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and
verbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and
emotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the
child is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of
his own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh
mentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to
reduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly
despised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses
the life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary
philosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities
of the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or
of manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy
has grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed
has caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a
moment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country
with two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of
the fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and
discoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of
the mind--in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions--it is the
hereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard
Shaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth
is that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in
practical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but
slightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while,
alongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the
other half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This
division may be found symbolised in American architecture: a neat
reproduction of the colonial mansion--with some modern comforts
introduced surreptitiously--stands beside the sky-scraper. The
American Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect
inhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American
man; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one
is all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.
Now, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how
this interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and
whither it tends. And in the first place we should remember what,
precisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with
them into the country. In strictness there was more than one; but we
may confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is
on this that the current academic philosophy has been grafted. I do
not mean exactly the Calvinism of Calvin, or even of Jonathan Edwards;
for in their systems there was much that was not pure philosophy, but
rather faith in the externals and history of revelation. Jewish and
Christian revelation was interpreted by these men, however, in the
spirit of a particular philosophy, which might have arisen under any
sky, and been associated with any other religion as well as with
Protestant Christianity. In fact, the philosophical principle of
Calvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal
Newman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like
Carlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically,
perfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression
of the agonised conscience. It is a view of the world which an
agonised conscience readily embraces, if it takes itself seriously,
as, being agonised, of course it must. Calvinism, essentially, asserts
three things: that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is
beautiful that sin should exist to be punished. The heart of the
Calvinist is therefore divided between tragic concern at his own
miserable condition, and tragic exultation about the universe at
large. He oscillates between a profound abasement and a paradoxical
elation of the spirit. To be a Calvinist philosophically is to feel a
fierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,
in that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is
irresponsible or infinite or holy. Human nature, it feels, is totally
depraved: to have the instincts and motives that we necessarily have
is a great scandal, and we must suffer for it; but that scandal is
requisite, since otherwise the serious importance of being as we ought
to be would not have been vindicated.
To those of us who have not an agonised conscience this system may
seem fantastic and even unintelligible; yet it is logically and
intently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take
permanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain
conditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small
nation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic
and distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints
life in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and
black abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps
to infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again
the early Protestants. If such a people is philosophical at all, it
will not improbably be Calvinistic. Even in the early American
communities many of these conditions were fulfilled. The nation was
small and isolated; it lived under pressure and constant trial; it was
acquainted with but a small range of goods and evils. Vigilance over
conduct and an absolute demand for personal integrity were not merely
traditional things, but things that practical sages, like Franklin and
Washington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues
that justified themselves visibly by their fruits. But soon these
happy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external
circumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience
within. The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or
distressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved
took another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good
sense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any
fixed principles. They retained their instinct for order, and often
created order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to
be obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too
unpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and
native-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin
totally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty
and commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing
quick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it
æsthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had
elbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he
wished their number to increase. Good will became the great American
virtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and
cubic feet, and minutes saved--as if there had been anything to save
them for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan
Edwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to
any intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.
If you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would
think you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that
he always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.
Calvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional
natures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private
searchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the
radical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but
none can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the
moral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon
parts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which
should separate the remainder from real life.
Meantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical
genius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the
world, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American
writers whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,
Hawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract
quality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too
keen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered
them little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.
They were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.
Emerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in
his reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way
of appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not
historically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might
have felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a
poet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to
avoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to
have any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of
Emerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of
vacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being
morbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental
rhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes
and quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius
sincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in
comparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.
Their manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they
escaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied
nothing to supplant it in other minds.
The churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no
philosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism
contained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it
besides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of
grace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and
it was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now
emphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant
damnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would
perfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to
exist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an
ingredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself
idealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in
current idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief
element in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.
Transcendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in
Germany, and independently, I believe, in America also.
Transcendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set
of dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe
regarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a
point of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain,
could be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is
systematic subjectivism. It studies the perspectives of knowledge as
they radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference
by which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford
any systematic or distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is
the critical logic of science. Knowledge, it says, has a station, as
in a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the
moment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived,
lie around it, painted as upon a panorama. They cannot be lighted up
save by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by
some active operation of the mind.
This is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate
insight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I
disparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct
and, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief
contribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method
only, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always
be legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to
the question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what
is to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing
the object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot
be answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if
discovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an
interest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full
transcendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less
frankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not
only their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about
themselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and
romantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality
might be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;
nay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own
romantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the
method of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of
evolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused,
produced transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge
was turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish
sharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is
significant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental
systems of the universe, which are chimeras.
In both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it
to American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to
the individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while
transcendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their
inherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to
preserve some semblance of philosophical backing. This last was the
use to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who
first brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of
hand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he
himself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith,
which in his case meant faith in Calvinism. In other words, he applied
the transcendental method to matters of fact, reducing them thereby
to human ideas, in order to give to the Calvinistic postulates of
conscience a metaphysical validity. For Kant had a genteel tradition
of his own, which he wished to remove to a place of safety, feeling
that the empirical world had become too hot for it; and this place of
safety was the region of transcendental myth. I need hardly say how
perfectly this expedient suited the needs of philosophers in America,
and it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant
here. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound
metaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no
difficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been
brought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and of
wishing to save it.
But the transcendental method, in its way, was also sympathetic to the
American mind. It embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of
Protestantism as distinguished from its inherited doctrines; it was
autonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary; it felt that Will was
deeper than Intellect; it focussed everything here and now, and asked
all things to show their credentials at the bar of the young self, and
to prove their value for this latest born moment. These things are
truly American; they would be characteristic of any young society with
a keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly
exemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They
constitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other
transcendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The
romantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking
and moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for
a pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion
has a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it
could boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among
the moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson
was a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,
child-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything
that it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or
to notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he
practised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no
system. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh
sincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they
suggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,
was not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his
mind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his
notions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones
that they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other
transcendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing
questions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to
think our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but
he stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of
compensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would
have been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.
But he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to
poetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and
hints toward fresh transcendental musings.
To covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher
says he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.
Bertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail
to reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those
who are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are
rather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and
ordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths
they find are never complete, and are not always important; but they
are integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to
fill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate
or afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually
only apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested
illusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study
the case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or
semblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much
prejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;
for they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and
perhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet
truth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they
defend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of
things, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever
been framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is
true, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in
maintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea
of ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of
many things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,
covering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our
logic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of
human soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be
poetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that
it was true?
Emerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional
consequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came
out of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous
close atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to
him: "Why so hot, little sir?" No doubt the spirit or energy of the
world is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every
little wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will
move on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our
dignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole
world is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is
silent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which
bridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his
genius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and
represented nothing except intelligence itself.
There was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with
transcendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,
for the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a
mirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing
his own verses), "What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was
such stuff in me?" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine
a ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually
has. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since
I made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,
undoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that
is inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was
particularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses
of fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all
Teutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and
spontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.
Just as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,
so others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual
resources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled
ideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for
instance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but
when a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are
unhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by
that; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself
openly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where
human circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in
a purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its
quietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the
classic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the
presence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and
thus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic
sentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.
Have there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the
genteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind
its back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so
precocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise
for its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and
poetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom
you here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,
only half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its
savour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts
it in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,
for they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out
how ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this
militates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the
facts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,
such an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.
Perhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may
be taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present
pervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the
Renaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the
intellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet
its hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that
humorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of
cardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the
saints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for
it so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that
it should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come
of it. So when Mark Twain says, "I was born of poor but dishonest
parents," the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon
convention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the
hollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom
one's habitual conviction.