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THE UNITY SERIES
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT
_ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED_
BY
F.S. MARVIN
AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST', ETC.
'To hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.'
_Prometheus Unbound._
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY
1920
PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PREFACE
This volume, like its two predecessors, arises from a course of lectures
delivered at a Summer School at Woodbrooke, near Birmingham, in August,
1919. The first, in 1915, dealt with 'The Unity of Western Civilization'
generally, the second, in 1916, with 'Progress'. In this book an attempt
has been made to trace the same ideas in the last period of European
history, broadly speaking since 1870.
It was felt at the conclusion of the course that the point of view was
so enlightening and offered so many opportunities of useful further
study that it should, if possible, be resumed in future years. A large
number of subjects were suggested--'The Relations of East and West,'
'The Duty of Advanced to Backward Peoples,' 'The Rôle of Science in
Civilization,' &c.--all containing the same elements of 'progress in
unity' which have inspired the previous volumes. It was thought that
possibly for the next session 'World Reconstructions Past and Present'
might be most appropriate.
If any reader feels moved by interest or sympathy with the general idea
to send suggestions, either as to possible places of meeting, or topics
for treatment or any other kindred matter, they would be welcomed either
by the Editor or by Edwin Gilbert, Woodbrooke, Selly Oak, Birmingham.
F.S.M.
BERKHAMSTED, _December, 1919._
[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains a single instance of a
character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
'r' with a caron (v-shaped symbol) above it. In the text, that
character is depicted thusly: [vr] **]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. GENERAL SURVEY 7
By F.S. MARVIN.
II. PHILOSOPHY 25
By Professor A.E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews.
III. RELIGION 65
By Dr. F.B. JEVONS, Hatfield Hall, Durham.
IV. POETRY 91
By Professor C.H. HERFORD, Manchester.
V. HISTORY 140
By G.P. GOOCH.
VI. POLITICAL THEORY 164
By A.D. LINDSAY, Balliol College, Oxford.
VII. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 181
1. THE INDUSTRIAL SCENE, 1842 181
2. MINING OPERATIONS 195
3. THE SPIRIT OF ASSOCIATION 209
By C.R. FAY, Christ's College, Cambridge.
VIII. ATOMIC THEORIES 216
By Professor W.H. BRAGG, F.R.S.
IX. BIOLOGY SINCE DARWIN 229
By Professor LEONARD DONCASTER, F.R.S.
X. ART 247
By A. CLUTTON BROCK.
XI. A GENERATION OF MUSIC 262
By Dr. ERNEST WALKER, Balliol College, Oxford.
XII. THE MODERN RENASCENCE 293
By F. MELIAN STAWELL.
I
GENERAL SURVEY
F.S. MARVIN
We are trying in this book to give some impression of the principal
changes and developments of Western thought in what might roughly be
called 'the last generation', though this limit of time has been, as it
must be, treated liberally. From the political point of view the two
most impressive milestones, events which will always mark for the
consciousness of the West the beginning and the end of a period, are no
doubt the war of 1870 and the Great War which has just ended. From 1870
to 1914 would therefore be the most obvious delimitation of our study;
and it is a striking illustration of human paradox, that a great stage
in the growth of unity should be marked by two international tragedies
and crowned by the most terrible of all.
Nearly coincident with the political divisions there are important
landmarks in the history of thought. During the 'sixties, while the
power of Prussia was rising to its culmination in the Franco-Prussian
War, the Darwinian theory of development was gaining command in biology.
To many thinkers there has appeared a clear connexion between that
biological doctrine and the 'imperialism', Teutonic and other, which was
so marked a feature of the time. In any case 'post-Darwinian' might well
describe the scientific thought of the age we have in view.
Industrially the epoch is as clearly defined as it is in politics and
science. For in 1871, the year of the Treaty of Frankfort, an act was
passed after a long working-class agitation, assisted by certain eminent
members of the middle class, legalizing strikes and Trade Unions. And
now at the end of the war, all over the world, society is faced by the
problem of reconciling the full rights, and in some cases the extreme
demands, of 'labour', with democratic government and the prosperity and
social union of the whole community. This is the situation discussed in
our seventh and eighth chapters.
In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the
'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system.
The _Principles of Psychology_ was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic
Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind,
and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might
well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind.
Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn
to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of
spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system
from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.
In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early
Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, _Daniel
Deronda_, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, _La
Légende des Siècles_, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages,
appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with
Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has
burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed.
Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in
human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good
men will only follow their better leading.
Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from
one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations
of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole
world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion
and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and
imagination, but also by a grappling with realities at closer quarters.
No wonder that some have seen here a 'tragedy of hope' and the
'bankruptcy of science'.
But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though
striking, are in themselves superficial. They require explanation rather
than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than
the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself. We may at least fairly
treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we
are traversing. We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil,
and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.
In making this fuller analysis of man's recent achievement, especially
in the West, the first, and perhaps ultimately the weightiest, element
we have to note is the continued and unexampled growth of science. Was
there ever a more fertile period than the generation which succeeded
Darwin's achievement in biology and Bunsen's and Kirchhoff's with the
spectroscope? Both have created revolutions, one in our view of living
things, the other in our view of matter. In physics the whole realm of
radio-activity has come into our ken within these years, and during the
same time chemistry, both organic and inorganic, has been equally
enlarged. All branches of science in fact show a similar expansion, and
a new school of mathematicians claim that they have recast the
foundations of the fundamental science and assimilated it to the
simplest laws of all thinking. Some discussion of this will be found in
the chapter on philosophy.
It may serve as tonic--an antidote to that depression of spirits of
which we have spoken--to consider that such an output of mental energy,
rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man's
evolution. No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of
the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For
since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for
historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down
in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at
least is glorious.
And there is tonic in another thought which rises from the very nature
of this recent blossoming of knowledge. It marks the growing
co-operative activity of mankind. The fact that science and research of
every kind have advanced so rapidly is not only, or even primarily, a
proof of the continued vigour of the human intellect, but of the
stability of society, the coherence of social classes and nations, the
readiness of the bulk of men to allow their more immediately productive
work to be used for the support of those whose labours are in a more
remote and ideal sphere. Science did not begin until the ancient
priesthoods were enabled to pursue disinterested inquiries without the
need of earning their daily bread. Civilization, we may be assured, is
not threatened in its most vital part so long as the general will
permits the application of the general resources to the promotion of
learning and research without a claim for immediate marketable results.
Our last generation has not only permitted but has encouraged this in
all Western countries, and in other countries, such as China and Japan,
influenced by the West. The money thus spent is vastly greater than in
any equal period before, and the United States, the land of the fullest
democratic claims, is also the land of the amplest generosity for
scientific and educational purposes.
The growth of knowledge is a symptom not only of the collective capacity
of living man but also of the continuity of the present age with those
which had laid the earlier foundations. One school of vigorous action,
and still more vigorous talk, advises our generation to be done with the
past and make a fresh start on more ideal lines. This is not the voice
of science, which, just in proportion to its growth, has shown more and
more care for its origins and its past: and this is true at every stage
in the history of thought. The Greeks, fighting for freedom and
establishing in the city-state a new form of political organization for
the world, were yet in their scientific evolution true and grateful
successors of the priests who first compiled the observations necessary
for the scientific study of the heavens and founded the art of medicine.
The men of the Renascence, who were burnt and imprisoned for doubting
the verbal inspiration of Aristotle and the Bible, were in fact going
back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The
mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried
further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first
sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries built therefore on the past, although accused of
impiety and revolution; and it must be so with any intellectual
construction which is to hold its own and form the future. So far from
there being any opposition in nature between history and science, the
two are but different aspects of one continuous enlargement of the human
spirit, which sees and lives more fully at each great moment of its
progress, and, so far as it is alive, is always informed by the real
achievements of the past. We illustrate this advance in the marvellous
record of our fifth chapter, and its spirit is summed up in the great
saying of Benedetto Croce that 'all history is contemporary history'.
But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience
with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region
of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and
hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the
end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the
contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current
of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get
right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream
may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were
insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and
capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.
The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders--the
motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not
sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent
upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather
than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying,
but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine
that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought
together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the
individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the
two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of
engineering as our own Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the
steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday,
Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913,
before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was
telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming
one in an altogether new sense.... More than four centuries ago the
discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the
European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the
earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our
disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in
each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in
any part of the globe has now a significance for every other part. World
History is tending to become one History.'
The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind,
has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth.
Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been
forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient
East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the
State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social
solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war
his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon,
reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long
discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with
dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the
franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the
industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and
stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making
every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a
consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.
Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest
voice in Europe to herald both movements: the advance to international
unity, and social reform within the State. It was he who, under the
title of _Western Republic_, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of
nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral
force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world. It
was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up
all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making
every citizen a full member of his nation. Like all ideals it was far
easier to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the
necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of
the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even
proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's
polity in the _De Monarchia_, to take its place rather among the utopias
than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite
complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they
suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature
of the age.
Here indeed it would appear that we have reached one of the most serious
cross-currents in recent European thought. In science, in philosophy, in
politics, and in social economics, though we see the goal at least in
outline, we are in some danger of being overwhelmed by the difficulties
of the pursuit. Our vision is somewhat clouded and our steps hampered by
the entangling details of the country between. It is substantially the
same problem which faces us both in the philosophical and the practical
sphere, and the analogy between the two is instructive. Spencer's
synthesis, which we instanced as the last encyclopaedic attempt to
present all knowledge--at least all scientific knowledge--in one system,
has been riddled fore and aft by hostile shot, though in the end more
of it may be found to have survived than is seen at present above water.
The philosopher who in our generation has acquired the European vogue
most comparable to that of Spencer is Bergson. Now Bergson has dealt
some of the shrewdest blows at Spencer's system, but he does not set out
to construct a rival system of his own. He is most careful to say that
he is not doing this, that any such work must be done by later workers,
that he is only making suggestions for a new point of view. It is
interesting to note in general terms what that point of view is, as we
shall have occasion later on to revert to it. It rests on a new
interpretation of the nature and growth of conscious life. He is in
short a _semeur d'idées-force_ rather than an encyclopaedist or a
system-maker. The difference is characteristic of the age and might be
traced in the other contemporary schools, the pragmatists, the new
realists, and the rest. The new Descartes is looked for but not
announced. Perhaps when he arrives he will prove to be a whole army and
not a single man. But if an army, it will need a better co-ordination, a
more clearly defined common spirit, than is at present apparent in the
philosophic hosts.
A similar perplexity in the practical sphere has a similar cause but a
graver urgency. The multiplicity and contrariety of the facts are upon
us as we face in practice the ideals which we have accepted from the
earlier thinkers, from the century of hope. In science and philosophy we
feel that the cause of unity may with some safety be left to look after
itself. If the new Descartes does not appear in person, we may have
confidence that plenty of inferior substitutes will be found, who, if
they work together, will keep alive the great task of unifying thought.
For in this region the nature of things assists our efforts and will
sooner or later get the work done. The stars in their courses are
fighting for us and for unity. But in the world of wills the task is
tenfold more difficult and the dangers imminent. The poor and labouring
millions, the oppressed and dissatisfied nations, are forcing the door,
and though there is fair agreement in theory as to how they should live
and work together in peace, yet the realization is by no means
automatic, and the difficulties thicken as we come nearer to them.
But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom
to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on
which we can rely in our forward march. And they are not far to seek in
all classes and in every Western land. Read any account of an English
community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in
the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. How far more humane, more enlightened,
and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or
Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have
welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress
made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by
personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our
fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their
prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a
certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of
work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any
playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of
the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as
exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all
for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees
of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager
questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.
But we are dealing in this volume rather with changes of thought than
with the actual life of the times. Theories affecting the organization
of work, the distribution of the product, and the government of society
have had much to do with our present difficulties. They have arisen from
the conditions of the industrial revolution and the doctrines of the
political revolution which began about the same time, and they have
reacted ever since on the work and wages, the life and government of the
mass of Western men. They are discussed in our eighth chapter. It may be
said broadly that in this sphere, as in philosophy, the old and
_simpliste_ doctrines have been criticized almost to the point of
extinction, but that no new all-embracing practical synthesis has taken
their place. The Marxian theory that social evolution has been due
mainly to economic causes, that these have produced inevitably the
present--or recent--capitalist system, which inevitably must be turned
upside down in the interests of manual labour--this is no longer
dominant in any Western community, though it is fighting a desperate
battle in Eastern Europe. But it is equally true that the capitalist
system, presented in an ideal and moralized form in the Utopias of St.
Simon and Comte, is not generally accepted now as an ideal for industry.
The spirit which Comte desired and believed would animate the moralized
employer, acting as the providence of his workpeople, we look to find
rather in a reconstituted and moralized State. We all share this hope in
our degree, _The Times_ as well as the _Daily News_, and we do not
expect the new spirit to operate simply through the free-will and
private capacity and initiative of individuals. The joint stock company
has settled that.
What we are waiting and hoping for is the time when, under the aegis of
a benevolent State, capital and labour may live together in many
mansions and, like the monks of old, follow many rules of life. In this
region our ideal of unity is more diversified than in the realm of
thought, and there is no demand for a Descartes.
And here it is interesting to note that one of the most telling books on
social reconstruction published since the war is by an international
writer. This is Dr. Walther Rathenau, a German of Jewish descent, whose
ideas have just been popularized by a Frenchman, M. Gaston Raphael[1].
He fits in well with our general argument by virtue of his double
attitude, holding, on the one hand, that under the general supervision
of the State, industry should be organized in various self-governing
groups, 'Social Guilds' or 'professional syndicates' in which both
employers and workmen would be included with representatives of the
Government; while, on the other hand, he is emphatic that progress must
proceed from a changed and widening mentality, and aim in turn at
increasing the depth and capacity of the individual soul.
Our book has no special chapter on the League of Nations itself. The
idea pervades the whole, and the subject was treated in detail in the
first volume of this series (_The Unity of Western Civilization_, 1915).
The history behind the League offers a striking analogy to the other
struggles for unity of which we have spoken. There is the same advance
from the idea of a unity dictated and controlled by one mind to a unity
of spirit arising from the free co-operation of many diverse elements
all aiming at the same general good. Down even to yesterday it seemed to
many minds a necessary condition that one man, gathering in his hands
the resources of one great State, should from that centre dominate the
world. And in the dawn of human history it was no doubt often true, the
only way in which the world could then advance. This was true for
Alexander, the prototype of all the Roman conquerors, and true,
conspicuously, for the Roman empire at its best. But, after the break-up
of the empire, unity of this type became a delusive mirage, misleading
all who, like the Holy Roman emperors, sought to enjoy it again. By the
time of Napoleon it had become an anachronism of the most dangerous and
reactionary kind. The world was then too vast, the freedom of men and
nations too various and deeply rooted. Meanwhile a real unity, stronger
than before, had been forming beneath the surface and needed fresh
institutions to body it forth. This movement for unity has been, as we
have seen, precipitated by the war into visible and decisive action. It
had been simmering for three hundred years in 'Great Designs', 'Projects
of Peace', Treaties of Arbitration, and Hague Conventions.
Among much that is doubtful in the future of the League, one thing
stands out as a capital certainty. Without losing the very spirit of its
being it can never become a satellite system, revolving round one
dominant Power or even a dominant clique. It was formed to contradict
and destroy an oppressive imperialism: it can only thrive by the free
co-operation of the partners, finding their proper end in a prosperity
shared by all.
Such is a short summary of some of the leading topics treated here,
those perhaps in which public interest has been most keenly aroused. But
nothing has been said in this introduction of Art or Music, and of
Religion only a little by implication. It may be well in conclusion to
attempt a still more summary impression of the main drift of the period
on the spiritual side. We may in such a wider view see some common
tendency in all these activities, some inspiration of religion, some
link with art, some impulse to live strongly and to hope.
The present writer would find this leading thread in the increasing
stress laid by recent European thought on the spiritual, or
psychological, side of every problem, in the growing desire to
understand the character of man's own nature and to develop all the
powers of his soul.
One of the latest authorities[2] on anthropology has told us that 'to
develop soul is progress', and he has followed the clue through the
meagre relics of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. So does the last
science of the nineteenth century throw light on the dim recesses of the
past. For unquestionably psychology is the characteristic science added
to the hierarchy in our period; it has crowned biology and is exercising
a profound influence on philosophy, literature, and even politics. If
Aristotle was its founder, if it was Descartes who first showed its
profound connexion with philosophy, it is to workers in our own day that
we must look for those methods of accurate observation, comparison, and
the study of causes without which it could not advance farther. And
modern psychology has advanced far enough to see that we must include in
its purview the 'soul' of a minnow as well as of a man. Descartes had
stopped too short, for to him animal life, as distinct from human,
showed only the movements of automata. But now, just as the biologist
conceives man as part of one infinite order of living things, so the
psychologist believes that the facts of his consciousness, the crown of
life, must find their place somewhere related to the simplest movements
of the amoeba. Hence the whole of animate evolution, and not only that
part of which Dr. Marett spoke, may be thought of as the growth of soul.
But, the objector will inquire, does this imply the enlargement of every
individual or even of the average or the typical personality? And if
not, what becomes of a 'growth of the soul'?
To this we must admit the impossibility of any complete, or even
approximate, answer with our present knowledge. We can only note one or
two points of certainty or of confident belief. The first, that there
have been individual men, an Aristotle or a Shakespeare, in the past,
with whom later ages never have, and perhaps never may, compare. The
second, that there are good grounds for thinking that the average man
has improved in goodness and in knowledge since we first knew him dimly
in the dawn of history. But more important and more certain is the fact
that the collective soul of man has grown, and all the extensions of
knowledge and of power of which our volume speaks bear witness to it.
They are essentially social in origin and outlook, and rest on a
foundation of common thought immeasurably wider than any in the more
distant past.
The man of science, the statesman, even the poet, now speaks for a
multitude, and out of a multitudinous consciousness, which had not
gathered to support, to inspire, or to weigh down, an Aristotle, a
Pericles, a Cromwell. This is a dominating fact from which it is well to
take our start. Assuredly the soul of mankind has been collectively
enlarged and enriched. How far the individual can share in this
enlargement is still one of the problems of the future. The West has
committed itself to a general policy of education which aims at making
every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race. But it cannot
be said that this policy has yet been really tried. It is the
acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have
been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders,
will continue to press for its fulfilment. As this approaches, the
individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which
philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which
we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man.
Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences
will appear? Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and
sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a
struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished,
should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not
be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they
can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary
writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets
and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the
inner life.
The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none
more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion
for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian
complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and
appreciation for the old order in England--the contentment and humours
of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for
religion--she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time
into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of
humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of
duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our
knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types
than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests
in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had
widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.
Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same
broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous.
The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a
commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of
late for comfort and inspiration: 'The world is not a vale of tears, but
a vale of soul-making.' Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of
children. But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it
be of humanity in growth. Soul-making--the practice and the theory--has
become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought
and endeavour. We need the greater mind to see the links in the
overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history.
We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social
life. Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul
needed, with a world-consciousness, some knowledge, some sympathy, some
hope for all mankind. Without this, a league of nations would be dead
before its birth.
The recent development of psychology, social as well as individual, its
pursuit on scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one
thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to
throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern
men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician,
the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the
answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity
of the work he shares, and confident that the future will extend and
make still more beneficial its results. His forward glance is more
assured because the backward reveals a course of growing strength and
continuous ascent. The physicist foresees unmeasured sources of energy,
still untapped. He warns us of our dangers, but has no doubt that, with
due foresight, we may overcome them, and make the reign of man upon the
planet wider and firmer than before. The doctor knows no disease which
may not in time yield to scientific treatment. The agricultural expert
foresees, and can produce, new types of grain and fruit which will
surpass the best yet known. And the trainer of youth, the man to whom
the new science of psychology stands most in stead, is the most hopeful
of them all. Dealing with human nature in its growth he puts no limits
to its powers of goodness and activity. He deplores the want of wise
methods in the past, and if he errs at all it is in an excess of
optimism, in believing that with new methods we may make a new man.
On this enlargement of the soul, enlightened by science, we build the
future. It is the crowning vision of the modern world, first sketched by
Descartes, filled out and strengthened by the life and thought of three
hundred years. In the interval we have lived much and learnt much, both
of our own nature and of the world in which we live. In our own age a
powerful stimulus has been given by a transformed biology and a new
science which shows the soul itself in growth from an immemorial past,
moulding the future by its own action, surmounting, while assimilating,
the mechanism which surrounds it. But for this building two things are
needed. One, that our souls, as builders, shall act as one with all our
fellows and strive for unity as well as power. The other, that in the
building the laws of growth shall be followed, which science has already
revealed in part and will reveal more fully. For the spirit of science
is the spirit of hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Walther Rathenau. Ses Idées et ses Projets d'Organisation
Économique_. By Gaston Raphael (Paris: Payot, 4f. 50 c).]
[Footnote 2: R.R. Marett in _Progress and History_ (Oxford University
Press).]
II
PHILOSOPHY
PROFESSOR A.E. TAYLOR
Between forty and fifty years ago a great European man of science, Emil
du Bois-Reymond, delivered before an audience of the leading scientific
men of Germany a famous discourse on _The Limits of our Knowledge of
Nature_, which he followed up some years later with a second discourse
on the _Seven Riddles of the Universe_. His object was to convince the
materialists of the 'seventies that there were at least seven such
unsound places in _their_ story of everything. Some of the 'riddles', he
admitted, might prove to be soluble as science advances, but the most
important of them will always remain unanswered. Our position as regards
them will always be _ignoramus et ignorabimus_--we do not know the
solutions and we never shall know them. I do not ask now whether du
Bois-Reymond was right in his judgement or not. If he was right, that
means, of course, that the one tale of everything will never be told by
human lips to human ears. There will no more ever be a finally true
Philosophy than there will ever be a finally perfect poem or picture or
symphony. But there is no reason why we should not, at any rate, try to
make our story as nearly perfect as we can, to reduce the number of the
places where we have to break off with 'that is another story', and
perhaps even to hazard a 'wide solution' in matters where absolute
certainty is beyond our reach. This is the work of human Philosophy as I
conceive it, and every man who is disinterestedly trying, without one
eye on wealth or fame or domination over the minds of others, to make
any contribution, however humble, to the telling of this one story or
the removal of loose threads from it, is inspired by the true spirit of
Philosophy. Whoever is doing anything else, no matter under what name or
with what profit or renown to himself, is no true philosopher.
This point of view implies, it will be seen, no sharp dividing line
between Philosophy and Science. The avoidance of this commonly made
distinction may offend two different sets of students--students of
metaphysics who wish to exalt their own pursuit at the expense of the
'special' sciences, and students of natural science who are accustomed
to pride themselves on the contrast between the finality and
definiteness of their own results and the vagueness and dubiousness of
the conclusion of the metaphysicians. But I must avow my own conviction
that the only distinction we can make is one of convenience, and it may
help to make my peace with both parties if I explain where I take this
distinction of convenience to come in. If we are ever to construct an
approximation to the one story of everything, clearly one result will
consist of a relatively few first principles and a great mass of
conclusions which can be inferred from them. And clearly again, since
men differ so widely in their mental aptitudes, some men will be most
successful in the detection of the principles which underlie all our
knowledge, and others most successful in the accumulation of facts and
the detailed working out of the application of the principles to the
facts. For convenience' sake it will be well that some of us shall be
engaged on the discovery of principles which are so very ultimate that
most men take them for granted without reflecting on them at all, and
others on the work of detail. Further, it will be convenient that,
within this second group, various students shall give their attention to
more special masses of detail, according to their several tastes and
aptitudes, some to the behaviour of moving particles, some to the
behaviour of living organisms, some again to the structure and
institutions of human societies, and so on. For convenience we may agree
to call preoccupation with the great ultimate principles Philosophy and
preoccupation with the application of the principles to masses of
special facts Science. If we make the distinction in this way, we shall
be following pretty closely the lines of historical development along
which 'special' sciences have gradually been constituted. When we go
back far enough in the history of human thought, we find that
originally, among the great Greeks who have taught the world to think,
there was no distinction at all between Science and Philosophy. Men like
Plato and Aristotle were busied at once with the discovery of the first
principles on which all our knowledge depends and with the construction
of a satisfactory theory of the planetary motions or of the facts of
growth and reproduction. As the study of special questions was pursued
further, it became advisable to hand over the treatment of first one and
then another group of closely interconnected questions to students who
would pursue them independently of research into ultimate
presuppositions. This is how Geometry, Astronomy, Biology came, in
ancient times, to be successively detached from general Philosophy. The
separation of Psychology--the detailed study of the processes of mental
life--from Philosophy hardly goes back beyond the days of our fathers,
and the separation of such studies as 'sociology' from general
Philosophy may be said to belong quite definitely to our own time. If
our children have leisure for study at all, no doubt they will see the
process carried much further. But it is important to bear in mind that
neither Philosophy in the narrower sense nor Science in the narrower
sense will be fruitfully prosecuted unless the men who are working at
each understand that their own labours are only part of a single
undivided work. Without a genuine grasp of some department of detailed
facts no man is likely to achieve much in the search for principles, for
it is by analysis of facts that principles are to be found, and without
real insight into broad general principles the worker in detail is
likely to achieve nothing but confusion. The antagonism between
'philosophers' and 'men of science' so characteristic of the last half
of the nineteenth century has been productive of nothing but evil. It
has given us 'philosophers' whose knowledge about the facts with which
serious thinking has to deal has been hopelessly inaccurate; it has also
given us 'men of science' who have been 'ageometretes' and have, by
consequence, when forced to offer some account of first principles,
taken refuge in the wildest and weirdest improvisation. For really
fruitful work we need the union in one person of the 'man of science'
and the 'philosopher', or at least the most intimate co-operation
between the two. Our theories of first principles require to be
constantly revised, purified, and quickened by contact with knowledge of
detailed fact; and our representations of fact call for constant
restatement in terms of a system of more and more thoroughly thought-out
postulates or first principles. This is perhaps why the department of
human knowledge in which the last half-century has seen the most
remarkable advances is just that in which unremitting scrutiny of
principles has gone most closely hand-in-hand with the mastery of fresh
masses of detail, pure mathematics, and again why the present state of
what is loosely called 'evolutionary' science is so unsatisfactory to
any one who has a high ideal of what a science ought to be. It exhibits
at once an enormous mass of detailed information and an apparently
hopeless vagueness about the meaning of the 'laws' by which all this
detail is to be co-ordinated, the reasons for thinking these laws true,
and the precise range of their significance. The work of men like
Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Whitehead, Russell, is providing us with an
almost unexceptional theory of the first principles required for pure
mathematics. We are already in a position to say with almost complete
freedom from uncertainty what undefined simple notions and
undemonstrated postulates we have to employ in the science and to
express these ultimates without ambiguity. 'Evolutionary science,' rich
as is its information about the details of the processes going on in the
organic world, seems still to await its Frege or Russell. It talks, for
example, much of 'hereditary' and non-hereditary peculiarities, and some
of us can remember a time when our friends among the biologists seemed
almost ready to put each other to the sword for differences of opinion
about the inheritability of certain characteristics; but no one seems to
trouble himself much with the question a philosopher would think most
important of all--precisely what is meant by the metaphor of
'inheritance' when it is applied to the facts of biology. (Indeed, it is
still quite fashionable to talk not merely as if a 'character' were,
like a house or an orchard, a _thing_ which can be transferred bodily
from the possession of a parent to the possession of the offspring, but
even as though an 'heir' could 'inherit' himself.)