Liberation through Ideas.
Matthew Arnold was in the habit of dwelling on the importance of a
free movement of fresh ideas through society; the men who are in touch
with such movements are certain to be productive, while those whose
minds are not fed by this stimulus are likely to remain unfruitful.
One of the most suggestive and beautiful facts in the spiritual
history of men is the exhilaration which a great new thought brings
with it; the thrilling moments in history are the moments of contact
between such ideas and the minds which are open to their approach. It
is true that fresh ideas often gain acceptance slowly and against
great odds in the way of organised error and of individual inertness
and dulness; nevertheless, it is also true that certain great ideas
rapidly clarify themselves in the thought of almost every century.
They are opposed and rejected by a multitude, but they are in the air,
as we say; they seem to diffuse themselves through all fields of
thought, and they are often worked out harmoniously in different
departments by men who have no concert of action, but whose minds are
open and sensitive to these invisible currents of light and power.
The first and the most enduring result of this movement of ideas is
the enlargement of the thoughts of men about themselves and their
world. Every great new truth compels, sooner or later, a readjustment
of the whole body of organised truth as men hold it. The fresh thought
about the physical constitution of man bears its fruit ultimately in
some fresh notion of his spiritual constitution; the new fact in
geology does not spend its force until it has wrought a modification
of the view of the creative method and the age of man in the world;
the fresh conception of the method of evolution along material and
physical lines slowly reconstructs the philosophy of mental and
spiritual development. Every new thought relates itself finally to all
thought, and is like the forward step which continually changes the
horizon about the traveller.
The history of man is the story of the ideas he has entertained and
accepted, and of his struggle to incorporate these ideas into laws,
customs, institutions, and character. At the heart of every race one
finds certain ideas, not always clearly seen nor often definitely
formulated save by a few persons, but unconsciously held with
deathless tenacity and illustrated by a vast range of action and
achievement; at the heart of every great civilisation one finds a few
dominant and vital conceptions which give a certain coherence and
unity to a vast movement of life. Now, the books of life, as has
already been said, hold their place in universal literature because
they reveal and illustrate, in symbol and personality, these
fundamental ideas with supreme power and felicity. The large body of
literature in prose and verse which is put between the covers of the
Old Testament not only gives us an account of what the Hebrew race did
in the world, but of its ideas about that world, and of the character
which it formed for itself largely as the fruit of those ideas. Those
ideas, it need hardly be said, not only registered a great advance on
the ideas which preceded them, but remain in many respects the most
fundamental ideas which the race as a whole has accepted. They lifted
the men to whom they were originally revealed, or who accepted them,
to a great height of spiritual and moral vision, and a race character
was organised about them of the most powerful and persistent type. The
modern student of the Old Testament is born into a very different
atmosphere from that in which these conceptions of man and the
universe were originally formed; but though they have largely lost
their novelty, they have not lost the power of enlargement and
expansion which were in them at the beginning.
In his own history every man repeats, within certain limits, the
history of the race; and the inexhaustible educational value of race
experience lies in the fact that it so completely parallels the
history of every member of the race. Childhood has the fancies and
faiths of the earliest ages; youth has visions and dreams which form,
generation after generation, a kind of contemporary mythology;
maturity aspires after and sometimes attains the repose, the clear
intelligence, the catholic outlook of the best modern type of mind and
character. In some form every modern man travels the road over which
his predecessors have passed, but he no longer blazes his path; a
highway has been built for him. He is spared the immense toil of
formulating the ideas by which he lives, and of passing through the
searching experience which is often the only approach to the greatest
truths. If he has originative power, he forms ideas of his own, but
they are based on a massive foundation of ideas which others have
worked out for him; he passes through his own individual experience,
but he inherits the results of a multitude of experiences of which
nothing remains save certain final generalisations. Every intelligent
man is born into possession of a world of knowledge and truth which
has been explored, settled, and organised for him. To the discovery
and regulation of this world every race has worked with more or less
definiteness of aim, and the total result of the incalculable labours
and sufferings of men is the somewhat intangible but very real thing
we call civilisation.
At the heart of civilisation, and determining its form and quality, is
that group of vital ideas to which each race has contributed according
to its intelligence and power,--the measure of the greatness of a race
being determined by the value of its contribution to this organised
spiritual life of the world. This body of ideas is the highest product
of the life of men under historic conditions; it is the quintessence
of whatever was best and enduring not only in their thought, but in
their feeling, their instinct, their affections, their activities; and
the degree in which the man of to-day is able to appropriate this rich
result of the deepest life of the past is the measure of his culture.
One may be well-trained and carefully disciplined, and yet have no
share in this organised life of the race; but no one can possess real
culture who has not, according to his ability, entered into it by
making it a part of himself. It is by contact with these great ideas
that the individual mind puts itself in touch with the universal mind
and indefinitely expands and enriches itself.
Culture rests on ideas rather than on knowledge; its distinctive use
of knowledge is to gain material for ideas. For this reason the
"Iliad" and "Odyssey" are of more importance than Thucydides and
Curtius. For Homer was not only in a very important sense the
historian of his race; he was, above all, the expositor of its ideas.
There is involved in the very structure of the Greek epics the
fundamental conception of life as the Greeks looked at it; their view
of reverence, worship, law, obligation, subordination, personality. No
one can be said to have read these poems in any real sense until he
has made these ideas clear to himself; and these ideas carry with them
a definite enlargement of thought. When a man has gotten a clear view
of the ideas about life held by a great race, he has gone a long way
towards self-education,--so rich and illuminative are these central
conceptions around which the life of each race has been organised. To
multiply these ideas by broad contact with the books of life is to
expand one's thought so as to compass the essential thought of the
entire race. And this is precisely what the man of broad culture
accomplishes; he emancipates himself from whatever is local,
provincial, and temporal, by gaining the power of taking the race
point of view. He is liberated by ideas, not only from his own
ignorance and the limitations of his own nature, but from the partial
knowledge and the prejudices of his time; and liberation by ideas, and
expansion through ideas, constitute one of the great services of the
books of life to those who read them with an open mind.