behind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans
find him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest
ought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he
certainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and
traditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he
is looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the
polite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the
inarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own
genteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner
opens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last
upon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy
is carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and
emotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and
equal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to
speak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not
excluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their
companions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the
refusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle
further down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a
whole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of
the Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and
self-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was
good enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia
rebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that
alone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in
principle, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to
the lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius
to fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the
registering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,
and therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and
his lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very
reason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many
beginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a
worthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth
century who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly
have done more.
But there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,
who has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as
Whitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent
American mind--I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as
tightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could
be, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.
Yet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two
brothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.
Henry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer
world, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns
everything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a
curious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with
other habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the
genteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With
William James too this infusion of worldly insight and European
sympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but
the chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal
spontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,
similar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so
to speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the
dawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.
His scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of
thinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in
a measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the
genteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its
opposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is
not dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of
experience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through
the infusion of new insights, and through the insensible
transformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at
last it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of
expanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when
it fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist
like William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its
neutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them
separately, according to his personal predilections.
For one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all
that might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in
religion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to
sentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and
impostors--for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing
to draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any
of these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the
blind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the
certainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least
they were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so
seriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,
or one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less
beauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus
William James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,
half-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry
individuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,
their spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he
made it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world
has to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and
interests of these people.
Yet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in
William James. There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and
Darwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for
practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.
Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned
to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James
embodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called
pragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,
by which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be
true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its
roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of
practical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It
does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to
connect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its
psychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it
chiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called
intellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his
kind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure
pedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up
nature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally
useful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of
life which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon
obsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds
and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the
pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that
must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.
To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is
anything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would
prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not
mirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet
events, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that
disappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true
themselves.
This may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I
think it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas,
their truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked
altogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes
which these ideas express. It is an external view only, which marks
the place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its
specific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a
ring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of
the mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to
become. If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to
expedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and
a chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be
expedited, nor could anything be useful to it. In other words--and
this is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has
played havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending
it--nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological
terms. Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding
destinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other
formal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete
endeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which
they transform and by which they, too, are affected. A spirit, the
divine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it,
is a romantic adventurer. Its future is undetermined. Its scope, its
duration, and the quality of its life are all contingent. This spirit
grows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for
such other centres of force or life as may exist there. It has a vital
momentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a
stepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely
fresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.
The universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or
total nature, because it has no end. It embodies no formula or
statable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing
what, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking
characteristic of existence; the law is a description _a posteriori_
of the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may
possibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is
uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
experiment keep quick the edge of life.
This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
William James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.
Bergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first
rank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.
Bergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative
evolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to
"_écraser l'infâme_." We may suspect, notwithstanding, that
intellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if
the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that
there shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may
possibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing
new--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from
the beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet
had had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not
merely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new
all day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that
controversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial
evolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel
tradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation
unpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William
James is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences
of religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of
the genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic
God is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will
answer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct
conditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring
being, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon
a personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How
disconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?
And yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!
I am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more
probable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All
three are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which
probabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to
the sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not
which notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all
expressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith
and imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's
new theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has
broken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new
direction, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than
the old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly
be true--who shall know that?--but that it has entered the heart of a
leading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition
cannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which
it is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been
challenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been
discovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No
one need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some
young prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a
dualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be
afraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The
intellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has
not been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That
is a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.
Something else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the
imagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic
idealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring
things as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel
tradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought
to be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,
by the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same
peace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will
be to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.
Nothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been
abandoned. An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel
tradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.
With this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you
of the genteel tradition in American philosophy. The subject is
complex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I
think the main outlines are clear enough. The chief fountains of this
tradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living
fountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised
conscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.
When these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared--and the
American atmosphere is not favourable to either of them--the two
systems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred
mysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental
system of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly
artificial. Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.
Natural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention,
could not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental
philosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting
his left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.
Nevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate
convictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has
subsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic
to take its place.
The academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side
came the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude
naturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,
welcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science
to an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to
be wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.
This revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,
who live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and
prodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you
experiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you
cannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these
adjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it
when she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must
feel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little
force among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to
your forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel
you made them, or that they were made for you. They have grown, as you
have grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human
beauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman
possibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that
they teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in
the world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,
the needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength
of time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable
variety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,
indefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its
old form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an
incipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor a
plan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is
the daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the
verbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the
philosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the
pleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among
your mountains their systems would have been different from what they
are. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems
are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since
Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly
they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that
man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,
is the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains
and the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,
indeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so
sweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or
your friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present
ambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you
are not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform
them at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition
itself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They
suspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as
individuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at
once to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for
what you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious
infinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails
little materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through
wonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you
are really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,
namely, in representing many things, without being them, and in
letting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their
life. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for
reaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of
these things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the
interest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes
that may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper
happiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate
men, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so
many storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be
frankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.
* * * * *