THE LIFE OF REASON

The Phases of Human Progress

Volumes One Through Five


GEORGE SANTAYANA


hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




In Five Volumes

    Introduction to Life of Reason

    Volume One

    Volume Two

    Volume Three

    Volume Four

    Volume Five




REASON IN COMMON SENSE

Volume One of “The Life of Reason”

GEORGE SANTAYANA


hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




CONTENTS


INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT OF THIS WORK, ITS METHOD AND ANTECEDENTS

Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.—Efficacious
reflection is reason.—The Life of Reason a name for all practical
thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness.—It is
the sum of Art.—It has a natural basis which makes it definable.—Modern
philosophy not helpful.—Positivism no positive ideal.—Christian
philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and conditions.—Liberal
theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural world.—The Greeks
thought straight in both physics and morals.—Heraclitus and the
immediate.—Democritus and the naturally intelligible.—Socrates and the
autonomy of mind.—Plato gave the ideal its full expression.—Aristotle
supplied its natural basis.—Philosophy thus complete, yet in need
of restatement.—Plato’s myths in lieu of physics.—Aristotle’s final
causes.—Modern science can avoid such expedients.—Transcendentalism
true but inconsequential.—Verbal ethics.—Spinoza and the Life of
Reason.—Modern and classic sources of inspiration. Pages 1-32


REASON IN COMMON SENSE

CHAPTER I

THE BIRTH OF REASON

Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible with
a chosen good.—Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent,
indifferent.—In experience order is relative to interests which
determine the moral status of all powers.—The discovered conditions
of reason not its beginning.—The flux first.—Life the fixation of
interests.—Primary dualities.—First gropings.—Instinct the nucleus of
reason.—Better and worse the fundamental categories. Pages 35-47


CHAPTER II

FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS

Dreams before thoughts.—The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by
physical forces.—Internal order supervenes.—Intrinsic pleasure in
existence.—Pleasure a good, but not pursued or remembered unless it
suffuses an object.—Subhuman delights.—Animal living.—Causes at last
discerned.—Attention guided by bodily impulse. Pages 48-63


CHAPTER III

THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS

Nature man’s home.—Difficulties in conceiving nature.—Transcendental
qualms.—Thought an aspect of life and transitive.—Perception
cumulative and synthetic.—No identical agent needed.—Example of the
sun.—His primitive divinity.—Causes and essences contrasted.—Voracity
of intellect.—Can the transcendent be known?—Can the immediate
be meant?—Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?—_Mens
naturaliter platonica_.—Identity and independence predicated of things.
Pages 64-83


CHAPTER IV

ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY

Psychology as a solvent.—Misconceived rôle of intelligence.—All
criticism dogmatic.—A choice of hypotheses.—Critics
disguised enthusiasts.—Hume’s gratuitous scepticism.—Kant’s
substitute for knowledge.—False subjectivity attributed to
reason.—Chimerical reconstruction.—The Critique a work on
mental architecture.—Incoherences.—Nature the true system of
conditions.—Artificial pathos in subjectivism.—Berkeley’s algebra
of perception.—Horror of physics.—Puerility in morals.—Truism and
sophism.—Reality is the practical made intelligible.—Vain “realities”
and trustworthy “fictions”. Pages 84-117


CHAPTER V

NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED

Man’s feeble grasp of nature.—Its unity ideal and discoverable only
by steady thought.—Mind the erratic residue of existence.—Ghostly
character of mind.—Hypostasis and criticism both need
control.—Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas.—Spirit and
sense defined by their relation to nature.—Vague notions of nature
involve vague notions of spirit.—Sense and spirit the life of nature,
which science redistributes but does not deny. Pages 118-136


CHAPTER VI

DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS

Another background for current experience may be found in alien
minds.—Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy
between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.—Subject and
object empirical, not transcendental, terms.—Objects originally
soaked in secondary and tertiary qualities.—Tertiary qualities
transposed.—Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities
of perceived body—“Pathetic fallacy” normal, yet ordinarily
fallacious.—Case where it is not a fallacy.—Knowledge succeeds only by
accident.—Limits of insight.—Perception of character.—Conduct divined,
consciousness ignored.—Consciousness untrustworthy.—Metaphorical
mind.—Summary. Pages 137-160


CHAPTER VII

CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE

So-called abstract qualities primary.—General qualities prior to
particular things.—Universals are concretions in discourse.—Similar
reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield an idea.—Ideas
are ideal.—So-called abstractions complete facts.—Things concretions
of concretions.—Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the
order of nature.—Aristotle’s compromise.—Empirical bias in favour of
contiguity.—Artificial divorce of logic from practice.—Their mutual
involution.—Rationalistic suicide.—Complementary character of essence
and existence. Pages 161-183


CHAPTER VIII

ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS

Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical
principle.—Concretions in discourse express instinctive
reactions.—Idealism rudimentary.—Naturalism sad.—The soul akin to
the eternal and ideal.—Her inexperience.—Platonism spontaneous.—Its
essential fidelity to the ideal.—Equal rights of empiricism.—Logic
dependent on fact for its importance, and for its subsistence.—Reason
and docility.—Applicable thought and clarified experience. Pages 184-204


CHAPTER IX

HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

Functional relations of mind and body.—They form one natural
life.—Artifices involved in separating them.—Consciousness expresses
vital equilibrium and docility.—Its worthlessness as a cause and value
as an expression.—Thought’s march automatic and thereby implicated in
events.—Contemplative essence of action.—Mechanical efficacy alien to
thought’s essence.—Consciousness transcendental and transcendent.—It
is the seat of value.—Apparent utility of pain.—Its real
impotence.—Preformations involved.—Its untoward significance.—Perfect
function not unconscious.—Inchoate ethics.—Thought the entelechy of
being.—Its exuberance. Pages 205-235


CHAPTER X

THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION

Honesty in hedonism.—Necessary qualifications.—The will must
judge.—Injustice inherent in representation.—Æsthetic and speculative
cruelty.—Imputed values: their inconstancy.—Methods of control.—Example
of fame.—Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic.—Irrational
religious allegiance.—Pathetic idealisations.—Inevitable impulsiveness
in prophecy.—The test a controlled present ideal. Pages 236-255


CHAPTER XI

SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL

The ultimate end a resultant.—Demands the substance of
ideals.—Discipline of the will.—Demands made practical and
consistent.—The ideal natural.—Need of unity and finality.—Ideals of
nothing.—Darwin on moral sense.—Conscience and reason compared.—Reason
imposes no new sacrifice.—Natural goods attainable and compatible in
principle.—Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason. Pages
256-268


CHAPTER XII

FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE

Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.—Contrary
currents of opinion.—Pantheism.—Instability in existences does
not dethrone their ideals.—Absolutist philosophy human and
halting.—All science a deliverance of momentary thought.—All
criticism likewise.—Origins inessential.—Ideals functional.—They
are transferable to similar beings.—Authority internal.—Reason
autonomous.—Its distribution.—Natural selection of minds.—Living
stability.—Continuity necessary to progress.—Limits of variation.
Spirit a heritage.—Perfectibility.—Nature and human nature.—Human
nature formulated.—Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.
Pages 269-291




Introduction to “The Life of Reason”


[Sidenote: Progress is relative to an ideal which reflection creates.]

Whatever forces may govern human life, if they are to be recognised by
man, must betray themselves in human experience. Progress in science or
religion, no less than in morals and art, is a dramatic episode in man’s
career, a welcome variation in his habit and state of mind; although
this variation may often regard or propitiate things external,
adjustment to which may be important for his welfare. The importance of
these external things, as well as their existence, he can establish only
by the function and utility which a recognition of them may have in his
life. The entire history of progress is a moral drama, a tale man might
unfold in a great autobiography, could his myriad heads and countless
scintillas of consciousness conspire, like the seventy Alexandrian
sages, in a single version of the truth committed to each for
interpretation. What themes would prevail in such an examination of
heart? In what order and with what emphasis would they be recounted? In
which of its adventures would the human race, reviewing its whole
experience, acknowledge a progress and a gain? To answer these
questions, as they may be answered speculatively and provisionally by an
individual, is the purpose of the following work.

[Sidenote: Efficacious reflection is reason.]

A philosopher could hardly have a higher ambition than to make himself a
mouth-piece for the memory and judgment of his race. Yet the most casual
consideration of affairs already involves an attempt to do the same
thing. Reflection is pregnant from the beginning with all the principles
of synthesis and valuation needed in the most comprehensive criticism.
So soon as man ceases to be wholly immersed in sense, he looks before
and after, he regrets and desires; and the moments in which prospect or
retrospect takes place constitute the reflective or representative part
of his life, in contrast to the unmitigated flux of sensations in which
nothing ulterior is regarded. Representation, however, can hardly remain
idle and merely speculative. To the ideal function of envisaging the
absent, memory and reflection will add (since they exist and constitute
a new complication in being) the practical function of modifying the
future. Vital impulse, however, when it is modified by reflection and
veers in sympathy with judgments pronounced on the past, is properly
called reason. Man’s rational life consists in those moments in which
reflection not only occurs but proves efficacious. What is absent then
works in the present, and values are imputed where they cannot be felt.
Such representation is so far from being merely speculative that its
presence alone can raise bodily change to the dignity of action.
Reflection gathers experiences together and perceives their relative
worth; which is as much as to say that it expresses a new attitude of
will in the presence of a world better understood and turned to some
purpose. The limits of reflection mark those of concerted and rational
action; they circumscribe the field of cumulative experience, or, what
is the same thing, of profitable living.

[Sidenote: The Life of Reason a name for all practical thought and all
action justified by its fruits in consciousness.]

Thus if we use the word life in a eulogistic sense to designate the
happy maintenance against the world of some definite ideal interest, we
may say with Aristotle that life is reason in operation. The _Life of
Reason_ will then be a name for that part of experience which perceives
and pursues ideals—all conduct so controlled and all sense so
interpreted as to perfect natural happiness.

Without reason, as without memory, there might still be pleasures and
pains in existence. To increase those pleasures and reduce those pains
would be to introduce an improvement into the sentient world, as if a
devil suddenly died in hell or in heaven a new angel were created. Since
the beings, however, in which these values would reside, would, by
hypothesis, know nothing of one another, and since the betterment would
take place unprayed-for and unnoticed, it could hardly be called a
progress; and certainly not a progress in man, since man, without the
ideal continuity given by memory and reason, would have no moral being.
In human progress, therefore, reason is not a casual instrument, having
its sole value in its service to sense; such a betterment in sentience
would not be progress unless it were a progress in reason, and the
increasing pleasure revealed some object that could please; for without
a picture of the situation from which a heightened vitality might flow,
the improvement could be neither remembered nor measured nor desired.
The Life of Reason is accordingly neither a mere means nor a mere
incident in human progress; it is the total and embodied progress
itself, in which the pleasures of sense are included in so far as they
can be intelligently enjoyed and pursued. To recount man’s rational
moments would be to take an inventory of all his goods; for he is not
himself (as we say with unconscious accuracy) in the others. If he ever
appropriates them in recollection or prophecy, it is only on the ground
of some physical relation which they may have to his being.

Reason is as old as man and as prevalent as human nature; for we should
not recognise an animal to be human unless his instincts were to some
degree conscious of their ends and rendered his ideas in that measure
relevant to conduct. Many sensations, or even a whole world of dreams,
do not amount to intelligence until the images in the mind begin to
represent in some way, however symbolic, the forces and realities
confronted in action. There may well be intense consciousness in the
total absence of rationality. Such consciousness is suggested in dreams,
in madness, and may be found, for all we know, in the depths of
universal nature. Minds peopled only by desultory visions and lusts
would not have the dignity of human souls even if they seemed to pursue
certain objects unerringly; for that pursuit would not be illumined by
any vision of its goal. Reason and humanity begin with the union of
instinct and ideation, when instinct becomes enlightened, establishes
values in its objects, and is turned from a process into an art, while
at the same time consciousness becomes practical and cognitive,
beginning to contain some symbol or record of the co-ordinate realities
among which it arises.

Reason accordingly requires the fusion of two types of life, commonly
led in the world in well-nigh total separation, one a life of impulse
expressed in affairs and social passions, the other a life of reflection
expressed in religion, science, and the imitative arts. In the Life of
Reason, if it were brought to perfection, intelligence would be at once
the universal method of practice and its continual reward. All
reflection would then be applicable in action and all action fruitful in
happiness. Though this be an ideal, yet everyone gives it from time to
time a partial embodiment when he practises useful arts, when his
passions happily lead him to enlightenment, or when his fancy breeds
visions pertinent to his ultimate good. Everyone leads the Life of
Reason in so far as he finds a steady light behind the world’s glitter
and a clear residuum of joy beneath pleasure or success. No experience
not to be repented of falls without its sphere. Every solution to a
doubt, in so far as it is not a new error, every practical achievement
not neutralised by a second maladjustment consequent upon it, every
consolation not the seed of another greater sorrow, may be gathered
together and built into this edifice. The Life of Reason is the happy
marriage of two elements—impulse and ideation—which if wholly divorced
would reduce man to a brute or to a maniac. The rational animal is
generated by the union of these two monsters. He is constituted by ideas
which have ceased to be visionary and actions which have ceased to be
vain.

[Sidenote: It is the sum of Art.]

Thus the Life of Reason is another name for what, in the widest sense of
the word, might be called Art. Operations become arts when their purpose
is conscious and their method teachable. In perfect art the whole idea
is creative and exists only to be embodied, while every part of the
product is rational and gives delightful expression to that idea. Like
art, again, the Life of Reason is not a power but a result, the
spontaneous expression of liberal genius in a favouring environment.
Both art and reason have natural sources and meet with natural checks;
but when a process is turned successfully into an art, so that its
issues have value and the ideas that accompany it become practical and
cognitive, reflection, finding little that it cannot in some way justify
and understand, begins to boast that it directs and has created the
world in which it finds itself so much at home. Thus if art could extend
its sphere to include every activity in nature, reason, being everywhere
exemplified, might easily think itself omnipotent. This ideal, far as it
is from actual realisation, has so dazzled men, that in their religion
and mythical philosophy they have often spoken as if it were already
actual and efficient. This anticipation amounts, when taken seriously,
to a confusion of purposes with facts and of functions with causes, a
confusion which in the interests of wisdom and progress it is important
to avoid; but these speculative fables, when we take them for what they
are—poetic expressions of the ideal—help us to see how deeply rooted
this ideal is in man’s mind, and afford us a standard by which to
measure his approaches to the rational perfection of which he dreams.
For the Life of Reason, being the sphere of all human art, is man’s
imitation of divinity.

[Sidenote: It has a natural basis which makes it definable.]

To study such an ideal, dimly expressed though it be in human existence,
is no prophetic or visionary undertaking. Every genuine ideal has a
natural basis; anyone may understand and safely interpret it who is
attentive to the life from which it springs. To decipher the Life of
Reason nothing is needed but an analytic spirit and a judicious love of
man, a love quick to distinguish success from failure in his great and
confused experiment of living. The historian of reason should not be a
romantic poet, vibrating impotently to every impulse he finds afoot,
without a criterion of excellence or a vision of perfection. Ideals are
free, but they are neither more numerous nor more variable than the
living natures that generate them. Ideals are legitimate, and each
initially envisages a genuine and innocent good; but they are not
realisable together, nor even singly when they have no deep roots in the
world. Neither is the philosopher compelled by his somewhat judicial
office to be a satirist or censor, without sympathy for those tentative
and ingenuous passions out of which, after all, his own standards must
arise. He is the chronicler of human progress, and to measure that
progress he should be equally attentive to the impulses that give it
direction and to the circumstances amid which it stumbles toward its
natural goal.

[Sidenote: Modern philosophy not helpful.]

There is unfortunately no school of modern philosophy to which a
critique of human progress can well be attached. Almost every school,
indeed, can furnish something useful to the critic, sometimes a physical
theory, sometimes a piece of logical analysis. We shall need to borrow
from current science and speculation the picture they draw of man’s
conditions and environment, his history and mental habits. These may
furnish a theatre and properties for our drama; but they offer no hint
of its plot and meaning. A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the
mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour,
as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of
catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the
naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from
the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses.
Bacon indeed had prized science for adding to the comforts of life, a
function still commemorated by positivists in their eloquent moments.
Habitually, however, when they utter the word progress it is, in their
mouths, a synonym for inevitable change, or at best for change in that
direction which they conceive to be on the whole predominant. If they
combine with physical speculation some elements of morals, these are
usually purely formal, to the effect that happiness is to be pursued
(probably, alas! because to do so is a psychological law); but what
happiness consists in we gather only from casual observations or by
putting together their national prejudices and party saws.

[Sidenote: Positivism no positive ideal.]

The truth is that even this radical school, emancipated as it thinks
itself, is suffering from the after-effects of supernaturalism. Like
children escaped from school, they find their whole happiness in
freedom. They are proud of what they have rejected, as if a great wit
were required to do so; but they do not know what they want. If you
astonish them by demanding what is their positive ideal, further than
that there should be a great many people and that they should be all
alike, they will say at first that what ought to be is obvious, and
later they will submit the matter to a majority vote. They have
discarded the machinery in which their ancestors embodied the ideal;
they have not perceived that those symbols stood for the Life of Reason
and gave fantastic and embarrassed expression to what, in itself, is
pure humanity; and they have thus remained entangled in the colossal
error that ideals are something adventitious and unmeaning, not having a
soil in mortal life nor a possible fulfilment there.

[Sidenote: Christian philosophy mythical: it misrepresents facts and
conditions.]

The profound and pathetic ideas which inspired Christianity were
attached in the beginning to ancient myths and soon crystallised into
many new ones. The mythical manner pervades Christian philosophy; but
myth succeeds in expressing ideal life only by misrepresenting its
history and conditions. This method was indeed not original with the
Fathers; they borrowed it from Plato, who appealed to parables himself
in an open and harmless fashion, yet with disastrous consequences to his
school. Nor was he the first; for the instinct to regard poetic
fictions as revelations of supernatural facts is as old as the soul’s
primitive incapacity to distinguish dreams from waking perceptions, sign
from thing signified, and inner emotions from external powers. Such
confusions, though in a way they obey moral forces, make a rational
estimate of things impossible. To misrepresent the conditions and
consequences of action is no merely speculative error; it involves a
false emphasis in character and an artificial balance and co-ordination
among human pursuits. When ideals are hypostasised into powers alleged
to provide for their own expression, the Life of Reason cannot be
conceived; in theory its field of operation is pre-empted and its
function gone, while in practice its inner impulses are turned awry by
artificial stimulation and repression.

The Patristic systems, though weak in their foundations, were
extraordinarily wise and comprehensive in their working out; and while
they inverted life they preserved it. Dogma added to the universe
fabulous perspectives; it interpolated also innumerable incidents and
powers which gave a new dimension to experience. Yet the old world
remained standing in its strange setting, like the Pantheon in modern
Rome; and, what is more important, the natural springs of human action
were still acknowledged, and if a supernatural discipline was imposed,
it was only because experience and faith had disclosed a situation in
which the pursuit of earthly happiness seemed hopeless. Nature was not
destroyed by its novel appendages, nor did reason die in the cloister:
it hibernated there, and could come back to its own in due season, only
a little dazed and weakened by its long confinement. Such, at least, is
the situation in Catholic regions, where the Patristic philosophy has
not appreciably varied. Among Protestants Christian dogma has taken a
new and ambiguous direction, which has at once minimised its disturbing
effect in practice and isolated its primary illusion. The symptoms have
been cured and the disease driven in.

[Sidenote: Liberal theology a superstitious attitude toward a natural
world.]

The tenets of Protestant bodies are notoriously varied and on principle
subject to change. There is hardly a combination of tradition and
spontaneity which has not been tried in some quarter. If we think,
however, of broad tendencies and ultimate issues, it appears that in
Protestantism myth, without disappearing, has changed its relation to
reality: instead of being an extension to the natural world myth has
become its substratum. Religion no longer reveals divine personalities,
future rewards, and tenderer Elysian consolations; nor does it seriously
propose a heaven to be reached by a ladder nor a purgatory to be
shortened by prescribed devotions. It merely gives the real world an
ideal status and teaches men to accept a natural life on supernatural
grounds. The consequence is that the most pious can give an unvarnished
description of things. Even immortality and the idea of God are
submitted, in liberal circles, to scientific treatment. On the other
hand, it would be hard to conceive a more inveterate obsession than that
which keeps the attitude of these same minds inappropriate to the
objects they envisage. They have accepted natural conditions; they will
not accept natural ideals. The Life of Reason has no existence for them,
because, although its field is clear, they will not tolerate any human
or finite standard of value, and will not suffer extant interests, which
can alone guide them in action or judgment, to define the worth of life.

The after-effects of Hebraism are here contrary to its foundations; for
the Jews loved the world so much that they brought themselves, in order
to win and enjoy it, to an intense concentration of purpose; but this
effort and discipline, which had of course been mythically sanctioned,
not only failed of its object, but grew far too absolute and sublime to
think its object could ever have been earthly; and the supernatural
machinery which was to have secured prosperity, while that still
enticed, now had to furnish some worthier object for the passion it had
artificially fostered. Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort
when you have forgotten your aim.

An earnestness which is out of proportion to any knowledge or love of
real things, which is therefore dark and inward and thinks itself deeper
than the earth’s foundations—such an earnestness, until culture turns
it into intelligent interests, will naturally breed a new mythology. It
will try to place some world of Afrites and shadowy giants behind the
constellations, which it finds too distinct and constant to be its
companions or supporters; and it will assign to itself vague and
infinite tasks, for which it is doubtless better equipped than for those
which the earth now sets before it. Even these, however, since they are
parts of an infinite whole, the mystic may (histrionically, perhaps, yet
zealously) undertake; but as his eye will be perpetually fixed on
something invisible beyond, and nothing will be done for its own sake or
enjoyed in its own fugitive presence, there will be little art and
little joy in existence. All will be a tossing servitude and illiberal
mist, where the parts will have no final values and the whole no
pertinent direction.

[Sidenote: The Greeks thought straight in both physics and morals.]

In Greek philosophy the situation is far more auspicious. The ancients
led a rational life and envisaged the various spheres of speculation as
men might whose central interests were rational. In physics they leaped
at once to the conception of a dynamic unity and general evolution, thus
giving that background to human life which shrewd observation would
always have descried, and which modern science has laboriously
rediscovered. Two great systems offered, in two legitimate directions,
what are doubtless the final and radical accounts of physical being.
Heraclitus, describing the immediate, found it to be in constant and
pervasive change: no substances, no forms, no identities could be
arrested there, but as in the human soul, so in nature, all was
instability, contradiction, reconstruction, and oblivion. This remains
the empirical fact; and we need but to rescind the artificial division
which Descartes has taught us to make between nature and life, to feel
again the absolute aptness of Heraclitus’s expressions. These were
thought obscure only because they were so disconcertingly penetrating
and direct. The immediate is what nobody sees, because convention and
reflection turn existence, as soon as they can, into ideas; a man who
discloses the immediate seems profound, yet his depth is nothing but
innocence recovered and a sort of intellectual abstention. Mysticism,
scepticism, and transcendentalism have all in their various ways tried
to fall back on the immediate; but none of them has been ingenuous
enough. Each has added some myth, or sophistry, or delusive artifice to
its direct observation. Heraclitus remains the honest prophet of
immediacy: a mystic without raptures or bad rhetoric, a sceptic who does
not rely for his results on conventions unwittingly adopted, a
transcendentalist without false pretensions or incongruous dogmas.

[Sidenote: Heraclitus and the immediate.]

The immediate is not, however, a good subject for discourse, and the
expounders of Heraclitus were not unnaturally blamed for monotony. All
they could do was to iterate their master’s maxim, and declare
everything to be in flux. In suggesting laws of recurrence and a reason
in which what is common to many might be expressed, Heraclitus had
opened the door into another region: had he passed through, his
philosophy would have been greatly modified, for permanent forms would
have forced themselves on his attention no less than shifting materials.
Such a Heraclitus would have anticipated Plato; but the time for such a
synthesis had not yet arrived.

[Sidenote: Democritus and the naturally intelligible.]

At the opposite pole from immediacy lies intelligibility. To reduce
phenomena to constant elements, as similar and simple as possible, and
to conceive their union and separation to obey constant laws, is what a
natural philosopher will inevitably do so soon as his interest is not
merely to utter experience but to understand it. Democritus brought this
scientific ideal to its ultimate expression. By including psychic
existence in his atomic system, he indicated a problem which natural
science has since practically abandoned but which it may some day be
compelled to take up. The atoms of Democritus seem to us gross, even for
chemistry, and their quality would have to undergo great transformation
if they were to support intelligibly psychic being as well; but that
very grossness and false simplicity had its merits, and science must be
for ever grateful to the man who at its inception could so clearly
formulate its mechanical ideal. That the world is not so intelligible
as we could wish is not to be wondered at. In other respects also it
fails to respond to our ideals; yet our hope must be to find it more
propitious to the intellect as well as to all the arts in proportion as
we learn better how to live in it.

The atoms of what we call hydrogen or oxygen may well turn out to be
worlds, as the stars are which make atoms for astronomy. Their inner
organisation might be negligible on our rude plane of being; did it
disclose itself, however, it would be intelligible in its turn only if
constant parts and constant laws were discernible within each system. So
that while atomism at a given level may not be a final or metaphysical
truth, it will describe, on every level, the practical and efficacious
structure of the world. We owe to Democritus this ideal of practical
intelligibility; and he is accordingly an eternal spokesman of reason.
His system, long buried with other glories of the world, has been partly
revived; and although it cannot be verified in haste, for it represents
an ultimate ideal, every advance in science reconstitutes it in some
particular. Mechanism is not one principle of explanation among others.
In natural philosophy, where to explain means to discover origins,
transmutations, and laws, mechanism is explanation itself.

Heraclitus had the good fortune of having his physics absorbed by Plato.
It is a pity that Democritus’ physics was not absorbed by Aristotle. For
with the flux observed, and mechanism conceived to explain it, the
theory of existence is complete; and had a complete physical theory been
incorporated into the Socratic philosophy, wisdom would have lacked none
of its parts. Democritus, however, appeared too late, when ideal science
had overrun the whole field and initiated a verbal and dialectical
physics; so that Aristotle, for all his scientific temper and studies,
built his natural philosophy on a lamentable misunderstanding, and
condemned thought to confusion for two thousand years.

[Sidenote: Socrates and the autonomy of mind.]

If the happy freedom of the Greeks from religious dogma made them the
first natural philosophers, their happy political freedom made them the
first moralists. It was no accident that Socrates walked the Athenian
agora; it was no petty patriotism that made him shrink from any other
scene. His science had its roots there, in the personal independence,
intellectual vivacity, and clever dialectic of his countrymen. Ideal
science lives in discourse; it consists in the active exercise of
reason, in signification, appreciation, intent, and self-expression. Its
sum total is to know oneself, not as psychology or anthropology might
describe a man, but to know, as the saying is, one’s own mind. Nor is he
who knows his own mind forbidden to change it; the dialectician has
nothing to do with future possibilities or with the opinion of anyone
but the man addressed. This kind of truth is but adequate veracity; its
only object is its own intent. Having developed in the spirit the
consciousness of its meanings and purposes, Socrates rescued logic and
ethics for ever from authority. With his friends the Sophists, he made
man the measure of all things, after bidding him measure himself, as
they neglected to do, by his own ideal. That brave humanity which had
first raised its head in Hellas and had endowed so many things in heaven
and earth, where everything was hitherto monstrous, with proportion and
use, so that man’s works might justify themselves to his mind, now found
in Socrates its precise definition; and it was naturally where the Life
of Reason had been long cultivated that it came finally to be conceived.

[Sidenote: Plato gave the ideal its full expression.]

Socrates had, however, a plebeian strain in his humanity, and his
utilitarianism, at least in its expression, hardly did justice to what
gives utility to life. His condemnation for atheism—if we choose to
take it symbolically—was not altogether unjust: the gods of Greece were
not honoured explicitly enough in his philosophy. Human good appeared
there in its principle; you would not set a pilot to mend shoes, because
you knew your own purpose; but what purposes a civilised soul might
harbour, and in what highest shapes the good might appear, was a problem
that seems not to have attracted his genius. It was reserved to Plato to
bring the Socratic ethics to its sublimest expression and to elicit from
the depths of the Greek conscience those ancestral ideals which had
inspired its legislators and been embodied in its sacred civic
traditions. The owl of Minerva flew, as Hegel says, in the dusk of
evening; and it was horror at the abandonment of all creative virtues
that brought Plato to conceive them so sharply and to preach them in so
sad a tone. It was after all but the love of beauty that made him
censure the poets; for like a true Greek and a true lover he wished to
see beauty flourish in the real world. It was love of freedom that made
him harsh to his ideal citizens, that they might be strong enough to
preserve the liberal life. And when he broke away from political
preoccupations and turned to the inner life, his interpretations proved
the absolute sufficiency of the Socratic method; and he left nothing
pertinent unsaid on ideal love and ideal immortality.

[Sidenote: Aristotle supplied its natural basis.]

Beyond this point no rendering of the Life of Reason has ever been
carried, Aristotle improved the detail, and gave breadth and precision
to many a part. If Plato possessed greater imaginative splendour and
more enthusiasm in austerity, Aristotle had perfect sobriety and
adequacy, with greater fidelity to the common sentiments of his race.
Plato, by virtue of his scope and plasticity, together with a certain
prophetic zeal, outran at times the limits of the Hellenic and the
rational; he saw human virtue so surrounded and oppressed by physical
dangers that he wished to give it mythical sanctions, and his fondness
for transmigration and nether punishments was somewhat more than
playful. If as a work of imagination his philosophy holds the first
place, Aristotle’s has the decisive advantage of being the unalloyed
expression of reason. In Aristotle the conception of human nature is
perfectly sound; everything ideal has a natural basis and everything
natural an ideal development. His ethics, when thoroughly digested and
weighed, especially when the meagre outlines are filled in with Plato’s
more discursive expositions, will seem therefore entirely final. The
Life of Reason finds there its classic explication.

[Sidenote: Philosophy thus complete, yet in need of restatement.]

As it is improbable that there will soon be another people so free from
preoccupations, so gifted, and so fortunate as the Greeks, or capable in
consequence of so well exemplifying humanity, so also it is improbable
that a philosopher will soon arise with Aristotle’s scope, judgment, or
authority, one knowing so well how to be both reasonable and exalted. It
might seem vain, therefore, to try to do afresh what has been done
before with unapproachable success; and instead of writing inferior
things at great length about the Life of Reason, it might be simpler to
read and to propagate what Aristotle wrote with such immortal justness
and masterly brevity. But times change; and though the principles of
reason remain the same the facts of human life and of human conscience
alter. A new background, a new basis of application, appears for logic,
and it may be useful to restate old truths in new words, the better to
prove their eternal validity. Aristotle is, in his morals, Greek,
concise, and elementary. As a Greek, he mixes with the ideal argument
illustrations, appreciations, and conceptions which are not inseparable
from its essence. In themselves, no doubt, these accessories are better
than what in modern times would be substituted for them, being less
sophisticated and of a nobler stamp; but to our eyes they disguise what
is profound and universal in natural morality by embodying it in images
which do not belong to our life. Our direst struggles and the last
sanctions of our morality do not appear in them. The pagan world,
because its maturity was simpler than our crudeness, seems childish to
us. We do not find there our sins and holiness, our love, charity, and
honour.

The Greek too would not find in our world the things he valued most,
things to which he surrendered himself, perhaps, with a more constant
self-sacrifice—piety, country, friendship, and beauty; and he might add
that his ideals were rational and he could attain them, while ours are
extravagant and have been missed. Yet even if we acknowledged his
greater good fortune, it would be impossible for us to go back and
become like him. To make the attempt would show no sense of reality and
little sense of humour. We must dress in our own clothes, if we do not
wish to substitute a masquerade for practical existence. What we can
adopt from Greek morals is only the abstract principle of their
development; their foundation in all the extant forces of human nature
and their effort toward establishing a perfect harmony among them. These
forces themselves have perceptibly changed, at least in their relative
power. Thus we are more conscious of wounds to stanch and wrongs to
fight against, and less of goods to attain. The movement of conscience
has veered; the centre of gravity lies in another part of the character.

Another circumstance that invites a restatement of rational ethics is
the impressive illustration of their principle which subsequent history
has afforded. Mankind has been making extraordinary experiments of which
Aristotle could not dream; and their result is calculated to clarify
even his philosophy. For in some respects it needed experiments and
clarification. He had been led into a systematic fusion of dialectic
with physics, and of this fusion all pretentious modern philosophy is
the aggravated extension. Socrates’ pupils could not abandon his ideal
principles, yet they could not bear to abstain from physics altogether;
they therefore made a mock physics in moral terms, out of which theology
was afterward developed. Plato, standing nearer to Socrates and being no
naturalist by disposition, never carried the fatal experiment beyond the
mythical stage. He accordingly remained the purer moralist, much as
Aristotle’s judgment may be preferred in many particulars. Their
relative position may be roughly indicated by saying that Plato had no
physics and that Aristotle’s physics was false; so that ideal science in
the one suffered from want of environment and control, while in the
other it suffered from misuse in a sphere where it had no application.

[Sidenote: Plato’s myths in lieu of physics.]

What had happened was briefly this: Plato, having studied many sorts of
philosophy and being a bold and universal genius, was not satisfied to
leave all physical questions pending, as his master had done. He
adopted, accordingly, Heraclitus’s doctrine of the immediate, which he
now called the realm of phenomena; for what exists at any instant, if
you arrest and name it, turns out to have been an embodiment of some
logical essence, such as discourse might define; in every fact some idea
makes its appearance, and such an apparition of the ideal is a
phenomenon. Moreover, another philosophy had made a deep impression on
Plato’s mind and had helped to develop Socratic definitions: Parmenides
had called the concept of pure Being the only reality; and to satisfy
the strong dialectic by which this doctrine was supported and at the
same time to bridge the infinite chasm between one formless substance
and many appearances irrelevant to it, Plato substituted the many
Socratic ideas, all of which were relevant to appearance, for the one
concept of Parmenides. The ideas thus acquired what is called
metaphysical subsistence; for they stood in the place of the Eleatic
Absolute, and at the same time were the realities that phenomena
manifested.

The technique of this combination is much to be admired; but the feat is
technical and adds nothing to the significance of what Plato has to say
on any concrete subject. This barren triumph was, however, fruitful in
misunderstandings. The characters and values a thing possessed were now
conceived to subsist apart from it, and might even have preceded it and
caused its existence; a mechanism composed of values and definitions
could thus be placed behind phenomena to constitute a substantial
physical world. Such a dream could not be taken seriously, until good
sense was wholly lost and a bevy of magic spirits could be imagined
peopling the infinite and yet carrying on the business of earth.
Aristotle rejected the metaphysical subsistence of ideas, but thought
they might still be essences operative in nature, if only they were
identified with the life or form of particular things. The dream thus
lost its frank wildness, but none of its inherent incongruity: for the
sense in which characters and values make a thing what it is, is purely
dialectical. They give it its status in the ideal world; but the
appearance of these characters and values here and now is what needs
explanation in physics, an explanation which can be furnished, of
course, only by the physical concatenation and distribution of causes.

[Sidenote: Aristotle’s final causes. Modern science can avoid such
expedients.]

Aristotle himself did not fail to Aristotle’s make this necessary
distinction between efficient cause and formal essence; but as his
science was only natural history, and mechanism had no plausibility in
his eyes, the efficiency of the cause was always due, in his view, to
its ideal quality; as in heredity the father’s human character, not his
physical structure, might seem to warrant the son’s humanity. Every
ideal, before it could be embodied, had to pre-exist in some other
embodiment; but as when the ultimate purpose of the cosmos is considered
it seems to lie beyond any given embodiment, the highest ideal must
somehow exist disembodied. It must pre-exist, thought Aristotle, in
order to supply, by way of magic attraction, a physical cause for
perpetual movement in the world.

It must be confessed, in justice to this consummate philosopher, who is
not less masterly in the use of knowledge than unhappy in divination,
that the transformation of the highest good into a physical power is
merely incidental with him, and due to a want of faith (at that time
excusable) in mechanism and evolution. Aristotle’s deity is always a
moral ideal and every detail in its definition is based on
discrimination between the better and the worse. No accommodation to the
ways of nature is here allowed to cloud the kingdom of heaven; this
deity is not condemned to do whatever happens nor to absorb whatever
exists. It is mythical only in its physical application; in moral
philosophy it remains a legitimate conception.

Truth certainly exists, if existence be not too mean an attribute for
that eternal realm which is tenanted by ideals; but truth is repugnant
to physical or psychical being. Moreover, truth may very well be
identified with an impassible intellect, which should do nothing but
possess all truth, with no point of view, no animal warmth, and no
transitive process. Such an intellect and truth are expressions having a
different metaphorical background and connotation, but, when thought
out, an identical import. They both attempt to evoke that ideal standard
which human thought proposes to itself. This function is their effective
essence. It insures their eternal fixity, and this property surely
endows them with a very genuine and sublime reality. What is fantastic
is only the dynamic function attributed to them by Aristotle, which
obliges them to inhabit some fabulous extension to the physical world.
Even this physical efficacy, however, is spiritualised as much as
possible, since deity is said to move the cosmos only as an object of
love or an object of knowledge may move the mind. Such efficacy is
imputed to a hypostasised end, but evidently resides in fact in the
functioning and impulsive spirit that conceives and pursues an ideal,
endowing it with whatever attraction it may seem to have. The absolute
intellect described by Aristotle remains, therefore, as pertinent to
the Life of Reason as Plato’s idea of the good. Though less
comprehensive (for it abstracts from all animal interests, from all
passion and mortality), it is more adequate and distinct in the region
it dominates. It expresses sublimely the goal of speculative thinking;
which is none other than to live as much as may be in the eternal and to
absorb and be absorbed in the truth.

The rest of ancient philosophy belongs to the decadence and rests in
physics on eclecticism and in morals on despair. That creative breath
which had stirred the founders and legislators of Greece no longer
inspired their descendants. Helpless to control the course of events,
they took refuge in abstention or in conformity, and their ethics became
a matter of private economy and sentiment, no longer aspiring to mould
the state or give any positive aim to existence. The time was
approaching when both speculation and morals were to regard the other
world; reason had abdicated the throne, and religion, after that brief
interregnum, resumed it for long ages.

[Sidenote: Transcendentalism true but inconsequential.]

Such are the threads which tradition puts into the hands of an observer
who at the present time might attempt to knit the Life of Reason ideally
together. The problem is to unite a trustworthy conception of the
conditions under which man lives with an adequate conception of his
interests. Both conceptions, fortunately, lie before us. Heraclitus and
Democritus, in systems easily seen to be complementary, gave long ago a
picture of nature such as all later observation, down to our own day,
has done nothing but fill out and confirm. Psychology and physics still
repeat their ideas, often with richer detail, but never with a more
radical or prophetic glance. Nor does the transcendental philosophy, in
spite of its self-esteem, add anything essential. It was a thing taken
for granted in ancient and scholastic philosophy that a being dwelling,
like man, in the immediate, whose moments are in flux, needed
constructive reason to interpret his experience and paint in his
unstable consciousness some symbolic picture of the world. To have
reverted to this constructive process and studied its stages is an
interesting achievement; but the construction is already made by
common-sense and science, and it was visionary insolence in the Germans
to propose to make that construction otherwise. Retrospective
self-consciousness is dearly bought if it inhibits the intellect and
embarrasses the inferences which, in its spontaneous operation, it has
known perfectly how to make. In the heat of scientific theorising or
dialectical argument it is sometimes salutary to be reminded that we are
men thinking; but, after all, it is no news. We know that life is a
dream, and how should thinking be more? Yet the thinking must go on,
and the only vital question is to what practical or poetic conceptions
it is able to lead us.

[Sidenote: Verbal ethics.]

Similarly the Socratic philosophy affords a noble and genuine account of
what goods may be realised by living. Modern theory has not done so much
to help us here, however, as it has in physics. It seldom occurs to
modern moralists that theirs is the science of all good and the art of
its attainment; they think only of some set of categorical precepts or
some theory of moral sentiments, abstracting altogether from the ideals
reigning in society, in science, and in art. They deal with the
secondary question What ought I to do? without having answered the
primary question, What ought to be? They attach morals to religion
rather than to politics, and this religion unhappily long ago ceased to
be wisdom expressed in fancy in order to become superstition overlaid
with reasoning. They divide man into compartments and the less they
leave in the one labelled “morality” the more sublime they think their
morality is; and sometimes pedantry and scholasticism are carried so far
that nothing but an abstract sense of duty remains in the broad region
which should contain all human goods.

[Sidenote: Spinoza and the Life of Reason.]

Such trivial sanctimony in morals is doubtless due to artificial views
about the conditions of welfare; the basis is laid in authority rather
than in human nature, and the goal in salvation rather than in
happiness. One great modern philosopher, however, was free from these
preconceptions, and might have reconstituted the Life of Reason had he
had a sufficient interest in culture. Spinoza brought man back into
nature, and made him the nucleus of all moral values, showing how he may
recognise his environment and how he may master it. But Spinoza’s
sympathy with mankind fell short of imagination; any noble political or
poetical ideal eluded him. Everything impassioned seemed to him insane,
everything human necessarily petty. Man was to be a pious tame animal,
with the stars shining above his head. Instead of imagination Spinoza
cultivated mysticism, which is indeed an alternative. A prophet in
speculation, he remained a levite in sentiment. Little or nothing would
need to be changed in his system if the Life of Reason, in its higher
ranges, were to be grafted upon it; but such affiliation is not
necessary, and it is rendered unnatural by the lack of sweep and
generosity in Spinoza’s practical ideals.

[Sidenote: Modern and classic sources of inspiration.]

For moral philosophy we are driven back, then, upon the ancients; but
not, of course, for moral inspiration. Industrialism and democracy, the
French Revolution, the Renaissance, and even the Catholic system, which
in the midst of ancient illusions enshrines so much tenderness and
wisdom, still live in the world, though forgotten by philosophers, and
point unmistakably toward their several goals. Our task is not to
construct but only to interpret ideals, confronting them with one
another and with the conditions which, for the most part, they alike
ignore. There is no need of refuting anything, for the will which is
behind all ideals and behind most dogmas cannot itself be refuted; but
it may be enlightened and led to reconsider its intent, when its
satisfaction is seen to be either naturally impossible or inconsistent
with better things. The age of controversy is past; that of
interpretation has succeeded.

Here, then, is the programme of the following work: Starting with the
immediate flux, in which all objects and impulses are given, to describe
the Life of Reason; that is, to note what facts and purposes seem to be
primary, to show how the conception of nature and life gathers around
them, and to point to the ideals of thought and action which are
approached by this gradual mastering of experience by reason. A great
task, which it would be beyond the powers of a writer in this age either
to execute or to conceive, had not the Greeks drawn for us the outlines
of an ideal culture at a time when life was simpler than at present and
individual intelligence more resolute and free.




REASON IN COMMON SENSE




CHAPTER I—THE BIRTH OF REASON


[Sidenote: Existence always has an Order, called Chaos when incompatible
with a chosen good.]

Whether Chaos or Order lay at the beginning of things is a question once
much debated in the schools but afterward long in abeyance, not so much
because it had been solved as because one party had been silenced by
social pressure. The question is bound to recur in an age when
observation and dialectic again freely confront each other. Naturalists
look back to chaos since they observe everything growing from seeds and
shifting its character in regeneration. The order now established in the
world may be traced back to a situation in which it did not appear.
Dialecticians, on the other hand, refute this presumption by urging that
every collocation of things must have been preceded by another
collocation in itself no less definite and precise; and further that
some principle of transition or continuity must always have obtained,
else successive states would stand in no relation to one another,
notably not in the relation of cause and effect, expressed in a natural
law, which is presupposed in this instance. Potentialities are
dispositions, and a disposition involves an order, as does also the
passage from any specific potentiality into act. Thus the world, we are
told, must always have possessed a structure.

The two views may perhaps be reconciled if we take each with a
qualification. Chaos doubtless has existed and will return—nay, it
reigns now, very likely, in the remoter and inmost parts of the
universe—if by chaos we understand a nature containing none of the
objects we are wont to distinguish, a nature such that human life and
human thought would be impossible in its bosom; but this nature must be
presumed to have an order, an order directly importing, if the tendency
of its movement be taken into account, all the complexities and
beauties, all the sense and reason which exist now. Order is accordingly
continual; but only when order means not a specific arrangement,
favourable to a given form of life, but any arrangement whatsoever. The
process by which an arrangement which is essentially unstable gradually
shifts cannot be said to aim at every stage which at any moment it
involves. For the process passes beyond. It presently abolishes all the
forms which may have arrested attention and generated love; its initial
energy defeats every purpose which we may fondly attribute to it. Nor is
it here necessary to remind ourselves that to call results their own
causes is always preposterous; for in this case even the mythical sense
which might be attached to such language is inapplicable. Here the
process, taken in the gross, does not, even by mechanical necessity,
support the value which is supposed to guide it. That value is realised
for a moment only; so that if we impute to Cronos any intent to beget
his children we must also impute to him an intent to devour them.

[Sidenote: Absolute order, or truth, is static, impotent, indifferent.]

Of course the various states of the world, when we survey them
retrospectively, constitute another and now static order called historic
truth. To this absolute and impotent order every detail is essential. If
we wished to abuse language so much as to speak of will in an “Absolute”
where change is excluded, so that nothing can be or be conceived beyond
it, we might say that the Absolute willed everything that ever exists,
and that the eternal order terminated in every fact indiscriminately;
but such language involves an after-image of motion and life, of
preparation, risk, and subsequent accomplishment, adventures all
pre-supposing refractory materials and excluded from eternal truth by
its very essence. The only function those traditional metaphors have is
to shield confusion and sentimentality. Because Jehovah once fought for
the Jews, we need not continue to say that the truth is solicitous about
us, when it is only we that are fighting to attain it. The universe can
wish particular things only in so far as particular beings wish them;
only in its relative capacity can it find things good, and only in its
relative capacity can it be good for anything.

The efficacious or physical order which exists at any moment in the
world and out of which the next moment’s order is developed, may
accordingly be termed a relative chaos: a chaos, because the values
suggested and supported by the second moment could not have belonged to
the first; but merely a relative chaos, first because it probably
carried values of its own which rendered it an order in a moral and
eulogistic sense, and secondly because it was potentially, by virtue of
its momentum, a basis for the second moment’s values as well.

[Sidenote: In experience order is relative to interests, which determine
the moral status of all powers.]

Human life, when it begins to possess intrinsic value, is an incipient
order in the midst of what seems a vast though, to some extent, a
vanishing chaos. This reputed chaos can be deciphered and appreciated by
man only in proportion as the order in himself is confirmed and
extended. For man’s consciousness is evidently practical; it clings to
his fate, registers, so to speak, the higher and lower temperature of
his fortunes, and, so far as it can, represents the agencies on which
those fortunes depend. When this dramatic vocation of consciousness has
not been fulfilled at all, consciousness is wholly confused; the world
it envisages seems consequently a chaos. Later, if experience has fallen
into shape, and there are settled categories and constant objects in
human discourse, the inference is drawn that the original disposition
of things was also orderly and indeed mechanically conducive to just
those feats of instinct and intelligence which have been since
accomplished. A theory of origins, of substance, and of natural laws may
thus be framed and accepted, and may receive confirmation in the further
march of events. It will be observed, however, that what is credibly
asserted about the past is not a report which the past was itself able
to make when it existed nor one it is now able, in some oracular
fashion, to formulate and to impose upon us. The report is a rational
construction based and seated in present experience; it has no cogency
for the inattentive and no existence for the ignorant. Although the
universe, then, may not have come from chaos, human experience certainly
has begun in a private and dreamful chaos of its own, out of which it
still only partially and momentarily emerges. The history of this
awakening is of course not the same as that of the environing world
ultimately discovered; it is the history, however, of that discovery
itself, of the knowledge through which alone the world can be revealed.
We may accordingly dispense ourselves from preliminary courtesies to the
real universal order, nature, the absolute, and the gods. We shall make
their acquaintance in due season and better appreciate their moral
status, if we strive merely to recall our own experience, and to retrace
the visions and reflections out of which those apparitions have grown.

[Sidenote: The discovered conditions of reason not its beginning.]

To revert to primordial feeling is an exercise in mental disintegration,
not a feat of science. We might, indeed, as in animal psychology,
retrace the situations in which instinct and sense seem first to appear
and write, as it were, a genealogy of reason based on circumstantial
evidence. Reason was born, as it has since discovered, into a world
already wonderfully organised, in which it found its precursor in what
is called life, its seat in an animal body of unusual plasticity, and
its function in rendering that body’s volatile instincts and sensations
harmonious with one another and with the outer world on which they
depend. It did not arise until the will or conscious stress, by which
any modification of living bodies’ inertia seems to be accompanied,
began to respond to represented objects, and to maintain that inertia
not absolutely by resistance but only relatively and indirectly through
labour. Reason has thus supervened at the last stage of an adaptation
which had long been carried on by irrational and even unconscious
processes. Nature preceded, with all that fixation of impulses and
conditions which gives reason its tasks and its _point-d’appui_.
Nevertheless, such a matrix or cradle for reason belongs only externally
to its life. The description of conditions involves their previous
discovery and a historian equipped with many data and many analogies of
thought. Such scientific resources are absent in those first moments of
rational living which we here wish to recall; the first chapter in
reason’s memoirs would no more entail the description of its real
environment than the first chapter in human history would include true
accounts of astronomy, psychology, and animal evolution.

[Sidenote: The flux first.]

In order to begin at the beginning we must try to fall back on
uninterpreted feeling, as the mystics aspire to do. We need not expect,
however, to find peace there, for the immediate is in flux. Pure feeling
rejoices in a logical nonentity very deceptive to dialectical minds.
They often think, when they fall back on elements necessarily
indescribable, that they have come upon true nothingness. If they are
mystics, distrusting thought and craving the largeness of indistinction,
they may embrace this alleged nothingness with joy, even if it seem
positively painful, hoping to find rest there through self-abnegation.
If on the contrary they are rationalists they may reject the immediate
with scorn and deny that it exists at all, since in their books they
cannot define it satisfactorily. Both mystics and rationalists, however,
are deceived by their mental agility; the immediate exists, even if
dialectic cannot explain it. What the rationalist calls nonentity is the
substrate and locus of all ideas, having the obstinate reality of
matter, the crushing irrationality of existence itself; and one who
attempts to override it becomes to that extent an irrelevant rhapsodist,
dealing with thin after-images of being. Nor has the mystic who sinks
into the immediate much better appreciated the situation. This immediate
is not God but chaos; its nothingness is pregnant, restless, and
brutish; it is that from which all things emerge in so far as they have
any permanence or value, so that to lapse into it again is a dull
suicide and no salvation. Peace, which is after all what the mystic
seeks, lies not in indistinction but in perfection. If he reaches it in
a measure himself, it is by the traditional discipline he still
practises, not by his heats or his languors.

The seed-bed of reason lies, then, in the immediate, but what reason
draws thence is momentum and power to rise above its source. It is the
perturbed immediate itself that finds or at least seeks its peace in
reason, through which it comes in sight of some sort of ideal
permanence. When the flux manages to form an eddy and to maintain by
breathing and nutrition what we call a life, it affords some slight
foothold and object for thought and becomes in a measure like the ark in
the desert, a moving habitation for the eternal.

[Sidenote: Life the fixation of interests.]

Life begins to have some value and continuity so soon as there is
something definite that lives and something definite to live for. The
primacy of will, as Fichte and Schopenhauer conceived it, is a mythical
way of designating this situation. Of course a will can have no being in
the absence of realities or ideas marking its direction and contrasting
the eventualities it seeks with those it flies from; and tendency, no
less than movement, needs an organised medium to make it possible, while
aspiration and fear involve an ideal world. Yet a principle of choice is
not deducible from mere ideas, and no interest is involved in the formal
relations of things. All survey needs an arbitrary starting-point; all
valuation rests on an irrational bias. The absolute flux cannot be
physically arrested; but what arrests it ideally is the fixing of some
point in it from which it can be measured and illumined. Otherwise it
could show no form and maintain no preference; it would be impossible to
approach or recede from a represented state, and to suffer or to exert
will in view of events. The irrational fate that lodges the
transcendental self in this or that body, inspires it with definite
passions, and subjects it to particular buffets from the outer
world—this is the prime condition of all observation and inference, of
all failure or success.

[Sidenote: Primary dualities.]

Those sensations in which a transition is contained need only analysis
to yield two ideal and related terms—two points in space or two
characters in feeling. Hot and cold, here and there, good and bad, now
and then, are dyads that spring into being when the flux accentuates
some term and so makes possible a discrimination of parts and directions
in its own movement. An initial attitude sustains incipient interests.
What we first discover in ourselves, before the influence we obey has
given rise to any definite idea, is the working of instincts already in
motion. Impulses to appropriate and to reject first teach us the points
of the compass, and space itself, like charity, begins at home.

[Sidenote: First gropings. Instinct the nucleus of reason.]

The guide in early sensuous education is the same that conducts the
whole Life of Reason, namely, impulse checked by experiment, and
experiment judged again by impulse. What teaches the child to
distinguish the nurse’s breast from sundry blank or disquieting
presences? What induces him to arrest that image, to mark its
associates, and to recognise them with alacrity? The discomfort of its
absence and the comfort of its possession. To that image is attached the
chief satisfaction he knows, and the force of that satisfaction
disentangles it before all other images from the feeble and fluid
continuum of his life. What first awakens in him a sense of reality is
what first is able to appease his unrest.

Had the group of feelings, now welded together in fruition, found no
instinct in him to awaken and become a signal for, the group would never
have persisted; its loose elements would have been allowed to pass by
unnoticed and would not have been recognised when they recurred.
Experience would have remained absolute inexperience, as foolishly
perpetual as the gurglings of rivers or the flickerings of sunlight in a
grove. But an instinct was actually present, so formed as to be aroused
by a determinate stimulus; and the image produced by that stimulus, when
it came, could have in consequence a meaning and an individuality. It
seemed by divine right to signify something interesting, something real,
because by natural contiguity it flowed from something pertinent and
important to life. Every accompanying sensation which shared that
privilege, or in time was engrossed in that function, would ultimately
become a part of that conceived reality, a quality of that thing.

The same primacy of impulses, irrational in themselves but expressive of
bodily functions, is observable in the behaviour of animals, and in
those dreams, obsessions, and primary passions which in the midst of
sophisticated life sometimes lay bare the obscure groundwork of human
nature. Reason’s work is there undone. We can observe sporadic growths,
disjointed fragments of rationality, springing up in a moral wilderness.
In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer,
but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts
accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man’s gayety, dispels
his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks
for a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in
the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he
knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image
pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragic
earnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be
strong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered
before it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganised by it; it
may impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is
the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normally
intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed
to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its more
or less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This
madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in
his life, the man has something to live for. The blind affinity that
like a magnet draws all the faculties around it, in so uniting them,
suffuses them with an unwonted spiritual light.

[Sidenote: Better and worse the fundamental categories.]

Here, on a small scale and on a precarious foundation, we may see
clearly illustrated and foreshadowed that Life of Reason which is simply
the unity given to all existence by a mind _in love with the good_. In
the higher reaches of human nature, as much as in the lower, rationality
depends on distinguishing the excellent; and that distinction can be
made, in the last analysis, only by an irrational impulse. As life is a
better form given to force, by which the universal flux is subdued to
create and serve a somewhat permanent interest, so reason is a better
form given to interest itself, by which it is fortified and propagated,
and ultimately, perhaps, assured of satisfaction. The substance to which
this form is given remains irrational; so that rationality, like all
excellence, is something secondary and relative, requiring a natural
being to possess or to impute it. When definite interests are recognised
and the values of things are estimated by that standard, action at the
same time veering in harmony with that estimation, then reason has been
born and a moral world has arisen.




CHAPTER II—FIRST STEPS AND FIRST FLUCTUATIONS


[Sidenote: Dreams before thoughts.]

Consciousness is a born hermit. Though subject, by divine dispensation,
to spells of fervour and apathy, like a singing bird, it is at first
quite unconcerned about its own conditions or maintenance. To acquire a
notion of such matters, or an interest in them, it would have to lose
its hearty simplicity and begin to reflect; it would have to forget the
present with its instant joys in order laboriously to conceive the
absent and the hypothetical. The body may be said to make for
self-preservation, since it has an organic equilibrium which, when not
too rudely disturbed, restores itself by growth and co-operative action;
but no such principle appears in the soul. Foolish in the beginning and
generous in the end, consciousness thinks of nothing so little as of its
own interests. It is lost in its objects; nor would it ever acquire even
an indirect concern in its future, did not love of things external
attach it to their fortunes. Attachment to ideal terms is indeed what
gives consciousness its continuity; its parts have no relevance or
relation to one another save what they acquire by depending on the same
body or representing the same objects. Even when consciousness grows
sophisticated and thinks it cares for itself, it really cares only for
its ideals; the world it pictures seems to it beautiful, and it may
incidentally prize itself also, when it has come to regard itself as a
part of that world. Initially, however, it is free even from that honest
selfishness; it looks straight out; it is interested in the movements it
observes; it swells with the represented world, suffers with its
commotion, and subsides, no less willingly, in its interludes of calm.

Natural history and psychology arrive at consciousness from the outside,
and consequently give it an artificial articulation and rationality
which are wholly alien to its essence. These sciences infer feeling from
habit or expression; so that only the expressible and practical aspects
of feeling figure in their calculation. But these aspects are really
peripheral; the core is an irresponsible, ungoverned, irrevocable dream.
Psychologists have discussed perception _ad nauseam_ and become horribly
entangled in a combined idealism and physiology; for they must perforce
approach the subject from the side of matter, since all science and all
evidence is external; nor could they ever reach consciousness at all if
they did not observe its occasions and then interpret those occasions
dramatically. At the same time, the inferred mind they subject to
examination will yield nothing but ideas, and it is a marvel how such a
dream can regard those natural objects from which the psychologist has
inferred it. Perception is in fact no primary phase of consciousness; it
is an ulterior practical function acquired by a dream which has become
symbolic of its conditions, and therefore relevant to its own destiny.
Such relevance and symbolism are indirect and slowly acquired; their
status cannot be understood unless we regard them as forms of
imagination happily grown significant. In imagination, not in
perception, lies the substance of experience, while knowledge and reason
are but its chastened and ultimate form.

[Sidenote: The mind vegetates uncontrolled save by physical forces.]

Every actual animal is somewhat dull and somewhat mad. He will at times
miss his signals and stare vacantly when he might well act, while at
other times he will run off into convulsions and raise a dust in his own
brain to no purpose. These imperfections are so human that we should
hardly recognise ourselves if we could shake them off altogether. Not to
retain any dulness would mean to possess untiring attention and
universal interests, thus realising the boast about deeming nothing
human alien to us; while to be absolutely without folly would involve
perfect self-knowledge and self-control. The intelligent man known to
history nourishes within a dullard and holds a lunatic in leash. He is
encased in a protective shell of ignorance and insensibility which keeps
him from being exhausted and confused by this too complicated world; but
that integument blinds him at the same time to many of his nearest and
highest interests. He is amused by the antics of the brute dreaming
within his breast; he gloats on his passionate reveries, an amusement
which sometimes costs him very dear. Thus the best human intelligence is
still decidedly barbarous; it fights in heavy armour and keeps a fool at
court.

[Sidenote: Internal order supervenes.]

If consciousness could ever have the function of guiding conduct better
than instinct can, in the beginning it would be most incompetent for
that office. Only the routine and equilibrium which healthy instinct
involves keep thought and will at all within the limits of sanity. The
predetermined interests we have as animals fortunately focus our
attention on practical things, pulling it back, like a ball with an
elastic cord, within the radius of pertinent matters. Instinct alone
compels us to neglect and seldom to recall the irrelevant infinity of
ideas. Philosophers have sometimes said that all ideas come from
experience; they never could have been poets and must have forgotten
that they were ever children. The great difficulty in education is to
get experience out of ideas. Shame, conscience, and reason continually
disallow and ignore what consciousness presents; and what are they but
habit and latent instinct asserting themselves and forcing us to
disregard our midsummer madness? Idiocy and lunacy are merely reversions
to a condition in which present consciousness is in the ascendant and
has escaped the control of unconscious forces. We speak of people being
“out of their senses,” when they have in fact fallen back into them; or
of those who have “lost their mind,” when they have lost merely that
habitual control over consciousness which prevented it from flaring into
all sorts of obsessions and agonies. Their bodies having become
deranged, their minds, far from correcting that derangement, instantly
share and betray it. A dream is always simmering below the conventional
surface of speech and reflection. Even in the highest reaches and
serenest meditations of science it sometimes breaks through. Even there
we are seldom constant enough to conceive a truly natural world;
somewhere passionate, fanciful, or magic elements will slip into the
scheme and baffle rational ambition.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its
environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can
set themselves no limit; they lapse only when the corporeal frame that
sustains them yields to circumstances and changes its habit. If they are
unstable at all, it is because they ordinarily correspond to strains and
conjunctions which a vigorous body overcomes, or which dissolve the body
altogether. A pain not incidental to the play of practical instincts may
easily be recurrent, and it might be perpetual if even the worst habits
were not intermittent and the most useless agitations exhausting. Some
respite will therefore ensue upon pain, but no magic cure. Madness, in
like manner, if pronounced, is precarious, but when speculative enough
to be harmless or not strong enough to be debilitating, it too may last
for ever.

An imaginative life may therefore exist parasitically in a man, hardly
touching his action or environment. There is no possibility of
exorcising these apparitions by their own power. A nightmare does not
dispel itself; it endures until the organic strain which caused it is
relaxed either by natural exhaustion or by some external influence.
Therefore human ideas are still for the most part sensuous and trivial,
shifting with the chance currents of the brain, and representing
nothing, so to speak, but personal temperature. Personal temperature,
moreover, is sometimes tropical. There are brains like a South American
jungle, as there are others like an Arabian desert, strewn with nothing
but bones. While a passionate sultriness prevails in the mind there is
no end to its luxuriance. Languages intricately articulate, flaming
mythologies, metaphysical perspectives lost in infinity, arise in
remarkable profusion. In time, however, there comes a change of climate
and the whole forest disappears.

It is easy, from the stand-point of acquired practical competence, to
deride a merely imaginative life. Derision, however, is not
interpretation, and the better method of overcoming erratic ideas is to
trace them out dialectically and see if they will not recognise their
own fatuity. The most irresponsible vision has certain principles of
order and valuation by which it estimates itself; and in these
principles the Life of Reason is already broached, however halting may
be its development. We should lead ourselves out of our dream, as the
Israelites were led out of Egypt, by the promise and eloquence of that
dream itself. Otherwise we might kill the goose that lays the golden
egg, and by proscribing imagination abolish science.

[Sidenote: Intrinsic pleasure in existence.]

[Sidenote: Pleasure a good,]

Visionary experience has a first value in its possible pleasantness. Why
any form of feeling should be delightful is not to be explained
transcendentally: a physiological law may, after the fact, render every
instance predictable; but no logical affinity between the formal quality
of an experience and the impulse to welcome it will thereby be
disclosed. We find, however, that pleasure suffuses certain states of
mind and pain others; which is another way of saying that, for no
reason, we love the first and detest the second. The polemic which
certain moralists have waged against pleasure and in favour of pain is
intelligible when we remember that their chief interest is edification,
and that ability to resist pleasure and pain alike is a valuable virtue
in a world where action and renunciation are the twin keys to happiness.
But to deny that pleasure is a good and pain an evil is a grotesque
affectation: it amounts to giving “good” and “evil” artificial
definitions and thereby reducing ethics to arbitrary verbiage. Not only
is good that adherence of the will to experience of which pleasure is
the basal example, and evil the corresponding rejection which is the
very essence of pain, but when we pass from good and evil in sense to
their highest embodiments, pleasure remains eligible and pain something
which it is a duty to prevent. A man who without necessity deprived any
person of a pleasure or imposed on him a pain, would be a contemptible
knave, and the person so injured would be the first to declare it, nor
could the highest celestial tribunal, if it was just, reverse that
sentence. For it suffices that one being, however weak, loves or abhors
anything, no matter how slightly, for that thing to acquire a
proportionate value which no chorus of contradiction ringing through all
the spheres can ever wholly abolish. An experience good or bad in itself
remains so for ever, and its inclusion in a more general order of things
can only change that totality proportionately to the ingredient
absorbed, which will infect the mass, so far as it goes, with its own
colour. The more pleasure a universe can yield, other things being
equal, the more beneficent and generous is its general nature; the more
pains its constitution involves, the darker and more malign is its total
temper. To deny this would seem impossible, yet it is done daily; for
there is nothing people will not maintain when they are slaves to
superstition; and candour and a sense of justice are, in such a case,
the first things lost.

[Sidenote: but not pursued or remembered unless it suffuses an object.]

Pleasures differ sensibly in intensity; but the intensest pleasures are
often the blindest, and it is hard to recall or estimate a feeling with
which no definite and complex object is conjoined. The first step in
making pleasure intelligible and capable of being pursued is to make it
pleasure in something. The object it suffuses acquires a value, and
gives the pleasure itself a place in rational life. The pleasure can now
be named, its variations studied in reference to changes in its object,
and its comings and goings foreseen in the order of events. The more
articulate the world that produces emotion the more controllable and
recoverable is the emotion itself. Therefore diversity and order in
ideas makes the life of pleasure richer and easier to lead. A voluminous
dumb pleasure might indeed outweigh the pleasure spread thin over a
multitude of tame perceptions, if we could only weigh the two in one
scale; but to do so is impossible, and in memory and prospect, if not in
experience, diversified pleasure must needs carry the day.

[Sidenote: Subhuman delights.]

Here we come upon a crisis in human development which shows clearly how
much the Life of Reason is a natural thing, a growth that a different
course of events might well have excluded. Laplace is reported to have
said on his death-bed that science was mere trifling and that nothing
was real but love. Love, for such a man, doubtless involved objects and
ideas: it was love of persons. The same revulsion of feeling may,
however, be carried further. Lucretius says that passion is a torment
because its pleasures are not pure, that is, because they are mingled
with longing and entangled in vexatious things. Pure pleasure would be
without ideas. Many a man has found in some moment of his life an
unutterable joy which made all the rest of it seem a farce, as if a
corpse should play it was living. Mystics habitually look beneath the
Life of Reason for the substance and infinity of happiness. In all these
revulsions, and many others, there is a certain justification, inasmuch
as systematic living is after all an experiment, as is the formation of
animal bodies, and the inorganic pulp out of which these growths have
come may very likely have had its own incommunicable values, its
absolute thrills, which we vainly try to remember and to which, in
moments of dissolution, we may half revert. Protoplasmic pleasures and
strains may be the substance of consciousness; and as matter seeks its
own level, and as the sea and the flat waste to which all dust returns
have a certain primordial life and a certain sublimity, so all passions
and ideas, when spent, may rejoin the basal note of feeling, and enlarge
their volume as they lose their form. This loss of form may not be
unwelcome, if it is the formless that, by anticipation, speaks through
what is surrendering its being. Though to acquire or impart form is
delightful in art, in thought, in generation, in government, yet a
euthanasia of finitude is also known. All is not affectation in the poet
who says, “Now more than ever seems it rich to die”; and, without any
poetry or affectation, men may love sleep, and opiates, and every
luxurious escape from humanity.

The step by which pleasure and pain are attached to ideas, so as to be
predictable and to become factors in action, is therefore by no means
irrevocable. It is a step, however, in the direction of reason; and
though reason’s path is only one of innumerable courses perhaps open to
existence, it is the only one that we are tracing here; the only one,
obviously, which human discourse is competent to trace.

[Sidenote: Animal living.]

When consciousness begins to add diversity to its intensity, its value
is no longer absolute and inexpressible. The felt variations in its tone
are attached to the observed movement of its objects; in these objects
its values are imbedded. A world loaded with dramatic values may thus
arise in imagination; terrible and delightful presences may chase one
another across the void; life will be a kind of music made by all the
senses together. Many animals probably have this form of experience;
they are not wholly submerged in a vegetative stupor; they can discern
what they love or fear. Yet all this is still a disordered apparition
that reels itself off amid sporadic movements, efforts, and agonies. Now
gorgeous, now exciting, now indifferent, the landscape brightens and
fades with the day. If a dog, while sniffing about contentedly, sees
afar off his master arriving after long absence, the change in the
animal’s feeling is not merely in the quantity of pure pleasure; a new
circle of sensations appears, with a new principle governing interest
and desire; instead of waywardness subjection, instead of freedom love.
But the poor brute asks for no reason why his master went, why he has
come again, why he should be loved, or why presently while lying at his
feet you forget him and begin to grunt and dream of the chase—all that
is an utter mystery, utterly unconsidered. Such experience has variety,
scenery, and a certain vital rhythm; its story might be told in
dithyrambic verse. It moves wholly by inspiration; every event is
providential, every act unpremeditated. Absolute freedom and absolute
helplessness have met together: you depend wholly on divine favour, yet
that unfathomable agency is not distinguishable from your own life. This
is the condition to which some forms of piety invite men to return; and
it lies in truth not far beneath the level of ordinary human
consciousness.

[Sidenote: Causes at last discerned.]

The story which such animal experience contains, however, needs only to
be better articulated in order to disclose its underlying machinery. The
figures even of that disordered drama have their exits and their
entrances; and their cues can be gradually discovered by a being capable
of fixing his attention and retaining the order of events. Thereupon a
third step is made in imaginative experience. As pleasures and pains
were formerly distributed among objects, so objects are now marshalled
into a world. _Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas_, said a poet
who stood near enough to fundamental human needs and to the great answer
which art and civilisation can make to them, to value the Life of Reason
and think it sublime. To discern causes is to turn vision into knowledge
and motion into action. It is to fix the associates of things, so that
their respective transformations are collated, and they become
significant of one another. In proportion as such understanding advances
each moment of experience becomes consequential and prophetic of the
rest. The calm places in life are filled with power and its spasms with
resource. No emotion can overwhelm the mind, for of none is the basis or
issue wholly hidden; no event can disconcert it altogether, because it
sees beyond. Means can be looked for to escape from the worst
predicament; and whereas each moment had been formerly filled with
nothing but its own adventure and surprised emotion, each now makes room
for the lesson of what went before and surmises what may be the plot of
the whole.

At the threshold of reason there is a kind of choice. Not all
impressions contribute equally to the new growth; many, in fact, which
were formerly equal in rank to the best, now grow obscure. Attention
ignores them, in its haste to arrive at what is significant of something
more. Nor are the principles of synthesis, by which the aristocratic few
establish their oligarchy, themselves unequivocal. The first principles
of logic are like the senses, few but arbitrary. They might have been
quite different and yet produced, by a now unthinkable method, a
language no less significant than the one we speak. Twenty-six letters
may suffice for a language, but they are a wretched minority among all
possible sounds. So the forms of perception and the categories of
thought, which a grammarian’s philosophy might think primordial
necessities, are no less casual than words or their syntactical order.
Why, we may ask, did these forms assert themselves here? What principles
of selection guide mental growth?

[Sidenote: Attention guided by bodily impulse.]

To give a logical ground for such a selection is evidently impossible,
since it is logic itself that is to be accounted for. A natural ground
is, in strictness, also irrelevant, since natural connections, where
thought has not reduced them to a sort of equivalence and necessity, are
mere data and juxtapositions. Yet it is not necessary to leave the
question altogether unanswered. By using our senses we may discover, not
indeed why each sense has its specific quality or exists at all, but
what are its organs and occasions. In like manner we may, by developing
the Life of Reason, come to understand its conditions. When
consciousness awakes the body has, as we long afterward discover, a
definite organisation. Without guidance from reflection bodily processes
have been going on, and most precise affinities and reactions have been
set up between its organs and the surrounding objects.

On these affinities and reactions sense and intellect are grafted. The
plants are of different nature, yet growing together they bear excellent
fruit. It is as the organs receive appropriate stimulations that
attention is riveted on definite sensations. It is as the system
exercises its natural activities that passion, will, and meditation
possess the mind. No syllogism is needed to persuade us to eat, no
prophecy of happiness to teach us to love. On the contrary, the living
organism, caught in the act, informs us how to reason and what to enjoy.
The soul adopts the body’s aims; from the body and from its instincts
she draws a first hint of the right means to those accepted purposes.
Thus reason enters into partnership with the world and begins to be
respected there; which it would never be if it were not expressive of
the same mechanical forces that are to preside over events and render
them fortunate or unfortunate for human interests. Reason is significant
in action only because it has begun by taking, so to speak, the body’s
side; that sympathetic bias enables her to distinguish events pertinent
to the chosen interests, to compare impulse with satisfaction, and, by
representing a new and circular current in the system, to preside over
the formation of better habits, habits expressing more instincts at once
and responding to more opportunities.




CHAPTER III—THE DISCOVERY OF NATURAL OBJECTS


[Sidenote: Nature man’s home.]

At first sight it might seem an idle observation that the first task of
intelligence is to represent the environing reality, a reality actually
represented in the notion, universally prevalent among men, of a cosmos
in space and time, an animated material engine called nature. In trying
to conceive nature the mind lisps its first lesson; natural phenomena
are the mother tongue of imagination no less than of science and
practical life. Men and gods are not conceivable otherwise than as
inhabitants of nature. Early experience knows no mystery which is not
somehow rooted in transformations of the natural world, and fancy can
build no hope which would not be expressible there. But we are grown so
accustomed to this ancient apparition that we may be no longer aware how
difficult was the task of conjuring it up. We may even have forgotten
the possibility that such a vision should never have arisen at all. A
brief excursion into that much abused subject, the psychology of
perception, may here serve to remind us of the great work which the
budding intellect must long ago have accomplished unawares.

[Sidenote: Difficulties in conceiving nature.]

Consider how the shocks out of which the notion of material things is to
be built first strike home into the soul. Eye and hand, if we may
neglect the other senses, transmit their successive impressions, all
varying with the position of outer objects and with the other material
conditions. A chaos of multitudinous impressions rains in from all sides
at all hours. Nor have the external or cognitive senses an original
primacy. The taste, the smell, the alarming sounds of things are
continually distracting attention. There are infinite reverberations in
memory of all former impressions, together with fresh fancies created in
the brain, things at first in no wise subordinated to external objects.
All these incongruous elements are mingled like a witches’ brew. And
more: there are indications that inner sensations, such as those of
digestion, have an overpowering influence on the primitive mind, which
has not learned to articulate or distinguish permanent needs. So that to
the whirl of outer sensations we must add, to reach some notion of what
consciousness may contain before the advent of reason, interruptions and
lethargies caused by wholly blind internal feelings; trances such as
fall even on comparatively articulate minds in rage, lust, or madness.
Against all these bewildering forces the new-born reason has to
struggle; and we need not wonder that the costly experiments and
disillusions of the past have not yet produced a complete
enlightenment.

[Sidenote: Transcendental qualms.]

The onslaught made in the last century by the transcendental philosophy
upon empirical traditions is familiar to everybody: it seemed a
pertinent attack, yet in the end proved quite trifling and unavailing.
Thought, we are told rightly enough, cannot be accounted for by
enumerating its conditions. A number of detached sensations, being each
its own little world, cannot add themselves together nor conjoin
themselves in the void. Again, experiences having an alleged common
cause would not have, merely for that reason, a common object. Nor would
a series of successive perceptions, no matter how quick, logically
involve a sense of time nor a notion of succession. Yet, in point of
fact, when such a succession occurs and a living brain is there to
acquire some structural modification by virtue of its own passing
states, a memory of that succession and its terms may often supervene.
It is quite true also that the simultaneous presence or association of
images belonging to different senses does not carry with it by intrinsic
necessity any fusion of such images nor any notion of an object having
them for its qualities. Yet, in point of fact, such a group of
sensations does often merge into a complex image; instead of the
elements originally perceptible in isolation, there arises a familiar
term, a sort of personal presence. To this felt presence, certain
instinctive reactions are attached, and the sensations that may be
involved in that apparition, when each for any reason becomes emphatic,
are referred to it as its qualities or its effects.

Such complications of course involve the gift of memory, with capacity
to survey at once vestiges of many perceptions, to feel their
implication and absorption in the present object, and to be carried, by
this sense of relation, to the thought that those perceptions have a
representative function. And this is a great step. It manifests the
mind’s powers. It illustrates those transformations of consciousness the
principle of which, when abstracted, we call intelligence. We must
accordingly proceed with caution, for we are digging at the very roots
of reason.

[Sidenote: Thought an aspect of life and transitive]

The chief perplexity, however, which besets this subject and makes
discussions of it so often end in a cloud, is quite artificial. Thought
is not a mechanical calculus, where the elements and the method exhaust
the fact. Thought is a form of life, and should be conceived on the
analogy of nutrition, generation, and art. Reason, as Hume said with
profound truth, is an unintelligible instinct. It could not be otherwise
if reason is to remain something transitive and existential; for
transition is unintelligible, and yet is the deepest characteristic of
existence. Philosophers, however, having perceived that the function of
thought is to fix static terms and reveal eternal relations, have
inadvertently transferred to the living act what is true only of its
ideal object; and they have expected to find in the process, treated
psychologically, that luminous deductive clearness which belongs to the
ideal world it tends to reveal. The intelligible, however, lies at the
periphery of experience, the surd at its core; and intelligence is but
one centrifugal ray darting from the slime to the stars. Thought must
execute a metamorphosis; and while this is of course mysterious, it is
one of those familiar mysteries, like motion and will, which are more
natural than dialectical lucidity itself; for dialectic grows cogent by
fulfilling intent, but intent or meaning is itself vital and
inexplicable.

[Sidenote: Perception cumulative and synthetic]

The process of counting is perhaps as simple an instance as can be found
of a mental operation on sensible data. The clock, let us say, strikes
two: if the sensorium were perfectly elastic and after receiving the
first blow reverted exactly to its previous state, retaining absolutely
no trace of that momentary oscillation and no altered habit, then it is
certain that a sense for number or a faculty of counting could never
arise. The second stroke would be responded to with the same reaction
which had met the first. There would be no summation of effects, no
complication. However numerous the successive impressions might come to
be, each would remain fresh and pure, the last being identical in
character with the first. One, one, one, would be the monotonous
response for ever. Just so generations of ephemeral insects that
succeeded one another without transmitting experience might repeat the
same round of impressions—an everlasting progression without a shadow
of progress. Such, too, is the idiot’s life: his liquid brain transmits
every impulse without resistance and retains the record of no
impression.

Intelligence is accordingly conditioned by a modification of both
structure and consciousness by dint of past events. To be aware that a
second stroke is not itself the first, I must retain something of the
old sensation. The first must reverberate still in my ears when the
second arrives, so that this second, coming into a consciousness still
filled by the first, is a different experience from the first, which
fell into a mind perfectly empty and unprepared. Now the newcomer finds
in the subsisting One a sponsor to christen it by the name of Two. The
first stroke was a simple 1. The second is not simply another 1, a mere
iteration of the first. It is 1^{1}, where the coefficient represents
the reverberating first stroke, still persisting in the mind, and
forming a background and perspective against which the new stroke may be
distinguished. The meaning of “two,” then, is “this after that” or “this
again,” where we have a simultaneous sense of two things which have been
separately perceived but are identified as similar in their nature.
Repetition must cease to be pure repetition and become cumulative before
it can give rise to the consciousness of repetition.

The first condition of counting, then, is that the sensorium should
retain something of the first impression while it receives the second,
or (to state the corresponding mental fact) that the second sensation
should be felt together with a survival of the first from which it is
distinguished in point of existence and with which it is identified in
point of character.

[Sidenote: No identical agent needed.]

Now, to secure this, it is not enough that the sensorium should be
materially continuous, or that a “spiritual substance” or a
“transcendental ego” should persist in time to receive the second
sensation after having received and registered the first. A perfectly
elastic sensorium, a wholly unchanging soul, or a quite absolute ego
might remain perfectly identical with itself through various experiences
without collating them. It would then remain, in fact, more truly and
literally identical than if it were modified somewhat by those
successive shocks. Yet a sensorium or a spirit thus unchanged would be
incapable of memory, unfit to connect a past perception with one present
or to become aware of their relation. It is not identity in the
substance impressed, but growing complication in the phenomenon
presented, that makes possible a sense of diversity and relation between
things. The identity of substance or spirit, if it were absolute, would
indeed prevent comparison, because it would exclude modifications, and
it is the survival of past modifications within the present that makes
comparisons possible. We may impress any number of forms successively on
the same water, and the identity of the substance will not help those
forms to survive and accumulate their effects. But if we have a surface
that retains our successive stampings we may change the substance from
wax to plaster and from plaster to bronze, and the effects of our labour
will survive and be superimposed upon one another. It is the actual
plastic form in both mind and body, not any unchanging substance or
agent, that is efficacious in perpetuating thought and gathering
experience.

[Sidenote: Example of the sun.]

Were not Nature and all her parts such models of patience and
pertinacity, they never would have succeeded in impressing their
existence on something so volatile and irresponsible as thought is. A
sensation needs to be violent, like the sun’s blinding light, to arrest
attention, and keep it taut, as it were, long enough for the system to
acquire a respectful attitude, and grow predisposed to resume it. A
repetition of that sensation will thereafter meet with a prepared
response which we call recognition; the concomitants of the old
experience will form themselves afresh about the new one and by their
convergence give it a sort of welcome and interpretation. The movement,
for instance, by which the face was raised toward the heavens was
perhaps one element which added to the first sensation, brightness, a
concomitant sensation, height; the brightness was not bright merely,
but high. Now when the brightness reappears the face will more quickly
be lifted up; the place where the brightness shone will be looked for;
the brightness will have acquired a claim to be placed somewhere. The
heat which at the same moment may have burned the forehead will also be
expected and, when felt, projected into the brightness, which will now
be hot as well as high. So with whatever other sensations time may
associate with this group. They will all adhere to the original
impression, enriching it with an individuality which will render it
before long a familiar complex in experience, and one easy to recognise
and to complete in idea.

[Sidenote: His primitive divinity.]

In the case of so vivid a thing as the sun’s brightness many other
sensations beside those out of which science draws the qualities
attributed to that heavenly body adhere in the primitive mind to the
phenomenon. Before he is a substance the sun is a god. He is beneficent
and necessary no less than bright and high; he rises upon all happy
opportunities and sets upon all terrors. He is divine, since all life
and fruitfulness hang upon his miraculous revolutions. His coming and
going are life and death to the world. As the sensations of light and
heat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so
the feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul
are projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than to
anything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally
attributed. The emotions felt in his presence being the ultimate issue
and term of his effect in us, the counterpart or shadow of those
emotions is regarded as the first and deepest factor in his causality.
It is his divine life, more than aught else, that underlies his
apparitions and explains the influences which he propagates. The
substance or independent existence attributed to objects is therefore by
no means only or primarily a physical notion. What is conceived to
support the physical qualities is a pseudo-psychic or vital force. It is
a moral and living object that we construct, building it up out of all
the materials, emotional, intellectual, and sensuous, which lie at hand
in our consciousness to be synthesised into the hybrid reality which we
are to fancy confronting us. To discriminate and redistribute those
miscellaneous physical and psychical elements, and to divorce the god
from the material sun, is a much later problem, arising at a different
and more reflective stage in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: Causes and essences contrasted.]

When reflection, turning to the comprehension of a chaotic experience,
busies itself about recurrences, when it seeks to normalise in some way
things coming and going, and to straighten out the causes of events,
that reflection is inevitably turned toward something dynamic and
independent, and can have no successful issue except in mechanical
science. When on the other hand reflection stops to challenge and
question the fleeting object, not so much to prepare for its possible
return as to conceive its present nature, this reflection is turned no
less unmistakably in the direction of ideas, and will terminate in logic
or the morphology of being. We attribute independence to things in order
to normalise their recurrence. We attribute essences to them in order to
normalise their manifestations or constitution. Independence will
ultimately turn out to be an assumed constancy in material processes,
essence an assumed constancy in ideal meanings or points of reference in
discourse. The one marks the systematic distribution of objects, the
other their settled character.

[Sidenote: Voracity of intellect.]

We talk of recurrent perceptions, but materially considered no
perception recurs. Each recurrence is one of a finite series and holds
for ever its place and number in that series. Yet human attention, while
it can survey several simultaneous impressions and find them similar,
cannot keep them distinct if they grow too numerous. The mind has a
native bias and inveterate preference for form and identification. Water
does not run down hill more persistently than attention turns experience
into constant terms. The several repetitions of one essence given in
consciousness will tend at once to be neglected, and only the essence
itself—the character shared by those sundry perceptions—will stand and
become a term in mental discourse. After a few strokes of the clock,
the reiterated impressions merge and cover one another; we lose count
and perceive the quality and rhythm but not the number of the sounds. If
this is true of so abstract and mathematical a perception as is
counting, how emphatically true must it be of continuous and infinitely
varied perceptions flowing in from the whole spatial world. Glimpses of
the environment follow one another in quick succession, like a regiment
of soldiers in uniform; only now and then does the stream take a new
turn, catch a new ray of sunlight, or arrest our attention at some
break.

The senses in their natural play revert constantly to familiar objects,
gaining impressions which differ but slightly from one another. These
slight differences are submerged in apperception, so that sensation
comes to be not so much an addition of new items to consciousness as a
reburnishing there of some imbedded device. Its character and relations
are only slightly modified at each fresh rejuvenation. To catch the
passing phenomenon in all its novelty and idiosyncrasy is a work of
artifice and curiosity. Such an exercise does violence to intellectual
instinct and involves an æsthetic power of diving bodily into the stream
of sensation, having thrown overboard all rational ballast and escaped
at once the inertia and the momentum of practical life. Normally every
datum of sense is at once devoured by a hungry intellect and digested
for the sake of its vital juices. The result is that what ordinarily
remains in memory is no representative of particular moments or
shocks—though sensation, as in dreams, may be incidentally recreated
from within—but rather a logical possession, a sense of acquaintance
with a certain field of reality, in a word, a consciousness of
_knowledge_.

[Sidenote: Can the transcendent be known?]

But what, we may ask, is this reality, which we boast to know? May not
the sceptic justly contend that nothing is so unknown and indeed
unknowable as this pretended object of knowledge? The sensations which
reason treats so cavalierly were at least something actual while they
lasted and made good their momentary claim to our interest; but what is
this new ideal figment, unseizable yet ever present, invisible but
indispensable, unknowable yet alone interesting or important? Strange
that the only possible object or theme of our knowledge should be
something we cannot know.

[Sidenote: Can the immediate be meant?]

An answer these doubts will perhaps appear if we ask ourselves what sort
of contact with reality would satisfy us, and in what terms we expect or
desire to possess the subject-matter of our thoughts. Is it simply
corroboration that we look for? Is it a verification of truth in sense?
It would be unreasonable, in that case, after all the evidence we demand
has been gathered, to complain that the ideal term thus concurrently
suggested, the super-sensible substance, reality, or independent object,
does not itself descend into the arena of immediate sensuous
presentation. Knowledge is not eating, and we cannot expect to devour
and possess _what we mean_. Knowledge is recognition of something
absent; it is a salutation, not an embrace. It is an advance on
sensation precisely because it is representative. The terms or goals of
thought have for their function to subtend long tracts of sensuous
experience, to be ideal links between fact and fact, invisible wires
behind the scenes, threads along which inference may run in making
phenomena intelligible and controllable. An idea that should become an
image would cease to be ideal; a principle that is to remain a principle
can never become a fact. A God that you could see with the eyes of the
body, a heaven you might climb into by a ladder planted at Bethel, would
be parts of this created and interpretable world, not terms in its
interpretation nor objects in a spiritual sphere. Now external objects
are thought to be principles and sources of experience; they are
accordingly conceived realities on an ideal plane. We may look for all
the evidence we choose before we declare our inference to be warranted;
but we must not ask for something more than evidence, nor expect to know
realities without inferring them anew. They are revealed only to
understanding. We cannot cease to think and still continue to know.

[Sidenote: Is thought a bridge from sensation to sensation?]

It may be said, however, that principles and external objects are
interesting only because they symbolise further sensations, that
thought is an expedient of finite minds, and that representation is a
ghostly process which we crave to materialise into bodily possession. We
may grow sick of inferring truth and long rather to become reality.
Intelligence is after all no compulsory possession; and while some of us
would gladly have more of it, others find that they already have too
much. The tension of thought distresses them and to represent what they
cannot and would not be is not a natural function of their spirit. To
such minds experience that should merely corroborate ideas would prolong
dissatisfaction. The ideas must be realised; they must pass into
immediacy. If reality (a word employed generally in a eulogistic sense)
is to mean this desired immediacy, no ideal of thought can be real. All
intelligible objects and the whole universe of mental discourse would
then be an unreal and conventional structure, impinging ultimately on
sense from which it would derive its sole validity.

There would be no need of quarrelling with such a philosophy, were not
its use of words rather misleading. Call experience in its existential
and immediate aspect, if you will, the sole reality; that will not
prevent reality from having an ideal dimension. The intellectual world
will continue to give beauty, meaning, and scope to those bubbles of
consciousness on which it is painted. Reality would not be, in that
case, what thought aspires to reach. Consciousness is the least ideal
of things when reason is taken out of it. Reality would then need
thought to give it all those human values of which, in its substance, it
would have been wholly deprived; and the ideal would still be what lent
music to throbs and significance to being.

[Sidenote: Mens naturaliter platonica.]

The equivocation favoured by such language at once begins to appear. Is
not thought with all its products a part of experience? Must not sense,
if it be the only reality, be sentient sometimes of the ideal? What the
site is to a city that is immediate experience to the universe of
discourse. The latter is all held materially within the limits defined
by the former; but if immediate experience be the seat of the moral
world, the moral world is the only interesting possession of immediate
experience. When a waste is built on, however, it is a violent paradox
to call it still a waste; and an immediate experience that represents
the rest of sentience, with all manner of ideal harmonies read into the
whole in the act of representing it, is an immediate experience raised
to its highest power: it is the Life of Reason. In vain, then, will a
philosophy of intellectual abstention limit so Platonic a term as
reality to the immediate aspect of existence, when it is the ideal
aspect that endows existence with character and value, together with
representative scope and a certain lien upon eternity.

More legitimate, therefore, would be the assertion that knowledge
reaches reality when it touches its ideal goal. Reality is known when,
as in mathematics, a stable and unequivocal object is developed by
thinking. The locus or material embodiment of such a reality is no
longer in view; these questions seem to the logician irrelevant. If
necessary ideas find no illustration in sense, he deems the fact an
argument against the importance and validity of sensation, not in the
least a disproof of his ideal knowledge. If no site be found on earth
for the Platonic city, its constitution is none the less recorded and
enshrined in heaven; nor is that the only true ideal that has not where
to lay its head. What in the sensualistic or mystical system was called
reality will now be termed appearance, and what there figured as an
imaginary construction borne by the conscious moment will now appear to
be a prototype for all existence and an eternal standard for its
estimation.

It is this rationalistic or Platonic system (little as most men may
suspect the fact) that finds a first expression in ordinary perception.
When you distinguish your sensations from their cause and laugh at the
idealist (as this kind of sceptic is called) who says that chairs and
tables exist only in your mind, you are treating a figment of reason as
a deeper and truer thing than the moments of life whose blind experience
that reason has come to illumine. What you call the evidence of sense is
pure confidence in reason. You will not be so idiotic as to make no
inferences from your sensations; you will not pin your faith so
unimaginatively on momentary appearance as to deny that the world exists
when you stop thinking about it. You feel that your intellect has wider
scope and has discovered many a thing that goes on behind the scenes,
many a secret that would escape a stupid and gaping observation. It is
the fool that looks to look and stops at the barely visible: you not
only look but _see_; for you understand.

[Sidenote: Identity and independence predicated of things.]

Now the practical burden of such understanding, if you take the trouble
to analyse it, will turn out to be what the sceptic says it is:
assurance of eventual sensations. But as these sensations, in memory and
expectation, are numerous and indefinitely variable, you are not able to
hold them clearly before the mind; indeed, the realisation of all the
potentialities which you vaguely feel to lie in the future is a task
absolutely beyond imagination. Yet your present impressions, dependent
as they are on your chance attitude and disposition and on a thousand
trivial accidents, are far from representing adequately all that might
be discovered or that is actually known about the object before you.
This object, then, to your apprehension, is not identical with any of
the sensations that reveal it, nor is it exhausted by all these
sensations when they are added together; yet it contains nothing
assignable but what they might conceivably reveal. As it lies in your
fancy, then, this object, the reality, is a complex and elusive entity,
the sum at once and the residuum of all particular impressions which,
underlying the present one, have bequeathed to it their surviving
linkage in discourse and consequently endowed it with a large part of
its present character. With this hybrid object, sensuous in its
materials and ideal in its locus, each particular glimpse is compared,
and is recognised to be but a glimpse, an aspect which the object
presents to a particular observer. Here are two identifications. In the
first place various sensations and felt relations, which cannot be kept
distinct in the mind, fall together into one term of discourse,
represented by a sign, a word, or a more or less complete sensuous
image. In the second place the new perception is referred to that ideal
entity of which it is now called a manifestation and effect.

Such are the primary relations of reality and appearance. A reality is a
term of discourse based on a psychic complex of memories, associations,
and expectations, but constituted in its ideal independence by the
assertive energy of thought. An appearance is a passing sensation,
recognised as belonging to that group of which the object itself is the
ideal representative, and accordingly regarded as a manifestation of
that object.

Thus the notion of an independent and permanent world is an ideal term
used to mark and as it were to justify the cohesion in space and the
recurrence in time of recognisable groups of sensations. This coherence
and recurrence force the intellect, if it would master experience at all
or understand anything, to frame the idea of such a reality. If we wish
to defend the use of such an idea and prove to ourselves its necessity,
all we need do is to point to that coherence and recurrence in external
phenomena. That brave effort and flight of intelligence which in the
beginning raised man to the conception of reality, enabling him to
discount and interpret appearance, will, if we retain our trust in
reason, raise us continually anew to that same idea, by a no less
spontaneous and victorious movement of thought.




CHAPTER IV—ON SOME CRITICS OF THIS DISCOVERY


[Sidenote: Psychology as a solvent.]

The English psychologists who first disintegrated the idea of substance,
and whose traces we have in general followed in the above account, did
not study the question wholly for its own sake or in the spirit of a
science that aims at nothing but a historical analysis of mind. They had
a more or less malicious purpose behind their psychology. They thought
that if they could once show how metaphysical ideas are made they would
discredit those ideas and banish them for ever from the world. If they
retained confidence in any notion—as Hobbes in body, Locke in matter
and in God, Berkeley in spirits, and Kant, the inheritor of this
malicious psychology, in the thing-in-itself and in heaven—it was
merely by inadvertence or want of courage. The principle of their
reasoning, where they chose to apply it, was always this, that ideas
whose materials could all be accounted for in consciousness and referred
to sense or to the operations of mind were thereby exhausted and
deprived of further validity. Only the unaccountable, or rather the
uncriticised, could be true. Consequently the advance of psychology
meant, in this school, the retreat of reason; for as one notion after
another was clarified and reduced to its elements it was _ipso facto_
deprived of its function.

So far were these philosophers from conceiving that validity and truth
are ideal relations, accruing to ideas by virtue of dialectic and use,
that while on the one hand they pointed out vital affinities and
pragmatic sanctions in the mind’s economy they confessed on the other
that the outcome of their philosophy was sceptical; for no idea could be
found in the mind which was not a phenomenon there, and no inference
could be drawn from these phenomena not based on some inherent “tendency
to feign.” The analysis which was in truth legitimising and purifying
knowledge seemed to them absolutely to blast it, and the closer they
came to the bed-rock of experience the more incapable they felt of
building up anything upon it. Self-knowledge meant, they fancied,
self-detection; the representative value of thought decreased as thought
grew in scope and elaboration. It became impossible to be at once quite
serious and quite intelligent; for to use reason was to indulge in
subjective fiction, while conscientiously to abstain from using it was
to sink back upon inarticulate and brutish instinct.

In Hume this sophistication was frankly avowed. Philosophy discredited
itself; but a man of parts, who loved intellectual games even better
than backgammon, might take a hand with the wits and historians of his
day, until the clock struck twelve and the party was over. Even in Kant,
though the mood was more cramped and earnest, the mystical
sophistication was quite the same. Kant, too, imagined that the bottom
had been knocked out of the world; that in comparison with some
unutterable sort of truth empirical truth was falsehood, and that
validity for all possible experience was weak validity, in comparison
with validity of some other and unmentionable sort. Since space and time
could not repel the accusation of being the necessary forms of
perception, space and time were not to be much thought of; and when the
sad truth was disclosed that causality and the categories were
instruments by which the idea of nature had to be constructed, if such
an idea was to exist at all, then nature and causality shrivelled up and
were dishonoured together; so that, the soul’s occupation being gone,
she must needs appeal to some mysterious oracle, some abstract and
irrelevant omen within the breast, and muster up all the stern courage
of an accepted despair to carry her through this world of mathematical
illusion into some green and infantile paradise beyond.

[Sidenote: Misconceived rôle of intelligence.]

What idea, we may well ask ourselves, did these modern philosophers
entertain regarding the pretensions of ancient and mediæval metaphysics?
What understanding had they of the spirit in which the natural organs of
reason had been exercised and developed in those schools? Frankly, very
little; for they accepted from ancient philosophy and from common-sense
the distinction between reality and appearance, but they forgot the
function of that distinction and dislocated its meaning, which was
nothing but to translate the chaos of perception into the regular play
of stable natures and objects congenial to discursive thought and valid
in the art of living. Philosophy had been the natural science of
perception raised to the reflective plane, the objects maintaining
themselves on this higher plane being styled realities, and those still
floundering below it being called appearances or mere ideas. The
function of envisaging reality, ever since Parmenides and Heraclitus,
had been universally attributed to the intellect. When the moderns,
therefore, proved anew that it was the mind that framed that idea, and
that what we call reality, substance, nature, or God, can be reached
only by an operation of reason, they made no very novel or damaging
discovery.

Of course, it is possible to disregard the suggestions of reason in any
particular case and it is quite possible to believe, for instance, that
the hypothesis of an external material world is an erroneous one. But
that this hypothesis is erroneous does not follow from the fact that it
is a hypothesis. To discard it on that ground would be to discard all
reasoned knowledge and to deny altogether the validity of thought. If
intelligence is assumed to be an organ of cognition and a vehicle for
truth, a given hypothesis about the causes of perception can only be
discarded when a better hypothesis on the same subject has been
supplied. To be better such a hypothesis would have to meet the
multiplicity of phenomena and their mutations with a more intelligible
scheme of comprehension and a more useful instrument of control.

[Sidenote: All criticism dogmatic.]

Scepticism is always possible while it is partial. It will remain the
privilege and resource of a free mind that has elasticity enough to
disintegrate its own formations and to approach its experience from a
variety of sides and with more than a single method. But the method
chosen must be coherent in itself and the point of view assumed must be
adhered to during that survey; so that whatever reconstruction the novel
view may produce in science will be science still, and will involve
assumptions and dogmas which must challenge comparison with the dogmas
and assumptions they would supplant. People speak of dogmatism as if it
were a method to be altogether outgrown and something for which some
non-assertive philosophy could furnish a substitute. But dogmatism is
merely a matter of degree. Some thinkers and some systems retreat
further than others into the stratum beneath current conventions and
make us more conscious of the complex machinery which, working silently
in the soul, makes possible all the rapid and facile operations of
reason. The deeper this retrospective glance the less dogmatic the
philosophy. A primordial constitution or tendency, however, must always
remain, having structure and involving a definite life; for if we
thought to reach some wholly vacant and indeterminate point of origin,
we should have reached something wholly impotent and indifferent, a
blank pregnant with nothing that we wished to explain or that actual
experience presented. When, starting with the inevitable preformation
and constitutional bias, we sought to build up a simpler and nobler
edifice of thought, to be a palace and fortress rather than a prison for
experience, our critical philosophy would still be dogmatic, since it
would be built upon inexplicable but actual data by a process of
inference underived but inevitable.

[Sidenote: A choice of hypotheses.]

No doubt Aristotle and the scholastics were often uncritical. They were
too intent on building up and buttressing their system on the broad
human or religious foundations which they had chosen for it. They nursed
the comfortable conviction that whatever their thought contained was
eternal and objective truth, a copy of the divine intellect or of the
world’s intelligible structure. A sceptic may easily deride that
confidence of theirs; their system may have been their system and
nothing more. But the way to proceed if we wish to turn our shrewd
suspicions and our sense of insecurity into an articulate conviction and
to prove that they erred, is to build another system, a more modest one,
perhaps, which will grow more spontaneously and inevitably in the mind
out of the data of experience. Obviously the rival and critical theory
will make the same tacit claim as the other to absolute validity. If all
our ideas and perceptions conspire to reinforce the new hypothesis, this
will become inevitable and necessary to us. We shall then condemn the
other hypothesis, not indeed for having been a hypothesis, which is the
common fate of all rational and interpretative thought, but for having
been a hypothesis artificial, misleading, and false; one not following
necessarily nor intelligibly out of the facts, nor leading to a
satisfactory reaction upon them, either in contemplation or in practice.

[Sidenote: Critics disguised enthusiasts.]

Now this is in truth exactly the conviction which those malicious
psychologists secretly harboured. Their critical scruples and
transcendental qualms covered a robust rebellion against being fooled by
authority. They rose to abate abuses among which, as Hobbes said, “the
frequency of insignificant speech is one.” Their psychology was not
merely a cathartic, but a gospel. Their young criticism was sent into
the world to make straight the path of a new positivism, as now, in its
old age, it is invoked to keep open the door to superstition. Some of
those reformers, like Hobbes and Locke, had at heart the interests of a
physical and political mechanism, which they wished to substitute for
the cumbrous and irritating constraints of tradition. Their criticism
stopped at the frontiers of their practical discontent; they did not
care to ask how the belief in matter, space, motion, God, or whatever
else still retained their allegiance, could withstand the kind of
psychology which, as they conceived, had done away with individual
essences and nominal powers. Berkeley, whose interests lay in a
different quarter, used the same critical method in support of a
different dogmatism; armed with the traditional pietistic theory of
Providence he undertook with a light heart to demolish the whole edifice
which reason and science had built upon spatial perception. He wished
the lay intellect to revert to a pious idiocy in the presence of Nature,
lest consideration of her history and laws should breed “mathematical
atheists”; and the outer world being thus reduced to a sensuous dream
and to the blur of immediate feeling, intelligence and practical faith
would be more unremittingly employed upon Christian mythology. Men would
be bound to it by a necessary allegiance, there being no longer any
rival object left for serious or intelligent consideration.

The psychological analysis on which these partial or total negations
were founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices to
which it had recourse in distinguishing simple and complex ideas,
principles of association and inference, were nothing but premonitions
of what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mental
process to its organic and external supports; for experience has no
other divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguishing its
objects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom
explicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an
introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them;
as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between
impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on
relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation
respectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain.

[Sidenote: Hume’s gratuitous scepticism.]

Hume it was who carried this psychological analysis to its goal, giving
it greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the further
advantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own to
substitute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. His
curiosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laid
bare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singular
lucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice
of a psychology intended as a weapon against superstition here recoils
on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce
five-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not ready
to propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in
practice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An
ulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, for
though inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil of
that mythical philosophy which attributed the value of things to their
origin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolic
way, erected the highest good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in
spite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume could
not discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he had
destroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one;
his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who
asked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychology
and criticism seemed accordingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was
left free to choose between the distractions of backgammon and “sitting
down in a forlorn scepticism.”

In his first youth, while disintegrating reflection still overpowered
the active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of
genuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normal
habits of inference which he had so acutely analysed asserted themselves
in his own person and he yielded to the “tendency to feign” so far at
least as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments
he received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of
courtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite
conventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence of
our estates, our neighbours’ independent existence, or even the
justification of a good bishop’s faith and income. Against
metaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its
savour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of
the world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption of
all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited
his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe
into more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a
voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the
rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he
laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to
which his interests happened to attach.

[Sidenote: Kant’s substitute for knowledge.]

Kant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon
the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to
make way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocation
involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which
German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver
between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To
substitute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect
humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a
faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of
methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between
endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over
us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our
thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and
products of an immortal vitality in God and in nature, which fosters and
illumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms.

Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _the
same natural ideas_ which had previously been taken for absolute
knowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise,
and his analysis free from venom and _arrière-pensée_. Man, because of
his finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a
traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, the
hidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what
else shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his
perception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his
understanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for
faith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a
practical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the
governance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using his
only possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of
understanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already,
to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant’s criticism amounted
simply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and
hypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly
acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing
but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism
of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with
self. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and passion to
reason’s support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in
the intellect, a faith naturally expressing man’s practical and ideal
nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.

[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason.]

Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was not
absent from Kant’s system in its critical phase and in its application
to science, there lurked in his substitution of faith for knowledge
another and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant,
because “subjective,” the whole structure of human intelligence, with
all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and
to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic
religious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, and
far more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; and
it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that
they remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success
or of happiness. The “categorical imperative” was a shadow of the ten
commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets
of the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably
imbedded in the old man’s mind, he regarded as the evidences of an
inward but supernatural revelation.

[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction.]

Only the quaint severity of Kant’s education and character can make
intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural
postulates. All he asserted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a
God to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been
Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to
other cherished imaginations: there is no superstition which it might
not justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superstition
the sanction of their morality. For the “practical” proofs of freedom,
immortality, and Providence—of which all evidence in reason or
experience had previously been denied—exceed in perfunctory sophistry
anything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth
the guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a
figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock
allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world
we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our
nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind
was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external
and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able
to do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our
senses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through
many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion,
these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all
knowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone
possesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in
contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of
knowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and
not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the
intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such
inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is
first instituted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as
subjective and of merely empirical validity.

“Merely empirical” is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is
less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is
something given only in present fancy. The gods of genuine religion, for
instance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see
God. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral
law, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance
and true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that
it expresses interests and aspirations in which man’s fate in time and
space, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, is
concerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this
is a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personal
superstition, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His
notions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, and
did not pass to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was
simply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice,
authorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great
clearing which the Critique was supposed to have made.

It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that
as the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychological
machinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with the
beginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstract
materialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of analytic criticism, a
popular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development;
in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, a
withdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception
of the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out,
a flight from the natural world altogether.

[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture.]

The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in
arrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich
architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation,
comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of
intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The
dynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas,
if not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in its
principle. It was as great an enlargement of Hume’s work as Hume’s had
been of Locke’s or Locke’s of Hobbes’s. And the very fact that the
metaphysical residuum practically disappeared—for the weak
reconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as
irrelevant—renders the work essentially valid, essentially a
description of something real. It is therefore a great source of
instruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems of
mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a
confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely
incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can
at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions
absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the
transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that
between the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability.
Kant’s assumptions and his conclusions, his superstitions and his
wisdom, alternate without neutralising each other.

[Sidenote: Incoherences.]

That experience is a product of two factors is an assumption made by
Kant. It rests on a psychological analogy, namely on the fact that
organ and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is
the substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought,
is Kant’s conclusion, based on intrinsic logical analysis. Here
experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without
conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable
objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience
and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism
which—if we have it at all—must be fundamental, he made derivative;
and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute.
Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical
or malicious.

Ask what can be meant by “conditions of experience” and Kant’s
bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is
a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural
connections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are
the characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience;
in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be
used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in
general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used,
as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its
conditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of
stimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most
pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the
condition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last
sense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fashion that
only by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge
of an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a
vista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given
thought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are the
principles of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires this
perspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system of
successive or collateral existences.

The circumstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term
reserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark
flying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to shift his
point of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense
of natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an
antecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logical
energy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of
pregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience but
constitutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould
of experience came to figure, in Kant’s mythology, as machinery behind
the scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner in
a marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus
suggest itself—favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actual
psychological situation—that all experience, in every sense of the
word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions
of experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of
experience in the lowest.

[Sidenote: Nature the true system of conditions.]

It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no
natural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; for
every real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience,
and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest
and non-exhaustive experience—that is, any particular sensation,
thought, or life—which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to
natural conditions. Saint Lawrence’s experience of being roasted, for
instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the
court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other
parts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned,
fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping
and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or
supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions;
the whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, is
the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of
this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other
objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe’s casual sensation of light is
a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother’s. The true
conditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find
by experience, sensations of light do not appear.

Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have
felt that the phrase “subjective conditions” is a contradiction in
terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and
imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are
_ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the “objective” world.
All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective
and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together
the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of
an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially
observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically;
and common-sense is right as against Kant’s subjectivism in regarding
nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.
This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given
existence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially
dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not
“conditions” inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence,
potentialities and powers? Kant’s fabled conditions also are inferred;
but they are inferred illegitimately since the “subjective” ones are
dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the
thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function.
Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions
are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary
position of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes,
objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of
experience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to
experience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form
was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to
impress that form on whatever happened to have it.

All this was opposed to Kant’s own discovery and to his critical
doctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those
conditions which experience assigns to itself as it develops and
progresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order of
knowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay
in not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise
and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having
one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became
mythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition
experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone
could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fictitious.
The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experience
which the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and
perceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It
is, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts,
hypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point
we test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thence
made by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of
existence.

[Sidenote: Artificial pathos in subjectivism.]

The ambiguity in Kant’s doctrine makes him a confusing representative of
that criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer.
When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognised
independent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life,
we need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a true
one. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis
indispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a false
hypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant’s
answer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery
in the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes
for perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But
this inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there
was a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not
intellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be
obtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised
Kant’s system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the
justification for the use of such categories as that of cause and
substance (categories by which the idea of reality is constituted) was
invalidated by the counter-assertion that empirical reality was not true
reality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merely
an idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude
immediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to
a supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or
non-discursive discourse.

So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing,
that it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making inferences
from the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of
understanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of
nature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense
that this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory.
Understanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and
oracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any
reality—such as God, for instance—should not be just as empirical as
the other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reason
discovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by
reason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for a
moment a man’s waking attention—that is what Kant never tells us and
never himself knew.

Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we
may therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who
seek to invalidate the discovery of material objects.

[Sidenote: Berkeley’s algebra of perception.]

Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was
patched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our
minds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of
course in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating
sensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a
permanent space, he would reply that this means nothing, because
“substance,” “permanence,” and “space” are non-existent ideas, _i.e._,
they are not images in sense. They might, however, be “notions” like
that of “spirit,” which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system,
to be, mysteriously enough, _that which has_ ideas. Or they might be
(what would do just as well for our purpose) that which he elsewhere
called them, algebraic signs used to facilitate the operations of
thought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraic
in a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, in
respect of their object or signification, not concrete images but terms
in a mental process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then,
denounce them? They could be used with all confidence to lead us back
to the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations which
they enabled us to state and discover. Experience would thus be
furnished with an intelligible structure and articulation, and a
psychological analysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuous
material and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley’s objection to
these algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of space,
matter, independent existence, and efficient causality which these
methods involve?

[Sidenote: Horror of physics.]

What he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpreting
experience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the
fashion of “mathematical atheists” we could understand experience as
well as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to
it than that system of associations and algebraic substitutions which is
called the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to
expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception
and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an
idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater
wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time—long before days of
“Siris” and tar-water—was too ignorant and hasty to understand how
inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man’s
tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom.
He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no
longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared,
those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never
leads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand,
amid irrational habits and passions. He was accordingly repelled by
whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious
prejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no
better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the
reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers
of reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science
had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the
value of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped
him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of
reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else
humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in
philosophy, where partisanship is treason, and opposed the work of
reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral.

[Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]

Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and
perfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could
solve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and
mature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in things
divine were they not interpretations and sublimations of things
natural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising
ambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to
cajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of
idealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values.
Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense
and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven,
an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of God; as if there
were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than
to study the ways of nature and man.

Converse with God has been the life of many a wiser and sadder
philosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or
Spinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of
that intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree
of pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was
satisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find out
how the consciousness that God is the direct author of our incidental
perceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights and
principles are to be substituted for those that disclose the economy of
nature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absolute
providentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence of
fellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired by
conventional theology and a psychology that refused to pass, except
grudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley
had nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repetition of
the truism that ideas are all “in the mind” constituted his total
wisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue of
which we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all,
which was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human development, at
least to refrain from regarding our necessary thoughts on nature as true
or rational. Intelligence was but a false method of imagination by which
God trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossible
to endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shall
we think of the critical acumen or practical wisdom of a philosopher who
dreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary implication in
thought and action?

[Sidenote: Truism and sophism.]

In the melodramatic fashion so common in what is called philosophy we
may delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: _esse est
percipi_. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through
perception alone can we get at being—a modest and familiar notion which
makes, as Plato’s “Theætetus” shows, not a bad point of departure for a
serious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, is
to deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make and
which the speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase; for he
would not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering a
tautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception,
we should indeed never know that it existed; but once perceived or
inferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practical
competence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; and
our ability to make this supposition is registered in the difference
between the two words _to be_ and _to be perceived_—words which are by
no means synonymous but designate two very different relations of things
in thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of
assertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-consciousness,
has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy
between two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of such
sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in
one sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by
showing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has
also been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus
of my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity
to say that I am the only object of my thought and perception.

[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible.]

To confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with its
meaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus
come about that the function of intelligence should be altogether
misconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that
figments of reason could never become elements of sense but must always
remain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and
therefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend
to give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical
intellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of
experience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called
illusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they
last, they have no sustained function and no right to practical
dominion.

Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal
consciousness which first used the category of substance and passed from
its perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. “Beware, my
child,” he would have said, “you are taking a dangerous step, one which
may hereafter produce a multitude of mathematical atheists, not to speak
of cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in
your mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in
mid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit a
great impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes
the world continues to exist until you open them again, you will
inevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about
the discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and
deafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel
will be extinguished in your soul.” “But,” that tender Peripatetic might
answer, “I cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes: I know
and almost feel their persistent presence, and I always find them again,
upon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to which
the operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence.
If I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptible
transformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceive
me; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether the
conditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understand
what sort of a world I lived in.”

“Ah, my child,” the good Bishop would reply, “you misunderstand me. You
may indeed, nay, you must, live and think _as if_ everything remained
independently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which God
in his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into your
soul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessary
hypotheses and support your humble and prudent expectations. Only you
must not attribute that constancy to the things themselves which is due
to steadfastness in the designs of Providence. _Think and act_ as if a
material world existed, but do not for a moment _believe_ it to exist.”

[Sidenote: Vain “realities” and trustworthy “fictions.”]

With this advice, coming reassuringly from the combined forces of
scepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its own
devices, satisfied that even according to the most malicious
psychologists its first step toward the comprehension of experience is
one it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for the
present at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reason
is not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous
“realities”; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which are
necessary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The first
among these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is the
indispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in their
congeries, shifts, and secret animation the system and life of nature.

     NOTE—There is a larger question raised by Berkeley’s
     arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely,
     whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental
     representation can be supposed to inform us about anything.
     Berkeley of course assumed this power in that he continued to
     believe in God, in other spirits, in the continuity of
     experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to
     material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that
     they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings,
     exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It
     could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects,
     in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence
     inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to
     which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical
     criticism, such as that contained in Kant’s antinomies, the
     royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked;
     to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive
     and representative value in that idea. The fact that material
     objects were represented or conceived would not of itself
     prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be
     necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and
     function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of
     Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their
     relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have
     augured ill for Berkeley’s prejudices; what its result might
     have been we can see in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. In
     order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of
     his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more
     insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative
     character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all
     knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought
     and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind
     it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given
     cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then,
     two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently,
     viz., that nothing can be known which is different in
     character or nature from the object present to the thinking
     mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since
     it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz., that
     nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature
     or character to the “ideas” within it; or, to put the same
     thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea
     which is different from that idea in point of existence. The
     first maxim does not contradict the existence of external
     objects in space; the second contradicts every conception that
     the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the
     grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory
     represents his past experience by inward similarity and
     conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the
     moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another
     and their general system. Else the idealist’s philosophy
     itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion.




CHAPTER V—NATURE UNIFIED AND MIND DISCERNED


[Sidenote: Man’s feeble grasp of nature.]

When the mind has learned to distinguish external objects and to
attribute to them a constant size, shape, and potency, in spite of the
variety and intermittence ruling in direct experience, there yet remains
a great work to do before attaining a clear, even if superficial, view
of the world. An animal’s customary habitat may have constant features
and their relations in space may be learned by continuous exploration;
but probably many other landscapes are also within the range of memory
and fancy that stand in no visible relation to the place in which we
find ourselves at a given moment. It is true that, at this day, we take
it for granted that all real places, as we call them, lie in one space,
in which they hold definite geometric relations to one another; and if
we have glimpses of any region for which no room can be found in the
single map of the universe which astronomy has drawn, we unhesitatingly
relegate that region to the land of dreams. Since the Elysian Fields and
the Coast of Bohemia have no assignable latitude and longitude, we call
these places imaginary, even if in some dream we remember to have
visited them and dwelt there with no less sense of reality than in this
single and geometrical world of commerce. It belongs to sanity and
common-sense, as men now possess them, to admit no countries unknown to
geography and filling no part of the conventional space in three
dimensions. All our waking experience is understood to go on in some
part of this space, and no court of law would admit evidence relating to
events in some other sphere.

This principle, axiomatic as it has become, is in no way primitive,
since primitive experience is sporadic and introduces us to detached
scenes separated by lapses in our senses and attention. These scenes do
not hang together in any local contiguity. To construct a chart of the
world is a difficult feat of synthetic imagination, not to be performed
without speculative boldness and a heroic insensibility to the claims of
fancy. Even now most people live without topographical ideas and have no
clear conception of the spatial relations that keep together the world
in which they move. They feel their daily way about like animals,
following a habitual scent, without dominating the range of their
instinctive wanderings. Reality is rather a story to them than a system
of objects and forces, nor would they think themselves mad if at any
time their experience should wander into a fourth dimension. Vague
dramatic and moral laws, when they find any casual application, seem to
such dreaming minds more notable truths, deeper revelations of
efficacious reality, than the mechanical necessities of the case, which
they scarcely conceive of; and in this primordial prejudice they are
confirmed by superstitious affinities often surviving in their religion
and philosophy. In the midst of cities and affairs they are like
landsmen at sea, incapable of an intellectual conception of their
position: nor have they any complete confidence in their principles of
navigation. They know the logarithms by rote merely, and if they reflect
are reduced to a stupid wonder and only half believe they are in a known
universe or will ever reach an earthly port. It would not require
superhuman eloquence in some prophetic passenger to persuade them to
throw compass and quadrant overboard and steer enthusiastically for El
Dorado. The theory of navigation is essentially as speculative as that
of salvation, only it has survived more experiences of the judgment and
repeatedly brought those who trust in it to their promised land.

[Sidenote: Its unity ideal and discoverable only by steady thought.]

The theory that all real objects and places lie together in one even and
homogeneous space, conceived as similar in its constitution to the parts
of extension of which we have immediate intuition, is a theory of the
greatest practical importance and validity. By its light we carry on all
our affairs, and the success of our action while we rely upon it is the
best proof of its truth. The imaginative parsimony and discipline which
such a theory involves are balanced by the immense extension and
certitude it gives to knowledge. It is at once an act of allegiance to
nature and a Magna Charta which mind imposes on the tyrannous world,
which in turn pledges itself before the assembled faculties of man not
to exceed its constitutional privilege and to harbour no magic monsters
in unattainable lairs from which they might issue to disturb human
labours. Yet that spontaneous intelligence which first enabled men to
make this genial discovery and take so fundamental a step toward taming
experience should not be laid by after this first victory; it is a
weapon needed in many subsequent conflicts. To conceive that all nature
makes one system is only a beginning: the articulation of natural life
has still to be discovered in detail and, what is more, a similar
articulation has to be given to the psychic world which now, by the very
act that constitutes Nature and makes her consistent, appears at her
side or rather in her bosom.

That the unification of nature is eventual and theoretical is a point
useful to remember: else the relation of the natural world to poetry,
metaphysics, and religion will never become intelligible. Lalande, or
whoever it was, who searched the heavens with his telescope and could
find no God, would not have found the human mind if he had searched the
brain with a microscope. Yet God existed in man’s apprehension long
before mathematics or even, perhaps, before the vault of heaven; for
the objectification of the whole mind, with its passions and motives,
naturally precedes that abstraction by which the idea of a material
world is drawn from the chaos of experience, an abstraction which
culminates in such atomic and astronomical theories as science is now
familiar with. The sense for life in things, be they small or great, is
not derived from the abstract idea of their bodies but is an ancient
concomitant to that idea, inseparable from it until it became abstract.
Truth and materiality, mechanism and ideal interests, are collateral
projections from one rolling experience, which shows up one aspect or
the other as it develops various functions and dominates itself to
various ends. When one ore is abstracted and purified, the residuum
subsists in that primeval quarry in which it originally lay. The failure
to find God among the stars, or even the attempt to find him there, does
not indicate that human experience affords no avenue to the idea of
God—for history proves the contrary—but indicates rather the atrophy
in this particular man of the imaginative faculty by which his race had
attained to that idea. Such an atrophy might indeed become general, and
God would in that case disappear from human experience as music would
disappear if universal deafness attacked the race. Such an event is made
conceivable by the loss of allied imaginative habits, which is
observable in historic times. Yet possible variations in human faculty
do not involve the illegitimacy of such faculties as actually subsist;
and the abstract world known to science, unless it dries up the ancient
fountains of ideation by its habitual presence in thought, does not
remove those parallel dramatisations or abstractions which experience
may have suggested to men.

What enables men to perceive the unity of nature is the unification of
their own wills. A man half-asleep, without fixed purposes, without
intellectual keenness or joy in recognition, might graze about like an
animal, forgetting each satisfaction in the next and banishing from his
frivolous mind the memory of every sorrow; what had just failed to kill
him would leave him as thoughtless and unconcerned as if it had never
crossed his path. Such irrational elasticity and innocent improvidence
would never put two and two together. Every morning there would be a new
world with the same fool to live in it. But let some sobering passion,
some serious interest, lend perspective to the mind, and a point of
reference will immediately be given for protracted observation; then the
laws of nature will begin to dawn upon thought. Every experiment will
become a lesson, every event will be remembered as favourable or
unfavourable to the master-passion. At first, indeed, this keen
observation will probably be animistic and the laws discovered will be
chiefly habits, human or divine, special favours or envious punishments
and warnings. But the same constancy of aim which discovers the
dramatic conflicts composing society, and tries to read nature in terms
of passion, will, if it be long sustained, discover behind this glorious
chaos a deeper mechanical order. Men’s thoughts, like the weather, are
not so arbitrary as they seem and the true master in observation, the
man guided by a steadfast and superior purpose, will see them revolving
about their centres in obedience to quite calculable instincts, and the
principle of all their flutterings will not be hidden from his eyes.
Belief in indeterminism is a sign of indetermination. No commanding or
steady intellect flirts with so miserable a possibility, which in so far
as it actually prevailed would make virtue impotent and experience, in
its pregnant sense, impossible.

[Sidenote: Mind the erratic residue of existence.]

We have said that those objects which cannot be incorporated into the
one space which the understanding envisages are relegated to another
sphere called imagination. We reach here a most important corollary. As
material objects, making a single system which fills space and evolves
in time, are conceived by abstraction from the flux of sensuous
experience, so, _pari passu_, the rest of experience, with all its other
outgrowths and concretions, falls out with the physical world and forms
the sphere of mind, the sphere of memory, fancy, and the passions. We
have in this discrimination the _genesis of mind_, not of course in the
transcendental sense in which the word mind is extended to mean the sum
total and mere fact of existence—for mind, so taken, can have no origin
and indeed no specific meaning—but the genesis of mind as a determinate
form of being, a distinguishable part of the universe known to
experience and discourse, the mind that unravels itself in meditation,
inhabits animal bodies, and is studied in psychology.

Mind, in this proper sense of the word, is the residue of existence, the
leavings, so to speak, and parings of experience when the material world
has been cut out of the whole cloth. Reflection underlines in the
chaotic continuum of sense and longing those aspects that have practical
significance; it selects the efficacious ingredients in the world. The
trustworthy object which is thus retained in thought, the complex of
connected events, is nature, and though so intelligible an object is not
soon nor vulgarly recognised, because human reflection is perturbed and
halting, yet every forward step in scientific and practical knowledge is
a step toward its clearer definition. At first much parasitic matter
clings to that dynamic skeleton. Nature is drawn like a sponge heavy and
dripping from the waters of sentience. It is soaked with inefficacious
passions and overlaid with idle accretions. Nature, in a word, is at
first conceived mythically, dramatically, and retains much of the
unintelligible, sporadic habit of animal experience itself. But as
attention awakes and discrimination, practically inspired, grows firm
and stable, irrelevant qualities are stripped off, and the mechanical
process, the efficacious infallible order, is clearly disclosed beneath.
Meantime the incidental effects, the “secondary qualities,” are
relegated to a personal inconsequential region; they constitute the
realm of appearance, the realm of mind.

[Sidenote: Ghostly character of mind.]

Mind is therefore sometimes identified with the unreal. We oppose, in an
antithesis natural to thought and language, the imaginary to the true,
fancy to fact, idea to thing. But this thing, fact, or external reality
is, as we have seen, a completion and hypostasis of certain portions of
experience, packed into such shapes as prove cogent in thought and
practice. The stuff of external reality, the matter out of which its
idea is made, is therefore continuous with the stuff and matter of our
own minds. Their common substance is the immediate flux. This living
worm has propagated by fission, and the two halves into which it has
divided its life are mind and nature. Mind has kept and clarified the
crude appearance, the dream, the purpose that seethed in the mass;
nature has appropriated the order, the constant conditions, the causal
substructure, disclosed in reflection, by which the immediate flux is
explained and controlled. The chemistry of thought has precipitated
these contrasted terms, each maintaining a recognisable identity and
having the function of a point of reference for memory and will. Some of
these terms or objects of thought we call things and marshal in all
their ideal stability—for there is constancy in their motions and
transformations—to make the intelligible external world of practice and
science. Whatever stuff has not been absorbed in this construction,
whatever facts of sensation, ideation, or will, do not coalesce with the
newest conception of reality, we then call the mind.

Raw experience, then, lies at the basis of the idea of nature and
approves its reality; while an equal reality belongs to the residue of
experience, not taken up, as yet, into that idea. But this residual
sensuous reality often seems comparatively unreal because what it
presents is entirely without practical force apart from its mechanical
associates. This inconsequential character of what remains over follows
of itself from the concretion of whatever is constant and efficacious
into the external world. If this fact is ever called in question, it is
only because the external world is vaguely conceived, and loose wills
and ideas are thought to govern it by magic. Yet in many ways falling
short of absolute precision people recognise that thought is not dynamic
or, as they call it, not real. The idea of the physical world is the
first flower or thick cream of practical thinking. Being skimmed off
first and proving so nutritious, it leaves the liquid below somewhat
thin and unsavoury. Especially does this result appear when science is
still unpruned and mythical, so that what passes into the idea of
material nature is much more than the truly causal network of forces,
and includes many spiritual and moral functions.

The material world, as conceived in the first instance, had not that
clear abstractness, nor the spiritual world that wealth and interest,
which they have acquired for modern minds. The complex reactions of
man’s soul had been objectified together with those visual and tactile
sensations which, reduced to a mathematical baldness, now furnish terms
to natural science. Mind then dwelt in the world, not only in the warmth
and beauty with which it literally clothed material objects, as it still
does in poetic perception, but in a literal animistic way; for human
passion and reflection were attributed to every object and made a
fairy-land of the world. Poetry and religion discerned life in those
very places in which sense and understanding perceived body; and when so
much of the burden of experience took wing into space, and the soul
herself floated almost visibly among the forms of nature, it is no
marvel that the poor remnant, a mass of merely personal troubles, an
uninteresting distortion of things in individual minds, should have
seemed a sad and unsubstantial accident. The inner world was all the
more ghostly because the outer world was so much alive.

[Sidenote: Hypostasis and criticism both need control.]

This movement of thought, which clothed external objects in all the
wealth of undeciphered dreams, has long lost its momentum and yielded to
a contrary tendency. Just as the hypostasis of some terms in experience
is sanctioned by reason, when the objects so fixed and externalised can
serve as causes and explanations for the order of events, so the
criticism which tends to retract that hypostasis is sanctioned by reason
when the hypostasis has exceeded its function and the external object
conceived is loaded with useless ornament. The transcendental and
functional secret of such hypostases, however, is seldom appreciated by
the headlong mind; so that the ebb no less than the flow of
objectification goes on blindly and impulsively, and is carried to
absurd extremes. An age of mythology yields to an age of subjectivity;
reason being equally neglected and exceeded in both. The reaction
against imagination has left the external world, as represented in many
minds, stark and bare. All the interesting and vital qualities which
matter had once been endowed with have been attributed instead to an
irresponsible sensibility in man. And as habits of ideation change
slowly and yield only piecemeal to criticism or to fresh intuitions,
such a revolution has not been carried out consistently, but instead of
a thorough renaming of things and a new organisation of thought it has
produced chiefly distress and confusion. Some phases of this confusion
may perhaps repay a moment’s attention; they may enable us, when seen in
their logical sequence, to understand somewhat better the hypostasising
intellect that is trying to assert itself and come to the light through
all these gropings.

[Sidenote: Comparative constancy in objects and in ideas]

What helps in the first place to disclose a permanent object is a
permanent sensation. There is a vast and clear difference between a
floating and a fixed feeling; the latter, in normal circumstances, is
present only when continuous stimulation renews it at every moment.
Attention may wander, but the objects in the environment do not cease to
radiate their influences on the body, which is thereby not allowed to
lose the modification which those influences provoke. The consequent
perception is therefore always at hand and in its repetitions
substantially identical. Perceptions not renewed in this way by
continuous stimulation come and go with cerebral currents; they are rare
visitors, instead of being, like external objects, members of the
household. Intelligence is most at home in the ultimate, which is the
object of intent. Those realities which it can trust and continually
recover are its familiar and beloved companions. The mists that may
originally have divided it from them, and which psychologists call the
mind, are gladly forgotten so soon as intelligence avails to pierce
them, and as friendly communication can be established with the real
world. Moreover, perceptions not sustained by a constant external
stimulus are apt to be greatly changed when they reappear, and to be
changed unaccountably, whereas external things show some method and
proportion in their variations. Even when not much changed in
themselves, mere ideas fall into a new setting, whereas things, unless
something else has intervened to move them, reappear in their old
places. Finally things are acted upon by other men, but thoughts are
hidden from them by divine miracle.

Existence reveals reality when the flux discloses something permanent
that dominates it. What is thus dominated, though it is the primary
existence itself, is thereby degraded to appearance. Perceptions caused
by external objects are, as we have just seen, long sustained in
comparison with thoughts and fancies; but the objects are themselves in
flux and a man’s relation to them may be even more variable; so that
very often a memory or a sentiment will recur, almost unchanged in
character, long after the perception that first aroused it has become
impossible. The brain, though mobile, is subject to habit; its
formations, while they lapse instantly, return again and again. These
ideal objects may accordingly be in a way more real and enduring than
things external. Hence no primitive mind puts all reality, or what is
most real in reality, in an abstract material universe. It finds,
rather, ideal points of reference by which material mutation itself
seems to be controlled. An ideal world is recognised from the beginning
and placed, not in the immediate foreground, nearer than material
things, but much farther off. It has greater substantiality and
independence than material objects are credited with. It is divine.

When agriculture, commerce, or manual crafts have given men some
knowledge of nature, the world thus recognised and dominated is far from
seeming ultimate. It is thought to lie between two others, both now
often called mental, but in their original quality altogether disparate:
the world of spiritual forces and that of sensuous appearance. The
notions of permanence and independence by which material objects are
conceived apply also, of course, to everything spiritual; and while the
dominion exercised by spirits may be somewhat precarious, they are as
remote as possible from immediacy and sensation. They come and go; they
govern nature or, if they neglect to do so, it is from aversion or high
indifference; they visit man with obsessions and diseases; they hasten
to extricate him from difficulties; and they dwell in him, constituting
his powers of conscience and invention. Sense, on the other hand, is a
mere effect, either of body or spirit or of both in conjunction. It
gives a vitiated personal view of these realities. Its pleasures are
dangerous and unintelligent, and it perishes as it goes.

[Sidenote: Spirit and sense defined by their relation to nature.]

Such are, for primitive apperception, the three great realms of being:
nature, sense, and spirit. Their frontiers, however, always remain
uncertain. Sense, because it is insignificant when made an object, is
long neglected by reflection. No attempt is made to describe its
processes or ally them systematically to natural changes. Its
illusions, when noticed, are regarded as scandals calculated to foster
scepticism. The spiritual world is, on the other hand, a constant theme
for poetry and speculation. In the absence of ideal science, it can be
conceived only in myths, which are naturally as shifting and
self-contradictory as they are persistent. They acquire no fixed
character until, in dogmatic religion, they are defined with reference
to natural events, foretold or reported. Nature is what first acquires a
form and then imparts form to the other spheres. Sense admits definition
and distribution only as an effect of nature and spirit only as its
principle.

[Sidenote: Vague notions of nature involve vague notions of spirit.]

The form nature acquires is, however, itself vague and uncertain and can
ill serve, for long ages, to define the other realms which depend on it
for definition. Hence it has been common, for instance, to treat the
spiritual as a remote or finer form of the natural. Beyond the moon
everything seemed permanent; it was therefore called divine and declared
to preside over the rest. The breath that escaped from the lips at
death, since it took away with it the spiritual control and miraculous
life that had quickened the flesh, was itself the spirit. On the other
hand, natural processes have been persistently attributed to spiritual
causes, for it was not matter that moved itself but intent that moved
it. Thus spirit was barbarously taken for a natural substance and a
natural force. It was identified with everything in which it was
manifested, so long as no natural causes could be assigned for that
operation.

[Sidenote: Sense and spirit the life of nature, which science
redistributes but does not deny.]

If the unification of nature were complete sense would evidently fall
within it; it is to subtend and sustain the sensible flux that
intelligence acknowledges first stray material objects and then their
general system. The elements of experience not taken up into the
constitution of objects remain attached to them as their life. In the
end the dynamic skeleton, without losing its articulation, would be
clothed again with its flesh. Suppose my notions of astronomy allowed me
to believe that the sun, sinking into the sea, was extinguished every
evening, and that what appeared the next morning was his younger
brother, hatched in a sun-producing nest to be found in the Eastern
regions. My theory would have robbed yesterday’s sun of its life and
brightness; it would have asserted that during the night no sun existed
anywhere; but it would have added the sun’s qualities afresh to a matter
that did not previously possess them, namely, to the imagined egg that
would produce a sun for to-morrow. Suppose we substitute for that
astronomy the one that now prevails: we have deprived the single
sun—which now exists and spreads its influences without
interruption—of its humanity and even of its metaphysical unity. It has
become a congeries of chemical substances. The facts revealed to
perception have partly changed their locus and been differently deployed
throughout nature. Some have become attached to operations in the human
brain. Nature has not thereby lost any quality she had ever manifested;
these have merely been redistributed so as to secure a more systematic
connection between them all. They are the materials of the system, which
has been conceived by making existences continuous, whenever this
extension of their being was needful to render their recurrences
intelligible. Sense, which was formerly regarded as a sad distortion of
its objects, now becomes an original and congruent part of nature, from
which, as from any other part, the rest of nature might be
scientifically inferred.

Spirit is not less closely attached to nature, although in a different
manner. Taken existentially it is a part of sense; taken ideally it is
the form or value which nature acquires when viewed from the
vantage-ground of any interest. Individual objects are recognisable for
a time not because the flux is materially arrested but because it
somewhere circulates in a fashion which awakens an interest and brings
different parts of the surrounding process into definable and prolonged
relations with that interest. Particular objects may perish yet others
may continue, like the series of suns imagined by Heraclitus, to perform
the same office. The function will outlast the particular organ. That
interest in reference to which the function is defined will essentially
determine a perfect world of responsive extensions and conditions. These
ideals will be a spiritual reality; and they will be expressed in nature
in so far as nature supports that regulative interest. Many a perfect
and eternal realm, merely potential in existence but definite in
constitution, will thus subtend nature and be what a rational philosophy
might call the ideal. What is called spirit would be the ideal in so far
as it obtained expression in nature; and the power attributed to spirit
would be the part of nature’s fertility by which such expression was
secured.




CHAPTER VI—DISCOVERY OF FELLOW-MINDS


[Sidenote: Another background for current experience may be found in
alien minds.]

When a ghostly sphere, containing memory and all ideas, has been
distinguished from the material world, it tends to grow at the expense
of the latter, until nature is finally reduced to a mathematical
skeleton. This skeleton itself, but for the need of a bridge to connect
calculably episode with episode in experience, might be transferred to
mind and identified with the scientific thought in which it is
represented. But a scientific theory inhabiting a few scattered moments
of life cannot connect those episodes among which it is itself the last
and the least substantial; nor would such a notion have occurred even to
the most reckless sceptic, had the world not possessed another sort of
reputed reality—the minds of others—which could serve, even after the
supposed extinction of the physical world, to constitute an independent
order and to absorb the potentialities of being when immediate
consciousness nodded. But other men’s minds, being themselves precarious
and ineffectual, would never have seemed a possible substitute for
nature, to be in her stead the background and intelligible object of
experience. Something constant, omnipresent, infinitely fertile is
needed to support and connect the given chaos. Just these properties,
however, are actually attributed to one of the minds supposed to
confront the thinker, namely, the mind of God. The divine mind has
therefore always constituted in philosophy either the alternative to
nature or her other name: it is _par excellence_ the seat of all
potentiality and, as Spinoza said, the refuge of all ignorance.

Speculative problems would be greatly clarified, and what is genuine in
them would be more easily distinguished from what is artificial, if we
could gather together again the original sources for the belief in
separate minds and compare these sources with those we have already
assigned to the conception of nature. But speculative problems are not
alone concerned, for in all social life we envisage fellow-creatures
conceived to share the same thoughts and passions and to be similarly
affected by events. What is the basis of this conviction? What are the
forms it takes, and in what sense is it a part or an expression of
reason?

This question is difficult, and in broaching it we cannot expect much
aid from what philosophers have hitherto said on the subject. For the
most part, indeed, they have said nothing, as by nature’s kindly
disposition most questions which it is beyond a man’s power to answer do
not occur to him at all. The suggestions which have actually been made
in the matter may be reduced to two: first, that we conceive other men’s
minds by projecting into their bodies those feelings which we
immediately perceive to accompany similar operations in ourselves, that
is, we infer alien minds by analogy; and second, that we are immediately
aware of them and feel them to be friendly or hostile counterparts of
our own thinking and effort, that is, we evoke them by dramatic
imagination.

[Sidenote: Two usual accounts of this conception criticised:]

[Sidenote: analogy between bodies,]

The first suggestion has the advantage that it escapes solipsism by a
reasonable argument, provided the existence of the material world has
already been granted. But if the material world is called back into the
private mind, it is evident that every soul supposed to inhabit it or to
be expressed in it must follow it thither, as inevitably as the
characters and forces in an imagined story must remain with it in the
inventor’s imagination. When, on the contrary, nature is left standing,
it is reasonable to suppose that animals having a similar origin and
similar physical powers should have similar minds, if any of them was to
have a mind at all. The theory, however, is not satisfactory on other
grounds. We do not in reality associate our own grimaces with the
feelings that accompany them and subsequently, on recognising similar
grimaces in another, proceed to attribute emotions to him like those we
formerly experienced. Our own grimaces are not easily perceived, and
other men’s actions often reveal passions which we have never had, at
least with anything like their suggested colouring and intensity. This
first view is strangely artificial and mistakes for the natural origin
of the belief in question what may be perhaps its ultimate test.

[Sidenote: and dramatic dialogue in the soul.]

The second suggestion, on the other in hand, takes us into a mystic
region. That we evoke the felt souls of our fellows by dramatic
imagination is doubtless true; but this does not explain how we come to
do so, under what stimulus and in what circumstances. Nor does it avoid
solipsism; for the felt counterparts of my own will are echoes within
me, while if other minds actually exist they cannot have for their
essence to play a game with me in my own fancy. Such society would be
mythical, and while the sense for society may well be mythical in its
origin, it must acquire some other character if it is to have practical
and moral validity. But practical and moral validity is above all what
society seems to have. This second theory, therefore, while its feeling
for psychological reality is keener, does not make the recognition of
other minds intelligible and leaves our faith in them without
justification.

[Sidenote: Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.]

In approaching the subject afresh we should do well to remember that
crude experience knows nothing of the distinction between subject and
object. This distinction is a division in things, a contrast
established between masses of images which show different
characteristics in their modes of existence and relation. If this truth
is overlooked, if subject and object are made conditions of experience
instead of being, like body and mind, its contrasted parts, the revenge
of fate is quick and ironical; either subject or object must immediately
collapse and evaporate altogether. All objects must become modifications
of the subject or all subjects aspects or fragments of the object.

[Sidenote: Objects originally soaked in secondary and tertiary
qualities.]

Now the fact that crude experience is innocent of modern philosophy has
this important consequence: that for crude experience all data whatever
lie originally side by side in the same field; extension is passionate,
desire moves bodies, thought broods in space and is constituted by a
visible metamorphosis of its subject matter. Animism or mythology is
therefore no artifice. Passions naturally reside in the object they
agitate—our own body, if that be the felt seat of some pang, the stars,
if the pang can find no nearer resting-place. Only a long and still
unfinished education has taught men to separate emotions from things and
ideas from their objects. This education was needed because crude
experience is a chaos, and the qualities it jumbles together do not
march together in time. Reflection must accordingly separate them, if
knowledge (that is, ideas with eventual application and practical
transcendence) is to exist at all. In other words, action must be
adjusted to certain elements of experience and not to others, and those
chiefly regarded must have a certain interpretation put upon them by
trained apperception. The rest must be treated as moonshine and taken no
account of except perhaps in idle and poetic revery. In this way crude
experience grows reasonable and appearance becomes knowledge of reality.

The fundamental reason, then, why we attribute consciousness to natural
bodies is that those bodies, before they are conceived to be merely
material, are conceived to possess all the qualities which our own
consciousness possesses when we behold them. Such a supposition is far
from being a paradox, since only this principle justifies us to this day
in believing in whatever we may decide to believe in. The qualities
attributed to reality must be qualities found in experience, and if we
deny their presence in ourselves (_e.g._, in the case of omniscience),
that is only because the idea of self, like that of matter, has already
become special and the region of ideals (in which omniscience lies) has
been formed into a third sphere. But before the idea of self is well
constituted and before the category of ideals has been conceived at all,
every ingredient ultimately assigned to those two regions is attracted
into the perceptual vortex for which such qualities as pressure and
motion supply a nucleus. The moving image is therefore impregnated not
only with secondary qualities—colour, heat, etc.—but with qualities
which we may call tertiary, such as pain, fear, joy, malice,
feebleness, expectancy. Sometimes these tertiary qualities are
attributed to the object in their fulness and just as they are felt.
Thus the sun is not only bright and warm in the same way as he is round,
but by the same right he is also happy, arrogant, ever-young, and
all-seeing; for a suggestion of these tertiary qualities runs through us
when we look at him, just as immediately as do his warmth and light. The
fact that these imaginative suggestions are not constant does not impede
the instant perception that they are actual, and for crude experience
whatever a thing possesses in appearance it possesses indeed, no matter
how soon that quality may be lost again. The moment when things have
most numerous and best defined tertiary qualities is accordingly, for
crude experience, the moment when they are most adequately manifested
and when their inner essence is best revealed; for it is then that they
appear in experience most splendidly arrayed and best equipped for their
eventual functions. The sun is a better expression of all his ulterior
effects when he is conceived to be an arrogant and all-seeing spirit
than when he is stupidly felt to be merely hot; so that the attentive
and devout observer, to whom those tertiary qualities are revealed,
stands in the same relation to an ordinary sensualist, who can feel only
the sun’s material attributes, as the sensualist in turn stands in to
one born blind, who cannot add the sun’s brightness to its warmth
except by faith in some happier man’s reported intuition. The
mythologist or poet, before science exists, is accordingly the man of
truest and most adequate vision. His persuasion that he knows the heart
and soul of things is no fancy reached by artificial inference or
analogy but is a direct report of his own experience and honest
contemplation.

[Sidenote: Tertiary qualities transposed.]

More often, however, tertiary qualities are somewhat transposed in
projection, as sound in being lodged in the bell is soon translated into
sonority, made, that is, into its own potentiality. In the same way
painfulness is translated into malice or wickedness, terror into hate,
and every felt tertiary quality into whatever tertiary quality is in
experience its more quiescent or potential form. So religion, which
remains for the most part on the level of crude experience, attributes
to the gods not only happiness—the object’s direct tertiary
quality—but goodness—its tertiary quality transposed and made
potential; for goodness is that disposition which is fruitful in
happiness throughout imagined experience. The devil, in like manner, is
cruel and wicked as well as tormented. Uncritical science still
attributes these transposed tertiary qualities to nature; the mythical
notion of force, for instance, being a transposed sensation of effort.
In this case we may distinguish two stages or degrees in the
transposition: first, before we think of our own pulling, we say the
object itself pulls; in the first transposition we say it pulls against
us, its pull is the counterpart or rival of ours but it is still
conceived in the same direct terms of effort; and in the second
transposition this intermittent effort is made potential or slumbering
in what we call strength or force.

[Sidenote: Imputed mind consists of the tertiary qualities of perceived
body.]

It is obvious that the feelings attributed to other men are nothing but
the tertiary qualities of their bodies. In beings of the same species,
however, these qualities are naturally exceedingly numerous, variable,
and precise. Nature has made man man’s constant study. His thought, from
infancy to the drawing up of his last will and testament, is busy about
his neighbour. A smile makes a child happy; a caress, a moment’s
sympathetic attention, wins a heart and gives the friend’s presence a
voluminous and poignant value. In youth all seems lost in losing a
friend. For the tertiary values, the emotions attached to a given image,
the moral effluence emanating from it, pervade the whole present world.
The sense of union, though momentary, is the same that later returns to
the lover or the mystic, when he feels he has plucked the heart of
life’s mystery and penetrated to the peaceful centre of things. What the
mystic beholds in his ecstasy and loses in his moments of dryness, what
the lover pursues and adores, what the child cries for when left alone,
is much more a spirit, a person, a haunting mind, than a set of visual
sensations; yet the visual sensations are connected inextricably with
that spirit, else the spirit would not withdraw when the sensations
failed. We are not dealing with an articulate mind whose possessions are
discriminated and distributed into a mastered world where everything has
its department, its special relations, its limited importance; we are
dealing with a mind all pulp, all confusion, keenly sensitive to passing
influences and reacting on them massively and without reserve.

This mind is feeble, passionate, and ignorant. Its sense for present
spirit is no miracle of intelligence or of analogical reasoning; on the
contrary, it betrays a vagueness natural to rudimentary consciousness.
Those visual sensations suddenly cut off cannot there be recognised for
what they are. The consequences which their present disappearance may
have for subsequent experience are in no wise foreseen or estimated,
much less are any inexperienced feelings invented and attached to that
retreating figure, otherwise a mere puppet. What happens is that by the
loss of an absorbing stimulus the whole chaotic mind is thrown out of
gear; the child cries, the lover faints, the mystic feels hell opening
before him. All this is a present sensuous commotion, a derangement in
an actual dream. Yet just at this lowest plunge of experience, in this
drunkenness of the soul, does the overwhelming reality and externality
of the other mind dawn upon us. Then we feel that we are surrounded not
by a blue sky or an earth known to geographers but by unutterable and
most personal hatreds and loves. For then we allow the half-deciphered
images of sense to drag behind them every emotion they have awakened. We
endow each overmastering stimulus with all its diffuse effects; and any
dramatic potentiality that our dream acts out under that high
pressure—and crude experience is rich in dreams—becomes our notion of
the life going on before us. We cannot regard it as our own life,
because it is not felt to be a passion in our own body, but attaches
itself rather to images we see moving about in the world; it is
consequently, without hesitation, called the life of those images, or
those creatures’ souls.

[Sidenote: “Pathetic fallacy” normal yet ordinarily fallacious.]

The pathetic fallacy is accordingly what originally peoples the imagined
world. All the feelings aroused by perceived things are merged in those
things and made to figure as the spiritual and invisible part of their
essence, a part, moreover, quite as well known and as directly perceived
as their motions. To ask why such feelings are objectified would be to
betray a wholly sophisticated view of experience and its articulation.
They do not need to be objectified, seeing they were objective from the
beginning, inasmuch as they pertain to objects and have never, any more
than those objects, been “subjectified” or localised in the thinker’s
body, nor included in that train of images which as a whole is known to
have in that body its seat and thermometer. The thermometer for these
passions is, on the contrary, the body of another; and the little dream
in us, the quick dramatic suggestion which goes with our perception of
his motions, is our perception of his thoughts.

A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete
illusion. The thought is one’s own, it is associated with an image
moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of
that image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and
actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy.
A complete illusion this sense remains in mythology, in animism, in the
poetic forms of love and religion. A better mastery of experience will
in such cases dispel those hasty conceits by showing the fundamental
divergence which at once manifests itself between the course of
phenomena and the feelings associated with them. It will appear beyond
question that those feelings were private fancies merged with
observation in an undigested experience. They indicated nothing in the
object but its power of arousing emotional and playful reverberations in
the mind. Criticism will tend to clear the world of such poetic
distortion; and what vestiges of it may linger will be avowed fables,
metaphors employed merely in conventional expression. In the end even
poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood: the poet himself will
soon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human
emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual
sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and
occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of
the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the
steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and
collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its
majesty, as precision does in the poems of Lucretius and Dante, while
its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth.

[Sidenote: Case where it is not a fallacy.]

A primary habit producing widespread illusions may in certain cases
become the source of rational knowledge. This possibility will surprise
no one who has studied nature and life to any purpose. Nature and life
are tentative in all their processes, so that there is nothing
exceptional in the fact that, since in crude experience image and
emotion are inevitably regarded as constituting a single event, this
habit should usually lead to childish absurdities, but also, under
special circumstances, to rational insight and morality. There is
evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the
case in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the
observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd
are swayed by panic fear. The emotion which each, as he runs, attributes
to the others is, as usual, the emotion he feels himself; but this
emotion, fear, is the same which in fact the others are then feeling.
Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling
which really accompanies it. So in hand-to-hand fighting: the intention
and passion which each imputes to the other is what he himself feels;
but the imputation is probably just, since pugnacity is a remarkably
contagious and monotonous passion. It is awakened by the slightest
hostile suggestion and is greatly intensified by example and emulation;
those we fight against and those we fight with arouse it concurrently
and the universal battle-cry that fills the air, and that each man
instinctively emits, is an adequate and exact symbol for what is passing
in all their souls.

Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to the
percipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct.
Contagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far as
they are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall
and correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a
vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight.

[Sidenote: Knowledge succeeds only by accident.]

Let the reader meditate for a moment upon the following point: to know
reality is, in a way, an impossible pretension, because knowledge means
significant representation, discourse about an existence not contained
in the knowing thought, and different in duration or locus from the
ideas which represent it. But if knowledge does not possess its object
how can it intend it? And if knowledge possesses its object, how can it
be knowledge or have any practical, prophetic, or retrospective value?
Consciousness is not knowledge unless it indicates or signifies what
actually it is not. This transcendence is what gives knowledge its
cognitive and useful essence, its transitive function and validity. In
knowledge, therefore, there must be some such thing as a justified
illusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot
hitting the mark. For dead logic would stick at solipsism; yet
irrational life, as it stumbles along from moment to moment, and
multiplies itself in a thousand centres, is somehow amenable to logic
and finds uses for the reason it breeds.

Now, in the relation of a natural being to similar beings in the same
habitat there is just the occasion we require for introducing a
miraculous transcendence in knowledge, a leap out of solipsism which,
though not prompted by reason, will find in reason a continual
justification. For tertiary qualities are imputed to objects by
psychological or pathological necessity. Something not visible in the
object, something not possibly revealed by any future examination of
that object, is thus united with it, felt to be its core, its
metaphysical truth. Tertiary qualities are emotions or thoughts present
in the observer and in his rudimentary consciousness not yet connected
with their proper concomitants and antecedents, not yet relegated to
his private mind, nor explained by his personal endowment and situation.
To take these private feelings for the substance of other beings is
evidently a gross blunder; yet this blunder, without ceasing to be one
in point of method, ceases to be one in point of fact when the other
being happens to be similar in nature and situation to the mythologist
himself and therefore actually possesses the very emotions and thoughts
which lie in the mythologist’s bosom and are attributed by him to his
fellow. Thus an imaginary self-transcendence, a rash pretension to grasp
an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself
accidentally rewarded. Imagination will have drawn a prize in its
lottery and the pathological accidents of thought will have begotten
knowledge and right reason. The inner and unattainable core of other
beings will have been revealed to private intuition.

[Sidenote: Limits of insight]

This miracle of insight, as it must seem to those who have not
understood its natural and accidental origin, extends only so far as
does the analogy between the object and the instrument of perception.
The gift of intuition fails in proportion as the observer’s bodily habit
differs from the habit and body observed. Misunderstanding begins with
constitutional divergence and deteriorates rapidly into false
imputations and absurd myths. The limits of mutual understanding
coincide with the limits of similar structure and common occupation, so
that the distortion of insight begins very near home. It is hard to
understand the minds of children unless we retain unusual plasticity and
capacity to play; men and women do not really understand each other,
what rules between them being not so much sympathy as habitual trust,
idealisation, or satire; foreigners’ minds are pure enigmas, and those
attributed to animals are a grotesque compound of Æsop and physiology.
When we come to religion the ineptitude of all the feelings attributed
to nature or the gods is so egregious that a sober critic can look to
such fables only for a pathetic expression of human sentiment and need;
while, even apart from the gods, each religion itself is quite
unintelligible to infidels who have never followed its worship
sympathetically or learned by contagion the human meaning of its
sanctions and formulas. Hence the stupidity and want of insight commonly
shown in what calls itself the history of religions. We hear, for
instance, that Greek religion was frivolous, because its mystic awe and
momentous practical and poetic truths escape the Christian historian
accustomed to a catechism and a religious morality; and similarly
Catholic piety seems to the Protestant an æsthetic indulgence, a
religion appealing to sense, because such is the only emotion its
externals can awaken in him, unused as he is to a supernatural economy
reaching down into the incidents and affections of daily life.

Language is an artificial means of establishing unanimity and
transferring thought from one mind to another. Every symbol or phrase,
like every gesture, throws the observer into an attitude to which a
certain idea corresponded in the speaker; to fall exactly into the
speaker’s attitude is exactly to understand. Every impediment to
contagion and imitation in expression is an impediment to comprehension.
For this reason language, like all art, becomes pale with years; words
and figures of speech lose their contagious and suggestive power; the
feeling they once expressed can no longer be restored by their
repetition. Even the most inspired verse, which boasts not without a
relative justification to be immortal, becomes in the course of ages a
scarcely legible hieroglyphic; the language it was written in dies, a
learned education and an imaginative effort are requisite to catch even
a vestige of its original force. Nothing is so irrevocable as mind.

    Unsure the ebb and flood of thought,
    The moon comes back, the spirit not.

[Sidenote: Perception of character]

There is, however, a wholly different and far more positive method of
reading the mind, or what in a metaphorical sense is called by that
name. This method is to read character. Any object with which we are
familiar teaches us to divine its habits; slight indications, which we
should be at a loss to enumerate separately, betray what changes are
going on and what promptings are simmering in the organism. Hence the
expression of a face or figure; hence the traces of habit and passion
visible in a man and that indescribable something about him which
inspires confidence or mistrust. The gift of reading character is partly
instinctive, partly a result of experience; it may amount to foresight
and is directed not upon consciousness but upon past or eventual action.
Habits and passions, however, have metaphorical psychic names, names
indicating dispositions rather than particular acts (a disposition being
mythically represented as a sort of wakeful and haunting genius waiting
to whisper suggestions in a man’s ear). We may accordingly delude
ourselves into imagining that a pose or a manner which really indicates
habit indicates feeling instead. In truth the feeling involved, if
conceived at all, is conceived most vaguely, and is only a sort of
reverberation or penumbra surrounding the pictured activities.

[Sidenote: Conduct divined, consciousness ignored.]

It is a mark of the connoisseur to be able to read character and habit
and to divine at a glance all a creature’s potentialities. This sort of
penetration characterises the man with an eye for horse-flesh, the
dog-fancier, and men and women of the world. It guides the born leader
in the judgments he instinctively passes on his subordinates and
enemies; it distinguishes every good judge of human affairs or of
natural phenomena, who is quick to detect small but telling indications
of events past or brewing. As the weather-prophet reads the heavens so
the man of experience reads other men. Nothing concerns him less than
their consciousness; he can allow that to run itself off when he is sure
of their temper and habits. A great master of affairs is usually
unsympathetic. His observation is not in the least dramatic or dreamful,
he does not yield himself to animal contagion or re-enact other people’s
inward experience. He is too busy for that, and too intent on his own
purposes. His observation, on the contrary, is straight calculation and
inference, and it sometimes reaches truths about people’s character and
destiny which they themselves are very far from divining. Such
apprehension is masterful and odious to weaklings, who think they know
themselves because they indulge in copious soliloquy (which is the
discourse of brutes and madmen), but who really know nothing of their
own capacity, situation, or fate.

If Rousseau, for instance, after writing those Confessions in which
candour and ignorance of self are equally conspicuous, had heard some
intelligent friend, like Hume, draw up in a few words an account of
their author’s true and contemptible character, he would have been loud
in protestations that no such ignoble characteristics existed in his
eloquent consciousness; and they might not have existed there, because
his consciousness was a histrionic thing, and as imperfect an expression
of his own nature as of man’s. When the mind is irrational no practical
purpose is served by stopping to understand it, because such a mind is
irrelevant to practice, and the principles that guide the man’s practice
can be as well understood by eliminating his mind altogether. So a wise
governor ignores his subjects’ religion or concerns himself only with
its economic and temperamental aspects; if the real forces that control
life are understood, the symbols that represent those forces in the mind
may be disregarded. But such a government, like that of the British in
India, is more practical than sympathetic. While wise men may endure it
for the sake of their material interests, they will never love it for
itself. There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathised with, while
nothing requires a rarer intellectual heroism than willingness to see
one’s equation written out.

[Sidenote: Consciousness untrustworthy.]

Nevertheless this same algebraic sense for character plays a large part
in human friendship. A chief element in friendship is trust, and trust
is not to be acquired by reproducing consciousness but only by
penetrating to the constitutional instincts which, in determining action
and habit, determine consciousness as well. Fidelity is not a property
of ideas. It is a virtue possessed pre-eminently by nature, from the
animals to the seasons and the stars. But fidelity gives friendship its
deepest sanctity, and the respect we have for a man, for his force,
ability, constancy, and dignity, is no sentiment evoked by his floating
thoughts but an assurance founded on our own observation that his
conduct and character are to be counted upon. Smartness and vivacity,
much emotion and many conceits, are obstacles both to fidelity and to
merit. There is a high worth in rightly constituted natures independent
of incidental consciousness. It consists in that ingrained virtue which
under given circumstances would insure the noblest action and with that
action, of course, the noblest sentiments and ideas; ideas which would
arise spontaneously and would make more account of their objects than of
themselves.

[Sidenote: Metaphorical mind.]

The expression of habit in psychic metaphors is a procedure known also
to theology. Whenever natural or moral law is declared to reveal the
divine mind, this mind is a set of formal or ethical principles rather
than an imagined consciousness, re-enacted dramatically. What is
conceived is the god’s operation, not his emotions. In this way God’s
goodness becomes a symbol for the advantages of life, his wrath a symbol
for its dangers, his commandments a symbol for its laws. The deity
spoken of by the Stoics had exclusively this symbolic character; it
could be called a city—dear City of Zeus—as readily as an
intelligence. And that intelligence which ancient and ingenuous
philosophers said they saw in the world was always intelligence in this
algebraic sense, it was intelligible order. Nor did the Hebrew prophets,
in their emphatic political philosophy, seem to mean much more by
Jehovah than a moral order, a principle giving vice and virtue their
appropriate fruits.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

True society, then, is limited to similar beings living similar lives
and enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to
attribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other
actually endures. A fresh thought may be communicated to one who has
never had it before, but only when the speaker so dominates the
auditor’s mind by the instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that
he compels that mind to reproduce his experience. Analogy between
actions and bodies is accordingly the only test of valid inference
regarding the existence or character of conceived minds; but this
eventual test is far from being the source of such a conception. Its
source is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic
fallacy. In the beginning, as in the end, what is attributed to others
is something directly felt, a dream dreamed through and dramatically
enacted, but uncritically attributed to the object by whose motions it
is suggested and controlled. In a single case, however, tertiary
qualities happen to correspond to an experience actually animating the
object to which they are assigned. This is the case in which the object
is a body similar in structure and action to the percipient himself, who
assigns to that body a passion he has caught by contagion from it and by
imitation of its actual attitude. Such are the conditions of
intelligible expression and true communion; beyond these limits nothing
is possible save myth and metaphor, or the algebraic designation of
observed habits under the name of moral dispositions.




CHAPTER VII—CONCRETIONS IN DISCOURSE AND IN EXISTENCE


[Sidenote: So-called abstract qualities primary.]

Ideas of material objects ordinarily absorb the human mind, and their
prevalence has led to the rash supposition that ideas of all other kinds
are posterior to physical ideas and drawn from the latter by a process
of abstraction. The table, people said, was a particular and single
reality; its colour, form, and material were parts of its integral
nature, qualities which might be attended to separately, perhaps, but
which actually existed only in the table itself. Colour, form, and
material were therefore abstract elements. They might come before the
mind separately and be contrasted objects of attention, but they were
incapable of existing in nature except together, in the concrete reality
called a particular thing. Moreover, as the same colour, shape, or
substance might be found in various tables, these abstract qualities
were thought to be general qualities as well; they were universal terms
which might be predicated of many individual things. A contrast could
then be drawn between these qualities or ideas, which the mind may
envisage, and the concrete reality existing beyond. Thus philosophy
could reach the familiar maxim of Aristotle that the particular alone
exists in nature and the general alone in the mind.

[Sidenote: General qualities prior to particular things.]

Such language expresses correctly enough a secondary conventional stage
of conception, but it ignores the primary fictions on which convention
itself must rest. Individual physical objects must be discovered before
abstractions can be made from their conceived nature; the bird must be
caught before it is plucked. To discover a physical object is to pack in
the same part of space, and fuse in one complex body, primary data like
coloured form and tangible surface. Intelligence, observing these
sensible qualities to evolve together, and to be controlled at once by
external forces, or by one’s own voluntary motions, identifies them in
their operation although they remain for ever distinct in their sensible
character. A physical object is accordingly conceived by fusing or
interlacing spatial qualities, in a manner helpful to practical
intelligence. It is a far higher and remoter thing than the elements it
is compacted of and that suggest it; what habits of appearance and
disappearance the latter may have, the object reduces to permanent and
calculable principles. It is altogether erroneous, therefore, to view an
object’s sensible qualities as abstractions from it, seeing they are its
original and component elements; nor can the sensible qualities be
viewed as generic notions arising by comparison of several concrete
objects, seeing that these concretions would never have been made or
thought to be permanent, did they not express observed variations and
recurrences in the sensible qualities immediately perceived and already
recognised in their recurrence. These are themselves the true
particulars. They are the first objects discriminated in attention and
projected against the background of consciousness.

The immediate continuum may be traversed and mapped by two different
methods. The prior one, because it is so very primitive and rudimentary,
and so much a condition of all mental discourse, is usually ignored in
psychology. The secondary method, by which external things are
discovered, has received more attention. The latter consists in the fact
that when several disparate sensations, having become recognisable in
their repetitions, are observed to come and go together, or in fixed
relation to some voluntary operation on the observer’s part, they may be
associated by contiguity and merged in one portion of perceived space.
Those having, like sensations of touch and sight, an essentially spatial
character, may easily be superposed; the surface I see and that I touch
may be identified by being presented together and being found to undergo
simultaneous variations and to maintain common relations to other
perceptions. Thus I may come to attribute to a single object, the term
of an intellectual synthesis and ideal intention, my experiences through
all the senses within a certain field of association, defined by its
practical relations. That ideal object is thereby endowed with as many
qualities and powers as I had associable sensations of which to make it
up. This object is a concretion of my perceptions in space, so that the
redness, hardness, sweetness, and roundness of the apple are all fused
together in my practical regard and given one local habitation and one
name.

[Sidenote: Universals are concretions in discourse.]

This kind of synthesis, this superposition and mixture of images into
notions of physical objects, is not, however, the only kind to which
perceptions are subject. They fall together by virtue of their
qualitative identity even before their spatial superposition; for in
order to be known as repeatedly simultaneous, and associable by
contiguity, they must be associated by similarity and known as
individually repeated. The various recurrences of a sensation must be
recognised as recurrences, and this implies the collection of sensations
into classes of similars and the apperception of a common nature in
several data. Now the more frequent a perception is the harder it will
be to discriminate in memory its past occurrences from one another, and
yet the more readily will its present recurrence be recognised as
familiar. The perception in sense will consequently be received as a
repetition not of any single earlier sensation but of a familiar and
generic experience. This experience, a spontaneous reconstruction based
on all previous sensations of that kind, will be the one habitual _idea_
with which recurring sensations will be henceforth identified. Such a
living concretion of similars succeeding one another in time, is the
idea of a nature or quality, the universal falsely supposed to be an
abstraction from physical objects, which in truth are conceived by
putting together these very ideas into a spatial and permanent system.

Here we have, if I am not mistaken, the origin of the two terms most
prominent in human knowledge, ideas and things. Two methods of
conception divide our attention in common life; science and philosophy
develop both, although often with an unjustifiable bias in favour of one
or the other. They are nothing but the old principles of Aristotelian
psychology, association by similarity and association by contiguity.
Only now, after logicians have exhausted their ingenuity in criticising
them and psychologists in applying them, we may go back of the
traditional position and apply the ancient principles at a deeper stage
of mental life.

[Sidenote: Similar reactions, merged in one habit of reproduction, yield
an idea.]

Association by similarity is a fusion of impressions merging what is
common in them, interchanging what is peculiar, and cancelling in the
end what is incompatible; so that any excitement reaching that centre
revives one generic reaction which yields the idea. These concrete
generalities are actual feelings, the first terms in mental discourse,
the first distinguishable particulars in knowledge, and the first
bearers of names. Intellectual dominion of the conscious stream begins
with the act of recognising these pervasive entities, which having
character and ideal permanence can furnish common points of reference
for different moments of discourse. Save for ideas no perception could
have significance, or acquire that indicative force which we call
knowledge. For it would refer to nothing to which another perception
might also have referred; and so long as perceptions have no common
reference, so long as successive moments do not enrich by their
contributions the same object of thought, evidently experience, in the
pregnant sense of the word, is impossible. No fund of valid ideas, no
wisdom, could in that case be acquired by living.

[Sidenote: Ideas are ideal.]

Ideas, although their material is of course sensuous, are not sensations
nor perceptions nor objects of any possible immediate experience: they
are creatures of intelligence, goals of thought, ideal terms which
cogitation and action circle about. As the centre of mass is a body,
while it may by chance coincide with one or another of its atoms, is no
atom itself and no material constituent of the bulk that obeys its
motion, so an idea, the centre of mass of a certain mental system, is no
material fragment of that system, but an ideal term of reference and
signification by allegiance to which the details of consciousness first
become parts of a system and of a thought. An idea is an ideal. It
represents a functional relation in the diffuse existences to which it
gives a name and a rational value. An idea is an expression of life,
and shares with life that transitive and elusive nature which defies
definition by mere enumeration of its materials. The peculiarity of life
is that it lives; and thought also, when living, passes out of itself
and directs itself on the ideal, on the eventual. It is an activity.
Activity does not consist in velocity of change but in constancy of
purpose; in the conspiracy of many moments and many processes toward one
ideal harmony and one concomitant ideal result. The most rudimentary
apperception, recognition, or expectation, is already a case of
representative cognition, of transitive thought resting in a permanent
essence. Memory is an obvious case of the same thing; for the past, in
its truth, is a system of experiences in relation, a system now
non-existent and never, as a system, itself experienced, yet confronted
in retrospect and made the ideal object and standard for all historical
thinking.

[Sidenote: So-called abstractions complete facts.]

These arrested and recognisable ideas, concretions of similars
succeeding one another in time, are not abstractions; but they may come
to be regarded as such after the other kind of concretions in
experience, concretions of superposed perceptions in space, have become
the leading objects of attention. The sensuous material for both
concretions is the same; the perception which, recurring in different
objects otherwise not retained in memory gives the idea of roundness, is
the same perception which helps to constitute the spatial concretion
called the sun. Roundness may therefore be carelessly called an
abstraction from the real object “sun”; whereas the peculiar
optical and muscular feelings by which the sense of roundness is
constituted—probably feelings of gyration and perpetual unbroken
movement—are much earlier than any solar observations; they are a
self-sufficing element in experience which, by repetition in various
accidental contests, has come to be recognised and named, and to be a
characteristic by virtue of which more complex objects can be
distinguished and defined. The idea of the sun is a much later product,
and the real sun is so far from being an original datum from which
roundness is abstracted, that it is an ulterior and quite ideal
construction, a spatial concretion into which the logical concretion
roundness enters as a prior and independent factor. Roundness may be
felt in the dark, by a mere suggestion of motion, and is a complete
experience in itself. When this recognisable experience happens to be
associated by contiguity with other recognisable experiences of heat,
light, height, and yellowness, and these various independent objects are
projected into the same portion of a real space; then a concretion
occurs, and these ideas being recognised in that region and finding a
momentary embodiment there, become the qualities of a thing.

A conceived thing is doubly a product of mind, more a product of mind,
if you will, than an idea, since ideas arise, so to speak, by the
mind’s inertia and conceptions of things by its activity.

[Sidenote: Things concretions of concretions.]

Ideas are mental sediment; conceived things are mental growths. A
concretion in discourse occurs by repetition and mere emphasis on a
datum, but a concretion in existence requires a synthesis of disparate
elements and relations. An idea is nothing but a sensation apperceived
and rendered cognitive, so that it envisages its own recognised
character as its object and ideal: yellowness is only some sensation of
yellow raised to the cognitive power and employed as the symbol for its
own specific essence. It is consequently capable of entering as a term
into rational discourse and of becoming the subject or predicate of
propositions eternally valid. A thing, on the contrary, is discovered
only when the order and grouping of such recurring essences can be
observed, and when various themes and strains of experience are woven
together into elaborate progressive harmonies. When consciousness first
becomes cognitive it frames ideas; but when it becomes cognitive of
causes, that is, when it becomes practical, it perceives things.

[Sidenote: Ideas prior in the order of knowledge, things in the order of
nature.]

Concretions of qualities recurrent in time and concretions of qualities
associated in existence are alike involved in daily life and
inextricably ingrown into the structure of reason. In consciousness and
for logic, association by similarity, with its aggregations and
identifications of recurrences in time, is fundamental rather than
association by contiguity and its existential syntheses; for
recognition identifies similars perceived in succession, and without
recognition of similars there could be no known persistence of
phenomena. But physiologically and for the observer association by
contiguity comes first. All instinct—without which there would be no
fixity or recurrence in ideation—makes movement follow impression in an
immediate way which for consciousness becomes a mere juxtaposition of
sensations, a juxtaposition which it can neither explain nor avoid. Yet
this juxtaposition, in which pleasure, pain, and striving are prominent
factors, is the chief stimulus to attention and spreads before the mind
that moving and variegated field in which it learns to make its first
observations. Facts—the burdens of successive moments—are all
associated by contiguity, from the first facts of perception and passion
to the last facts of fate and conscience. We undergo events, we grow
into character, by the subterraneous working of irrational forces that
make their incalculable irruptions into life none the less wonderfully
in the revelations of a man’s heart to himself than in the cataclysms of
the world around him. Nature’s placid procedure, to which we yield so
willingly in times of prosperity, is a concatenation of states which can
only be understood when it is made its own standard and law. A sort of
philosophy without wisdom may seek to subjugate this natural life, this
blind budding of existence, to some logical or moral necessity; but this
very attempt remains, perhaps, the most striking monument to that
irrational fatality that rules affairs, a monument which reason itself
is compelled to raise with unsuspected irony.

[Sidenote: Aristotle’s compromise.]

Reliance on external perception, constant appeals to concrete fact and
physical sanctions, have always led the mass of reasonable men to
magnify concretions in existence and belittle concretions in discourse.
They are too clever, as they feel, to mistake words for things. The most
authoritative thinker on this subject, because the most mature,
Aristotle himself, taught that things had reality, individuality,
independence, and were the outer cause of perception, while general
ideas, products of association by similarity, existed only in the mind.
The public, pleased at its ability to understand this doctrine and
overlooking the more incisive part of the philosopher’s teaching, could
go home comforted and believing that material things were primary and
perfect entities, while ideas were only abstractions, effects those
realities produced on our incapable minds. Aristotle, however, had a
juster view of general concepts and made in the end the whole material
universe gravitate around them and feel their influence, though in a
metaphysical and magic fashion to which a more advanced natural science
need no longer appeal. While in the shock of life man was always coming
upon the accidental, in the quiet of reflection he could not but recast
everything in ideal moulds and retain nothing but eternal natures and
intelligible relations. Aristotle conceived that while the origin of
knowledge lay in the impact of matter upon sense its goal was the
comprehension of essences, and that while man was involved by his animal
nature in the accidents of experience he was also by virtue of his
rationality a participator in eternal truth. A substantial justice was
thus done both to the conditions and to the functions of human life,
although, for want of a natural history inspired by mechanical ideas,
this dualism remained somewhat baffling and incomprehensible in its
basis. Aristotle, being a true philosopher and pupil of experience,
preferred incoherence to partiality.

[Sidenote: Empirical bias in favour of contiguity.]

Active life and the philosophy that borrows its concepts from practice
has thus laid a great emphasis on association by contiguity. Hobbes and
Locke made knowledge of this kind the only knowledge of reality, while
recognising it to be quite empirical, tentative, and problematical. It
was a kind of acquaintance with fact that increased with years and
brought the mind into harmony with something initially alien to it.
Besides this practical knowledge or prudence there was a sort of verbal
and merely ideal knowledge, a knowledge of the meaning and relation of
abstract terms. In mathematics and logic we might carry out long trains
of abstracted thought and analyse and develop our imaginations _ad
infinitum_. These speculations, however, were in the air or—what for
these philosophers is much the same thing—in the mind; their
applicability and their relevance to practical life and to objects given
in perception remained quite problematical. A self-developing science, a
synthetic science _a priori_, had a value entirely hypothetical and
provisional; its practical truth depended on the verification of its
results in some eventual sensible experience. Association was invoked to
explain the adjustment of ideation to the order of external perception.
Association, by which association by contiguity was generally
understood, thus became the battle-cry of empiricism; if association by
similarity had been equally in mind, the philosophy of pregnant reason
could also have adopted the principle for its own. But logicians and
mathematicians naturally neglect the psychology of their own processes
and, accustomed as they are to an irresponsible and constructive use of
the intellect, regard as a confused and uninspired intruder the critic
who, by a retrospective and naturalistic method, tries to give them a
little knowledge of themselves.

[Sidenote: Artificial divorce of logic from practice.]

Rational ideas must arise somehow in the mind, and since they are not
meant to be without application to the world of experience, it is
interesting to discover the point of contact between the two and the
nature of their interdependence. This would have been found in the
mind’s initial capacity to frame objects of two sorts, those compacted
of sensations that are persistently similar, and those compacted of
sensations that are momentarily fused. In empirical philosophy the
applicability of logic and mathematics remains a miracle or becomes a
misinterpretation: a miracle if the process of nature independently
follows the inward elaboration of human ideas; a misinterpretation if
the bias of intelligence imposes _a priori_ upon reality a character and
order not inherent in it. The mistake of empiricists—among which Kant
is in this respect to be numbered—which enabled them to disregard this
difficulty, was that they admitted, beside rational thinking, another
instinctive kind of wisdom by which men could live, a wisdom the
Englishmen called experience and the Germans practical reason, spirit,
or will. The intellectual sciences could be allowed to spin themselves
out in abstracted liberty while man practised his illogical and inspired
art of life.

Here we observe a certain elementary crudity or barbarism which the
human spirit often betrays when it is deeply stirred. Not only are
chance and divination welcomed into the world but they are reverenced
all the more, like the wind and fire of idolaters, precisely for not
being amenable to the petty rules of human reason. In truth, however,
the English duality between prudence and science is no more fundamental
than the German duality between reason and understanding.[A] The true
contrast is between impulse and reflection, instinct and intelligence.
When men feel the primordial authority of the animal in them and have
little respect for a glimmering reason which they suspect to be
secondary but cannot discern to be ultimate, they readily imagine they
are appealing to something higher than intelligence when in reality they
are falling back on something deeper and lower. The rudimentary seems to
them at such moments divine; and if they conceive a Life of Reason at
all they despise it as a mass of artifices and conventions. Reason is
indeed not indispensable to life, nor needful if living anyhow be the
sole and indeterminate aim; as the existence of animals and of most men
sufficiently proves. In so far as man is not a rational being and does
not live in and by the mind, in so far as his chance volitions and
dreamful ideas roll by without mutual representation or adjustment, in
so far as his body takes the lead and even his galvanised action is a
form of passivity, we may truly say that his life is not intellectual
and not dependent on the application of general concepts to experience;
for he lives by instinct.

[Sidenote: Their mutual involution.]

The Life of Reason, the comprehension of causes and pursuit of aims,
begins precisely where instinctive operation ceases to be merely such by
becoming conscious of its purposes and representative of its conditions.
Logical forms of thought impregnate and constitute practical intellect.
The shock of experience can indeed correct, disappoint, or inhibit
rational expectation, but it cannot take its place. The very first
lesson that experience should again teach us after our disappointment
would be a rebirth of reason in the soul. Reason has the indomitable
persistence of all natural tendencies; it returns to the attack as waves
beat on the shore. To observe its defeat is already to give it a new
embodiment. Prudence itself is a vague science, and science, when it
contains real knowledge, is but a clarified prudence, a description of
experience and a guide to life. Speculative reason, if it is not also
practical, is not reason at all. Propositions irrelevant to experience
may be correct in form, the method they are reached by may parody
scientific method, but they cannot be true in substance, because they
refer to nothing. Like music, they have no object. They merely flow, and
please those whose unattached sensibility they somehow flatter.

Hume, in this respect more radical and satisfactory than Kant himself,
saw with perfect clearness that reason was an ideal expression of
instinct, and that consequently no rational spheres could exist other
than the mathematical and the empirical, and that what is not a datum
must certainly be a construction. In establishing his “tendencies to
feign” at the basis of intelligence, and in confessing that he yielded
to them himself no less in his criticism of human nature than in his
practical life, he admitted the involution of reason—that
unintelligible instinct—in all the observations and maxims vouchsafed
to an empiricist or to a man. He veiled his doctrine, however, in a
somewhat unfair and satirical nomenclature, and he has paid the price of
that indulgence in personal humour by incurring the immortal hatred of
sentimentalists who are too much scandalised by his tone ever to
understand his principles.

[Sidenote: Rationalistic suicide.]

If the common mistake in empiricism is not to see the omnipresence of
reason in thought, the mistake of rationalism is not to admit its
variability and dependence, not to understand its natural life.
Parmenides was the Adam of that race, and first tasted the deceptive
kind of knowledge which, promising to make man God, banishes him from
the paradise of experience. His sin has been transmitted to his
descendants, though hardly in its magnificent and simple enormity. “The
whole is one,” Xenophanes had cried, gazing into heaven; and that same
sense of a permeating identity, translated into rigid and logical
terms, brought his sublime disciple to the conviction that an
indistinguishable immutable substance was omnipresent in the world.
Parmenides carried association by similarity to such lengths that he
arrived at the idea of what alone is similar in everything, viz., the
fact that it is. Being exists, and nothing else does; whereby every
relation and variation in experience is reduced to a negligible
illusion, and reason loses its function at the moment of asserting its
absolute authority. Notable lesson, taught us like so many others by the
first experiments of the Greek mind, in its freedom and insight, a mind
led quickly by noble self-confidence to the ultimate goals of thought.

Such a pitch of heroism and abstraction has not been reached by any
rationalist since. No one else has been willing to ignore entirely all
the data and constructions of experience, save the highest concept
reached by assimilations in that experience; no one else has been
willing to demolish all the scaffolding and all the stones of his
edifice, hoping still to retain the sublime symbol which he had planted
on the summit. Yet all rationalists have longed to demolish or to
degrade some part of the substructure, like those Gothic architects who
wished to hang the vaults of their churches upon the slenderest possible
supports, abolishing and turning into painted crystal all the dead walls
of the building. So experience and its crowning conceptions were to rest
wholly on a skeleton of general natures, physical forces being
assimilated to logical terms, and concepts gained by identification of
similars taking the place of those gained by grouping disparate things
in their historical conjunctions. These contiguous sensations, which
occasionally exemplify the logical contrasts in ideas and give them
incidental existence, were either ignored altogether and dismissed as
unmeaning, or admitted merely as illusions. The eye was to be trained to
pass from that parti-coloured chaos to the firm lines and permanent
divisions that were supposed to sustain it and frame it in.

Rationalism is a kind of builder’s bias which the impartial public
cannot share; for the dead walls and glass screens which may have no
function in supporting the roof are yet as needful as the roof itself to
shelter and beauty. So the incidental filling of experience which
remains unclassified under logical categories retains all its primary
reality and importance. The outlines of it emphasised by logic, though
they may be the essential vehicle of our most soaring thoughts, are only
a method and a style of architecture. They neither absorb the whole
material of life nor monopolise its values. And as each material imposes
upon the builder’s ingenuity a different type of construction, and
stone, wood, and iron must be treated on different structural
principles, so logical methods of comprehension, spontaneous though they
be in their mental origin, must prove themselves fitted to the natural
order and affinity of the facts.[B] Nor is there in this necessity any
violence to the spontaneity of reason: for reason also has manifold
forms, and the accidents of experience are more than matched in variety
by the multiplicity of categories. Here one principle of order and there
another shoots into the mind, which breeds more genera and species than
the most fertile terrestrial slime can breed individuals.

[Sidenote: Complementary character of essence and existence.]

Language, then, with the logic imbedded in it, is a repository of terms
formed by identifying successive perceptions, as the external world is a
repository of objects conceived by superposing perceptions that exist
together. Being formed on different principles these two orders of
conception—the logical and the physical—do not coincide, and the
attempt to fuse them into one system of demonstrable reality or moral
physics is doomed to failure by the very nature of the terms compared.
When the Eleatics proved the impossibility—_i.e._, the
inexpressibility—of motion, or when Kant and his followers proved the
unreal character of all objects of experience and of all natural
knowledge, their task was made easy by the native diversity between the
concretions in existence which were the object of their thought and the
concretions in discourse which were its measure. The two do not fit; and
intrenched as these philosophers were in the forms of logic they
compelled themselves to reject as unthinkable everything not fully
expressible in those particular forms. Thus they took their revenge upon
the vulgar who, being busy chiefly with material things and dwelling in
an atmosphere of sensuous images, call unreal and abstract every product
of logical construction or reflective analysis. These logical products,
however, are not really abstract, but, as we have seen, concretions
arrived at by a different method than that which results in material
conceptions. Whereas the conception of a thing is a local conglomerate
of several simultaneous sensations, logical entity is a homogeneous
revival in memory of similar sensations temporally distinct.

Thus the many armed with prejudice and the few armed with logic fight an
eternal battle, the logician charging the physical world with
unintelligibility and the man of common-sense charging the logical
world with abstractness and unreality. The former view is the more
profound, since association by similarity is the more elementary and
gives constancy to meanings; while the latter view is the more
practical, since association by contiguity alone informs the mind about
the mechanical sequence of its own experience. Neither principle can be
dispensed with, and each errs only in denouncing the other and wishing
to be omnivorous, as if on the one hand logic could make anybody
understand the history of events and the conjunction of objects, or on
the other hand as if cognitive and moral processes could have any other
terms than constant and ideal natures. The namable essence of things or
the standard of values must always be an ideal figment; existence must
always be an empirical fact. The former remains always remote from
natural existence and the latter irreducible to a logical principle.[C]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: This distinction, in one sense, is Platonic: but Plato’s
Reason was distinguished from understanding (which dealt with phenomenal
experience) because it was a moral faculty defining those values and
meanings which in Platonic nomenclature took the title of reality. The
German Reason was only imagination, substituting a dialectical or poetic
history of the world for its natural development. German idealism,
accordingly, was not, like Plato’s, a moral philosophy hypostasised but
a false physics adored.]

[Footnote B: This natural order and affinity is something imputed to the
ultimate object of thought—the reality—by the last act of judgment
assuming its own truth. It is, of course, not observable by
consciousness before the first experiment in comprehension has been
made; the act of comprehension which first imposes on the sensuous
material some subjective category is the first to arrive at the notion
of an objective order. The historian, however, has a well-tried and
mature conception of the natural order arrived at after many such
experiments in comprehension. From the vantage-ground of this latest
hypothesis, he surveys the attempts others have made to understand
events and compares them with the objective order which he believes
himself to have discovered. This observation is made here lest the
reader should confuse the natural order, imagined to exist before any
application of human categories, with the last conception of that order
attained by the philosopher. The latter is but faith, the former is
faith’s ideal object.]

[Footnote C: For the sake of simplicity only such ideas as precede
conceptions of things have been mentioned here. After things are
discovered, however, they may be used as terms in a second ideal
synthesis and a concretion in discourse on a higher plane may be
composed out of sustained concretions in existence. Proper names are
such secondary concretions in discourse. “Venice” is a term covering
many successive aspects and conditions, not distinguished in fancy,
belonging to an object existing continuously in space and time. Each of
these states of Venice constitutes a natural object, a concretion in
existence, and is again analysable into a mass of fused but recognisable
qualities—light, motion, beauty—each of which was an original
concretion in discourse, a primordial term in experience. A quality is
recognised by its own idea or permanent nature, a thing by its
constituent qualities, and an embodied spirit by fusion into an ideal
essence of the constant characters possessed by a thing. To raise
natural objects into historic entities it is necessary to repeat upon a
higher plane that concretion in discourse by which sensations were
raised to ideas. When familiar objects attain this ideal character they
have become poetical and achieved a sort of personality. They then
possess a spiritual status. Thus sensuous experience is solidified into
logical terms, these into ideas of things, and these, recast and smelted
again in imagination, into forms of spirit.]




CHAPTER VIII—ON THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THINGS AND IDEAS


[Sidenote: Moral tone of opinions derived from their logical principle.]

Those who look back upon the history of opinion for many centuries
commonly feel, by a vague but profound instinct, that certain
consecrated doctrines have an inherent dignity and spirituality, while
other speculative tendencies and other vocabularies seem wedded to all
that is ignoble and shallow. So fundamental is this moral tone in
philosophy that people are usually more firmly convinced that their
opinions are precious than that they are true. They may avow, in
reflective moments, that they may be in error, seeing that thinkers of
no less repute have maintained opposite opinions, but they are commonly
absolutely sure that if their own views could be generally accepted, it
would be a boon to mankind, that in fact the moral interests of the race
are bound up, not with discovering what may chance to be true, but with
discovering the truth to have a particular complexion. This predominant
trust in moral judgments is in some cases conscious and avowed, so that
philosophers invite the world to embrace tenets for which no evidence
is offered but that they chime in with current aspirations or
traditional bias. Thus the substance of things hoped for becomes, even
in philosophy, the evidence of things not seen.

Such faith is indeed profoundly human and has accompanied the mind in
all its gropings and discoveries; preference being the primary principle
of discrimination and attention. Reason in her earliest manifestations
already discovered her affinities and incapacities, and loaded the ideas
she framed with friendliness or hostility. It is not strange that her
latest constructions should inherit this relation to the will; and we
shall see that the moral tone and affinity of metaphysical systems
corresponds exactly with the primary function belonging to that type of
idea on which they are based. Idealistic systems, still cultivating
concretions in discourse, study the first conditions of knowledge and
the last interests of life; materialistic systems, still emphasising
concretions in existence, describe causal relations, and the habits of
nature. Thus the spiritual value of various philosophies rests in the
last instance on the kind of good which originally attached the mind to
that habit and plane of ideation.

[Sidenote: Concretions in discourse express instinctive reactions.]

We have said that perceptions must be recognised before they can be
associated by contiguity, and that consequently the fusion of temporally
diffused experiences must precede their local fusion into material
objects. It might be urged in opposition to this statement that concrete
objects can be recognised in practice before their general qualities
have been distinguished in discourse. Recognition may be instinctive,
that is, based on the repetition of a felt reaction or emotion, rather
than on any memory of a former occasion on which the same perception
occurred. Such an objection seems to be well grounded, for it is
instinctive adjustments and suggested action that give cognitive value
to sensation and endow it with that transitive force which makes it
consciously representative of what is past, future, or absent. If
practical instinct did not stretch what is given into what is meant,
reason could never recognise the datum for a copy of an ideal object.

[Sidenote: Idealism rudimentary.]

This description of the case involves an application or extension of our
theory rather than an argument against it. For where recognition is
instinctive and a familiar action is performed with absent-minded
confidence and without attending to the indications that justify that
action, there is in an eminent degree a qualitative concretion in
experience. Present impressions are merged so completely in structural
survivals of the past that instead of arousing any ideas distinct enough
to be objectified they merely stimulate the inner sense, remain imbedded
in the general feeling of motion or life, and constitute in fact a
heightened sentiment of pure vitality and freedom. For the lowest and
vaguest of concretions in discourse are the ideas of self and of an
embosoming external being, with the felt continuity of both; what Fichte
would call the Ego, the Non-Ego, and Life. Where no particular events
are recognised there is still a feeling of continuous existence. We
trail after us from our whole past some sense of the continuous energy
and movement both of our passionate fancies and of the phantasmagoria
capriciously at work beyond. An ignorant mind believes itself omniscient
and omnipotent; those impulses in itself which really represent the
inertia and unspent momentum of its last dream it regards as the
creative forces of nature.

The first lines of cleavage and the first recognisable bulks at which
attention is arrested are in truth those shadowy Fichtean divisions:
such are the rude beginnings of logical architecture. In its inability
to descry anything definite and fixed, for want of an acquired empirical
background and a distinct memory, the mind flounders forward in a dream
full of prophecies and wayward identifications. The world possesses as
yet in its regard only the superficial forms that appear in revery, it
has no hidden machinery, no third dimension in which unobserved and
perpetual operations are going on. Its only terms, in a word, are
concretions in discourse, ideas combined in their æsthetic and logical
harmonies, not in their habitual and efficacious conjunctions. The
disorder of such experience is still a spontaneous disorder; it has not
discovered how calculable are its unpremeditated shocks. The cataclysms
that occur seem to have only ideal grounds and only dramatic meaning.
Though the dream may have its terrors and degenerate at moments into a
nightmare, it has still infinite plasticity and buoyancy. What
perceptions are retained merge in those haunting and friendly presences,
they have an intelligible and congenial character because they appear as
parts and effluences of an inner fiction, evolving according to the
barbaric prosody of an almost infant mind.

This is the fairy-land of idealism where only the miraculous seems a
matter of course and every hint of what is purely natural is
disregarded, for the truly natural still seems artificial, dead, and
remote. New and disconcerting facts, which intrude themselves
inopportunely into the story, chill the currents of spontaneous
imagination and are rejected as long as possible for being alien and
perverse. Perceptions, on the contrary, which can be attached to the old
presences as confirmations or corollaries, become at once parts of the
warp and woof of what we call ourselves. They seem of the very substance
of spirit, obeying a vital momentum and flowing from the inmost
principle of being; and they are so much akin to human presumptions that
they pass for manifestations of necessary truth. Thus the demonstrations
of geometry being but the intent explication of a long-consolidated
ideal concretion which we call space, are welcomed by the mind as in a
sense familiar and as revelations of a truth implicit in the soul, so
that Plato could plausibly take them for recollections of prenatal
wisdom. But a rocket that bursts into sparks of a dozen colours, even if
expected, is expected with anxiety and observed with surprise; it
assaults the senses at an incalculable moment with a sensation
individual and new. The exciting tension and lively stimulus may please
in their way, yet the badge of the accidental and unmeaning adheres to
the thing. It is a trivial experience and one quickly forgotten. The
shock is superficial and were it repeated would soon fatigue. We should
retire with relief into darkness and silence, to our permanent and
rational thoughts.

[Sidenote: Naturalism sad.]

It is a remarkable fact, which may easily be misinterpreted, that while
all the benefits and pleasures of life seem to be associated with
external things, and all certain knowledge seems to describe material
laws, yet a deified nature has generally inspired a religion of
melancholy. Why should the only intelligible philosophy seem to defeat
reason and the chief means of benefiting mankind seem to blast our best
hopes? Whence this profound aversion to so beautiful and fruitful a
universe? Whence this persistent search for invisible regions and powers
and for metaphysical explanations that can explain nothing, while
nature’s voice without and within man cries aloud to him to look, act,
and enjoy? And when someone, in protest against such senseless oracular
prejudices, has actually embraced the life and faith of nature and
taught others to look to the natural world for all motives and
sanctions, expecting thus to refresh and marvellously to invigorate
human life, why have those innocent hopes failed so miserably? Why is
that sensuous optimism we may call Greek, or that industrial optimism we
may call American, such a thin disguise for despair? Why does each melt
away and become a mockery at the first approach of reflection? Why has
man’s conscience in the end invariably rebelled against naturalism and
reverted in some form or other to a cultus of the unseen?

[Sidenote: The soul akin to the eternal and ideal.]

We may answer in the words of Saint Paul: because things seen are
temporal and things not seen are eternal. And we may add, remembering
our analysis of the objects inhabiting the mind, that the eternal is the
truly human, that which is akin to the first indispensable products of
intelligence, which arise by the fusion of successive images in
discourse, and transcend the particular in time, peopling the mind with
permanent and recognisable objects, and strengthening it with a
synthetic, dramatic apprehension of itself and its own experience.
Concretion in existence, on the contrary, yields essentially detached
and empirical unities, foreign to mind in spite of their order, and
unintelligible in spite of their clearness. Reason fails to assimilate
in them precisely that which makes them real, namely, their presence
here and now, in this order and number. The form and quality of them we
can retain, domesticate, and weave into the texture of reflection, but
their existence and individuality remain a datum of sense needing to be
verified anew at every moment and actually receiving continual
verification or disproof while we live in this world.

“This world” we call it, not without justifiable pathos, for many other
worlds are conceivable and if discovered might prove more rational and
intelligible and more akin to the soul than this strange universe which
man has hitherto always looked upon with increasing astonishment. The
materials of experience are no sooner in hand than they are transformed
by intelligence, reduced to those permanent presences, those natures and
relations, which alone can live in discourse. Those materials,
rearranged into the abstract summaries we call history or science, or
pieced out into the reconstructions and extensions we call poetry or
religion, furnish us with ideas of as many dream-worlds as we please,
all nearer to reason’s ideal than is the actual chaos of perceptual
experience, and some nearer to the heart’s desire. When an empirical
philosophy, therefore, calls us back from the irresponsible flights of
imagination to the shock of sense and tries to remind us that in this
alone we touch existence and come upon fact, we feel dispossessed of our
nature and cramped in our life. The actuality possessed by external
experience cannot make up for its instability, nor the applicability of
scientific principles for their hypothetical character. The dependence
upon sense, which we are reduced to when we consider the world of
existences, becomes a too plain hint of our essential impotence and
mortality, while the play of logical fancy, though it remain inevitable,
is saddened by a consciousness of its own insignificance.

[Sidenote: Her inexperience.]

That dignity, then, which inheres in logical ideas and their affinity to
moral enthusiasm, springs from their congruity with the primary habits
of intelligence and idealisation. The soul or self or personality, which
in sophisticated social life is so much the centre of passion and
concern, is itself an idea, a concretion in discourse; and the level on
which it swims comes to be, by association and affinity, the region of
all the more vivid and massive human interests. The pleasures which lie
beneath it are ignored, and the ideals which lie above it are not
perceived. Aversion to an empirical or naturalistic philosophy
accordingly expresses a sort of logical patriotism and attachment to
homespun ideas. The actual is too remote and unfriendly to the dreamer;
to understand it he has to learn a foreign tongue, which his native
prejudice imagines to be unmeaning and unpoetical. The truth is,
however, that nature’s language is too rich for man; and the discomfort
he feels when he is compelled to use it merely marks his lack of
education. There is nothing cheaper than idealism. It can be had by
merely not observing the ineptitude of our chance prejudices, and by
declaring that the first rhymes that have struck our ear are the eternal
and necessary harmonies of the world.

[Sidenote: Platonism spontaneous.]

The thinker’s bias is naturally favourable to logical ideas. The man of
reflection will attribute, as far as possible, validity and reality to
these alone. Platonism remains the classic instance of this way of
thinking. Living in an age of rhetoric, with an education that dealt
with nothing but ideal entities, verbal, moral, or mathematical, Plato
saw in concretions in discourse the true elements of being. Definable
meanings, being the terms of thought, must also, he fancied, be the
constituents of reality. And with that directness and audacity which was
possible to the ancients, and of which Pythagoreans and Eleatics had
already given brilliant examples, he set up these terms of discourse,
like the Pythagorean numbers, for absolute and eternal entities,
existing before all things, revealed in all things, giving the cosmic
artificer his models and the creature his goal. By some inexplicable
necessity the creation had taken place. The ideas had multiplied
themselves in a flux of innumerable images which could be recognised by
their resemblance to their originals, but were at once cancelled and
expunged by virtue of their essential inadequacy. What sounds are to
words and words to thoughts, that was a thing to its idea.

[Sidenote: Its essential fidelity to the ideal.]

Plato, however, retained the moral and significant essence of his ideas,
and while he made them ideal absolutes, fixed meanings antecedent to
their changing expressions, never dreamed that they could be natural
existences, or psychological beings. In an original thinker, in one who
really thinks and does not merely argue, to call a thing supernatural,
or spiritual, or intelligible is to declare that it is no _thing_ at
all, no existence actual or possible, but a value, a term of thought, a
merely ideal principle; and the more its reality in such a sense is
insisted on the more its incommensurability with brute existence is
asserted. To express this ideal reality myth is the natural vehicle; a
vehicle Plato could avail himself of all the more freely that he
inherited a religion still plastic and conscious of its poetic essence,
and did not have to struggle, like his modern disciples, with the
arrested childishness of minds that for a hundred generations have
learned their metaphysics in the cradle. His ideas, although their
natural basis was ignored, were accordingly always ideal; they always
represented meanings and functions and were never degraded from the
moral to the physical sphere. The counterpart of this genuine ideality
was that the theory retained its moral force and did not degenerate into
a bewildered and idolatrous pantheism. Plato conceived the soul’s
destiny to be her emancipation from those material things which in this
illogical apparition were so alien to her essence. She should return,
after her baffling and stupefying intercourse with the world of sense
and accident, into the native heaven of her ideas. For animal desires
were no less illusory, and yet no less significant, than sensuous
perceptions. They engaged man in the pursuit of the good and taught him,
through disappointment, to look for it only in those satisfactions which
can be permanent and perfect. Love, like intelligence, must rise from
appearance to reality, and rest in that divine world which is the
fulfilment of the human.

[Sidenote: Equal rights of empiricism.]

A geometrician does a good service when he declares and explicates the
nature of the triangle, an object suggested by many casual and recurring
sensations. His service is not less real, even if less obvious, when he
arrests some fundamental concretion in discourse, and formulates the
first principles of logic. Mastering such definitions, sinking into the
dry life of such forms, he may spin out and develop indefinitely, in the
freedom of his irresponsible logic, their implications and congruous
extensions, opening by his demonstration a depth of knowledge which we
should otherwise never have discovered in ourselves. But if the geometer
had a fanatical zeal and forbade us to consider space and the triangles
it contains otherwise than as his own ideal science considers them:
forbade us, for instance, to inquire how we came to perceive those
triangles or that space; what organs and senses conspired in furnishing
the idea of them; what material objects show that character, and how
they came to offer themselves to our observation—then surely the
geometer would qualify his service with a distinct injury and while he
opened our eyes to one fascinating vista would tend to blind them to
others no less tempting and beautiful. For the naturalist and
psychologist have also their rights and can tell us things well worth
knowing; nor will any theory they may possibly propose concerning the
origin of spatial ideas and their material embodiments ever invalidate
the demonstrations of geometry. These, in their hypothetical sphere, are
perfectly autonomous and self-generating, and their applicability to
experience will hold so long as the initial images they are applied to
continue to abound in perception.

If we awoke to-morrow in a world containing nothing but music, geometry
would indeed lose its relevance to our future experience; but it would
keep its ideal cogency, and become again a living language if any
spatial objects should ever reappear in sense.

The history of such reappearances—natural history—is meantime a good
subject for observation and experiment. Chronicler and critic can always
approach experience with a method complementary to the deductive methods
pursued in mathematics and logic: instead of developing the import of a
definition, he can investigate its origin and describe its relation to
other disparate phenomena. The mathematician develops the import of
given ideas; the psychologist investigates their origin and describes
their relation to the rest of human experience. So the prophet develops
the import of his trance, and the theologian the import of the prophecy:
which prevents not the historian from coming later and showing the
origin, the growth, and the possible function of that maniacal sort of
wisdom. True, the theologian commonly dreads a critic more than does the
geometer, but this happens only because the theologian has probably not
developed the import of his facts with any austerity or clearness, but
has distorted that ideal interpretation with all sorts of concessions
and side-glances at other tenets to which he is already pledged, so that
he justly fears, when his methods are exposed, that the religious heart
will be alienated from him and his conclusions be left with no foothold
in human nature. If he had not been guilty of such misrepresentation, no
history or criticism that reviewed his construction would do anything
but recommend it to all those who found in themselves the primary
religious facts and religious faculties which that construction had
faithfully interpreted in its ideal deductions and extensions. All who
perceived the facts would thus learn their import; and theology would
reveal to the soul her natural religion, just as Euclid reveals to
architects and navigators the structure of natural space, so that they
value his demonstrations not only for their hypothetical cogency but
for their practical relevance and truth.

[Sidenote: Logic dependent on fact for its importance,]

Now, like the geometer and ingenuous theologian that he was, Plato
developed the import of moral and logical experience. Even his
followers, though they might give rein to narrower and more fantastic
enthusiasms, often unveiled secrets, hidden in the oracular intent of
the heart, which might never have been disclosed but for their lessons.
But with a zeal unbecoming so well grounded a philosophy they turned
their backs upon the rest of wisdom, they disparaged the evidence of
sense, they grew hot against the ultimate practical sanctions furnished
by impulse and pleasure, they proscribed beauty in art (where Plato had
proscribed chiefly what to a fine sensibility is meretricious ugliness),
and in a word they sought to abolish all human activities other than the
one pre-eminent in themselves. In revenge for their hostility the great
world has never given them more than a distrustful admiration and,
confronted daily by the evident truths they denied, has encouraged
itself to forget the truths they asserted. For they had the bias of
reflection and man is born to do more than reflect; they attributed
reality and validity only to logical ideas, and man finds other objects
continually thrusting themselves before his eyes, claiming his affection
and controlling his fortunes.

The most legitimate constructions of reason soon become merely
speculative, soon pass, I mean, beyond the sphere of practical
application; and the man of affairs, adjusting himself at every turn to
the opaque brutality of fact, loses his respect for the higher reaches
of logic and forgets that his recognition of facts themselves is an
application of logical principles. In his youth, perhaps, he pursued
metaphysics, which are the love-affairs of the understanding; now he is
wedded to convention and seeks in the passion he calls business or in
the habit he calls duty some substitute for natural happiness. He fears
to question the value of his life, having found that such questioning
adds nothing to his powers; and he thinks the mariner would die of old
age in port who should wait for reason to justify his voyage. Reason is
indeed like the sad Iphigenia whom her royal father, the Will, must
sacrifice before any wind can fill his sails. The emanation of all
things from the One involves not only the incarnation but the
crucifixion of the Logos. Reason must be eclipsed by its supposed
expressions, and can only shine in a darkness which does not comprehend
it. For reason is essentially hypothetical and subsidiary, and can never
constitute what it expresses in man, nor what it recognises in nature.

[Sidenote: and for its subsistence.]

If logic should refuse to make this initial self-sacrifice and to
subordinate itself to impulse and fact, it would immediately become
irrational and forfeit its own justification. For it exists by virtue
of a human impulse and in answer to a human need. To ask a man, in the
satisfaction of a metaphysical passion, to forego every other good is to
render him fanatical and to shut his eyes daily to the sun in order that
he may see better by the star-light. The radical fault of rationalism is
not any incidental error committed in its deductions, although such
necessarily abound in every human system. Its great original sin is its
denial of its own basis and its refusal to occupy its due place in the
world, an ignorant fear of being invalidated by its history and
dishonoured, as it were, if its ancestry is hinted at. Only bastards
should fear that fate, and criticism would indeed be fatal to a bastard
philosophy, to one that does not spring from practical reason and has no
roots in life. But those products of reason which arise by reflection on
fact, and those spontaneous and demonstrable systems of ideas which can
be verified in experience, and thus serve to render the facts calculable
and articulate, will lose nothing of their lustre by discovering their
lineage. So the idea of nature remains true after psychology has
analysed its origin, and not only true, but beautiful and beneficent.
For unlike many negligible products of speculative fancy it is woven out
of recurrent perceptions into a hypothetical cause from which further
perceptions can be deduced as they are actually experienced.

Such a mechanism once discovered confirms itself at every breath we
draw, and surrounds every object in history and nature with infinite
and true suggestions, making it doubly interesting, fruitful, and potent
over the mind. The naturalist accordingly welcomes criticism because his
constructions, though no less hypothetical and speculative than the
idealist’s dreams, are such legitimate and fruitful fictions that they
are obvious truths. For truth, at the intelligible level where it
arises, means not sensible fact, but valid ideation, verified
hypothesis, and inevitable, stable inference. If the idealist fears and
deprecates any theory of his own origin and function, he is only obeying
the instinct of self-preservation; for he knows very well that his past
will not bear examination. He is heir to every superstition and by
profession an apologist; his deepest vocation is to rescue, by some
logical _tour de force_, what spontaneously he himself would have taken
for a consecrated error. Now history and criticism would involve, as he
instinctively perceives, the reduction of his doctrines to their
pragmatic value, to their ideal significance for real life. But he
detests any admission of relativity in his doctrines, all the more
because he cannot avow his reasons for detesting it; and zeal, here as
in so many cases, becomes the cover and evidence of a bad conscience.
Bigotry and craft, with a rhetorical vilification of enemies, then come
to reinforce in the prophet that natural limitation of his interests
which turns his face away from history and criticism; until his system,
in its monstrous unreality and disingenuousness, becomes intolerable,
and provokes a general revolt in which too often the truth of it is
buried with the error in a common oblivion.

[Sidenote: Reason and docility.]

If idealism is intrenched in the very structure of human reason,
empiricism represents all those energies of the external universe which,
as Spinoza says, must infinitely exceed the energies of man. If
meditation breeds science, wisdom comes by disillusion, even on the
subject of science itself. Docility to the facts makes the sanity of
science. Reason is only half grown and not really distinguishable from
imagination so long as she cannot check and recast her own processes
wherever they render the moulds of thought unfit for their
subject-matter. Docility is, as we have seen, the deepest condition of
reason’s existence; for if a form of mental synthesis were by chance
developed which was incapable of appropriating the data of sense, these
data could not be remembered or introduced at all into a growing and
cumulative experience. Sensations would leave no memorial; while logical
thoughts would play idly, like so many parasites in the mind, and
ultimately languish and die of inanition. To be nourished and employed,
intelligence must have developed such structure and habits as will
enable it to assimilate what food comes in its way; so that the
persistence of any intellectual habit is a proof that it has some
applicability, however partial, to the facts of sentience.

[Sidenote: Applicable thought and clarified experience.]

This applicability, the prerequisite of significant thought, is also its
eventual test; and the gathering of new experiences, the consciousness
of more and more facts crowding into the memory and demanding
co-ordination, is at once the presentation to reason of her legitimate
problem and a proof that she is already at work. It is a presentation of
her problem, because reason is not a faculty of dreams but a method in
living; and by facing the flux of sensations and impulses that
constitute mortal life with the gift of ideal construction and the
aspiration toward eternal goods, she is only doing her duty and
manifesting what she is. To accumulate facts, moreover, is in itself to
prove that rational activity is already awakened, because a
consciousness of multitudinous accidents diversifying experience
involves a wide scope in memory, good methods of classification, and
keen senses, so that all working together they may collect many
observations. Memory and all its instruments are embodiments, on a
modest scale, of rational activities which in theory and speculation
reappear upon a higher level. The expansion of the mind in point of
retentiveness and wealth of images is as much an advance in knowledge as
is its development in point of organisation. The structure may be
widened at the base as well as raised toward its ideal summit, and while
a mass of information imperfectly digested leaves something still for
intelligence to do, it shows at the same time how much intelligence has
done already.

The function of reason is to dominate experience; and obviously
openness to new impressions is no less necessary to that end than is the
possession of principles by which new impressions may be interpreted.




CHAPTER IX—HOW THOUGHT IS PRACTICAL

[Sidenote: Functional relations of mind and body.]

Nothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of
experience than that animals should feel and think. The relation of mind
to body, of reason to nature, seems to be actually this: when bodies
have reached a certain complexity and vital equilibrium, a sense begins
to inhabit them which is focussed upon the preservation of that body and
on its reproduction. This sense, as it becomes reflective and expressive
of physical welfare, points more and more to its own persistence and
harmony, and generates the Life of Reason. Nature is reason’s basis and
theme; reason is nature’s consciousness; and, from the point of view of
that consciousness when it has arisen, reason is also nature’s
justification and goal.

To separate things so closely bound together as are mind and body,
reason and nature, is consequently a violent and artificial divorce, and
a man of judgment will instinctively discredit any philosophy in which
it is decreed. But to avoid divorce it is well first to avoid unnatural
unions, and not to attribute to our two elements, which must be
partners for life, relations repugnant to their respective natures and
offices. Now the body is an instrument, the mind its function, the
witness and reward of its operation. Mind is the body’s entelechy, a
value which accrues to the body when it has reached a certain
perfection, of which it would be a pity, so to speak, that it should
remain unconscious; so that while the body feeds the mind the mind
perfects the body, lifting it and all its natural relations and impulses
into the moral world, into the sphere of interests and ideas.

No connection could be closer than this reciprocal involution, as nature
and life reveal it; but the connection is natural, not dialectical. The
union will be denaturalised and, so far as philosophy goes, actually
destroyed, if we seek to carry it on into logical equivalence. If we
isolate the terms mind and body and study the inward implications of
each apart, we shall never discover the other. That matter cannot, by
transposition of its particles, _become_ what we call consciousness, is
an admitted truth; that mind cannot _become_ its own occasions or
determine its own march, though it be a truth not recognised by all
philosophers, is in itself no less obvious. Matter, dialectically
studied, makes consciousness seem a superfluous and unaccountable
addendum; mind, studied in the same way, makes nature an embarrassing
idea, a figment which ought to be subservient to conscious aims and
perfectly transparent, but which remains opaque and overwhelming. In
order to escape these sophistications, it suffices to revert to
immediate observation and state the question in its proper terms: nature
lives, and perception is a private echo and response to ambient motions.
The soul is the voice of the body’s interests; in watching them a man
defines the world that sustains him and that conditions all his
satisfactions. In discerning his origin he christens Nature by the
eloquent name of mother, under which title she enters the universe of
discourse. Simultaneously he discerns his own existence and marks off
the inner region of his dreams. And it behooves him not to obliterate
these discoveries. By trying to give his mind false points of attachment
in nature he would disfigure not only nature but also that reason which
is so much the essence of his life.

[Sidenote: They form one natural life.]

Consciousness, then, is the expression of bodily life and the seat of
all its values. Its place in the natural world is like that of its own
ideal products, art, religion, or science; it translates natural
relations into synthetic and ideal symbols by which things are
interpreted with reference to the interests of consciousness itself.
This representation is also an existence and has its place along with
all other existences in the bosom of nature. In this sense its
connection with its organs, and with all that affects the body or that
the body affects, is a natural connection. If the word cause did not
suggest dialectical bonds we might innocently say that thought was a
link in the chain of natural causes. It is at least a link in the chain
of natural events; for it has determinate antecedents in the brain and
senses and determinate consequents in actions and words. But this
dependence and this efficacy have nothing logical about them; they are
habitual collocations in the world, like lightning and thunder. A more
minute inspection of psycho-physical processes, were it practicable,
would doubtless disclose undreamed of complexities and harmonies in
them; the mathematical and dynamic relations of stimulus and sensation
might perhaps be formulated with precision. But the terms used in the
equation, their quality and inward habit, would always remain data which
the naturalist would have to assume after having learned them by
inspection. Movement could never be deduced dialectically or graphically
from thought nor thought from movement. Indeed no natural relation is in
a different case. Neither gravity, nor chemical reaction, nor life and
reproduction, nor time, space, and motion themselves are logically
deducible, nor intelligible in terms of their limits. The phenomena have
to be accepted at their face value and allowed to retain a certain
empirical complexity; otherwise the seed of all science is sterilised
and calculation cannot proceed for want of discernible and pregnant
elements.

How fine nature’s habits may be, where repetition begins, and down to
what depth a mathematical treatment can penetrate, is a question for
the natural sciences to solve. Whether consciousness, for instance,
accompanies vegetative life, or even all motion, is a point to be
decided solely by empirical analogy. When the exact physical conditions
of thought are discovered in man, we may infer how far thought is
diffused through the universe, for it will be coextensive with the
conditions it will have been shown to have. Now, in a very rough way, we
know already what these conditions are. They are first the existence of
an organic body and then its possession of adaptable instincts, of
instincts that can be modified by experience. This capacity is what an
observer calls intelligence; docility is the observable half of reason.
When an animal winces at a blow and readjusts his pose, we say he feels;
and we say he thinks when we see him brooding over his impressions, and
find him launching into a new course of action after a silent decoction
of his potential impulses. Conversely, when observation covers both the
mental and the physical process, that is, in our own experience, we find
that felt impulses, the conceived objects for which they make, and the
values they determine are all correlated with animal instincts and
external impressions. A desire is the inward sign of a physical
proclivity to act, an image in sense is the sign in most cases of some
material object in the environment and always, we may presume, of some
cerebral change. The brain seems to simmer like a caldron in which all
sorts of matters are perpetually transforming themselves into all sorts
of shapes. When this cerebral reorganisation is pertinent to the
external situation and renders the man, when he resumes action, more a
master of his world, the accompanying thought is said to be practical;
for it brings a consciousness of power and an earnest of success.

Cerebral processes are of course largely hypothetical. Theory suggests
their existence, and experience can verify that theory only in an
indirect and imperfect manner. The addition of a physical substratum to
all thinking is only a scientific expedient, a hypothesis expressing the
faith that nature is mechanically intelligible even beyond the reaches
of minute verification. The accompanying consciousness, on the other
hand, is something intimately felt by each man in his own person; it is
a portion of crude and immediate experience. That it accompanies changes
in his body and in the world is not an inference for him but a datum.
But when crude experience is somewhat refined and the soul, at first
mingled with every image, finds that it inhabits only her private body,
to whose fortunes hers are altogether wedded, we begin to imagine that
we know the cosmos at large better than the spirit; for beyond the
narrow limits of our own person only the material phase of things is
open to our observation. To add a mental phase to every part and motion
of the cosmos is then seen to be an audacious fancy. It violates all
empirical analogy, for the phenomenon which feeling accompanies in crude
experience is not mere material existence, but reactive organisation
and docility.

[Sidenote: Artifices involved in separating them.]

The limits set to observation, however, render the mental and material
spheres far from coincident, and even in a rough way mutually
supplementary, so that human reflection has fallen into a habit of
interlarding them. The world, instead of being a living body, a natural
system with moral functions, has seemed to be a bisectible hybrid, half
material and half mental, the clumsy conjunction of an automaton with a
ghost. These phases, taken in their abstraction, as they first forced
themselves on human attention, have been taken for independent and
separable facts. Experience, remaining in both provinces quite sensuous
and superficial, has accordingly been allowed to link this purely mental
event with that purely mechanical one. The linkage is practically not
deceptive, because mental transformations are indeed signs of changes in
bodies; and so long as a cause is defined merely as a sign, mental and
physical changes may truly be said to cause one another. But so soon as
this form of augury tries to overcome its crude empiricism and to
establish phenomenal laws, the mental factor has to fall out of the
efficient process and be represented there by what, upon accurate
examination, it is seen to be really the sign of—I mean by some
physiological event.

If philosophers of the Cartesian school had taken to heart, as the
German transcendentalists did, the _cogito ergo sum_ of their master,
and had considered that a physical world is, for knowledge, nothing but
an instrument to explain sensations and their order, they might have
expected this collapse of half their metaphysics at the approach of
their positive science: for if mental existence was to be kept standing
only by its supposed causal efficacy nothing could prevent the whole
world from becoming presently a _bête-machine._ Psychic events have no
links save through their organs and their objects; the function of the
material world is, indeed, precisely to supply their linkage. The
internal relations of ideas, on the other hand, are dialectical; their
realm is eternal and absolutely irrelevant to the march of events. If we
must speak, therefore, of causal relations between mind and body, we
should say that matter is the pervasive cause of mind’s distribution,
and mind the pervasive cause of matter’s discovery and value. To ask for
an efficient cause, to trace back a force or investigate origins, is to
have already turned one’s face in the direction of matter and mechanical
laws: no success in that undertaking can fail to be a triumph for
materialism. To ask for a justification, on the other hand, is to turn
no less resolutely in the direction of ideal results and actualities
from which instrumentality and further use have been eliminated. Spirit
is useless, being the end of things: but it is not vain, since it alone
rescues all else from vanity. It is called practical when it is
prophetic of its own better fulfilments, which is the case whenever
forces are being turned to good uses, whenever an organism is exploring
its relations and putting forth new tentacles with which to grasp the
world.

[Sidenote: Consciousness expresses vital equilibrium and docility.]

We saw in the beginning that the exigences of bodily life gave
consciousness its first articulation. A bodily feat, like nutrition or
reproduction, is celebrated by a festival in the mind, and consciousness
is a sort of ritual solemnising by prayer, jubilation, or mourning, the
chief episodes in the body’s fortunes. The organs, by their structure,
select the impressions possible to them from the divers influences
abroad in the world, all of which, if animal organisms had learned to
feed upon them, might plausibly have offered a basis for sensation.
Every instinct or habitual impulse further selects from the passing
bodily affections those that are pertinent to its own operation and
which consequently adhere to it and modify its reactive machinery.
Prevalent and notable sensations are therefore signs, presumably marking
the presence of objects important for the body’s welfare or for the
execution of its predestined offices. So that not only are the soul’s
aims transcripts of the body’s tendencies, but all ideas are grafted
upon the interplay of these tendencies with environing forces. Early
images hover about primary wants as highest conceptions do about
ultimate achievements.

[Sidenote: Its worthlessness as a cause and value as an expression]

Thought is essentially practical in the sense that but for thought no
motion would be an action, no change a progress; but thought is in no
way instrumental or servile; it is an experience realised, not a force
to be used. That same spontaneity in nature which has suggested a good
must be trusted to fulfil it. If we look fairly at the actual resources
of our minds we perceive that we are as little informed concerning the
means and processes of action as concerning the reason why our motives
move us. To execute the simplest intention we must rely on fate: our own
acts are mysteries to us. Do I know how I open my eyes or how I walk
down stairs? Is it the supervising wisdom of consciousness that guides
me in these acts? Is it the mind that controls the bewildered body and
points out the way to physical habits uncertain of their affinities? Or
is it not much rather automatic inward machinery that executes the
marvellous work, while the mind catches here and there some glimpse of
the operation, now with delight and adhesion, now with impotent
rebellion? When impulses work themselves out unimpeded we say we act;
when they are thwarted we say we are acted upon; but in neither case do
we in the least understand the natural history of what is occurring. The
mind at best vaguely forecasts the result of action: a schematic verbal
sense of the end to be accomplished possibly hovers in consciousness
while the act is being performed; but this premonition is itself the
sense of a process already present and betrays the tendency at work; it
can obviously give no aid or direction to the unknown mechanical process
that produced it and that must realise its own prophecy, if that
prophecy is to be realised at all.

That such an unknown mechanism exists, and is adequate to explain every
so-called decision, is indeed a hypothesis far outrunning detailed
verification, although conceived by legitimate analogy with whatever is
known about natural processes; but that the mind is not the source of
itself or its own transformations is a matter of present experience; for
the world is an unaccountable datum, in its existence, in its laws, and
in its incidents. The highest hopes of science and morality look only to
discovering those laws and bringing one set of incidents—facts of
perception—into harmony with another set—facts of preference. This
hoped-for issue, if it comes, must come about in the mind; but the mind
cannot be its cause since, by hypothesis, it does not possess the ideas
it seeks nor has power to realise the harmonies it desiderates. These
have to be waited for and begged of destiny; human will, not controlling
its basis, cannot possibly control its effects. Its existence and its
efforts have at best the value of a good omen. They show in what
direction natural forces are moving in so far as they are embodied in
given men.

[Sidenote: Thought’s march automatic and thereby implicated in events.]

Men, like all things else in the world, are products and vehicles of
natural energy, and their operation counts. But their conscious will, in
its moral assertiveness, is merely a sign of that energy and of that
will’s eventual fortunes. Dramatic terror and dramatic humour both
depend on contrasting the natural pregnancy of a passion with its
conscious intent. Everything in human life is ominous, even the
voluntary acts. We cannot, by taking thought, add a cubit to our
stature, but we may build up a world without meaning it. Man is as full
of potentiality as he is of impotence. A will that represents many
active forces, and is skilful in divination and augury, may long boast
to be almighty without being contradicted by the event.

[Sidenote: Contemplative essence of action.]

That thought is not self-directive appears best in the most immaterial
processes. In strife against external forces men, being ignorant of
their deeper selves, attribute the obvious effects of their action to
their chance ideas; but when the process is wholly internal the real
factors are more evenly represented in consciousness and the magical,
involuntary nature of life is better perceived. My hand, guided by I
know not what machinery, is at this moment adding syllable to syllable
upon this paper, to the general fulfilment, perhaps, of my felt intent,
yet giving that intent an articulation wholly unforeseen, and often
disappointing. The thoughts to be expressed simmer half-consciously in
my brain. I feel their burden and tendency without seeing their form,
until the mechanical train of impulsive association, started by the
perusal of what precedes or by the accidental emergence of some new
idea, lights the fuse and precipitates the phrases. If this happens in
the most reflective and deliberate of activities, like this of
composition, how much more does it happen in positive action, “The die
is cast,” said Caesar, feeling a decision in himself of which he could
neither count nor weigh the multitudinous causes; and so says every
strong and clear intellect, every well-formed character, seizing at the
same moment with comprehensive instinct both its purposes and the means
by which they shall be attained. Only the fool, whose will signifies
nothing, boasts to have created it himself.

We must not seek the function of thought, then, in any supposed power to
discover either ends not suggested by natural impulse or means to the
accomplishment of those irrational ends. Attention is utterly powerless
to change or create its objects in either respect; it rather registers
without surprise—for it expects nothing in particular—and watches
eagerly the images bubbling up in the living mind and the processes
evolving there. These processes are themselves full of potency and
promise; will and reflection are no more inconsequential than any other
processes bound by natural links to the rest of the world. Even if an
atomic mechanism suffices to mark the concatenation of everything in
nature, including the mind, it cannot rob what it abstracts from of its
natural weight and reality: a thread that may suffice to hold the pearls
together is not the whole cause of the necklace. But this pregnancy and
implication of thought in relation to its natural environment is purely
empirical. Since natural connection is merely a principle of arrangement
by which the contiguities of things may be described and inferred, there
is no difficulty in admitting consciousness and all its works into the
web and woof of nature. Each psychic episode would be heralded by its
material antecedents; its transformations would be subject to mechanical
laws, which would also preside over the further transition from thought
into its material expression.

[Sidenote: Mechanical efficacy alien to thought’s essence.]

This inclusion of mind in nature, however, is as far as possible from
constituting the mind’s function and value, or its efficacy in a moral
and rational sense. To have prepared changes in matter would give no
rationality to mind unless those changes in turn paved the way to some
better mental existence. The worth of natural efficacy is therefore
always derivative; the utility of mind would be no more precious than
the utility of matter; both borrow all their worth from the part they
may play empirically in introducing those moral values which are
intrinsic and self-sufficing. In so far as thought is instrumental it is
not worth having, any more than matter, except for its promise; it must
terminate in something truly profitable and ultimate which, being good
in itself, may lend value to all that led up to it. But this ultimate
good is itself consciousness, thought, rational activity; so that what
instrumental mentality may have preceded might be abolished without
loss, if matter suffices to sustain reason in being; or if that
instrumental mentality is worth retaining, it is so only because it
already contains some premonition and image of its own fulfilment. In a
word, the value of thought is ideal. The material efficacy which may be
attributed to it is the proper efficacy of matter—an efficacy which
matter would doubtless claim if we knew enough of its secret mechanism.
And when that imputed and incongruous utility was subtracted from ideas
they would appear in their proper form of expressions, realisations,
ultimate fruits.

[Sidenote: Consciousness transcendental.]

The incongruity of making thought, in its moral and logical essence, an
instrument in the natural world will appear from a different point of
view if we shift the discussion for a moment to a transcendental level.
Since the material world is an object for thought, and potential in
relation to immediate experience, it can hardly lie in the same plane of
reality with the thought to which it appears. The spectator on this side
of the foot-lights, while surely regarded by the play as a whole, cannot
expect to figure in its mechanism or to see himself strutting among the
actors on the boards. He listens and is served, being at once impotent
and supreme. It has been well said that

    Only the free divine the laws,
    The causeless only know the cause.

Conversely, what in such a transcendental sense is causeless and free
will evidently not be causal or determinant, being something altogether
universal and notional, without inherent determinations or specific
affinities. The objects figuring in consciousness will have implications
and will require causes; not so the consciousness itself. The Ego to
which all things appear equally, whatever their form or history, is the
ground of nothing incidental: no specific characters or order found in
the world can be attributed to its efficacy. The march of experience is
not determined by the mere fact that experience exists. Another
experience, differently logical, might be equally real. Consciousness is
not itself dynamic, for it has no body, no idiosyncrasy or particular
locus, to be the point of origin for definite relationships. It is
merely an abstract name for the actuality of its random objects. All
force, implication, or direction inhere in the constitution of specific
objects and live in their interplay. Logic is revealed to thought no
less than nature is, and even what we call invention or fancy is
generated not by thought itself but by the chance fertility of nebulous
objects, floating and breeding in the primeval chaos. Where the natural
order lapses, if it ever does, not mind or will or reason can possibly
intervene to fill the chasm—for these are parcels and expressions of
the natural order—but only nothingness and pure chance.

[Sidenote: and transcendent.]

Thought is thus an expression of natural relations, as will is of
natural affinities; yet consciousness of an object’s value, while it
declares the blind disposition to pursue that object, constitutes its
entire worth. Apart from the pains and satisfactions involved, an
impulse and its execution would be alike destitute of importance. It
would matter nothing how chaotic or how orderly the world became, or
what animal bodies arose or perished there; any tendencies afoot in
nature, whatever they might construct or dissolve, would involve no
progress or disaster, since no preferences would exist to pronounce one
eventual state of things better than another. These preferences are in
themselves, if the dynamic order alone be considered, works of
supererogation, expressing force but not producing it, like a statue of
Hercules; but the principle of such preferences, the force they express
and depend upon, is some mechanical impulse itself involved in the
causal process. Expression gives value to power, and the strength of
Hercules would have no virtue in it had it contributed nothing to art
and civilisation. That conceived basis of all life which we call matter
would be a mere potentiality, an inferred instrument deprived of its
function, if it did not actually issue in life and consciousness. What
gives the material world a legitimate status and perpetual pertinence in
human discourse is the conscious life it supports and carries in its own
direction, as a ship carries its passengers or rather as a passion
carries its hopes. Conscious interests first justify and moralise the
mechanisms they express. Eventual satisfactions, while their form and
possibility must be determined by animal tendencies, alone render these
tendencies vehicles of the good. The direction in which benefit shall
lie must be determined by irrational impulse, but the attainment of
benefit consists in crowning that impulse with its ideal achievement.
Nature dictates what men shall seek and prompts them to seek it; a
possibility of happiness is thus generated and only its fulfilment would
justify nature and man in their common venture.

[Sidenote: It is the seat of value.]

Satisfaction is the touchstone of value; without reference to it all
talk about good and evil, progress or decay, is merely confused
verbiage, pure sophistry in which the juggler adroitly withdraws
attention from what works the wonder—namely, that human and moral
colouring to which the terms he plays with owe whatever efficacy they
have. Metaphysicians sometimes so define the good as to make it a matter
of no importance; not seldom they give that name to the sum of all
evils. A good, absolute in the sense of being divorced from all natural
demand and all possible satisfaction, would be as remote as possible
from goodness: to call it good is mere disloyalty to morals, brought
about by some fantastic or dialectical passion. In excellence there is
an essential bias, an opposition to the possible opposite; this bias
expresses a mechanical impulse, a situation that has stirred the senses
and the will. Impulse makes value possible; and the value becomes actual
when the impulse issues in processes that give it satisfaction and have
a conscious worth. Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the
sanction of character.[D]

That thought is nature’s concomitant expression or entelechy, never one
of her instruments, is a truth long ago divined by the more judicious
thinkers, like Aristotle and Spinoza; but it has not met with general
acceptance or even consideration. It is obstructed by superficial
empiricism, which associates the better-known aspects of events directly
together, without considering what mechanical  bonds may secretly unite
them; it is obstructed also by the traditional mythical idealism, intent
as this philosophy is on proving nature to be the expression of
something ulterior and non-natural and on hugging the fatal
misconception that ideals and eventual goods are creative and miraculous
forces, without perceiving that it thereby renders goods and ideals
perfectly senseless; for how can anything be a good at all to which some
existing nature is not already directed? It may therefore be worth
while, before leaving this phase of the subject, to consider one or two
prejudices which might make it sound paradoxical to say, as we propose,
that ideals are ideal and nature natural.

[Sidenote: Apparent utility of pain]

[Sidenote: Its real impotence.]

Of all forms of consciousness the one apparently most useful is pain,
which is also the one most immersed in matter and most opposite to
ideality and excellence. Its utility lies in the warning it gives: in
trying to escape pain we escape destruction. That we desire to escape
pain is certain; its very definition can hardly go beyond the statement
that pain is that element of feeling which we seek to abolish on account
of its intrinsic quality. That this desire, however, should know how to
initiate remedial action is a notion contrary to experience and in
itself unthinkable. If pain could have cured us we should long ago have
been saved. The bitterest quintessence of pain is its helplessness, and
our incapacity to abolish it. The most intolerable torments are those
we feel gaining upon us, intensifying and prolonging themselves
indefinitely. This baffling quality, so conspicuous in extreme agony, is
present in all pain and is perhaps its essence. If we sought to describe
by a circumlocution what is of course a primary sensation, we might
scarcely do better than to say that pain is consciousness at once
intense and empty, fixing attention on what contains no character, and
arrests all satisfactions without offering anything in exchange. The
horror of pain lies in its intolerable intensity and its intolerable
tedium. It can accordingly be cured either by sleep or by entertainment.
In itself it has no resource; its violence is quite helpless and its
vacancy offers no expedients by which it might be unknotted and
relieved.

Pain is not only impotent in itself but is a sign of impotence in the
sufferer. Its appearance, far from constituting its own remedy, is like
all other organic phenomena subject to the law of inertia and tends only
to its own continuance. A man’s hatred of his own condition no more
helps to improve it than hatred of other people tends to improve them.
If we allowed ourselves to speak in such a case of efficacy at all, we
should say that pain perpetuates and propagates itself in various ways,
now by weakening the system, now by prompting convulsive efforts, now by
spreading to other beings through the contagion of sympathy or
vengeance. In fact, however, it merely betrays a maladjustment which
has more or less natural stability. It may be instantaneous only; by its
lack of equilibrium it may involve the immediate destruction of one of
its factors. In that case we fabulously say that the pain has
instinctively removed its own cause. Pain is here apparently useful
because it expresses an incipient tension which the self-preserving
forces in the organism are sufficient to remove. Pain’s appearance is
then the sign for its instant disappearance; not indeed by virtue of its
inner nature or of any art it can initiate, but merely by virtue of
mechanical associations between its cause and its remedy. The burned
child dreads the fire and, reading only the surface of his life, fancies
that the pain once felt and still remembered is the ground of his new
prudence. Punishments, however, are not always efficacious, as everyone
knows who has tried to govern children or cities by the rod; suffering
does not bring wisdom nor even memory, unless intelligence and docility
are already there; that is, unless the friction which the pain betrayed
sufficed to obliterate permanently one of the impulses in conflict. This
readjustment, on which real improvement hangs and which alone makes
“experience” useful, does not correspond to the intensity or repetition
of the pains endured; it corresponds rather to such a plasticity in the
organism that the painful conflict is no longer produced.

[Sidenote: Preformations involved.]

Threatened destruction would not involve pain unless that threatened
destruction were being resisted; so that the reaction which pain is
supposed to cause must already be taking place before pain can be felt.
A will without direction cannot be thwarted; so that inhibition cannot
be the primary source of any effort or of any ideal. Determinate
impulses must exist already for their inhibition to have taken place or
for the pain to arise which is the sign of that inhibition. The child’s
dread of the fire marks the acceleration of that impulse which, when he
was burned, originally enabled him to withdraw his hand; and if he did
not now shrink in anticipation he would not remember the pain nor know
to what to attach his terror. Sight now suffices to awaken the reaction
which touch at first was needed to produce; the will has extended its
line of battle and thrown out its scouts farther afield; and pain has
been driven back to the frontiers of the spirit. The conflicting
reactions are now peripheral and feeble; the pain involved in aversion
is nothing to that once involved in the burn. Had this aversion to fire
been innate, as many aversions are, no pain would have been caused,
because no profound maladjustment would have occurred. The surviving
attraction, checked by fear, is a remnant of the old disorganisation in
the brain which was the seat of conflicting reactions.

[Sidenote: Its untoward significance.]

To say that this conflict is the guide to its own issue is to talk
without thinking. The conflict is the sign of inadequate organisation,
or of non-adaptation in the given organism to the various stimuli which
irritate it. The reconstruction which follows this conflict, when it
indeed follows, is of course a new and better adaptation; so that what
involves the pain may often be a process of training which directs
reaction into new and smoother channels. But the pain is present whether
a permanent adaptation is being attained or not. It is present in
progressive dissolution and in hopeless and exhausting struggles far
more than in education or in profitable correction. Toothache and
sea-sickness, birth-pangs and melancholia are not useful ills. The
intenser the pain the more probable its uselessness. Only in vanishing
is it a sign of progress; in occurring it is an omen of defeat, just as
disease is an omen of death, although, for those diseased already,
medicine and convalescence may be approaches to health again. Where a
man’s nature is out of gear and his instincts are inordinate, suffering
may be a sign that a dangerous peace, in which impulse was carrying him
ignorantly into paths without issue, is giving place to a peace with
security in which his reconstructed character may respond without
friction to the world, and enable him to gather a clearer experience and
enjoy a purer vitality. The utility of pain is thus apparent only, and
due to empirical haste in collating events that have no regular nor
inward relation; and even this imputed utility pain has only in
proportion to the worthlessness of those who need it.

[Sidenote: Perfect function no unconscious.]

A second current prejudice which may deserve notice suggests that an
organ, when its function is perfect, becomes unconscious, so that if
adaptation were complete life would disappear. The well-learned routine
of any mechanical art passes into habit, and habit into unconscious
operation. The virtuoso is not aware how he manipulates his instrument;
what was conscious labour in the beginning has become instinct and
miracle in the end. Thus it might appear that to eliminate friction and
difficulty would be to eliminate consciousness, and therefore value,
from the world. Life would thus be involved in a contradiction and moral
effort in an absurdity; for while the constant aim of practice is
perfection and that of labour ease, and both are without meaning or
standard unless directed to the attainment of these ends, yet such
attainment, if it were actual, would be worthless, so that what alone
justifies effort would lack justification and would in fact be incapable
of existence. The good musician must strive to play perfectly, but,
alas, we are told, if he succeeded he would have become an automaton.
The good man must aspire to holiness, but, alas, if he reached holiness
his moral life would have evaporated.

These melodramatic prophecies, however, need not alarm us. They are
founded on nothing but rhetoric and small allegiance to any genuine
good. When we attain perfection of function we lose consciousness of the
medium, to become more clearly conscious of the result. The eye that
does its duty gives no report of itself and has no sense of muscular
tension or weariness; but it gives all the brighter and steadier image
of the object seen. Consciousness is not lost when focussed, and the
labour of vision is abolished in its fruition. So the musician, could he
play so divinely as to be unconscious of his body, his instrument, and
the very lapse of time, would be only the more absorbed in the harmony,
more completely master of its unities and beauty. At such moments the
body’s long labour at last brings forth the soul. Life from its
inception is simply some partial natural harmony raising its voice and
bearing witness to its own existence; to perfect that harmony is to
round out and intensify that life. This is the very secret of power, of
joy, of intelligence. Not to have understood it is to have passed
through life without understanding anything.

The analogy extends to morals, where also the means may be
advantageously forgotten when the end has been secured. That leisure to
which work is directed and that perfection in which virtue would be
fulfilled are so far from being apathetic that they are states of pure
activity, by containing which other acts are rescued from utter
passivity and unconsciousness. Impure feeling ranges between two
extremes: absolute want and complete satisfaction. The former limit is
reached in anguish, madness, or the agony of death, when the accidental
flux of things in contradiction has reached its maximum or vanishing
point, so that the contradiction and the flux themselves disappear by
diremption. Such feeling denotes inward disorganisation and a hopeless
conflict of reflex actions tending toward dissolution. The second limit
is reached in contemplation, when anything is loved, understood, or
enjoyed. Synthetic power is then at its height; the mind can survey its
experience and correlate all the motions it suggests. Power in the mind
is exactly proportionate to representative scope, and representative
scope to rational activity. A steady vision of all things in their true
order and worth results from perfection of function and is its index; it
secures the greatest distinctness in thought together with the greatest
decision, wisdom, and ease in action, as the lightning is brilliant and
quick. It also secures, so far as human energies avail, its own
perpetuity, since what is perfectly adjusted within and without lasts
long and goes far.

[Sidenote: Inchoate ethics.]

To confuse means with ends and mistake disorder for vitality is not
unnatural to minds that hear the hum of mighty workings but can imagine
neither the cause nor the fruits of that portentous commotion. All
functions, in such chaotic lives, seem instrumental functions. It is
then supposed that what serves no further purpose can have no value, and
that he who suffers no offuscation can have no feeling and no life. To
attain an ideal seems to destroy its worth. Moral life, at that low
level, is a fantastic game only, not having come in sight of humane and
liberal interests. The barbarian’s intensity is without seriousness and
his passion without joy. His philosophy, which means to glorify all
experience and to digest all vice, is in truth an expression of pathetic
innocence. It betrays a rudimentary impulse to follow every beckoning
hand, to assume that no adventure and no bewitchment can be anything but
glorious. Such an attitude is intelligible in one who has never seen
anything worth seeing nor loved anything worth loving. Immaturity could
go no farther than to acknowledge no limits defining will and happiness.
When such limits, however, are gradually discovered and an authoritative
ideal is born of the marriage of human nature with experience, happiness
becomes at once definite and attainable; for adjustment is possible to a
world that has a fruitful and intelligible structure.

Such incoherences, which might well arise in ages without traditions,
may be preserved and fostered by superstition. Perpetual servile
employments and subjection to an irrational society may render people
incapable even of conceiving a liberal life. They may come to think
their happiness no longer separable from their misery and to fear the
large emptiness, as they deem it, of a happy world. Like the prisoner of
Chillon, after so long a captivity, they would regain their freedom with
a sigh. The wholesome influences of nature, however, would soon revive
their wills, contorted by unnatural oppression, and a vision of
perfection would arise within them upon breathing a purer air. Freedom
and perfection are synonymous with life. The peace they bring is one

                       whose names are also rapture, power,
    Clear sight, and love; for these are parts of peace.

[Sidenote: Thought the entelechy of being.]

Thought belongs to the sphere of ultimate results. What, indeed, could
be more fitting than that consciousness, which is self-revealing and
transcendentally primary, should be its own excuse for being and should
contain its own total value, together with the total value of everything
else? What could be more proper than that the whole worth of ideas
should be ideal? To make an idea instrumental would be to prostitute
what, being self-existent, should be self-justifying. That continual
absoluteness which consciousness possesses, since in it alone all heaven
and earth are at any moment revealed, ought to convince any radical and
heart-searching philosopher that all values should be continually
integrated and realised there, where all energies are being momently
focussed. Thought is a fulfilment; its function is to lend utility to
its causes and to make actual those conceived and subterranean processes
which find in it their ultimate expression. Thought is nature
represented; it is potential energy producing life and becoming an
actual appearance.

[Sidenote: Its exuberance.]

The conditions of consciousness, however, are far from being its only
theme. As consciousness bears a transcendent relation to the dynamic
world (for it is actual and spiritual, while the dynamic is potential
and material) so it may be exuberant and irresponsibly rich. Although
its elements, in point of distribution and derivation, are grounded in
matter, as music is in vibrations, yet in point of character the result
may be infinitely redundant. The complete musician would devote but a
small part of his attention to the basis of music, its mechanism,
psychology, or history. Long before he had represented to his mind the
causes of his art, he would have proceeded to practise and enjoy it. So
sense and imagination, passion and reason, may enrich the soil that
breeds them and cover it with a maze of flowers.

The theme of consciousness is accordingly far more than the material
world which constitutes its basis, though this also is one of its
themes; thought is no less at home in various expressions and
embroideries with which the material world can be overlaid in
imagination. The material world is conceived by digging beneath
experience to find its cause; it is the efficacious structure and
skeleton of things. This is the subject of scientific retrospect and
calculation. The forces disclosed by physical studies are of course not
directed to producing a mind that might merely describe them. A force is
expressed in many other ways than by being defined; it may be felt,
resisted, embodied, transformed, or symbolised. Forces work; they are
not, like mathematical concepts, exhausted in description. From that
matter which might be describable in mechanical formulæ there issue
notwithstanding all manner of forms and harmonies, visible, audible,
imaginable, and passionately prized. Every phase of the ideal world
emanates from the natural and loudly proclaims its origin by the
interest it takes in natural existences, of which it gives a rational
interpretation. Sense, art, religion, society, express nature
exuberantly and in symbols long before science is added to represent, by
a different abstraction, the mechanism which nature contains.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote D: Aristippus asked Socrates “whether he knew anything good,
so that if he answered by naming food or drink or money or health or
strength or valour or anything of that sort, he might at once show that
it was sometimes an evil. Socrates, however, knew very well that if
anything troubles us what we demand is its cure, and he replied in the
most pertinent fashion. ‘Are you asking me,’ he said, ‘if I know
anything good for a fever?’ ‘Oh, no,’ said the other. ‘Or for sore
eyes?’ ‘Not that, either.’ ‘Or for hunger?’ ‘No, not for hunger.’ ‘Well,
then,’ said he, ‘if you ask me whether I know a good that is good for
nothing, I neither know it nor want to know it’”—Xenophon, Memorabilia,
iii., 8.]




CHAPTER X—THE MEASURE OF VALUES IN REFLECTION


[Sidenote: Honesty in hedonism.]

To put value in pleasure and pain, regarding a given quantity of pain as
balancing a given quantity of pleasure, is to bring to practical ethics
a worthy intention to be clear and, what is more precious, an undoubted
honesty not always found in those moralists who maintain the opposite
opinion and care more for edification than for truth. For in spite of
all logical and psychological scruples, conduct that should not justify
itself somehow by the satisfactions secured and the pains avoided would
not justify itself at all. The most instinctive and unavoidable desire
is forthwith chilled if you discover that its ultimate end is to be a
preponderance of suffering; and what arrests this desire is not fear or
weakness but conscience in its most categorical and sacred guise. Who
would not be ashamed to acknowledge or to propose so inhuman an action?

By sad experience rooted impulses may be transformed or even
obliterated. And quite intelligibly: for the idea of pain is already the
sign and the beginning of a certain stoppage. To imagine failure is to
interpret ideally a felt inhibition. To prophesy a check would be
impossible but for an incipient movement already meeting an incipient
arrest. Intensified, this prophecy becomes its own fulfilment and
totally inhibits the opposed tendency. Therefore a mind that foresees
pain to be the ultimate result of action cannot continue unreservedly to
act, seeing that its foresight is the conscious transcript of a recoil
already occurring. Conversely, the mind that surrenders itself wholly to
any impulse must think that its execution would be delightful. A
perfectly wise and representative will, therefore, would aim only at
what, in its attainment, could continue to be aimed at and approved; and
this is another way of saying that its aim would secure the maximum of
satisfaction eventually possible.

[Sidenote: Necessary qualifications.]

In spite, however, of this involution of pain and pleasure in all
deliberate forecast and volition, pain and pleasure are not the ultimate
sources of value. A correct psychology and logic cannot allow that an
eventual and, in strictness, unpresentable feeling, can determine any
act or volition, but must insist that, on the contrary, all beliefs
about future experience, with all premonition of its emotional quality,
is based on actual impulse and feeling; so that the source of value is
nothing but the inner fountain of life and imagination, and the object
of pursuit nothing but the ideal object, counterpart of the present
demand. Abstract satisfaction is not pursued, but, if the will and the
environment are constant, satisfaction will necessarily be felt in
achieving the object desired. A rejection of hedonistic psychology,
therefore, by no means involves any opposition to eudæmonism in ethics.
Eudæmonism is another name for wisdom: there is no other _moral_
morality. Any system that, for some sinister reason, should absolve
itself from good-will toward all creatures, and make it somehow a duty
to secure their misery, would be clearly disloyal to reason, humanity,
and justice. Nor would it be hard, in that case, to point out what
superstition, what fantastic obsession, or what private fury, had made
those persons blind to prudence and kindness in so plain a matter.
Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence
remains a mad and lamentable experiment. The question, however, what
happiness shall consist in, its complexion if it should once arise, can
only be determined by reference to natural demands and capacities; so
that while satisfaction by the attainment of ends can alone justify
their pursuit, this pursuit itself must exist first and be spontaneous,
thereby fixing the goals of endeavour and distinguishing the states in
which satisfaction might be found. Natural disposition, therefore, is
the principle of preference and makes morality and happiness possible.

[Sidenote: The will must judge.]

The standard of value, like every standard, must be one. Pleasures and
pains are not only infinitely diverse but, even if reduced to their
total bulk and abstract opposition, they remain two. Their values must
be compared, and obviously neither one can be the standard by which to
judge the other. This standard is an ideal involved in the judgment
passed, whatever that judgment may be. Thus when Petrarch says that a
thousand pleasures are not worth one pain, he establishes an ideal of
value deeper than either pleasure or pain, an ideal which makes a life
of satisfaction marred by a single pang an offence and a horror to his
soul. If our demand for rationality is less acute and the miscellaneous
affirmations of the will carry us along with a well-fed indifference to
some single tragedy within us, we may aver that a single pang is only
the thousandth part of a thousand pleasures and that a life so balanced
is nine hundred and ninety-nine times better than nothing. This
judgment, for all its air of mathematical calculation, in truth
expresses a choice as irrational as Petrarch’s. It merely means that, as
a matter of fact, the mixed prospect presented to us attracts our wills
and attracts them vehemently. So that the only possible criterion for
the relative values of pains and pleasures is the will that chooses
among them or among combinations of them; nor can the intensity of
pleasures and pains, apart from the physical violence of their
expression, be judged by any other standard than by the power they have,
when represented, to control the will’s movement.

[Sidenote: Injustice inherent in representation]

Here we come upon one of those initial irrationalities in the world
theories of all sorts, since they are attempts to find rationality in
things, are in serious danger of overlooking. In estimating the value of
any experience, our endeavour, our pretension, is to weigh the value
which that experience possesses when it is actual. But to weigh is to
compare, and to compare is to represent, since the transcendental
isolation and self-sufficiency of actual experience precludes its lying
side by side with another datum, like two objects given in a single
consciousness. Successive values, to be compared, must be represented;
but the conditions of representation are such that they rob objects of
the values they had at their first appearance to substitute the values
they possess at their recurrence. For representation mirrors
consciousness only by mirroring its objects, and the emotional reaction
upon those objects cannot be represented directly, but is approached by
indirect methods, through an imitation or assimilation of will to will
and emotion to emotion. Only by the instrumentality of signs, like
gesture or language, can we bring ourselves to reproduce in some measure
an absent experience and to feel some premonition of its absolute value.
Apart from very elaborate and cumulative suggestions to the contrary, we
should always attribute to an event in every other experience the value
which its image now had in our own. But in that case the pathetic
fallacy would be present; for a volitional reaction upon an idea in one
vital context is no index to what the volitional reaction would be in
another vital context upon the situation which that idea represents.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic and speculative cruelty.]

This divergence falsifies all representation of life and renders it
initially cruel, sentimental, and mythical. We dislike to trample on a
flower, because its form makes a kind of blossoming in our own fancy
which we call beauty; but we laugh at pangs we endured in childhood and
feel no tremor at the incalculable sufferings of all mankind beyond our
horizon, because no imitable image is involved to start a contrite
thrill in our own bosom. The same cruelty appears in æsthetic pleasures,
in lust, war, and ambition; in the illusions of desire and memory; in
the unsympathetic quality of theory everywhere, which regards the
uniformities of cause and effect and the beauties of law as a
justification for the inherent evils in the experience described; in the
unjust judgments, finally, of mystical optimism, that sinks so
completely into its subjective commotion as to mistake the suspension of
all discriminating and representative faculties for a true union in
things, and the blur of its own ecstasy for a universal glory. These
pleasures are all on the sensuous plane, the plane of levity and
unintentional wickedness; but in their own sphere they have their own
value. Æsthetic and speculative emotions make an important contribution
to the total worth of existence, but they do not abolish the evils of
that experience on which they reflect with such ruthless satisfaction.
The satisfaction is due to a private flood of emotion submerging the
images present in fancy, or to the exercise of a new intellectual
function, like that of abstraction, synthesis, or comparison. Such a
faculty, when fully developed, is capable of yielding pleasures as
intense and voluminous as those proper to rudimentary animal functions,
wrongly supposed to be more vital. The acme of vitality lies in truth in
the most comprehensive and penetrating thought. The rhythms, the sweep,
the impetuosity of impassioned contemplation not only contain in
themselves a great vitality and potency, but they often succeed in
engaging the lower functions in a sympathetic vibration, and we see the
whole body and soul rapt, as we say, and borne along by the harmonies of
imagination and thought. In these fugitive moments of intoxication the
detail of truth is submerged and forgotten. The emotions which would be
suggested by the parts are replaced by the rapid emotion of transition
between them; and this exhilaration in survey, this mountain-top
experience, is supposed to be also the truest vision of reality.
Absorption in a supervening function is mistaken for comprehension of
all fact, and this inevitably, since all consciousness of particular
facts and of their values is then submerged in the torrent of cerebral
excitement.

[Sidenote: Imputed values: their inconstancy.]

That luminous blindness which in these cases takes an extreme form is
present in principle throughout all reflection. We tend to regard our
own past as good only when we still find some value in the memory of it.
Last year, last week, even the feelings of the last five minutes, are
not otherwise prized than by the pleasure we may still have in recalling
them; the pulsations of pleasure or pain which they contained we do not
even seek to remember or to discriminate. The period is called happy or
unhappy merely as its ideal representation exercises fascination or
repulsion over the present will. Hence the revulsion after physical
indulgence, often most violent when the pleasure—judged by its
concomitant expression and by the desire that heralded it—was most
intense. For the strongest passions are intermittent, so that the
unspeakable charm which their objects possess for a moment is lost
immediately and becomes unintelligible to a chilled and cheated
reflection. The situation, when yet unrealised, irresistibly solicited
the will and seemed to promise incomparable ecstasy; and perhaps it
yields an indescribable moment of excitement and triumph—a moment only
half-appropriated into waking experience, so fleeting is it, and so
unfit the mind to possess or retain its tenser attitudes. The same
situation, if revived in memory when the system is in an opposite and
relaxed state, forfeits all power to attract and fills the mind rather
with aversion and disgust. For all violent pleasures, as Shakespeare
says, are cruel and not to be trusted.

    A bliss in proof and, proved, a very woe:
    Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream ...
    Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;
    Past reason hunted and, no sooner had,
    Past reason hated.

[Sidenote: Methods of control.]

Past reason, indeed. For although an impulsive injustice is inherent in
the very nature of representation and cannot be overcome altogether, yet
reason, by attending to all the evidences that can be gathered and by
confronting the first pronouncement by others fetched from every quarter
of experience, has power to minimise the error and reach a practically
just estimate of absent values. This achieved rightness can be tested by
comparing two experiences, each when it is present, with the same
conventional permanent object chosen to be their expression. A
love-song, for instance, can be pronounced adequate or false by various
lovers; and it can thus remain a sort of index to the fleeting
sentiments once confronted with it. Reason has, to be sure, no
independent method of discovering values. They must be rated as the
sensitive balance of present inclination, when completely laden, shows
them to stand. In estimating values reason is reduced to data furnished
by the mechanical processes of ideation and instinct, as in framing all
knowledge; an absent joy can only be represented by a tinge of emotion
dyeing an image that pictures the situation in which the joy was felt;
but the suggested value being once projected into the potential world,
that land of inferred being, this projection may be controlled and
corroborated by other suggestions and associations relevant to it, which
it is the function of reason to collect and compare. A right estimate of
absent values must be conventional and mediated by signs. Direct
sympathies, which suffice for instinctive present co-operation, fail to
transmit alien or opposite pleasures. They over-emphasise momentary
relations, while they necessarily ignore permanent bonds. Therefore the
same intellect that puts a mechanical reality behind perception must put
a moral reality behind sympathy.

[Sidenote: Example of fame.]

Fame, for example, is a good; its value arises from a certain movement
of will and emotion which is elicited by the thought that one’s name
might be associated with great deeds and with the memory of them. The
glow of this thought bathes the object it describes, so that fame is
felt to have a value quite distinct from that which the expectation of
fame may have in the present moment. Should this expectation be foolish
and destined to prove false, it would have no value, and be indeed the
more ludicrous and repulsive the more pleasure its dupe took in it, and
the longer his illusion lasted. The heart is resolutely set on its
object and despises its own phenomena, not reflecting that its emotions
have first revealed that object’s worth and alone can maintain it. For
if a man cares nothing for fame, what value has it?

This projection of interest into excellence takes place mechanically and
is in the first instance irrational. Did all glow die out from memory
and expectation, the events represented remaining unchanged, we should
be incapable of assigning any value to those events, just as, if eyes
were lacking, we should be incapable of assigning colour to the world,
which would, notwithstanding, remain as it is at present. So fame could
never be regarded as a good if the idea of fame gave no pleasure; yet
now, because the idea pleases, the reality is regarded as a good,
absolute and intrinsic. This moral hypostasis involved in the love of
fame could never be rationalised, but would subsist unmitigated or die
out unobserved, were it not associated with other conceptions and other
habits of estimating values. For the passions are humanised only by
being juxtaposed and forced to live together. As fame is not man’s only
goal and the realisation of it comes into manifold relations with other
interests no less vivid, we are able to criticise the impulse to pursue
it.

Fame may be the consequence of benefits conferred upon mankind. In that
case the abstract desire for fame would be reinforced and, as it were,
justified by its congruity with the more voluminous and stable desire to
benefit our fellow-men. Or, again, the achievements which insure fame
and the genius that wins it probably involve a high degree of vitality
and many profound inward satisfactions to the man of genius himself; so
that again the abstract love of fame would be reinforced by the
independent and more rational desire for a noble and comprehensive
experience. On the other hand, the minds of posterity, whose homage is
craved by the ambitious man, will probably have very false conceptions
of his thoughts and purposes. What they will call by his name will be,
in a great measure, a fiction of their own fancy and not his portrait at
all. Would Caesar recognise himself in the current notions of him, drawn
from some school-history, or perhaps from Shakespeare’s satirical
portrait? Would Christ recognise himself upon our altars, or in the
romances about him constructed by imaginative critics? And not only is
remote experience thus hopelessly lost and misrepresented, but even this
nominal memorial ultimately disappears.

The love of fame, if tempered by these and similar considerations, would
tend to take a place in man’s ideal such as its roots in human nature
and its functions in human progress might seem to justify. It would be
rationalised in the only sense in which any primary desire can be
rationalised, namely, by being combined with all others in a consistent
whole. How much of it would survive a thorough sifting and criticism,
may well remain in doubt. The result would naturally differ for
different temperaments and in different states of society. The wisest
men, perhaps, while they would continue to feel some love of honour and
some interest in their image in other minds, would yet wish that
posterity might praise them as Sallust praises Cato by saying: _Esse
quam videri bonus maluit_; he preferred worth to reputation.

[Sidenote: Disproportionate interest in the æsthetic.]

The fact that value is attributed to absent experience according to the
value experience has in representation appears again in one of the most
curious anomalies in human life—the exorbitant interest which thought
and reflection take in the form of experience and the slight account
they make of its intensity or volume. Sea-sickness and child-birth when
they are over, the pangs of despised love when that love is finally
forgotten or requited, the travail of sin when once salvation is
assured, all melt away and dissolve like a morning mist leaving a clear
sky without a vestige of sorrow. So also with merely remembered and not
reproducible pleasures; the buoyancy of youth, when absurdity is not yet
tedious, the rapture of sport or passion, the immense peace found in a
mystical surrender to the universal, all these generous ardours count
for nothing when they are once gone. The memory of them cannot cure a
fit of the blues nor raise an irritable mortal above some petty act of
malice or vengeance, or reconcile him to foul weather. An ode of Horace,
on the other hand, a scientific monograph, or a well-written page of
music is a better antidote to melancholy than thinking on all the
happiness which one’s own life or that of the universe may ever have
contained. Why should overwhelming masses of suffering and joy affect
imagination so little while it responds sympathetically to æsthetic and
intellectual irritants of very slight intensity, objects that, it must
be confessed, are of almost no importance to the welfare of mankind? Why
should we be so easily awed by artistic genius and exalt men whose works
we know only by name, perhaps, and whose influence upon society has been
infinitesimal, like a Pindar or a Leonardo, while we regard great
merchants and inventors as ignoble creatures in comparison? Why should
we smile at the inscription in Westminster Abbey which calls the
inventor of the spinning-jenny one of the _true_ benefactors of mankind?
Is it not probable, on the whole, that he has had a greater and less
equivocal influence on human happiness than Shakespeare with all his
plays and sonnets? But the cheapness of cotton cloth produces no
particularly delightful image in the fancy to be compared with Hamlet or
Imogen. There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly
deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

[Sidenote: Irrational religious allegiance.]

The same æsthetic bias appears in the moral sphere. Utilitarians have
attempted to show that the human conscience commends precisely those
actions which tend to secure general happiness and that the notions of
justice and virtue prevailing in any age vary with its social economy
and the prizes it is able to attain. And, if due allowance is made for
the complexity of the subject, we may reasonably admit that the precepts
of obligatory morality bear this relation to the general welfare; thus
virtue means courage in a soldier, probity in a merchant, and chastity
in a woman. But if we turn from the morality required of all to the type
regarded as perfect and ideal, we find no such correspondence to the
benefits involved. The selfish imagination intervenes here and
attributes an absolute and irrational value to those figures that
entertain it with the most absorbing and dreamful emotions. The
character of Christ, for instance, which even the least orthodox among
us are in the habit of holding up as a perfect model, is not the
character of a benefactor but of a martyr, a spirit from a higher world
lacerated in its passage through this uncomprehending and perverse
existence, healing and forgiving out of sheer compassion, sustained by
his inner affinities to the supernatural, and absolutely disenchanted
with all earthly or political goods. Christ did not suffer, like
Prometheus, for having bestowed or wished to bestow any earthly
blessing: the only blessing he bequeathed was the image of himself upon
the cross, whereby men might be comforted in their own sorrows, rebuked
in their worldliness, driven to put their trust in the supernatural, and
united, by their common indifference to the world, in one mystic
brotherhood. As men learned these lessons, or were inwardly ready to
learn them, they recognised more and more clearly in Jesus their
heaven-sent redeemer, and in following their own conscience and
desperate idealism into the desert or the cloister, in ignoring all
civic virtues and allowing the wealth, art, and knowledge of the pagan
world to decay, they began what they felt to be an imitation of Christ.

All natural impulses, all natural ideals, subsisted of course beneath
this theoretic asceticism, writhed under its unearthly control, and
broke out in frequent violent irruptions against it in the life of each
man as well as in the course of history. Yet the image of Christ
remained in men’s hearts and retained its marvellous authority, so that
even now, when so many who call themselves Christians, being pure
children of nature, are without the least understanding of what
Christianity came to do in the world, they still offer his person and
words a sincere if inarticulate worship, trying to transform that
sacrificial and crucified spirit, as much as their bungling fancy can,
into a patron of Philistia Felix. Why this persistent adoration of a
character that is the extreme negation of all that these good souls
inwardly value and outwardly pursue? Because the image of Christ and the
associations of his religion, apart from their original import, remain
rooted in the mind: they remain the focus for such wayward emotions and
mystic intuitions as their magnetism can still attract, and the value
which this hallowed compound possesses in representation is transferred
to its nominal object, and Christ is the conventional name for all the
impulses of religion, no matter how opposite to the Christian.

[Sidenote: Pathetic idealizations.]

Symbols, when their significance has been great, outlive their first
significance. The image of Christ was a last refuge to the world; it was
a consolation and a new ground for hope, from which no misfortune could
drive the worshipper. Its value as an idea was therefore immense, as to
the lover the idea of his untasted joys, or to the dying man the idea of
health and invigorating sunshine. The votary can no more ask himself
whether his deity, in its total operation, has really blessed him and
deserved his praise than the lover can ask if his lady is worth pursuing
or the expiring cripple whether it would be, in very truth, a benefit to
be once more young and whole. That life is worth living is the most
necessary of assumptions and, were it not assumed, the most impossible
of conclusions. Experience, by its passive weight of joy and sorrow, can
neither inspire nor prevent enthusiasm; only a present ideal will avail
to move the will and, if realised, to justify it. A saint’s halo is an
optical illusion; it glorifies his actions whatever their eventual
influence in the world, because they seem to have, when rehearsed
dramatically, some tenderness or rapture or miracle about them.

Thus it appears that the great figures of art or religion, together
with all historic and imaginative ideals, advance insensibly on the
values they represent. The image has more lustre than the original, and
is often the more important and influential fact. Things are esteemed as
they weigh in representation. A _memorable thing_, people say in their
eulogies, little thinking to touch the ground of their praise. For
things are called great because they are memorable, they are not
remembered because they were great. The deepest pangs, the highest joys,
the widest influences are lost to apperception in its haste, and if in
some rational moment reconstructed and acknowledged, are soon forgotten
again and cut off from living consideration. But the emptiest
experience, even the most pernicious tendency, if embodied in a
picturesque image, if reverberating in the mind with a pleasant echo, is
idolised and enshrined. Fortunate indeed was Achilles that Homer sang of
him, and fortunate the poets that make a public titillation out of their
sorrows and ignorance. This imputed and posthumous fortune is the only
happiness they have. The favours of memory are extended to those feeble
realities and denied to the massive substance of daily experience. When
life dies, when what was present becomes a memory, its ghost flits still
among the living, feared or worshipped not for the experience it once
possessed but for the aspect it now wears. Yet this injustice in
representation, speculatively so offensive, is practically excusable;
for it is in one sense right and useful that all things, whatever their
original or inherent dignity, should be valued at each moment only by
their present function and utility.

[Sidenote: Inevitable impulsiveness in prophecy.]

[Sidenote: The test a controlled present ideal.]

The error involved in attributing value to the past is naturally
aggravated when values are to be assigned to the future. In the latter
case imagination cannot be controlled by circumstantial evidence, and is
consequently the only basis for judgment. But as the conception of a
thing naturally evokes an emotion different from that involved in its
presence, ideals of what is desirable for the future contain no warrant
that the experience desired would, when actual, prove to be acceptable
and good. An ideal carries no extrinsic assurance that its realisation
would be a benefit. To convince ourselves that an ideal has rational
authority and represents a better experience than the actual condition
it is contrasted with, we must control the prophetic image by as many
circumlocutions as possible. As in the case of fame, we must buttress or
modify our spontaneous judgment with all the other judgments that the
object envisaged can prompt: we must make our ideal harmonise with all
experience rather than with a part only. The possible error remains even
then; but a practical mind will always accept the risk of error when it
has made every possible correction. A rational will is not a will that
has reason for its basis or that possesses any other proof that its
realisation would be possible or good than the oracle which a living
will inspires and pronounces. The rationality possible to the will lies
not in its source but in its method. An ideal cannot wait for its
realisation to prove its validity. To deserve adhesion it needs only to
be adequate as an ideal, that is, to express completely what the soul at
present demands, and to do justice to all extant interests.




CHAPTER XI—SOME ABSTRACT CONDITIONS OF THE IDEAL


[Sidenote: The ultimate end a resultant.]

Reason’s function is to embody the good, but the test of excellence is
itself ideal; therefore before we can assure ourselves that reason has
been manifested in any given case we must make out the reasonableness of
the ideal that inspires us. And in general, before we can convince
ourselves that a Life of Reason, or practice guided by science and
directed toward spiritual goods, is at all worth having, we must make
out the possibility and character of its ultimate end. Yet each ideal is
its own justification; so that the only sense in which an ultimate end
can be established and become a test of general progress is this: that a
harmony and co-operation of impulses should be conceived, leading to the
maximum satisfaction possible in the whole community of spirits affected
by our action. Now, without considering for the present any concrete
Utopia, such, for instance, as Plato’s Republic or the heavenly
beatitude described by theologians, we may inquire what formal qualities
are imposed on the ideal by its nature and function and by the relation
it bears to experience and to desire.

[Sidenote: Demands the substance of ideals.]

The ideal has the same relation to given demands that the reality has to
given perceptions. In the face of the ideal, particular demands forfeit
their authority and the goods to which a particular being may aspire
cease to be absolute; nay, the satisfaction of desire comes to appear an
indifferent or unholy thing when compared or opposed to the ideal to be
realised. So, precisely, in perception, flying impressions come to be
regarded as illusory when contrasted with a stable conception of
reality. Yet of course flying impressions are the only material out of
which that conception can be formed. Life itself is a flying impression,
and had we no personal and instant experience, importuning us at each
successive moment, we should have no occasion to ask for a reality at
all, and no materials out of which to construct so gratuitous an idea.
In the same way present demands are the only materials and occasions for
any ideal: without demands the ideal would have no _locus standi_ or
foothold in the world, no power, no charm, and no prerogative. If the
ideal can confront particular desires and put them to shame, that
happens only because the ideal is the object of a more profound and
voluminous desire and embodies the good which they blindly and perhaps
deviously pursue. Demands could not be misdirected, goods sought could
not be false, if the standard by which they are to be corrected were
not constructed out of them. Otherwise each demand would render its
object a detached, absolute, and unimpeachable good. But when each
desire in turn has singed its wings and retired before some disillusion,
reflection may set in to suggest residual satisfactions that may still
be possible, or some shifting of the ground by which much of what was
hoped for may yet be attained.

[Sidenote: Discipline of the will.]

[Sidenote: Demands made practical and consistent.]

The force for this new trial is but the old impulse renewed; this new
hope is a justified remnant of the old optimism. Each passion, in this
second campaign, takes the field conscious that it has indomitable
enemies and ready to sign a reasonable peace, and even to capitulate
before superior forces. Such tameness may be at first merely a
consequence of exhaustion and prudence; but a mortal will, though
absolute in its deliverances, is very far from constant, and its
sacrifices soon constitute a habit, its exile a new home. The old
ambition, now proved to be unrealisable, begins to seem capricious and
extravagant; the circle of possible satisfactions becomes the field of
conventional happiness. Experience, which brings about this humbler and
more prosaic state of mind, has its own imaginative fruits. Among those
forces which compelled each particular impulse to abate its pretensions,
the most conspicuous were other impulses, other interests active in
oneself and in one’s neighbours. When the power of these alien demands
is recognised they begin, in a physical way, to be respected; when an
adjustment to them is sought they begin to be understood, for it is only
by studying their expression and tendency that the degree of their
hostility can be measured. But to understand is more than to forgive, it
is to adopt; and the passion that thought merely to withdraw into a
sullen and maimed self-indulgence can feel itself expanded by sympathies
which in its primal vehemence it would have excluded altogether.
Experience, in bringing humility, brings intelligence also. Personal
interests begin to seem relative, factors only in a general voluminous
welfare expressed in many common institutions and arts, moulds for
whatever is communicable or rational in every passion. Each original
impulse, when trimmed down more or less according to its degree of
savageness, can then inhabit the state, and every good, when
sufficiently transfigured, can be found again in the general ideal. The
factors may indeed often be unrecognisable in the result, so much does
the process of domestication transform them; but the interests that
animated them survive this discipline and the new purpose is really
esteemed; else the ideal would have no moral force. An ideal
representing no living interest would be irrelevant to practice, just as
a conception of reality would be irrelevant to perception which should
not be composed of the materials that sense supplies, or should not
re-embody actual sensations in an intelligible system.

[Sidenote: The ideal natural.]

Here we have, then, one condition which the ideal must fulfil: it must
be a resultant or synthesis of impulses already afoot. An ideal out of
relation to the actual demands of living beings is so far from being an
ideal that it is not even a good. The pursuit of it would be not the
acme but the atrophy of moral endeavour. Mysticism and asceticism run
into this danger, when the intent to be faithful to a supreme good too
symbolically presented breeds a superstitious repugnance toward
everything naturally prized. So also an artificial scepticism can regard
all experience as deceptive, by contrasting it with the chimera of an
absolute reality. As an absolute reality would be indescribable and
without a function in the elucidation of phenomena, so a supreme good
which was good for nobody would be without conceivable value. Respect
for such an idol is a dialectical superstition; and if zeal for that
shibboleth should actually begin to inhibit the exercise of intelligent
choice or the development of appreciation for natural pleasures, it
would constitute a reversal of the Life of Reason which, if persistently
indulged in, could only issue in madness or revert to imbecility.

[Sidenote: Need of unity and finality.]

[Sidenote: Ideals of nothing.]

No less important, however, than this basis which the ideal must have in
extant demands, is the harmony with which reason must endow it. If
without the one the ideal loses its value, without the other it loses
its finality. Human nature is fluid and imperfect; its demands are
expressed in incidental desires, elicited by a variety of objects which
perhaps cannot coexist in the world. If we merely transcribe these
miscellaneous demands or allow these floating desires to dictate to us
the elements of the ideal, we shall never come to a Whole or to an End.
One new fancy after another will seem an embodiment of perfection, and
we shall contradict each expression of our ideal by every other. A
certain school of philosophy—if we may give that name to the systematic
neglect of reason—has so immersed itself in the contemplation of this
sort of inconstancy, which is indeed prevalent enough in the world, that
it has mistaken it for a normal and necessary process. The greatness of
the ideal has been put in its vagueness and in an elasticity which makes
it wholly indeterminate and inconsistent. The goal of progress, beside
being thus made to lie at every point of the compass in succession, is
removed to an infinite distance, whereby the possibility of attaining it
is denied and progress itself is made illusory. For a progress must be
directed to attaining some definite type of life, the counterpart of a
given natural endowment, and nothing can be called an improvement which
does not contain an appreciable benefit. A victory would be a mockery
that left us, for some new reason, as much impeded as before and as far
removed from peace.

The picture of life as an eternal war for illusory ends was drawn at
first by satirists, unhappily with too much justification in the facts.
Some grosser minds, too undisciplined to have ever pursued a good either
truly attainable or truly satisfactory, then proceeded to mistake that
satire on human folly for a sober account of the whole universe; and
finally others were not ashamed to represent it as the ideal itself—so
soon is the dyer’s hand subdued to what it works in. A barbarous mind
cannot conceive life, like health, as a harmony continually preserved or
restored, and containing those natural and ideal activities which
disease merely interrupts. Such a mind, never having tasted order,
cannot conceive it, and identifies progress with new conflicts and life
with continual death. Its deification of unreason, instability, and
strife comes partly from piety and partly from inexperience. There is
piety in saluting nature in her perpetual flux and in thinking that
since no equilibrium is maintained for ever none, perhaps, deserves to
be. There is inexperience in not considering that wherever interests and
judgments exist, the natural flux has fallen, so to speak, into a
vortex, and created a natural good, a cumulative life, and an ideal
purpose. Art, science, government, human nature itself, are
self-defining and self-preserving: by partly fixing a structure they fix
an ideal. But the barbarian can hardly regard such things, for to have
distinguished and fostered them would be to have founded a civilisation.

[Sidenote: Darwin on moral sense.]

Reason’s function in defining the ideal is in principle extremely
simple, although all time and all existence would have to be gathered in
before the applications of that principle could be exhausted. A better
example of its essential working could hardly be found than one which
Darwin gives to illustrate the natural origin of moral sense. A swallow,
impelled by migratory instincts to leave a nest full of unfledged young,
would endure a moral conflict. The more lasting impulse, memory being
assumed, would prompt a moral judgment when it emerged again after being
momentarily obscured by an intermittent passion. “While the mother bird
is feeding or brooding over her nestlings, the maternal instinct is
probably stronger than the migratory; but the instinct which is more
persistent gains the victory, and at last, at a moment when her young
ones are not in sight, she takes flight and deserts them. When arrived
at the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct ceases to
act, what an agony of remorse each bird would feel if, from being
endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image
continually passing before her mind of her young ones perishing in the
bleak north from cold and hunger.”[E] She would doubtless upbraid
herself, like any sinner, for a senseless perfidy to her own dearest
good. The perfidy, however, was not wholly senseless, because the
forgotten instinct was not less natural and necessary than the
remembered one, and its satisfaction no less true. Temptation has the
same basis as duty. The difference is one of volume and permanence in
the rival satisfactions, and the attitude conscience will assume toward
these depends more on the representability of the demands compared than
on their original vehemence or ultimate results.

[Sidenote: Conscience and reason compared.]

A passionate conscience may thus arise in the play of impulses differing
in permanence, without involving a judicial exercise of reason. Nor does
such a conscience involve a synthetic ideal, but only the ideal presence
of particular demands. Conflicts in the conscience are thus quite
natural and would continually occur but for the narrowness that commonly
characterises a mind inspired by passion. A life of sin and repentance
is as remote as possible from a Life of Reason. Yet the same situation
which produces conscience and the sense of duty is an occasion for
applying reason to action and for forming an ideal, so soon as the
demands and satisfactions concerned are synthesised and balanced
imaginatively. The stork might do more than feel the conflict of his two
impulses, he might do more than embody in alternation the eloquence of
two hostile thoughts. He might pass judgment upon them impartially and,
in the felt presence of both, conceive what might be a union or
compromise between them.

This resultant object of pursuit, conceived in reflection and in itself
the initial goal of neither impulse, is the ideal of a mind occupied by
the two: it is the aim prescribed by reason under the circumstances. It
differs from the prescription of conscience, in that conscience is often
the spokesman of one interest or of a group of interests in opposition
to other primary impulses which it would annul altogether; while reason
and the ideal are not active forces nor embodiments of passion at all,
but merely a method by which objects of desire are compared in
reflection. The goodness of an end is felt inwardly by conscience; by
reason it can be only taken upon trust and registered as a fact. For
conscience the object of an opposed will is an evil, for reason it is a
good on the same ground as any other good, because it is pursued by a
natural impulse and can bring a real satisfaction. Conscience, in fine,
is a party to moral strife, reason an observer of it who, however, plays
the most important and beneficent part in the outcome by suggesting the
terms of peace. This suggested peace, inspired by sympathy and by
knowledge of the world, is the ideal, which borrows its value and
practical force from the irrational impulses which it embodies, and
borrows its final authority from the truth with which it recognises them
all and the necessity by which it imposes on each such sacrifices as are
requisite to a general harmony.

[Sidenote: Reason imposes no new sacrifice.]

Could each impulse, apart from reason, gain perfect satisfaction,
it would doubtless laugh at justice. The divine, to exercise
suasion, must use an _argumentum ad hominem_; reason must justify
itself to the heart. But perfect satisfaction is what an
irresponsible impulse can never hope for: all other impulses,
though absent perhaps from the mind, are none the less present in
nature and have possession of the field through their physical
basis. They offer effectual resistance to a reckless intruder. To
disregard them is therefore to gain nothing: reason, far from
creating the partial renunciation and proportionate sacrifices
which it imposes, really minimises them by making them voluntary
and fruitful. The ideal, which may seem to wear so severe a frown,
really fosters all possible pleasures; what it retrenches is
nothing to what blind forces and natural catastrophes would
otherwise cut off; while it sweetens what it sanctions, adding to
spontaneous enjoyments a sense of moral security and an
intellectual light.

[Sidenote: Natural goods attainable and compatible in principle.]

Those who are guided only by an irrational conscience can hardly
understand what a good life would be. Their Utopias have to be
supernatural in order that the irresponsible rules which they call
morality may lead by miracle to happy results. But such a magical and
undeserved happiness, if it were possible, would be unsavoury: only one
phase of human nature would be satisfied by it, and so impoverished an
ideal cannot really attract the will. For human nature has been moulded
by the same natural forces among which its ideal has to be fulfilled,
and, apart from a certain margin of wild hopes and extravagances, the
things man’s heart desires are attainable under his natural conditions
and would not be attainable elsewhere. The conflict of desires and
interests in the world is not radical any more than man’s
dissatisfaction with his own nature can be; for every particular ideal,
being an expression of human nature in operation, must in the end
involve the primary human faculties and cannot be essentially
incompatible with any other ideal which involves them too.

To adjust all demands to one ideal and adjust that ideal to its natural
conditions—in other words, to live the Life of Reason—is something
perfectly possible; for those demands, being akin to one another in
spite of themselves, can be better furthered by co-operation than by
blind conflict, while the ideal, far from demanding any profound
revolution in nature, merely expresses her actual tendency and forecasts
what her perfect functioning would be.

[Sidenote: Harmony the formal and intrinsic demand of reason.]

Reason as such represents or rather constitutes a single formal
interest, the interest in harmony. When two interests are simultaneous
and fall within one act of apprehension the desirability of harmonising
them is involved in the very effort to realise them together. If
attention and imagination are steady enough to face this implication
and not to allow impulse to oscillate between irreconcilable tendencies,
reason comes into being. Henceforth things actual and things desired are
confronted by an ideal which has both pertinence and authority.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Descent of Man, chapter iii.]




CHAPTER XII—FLUX AND CONSTANCY IN HUMAN NATURE


[Sidenote: Respectable tradition that human nature is fixed.]

A conception of something called human nature arises not unnaturally on
observing the passions of men, passions which under various disguises
seem to reappear in all ages and countries. The tendency of Greek
philosophy, with its insistence on general concepts, was to define this
idea of human nature still further and to encourage the belief that a
single and identical essence, present in all men, determined their
powers and ideal destiny. Christianity, while it transposed the human
ideal and dwelt on the superhuman affinities of man, did not abandon the
notion of a specific humanity. On the contrary, such a notion was
implied in the Fall and Redemption, in the Sacraments, and in the
universal validity of Christian doctrine and precept. For if human
nature were not one, there would be no propriety in requiring all men to
preserve unanimity in faith or conformity in conduct. Human nature was
likewise the entity which the English psychologists set themselves to
describe; and Kant was so entirely dominated by the notion of a fixed
and universal human nature that its constancy, in his opinion, was the
source of all natural as well as moral laws. Had he doubted for a moment
the stability of human nature, the foundations of his system would have
fallen out; the forms of perception and thought would at once have lost
their boasted necessity, since to-morrow might dawn upon new categories
and a modified _a priori_ intuition of space or time; and the avenue
would also have been closed by which man was led, through his
unalterable moral sentiments, to assumptions about metaphysical truths.

[Sidenote: Contrary currents of opinion.]

[Sidenote: Evolution]

The force of this long tradition has been broken, however, by two
influences of great weight in recent times, the theory of evolution and
the revival of pantheism. The first has reintroduced flux into the
conception of existence and the second into the conception of values. If
natural species are fluid and pass into one another, human nature is
merely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribes
of animals, a group to which new qualities are constantly tending to
attach themselves while other faculties become extinct, now in whole
races, now in sporadic individuals. Human nature is therefore a
variable, and its ideal cannot have a greater constancy than the demands
to which it gives expression. Nor can the ideal of one man or one age
have any authority over another, since the harmony existing in their
nature and interests is accidental and each is a transitional phase in
an indefinite evolution. The crystallisation of moral forces at any
moment is consequently to be explained by universal, not by human, laws;
the philosopher’s interest cannot be to trace the implications of
present and unstable desires, but rather to discover the mechanical law
by which these desires have been generated and will be transformed, so
that they will change irrevocably both their basis and their objects.

[Sidenote: Pantheism.]

To this picture of physical instability furnished by popular science are
to be added the mystical self-denials involved in pantheism. These come
to reinforce the doctrine that human nature is a shifting thing with the
sentiment that it is a finite and unworthy one: for every determination
of being, it is said, has its significance as well as its origin in the
infinite continuum of which it is a part. Forms are limitations, and
limitations, according to this philosophy, would be defects, so that
man’s only goal would be to escape humanity and lose himself in the
divine nebula that has produced and must invalidate each of his thoughts
and ideals. As there would be but one spirit in the world, and that
infinite, so there would be but one ideal and that indiscriminate. The
despair which the naturalist’s view of human instability might tend to
produce is turned by this mystical initiation into a sort of ecstasy;
and the deluge of conformity suddenly submerges that Life of Reason
which science seemed to condemn to gradual extinction.

[Sidenote: Instability in existences does not dethrone their ideals.]

Reason is a human function. Though the name of reason has been applied
to various alleged principles of cosmic life, vital or dialectical,
these principles all lack the essence of rationality, in that they are
not conscious movements toward satisfaction, not, in other words, moral
and beneficent principles at all. Be the instability of human nature
what it may, therefore, the instability of reason is not less, since
reason is but a function of human nature. However relative and
subordinate, in a physical sense, human ideals may be, these ideals
remain the only possible moral standards for man, the only tests which
he can apply for value or authority, in any other quarter. And among
unstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable than
that which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferent
to good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry would
indeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at in
following out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertia
and the ambiguity of words. In truth mystics do not practise so entire a
renunciation of reason as they preach: eternal validity and the capacity
to deal with absolute reality are still assumed by them to belong to
thought or at least to feeling. Only they overlook in their description
of human nature just that faculty which they exercise in their
speculation; their map leaves out the ground on which they stand. The
rest, which they are not identified with for the moment, they proceed
to regard _de haut en bas_ and to discredit as a momentary manifestation
of universal laws, physical or divine. They forget that this faith in
law, this absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for the
ultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that they
endure them as they might a fever and that the animal instincts are
patent on which those spiritual yearnings repose.

[Sidenote: Absolutist philosophy human and halting.]

This last fact would be nothing against the feelings in question, if
they were not made vehicles for absolute revelations. On the contrary,
such a relativity in instincts is the source of their importance. In
virtue of this relativity they have some basis and function in the
world; for did they not repose on human nature they could never express
or transform it. Religion and philosophy are not always beneficent or
important, but when they are it is precisely because they help to
develop human faculty and to enrich human life. To imagine that by means
of them we can escape from human nature and survey it from without is an
ostrich-like illusion obvious to all but to the victim of it. Such a
pretension may cause admiration in the schools, where self-hypnotisation
is easy, but in the world it makes its professors ridiculous. For in
their eagerness to empty their mind of human prejudices they reduce its
rational burden to a minimum, and if they still continue to dogmatise,
it is sport for the satirist to observe what forgotten accident of
language or training has survived the crash of the universe and made the
one demonstrable path to Absolute Truth.

[Sidenote: All science a deliverance of momentary thought.]

Neither the path of abstraction followed by the mystics, nor that of
direct and, as it avers, unbiassed observation followed by the
naturalists, can lead beyond that region of common experience,
traditional feeling, and conventional thought which all minds enter at
birth and can elude only at the risk of inward collapse and extinction.
The fact that observation involves the senses, and the senses their
organs, is one which a naturalist can hardly overlook; and when we add
that logical habits, sanctioned by utility, are needed to interpret the
data of sense, the humanity of science and all its constructions becomes
clearer than day. Superstition itself could not be more human. The path
of unbiassed observation is not a path away from conventional life; it
is a progress in conventions. It improves human belief by increasing the
proportion of two of its ingredients, attentive perception and practical
calculus. The whole resulting vision, as it is sustained from moment to
moment by present experience and instinct, has no value apart from
actual ideals. And if it proves human nature to be unstable, it can
build that proof on nothing more stable than human faculty as at the
moment it happens to be.

[Sidenote: All criticism likewise.]

Nor is abstraction a less human process, as if by becoming very
abstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplace
of the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man’s
reason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makes
haste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind overloaded with its experience,
the trick of an eye that cannot master a profuse and ever-changing
world? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this system of signals in
thought, be the Absolute Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain reality
by making a silhouette of our dreams? If the scientific world be a
product of human faculties, the metaphysical world must be doubly so;
for the material there given to human understanding is here worked over
again by human art. This constitutes the dignity and value of dialectic,
that in spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to experience a
relation similar to that which the arts bear to the same, where sensible
images, selected by the artist’s genius and already coloured by his
æsthetic bias, are redyed in the process of reproduction whenever he has
a great style, and saturated anew with his mind.

There can be no question, then, of eluding human nature or of conceiving
it and its environment in such a way as to stop its operation. We may
take up our position in one region of experience or in another, we may,
in unconsciousness of the interests and assumptions that support us,
criticise the truth or value of results obtained elsewhere. Our
criticism will be solid in proportion to the solidity of the unnamed
convictions that inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep roots
and fruitful ramifications which those convictions may have in human
life. Ultimate truth and ultimate value will be reasonably attributed to
those ideas and possessions which can give human nature, as it is, the
highest satisfaction. We may admit that human nature is variable; but
that admission, if justified, will be justified by the satisfaction
which it gives human nature to make it. We might even admit that human
ideals are vain but only if they were nothing worth for the attainment
of the veritable human ideal.

[Sidenote: Origins inessential.]

The given constitution of reason, with whatever a dialectical philosophy
might elicit from it, obviously determines nothing about the causes that
may have brought reason to its present pass or the phases that may have
preceded its appearance. Certain notions about physics might no doubt
suggest themselves to the moralist, who never can be the whole man; he
might suspect, for instance, that the transitive intent of intellect and
will pointed to their vital basis. Transcendence in operation might seem
appropriate only to a being with a history and with an organism subject
to external influences, whose mind should thus come to represent not
merely its momentary state but also its constitutive past and its
eventual fortunes. Such suggestions, however, would be extraneous to
dialectical self-knowledge. They would be tentative only, and human
nature would be freely admitted to be as variable, as relative, and as
transitory as the natural history of the universe might make it.

[Sidenote: Ideals functional.]

The error, however, would be profound and the contradiction hopeless if
we should deny the ideal authority of human nature because we had
discovered its origin and conditions. Nature and evolution, let us say,
have brought life to the present form; but this life lives, these organs
have determinate functions, and human nature, here and now, in relation
to the ideal energies it unfolds, is a fundamental essence, a collection
of activities with determinate limits, relations, and ideals. The
integration and determinateness of these faculties is the condition for
any synthetic operation of reason. As the structure of the steam-engine
has varied greatly since its first invention, and its attributions have
increased, so the structure of human nature has undoubtedly varied since
man first appeared upon the earth; but as in each steam-engine at each
moment there must be a limit of mobility, a unity of function and a
clear determination of parts and tensions, so in human nature, as found
at any time in any man, there is a definite scope by virtue of which
alone he can have a reliable memory, a recognisable character, a faculty
of connected thought and speech, a social utility, and a moral ideal. On
man’s given structure, on his activity hovering about fixed objects,
depends the possibility of conceiving or testing any truth or making
any progress in happiness.

[Sidenote: They are transferable to similar beings.]

Thinkers of different experience and organisation have _pro tanto_
different logics and different moral laws. There are limits to
communication even among beings of the same race, and the faculties and
ideals of one intelligence are not transferable without change to any
other. If this historic diversity in minds were complete, so that each
lived in its own moral world, a science of each of these moral worlds
would still be possible provided some inner fixity or constancy existed
in its meanings. In every human thought together with an immortal intent
there is a mortal and irrecoverable perception: something in it perishes
instantly, the part that can be materially preserved being proportionate
to the stability or fertility of the organ that produced it. If the
function is imitable, the object it terminates in will reappear, and two
or more moments, having the same ideal, will utter comparable messages
and may perhaps be unanimous. Unanimity in thought involves identity of
functions and similarity in organs. These conditions mark off the sphere
of rational communication and society; where they fail altogether there
is no mutual intelligence, no conversation, no moral solidarity.

[Sidenote: Authority internal.]

The inner authority of reason, however, is no more destroyed because it
has limits in physical expression or because irrational things exist,
than the grammar of a given language is invalidated because other
languages do not share it, or because some people break its rules and
others are dumb altogether. Innumerable madmen make no difference to the
laws of thought, which borrow their authority from the inward intent and
cogency of each rational mind. Reason, like beauty, is its own excuse
for being. It is useful, indeed, for living well, when to give reason
satisfaction is made the measure of good.

The true philosopher, who is not one chiefly by profession, must be
prepared to tread the winepress alone. He may indeed flourish like the
bay-tree in a grateful environment, but more often he will rather
resemble a reed shaken by the wind. Whether starved or fed by the
accidents of fortune he must find his essential life in his own ideal.
In spiritual life, heteronomy is suicide. That universal soul sometimes
spoken of, which is to harmonise and correct individual demands, if it
were a will and an intelligence in act, would itself be an individual
like the others; while if it possessed no will and no intelligence, such
as individuals may have, it would be a physical force or law, a dynamic
system without moral authority and with a merely potential or
represented existence. For to be actual and self-existent is to be
individual. The living mind cannot surrender its rights to any physical
power or subordinate itself to any figment of its own art without
falling into manifest idolatry.

[Sidenote: Reason autonomous.]

Human nature, in the sense in which it is the transcendental foundation
of all science and morals, is a functional unity in each man; it is no
general or abstract essence, the average of all men’s characters, nor
even the complex of the qualities common to all men. It is the entelechy
of the living individual, be he typical or singular. That his type
should be odd or common is merely a physical accident. If he can know
himself by expressing the entelechy of his own nature in the form of a
consistent ideal, he is a rational creature after his own kind, even if,
like the angels of Saint Thomas, he be the only individual of his
species. What the majority of human animals may tend to, or what the
past or future variations of a race may be, has nothing to do with
determining the ideal of human nature in a living man, or in an ideal
society of men bound together by spiritual kinship. Otherwise Plato
could not have reasoned well about the republic without adjusting
himself to the politics of Buddha or Rousseau, and we should not be able
to determine our own morality without making concessions to the
cannibals or giving a vote to the ants. Within the field of an
anthropology that tests humanity by the skull’s shape, there might be
room for any number of independent moralities, and although, as we shall
see, there is actually a similar foundation in all human and even in all
animal natures, which supports a rudimentary morality common to all, yet
a perfect morality is not really common to any two men nor to any two
phases of the same man’s life.

[Sidenote: Its distribution.]

The distribution of reason, though a subject irrelevant to pure logic or
morals, is one naturally interesting to a rational man, for he is
concerned to know how far beings exist with a congenial structure and an
ideal akin to his own. That circumstance will largely influence his
happiness if, being a man, he is a gregarious and sympathetic animal.
His moral idealism itself will crave support from others, if not to give
it direction, at least to give it warmth and courage. The best part of
wealth is to have worthy heirs, and mind can be transmitted only to a
kindred mind. Hostile natures cannot be brought together by mutual
invective nor harmonised by the brute destruction and disappearance of
either party. But when one or both parties have actually disappeared,
and the combat has ceased for lack of combatants, natures not hostile to
one another can fill the vacant place. In proportion to their inbred
unanimity these will cultivate a similar ideal and rejoice together in
its embodiment.

[Sidenote: Natural selection of minds.]

This has happened to some extent in the whole world, on account of
natural conditions which limit the forms of life possible in one region;
for nature is intolerant in her laxity and punishes too great
originality and heresy with death. Such moral integration has occurred
very markedly in every good race and society whose members, by adapting
themselves to the same external forces, have created and discovered
their common soul. Spiritual unity is a natural product. There are those
who see a great mystery in the presence of eternal values and impersonal
ideals in a moving and animal world, and think to solve that dualism, as
they call it, by denying that nature can have spiritual functions or
spirit a natural cause; but nothing can be simpler if we make, as we
should, existence the test of possibility. _Ab esse ad posse valet
illatio_. Nature is a perfect garden of ideals, and passion is the
perpetual and fertile soil for poetry, myth, and speculation. Nor is
this origin merely imputed to ideals by a late and cynical observer: it
is manifest in the ideals themselves, by their subject matter and
intent. For what are ideals about, what do they idealise, except natural
existence and natural passions? That would be a miserable and
superfluous ideal indeed that was nobody’s ideal of nothing. The
pertinence of ideals binds them to nature, and it is only the worst and
flimsiest ideals, the ideals of a sick soul, that elude nature’s limits
and belie her potentialities. Ideals are forerunners or heralds of
nature’s successes, not always followed, indeed, by their fulfilment,
for nature is but nature and has to feel her way; but they are an
earnest, at least, of an achieved organisation, an incipient
accomplishment, that tends to maintain and root itself in the world.

To speak of nature’s successes is, of course, to impute success
retroactively; but the expression may be allowed when we consider that
the same functional equilibrium which is looked back upon as a good by
the soul it serves, first creates individual being and with it creates
the possibility of preference and the whole moral world; and it is more
than a metaphor to call that achievement a success which has made a
sense of success possible and actual. That nature cannot intend or
previously esteem those formations which are the condition of value or
intention existing at all, is a truth too obvious to demand repetition;
but when those formations arise they determine estimation, and fix the
direction of preference, so that the evolution which produced them, when
looked back upon from the vantage-ground thus gained, cannot help
seeming to have been directed toward the good now distinguished and
partly attained. For this reason creation is regarded as a work of love,
and the power that brought order out of chaos is called intelligence.

[Sidenote: Living stability.]

These natural formations, tending to generate and realise each its
ideal, are, as it were, eddies in the universal flux, produced no less
mechanically, doubtless, than the onward current, yet seeming to arrest
or to reverse it. Inheritance arrests the flux by repeating a series of
phases with a recognisable rhythm; memory reverses it by modifying this
rhythm itself by the integration of earlier phases into those that
supervene. Inheritance and memory make human stability. This stability
is relative, being still a mode of flux, and consists fundamentally in
repetition. Repetition marks some progress on mere continuity, since it
preserves form and disregards time and matter. Inheritance is repetition
on a larger scale, not excluding spontaneous variations; while habit and
memory are a sort of heredity within the individual, since here an old
perception reappears, by way of atavism, in the midst of a forward
march. Life is thus enriched and reaction adapted to a wider field; much
as a note is enriched by its overtones, and by the tensions, inherited
from the preceding notes, which give it a new setting.

[Sidenote: Continuity necessary to progress.]

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When
change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is
set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as
among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past
are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is
frivolous and easily distracted; it misses progress by failing in
consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and
barbarians, in whom instinct has learned nothing from experience. In a
second stage men are docile to events, plastic to new habits and
suggestions, yet able to graft them on original instincts, which they
thus bring to fuller satisfaction. This is the plane of manhood and
true progress. Last comes a stage when retentiveness is exhausted and
all that happens is at once forgotten; a vain, because unpractical,
repetition of the past takes the place of plasticity and fertile
readaptation. In a moving world readaptation is the price of longevity.
The hard shell, far from protecting the vital principle, condemns it to
die down slowly and be gradually chilled; immortality in such a case
must have been secured earlier, by giving birth to a generation plastic
to the contemporary world and able to retain its lessons. Thus old age
is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same
inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and
degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird’s chirp.

[Sidenote: Limits of variation. Spirit a heritage.]

Not all readaptation, however, is progress, for ideal identity must not
be lost. The Latin language did not progress when it passed into
Italian. It died. Its amiable heirs may console us for its departure,
but do not remove the fact that their parent is extinct. So every
individual, nation, and religion has its limit of adaptation; so long as
the increment it receives is digestible, so long as the organisation
already attained is extended and elaborated without being surrendered,
growth goes on; but when the foundation itself shifts, when what is
gained at the periphery is lost at the centre, the flux appears again
and progress is not real. Thus a succession of generations or languages
or religions constitutes no progress unless some ideal present at the
beginning is transmitted to the end and reaches a better expression
there; without this stability at the core no common standard exists and
all comparison of value with value must be external and arbitrary.
Retentiveness, we must repeat, is the condition of progress.

The variation human nature is open to is not, then, variation in any
direction. There are transformations that would destroy it. So long as
it endures it must retain all that constitutes it now, all that it has
so far gathered and worked into its substance. The genealogy of progress
is like that of man, who can never repudiate a single ancestor. It
starts, so to speak, from a single point, free as yet to take any
direction. When once, however, evolution has taken a single step, say in
the direction of vertebrates, that step cannot be retraced without
extinction of the species. Such extinction may take place while progress
in other lines is continued. All that preceded the forking of the dead
and the living branch will be as well represented and as legitimately
continued by the surviving radiates as it could have been by the
vertebrates that are no more; but the vertebrate ideal is lost for ever,
and no more progress is possible along that line.

[Sidenote: Perfectibility.]

The future of moral evolution is accordingly infinite, but its character
is more and more determinate at every step. Mankind can never, without
perishing, surrender its animal nature, its need to eat and drink, its
sexual method of reproduction, its vision of nature, its faculty of
speech, its arts of music, poetry, and building. Particular races cannot
subsist if they renounce their savage instincts, but die, like wild
animals, in captivity; and particular individuals die when not suffered
any longer to retain their memories, their bodies, or even their master
passions. Thus human nature survives amid a continual fluctuation of its
embodiments. At every step twigs and leaves are thrown out that last but
one season; but the underlying stem may have meantime grown stronger and
more luxuriant. Whole branches sometimes wither, but others may continue
to bloom. Spiritual unity runs, like sap, from the common root to every
uttermost flower; but at each forking in the growth the branches part
company, and what happens in one is no direct concern of the others. The
products of one age and nation may well be unintelligible to another;
the elements of humanity common to both may lie lower down. So that the
highest things are communicable to the fewest persons, and yet, among
these few, are the most perfectly communicable. The more elaborate and
determinate a man’s heritage and genius are, the more he has in common
with his next of kin, and the more he can transmit and implant in his
posterity for ever. Civilisation is cumulative. The farther it goes the
intenser it is, substituting articulate interests for animal fumes and
for enigmatic passions. Such articulate interests can be shared; and
the infinite vistas they open up can be pursued for ever with the
knowledge that a work long ago begun is being perfected and that an
ideal is being embodied which need never be outworn.

[Sidenote: Nature and human nature.]

So long as external conditions remain constant it is obvious that the
greater organisation a being possesses the greater strength he will
have. If indeed primary conditions varied, the finer creatures would die
first; for their adaptation is more exquisite and the irreversible core
of their being much larger relatively; but in a constant environment
their equipment makes them irresistible and secures their permanence and
multiplication. Now man is a part of nature and her organisation may be
regarded as the foundation of his own: the word nature is therefore less
equivocal than it seems, for every nature is Nature herself in one of
her more specific and better articulated forms. Man therefore represents
the universe that sustains him; his existence is a proof that the cosmic
equilibrium that fostered his life is a natural equilibrium, capable of
being long maintained. Some of the ancients thought it eternal; physics
now suggests a different opinion. But even if this equilibrium, by which
the stars are kept in their courses and human progress is allowed to
proceed, is fundamentally unstable, it shows what relative stability
nature may attain. Could this balance be preserved indefinitely, no one
knows what wonderful adaptations might occur within it, and to what
excellence human nature in particular might arrive. Nor is it unlikely
that before the cataclysm comes time will be afforded for more
improvement than moral philosophy has ever dreamed of. For it is
remarkable how inane and unimaginative Utopias have generally been. This
possibility is not uninspiring and may help to console those who think
the natural conditions of life are not conditions that a good life can
be lived in. The possibility of essential progress is bound up with the
tragic possibility that progress and human life should some day end
together. If the present equilibrium of forces were eternal all
adaptations to it would have already taken place and, while no essential
catastrophe would need to be dreaded, no essential improvement could be
hoped for in all eternity. I am not sure that a humanity such as we
know, were it destined to exist for ever, would offer a more
exhilarating prospect than a humanity having indefinite elasticity
together with a precarious tenure of life. Mortality has its
compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better
times may come.

[Sidenote: Human nature formulated.]

Human nature, then, has for its core the substance of nature at large,
and is one of its more complex formations. Its determination is
progressive. It varies indefinitely in its historic manifestations and
fades into what, as a matter of natural history, might no longer be
termed human. At each moment it has its fixed and determinate
entelechy, the ideal of that being’s life, based on his instincts,
summed up in his character, brought to a focus in his reflection, and
shared by all who have attained or may inherit his organisation. His
perceptive and reasoning faculties are parts of human nature, as
embodied in him; all objects of belief or desire, with all standards of
justice and duty which he can possibly acknowledge, are transcripts of
it, conditioned by it, and justifiable only as expressions of its
inherent tendencies.

[Sidenote: Its concrete description reserved for the sequel.]

This definition of human nature, clear as it may be in itself and true
to the facts, will perhaps hardly make sufficiently plain how the Life
of Reason, having a natural basis, has in the ideal world a creative and
absolute authority. A more concrete description of human nature may
accordingly not come amiss, especially as the important practical
question touching the extension of a given moral authority over times
and places depends on the degree of kinship found among the creatures
inhabiting those regions. To give a general picture of human nature and
its rational functions will be the task of the following books. The
truth of a description which must be largely historical may not be
indifferent to the reader, and I shall study to avoid bias in the
presentation, in so far as is compatible with frankness and brevity; yet
even if some bias should manifest itself and if the picture were
historically false, the rational principles we shall be trying to
illustrate will not thereby be invalidated. Illustrations might have
been sought in some fictitious world, if imagination had not seemed so
much less interesting than reality, which besides enforces with
unapproachable eloquence the main principle in view, namely, that nature
carries its ideal with it and that the progressive organisation of
irrational impulses makes a rational life.


*** End of Volume I ***




REASON IN SOCIETY

Volume Two of “The Life of Reason”


GEORGE SANTAYANA

hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




CONTENTS

BOOK II.—REASON IN SOCIETY


CHAPTER I


LOVE

Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.—Nutrition and
reproduction.—Priority of the latter.—Love celebrates the initial
triumph of form and is deeply ideal.—Difficulty in describing
love.—One-sided or inverted theories about it.—Sexual functions its
basis.—Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.—Glory of
animal love.—Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.—Moral censure provoked.—The heart alienated from the
world.—Childish ideals.—Their light all focussed on the object of
love.—Three environments for love.—Subjectivity of the
passion.—Machinery regulating choice.—The choice
unstable.—Instinctive essence of love.—Its ideality.—Its universal
scope.—Its euthanasia. Pages 3-34


CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY

The family arises spontaneously.—It harmonises natural
interests.—Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.—The
naturally dull achieve intelligence.—It is more blessed to save than to
create.—Parental instinct regards childhood only.—Handing on the torch
of life.—Adventitious functions assumed by the family.—Inertia in
human nature.—Family tyrannies.—Difficulty in abstracting from the
family.—Possibility of substitutes.—Plato’s heroic
communism.—Opposite modern tendencies.—Individualism in a sense
rational.—The family tamed.—Possible readjustments and
reversions.—The ideal includes generation.—Inner values already lodged
in this function.—Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.
Pages 35-59


CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR

Patriarchal economy.—Origin of the state.—Three uses of
civilisation.—Its rationality contingent.—Sources of wealth.—Excess
of it possible.—Irrational industry.—Its jovial and ingenious
side.—Its tyranny.—An impossible remedy.—Basis of government.—How
rationality accrues.—Ferocious but useful despotisms.—Occasional
advantage of being conquered.—Origin of free governments.—Their
democratic tendencies.—Imperial peace.—Nominal and real status of
armies.—Their action irresponsible.—Pugnacity human.—Barrack-room
philosophy.—Military virtues.—They are splendid vices.—Absolute value
in strife.—Sport a civilised way of preserving it.—Who shall found the
universal commonwealth? Pages 60-87


CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL

Eminence, once existing, grows by its own operation.—Its causes natural
and its privileges just.—Advantage of inequality.—Fable of the belly
and the members.—Fallacy in it.—Theism expresses better the
aristocratic ideal.—A heaven with many mansions.—If God is defined as
the human ideal, apotheosis the only paradise.—When natures differ
perfections differ too.—Theory that stations actually correspond to
faculty.—Its falsity.—Feeble individuality the rule.—Sophistical
envy.—Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.—Mutilation by
crowding.—A hint to optimists.—How aristocracies might do good.—Man
adds wrong to nature’s injury.—Conditions of a just inequality. Pages
88-113




CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY

Democracy as an end and as a means.—Natural democracy leads to
monarchy.—Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.—Ideals
and expedients.—Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if
rational, would serve common interests.—People jealous of eminence.—It
is representative, but subject to decay.—Ancient citizenship a
privilege.—Modern democracy industrial.—Dangers to current
civilisation.—Is current civilisation a good?—Horrors of materialistic
democracy.—Timocracy or socialistic aristocracy.—The difficulty the
same as in all Socialism.—The masses would have to be plebeian in
position and patrician in feeling.—Organisation for ideal ends breeds
fanaticism.—Public spirit the life of democracy. Pages 114-136


CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY

Primacy of nature over spirit.—All experience at bottom
liberal.—Social experience has its ideality too.—The self an
ideal.—Romantic egotism.—Vanity.—Ambiguities of fame.—Its possible
ideality.—Comradeship.—External conditions of friendship.—Identity in
sex required, and in age.—Constituents of friendship.—Personal
liking.—The refracting human medium for ideas.—Affection based on the
refraction.—The medium must also be transparent.—Common interests
indispensable.—Friendship between man and wife.—Between master and
disciple.—Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.—Automatic
idealisation of heroes. Pages 137-159


CHAPTER VII

PATRIOTISM

The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must be
represented symbolically.—Ambiguous limits of a native country,
geographical and moral.—Sentimental and political patriotism.—The
earth and the race the first objects of rational loyalty.—Race, when
distinct, the greatest of distinctions.—“Pure” races may be morally
sterile.—True nationality direction on a definite ideal.—Country well
represented by domestic and civic religion.—Misleading identification
of country with government.—Sporting or belligerent
patriotism.—Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government
supported is universally beneficent.—Accidents of birth and training
affect the ideal.—They are conditions and may contribute
something.—They are not ends.—The symbol for country may be a man and
may become an idol.—Feudal representation sensitive but
partial.—Monarchical representation comprehensive but
treacherous.—Impersonal symbols no advantage.—Patriotism not
self-interest, save to the social man whose aims are ideal. Pages 160-183


CHAPTER VIII

IDEAL SOCIETY

The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.—It gives rise
to conscience or sympathy with the public voice.—Guises of public
opinion.—Oracles and revelations.—The ideal a measure for all
existences and no existence itself.—Contrast between natural and
intellectual bonds.—Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal
society.—Significant symbols revert to the concrete.—Nature a symbol
for destiny.—Representative notions have also inherent
values.—Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.—Their opposite outlook.—In translating existence into human
terms they give human nature its highest exercise.—Science should be
mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.—Summary of this book. Pages
184-205




REASON IN SOCIETY




CHAPTER I

LOVE


[Sidenote: Fluid existences have none but ideal goals.]

If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought
to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all
other interests would be subsumed. His acts would explain themselves
without looking beyond his given essence, and his soul would be like a
musical composition, which once written out cannot grow different and
once rendered can ask for nothing but, at most, to be rendered over
again. In truth, however, man is an animal, a portion of the natural
flux; and the consequence is that his nature has a moving centre, his
functions an external reference, and his ideal a true ideality. What he
strives to preserve, in preserving himself, is something which he never
has been at any particular moment. He maintains his equilibrium by
motion. His goal is in a sense beyond him, since it is not his
experience, but a form which all experience ought to receive. The inmost
texture of his being is propulsive, and there is nothing more intimately
bound up with his success than mobility and devotion to transcendent
aims. If there is a transitive function in knowledge and an unselfish
purpose in love, that is only because, at bottom, there is a
self-reproductive, flying essence in all existence.

If the equilibrium of man’s being were stable he would need neither
nutrition, reproduction, nor sense. As it is, sense must renew his ideas
and guide his instincts otherwise than as their inner evolution would
demand; and regenerative processes must strive to repair beneath the
constant irreparable lapse of his substance. His business is to create
and remodel those organisms in which ideals are bred. In order to have a
soul to save he must perpetually form it anew; he must, so to speak,
_earn his own living_. In this vital labour, we may ask, is nutrition or
reproduction the deeper function? Or, to put the corresponding moral
question, is the body or the state the primary good?

[Sidenote: Nutrition and reproduction]

If we view the situation from the individual’s side, as
self-consciousness might view it, we may reply that nutrition is
fundamental, for if the body were not nourished every faculty would
decay. Could nutrition only succeed and keep the body young,
reproduction would be unnecessary, with its poor pretence at maintaining
the mobile human form in a series of examples. On the other hand, if we
view the matter from above, as science and philosophy should, we may say
that nutrition is but germination of a pervasive sort, that the body is
a tabernacle in which the transmissible human spirit is carried for a
while, a shell for the immortal seed that dwells in it and has created
it. This seed, however, for rational estimation, is merely a means to
the existence and happiness of individuals. Transpersonal and continuous
in its own fluid being, the potential grows personal in its ideal
fulfilments. In other words, this potentiality is material (though
called sometimes an idea) and has its only value in the particular
creatures it may produce.

[Sidenote: Priority of the latter]

Reproduction is accordingly primary and more completely instrumental
than nutrition is, since it serves a soul as yet non-existent, while
nutrition is useful to a soul that already has some actuality.
Reproduction initiates life and remains at life’s core, a function
without which no other, in the end, would be possible. It is more
central, crucial, and representative than nutrition, which is in a way
peripheral only; it is a more typical and rudimentary act, marking the
ideal’s first victory over the universal flux, before any higher
function than reproduction itself has accrued to the animal. To nourish
an existing being is to presuppose a pause in generation; the nucleus,
before it dissolves into other individuals, gathers about itself, for
its own glory, certain temporal and personal faculties. It lives for
itself; while in procreation it signs its own death-warrant, makes its
will, and institutes its heir.

[Sidenote: Love celebrates the initial triumph of form and is deeply
ideal.]

This situation has its counterpart in feeling. Replenishment is a sort
of delayed breathing, as if the animal had to hunt for air: it
necessitates more activity than it contains; it engages external senses
in its service and promotes intelligence. After securing a dumb
satisfaction, or even in preparing it, it leaves the habits it employed
free for observation and ideal exercise. Reproduction, on the contrary,
depletes; it is an expense of spirit, a drag on physical and mental
life; it entangles rather than liberates; it fuses the soul again into
the impersonal, blind flux. Yet, since it constitutes the primary and
central triumph of life, it is in itself more ideal and generous than
nutrition; it fascinates the will in an absolute fashion, and the
pleasures it brings are largely spiritual. For though the
instrumentalities of reproduction may seem gross and trivial from a
conventional point of view, its essence is really ideal, the perfect
type, indeed, of ideality, since form and an identical life are therein
sustained successfully by a more rhythmical flux of matter.

It may seem fanciful, even if not unmeaning, to say that a man’s soul
more truly survives in his son’s youth than in his own decrepitude; but
this principle grows more obvious as we descend to simpler beings, in
which individual life is less elaborated and has not intrenched itself
in so many adventitious and somewhat permanent organs. In vegetables
soul and seed go forth together and leave nothing but a husk behind. In
the human individual love may seem a mere incident of youth and a
sentimental madness; but that episode, if we consider the race, is
indispensable to the whole drama; and if we look to the order in which
ideal interests have grown up and to their superposition in moral
experience, love will seem the truly primitive and initiatory passion.
Consciousness, amused ordinarily by the most superficial processes,
itself bears witness to the underlying claims of reproduction and is
drawn by it for a moment into life’s central vortex; and love, while it
betrays its deep roots by the imperative force it exerts and the silence
it imposes on all current passions, betrays also its ideal mission by
casting an altogether novel and poetic spell over the mind.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in describing love.]

The conscious quality of this passion differs so much in various races
and individuals, and at various points in the same life, that no account
of it will ever satisfy everybody.[A] Poets and novelists never tire of
depicting it anew; but although the experience they tell of is fresh
and unparalleled in every individual, their rendering suffers, on the
whole, from a great monotony. Love’s gesture and symptoms are noted and
unvarying; its vocabulary is poor and worn. Even a poet, therefore, can
give of love but a meagre expression, while the philosopher, who
renounces dramatic representation, is condemned to be avowedly
inadequate. Love, to the lover, is a noble and immense inspiration; to
the naturalist it is a thin veil and prelude to the self-assertion of
lust. This opposition has prevented philosophers from doing justice to
the subject. Two things need to be admitted by anyone who would not go
wholly astray in such speculation: one, that love has an animal basis;
the other, that it has an ideal object. Since these two propositions
have usually been thought contradictory, no writer has ventured to
present more than half the truth, and that half out of its true
relations.

[Sidenote: One-sided or inverted theories about it.]

Plato, who gave eloquent expression to the ideal burden of the passion,
and divined its political and cosmic message, passed over its natural
history with a few mythical fancies; and Schopenhauer, into whose
system a naturalistic treatment would have fitted so easily, allowed his
metaphysics to carry him at this point into verbal inanities; while, of
course, like all profane writers on the subject, he failed to appreciate
the oracles which Plato had delivered. In popular feeling, where
sentiment and observation must both make themselves felt somehow or
other, the tendency is to imagine that love is an absolute, non-natural
energy which, for some unknown reason, or for none at all, lights upon
particular persons, and rests there eternally, as on its ultimate goal.
In other words, it makes the origin of love divine and its object
natural: which is the exact opposite of the truth. If it were once seen,
however, that every ideal expresses some natural function, and that no
natural function is incapable, in its free exercise, of evolving some
ideal and finding justification, not in some collateral animal, but in
an inherent operation like life or thought, which being transmissible in
its form is also eternal, then the philosophy of love should not prove
permanently barren. For love is a brilliant illustration of a principle
everywhere discoverable: namely, that human reason lives by turning the
friction of material forces into the light of ideal goods. There can be
no philosophic interest in disguising the animal basis of love, or in
denying its spiritual sublimations, since all life is animal in its
origin and all spiritual in its possible fruits.

[Sidenote: Sexual functions its basis.]

Plastic matter, in transmitting its organisation, takes various courses
which it is the part of natural history to describe. Even after
reproduction has become sexual, it will offer no basis for love if it
does not require a union of the two parent bodies. Did germinal
substances, unconsciously diffused, meet by chance in the external
medium and unite there, it is obvious that whatever obsessions or
pleasures maturity might bring they would not have the quality which men
call love. But when an individual of the opposite sex must be met with,
recognised, and pursued, and must prove responsive, then each is haunted
by the possible other. Each feels in a generic way the presence and
attraction of his fellows; he vibrates to their touch, he dreams of
their image, he is restless and wistful if alone. When the vague need
that solicits him is met by the presence of a possible mate it is
extraordinarily kindled. Then, if it reaches fruition, it subsides
immediately, and after an interval, perhaps, of stupor and vital
recuperation, the animal regains his independence, his peace, and his
impartial curiosity. You might think him on the way to becoming
intelligent; but the renewed nutrition and cravings of the sexual
machinery soon engross his attention again; all his sprightly
indifference vanishes before nature’s categorical imperative. That
fierce and turbid pleasure, by which his obedience is rewarded, hastens
his dissolution; every day the ensuing lassitude and emptiness give him
a clearer premonition of death. It is not figuratively only that his
soul has passed into his offspring. The vocation to produce them was a
chief part of his being, and when that function is sufficiently
fulfilled he is superfluous in the world and becomes partly superfluous
even to himself. The confines of his dream are narrowed. He moves
apathetically and dies forlorn.

Some echo of the vital rhythm which pervades not merely the generations
of animals, but the seasons and the stars, emerges sometimes in
consciousness; on reaching the tropics in the mortal ecliptic, which the
human individual may touch many times without much change in his outer
fortunes, the soul may occasionally divine that it is passing through a
supreme crisis. Passion, when vehement, may bring atavistic sentiments.
When love is absolute it feels a profound impulse to welcome death, and
even, by a transcendental confusion, to invoke the end of the
universe.[B] The human soul reverts at such a moment to what an
ephemeral insect might feel, buzzing till it finds its mate in the noon.
Its whole destiny was wooing, and, that mission accomplished, it sings
its _Nunc dimittis_, renouncing heartily all irrelevant things, now that
the one fated and all-satisfying good has been achieved. Where parental
instincts exist also, nature soon shifts her loom: a milder impulse
succeeds, and a satisfaction of a gentler sort follows in the birth of
children. The transcendental illusion is here corrected, and it is seen
that the extinction the lovers had accepted needed not to be complete.
The death they welcomed was not without its little resurrection. The
feeble worm they had generated bore their immortality within it.

The varieties of sexual economy are many and to each may correspond, for
all we know, a special sentiment. Sometimes the union established is
intermittent; sometimes it crowns the end of life and dissolves it
altogether; sometimes it remains, while it lasts, monogamous; sometimes
the sexual and social alertness is constant in the male, only periodic
in the female. Sometimes the group established for procreation endures
throughout the seasons, and from year to year; sometimes the males herd
together, as if normally they preferred their own society, until the
time of rut comes, when war arises between them for the possession of
what they have just discovered to be the fair.

[Sidenote: Structure the ground of faculty and faculty of duty.]

A naturalist not ashamed to indulge his poetic imagination might easily
paint for us the drama of these diverse loves. It suffices for our
purpose to observe that the varying passions and duties which life can
contain depend upon the organic functions of the animal. A fish
incapable of coition, absolved from all care for its young, which it
never sees or never distinguishes from the casual swimmers darting
across its path, such a fish, being without social faculties or calls to
co-operation, cannot have the instincts, perceptions, or emotions which
belong to social beings. A male of some higher species that feels only
once a year the sudden solicitations of love cannot be sentimental in
all the four seasons: his head-long passion, exhausted upon its present
object and dismissed at once without remainder, leaves his senses
perfectly free and colourless to scrutinise his residual world. Whatever
further fears or desires may haunt him will have nothing mystical or
sentimental about them. He will be a man of business all the year round,
and a lover only on May-day. A female that does not suffice for the
rearing of her young will expect and normally receive her mate’s aid
long after the pleasures of love are forgotten by him. Disinterested
fidelity on his part will then be her right and his duty. But a female
that, once pregnant, needs, like the hen, no further co-operation on the
male’s part will turn from him at once with absolute indifference to
brood perpetually on her eggs, undisturbed by the least sense of
solitude or jealousy. And the chicks that at first follow her and find
shelter under her wings will soon be forgotten also and relegated to the
mechanical landscape. There is no pain in the timely snapping of the
dearest bonds where society has not become a permanent organism, and
perpetual friendship is not one of its possible modes.

Transcendent and ideal passions may well judge themselves to have an
incomparable dignity. Yet that dignity is hardly more than what every
passion, were it articulate, would assign to itself and to its objects.
The dumbness of a passion may accordingly, from one point of view, be
called the index of its baseness; for if it cannot ally itself with
ideas its affinities can hardly lie in the rational mind nor its
advocates be among the poets. But if we listen to the master-passion
itself rather than to the loquacious arts it may have enlisted in its
service, we shall understand that it is not self-condemned because it is
silent, nor an anomaly in nature because inharmonious with human life.
The fish’s heartlessness is his virtue; the male bee’s lasciviousness is
his vocation; and if these functions were retrenched or encumbered in
order to assimilate them to human excellence they would be merely
dislocated. We should not produce virtue where there was vice, but
defeat a possible arrangement which would have had its own vitality and
order.

[Sidenote: Glory of animal love.]

Animal love is a marvellous force; and while it issues in acts that may
be followed by a revulsion of feeling, it yet deserves a more
sympathetic treatment than art and morals have known how to accord it.
Erotic poets, to hide their want of ability to make the dumb passion
speak, have played feebly with veiled insinuations and comic effects;
while more serious sonneteers have harped exclusively on secondary and
somewhat literary emotions, abstractly conjugating the verb to love.
Lucretius, in spite of his didactic turns, has been on this subject,
too, the most ingenuous and magnificent of poets, although he chose to
confine his description to the external history of sexual desire. It is
a pity that he did not turn, with his sublime sincerity, to the inner
side of it also, and write the drama of the awakened senses, the
poignant suasion of beauty, when it clouds the brain, and makes the
conventional earth, seen through that bright haze, seem a sorry fable.
Western poets should not have despised what the Orientals, in their
fugitive stanzas, seem often to have sung most exquisitely: the joy of
gazing on the beloved, of following or being followed, of tacit
understandings and avowals, of flight together into some solitude to
people it with those ineffable confidences which so naturally follow the
outward proofs of love. All this makes the brightest page of many a
life, the only bright page in the thin biography of many a human animal;
while if the beasts could speak they would give us, no doubt, endless
versions of the only joy in which, as we may fancy, the blood of the
universe flows consciously through their hearts.

The darkness which conventionally covers this passion is one of the
saddest consequences of Adam’s fall. It was a terrible misfortune in
man’s development that he should not have been able to acquire the
higher functions without deranging the lower. Why should the depths of
his being be thus polluted and the most delightful of nature’s mysteries
be an occasion not for communion with her, as it should have remained,
but for depravity and sorrow?

[Sidenote: Its degradation when instincts become numerous and
competitive.]

This question, asked in moral perplexity, admits of a scientific answer.
Man, in becoming more complex, becomes less stably organised. His sexual
instinct, instead of being intermittent, but violent and boldly
declared, becomes practically constant, but is entangled in many
cross-currents of desire, in many other equally imperfect adaptations of
structure to various ends. Indulgence in any impulse can then easily
become excessive and thwart the rest; for it may be aroused artificially
and maintained from without, so that in turn it disturbs its neighbours.
Sometimes the sexual instinct may be stimulated out of season by
example, by a too wakeful fancy, by language, by pride—for all these
forces are now working in the same field and intermingling their
suggestions. At the same time the same instinct may derange others, and
make them fail at their proper and pressing occasions.

[Sidenote: Moral censure provoked.]

In consequence of such derangements, reflection and public opinion will
come to condemn what in itself was perfectly innocent. The corruption of
a given instinct by others and of others by it, becomes the ground for
long attempts to suppress or enslave it. With the haste and formalism
natural to language and to law, external and arbitrary limits are set to
its operation. As no inward adjustment can possibly correspond to these
conventional barriers and compartments of life, a war between nature and
morality breaks out both in society and in each particular bosom—a war
in which every victory is a sorrow and every defeat a dishonour. As one
instinct after another becomes furious or disorganised, cowardly or
criminal, under these artificial restrictions, the public and private
conscience turns against it all its forces, necessarily without much
nice discrimination; the frank passions of youth are met with a grimace
of horror on all sides, with _rumores senum severiorum_, with an
insistence on reticence and hypocrisy. Such suppression is favourable to
corruption: the fancy with a sort of idiotic ingenuity comes to supply
the place of experience; and nature is rendered vicious and overlaid
with pruriency, artifice, and the love of novelty. Hereupon the
authorities that rule in such matters naturally redouble their vigilance
and exaggerate their reasonable censure: chastity begins to seem
essentially holy and perpetual virginity ends by becoming an absolute
ideal. Thus the disorder in man’s life and disposition, when grown
intolerable, leads him to condemn the very elements out of which order
might have been constituted, and to mistake his total confusion for his
total depravity.

[Sidenote: The heart alienated from the world.]

Banished from the open day, covered with mockery, and publicly ignored,
this necessary pleasure flourishes none the less in dark places and in
the secret soul. Its familiar presence there, its intimate habitation in
what is most oneself, helps to cut the world in two and to separate the
inner from the outer life. In that mysticism which cannot disguise its
erotic affinities this disruption reaches an absolute and theoretic
form; but in many a youth little suspected of mysticism it produces
estrangement from the conventional moralising world, which he
instinctively regards as artificial and alien. It prepares him for
excursions into a private fairy-land in which unthought-of joys will
blossom amid friendlier magic forces. The truly good then seems to be
the fantastic, the sensuous, the prodigally unreal. He gladly forgets
the dreary world he lives in to listen for a thousand and one nights to
his dreams.

[Sidenote: Childish ideals.]

This is the region where those who have no conception of the Life of
Reason place the ideal; and an ideal is indeed there but the ideal of a
single and inordinate impulse. A rational mind, on the contrary, moves
by preference in the real world, cultivating all human interests in due
proportion. The love-sick and luxurious dream-land dear to irrational
poets is a distorted image of the ideal world; but this distortion has
still an ideal motive, since it is made to satisfy the cravings of a
forgotten part of the soul and to make a home for those elements in
human nature which have been denied overt existence. If the ideal is
meantime so sadly caricatured, the fault lies with the circumstances of
life that have not allowed the sane will adequate exercise. Lack of
strength and of opportunity makes it impossible for man to preserve all
his interests in a just harmony; and his conscious ideal, springing up
as it too often does in protest against suffering and tyranny, has not
scope and range enough to include the actual opportunities for action.
Nature herself, by making a slave of the body, has thus made a tyrant of
the soul.

[Sidenote: Their light all focussed on the object of love.]

Fairy-land and a mystical heaven contain many other factors besides that
furnished by unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal
images may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these
fantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and
vaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but
mindless æstheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood
on such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for
romantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back from
its loose reveries and fixes it upon a single object. Then the ideal
seems at last to have been brought down to earth. Its embodiment has
been discovered amongst the children of men. Imagination narrows her
range. Instead of all sorts of flatteries to sense and improbable
delicious adventures, the lover imagines but a single joy: to be master
of his love in body and soul. Jealousy pursues him. Even if he dreads no
physical betrayal, he suffers from terror and morbid sensitiveness at
every hint of mental estrangement.

[Sidenote: Three environments for love.]

This attachment is often the more absorbing the more unaccountable it
seems; and as in hypnotism the subject is dead to all influences but
that of the operator, so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to
the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not
selected; it is recognised and obeyed. Pre-arranged reactions in the
system respond to whatever stimulus, at a propitious moment, happens to
break through and arouse them pervasively. Nature has opened various
avenues to that passion in whose successful operation she has so much at
stake. Sometimes the magic influence asserts itself suddenly, sometimes
gently and unawares. One approach, which in poetry has usurped more
than its share of attention, is through beauty; another, less glorious,
but often more efficacious, through surprised sense and premonitions of
pleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities.
Contemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence nor
even the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply it
with a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, for
instance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, the
sympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such an
effect no passion would be needed, as none is needed to perceive beauty
or to feel pleasure.

What Aristotle calls friendships of utility, pleasure, or virtue, all
resting on common interests of some impersonal sort, are far from
possessing the quality of love, its thrill, flutter, and absolute sway
over happiness and misery. But it may well fall to such influences to
awaken or feed the passion where it actually arises. Whatever
circumstances pave the way, love does not itself appear until a sexual
affinity is declared. When a woman, for instance, contemplating
marriage, asks herself whether she really loves her suitor or merely
accepts him, the test is the possibility of awakening a sexual affinity.
For this reason women of the world often love their husbands more truly
than they did their lovers, because marriage has evoked an elementary
feeling which before lay smothered under a heap of coquetries,
vanities, and conventions.

[Sidenote: Subjectivity of the passion.]

Man, on the contrary, is polygamous by instinct, although often kept
faithful by habit no less than by duty. If his fancy is left free, it is
apt to wander. We observe this in romantic passion no less than in a
life of mere gallantry and pleasure. Sentimental illusions may become a
habit, and the shorter the dream is the more often it is repeated, so
that any susceptible poet may find that he, like Alfred de Musset, “must
love incessantly, who once has loved.” Love is indeed much less exacting
than it thinks itself. Nine-tenths of its cause are in the lover, for
one-tenth that may be in the object. Were the latter not accidentally at
hand, an almost identical passion would probably have been felt for
someone else; for although with acquaintance the quality of an
attachment naturally adapts itself to the person loved, and makes that
person its standard and ideal, the first assault and mysterious glow of
the passion is much the same for every object. What really affects the
character of love is the lover’s temperament, age, and experience. The
objects that appeal to each man reveal his nature; but those
unparalleled virtues and that unique divinity which the lover discovers
there are reflections of his own adoration, things that ecstasy is very
cunning in. He loves what he imagines and worships what he creates.

[Sidenote: Machinery regulating choice.]

Those who do not consider these matters so curiously may feel that to
refer love in this way chiefly to inner processes is at once ignominious
and fantastic. But nothing could be more natural; the soul accurately
renders, in this experience, what is going on in the body and in the
race. Nature had a problem to solve in sexual reproduction which would
have daunted a less ruthless experimenter. She had to bring together
automatically, and at the dictation, as they felt, of their
irresponsible wills, just the creatures that by uniting might reproduce
the species. The complete sexual reaction had to be woven together out
of many incomplete reactions to various stimuli, reactions not
specifically sexual. The outer senses had to be engaged, and many
secondary characters found in bodies had to be used to attract
attention, until the deeper instinctive response should have time to
gather itself together and assert itself openly. Many mechanical
preformations and reflexes must conspire to constitute a determinate
instinct. We name this instinct after its ultimate function, looking
forward to the uses we observe it to have; and it seems to us in
consequence an inexplicable anomaly that many a time the instinct is set
in motion when its alleged purpose cannot be fulfilled; as when love
appears prematurely or too late, or fixes upon a creature of the wrong
age or sex. These anomalies show us how nature is built up and, far from
being inexplicable, are hints that tend to make everything clear, when
once a verbal and mythical philosophy has been abandoned.

Responses which we may call sexual in view of results to which they may
ultimately lead are thus often quite independent, and exist before they
are drawn into the vortex of a complete and actually generative act.
External stimulus and present idea will consequently be altogether
inadequate to explain the profound upheaval which may ensue, if, as we
say, we actually fall in love. That the senses should be played upon is
nothing, if no deeper reaction is aroused. All depends on the juncture
at which, so to speak, the sexual circuit is completed and the emotional
currents begin to circulate. Whatever object, at such a critical moment,
fills the field of consciousness becomes a signal and associate for the
whole sexual mood. It is breathlessly devoured in that pause and
concentration of attention, that rearrangement of the soul, which love
is conceived in; and the whole new life which that image is engulfed in
is foolishly supposed to be its effect. For the image is in
consciousness, but not the profound predispositions which gave it place
and power.

[Sidenote: The choice unstable.]

This association between passion and its signals may be merely
momentary, or it may be perpetual: a Don Juan and a Dante are both
genuine lovers. In a gay society the gallant addresses every woman as if
she charmed him, and perhaps actually finds any kind of beauty, or mere
femininity anywhere, a sufficient spur to his desire. These momentary
fascinations are not necessarily false: they may for an instant be quite
absorbing and irresistible; they may genuinely suffuse the whole mind.
Such mercurial fire will indeed require a certain imaginative
temperament; and there are many persons who, short of a life-long
domestic attachment, can conceive of nothing but sordid vice. But even
an inconstant flame may burn brightly, if the soul is naturally
combustible. Indeed these sparks and glints of passion, just because
they come and vary so quickly, offer admirable illustrations of it, in
which it may be viewed, so to speak, under the microscope and in its
formative stage.

Thus Plato did not hesitate to make the love of all wines, under
whatever guise, excuse, or occasion, the test of a true taste for wine
and an unfeigned adoration of Bacchus; and, like Lucretius after him, he
wittily compiled a list of names, by which the lover will flatter the
most opposite qualities, if they only succeed in arousing his
inclination. To be omnivorous is one pole of true love: to be exclusive
is the other. A man whose heart, if I may say so, lies deeper, hidden
under a thicker coat of mail, will have less play of fancy, and will be
far from finding every charm charming, or every sort of beauty a
stimulus to love. Yet he may not be less prone to the tender passion,
and when once smitten may be so penetrated by an unimagined tenderness
and joy, that he will declare himself incapable of ever loving again,
and may actually be so. Having no rivals and a deeper soil, love can
ripen better in such a constant spirit; it will not waste itself in a
continual patter of little pleasures and illusions. But unless the
passion of it is to die down, it must somehow assert its universality:
what it loses in diversity it must gain in applicability. It must become
a principle of action and an influence colouring everything that is
dreamt of; otherwise it would have lost its dignity and sunk into a dead
memory or a domestic bond.

[Sidenote: Instinctive essence of love.]

True love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners have much
to do with such incidents, and the race which happens to set, at a given
time, the fashion in literature makes its temperament public and
exercises a sort of contagion over all men’s fancies. If women are
rarely seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to; if all imagination has
to build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion, people fall in love
at first sight. For they must fall in love somehow, and any stimulus is
enough if none more powerful is forthcoming. When society, on the
contrary, allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, a
first impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and obliterated
by others. Acquaintance becomes necessary for love when it is necessary
for memory. But what makes true love is not the information conveyed by
acquaintance, not any circumstantial charms that may be therein
discovered; it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity, an
inexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence organising the
world, like a luminous crystal, about one magic point. So that although
love seldom springs up suddenly in these days into anything like a
full-blown passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time a
conquest over the heart; for all virtues, sympathies, confidences will
fail to move a man to tenderness and to worship, unless a poignant
effluence from the object envelop him, so that he begins to walk, as it
were, in a dream.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some people
so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest
on circumstantial evidence. But a finely constituted being is sensitive
to its deepest affinities. This is precisely what refinement consists
in, that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a sure
premonition of things ultimate and important. Fine senses vibrate at
once to harmonies which it may take long to verify; so sight is finer
than touch, and thought than sensation. Well-bred instinct meets reason
half-way, and is prepared for the consonances that may follow. Beautiful
things, when taste is formed, are obviously and unaccountably beautiful.
The grounds we may bring ourselves to assign for our preferences are
discovered by analysing those preferences, and articulate judgments
follow upon emotions which they ought to express, but which they
sometimes sophisticate. So, too, the reasons we give for love either
express what it feels or else are insincere, attempting to justify at
the bar of reason and convention something which is far more primitive
than they and underlies them both. True instinct can dispense with such
excuses. It appeals to the event and is justified by the response which
nature makes to it. It is, of course, far from infallible; it cannot
dominate circumstances, and has no discursive knowledge; but it is
presumably true, and what it foreknows is always essentially possible.
Unrealisable it may indeed be in the jumbled context of this world,
where the Fates, like an absent-minded printer, seldom allow a single
line to stand perfect and unmarred.

The profoundest affinities are those most readily felt, and though a
thousand later considerations may overlay and override them, they remain
a background and standard for all happiness. If we trace them out we
succeed. If we put them by, although in other respects we may call
ourselves happy, we inwardly know that we have dismissed the ideal, and
all that was essentially possible has not been realised. Love in that
case still owns a hidden and potential object, and we sanctify, perhaps,
whatever kindnesses or partialities we indulge in by a secret loyalty to
something impersonal and unseen. Such reserve, such religion, would not
have been necessary had things responded to our first expectations. We
might then have identified the ideal with the object that happened to
call it forth. The Life of Reason might have been led instinctively, and
we might have been guided by nature herself into the ways of peace.

[Sidenote: Its ideality.]

As it is, circumstances, false steps, or the mere lapse of time, force
us to shuffle our affections and take them as they come, or as we are
suffered to indulge them. A mother is followed by a boyish friend, a
friend by a girl, a girl by a wife, a wife by a child, a child by an
idea. A divinity passes through these various temples; they may all
remain standing, and we may continue our cult in them without outward
change, long after the god has fled from the last into his native
heaven. We may try to convince ourselves that we have lost nothing when
we have lost all. We may take comfort in praising the mixed and
perfunctory attachments which cling to us by force of habit and duty,
repeating the empty names of creatures that have long ceased to be what
we once could love, and assuring ourselves that we have remained
constant, without admitting that the world, which is in irreparable
flux, has from the first been betraying us.

Ashamed of being so deeply deceived, we may try to smile cynically at
the glory that once shone upon us, and call it a dream. But cynicism is
wasted on the ideal. There is indeed no idol ever identified with the
ideal which honest experience, even without cynicism, will not some day
unmask and discredit. Every real object must cease to be what it seemed,
and none could ever be what the whole soul desired. Yet what the soul
desires is nothing arbitrary. Life is no objectless dream, but
continually embodies, with varying success, the potentialities it
contains and that prompt desire. Everything that satisfies at all, even
if partially and for an instant, justifies aspiration and rewards it.
Existence, however, cannot be arrested; and only the transmissible forms
of things can endure, to match the transmissible faculties which living
beings hand down to one another. The ideal is accordingly significant,
perpetual, and as constant as the nature it expresses; but it can never
itself exist, nor can its particular embodiments endure.

[Sidenote: Its universal scope.]

Love is accordingly only half an illusion; the lover, but not his love,
is deceived. His madness, as Plato taught, is divine; for though it be
folly to identify the idol with the god, faith in the god is inwardly
justified. That egregious idolatry may therefore be interpreted ideally
and given a symbolic scope worthy of its natural causes and of the
mystery it comes to celebrate. The lover knows much more about absolute
good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the
latter, too, be lovers in disguise. Logical universals are terms in
discourse, without vital ideality, while traditional gods are at best
natural existences, more or less indifferent facts. What the lover comes
upon, on the contrary, is truly persuasive, and witnesses to itself, so
that he worships from the heart and beholds what he worships. That the
true object is no natural being, but an ideal form essentially eternal
and capable of endless embodiments, is far from abolishing its worth; on
the contrary, this fact makes love ideally relevant to generation, by
which the human soul and body may be for ever renewed, and at the same
time makes it a thing for large thoughts to be focussed upon, a thing
representing all rational aims.

Whenever this ideality is absent and a lover sees nothing in his
mistress but what everyone else may find in her, loving her honestly in
her unvarnished and accidental person, there is a friendly and humorous
affection, admirable in itself, but no passion or bewitchment of love;
she is a member of his group, not a spirit in his pantheon. Such an
affection may be altogether what it should be; it may bring a happiness
all the more stable because the heart is quite whole, and no divine
shaft has pierced it. It is hard to stanch wounds inflicted by a god.
The glance of an ideal love is terrible and glorious, foreboding death
and immortality together. Love could not be called divine without
platitude if it regarded nothing but its nominal object; to be divine it
must not envisage an accidental good but the principle of goodness, that
which gives other goods their ultimate meaning, and makes all functions
useful. Love is a true natural religion; it has a visible cult, it is
kindled by natural beauties and bows to the best symbol it may find for
its hope; it sanctifies a natural mystery; and, finally, when
understood, it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was
truly the principle of all good.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never
take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and
elementary. It is accordingly most truly love when it is irresistible
and fatal. The substance of all passion, if we could gather it together,
would be the basis of all ideals, to which all goods would have to
refer. Love actually accomplishes something of the sort; being
primordial it underlies other demands, and can be wholly satisfied only
by a happiness which is ultimate and comprehensive. Lovers are vividly
aware of this fact: their ideal, apparently so inarticulate, seems to
them to include everything. It shares the mystical quality of all
primitive life. Sophisticated people can hardly understand how vague
experience is at bottom, and how truly that vagueness supports whatever
clearness is afterward attained. They cling to the notion that nothing
can have a spiritual scope that does not spring from reflection. But in
that case life itself, which brings reflection about, would never
support spiritual interests, and all that is moral would be unnatural
and consequently self-destructive. In truth, all spiritual interests
are supported by animal life; in this the generative function is
fundamental; and it is therefore no paradox, but something altogether
fitting, that if that function realised all it comprises, nothing human
would remain outside. Such an ultimate fulfilment would differ, of
course, from a first satisfaction, just as all that reproduction
reproduces differs from the reproductive function itself, and vastly
exceeds it. All organs and activities which are inherited, in a sense,
grow out of the reproductive process and serve to clothe it; so that
when the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually
called up and, so to speak, made consciously potential; and love yearns
for the universe of values.

[Sidenote: Its euthanasia.]

This secret is gradually revealed to those who are inwardly attentive
and allow love to teach them something. A man who has truly loved,
though he may come to recognise the thousand incidental illusions into
which love may have led him, will not recant its essential faith. He
will keep his sense for the ideal and his power to worship. The further
objects by which these gifts will be entertained will vary with the
situation. A philosopher, a soldier, and a courtesan will express the
same religion in different ways. In fortunate cases love may glide
imperceptibly into settled domestic affections, giving them henceforth a
touch of ideality; for when love dies in the odour of sanctity people
venerate his relics. In other cases allegiance to the ideal may appear
more sullenly, breaking out in whims, or in little sentimental practices
which might seem half-conventional. Again it may inspire a religious
conversion, charitable works, or even artistic labours. In all these
ways people attempt more or less seriously to lead the Life of Reason,
expressing outwardly allegiance to whatever in their minds has come to
stand for the ideal. If to create was love’s impulse originally, to
create is its effort still, after it has been chastened and has received
some rational extension. The machinery which serves reproduction thus
finds kindred but higher uses, as every organ does in a liberal life;
and what Plato called a desire for birth in beauty may be sublimated
even more, until it yearns for an ideal immortality in a transfigured
world, a world made worthy of that love which its children have so often
lavished on it in their dreams.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: The wide uses of the English word love add to the
difficulty. I shall take the liberty of limiting the term here to
imaginative passion, to being in love, excluding all other ways of
loving. It follows that love—like its shadow, jealousy—will often be
merely an ingredient in an actual state of feeling; friendship and
confidence, with satisfaction at being liked in return, will often be
mingled with it. We shall have to separate physiologically things which
in consciousness exist undivided, since a philosophic description is
bound to be analytic and cannot render everything at once. Where a poet
might conceive a new composite, making it live, a moralist must dissect
the experience and rest in its eternal elements.]

[Footnote B: One example, among a thousand, is the cry of Siegfried and
Brünhilde in Wagner:

  Lachend lass’ uns verderben
  Lachend zu Grunde geh’n.
  Fahr hin, Walhall’s
  Leuchtende Welt!...
  Leb’ wohl, pragende
  Götter Pracht!
  Ende in Wonne,
  Du ewig Geschlecht!]




CHAPTER II

THE FAMILY


[Sidenote: The family arises spontaneously.]

Love is but a prelude to life, an overture in which the theme of the
impending work is exquisitely hinted at, but which remains nevertheless
only a symbol and a promise. What is to follow, if all goes well, begins
presently to appear. Passion settles down into possession, courtship
into partnership, pleasure into habit. A child, half mystery and half
plaything, comes to show us what we have done and to make its
consequences perpetual. We see that by indulging our inclinations we
have woven about us a net from which we cannot escape: our choices,
bearing fruit, begin to manifest our destiny. That life which once
seemed to spread out infinitely before us is narrowed to one mortal
career. We learn that in morals the infinite is a chimera, and that in
accomplishing anything definite a man renounces everything else. He
sails henceforth for one point of the compass.

[Sidenote: It harmonises natural interests.]

The family is one of nature’s masterpieces. It would be hard to conceive
a system of instincts more nicely adjusted, where the constituents
should represent or support one another better. The husband has an
interest in protecting the wife, she in serving the husband. The weaker
gains in authority and safety, the wilder and more unconcerned finds a
help-mate at home to take thought for his daily necessities. Parents
lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow
their parents with a vicarious immortality.

[Sidenote: Capacity to be educated goes with immaturity at birth.]

The long childhood in the human race has made it possible and needful to
transmit acquired experience: possible, because the child’s brain, being
immature, allows instincts and habits to be formed after birth, under
the influence of that very environment in which they are to operate; and
also needful, since children are long incapable of providing for
themselves and compel their parents, if the race is not to die out, to
continue their care, and to diversify it. To be born half-made is an
immense advantage. Structure performed is formed blindly; the _a priori_
is as dangerous in life as in philosophy. Only the cruel workings of
compulsion and extermination keep what is spontaneous in any creature
harmonious with the world it is called upon to live in. Nothing but
casual variations could permanently improve such a creature; and casual
variations will seldom improve it. But if experience can co-operate in
forming instincts, and if human nature can be partly a work of art,
mastery can be carried quickly to much greater lengths. This is the
secret of man’s pre-eminence. His liquid brain is unfit for years to
control action advantageously. He has an age of play which is his
apprenticeship; and he is formed unawares by a series of selective
experiments, of curious gropings, while he is still under tutelage and
suffers little by his mistakes.

[Sidenote: The naturally dull achieve intelligence.]

Had all intelligence been developed in the womb, as it might have been,
nothing essential could have been learned afterward. Mankind would have
contained nothing but doctrinaires, and the arts would have stood still
for ever. Capacity to learn comes with dependence on education; and as
that animal which at birth is most incapable and immature is the most
teachable, so too those human races which are most precocious are most
incorrigible, and while they seem the cleverest at first prove
ultimately the least intelligent. They depend less on circumstances, but
do not respond to them so well. In some nations everybody is by nature
so astute, versatile, and sympathetic that education hardly makes any
difference in manners or mind; and it is there precisely that
generation, follows generation without essential progress, and no one
ever remakes himself on a better plan. It is perhaps the duller races,
with a long childhood and a brooding mind, that bear the hopes of the
world within them, if only nature avails to execute what she has planned
on so great a scale.

[Sidenote: It is more blessed to save than to create.]

Generation answers no actual demand except that existing in the parents,
and it establishes a new demand without guaranteeing its satisfaction.
Birth is a benefit only problematically and by anticipation, on the
presumption that the faculties newly embodied are to be exercised
successfully. The second function of the family, to rear, is therefore
higher than the first. To foster and perfect a life after it has been
awakened, to co-operate with a will already launched into the world, is
a positive good work. It has a moral quality and is not mere vegetation;
for in expressing the agent and giving him ideal employment, it helps
the creature affected to employ itself better, too, and to find
expression. In propagating and sowing broadcast precarious beings there
is fertility only, such as plants and animals may have; but there is
charity in furthering what is already rooted in existence and is
striving to live.

This principle is strikingly illustrated in religion. When the Jews had
become spiritual they gave the name of Father to Jehovah, who had before
been only the Lord of Armies or the architect of the cosmos. A mere
source of being would not deserve to be called father, unless it shared
its creatures’ nature and therefore their interests. A deity not so much
responsible for men’s existence or situation as solicitous for their
welfare, who pitied a weakness he could not have intended and was
pleased by a love he could not command, might appropriately be called a
father. It then becomes possible to conceive moral intercourse and
mutual loyalty between God and man, such as Hebrew religion so earnestly
insisted on; for both then have the same interests in the world and look
toward the same consummations. So the natural relations subsisting
between parents and children become moral when it is not merely
derivation that unites them, but community of purpose. The father then
represents his children while they are under his tutelage, and afterward
they represent him, carrying on his arts and inheriting his mind.

[Sidenote: Parental instinct regards childhood only.]

These arts in some cases are little more than retarded instincts,
faculties that ripen late and that manifest themselves without special
instruction when the system is mature. So a bird feeds her young until
they are fledged and can provide for themselves. Parental functions in
such cases are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the
instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied
upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children’s
physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the
vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the
child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and
delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually
fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life
of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular
tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine
community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children.
Often the parent’s influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the
more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what
makes the parents’ claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is
founded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly
theirs, that no longer exists in the man.

To train character and mind would seem to be a father’s natural office,
but as a matter of fact he commonly delegates that task to society. The
fledgling venturing for the first time into the air may learn of his
father and imitate his style of flight; but once launched into the open
it will find the whole sky full of possible masters. The one ultimately
chosen will not necessarily be the nearest; in reason it should be the
most congenial, from whom most can be learned. To choose an imitable
hero is the boy’s first act of freedom; his heart grows by finding its
elective affinities, and it grows most away from home. It will grow also
by returning there, when home has become a part of the world or a refuge
from it; but even then the profoundest messages will come from religion
and from solitary dreams. A consequence is that parental influence, to
be permanent, requires that the family should be hedged about with high
barriers and that the father he endowed with political and religious
authority. He can then exercise the immense influence due to all
tradition, which he represents, and all law, which he administers; but
it is not his bare instincts as a father that give him this ascendency.
It is a social system that has delegated to him most of its functions,
so that all authority flows through him, and he retails justice and
knowledge, besides holding all wealth in his hand. When the father,
apart from these official prerogatives, is eager and able to mould his
children’s minds, a new relation half natural and half ideal, which is
friendship, springs up between father and son. In this ties of blood
merely furnish the opportunity, and what chiefly counts is a moral
impulse, on the one side, to beget children in the spirit, and on the
other a youthful hunger for experience and ideas.

[Sidenote: Handing on the torch of life.]

If _Nunc dimittis_ is a psalm for love to sing, it is even more
appropriate for parental piety. On seeing heirs and representatives of
ours already in the world, we are inclined to give them place and trust
them to realise our foiled ambitions. They, we fancy, will be more
fortunate than we; we shall have screened them from whatever has most
maimed our own lives. Their purer souls, as we imagine, will reach
better things than are now possible to ours, distracted and abused so
long. We commit the blotted manuscript of our lives more willingly to
the flames, when we find the immortal text already half engrossed in a
fairer copy. In all this there is undoubtedly a measure of illusion,
since little clear improvement is ordinarily possible in the world, and
while our children may improve upon us in some respects, the devil will
catch them unprepared in another quarter. Yet the hope in question is a
transcript of primary impersonal functions to which nature, at certain
levels, limits the animal will. To keep life going was, in the
beginning, the sole triumph of life. Even when nothing but reproduction
was aimed at or attained, existence was made possible and ideally stable
by securing so much; and when the ideal was enlarged so as to include
training and rearing the new generation, life was even better intrenched
and protected. Though further material progress may not be made easier
by this development, since more dangers become fatal as beings grow
complex and mutually dependent, a great step in moral progress has at
any rate been taken.

In itself, a desire to see a child grow and prosper is just as
irrational as any other absolute desire; but since the child also
desires his own happiness, the child’s will sanctions and supports the
father’s. Thus two irrationalities, when they conspire, make one
rational life. The father’s instinct and sense of duty are now
vindicated experimentally in the child’s progress, while the son,
besides the joy of living, has the pious function of satisfying his
parent’s hopes. Even if life could achieve nothing more than this, it
would have reached something profoundly natural and perfectly ideal. In
patriarchal ages men feel it is enough to have inherited their human
patrimony, to have enjoyed it, and to hand it down unimpaired. He who is
not childless goes down to his grave in peace. Reason may afterward come
to larger vistas and more spiritual aims, but the principle of love and
responsibility will not be altered. It will demand that wills be made
harmonious and satisfactions compatible.

[Sidenote: Adventitious functions assumed by the family.]

Life is experimental, and whatever performs some necessary function, and
cannot be discarded, is a safe nucleus for many a parasite, a
starting-point for many new experiments. So the family, in serving to
keep the race alive, becomes a point of departure for many institutions.
It assumes offices which might have been allotted to some other agency,
had not the family pre-empted them, profiting by its established
authority and annexing them to its domain. In no civilised community,
for instance, has the union of man and wife been limited to its barely
necessary period. It has continued after the family was reared and has
remained life-long; it has commonly involved a common dwelling and
religion and often common friends and property. Again, the children’s
emancipation has been put off indefinitely. The Roman father had a
perpetual jurisdiction and such absolute authority that, in the palmy
days of the Roman family, no other subsisted over it. He alone was a
citizen and responsible to the state, while his household were subject
to him in law, as well as in property and religion. In simple rural
communities the family has often been also the chief industrial unit,
almost all necessaries being produced under domestic economy.

[Sidenote: Inertia in human nature.]

Now the instincts and delights which nature associates with reproduction
cannot stretch so far. Their magic fails, and the political and
industrial family, which still thinks itself natural, is in truth casual
and conventional. There is no real instinct to protect those who can
already protect themselves; nor have they any profit in obeying nor, in
the end, any duty to do so. A _patria potestas_ much prolonged or
extended is therefore an abuse and prolific in abuses. The chieftain’s
mind, not being ruled by paternal instincts, will pursue arbitrary
personal ends, and it is hardly to be expected that his own wealth or
power or ideal interests will correspond with those of his subjects. The
government and supervision required by adults is what we call political;
it should stretch over all families alike. To annex this political
control to fatherhood is to confess that social instinct is singularly
barren, and that the common mind is not plastic enough to devise new
organs appropriate to the functions which a large society involves.

After all, the family is an early expedient and in many ways
irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be
nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees,
and if lovers had never been tied together by a bond less ethereal than
ideal passion, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a
division of labour would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but
it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.
For we pay a high price for our conquests in this quarter, and the
sweets of home are balanced not only by its tenderer sorrows, but by a
thousand artificial prejudices, enmities, and restrictions. It takes
patience to appreciate domestic bliss; volatile spirits prefer
unhappiness. Young men escape as soon as they can, at least in fancy,
into the wide world; all prophets are homeless and all inspired artists;
philosophers think out some communism or other, and monks put it in
practice. There is indeed no more irrational ground for living together
than that we have sprung from the same loins. They say blood is thicker
than water; yet similar forces easily compete while dissimilar forces
may perhaps co-operate. It is the end that is sacred, not the beginning.
A common origin unites reasonable creatures only if it involves common
thoughts and purposes; and these may bind together individuals of the
most remote races and ages, when once they have discovered one another.
It is difficulties of access, ignorance, and material confinement that
shut in the heart to its narrow loyalties; and perhaps greater mobility,
science, and the mingling of nations will one day reorganise the moral
world. It was a pure spokesman of the spirit who said that whosoever
should do the will of his _Father who was in heaven_, the same was his
brother and sister and mother.

[Sidenote: Family tyrannies.]

The family also perpetuates accidental social differences, exaggerating
and making them hereditary; it thus defeats that just moiety of the
democratic ideal which demands that all men should have equal
opportunities. In human society chance only decides what education a man
shall receive, what wealth and influence he shall enjoy, even what
religion and profession he shall adopt. People shudder at the system of
castes which prevails in India; but is not every family a little caste?
Was a man assigned to his family because he belonged to it in spirit, or
can he choose another? Half the potentialities in the human race are
thus stifled, half its incapacities fostered and made inveterate. The
family, too, is largely responsible for the fierce prejudices that
prevail about women, about religion, about seemly occupations, about
war, death, and honour. In all these matters men judge in a blind way,
inspired by a feminine passion that has no mercy for anything that
eludes the traditional household, not even for its members’ souls.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in abstracting from the family.]

At the same time there are insuperable difficulties in proposing any
substitute for the family. In the first place, all society at present
rests on this institution, so that we cannot easily discern which of our
habits and sentiments are parcels of it, and which are attached to it
adventitiously and have an independent basis. A reformer hewing so near
to the tree’s root never knows how much he may be felling. Possibly his
own ideal would lose its secret support if what it condemns had wholly
disappeared. For instance, it is conceivable that a communist,
abolishing the family in order to make opportunities equal and remove
the more cruel injustices of fortune, might be drying up that milk of
human kindness which had fed his own enthusiasm; for the foundlings
which he decreed were to people the earth might at once disown all
socialism and prove a brood of inhuman egoists. Or, as not wholly
contemptible theories have maintained, it might happen that if fathers
were relieved of care for their children and children of all paternal
suasion, human virtue would lose its two chief stays.

[Sidenote: Possibility of substitutes.]

On the other hand, an opposite danger is present in this sort of
speculation. Things now associated with the family may not depend upon
it, but might flourish equally well in a different soil. The family
being the earliest and closest society into which men enter, it assumes
the primary functions which all society can exercise. Possibly if any
other institution had been first in the field it might have had a
comparable moral influence. One of the great lessons, for example, which
society has to teach its members is that society exists. The child, like
the animal, is a colossal egoist, not from a want of sensibility, but
through his deep transcendental isolation. The mind is naturally its own
world and its solipsism needs to be broken down by social influence. The
child must learn to sympathise intelligently, to be considerate, rather
than instinctively to love and hate: his imagination must become
cognitive and dramatically just, instead of remaining, as it naturally
is, sensitively, selfishly fanciful.

To break down transcendental conceit is a function usually confided to
the family, and yet the family is not well fitted to perform it. To
mothers and nurses their darlings are always exceptional; even fathers
and brothers teach a child that he is very different from other
creatures and of infinitely greater consequence, since he lies closer to
their hearts and may expect from them all sorts of favouring services.
The whole household, in proportion as it spreads about the child a
brooding and indulgent atmosphere, nurses wilfulness and illusion. For
this reason the noblest and happiest children are those brought up, as
in Greece or England, under simple general conventions by persons
trained and hired for the purpose. The best training in character is
found in very large families or in schools, where boys educate one
another. Priceless in this regard is athletic exercise; for here the
test of ability is visible, the comparison not odious, the need of
co-operation clear, and the consciousness of power genuine and therefore
ennobling. Socratic dialectic is not a better means of learning to know
oneself. Such self-knowledge is objective and free from
self-consciousness; it sees the self in a general medium and measures it
by a general law. Even the tenderer associations of home might, under
other circumstances, attach to other objects. Consensus of opinion has a
distorting effect, sometimes, on ideal values. A thing which almost
everyone agrees in prizing, because it has played some part in every
life, tends to be valued above more important elements in personal
happiness that may not have been shared. So wealth, religion, military
victory have more rhetorical than efficacious worth. The family might
well be, to some extent, a similar idol of the tribe. Everyone has had a
father and a mother; but how many have had a friend? Everyone likes to
remember many a joy and even sorrow of his youth which was linked with
family occasions; but to name a man’s more private memories, attached to
special surroundings, would awaken no response in other minds. Yet these
other surroundings may have been no less stimulating to emotion, and if
familiar to all might be spoken of with as much conventional effect.
This appears so soon as any experience is diffused enough to enable a
tradition to arise, so that the sentiment involved can find a social
echo. Thus there is a loyalty, very powerful in certain quarters, toward
school, college, club, regiment, church, and country. Who shall say that
such associations, had they sprung up earlier and been more zealously
cultivated, or were they now reinforced by more general sympathy, would
not breed all the tenderness and infuse all the moral force which most
men now derive from the family?

[Sidenote: Plato’s heroic communism.]

Nevertheless, no suggested substitute for the family is in the least
satisfactory. Plato’s is the best grounded in reason; but to succeed it
would have to count on a degree of virtue absolutely unprecedented in
man. To be sure, the Platonic regimen, if it demands heroism for its
inception, provides in its scientific breeding and education a means of
making heroism perpetual. But to submit to such reforming regulations
men would first have to be reformed; it would not suffice, as Plato
suggested, merely to enslave them and to introduce scientific
institutions by despotic decrees. For in such a case there would be all
manner of evasions, rebellions, and corruptions. If marriage founded on
inclination and mutual consent is so often broken surreptitiously or by
open divorce, what should we expect amongst persons united and separated
by governmental policy? The love of home is a human instinct. Princes
who marry for political reasons often find a second household necessary
to their happiness, although every motive of honour, policy, religion,
and patriotism makes with overwhelming force against such
irregularities; and the celibate priesthood, presumably taking its vows
freely and under the influence of religious zeal, often revert in
practice to a sort of natural marriage. It is true that Plato’s citizens
were not to be celibates, and the senses would have had no just cause
for rebellion; but would the heart have been satisfied? Could passion or
habit submit to such regulation?

Even when every concession is made to the god-like simplicity and ardour
which that Platonic race was to show, a greater difficulty appears.
Apparently the guardians and auxiliaries, a small minority in the state,
were alone to submit to this regimen: the rest of the people, slaves,
tradesmen, and foreigners, were to live after their own devices and
were, we may suppose, to retain the family. So that, after all, Plato in
this matter proposes little more than what military and monastic orders
have actually done among Christians: to institute a privileged unmarried
class in the midst of an ordinary community. Such a proposal, therefore,
does not abolish the family.

[Sidenote: Opposite modern tendencies.]

Those forms of free love or facile divorce to which radical opinion and
practice incline in these days tend to transform the family without
abolishing it. Many unions might continue to be lasting, and the
children in any case would remain with one or the other parent. The
family has already suffered greater transformations than that suggested
by this sect. Polygamy persists, involving its own type of morals and
sentiment, and savage tribes show even more startling conventions. Nor
is it reasonable to dismiss all ideals but the Christian and then invoke
Christian patience to help us endure the consequent evils, which are
thus declared to be normal. No evil is normal. Of course virtue is the
cure for every abuse; but the question is the true complexion of virtue
and the regimen needful to produce it. Christianity, with its
non-political and remedial prescriptions, in the form of prayer,
penance, and patience, has left the causes of every evil untouched. It
has so truly come to call the sinner to repentance that its occupation
would be gone if once the sin could be abolished.

[Sidenote: Individualism in a sense rational.]

While a desirable form of society entirely without the family is hard to
conceive, yet the general tendency in historic times, and the marked
tendency in periods of ripe development, has been toward individualism.
Individualism is in one sense the only possible ideal; for whatever
social order may be most valuable can be valuable only for its effect on
conscious individuals. Man is of course a social animal and needs
society first that he may come safely into being, and then that he may
have something interesting to do. But society itself is no animal and
has neither instincts, interests, nor ideals. To talk of such things is
either to speak metaphorically or to think mythically; and myths, the
more currency they acquire, pass the more easily into superstitions. It
would be a gross and pedantic superstition to venerate any form of
society in itself, apart from the safety, breadth, or sweetness which it
lent to individual happiness. If the individual may be justly
subordinated to the state, not merely for the sake of a future freer
generation, but permanently and in the ideal society, the reason is
simply that such subordination is a part of man’s natural devotion to
things rational and impersonal, in the presence of which alone he can be
personally happy. Society, in its future and its past, is a natural
object of interest like art or science; it exists, like them, because
only when lost in such rational objects can a free soul be active and
immortal. But all these ideals are terms in some actual life, not alien
ends, important to nobody, to which, notwithstanding, everybody is to be
sacrificed.

Individualism is therefore the only ideal possible. The excellence of
societies is measured by what they provide for their members. A cumbrous
and sanctified social order manifests dulness, and cannot subsist
without it. It immerses man in instrumentalities, weighs him down with
atrophied organs, and by subjecting him eternally to fruitless
sacrifices renders him stupid and superstitious and ready to be himself
tyrannical when the opportunity occurs. A sure sign of having escaped
barbarism is therefore to feel keenly the pragmatic values belonging to
all institutions, to look deep into the human sanctions of things.
Greece was on this ground more civilised than Rome, and Athens more than
Sparta. Ill-governed communities may be more intelligent than
well-governed ones, when people feel the motive and partial advantage
underlying the abuses they tolerate (as happens where slavery or
nepotism is prevalent), but when on the other hand no reason is
perceived for the good laws which are established (as when law is based
on revelation). The effort to adjust old institutions suddenly to felt
needs may not always be prudent, because the needs most felt may not be
the deepest, yet so far as it goes the effort is intelligent.

[Sidenote: The family tamed.]

The family in a barbarous age remains sacrosanct and traditional;
nothing in its law, manners, or ritual is open to amendment. The
unhappiness which may consequently overtake individuals is hushed up or
positively blamed, with no thought of tinkering with the holy
institutions which are its cause. Civilised men think more and cannot
endure objectless tyrannies. It is inevitable, therefore, that as
barbarism recedes the family should become more sensitive to its
members’ personal interests. Husband and wife, when they are happily
matched, are in liberal communities more truly united than before,
because such closer friendship expresses their personal inclination.
Children are still cared for, because love of them is natural, but they
are ruled less and sooner suffered to choose their own associations.
They are more largely given in charge to persons not belonging to the
family, especially fitted to supply their education. The whole, in a
word, exists more and more for the sake of the parts, and the closeness,
duration, and scope of family ties comes to vary greatly in different
households. Barbaric custom, imposed in all cases alike without respect
of persons, yields to a regimen that dares to be elastic and will take
pains to be just.

[Sidenote: Possible readjustments and reversions.]

How far these liberties should extend and where they would pass into
license and undermine rational life, is another question. The pressure
of circumstances is what ordinarily forces governments to be absolute.
Political liberty is a sign of moral and economic independence. The
family may safely weaken its legal and customary authority so long as
the individual can support and satisfy himself. Children evidently never
can; consequently they must remain in a family or in some artificial
substitute for it which would be no less coercive. But to what extent
men and women, in a future age, may need to rely on ties of
consanguinity or marriage in order not to grow solitary, purposeless,
and depraved, is for prophets only to predict. If changes continue in
the present direction much that is now in bad odour may come to be
accepted as normal. It might happen, for instance, as a consequence of
woman’s independence, that mothers alone should be their children’s
guardians and sole mistresses in their houses; the husband, if he were
acknowledged at all, having at most a pecuniary responsibility for his
offspring. Such an arrangement would make a stable home for the
children, while leaving marriage dissoluble at the will of either party.

It may well be doubted, however, whether women, if given every
encouragement to establish and protect themselves, would not in the end
fly again into man’s arms and prefer to be drudges and mistresses at
home to living disciplined and submerged in some larger community.
Indeed, the effect of women’s emancipation might well prove to be the
opposite of what was intended. Really free and equal competition between
men and women might reduce the weaker sex to such graceless inferiority
that, deprived of the deference and favour they now enjoy, they should
find themselves entirely without influence. In that case they would have
to begin again at the bottom and appeal to arts of seduction and to
men’s fondness in order to regain their lost social position.

[Sidenote: The ideal includes generation.]

There is a certain order in progress which it is impossible to retract.
An advance must not subvert its own basis nor revoke the interest which
it furthers. While hunger subsists the art of ploughing is rational; had
agriculture abolished appetite it would have destroyed its own
rationality. Similarly no state of society is to be regarded as ideal in
which those bodily functions are supposed to be suspended which created
the ideal by suggesting their own perfect exercise. If old age and death
were abolished, reproduction, indeed, would become unnecessary: its
pleasures would cease to charm the mind, and its results—pregnancy,
child-birth, infancy—would seem positively horrible. But so long as
reproduction is necessary the ideal of life must include it. Otherwise
we should be constructing not an ideal of life but some dream of
non-human happiness, a dream whose only remnant of ideality would be
borrowed from such actual human functions as it still expressed
indirectly. The true ideal must speak for all necessary and compatible
functions. Man being an inevitably reproductive animal his reproductive
function must be included in his perfect life.


[Sidenote: Inner values already lodged in this function.]

Now, any function to reach perfection it must fulfil two conditions: it
must be delightful in itself, endowing its occasions and results with
ideal interest, and it must also co-operate harmoniously with all other
functions so that life may be profitable and happy. In the matter of
reproduction nature has already fulfilled the first of these conditions
in its essentials. It has indeed super-abundantly fulfilled them, and
not only has love appeared in man’s soul, the type and symbol of all
vital perfection, but a tenderness and charm, a pathos passing into the
frankest joy, has been spread over pregnancy, birth, and childhood. If
many pangs and tears still prove how tentative and violent, even here,
are nature’s most brilliant feats, science and kindness may strive not
unsuccessfully to diminish or abolish those profound traces of evil. But
reproduction will not be perfectly organised until the second condition
is fulfilled as well, and here nature has as yet been more remiss.
Family life, as Western nations possess it, is still regulated in a very
bungling, painful, and unstable manner. Hence, in the first rank of
evils, prostitution, adultery, divorce, improvident and unhappy
marriages; and in the second rank, a morality compacted of three
inharmonious parts, with incompatible ideals, each in its way
legitimate: I mean the ideals of passion, of convention, and of reason;
add, besides, genius and religion thwarted by family ties, single lives
empty, wedded lives constrained, a shallow gallantry, and a dull virtue.

[Sidenote: Outward beneficence might be secured by experiment.]

How to surround the natural sanctities of wedlock with wise custom and
law, how to combine the maximum of spiritual freedom with the maximum of
moral cohesion, is a problem for experiment to solve. It cannot be
solved, even ideally, in a Utopia. For each interest in play has its
rights and the prophet neither knows what interests may at a given
future time subsist in the world, nor what relative force they may have,
nor what mechanical conditions may control their expression. The
statesman in his sphere and the individual in his must find, as they go,
the best practical solutions. All that can be indicated beforehand is
the principle which improvements in this institution would comply with
if they were really improvements. They would reform and perfect the
function of reproduction without discarding it; they would maintain the
family unless they could devise some institution that combined intrinsic
and representative values better than does that natural artifice, and
they would recast either the instincts or the laws concerned, or both
simultaneously, until the family ceased to clash seriously with any of
these three things: natural affection, rational nurture, and moral
freedom.




CHAPTER III

INDUSTRY, GOVERNMENT, AND WAR


[Sidenote: Patriarchal economy.]

We have seen that the family, an association useful in rearing the
young, may become a means of further maintenance and defence. It is the
first economic and the first military group. Children become servants,
and servants, being adopted and brought up in the family, become like
other children and supply the family’s growing wants. It was no small
part of the extraordinary longing for progeny shown by patriarchal man
that children were wealth, and that by continuing in life-long
subjection to their father they lent prestige and power to his old age.
The daughters drew water, the wives and concubines spun, wove, and
prepared food. A great family was a great estate. It was augmented
further by sheep, goats, asses, and cattle. This numerous household,
bound together by personal authority and by common fortunes, was
sufficient to carry on many rude industries. It wandered from pasture to
pasture, practised hospitality, watched the stars, and seems (at least
in poetic retrospect) to have been not unhappy. A Roman adage has
declared that to know the world one household suffices; and one
patriarchal family, in its simplicity and grandeur, seems to have given
scope enough for almost all human virtues. And those early men, as Vico
says, were sublime poets.

[Sidenote: Origin of the state.]

Nevertheless, such a condition can only subsist in deserts where those
who try to till the soil cannot grow strong enough to maintain
themselves against marauding herdsmen. Whenever agriculture yields
better returns and makes the husbandman rich enough to support a
protector, patriarchal life disappears. The fixed occupation of land
turns a tribe into a state. Plato has given the classic account of such
a passage from idyllic to political conditions. Growth in population and
in requirements forces an Arcadian community to encroach upon its
neighbours; this encroachment means war; and war, when there are fields
and granaries to protect, and slaves and artisans to keep at their
domestic labours, means fortifications, an army, and a general. And to
match the army in the field another must be maintained at home, composed
of judges, priests, builders, cooks, barbers, and doctors. Such is the
inception of what, in the literal sense of the word, may be called
civilisation.

[Sidenote: Three uses of civilisation.]

Civilisation secures three chief advantages: greater wealth, greater
safety, and greater variety of experience. Whether, in spite of this,
there is a real—that is, a moral—advance is a question impossible to
answer off-hand, because wealth, safety, and variety are not absolute
goods, and their value is great or small according to the further values
they may help to secure. This is obvious in the case of riches. But
safety also is only good when there is something to preserve better than
courage, and when the prolongation of life can serve to intensify its
excellence. An animal’s existence is not improved when made safe by
imprisonment and domestication; it is only degraded and rendered passive
and melancholy. The human savage likewise craves a freedom and many a
danger inconsistent with civilisation, because independent of reason. He
does not yet identify his interests with any persistent and ideal
harmonies created by reflection. And when reflection is absent, length
of life is no benefit: a quick succession of generations, with a small
chance of reaching old age, is a beautiful thing in purely animal
economy, where vigour is the greatest joy, propagation the highest
function, and decrepitude the sorriest woe. The value of safety,
accordingly, hangs on the question whether life has become reflective
and rational. But the fact that a state arises does not in itself imply
rationality. It makes rationality possible, but leaves it potential.

[Sidenote: Its rationality contingent.]

Similar considerations apply to variety. To increase the number of
instincts and functions is probably to produce confusion and to augment
that secondary and reverberating kind of evil which consists in
expecting pain and regretting misfortune. On the other hand, a perfect
life could never be accused of monotony. All desirable variety lies
within the circle of perfection. Thus we do not tire of possessing two
legs nor wish, for the sake of variety, to be occasionally lunatics.
Accordingly, an increase in variety of function is a good only if a
unity can still be secured embracing that variety; otherwise it would
have been better that the irrelevant function should have been developed
by independent individuals or should not have arisen at all. The
function of seeing double adds more to the variety than to the spice of
life. Whether civilisation is a blessing depends, then, on its ulterior
uses. Judged by those interests which already exist when it arises, it
is very likely a burden and oppression. The birds’ instinctive economy
would not be benefited by a tax-gatherer, a recruiting-sergeant, a sect
or two of theologians, and the other usual organs of human polity.

For the Life of Reason, however, civilisation is a necessary condition.
Although animal life, within man and beyond him, has its wild beauty and
mystic justifications, yet that specific form of life which we call
rational, and which is no less natural than the rest, would never have
arisen without an expansion of human faculty, an increase in mental
scope, for which civilisation is necessary. Wealth, safety, variety of
pursuits, are all requisite if memory and purpose are to be trained
increasingly, and if a steadfast art of living is to supervene upon
instinct and dream.

[Sidenote: Sources of wealth.]

Wealth is itself expressive of reason for it arises whenever men,
instead of doing nothing or beating about casually in the world, take to
gathering fruits of nature which they may have uses for in future, or
fostering their growth, or actually contriving their appearance. Such is
man’s first industrial habit, seen in grazing, agriculture, and mining.
Among nature’s products are also those of man’s own purposeless and
imitative activity, results of his idle ingenuity and restlessness. Some
of these, like nature’s other random creations, may chance to have some
utility. They may then become conspicuous to reflection, be strengthened
by the relations which they establish in life, and be henceforth called
works of human art. They then constitute a second industrial habit and
that other sort of riches which is supplied by manufacture.

[Sidenote: Excess of it possible.]

The amount of wealth man can produce is apparently limited only by time,
invention, and the material at hand. It can very easily exceed his
capacity for enjoyment. As the habits which produce wealth were
originally spontaneous and only crystallised into reasonable processes
by mutual checks and the gradual settling down of the organism into
harmonious action, so also the same habits may outrun their uses. The
machinery to produce wealth, of which man’s own energies have become a
part, may well work on irrespective of happiness. Indeed, the industrial
ideal would be an international community with universal free trade,
extreme division of labour, and no unproductive consumption. Such an
arrangement would undoubtedly produce a maximum of riches, and any
objections made to it, if intelligent, must be made on other than
universal economic grounds. Free trade may be opposed, for instance
(while patriotism takes the invidious form of jealousy and while peace
is not secure), on the ground that it interferes with vested interests
and settled populations or with national completeness and
self-sufficiency, or that absorption in a single industry is
unfavourable to intellectual life. The latter is also an obvious
objection to any great division of labour, even in liberal fields; while
any man with a tender heart and traditional prejudices might hesitate to
condemn the irresponsible rich to extinction, together with all paupers,
mystics, and old maids living on annuities.

Such attacks on industrialism, however, are mere skirmishes and express
prejudices of one sort or another. The formidable judgment industrialism
has to face is that of reason, which demands that the increase and
specification of labour be justified by benefits somewhere actually
realised and integrated in individuals. Wealth must justify itself in
happiness. Someone must live better for having produced or enjoyed these
possessions. And he would not live better, even granting that the
possessions were in themselves advantages, if these advantages were
bought at too high a price and removed other greater opportunities or
benefits. The belle must not sit so long prinking before the glass as to
miss the party, and man must not work so hard and burden himself with so
many cares as to have no breath or interest left for things free and
intellectual. Work and life too often are contrasted and complementary
things; but they would not be contrasted nor even separable if work were
not servile, for of course man can have no life save in occupation, and
in the exercise of his faculties; contemplation itself can deal only
with what practice contains or discloses. But the pursuit of wealth is a
pursuit of instruments. The division of labour when extreme does
violence to natural genius and obliterates natural distinctions in
capacity. What is properly called industry is not art or self-justifying
activity, but on the contrary a distinctly compulsory and merely
instrumental labour, which if justified at all must be justified by some
ulterior advantage which it secures. In regard to such instrumental
activities the question is always pertinent whether they do not produce
more than is useful, or prevent the existence of something that is
intrinsically good.

[Sidenote: Irrational industry.]

Occidental society has evidently run in this direction into great
abuses, complicating life prodigiously without ennobling the mind. It
has put into rich men’s hands facilities and luxuries which they trifle
with without achieving any dignity or true magnificence in living,
while the poor, if physically more comfortable than formerly, are not
meantime notably wiser or merrier. Ideal distinction has been sacrificed
in the best men, to add material comforts to the worst. Things, as
Emerson said, are in the saddle and ride mankind. The means crowd out
the ends and civilisation reverts, when it least thinks it, to
barbarism.

[Sidenote: Its jovial and ingenious side.]

The acceptable side of industrialism, which is supposed to be inspired
exclusively by utility, is not utility at all but pure achievement. If
we wish to do such an age justice we must judge it as we should a child
and praise its feats without inquiring after its purposes. That is its
own spirit: a spirit dominant at the present time, particularly in
America, where industrialism appears most free from alloy. There is a
curious delight in turning things over, changing their shape,
discovering their possibilities, making of them some new contrivance.
Use, in these experimental minds, as in nature, is only incidental.
There is an irrational creative impulse, a zest in novelty, in
progression, in beating the other man, or, as they say, in breaking the
record. There is also a fascination in seeing the world unbosom itself
of ancient secrets, obey man’s coaxing, and take on unheard-of shapes.
The highest building, the largest steamer, the fastest train, the book
reaching the widest circulation have, in America, a clear title to
respect. When the just functions of things are as yet not discriminated,
the superlative in any direction seems naturally admirable. Again, many
possessions, if they do not make a man better, are at least expected to
make his children happier; and this pathetic hope is behind many
exertions. An experimental materialism, spontaneous and divorced from
reason and from everything useful, is also confused in some minds with
traditional duties; and a school of popular hierophants is not lacking
that turns it into a sort of religion and perhaps calls it idealism.
Impulse is more visible in all this than purpose, imagination more than
judgment; but it is pleasant for the moment to abound in invention and
effort and to let the future cash the account.

[Sidenote: Its tyranny.]

Wealth is excessive when it reduces a man to a middleman and a jobber,
when it prevents him, in his preoccupation with material things, from
making his spirit the measure of them. There are Nibelungen who toil
underground over a gold they will never use, and in their obsession with
production begrudge themselves all holidays, all concessions to
inclination, to merriment, to fancy; nay, they would even curtail as
much as possible the free years of their youth, when they might see the
blue, before rendering up their souls to the Leviathan. Visible signs of
such unreason soon appear in the relentless and hideous aspect which
life puts on; for those instruments which somehow emancipate themselves
from their uses soon become hateful. In nature irresponsible wildness
can be turned to beauty, because every product can be recomposed into
some abstract manifestation of force or form; but the monstrous in man
himself and in his works immediately offends, for here everything is
expected to symbolise its moral relations. The irrational in the human
has something about it altogether repulsive and terrible, as we see in
the maniac, the miser, the drunkard, or the ape. A barbaric
civilisation, built on blind impulse and ambition, should fear to awaken
a deeper detestation than could ever be aroused by those more beautiful
tyrannies, chivalrous or religious, against which past revolutions have
been directed.

[Sidenote: An impossible remedy.]

Both the sordidness and the luxury which industrialism may involve,
could be remedied, however, by a better distribution of the product. The
riches now created by labour would probably not seriously debauch
mankind if each man had only his share; and such a proportionate return
would enable him to perceive directly how far his interests required him
to employ himself in material production and how far he could allow
himself leisure for spontaneous things—religion, play, art, study,
conversation. In a world composed entirely of philosophers an hour or
two a day of manual labour—a very welcome quantity—would provide for
material wants; the rest could then be all the more competently
dedicated to a liberal life; for a healthy soul needs matter quite as
much for an object of interest as for a means of sustenance. But
philosophers do not yet people nor even govern the world, and so simple
a Utopia which reason, if it had direct efficacy, would long ago have
reduced to act, is made impossible by the cross-currents of instinct,
tradition, and fancy which variously deflect affairs.

[Sidenote: Basis of government.]

What are called the laws of nature are so many observations made by man
on a way things have of repeating themselves by replying always to their
old causes and never, as reason’s prejudice would expect, to their new
opportunities. This inertia, which physics registers in the first law of
motion, natural history and psychology call habit. Habit is a physical
law. It is the basis and force of all morality, but is not morality
itself. In society it takes the form of custom which, when codified, is
called law and when enforced is called government. Government is the
political representative of a natural equilibrium, of custom, of
inertia; it is by no means a representative of reason. But, like any
mechanical complication, it may become rational, and many of its forms
and operations may be defended on rational grounds. All natural
organisms, from protoplasm to poetry, can exercise certain ideal
functions and symbolise in their structure certain ideal relations.
Protoplasm tends to propagate itself, and in so doing may turn into a
conscious ideal the end it already tends to realise; but there could be
no desire for self-preservation were there not already a self
preserved. So government can by its existence define the commonwealth
it tends to preserve, and its acts may be approved from the point of
view of those eventual interests which they satisfy. But government
neither subsists nor arises because it is good or useful, but solely
because it is inevitable. It becomes good in so far as the inevitable
adjustment of political forces which it embodies is also a just
provision for all the human interests which it creates or affects.

[Sidenote: How rationality accrues.]

Suppose a cold and hungry savage, failing to find berries and game
enough in the woods, should descend into some meadow where a flock of
sheep were grazing and pounce upon a lame lamb which could not run away
with the others, tear its flesh, suck up its blood, and dress himself in
its skin. All this could not be called an affair undertaken in the
sheep’s interest. And yet it might well conduce to their interest in the
end. For the savage, finding himself soon hungry again, and
insufficiently warm in that scanty garment, might attack the flock a
second time, and thereby begin to accustom himself, and also his
delighted family, to a new and more substantial sort of raiment and
diet. Suppose, now, a pack of wolves, or a second savage, or a disease
should attack those unhappy sheep. Would not their primeval enemy defend
them? Would he not have identified himself with their interests to this
extent, that their total extinction or discomfiture would alarm him
also? And in so far as he provided for their well-being, would he not
have become a good shepherd? If, now, some philosophic wether, a lover
of his kind, reasoned with his fellows upon the change in their
condition, he might shudder indeed at those early episodes and at the
contribution of lambs and fleeces which would not cease to be levied by
the new government; but he might also consider that such a contribution
was nothing in comparison with what was formerly exacted by wolves,
diseases, frosts, and casual robbers, when the flock was much smaller
than it had now grown to be, and much less able to withstand decimation.
And he might even have conceived an admiration for the remarkable wisdom
and beauty of that great shepherd, dressed in such a wealth of wool; and
he might remember pleasantly some occasional caress received from him
and the daily trough filled with water by his providential hand. And he
might not be far from maintaining not only the rational origin, but the
divine right of shepherds.

Such a savage enemy, incidentally turned into a useful master, is called
a conqueror or king. Only in human experience the case is not so simple
and harmony is seldom established so quickly. The history of Asia is
replete with examples of conquest and extortion in which a rural
population living in comparative plenty is attacked by some more
ferocious neighbour who, after a round of pillage, establishes a quite
unnecessary government, raising taxes and soldiers for purposes
absolutely remote from the conquered people’s interests. Such a
government is nothing but a chronic raid, mitigated by the desire to
leave the inhabitants prosperous enough to be continually despoiled
afresh. Even this modicum of protection, however, can establish a
certain moral bond between ruler and subject; an intelligent government
and an intelligent fealty become conceivable.

[Sidenote: Ferocious but useful despotisms.]

Not only may the established régime be superior to any other that could
be substituted for it at the time, but some security against total
destruction, and a certain opportunity for the arts and for personal
advancement may follow subjugation. A moderate decrease in personal
independence may be compensated by a novel public grandeur; palace and
temple may make amends for hovels somewhat more squalid than before.
Hence, those who cannot conceive a rational polity, or a co-operative
greatness in the state, especially if they have a luxurious fancy, can
take pleasure in despotism; for it does not, after all, make so much
difference to an ordinary fool whether what he suffers from is another’s
oppression or his own lazy improvidence; and he can console himself by
saying with Goldsmith:

  How small, of all that human hearts endure,
  The part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

At the same time a court and a hierarchy, with their interesting pomp
and historic continuity, with their combined appeal to greed and
imagination, redeem human existence from pervasive vulgarity and allow
somebody at least to strut proudly over the earth. Serfs are not in a
worse material condition than savages, and their spiritual opportunities
are infinitely greater; for their eye and fancy are fed with visions of
human greatness, and even if they cannot improve their outward estate
they can possess a poetry and a religion. It suffices to watch an
Oriental rabble at prayer, or listening in profound immobility to some
wandering story-teller or musician, to feel how much such a people may
have to ruminate upon, and how truly Arabian days and Arabian Nights go
together. The ideas evolved may be wild and futile and the emotions
savagely sensuous, yet they constitute a fund of inner experience, a
rich soil for better imaginative growths. To such Oriental cogitations,
for instance, carried on under the shadow of uncontrollable despotisms,
mankind owes all its greater religions.

A government’s origin has nothing to do with its legitimacy; that is,
with its representative operation. An absolutism based on conquest or on
religious fraud may wholly lose its hostile function. It may become the
nucleus of a national organisation expressing justly enough the people’s
requirements. Such a representative character is harder to attain when
the government is foreign, for diversity in race language and local ties
makes the ruler less apt involuntarily to represent his subjects; his
measures must subserve their interests intentionally, out of sympathy,
policy, and a sense of duty, virtues which are seldom efficacious for
any continuous period. A native government, even if based on initial
outrage, can more easily drift into excellence; for when a great man
mounts the throne he has only to read his own soul and follow his
instinctive ambitions in order to make himself the leader and spokesman
of his nation. An Alexander, an Alfred, a Peter the Great, are examples
of persons who with varying degrees of virtue were representative
rulers: their policy, however irrationally inspired, happened to serve
their subjects and the world. Besides, a native government is less
easily absolute. Many influences control the ruler in his aims and
habits, such as religion, custom, and the very language he speaks, by
which praise and blame are assigned automatically to the objects loved
or hated by the people. He cannot, unless he be an intentional monster,
oppose himself wholly to the common soul.

[Sidenote: Occasional advantage of being conquered.]

For this very reason, however, native governments are little fitted to
redeem or transform a people, and all great upheavals and regenerations
have been brought about by conquest, by the substitution of one race and
spirit for another in the counsels of the world. What the Orient owes to
Greece, the Occident to Rome, India to England, native America to Spain,
is a civilisation incomparably better than that which the conquered
people could ever have provided for themselves. Conquest is a good means
of recasting those ideals, perhaps impracticable and ignorant, which a
native government at its best would try to preserve. Such inapt ideals,
it is true, would doubtless remodel themselves if they could be partly
realised. Progress from within is possible, otherwise no progress would
be possible for humanity at large. But conquest gives at once a freer
field to those types of polity which, since they go with strength,
presumably represent the better adjustment to natural conditions, and
therefore the better ideal. Though the substance of ideals is the will,
their mould must be experience and a true discernment of opportunity; so
that while all ideals, regarded _in vacuo_, are equal in ideality, they
are, under given circumstances, very diverse in worth.

[Sidenote: Origin of free governments.]

When not founded on conquest, which is the usual source of despotism,
government is ordinarily based on traditional authority vested in elders
or patriarchal kings. This is the origin of the classic state, and of
all aristocracy and freedom. The economic and political unit is a great
household with its lord, his wife and children, clients and slaves. In
the interstices of these households there may be a certain floating
residuum—freedmen, artisans, merchants, strangers. These people, while
free, are without such rights as even slaves possess; they have no share
in the religion, education, and resources of any established family.
For purposes of defence and religion the heads of houses gather together
in assemblies, elect or recognise some chief, and agree upon laws,
usually little more than extant customs regulated and formally
sanctioned.

[Sidenote: Their democratic tendencies.]

Such a state tends to expand in two directions. In the first place, it
becomes more democratic; that is, it tends to recognise other influences
than that which heads of families—_patres conscripti_—possess. The
people without such fathers, those who are not patricians, also have
children and come to imitate on a smaller scale the patriarchal economy.
These plebeians are admitted to citizenship. But they have no such
religious dignity and power in their little families as the patricians
have in theirs; they are scarcely better than loose individuals,
representing nothing but their own sweet wills. This individualism and
levity is not, however, confined to the plebeians; it extends to the
patrician houses. Individualism is the second direction in which a
patriarchal society yields to innovation. As the state grows the family
weakens; and while in early Rome, for instance, only the _pater
familias_ was responsible to the city, and his children and slaves only
to him, in Greece we find from early times individuals called to account
before public judges. A federation of households thus became a republic.
The king, that chief who enjoyed a certain hereditary precedence in
sacrifices or in war, yields to elected generals and magistrates whose
power, while it lasts, is much greater; for no other comparable power
now subsists in the levelled state.

Modern Europe has seen an almost parallel development of democracy and
individualism, together with the establishment of great artificial
governments. Though the feudal hierarchy was originally based on
conquest or domestic subjection, it came to have a fanciful or
chivalrous or political force. But gradually the plebeian classes—the
burghers—grew in importance, and military allegiance was weakened by
being divided between a number of superposed lords, up to the king,
emperor, or pope. The stronger rulers grew into absolute monarchs,
representatives of great states, and the people became, in a political
sense, a comparatively level multitude. Where parliamentary government
was established it became possible to subordinate or exclude the monarch
and his court; but the government remains an involuntary institution,
and the individual must adapt himself to its exigencies. The church
which once overshadowed the state has now lost its coercive authority
and the single man stands alone before an impersonal written law, a
constitutional government, and a widely diffused and contagious public
opinion, characterised by enormous inertia, incoherence, and blindness.
Contemporary national units are strongly marked and stimulate on
occasion a perfervid artificial patriotism; but they are strangely
unrepresentative of either personal or universal interests and may yield
in turn to new combinations, if the industrial and intellectual
solidarity of mankind, every day more obvious, ever finds a fit organ to
express and to defend it.

[Sidenote: Imperial peace.]

A despotic military government founded on alien force and aiming at its
own magnificence is often more efficient in defending its subjects than
is a government expressing only the people’s energies, as the predatory
shepherd and his dog prove better guardians for a flock than its own
wethers. The robbers that at their first incursion brought terror to
merchant and peasant may become almost immediately representative organs
of society—an army and a judiciary. Disputes between subjects are
naturally submitted to the invader, under whose laws and good-will alone
a practical settlement can now be effected; and this alien tribunal,
being exempt from local prejudices and interested in peace that taxes
may be undiminished, may administer a comparatively impartial justice,
until corrupted by bribes. The constant compensation tyranny brings,
which keeps it from at once exhausting its victims, is the silence it
imposes on their private squabbles. One distant universal enemy is less
oppressive than a thousand unchecked pilferers and plotters at home. For
this reason the reader of ancient history so often has occasion to
remark what immense prosperity Asiatic provinces enjoyed between the
periods when their successive conquerors devastated them. They
flourished exceedingly the moment peace and a certain order were
established in them.

[Sidenote: Nominal and real status of armies.]

Tyranny not only protects the subject against his kinsmen, thus taking
on the functions of law and police, but it also protects him against
military invasion, and thus takes on the function of an army. An army,
considered ideally, is an organ for the state’s protection; but it is
far from being such in its origin, since at first an army is nothing but
a ravenous and lusty horde quartered in a conquered country; yet the
cost of such an incubus may come to be regarded as an insurance against
further attack, and so what is in its real basis an inevitable burden
resulting from a chance balance of forces may be justified in
after-thought as a rational device for defensive purposes. Such an
ulterior justification has nothing to do, however, with the causes that
maintain armies or military policies: and accordingly those virginal
minds that think things originated in the uses they may have acquired,
have frequent cause to be pained and perplexed at the abuses and
over-development of militarism. An insurance capitalised may exceed the
value of the property insured, and the drain caused by armies and navies
may be much greater than the havoc they prevent. The evils against which
they are supposed to be directed are often evils only in a cant and
conventional sense, since the events deprecated (like absorption by a
neighbouring state) might be in themselves no misfortune to the people,
but perhaps a singular blessing. And those dreaded possibilities, even
if really evil, may well be less so than is the hateful actuality of
military taxes, military service, and military arrogance.

[Sidenote: Their action irresponsible.]

Nor is this all: the military classes, since they inherit the blood and
habits of conquerors, naturally love war and their irrational
combativeness is reinforced by interest; for in war officers can shine
and rise, while the danger of death, to a brave man, is rather a spur
and a pleasing excitement than a terror. A military class is therefore
always recalling, foretelling, and meditating war; it fosters artificial
and senseless jealousies toward other governments that possess armies;
and finally, as often as not, it precipitates disaster by bringing about
the objectless struggle on which it has set its heart.

[Sidenote: Pugnacity human.]

These natural phenomena, unintelligently regarded as anomalies and
abuses, are the appanage of war in its pristine and proper form. To
fight is a radical instinct; if men have nothing else to fight over they
will fight over words, fancies, or women, or they will fight because
they dislike each other’s looks, or because they have met walking in
opposite directions. To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked
at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight to the blood. To fight for a
reason and in a calculating spirit is something your true warrior
despises; even a coward might screw his courage up to such a reasonable
conflict. The joy and glory of fighting lie in its pure spontaneity and
consequent generosity; you are not fighting for gain, but for sport and
for victory. Victory, no doubt, has its fruits for the victor. If
fighting were not a possible means of livelihood the bellicose instinct
could never have established itself in any long-lived race. A few men
can live on plunder, just as there is room in the world for some beasts
of prey; other men are reduced to living on industry, just as there are
diligent bees, ants, and herbivorous kine. But victory need have no good
fruits for the people whose army is victorious. That it sometimes does
so is an ulterior and blessed circumstance hardly to be reckoned upon.

[Sidenote: Barrack-room philosophy.]

Since barbarism has its pleasures it naturally has its apologists. There
are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race
decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this
shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation’s wealth, chokes its
industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be
governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to
breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought
about the greatest set-back which the Life of Reason has ever suffered;
it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being
descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves; and it
is not their bodies only that show it. After a long peace, if the
conditions of life are propitious, we observe a people’s energies
bursting their barriers; they become aggressive on the strength they
have stored up in their remote and unchecked development. It is the
unmutilated race, fresh from the struggle with nature (in which the best
survive, while in war it is often the best that perish) that descends
victoriously into the arena of nations and conquers disciplined armies
at the first blow, becomes the military aristocracy of the next epoch
and is itself ultimately sapped and decimated by luxury and battle, and
merged at last into the ignoble conglomerate beneath. Then, perhaps, in
some other virgin country a genuine humanity is again found, capable of
victory because unbled by war. To call war the soil of courage and
virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love.

[Sidenote: Military virtues.]

Military institutions, adventitious and ill-adapted excrescences as they
usually are, can acquire rational values in various ways. Besides
occasional defence, they furnish a profession congenial to many, and a
spectacle and emotion interesting to all. Blind courage is an animal
virtue indispensable in a world full of dangers and evils where a
certain insensibility and dash are requisite to skirt the precipice
without vertigo. Such animal courage seems therefore beautiful rather
than desperate or cruel, and being the lowest and most instinctive of
virtues it is the one most widely and sincerely admired. In the form of
steadiness under risks rationally taken, and perseverance so long as
there is a chance of success, courage is a true virtue; but it ceases to
be one when the love of danger, a useful passion when danger is
unavoidable, begins to lead men into evils which it was unnecessary to
face. Bravado, provocativeness, and a gambler’s instinct, with a love of
hitting hard for the sake of exercise, is a temper which ought already
to be counted among the vices rather than the virtues of man. To delight
in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain,
and a positive crime in the statesman.

Discipline, or the habit of obedience, is a better sort of courage which
military life also requires. Discipline is the acquired faculty of
surrendering an immediate personal good for the sake of a remote and
impersonal one of greater value. This difficult wisdom is made easier by
training in an army, because the great forces of habit, example and
social suasion, are there enlisted in its service. But these natural
aids make it lose its conscious rationality, so that it ceases to be a
virtue except potentially; for to resist an impulse by force of habit or
external command may or may not be to follow the better course.

Besides fostering these rudimentary virtues the army gives the nation’s
soul its most festive and flaunting embodiment. Popular heroes, stirring
episodes, obvious turning-points in history, commonly belong to military
life.

[Sidenote: They are splendid vices.]

Nevertheless the panegyrist of war places himself on the lowest level on
which a moralist or patriot can stand and shows as great a want of
refined feeling as of right reason. For the glories of war are all
blood-stained, delirious, and infected with crime; the combative
instinct is a savage prompting by which one man’s good is found in
another’s evil. The existence of such a contradiction in the moral world
is the original sin of nature, whence flows every other wrong. He is a
willing accomplice of that perversity in things who delights in
another’s discomfiture or in his own, and craves the blind tension of
plunging into danger without reason, or the idiot’s pleasure in facing a
pure chance. To find joy in another’s trouble is, as man is constituted,
not unnatural, though it is wicked; and to find joy in one’s own
trouble, though it be madness, is not yet impossible for man. These are
the chaotic depths of that dreaming nature out of which humanity has to
grow.

[Sidenote: Absolute value in strife.]

If war could be abolished and the defence of all interests intrusted to
courts of law, there would remain unsatisfied a primary and therefore
ineradicable instinct—a love of conflict, of rivalry, and of victory.
If we desire to abolish war because it tries to do good by doing harm,
we must not ourselves do an injury to human nature while trying to
smooth it out. Now the test and limit of all necessary reform is vital
harmony. No impulse can be condemned arbitrarily or because some other
impulse or group of interests is, in a Platonic way, out of sympathy
with it. An instinct can be condemned only if it prevents the
realisation of other instincts, and only in so far as it does so. War,
which has instinctive warrant, must therefore be transformed only in so
far as it does harm to other interests. The evils of war are obvious
enough; could not the virtues of war, animal courage, discipline, and
self-knowledge, together with gaiety and enthusiasm, find some harmless
occasion for their development?

[Sidenote: Sport a civilised way of preserving it.]

Such a harmless simulacrum of war is seen in sport. The arduous and
competitive element in sport is not harmful, if the discipline involved
brings no loss of faculty or of right sensitiveness, and the rivalry no
rancour. In war states wish to be efficient in order to conquer, but in
sport men wish to prove their excellence because they wish to have it.
If this excellence does not exist, the aim is missed, and to discover
that failure is no new misfortune. To have failed unwittingly would have
been worse; and to recognise superiority in another is consistent with a
relatively good and honourable performance, so that even nominal failure
may be a substantial success. And merit in a rival should bring a
friendly delight even to the vanquished if they are true lovers of sport
and of excellence. Sport is a liberal form of war stripped of its
compulsions and malignity; a rational art and the expression of a
civilised instinct.

[Sidenote: Who shall found the universal commonwealth?]

The abolition of war, like its inception, can only be brought about by a
new collocation of material forces. As the suppression of some nest of
piratical tribes by a great emperor substitutes judicial for military
sanctions among them, so the conquest of all warring nations by some
imperial people could alone establish general peace. The Romans
approached this ideal because their vast military power stood behind
their governors and prætors. Science and commerce might conceivably
resume that lost imperial function. If at the present day two or three
powerful governments could so far forget their irrational origin as to
renounce the right to occasional piracy and could unite in enforcing the
decisions of some international tribunal, they would thereby constitute
that tribunal the organ of a universal government and render war
impossible between responsible states. But on account of their
irrational basis all governments largely misrepresent the true interests
of those who live under them. They pursue conventional and captious ends
to which alone public energies can as yet be efficiently directed.




CHAPTER IV

THE ARISTOCRATIC IDEAL


[Sidenote: Eminence, once existing, grows by its own.]

“To him that hath shall be given,” says the Gospel, representing as a
principle of divine justice one that undoubtedly holds in earthly
economy. A not dissimilar observation is made in the proverb:
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” Indeed, some trifling
acquisition often gives an animal an initial advantage which may easily
roll up and increase prodigiously, becoming the basis of prolonged good
fortune. Sometimes this initial advantage is a matter of natural
structure, like talent, strength, or goodness; sometimes an accidental
accretion, like breeding, instruction, or wealth. Such advantages grow
by the opportunities they make; and it is possible for a man launched
into the world at the right moment with the right equipment to mount
easily from eminence to eminence and accomplish very great things
without doing more than genially follow his instincts and respond with
ardour, like an Alexander or a Shakespeare, to his opportunities. A
great endowment, doubled by great good fortune, raises men like these
into supreme representatives of mankind.

[Sidenote: Its causes natural and its privileges just.]

It is no loss of liberty to subordinate ourselves to a natural leader.
On the contrary, we thereby seize an opportunity to exercise our
freedom, availing ourselves of the best instrument obtainable to
accomplish our ends. A man may be a natural either by his character or
by his position. The advantages a man draws from that peculiar structure
of his brain which renders him, for instance, a ready speaker or an
ingenious mathematician, are by common consent regarded as legitimate
advantages. The public will use and reward such ability without jealousy
and with positive delight. In an unsophisticated age the same feeling
prevails in regard to those advantages which a man may draw from more
external circumstances. If a traveller, having been shipwrecked in some
expedition, should learn the secrets of an unknown land, its arts and
resources, his fellow-citizens, on his return, would not hesitate to
follow his direction in respect to those novel matters. It would be
senseless folly on their part to begrudge him his adventitious eminence
and refuse to esteem him of more consequence than their uninitiated
selves. Yet when people, ignoring the natural causes of all that is
called artificial, think that but for an unlucky chance they, too, might
have enjoyed the advantages which raise other men above them, they
sometimes affect not to recognise actual distinctions and abilities, or
study enviously the means of annulling them. So long, however, as by the
operation of any causes whatever some real competence accrues to anyone,
it is for the general interest that this competence should bear its
natural fruits, diversifying the face of society and giving its
possessor a corresponding distinction.

[Sidenote: Advantage of inequality.]

Variety in the world is an unmixed blessing so long as each distinct
function can be exercised without hindrance to any other. There is no
greater stupidity or meanness than to take uniformity for an ideal, as
if it were not a benefit and a joy to a man, being what he is, to know
that many are, have been, and will be better than he. Grant that no one
is positively degraded by the great man’s greatness and it follows that
everyone is exalted by it. Beauty, genius, holiness, even power and
extraordinary wealth, radiate their virtue and make the world in which
they exist a better and a more joyful place to live in. Hence the
insatiable vulgar curiosity about great people, and the strange way in
which the desire for fame (by which the distinguished man sinks to the
common level) is met and satisfied by the universal interest in whatever
is extraordinary. This avidity not to miss knowledge of things notable,
and to enact vicariously all singular rôles, shows the need men have of
distinction and the advantage they find even in conceiving it. For it is
the presence of variety and a nearer approach somewhere to just and
ideal achievement that gives men perspective in their judgments and
opens vistas from the dull foreground of their lives to sea, mountain,
and stars.

No merely idle curiosity shows itself in this instinct; rather a mark of
human potentiality that recognises in what is yet attained a sad
caricature of what is essentially attainable. For man’s spirit is
intellectual and naturally demands dominion and science; it craves in
all things friendliness and beauty. The least hint of attainment in
these directions fills it with satisfaction and the sense of realised
expectation. So much so that when no inkling of a supreme fulfilment is
found in the world or in the heart, men still cling to the notion of it
in God or the hope of it in heaven, and religion, when it entertains
them with that ideal, seems to have reached its highest height. Love of
uniformity would quench the thirst for new outlets, for perfect, even if
alien, achievements, and this, so long as perfection had not been
actually attained, would indicate a mind dead to the ideal.

[Sidenote: Fable of the belly and the members.]

[Sidenote: Fallacy in it.]

Menenius Agrippa expressed very well the aristocratic theory of society
when he compared the state to a human body in which the common people
were the hands and feet, and the nobles the belly. The people, when they
forgot the conditions of their own well-being, might accuse themselves
of folly and the nobles of insolent idleness, for the poor spent their
lives in hopeless labour that others who did nothing might enjoy all.
But there was a secret circulation of substance in the body politic, and
the focussing of all benefits in the few was the cause of nutrition and
prosperity to the many. Perhaps the truth might be even better expressed
in a physiological figure somewhat more modern, by saying that the
brain, which consumes much blood, well repays its obligations to the
stomach and members, for it co-ordinates their motions and prepares
their satisfactions. Yet there is this important difference between the
human body and the state, a difference which renders Agrippa’s fable
wholly misleading: the hands and feet have no separate consciousness,
and if they are ill used it is the common self that feels the weariness
and the bruises. But in the state the various members have a separate
sensibility, and, although their ultimate interests lie, no doubt, in
co-operation and justice, their immediate instinct and passion may lead
them to oppress one another perpetually. At one time the brain,
forgetting the members, may feast on opiates and unceasing music; and
again, the members, thinking they could more economically shift for
themselves, may starve the brain and reduce the body politic to a colony
of vegetating microbes. In a word, the consciousness inhabiting the
brain embodies the functions of all the body’s organs, and responds in a
general way to all their changes of fortune, but in the state every
cell has a separate brain, and the greatest citizen, by his existence,
realises only his own happiness.

[Sidenote: Theism expresses better the aristocratic ideal.]

For an ideal aristocracy we should not look to Plato’s Republic, for
that Utopia is avowedly the ideal only for fallen and corrupt states,
since luxury and injustice, we are told, first necessitated war, and the
guiding idea of all the Platonic regimen is military efficiency.
Aristocracy finds a more ideal expression in theism; for theism imagines
the values of existence to be divided into two unequal parts: on the one
hand the infinite value of God’s life, on the other the finite values of
all the created hierarchy. According to theistic cosmology, there was a
metaphysical necessity, if creatures were to exist at all, that they
should be in some measure inferior to godhead; otherwise they would have
been indistinguishable from the godhead itself according to the
principle called the identity of indiscernibles, which declares that two
beings exactly alike cannot exist without collapsing into an undivided
unit. The propagation of life involved, then, declension from pure
vitality, and to diffuse being meant to dilute it with nothingness. This
declension might take place in infinite degrees, each retaining some
vestige of perfection mixed, as it were, with a greater and greater
proportion of impotence and nonentity. Below God stood the angels, below
them man, and below man the brute and inanimate creation. Each sphere,
as it receded, contained a paler adumbration of the central perfection;
yet even at the last confines of existence some feeble echo of divinity
would still resound. This inequality in dignity would be not only a
beauty in the whole, to whose existence and order such inequalities
would be essential, but also no evil to the creature and no injustice;
for a modicum of good is not made evil simply because a greater good is
elsewhere possible. On the contrary, by accepting that appointed place
and that specific happiness, each servant of the universal harmony could
feel its infinite value and could thrill the more profoundly to a music
which he helped to intone.

[Sidenote: A heaven with many mansions.]

Dante has expressed this thought with great simplicity and beauty. He
asks a friend’s spirit, which he finds lodged in the lowest circle of
paradise, if a desire to mount higher does not sometimes visit him; and
the spirit replies:

“Brother, the force of charity quiets our will, making us wish only for
what we have and thirst for nothing more. If we desired to be in a
sublimer sphere, our desires would be discordant with the will of him
who here allots us our divers stations—something which you will see
there is no room for in these circles, if to dwell in charity be needful
here, and if you consider duly the nature of charity. For it belongs to
the essence of that blessed state to keep within the divine purposes,
that our own purposes may become one also. Thus, the manner in which we
are ranged from step to step in this kingdom pleases the whole kingdom,
as it does the king who gives us will to will with him. And his will is
our peace; it is that sea toward which all things move that his will
creates and that nature fashions.”[C]

[Sidenote: If God is defined as the human ideal, apotheosis the only
paradise.]

Such pious resignation has in it something pathetic and constrained,
which Dante could not or would not disguise. For a theism which, like
Aristotle’s and Dante’s, has a Platonic essence, God is really nothing
but the goal of human aspiration embodied imaginatively. This fact makes
these philosophers feel that whatever falls short of divinity has
something imperfect about it. God is what man ought to be; and man,
while he is still himself, must yearn for ever, like Aristotle’s cosmos,
making in his perpetual round a vain imitation of deity, and an eternal
prayer. Hence, a latent minor strain in Aristotle’s philosophy, the
hopeless note of paganism, and in Dante an undertone of sorrow and
sacrifice, inseparable from Christian feeling. In both, virtue implies a
certain sense of defeat, a fatal unnatural limitation, as if a pristine
ideal had been surrendered and what remained were at best a compromise.
Accordingly we need not be surprised if aspiration, in all these men,
finally takes a mystical turn; and Dante’s ghostly friends, after
propounding their aristocratic philosophy, to justify God in other men’s
eyes, are themselves on the point of quitting the lower sphere to which
God had assigned them and plunging into the “sea” of his absolute
ecstasy. For, if the word God stands for man’s spiritual ideal, heaven
can consist only in apotheosis. This the Greeks knew very well. They
instinctively ignored or feared any immortality which fell short of
deification; and the Christian mystics reached the same goal by less
overt courses. They merged the popular idea of a personal God in their
foretaste of peace and perfection; and their whole religion was an
effort to escape humanity.

[Sidenote: When natures differ perfections differ too.]

It is true that the theistic cosmology might hear a different
interpretation. If by deity we mean not man’s ideal—intellectual or
sensuous—but the total cosmic order, then the universal hierarchy may
be understood naturalistically so that each sphere gives scope for one
sort of good. God, or the highest being, would then be simply the life
of nature as a whole, if nature has a conscious life, or that of its
noblest portion. The supposed “metaphysical evil” involved in finitude
would then be no evil at all, but the condition of every good. In
realising his own will in his own way, each creature would be perfectly
happy, without yearning or pathetic regrets for other forms of being.
Such forms of being would all be unpalatable to him, even if
conventionally called higher, because their body was larger, and their
soul more complex. Nor would divine perfection itself be in any sense
perfection unless it gave expression to some definite nature, the
entelechy either of the celestial spheres, or of scientific thought, or
of some other actual existence. Under these circumstances, inhabitants
even of the lowest heaven would be unreservedly happy, as happy in their
way as those of the seventh heaven could be in theirs. No pathetic note
would any longer disquiet their finitude. They would not have to
renounce, in sad conformity to an alien will, what even for them would
have been a deeper joy. They would be asked to renounce nothing but
what, for them, would be an evil. The overruling providence would then
in truth be fatherly, by providing for each being that which it inwardly
craved. Persons of one rank would not be improved by passing into the
so-called higher sphere, any more than the ox would be improved by being
transformed into a lark, or a king into a poet.

Man in such a system could no more pine to be God than he could pine to
be the law of gravity, or Spinoza’s substance, or Hegel’s dialectical
idea. Such naturalistic abstractions, while they perhaps express some
element of reality or its total form, are not objects corresponding to
man’s purposes and are morally inferior to his humanity. Every man’s
ideal lies within the potentialities of his nature, for only by
expressing his nature can ideals possess authority or attraction over
him. Heaven accordingly has really many mansions, each truly heavenly to
him who would inhabit it, and there is really no room for discord in
those rounds. One ideal can no more conflict with another than truth can
jostle truth; but men, or the disorganised functions within a given
individual, may be in physical conflict, as opinion may wrestle with
opinion in the world’s arena or in an ignorant brain. Among ideals
themselves infinite variety is consistent with perfect harmony, but
matter that has not yet developed or discovered its organic affinities
may well show groping and contradictory tendencies. When, however, these
embryonic disorders are once righted, each possible life knows its
natural paradise, and what some unintelligent outsider might say in
dispraise of that ideal will never wound or ruffle the self-justified
creature whose ideal it is, any more than a cat’s aversion to water will
disturb a fish’s plan of life.

[Sidenote: Theory that stations actually correspond to faculty.]

An aristocratic society might accordingly be a perfect heaven if the
variety and superposition of functions in it expressed a corresponding
diversity in its members’ faculties and ideals. And, indeed, what
aristocratic philosophers have always maintained is that men really
differ so much in capacity that one is happier for being a slave,
another for being a shopkeeper, and a third for being a king. All
professions, they say, even the lowest, are or may be vocations. Some
men, Aristotle tells us, are slaves by nature; only physical functions
are spontaneous in them. So long as they are humanely treated, it is,
we may infer, a benefit for them to be commanded; and the contribution
their labour makes toward rational life in their betters is the highest
dignity they can attain, and should be prized by them as a sufficient
privilege.

Such assertions, coming from lordly lips, have a suspicious optimism
about them; yet the faithful slave, such as the nurse we find in the
tragedies, may sometimes have corresponded to that description. In other
regions it is surely true that to advance in conventional station would
often entail a loss in true dignity and happiness. It would seldom
benefit a musician to be appointed admiral or a housemaid to become a
prima donna. Scientific breeding might conceivably develop much more
sharply the various temperaments and faculties needed in the state; and
then each caste or order of citizens would not be more commonly
dissatisfied with its lot than men or women now are with their sex. One
tribe would run errands as persistently as the ants; another would sing
like the lark; a third would show a devil’s innate fondness for stoking
a fiery furnace.

[Sidenote: Its falsity.]

Aristocracy logically involves castes. But such castes as exist in
India, and the social classes we find in the western world, are not now
based on any profound difference in race, capacity, or inclination. They
are based probably on the chances of some early war, reinforced by
custom and perpetuated by inheritance. A certain circulation,
corresponding in part to proved ability or disability, takes place in
the body politic, and, since the French Revolution, has taken place
increasingly. Some, by energy and perseverance, rise from the bottom;
some, by ill fortune or vice, fall from the top. But these readjustments
are insignificant in comparison with the social inertia that perpetuates
all the classes, and even such shifts as occur at once re-establish
artificial conditions for the next generation. As a rule, men’s station
determines their occupation without their gifts determining their
station. Thus stifled ability in the lower orders, and apathy or
pampered incapacity in the higher, unite to deprive society of its
natural leaders.

[Sidenote: Feeble individuality the rule.]

It would be easy, however, to exaggerate the havoc wrought by such
artificial conditions. The monotony we observe in mankind must not be
charged to the oppressive influence of circumstances crushing the
individual soul. It is not society’s fault that most men seem to miss
their vocation. Most men have no vocation; and society, in imposing on
them some chance language, some chance religion, and some chance career,
first plants an ideal in their bosoms and insinuates into them a sort of
racial or professional soul. Their only character is composed of the
habits they have been led to acquire. Some little propensities betrayed
in childhood may very probably survive; one man may prove by his dying
words that he was congenitally witty, another tender, another brave.
But these native qualities will simply have added an ineffectual tint to
some typical existence or other; and the vast majority will remain, as
Schopenhauer said, _Fabrikwaaren der Natur_.

Variety in human dreams, like personality among savages, may indeed be
inwardly very great, but it is not efficacious. To be socially important
and expressible in some common medium, initial differences in temper
must be organised into custom and become cumulative by being imitated
and enforced. The only artists who can show great originality are those
trained in distinct and established schools; for originality and genius
must be largely fed and raised on the shoulders of some old tradition. A
rich organisation and heritage, while they predetermine the core of all
possible variations, increase their number, since every advance opens up
new vistas; and growth, in extending the periphery of the substance
organised, multiplies the number of points at which new growths may
begin. Thus it is only in recent times that discoveries in science have
been frequent, because natural science until lately possessed no settled
method and no considerable fund of acquired truths. So, too, in
political society, statesmanship is made possible by traditional
policies, generalship by military institutions, great financiers by
established commerce.

If we ventured to generalise these observations we might say that such
an unequal distribution of capacity as might justify aristocracy should
be looked for only in civilised states. Savages are born free and equal,
but wherever a complex and highly specialised environment limits the
loose freedom of those born into it, it also stimulates their capacity.
Under forced culture remarkable growths will appear, bringing to light
possibilities in men which might, perhaps, not even have been
possibilities had they been left to themselves; for mulberry leaves do
not of themselves develop into brocade. A certain personal idiosyncrasy
must be assumed at bottom, else cotton damask would be as good as silk
and all men having like opportunities would be equally great. This
idiosyncrasy is brought out by social pressure, while in a state of
nature it might have betrayed itself only in trivial and futile ways, as
it does among barbarians.

[Sidenote: Sophistical envy.]

Distinction is thus in one sense artificial, since it cannot become
important or practical unless a certain environment gives play to
individual talent and preserves its originality; but distinction
nevertheless is perfectly real, and not merely imputed. In vain does the
man in the street declare that he, too, could have been a king if he had
been born in the purple; for that potentiality does not belong to him as
he is, but only as he might have been, if _per impossibile_ he had not
been himself. There is a strange metaphysical illusion in imagining that
a man might change his parents, his body, his early environment, and
yet retain his personality. In its higher faculties his personality is
produced by his special relations. If Shakespeare had been born in Italy
he might, if you will, have been a great poet, but Shakespeare he could
never have been. Nor can it be called an injustice to all of us who are
not Englishmen of Queen Elizabeth’s time that Shakespeare had that
advantage and was thereby enabled to exist.

The sense of injustice at unequal opportunities arises only when the two
environments compared are really somewhat analogous, so that the
illusion of a change of rôles without a change of characters may retain
some colour. It was a just insight, for instance, in the Christian fable
to make the first rebel against God the chief among the angels, the
spirit occupying the position nearest to that which he tried to usurp.
Lucifer’s fallacy consisted in thinking natural inequality artificial.
His perversity lay in rebelling against himself and rejecting the
happiness proper to his nature. This was the maddest possible way of
rebelling against his true creator; for it is our particular finitude
that creates us and makes us be. No one, except in wilful fancy, would
envy the peculiar advantages of a whale or an ant, of an Inca or a Grand
Lama. An exchange of places with such remote beings would too evidently
leave each creature the very same that it was before; for after a
nominal exchange of places each office would remain filled and no trace
of a change would be perceptible. But the penny that one man finds and
another misses would not, had fortune been reversed, have transmuted
each man into the other. So adventitious a circumstance seems easily
transferable without undermining that personal distinction which it had
come to embitter. Yet the incipient fallacy lurking even in such
suppositions becomes obvious when we inquire whether so blind an
accident, for instance, as sex is also adventitious and ideally
transferable and whether Jack and Jill, remaining themselves, could have
exchanged genders.

What extends these invidious comparisons beyond all tolerable bounds is
the generic and vague nature proper to language and its terms. The first
personal pronoun “I” is a concept so thoroughly universal that it can
accompany any experience whatever, yet it is used to designate an
individual who is really definable not by the formal selfhood which he
shares with every other thinker, but by the special events that make up
his life. Each man’s memory embraces a certain field, and if the
landscape open to his vision is sad and hateful he naturally wishes it
to shift and become like that paradise in which, as he fancies, other
men dwell. A legitimate rebellion against evil in his own experience
becomes an unthinkable supposition about what his experience might have
been had _he_ enjoyed those other men’s opportunities or even (so far
can unreason wander) had _he_ possessed their character. The wholly
different creature, a replica of that envied ideal, which would have
existed in that case would still have called itself “I”; and so, the
dreamer imagines, that creature would have been himself in a different
situation.

If a new birth could still be called by a man’s own name, the reason
would be that the concrete faculties now present in him are the basis
for the ideal he throws out, and if these particular faculties came to
fruition in a new being, he would call that being himself, inasmuch as
it realised his ideal. The poorer the reality, therefore, the meaner and
vaguer the ideal it is able to project. Man is so tied to his personal
endowment (essential to him though an accident in the world) that even
his uttermost ideal, into which he would fly out of himself and his
finitude, can be nothing but the fulfilment of his own initial
idiosyncrasies. Whatever other wills and other glories may exist in
heaven lie not within his universe of aspiration. Even his most
perversely metaphysical envy can begrudge to others only what he
instinctively craves for himself.

[Sidenote: Inequality is not a grievance; suffering is.]

It is not mere inequality, therefore, that can be a reproach to the
aristocratic or theistic ideal. Could each person fulfil his own nature
the most striking differences in endowment and fortune would trouble
nobody’s dreams. The true reproach to which aristocracy and theism are
open is the thwarting of those unequal natures and the consequent
suffering imposed on them all. Injustice in this world is not something
comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private
fate. A bruised child wailing in the street, his small world for the
moment utterly black and cruel before him, does not fetch his
unhappiness from sophisticated comparisons or irrational envy; nor can
any compensations and celestial harmonies supervening later ever expunge
or justify that moment’s bitterness. The pain may be whistled away and
forgotten; the mind may be rendered by it only a little harder, a little
coarser, a little more secretive and sullen and familiar with
unrightable wrong. But ignoring that pain will not prevent its having
existed; it must remain for ever to trouble God’s omniscience and be a
part of that hell which the creation too truly involves.

[Sidenote: Mutilation by crowding.]

The same curse of suffering vitiates Agrippa’s ingenious parable and the
joyful humility of Dante’s celestial friends, and renders both equally
irrelevant to human conditions. Nature may arrange her hierarchies as
she chooses and make her creatures instrumental to one another’s life.
That interrelation is no injury to any part and an added beauty in the
whole. It would have been a truly admirable arrangement to have enabled
every living being, in attaining its own end, to make the attainments of
the others’ ends possible to them also. An approach to such an
equilibrium has actually been reached in some respects by the rough
sifting of miscellaneous organisms until those that were compatible
alone remained. But nature, in her haste to be fertile, wants to produce
everything at once, and her distracted industry has brought about
terrible confusion and waste and terrible injustice. She has been led to
punish her ministers for the services they render and her favourites for
the honours they receive. She has imposed suffering on her creatures
together with life; she has defeated her own objects and vitiated her
bounty by letting every good do harm and bring evil in its train to some
unsuspecting creature.

This oppression is the moral stain that attaches to aristocracy and
makes it truly unjust. Every privilege that imposes suffering involves a
wrong. Not only does aristocracy lay on the world a tax in labour and
privation that its own splendours, intellectual and worldly, may arise,
but by so doing it infects intelligence and grandeur with inhumanity and
renders corrupt and odious that pre-eminence which should have been
divine. The lower classes, in submitting to the hardship and meanness of
their lives—which, to be sure, might have been harder and meaner had no
aristocracy existed—must upbraid their fellow-men for profiting by
their ill fortune and therefore having an interest in perpetuating it.
Instead of the brutal but innocent injustice of nature, what they suffer
from is the sly injustice of men; and though the suffering be less—for
the worst of men is human—the injury is more sensible. The
inclemencies and dangers men must endure in a savage state, in scourging
them, would not have profited by that cruelty. But suffering has an
added sting when it enables others to be exempt from care and to live
like the gods in irresponsible ease; the inequality which would have
been innocent and even beautiful in a happy world becomes, in a painful
world, a bitter wrong, or at best a criminal beauty.

[Sidenote: A hint to optimists.]

It would be a happy relief to the aristocrat’s conscience, when he
possesses one, could he learn from some yet bolder Descartes that common
people were nothing but _bêtes-machines_, and that only a groundless
prejudice had hitherto led us to suppose that life could exist where
evidently nothing good could be attained by living. If all unfortunate
people could be proved to be unconscious automata, what a brilliant
justification that would be for the ways of both God and man! Philosophy
would not lack arguments to support such an agreeable conclusion.
Beginning with the axiom that whatever is is right, a metaphysician
might adduce the truth that consciousness is something self-existent and
indubitably real; therefore, he would contend, it must be
self-justifying and indubitably good. And he might continue by saying
that a slave’s life was not its own excuse for being, nor were the
labours of a million drudges otherwise justified than by the
conveniences which they supplied their masters with. _Ergo_, those
servile operations could come to consciousness only where they attained
their end, and the world could contain nothing but perfect and universal
happiness. A divine omniscience and joy, shared by finite minds in so
far as they might attain perfection, would be the only life in
existence, and the notion that such a thing as pain, sorrow, or hatred
could exist at all would forthwith vanish like the hideous and
ridiculous illusion that it was. This argument may be recommended to
apologetic writers as no weaker than those they commonly rely on, and
infinitely more consoling.

[Sidenote: How aristocracies might do good.]

But so long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might
call the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that
we exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by
radiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above
less would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion of benefit
might take a material form, as when, by commercial guidance and military
protection, a greater net product is secured to labour, even after all
needful taxes have been levied upon it to support greatness. An
industrial and political oligarchy might defend itself on that ground.
Or the return might take the less positive form of opportunity, as it
does when an aristocratic society has a democratic government. Here the
people neither accept guidance nor require protection; but the existence
of a rich and irresponsible class offers them an ideal, such as it is,
in their ambitious struggles. For they too may grow rich, exercise
financial ascendancy, educate their sons like gentlemen, and launch
their daughters into fashionable society. Finally, if the only
aristocracy recognised were an aristocracy of achievement, and if public
rewards followed personal merit, the reversion to the people might take
the form of participation by them in the ideal interests of eminent men.
Holiness, genius, and knowledge can reverberate through all society. The
fruits of art and science are in themselves cheap and not to be
monopolised or consumed in enjoyment. On the contrary, their wider
diffusion stimulates their growth and makes their cultivation more
intense and successful. When an ideal interest is general the share
which falls to the private person is the more apt to be efficacious. The
saints have usually had companions, and artists and philosophers have
flourished in schools.

At the same time ideal goods cannot be assimilated without some training
and leisure. Like education and religion they are degraded by
popularity, and reduced from what the master intended to what the people
are able and willing to receive. So pleasing an idea, then, as this of
diffused ideal possessions has little application in a society
aristocratically framed; for the greater eminence the few attain the
less able are the many to follow them. Great thoughts require a great
mind and pure beauties a profound sensibility. To attempt to give such
things a wide currency is to be willing to denaturalise them in order to
boast that they have been propagated. Culture is on the horns of this
dilemma: if profound and noble it must remain rare, if common it must
become mean. These alternatives can never be eluded until some purified
and high-bred race succeeds the promiscuous bipeds that now blacken the
planet.

[Sidenote: Man adds wrong to nature’s injury.]

Aristocracy, like everything else, has no practical force save that
which mechanical causes endow it with. Its privileges are fruits of
inevitable advantages. Its oppressions are simply new forms and vehicles
for nature’s primeval cruelty, while the benefits it may also confer are
only further examples of her nice equilibrium and necessary harmony. For
it lies in the essence of a mechanical world, where the interests of its
products are concerned, to be fundamentally kind, since it has formed
and on the whole maintains those products, and yet continually cruel,
since it forms and maintains them blindly, without considering
difficulties or probable failures. Now the most tyrannical government,
like the best, is a natural product maintained by an equilibrium of
natural forces. It is simply a new mode of mechanical energy to which
the philosopher living under it must adjust himself as he would to the
weather. But when the vehicle of nature’s inclemency is a heartless man,
even if the harm done be less, it puts on a new and a moral aspect. The
source of injury is then not only natural but criminal as well, and the
result is a sense of wrong added to misfortune. It must needs be that
offence come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh. He justly
arouses indignation and endures remorse.

[Sidenote: Conditions of a just inequality.]

Now civilisation cannot afford to entangle its ideals with the causes of
remorse and of just indignation. In the first place nature in her slow
and ponderous way levels her processes and rubs off her sharp edges by
perpetual friction. Where there is maladjustment there is no permanent
physical stability. Therefore the ideal of society can never involve the
infliction of injury on anybody for any purpose. Such an ideal would
propose for a goal something out of equilibrium, a society which even if
established could not maintain itself; but an ideal life must not tend
to destroy its ideal by abolishing its own existence. In the second
place, it is impossible on moral grounds that injustice should subsist
in the ideal. The ideal means the perfect, and a supposed ideal in which
wrong still subsisted would be the denial of perfection. The ideal state
and the ideal universe should be a family where all are not equal, but
where all are happy. So that an aristocratic or theistic system in order
to deserve respect must discard its sinister apologies for evil and
clearly propose such an order of existences, one superposed upon the
other, as should involve no suffering on any of its levels. The
services required of each must involve no injury to any; to perform them
should be made the servant’s spontaneous and specific ideal. The
privileges the system bestows on some must involve no outrage on the
rest, and must not be paid for by mutilating other lives or thwarting
their natural potentialities. For the humble to give their labour would
then be blessed in reality, and not merely by imputation, while for the
great to receive those benefits would be blessed also, not in fact only
but in justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: Paradiso. Canto III., 70-87.]




CHAPTER V

DEMOCRACY


[Sidenote: Democracy as an end and as a means.]

[Sidenote: Natural democracy leads to monarchy.]

The word democracy may stand for a natural social equality in the body
politic or for a constitutional form of government in which power lies
more or less directly in the people’s hands. The former may be called
social democracy and the latter democratic government. The two differ
widely, both in origin and in moral principle. Genetically considered,
social democracy is something primitive, unintended, proper to
communities where there is general competence and no marked personal
eminence. It is the democracy of Arcadia, Switzerland, and the American
pioneers. Such a community might be said to have also a democratic
government, for everything in it is naturally democratic. There will be
no aristocracy, no prestige; but instead an intelligent readiness to
lend a hand and to do in unison whatever is done, not so much under
leaders as by a kind of conspiring instinct and contagious sympathy. In
other words, there will be that most democratic of governments—no
government at all. But when pressure of circumstances, danger, or
inward strife makes recognised and prolonged guidance necessary to a
social democracy, the form its government takes is that of a rudimentary
monarchy, established by election or general consent. A natural leader
presents himself and he is instinctively obeyed. He may indeed be freely
criticised and will not be screened by any pomp or traditional mystery;
he will be easy to replace and every citizen will feel himself radically
his equal. Yet such a state is at the beginnings of monarchy and
aristocracy, close to the stage depicted in Homer, where pre-eminences
are still obviously natural, although already over-emphasised by the
force of custom and wealth, and by the fission of society into divergent
classes.

[Sidenote: Artificial democracy is an extension of privilege.]

Political democracy, on the other hand, is a late and artificial
product. It arises by a gradual extension of aristocratic privileges,
through rebellion against abuses, and in answer to restlessness on the
people’s part. Its principle is not the absence of eminence, but the
discovery that existing eminence is no longer genuine and
representative. It is compatible with a very complex government, great
empire, and an aristocratic society; it may retain, as notably in
England and in all ancient republics, many vestiges of older and less
democratic institutions. For under democratic governments the people
have not created the state; they merely control it. Their suspicions
and jealousies are quieted by assigning to them a voice, perhaps only a
veto, in the administration; but the state administered is a prodigious
self-created historical engine. Popular votes never established the
family, private property, religious practices, or international
frontiers. Institutions, ideals, and administrators may all be such as
the popular classes could never have produced; but these products of
natural aristocracy are suffered to subsist so long as no very urgent
protest is raised against them. The people’s liberty consists not in
their original responsibility for what exists—for they are guiltless of
it—but merely in the faculty they have acquired of abolishing any
detail that may distress or wound them, and of imposing any new measure,
which, seen against the background of existing laws, may commend itself
from time to time to their instinct and mind.

[Sidenote: Ideals and expedients.]

If we turn from origins to ideals, the contrast between social and
political democracy is no less marked. Social democracy is a general
ethical ideal, looking to human equality and brotherhood, and
inconsistent, in its radical form, with such institutions as the family
and hereditary property. Democratic government, on the contrary, is
merely a means to an end, an expedient for the better and smoother
government of certain states at certain junctures. It involves no
special ideals of life; it is a question of policy, namely, whether the
general interest will be better served by granting all men (and perhaps
all women) an equal voice in elections. For political democracy, arising
in great and complex states, must necessarily be a government by deputy,
and the questions actually submitted to the people can be only very
large rough matters of general policy or of confidence in party leaders.

We may now add a few reflections about each kind of democracy, regarding
democratic government chiefly in its origin and phases (for its function
is that of all government) and social democracy chiefly as an ideal,
since its origin is simply that of society itself.

[Sidenote: Well-founded distrust of rulers. Yet experts, if rational,
would serve common interests.]

The possibility of intelligent selfishness and the prevalence of a
selfishness far from intelligent unite to make men wary in intrusting
their interests to one another’s keeping. If passion never overcame
prudence, and if private prudence always counselled what was profitable
also to others, no objection could arise to an aristocratic policy. For
if we assume a certain variety in endowments and functions among men, it
would evidently conduce to the general convenience that each man should
exercise his powers uncontrolled by the public voice. The government,
having facilities for information and ready resources, might be left to
determine all matters of policy; for its members’ private interests
would coincide with those of the public, and even if prejudices and
irrational habits prevented them from pursuing their own advantage, they
would surely not err more frequently or more egregiously in that respect
than would the private individual, to whose ignorant fancy every
decision would otherwise have to be referred.

Thus in monarchy every expedient is seized upon to render the king’s and
the country’s interests coincident; public prosperity fills his
treasury, the arts adorn his court, justice rendered confirms his
authority. If reason were efficacious kings might well be left to govern
alone. Theologians, under the same hypothesis, might be trusted to draw
up creeds and codes of morals; and, in fact, everyone with a gift for
management or creation might be authorised to execute his plans. It is
in this way, perhaps, that some social animals manage their affairs, for
they seem to co-operate without external control. That their instinctive
system is far from perfect we may safely take for granted; but
government, too, is not always adequate or wise. What spoils such a
spontaneous harmony is that people neither understand their own
interests nor have the constancy to pursue them systematically; and
further, that their personal or animal interests may actually clash, in
so far as they have not been harmonised by reason.

To rationalise an interest is simply to correlate it with every other
interest which it at all affects. In proportion as rational interests
predominate in a man and he esteems rational satisfactions above all
others, it becomes impossible that he should injure another by his
action, and unnecessary that he should sacrifice himself. But the worse
and more brutal his nature is, and the less satisfaction he finds in
justice, the more need he has to do violence to himself, lest he should
be doing it to others. This is the reason why preaching, conscious
effort, and even education are such feeble agencies for moral reform:
only selection and right breeding could produce that genuine virtue
which would not need to find goodness unpalatable nor to say, in
expressing its own perversities, that a distaste for excellence is a
condition of being good. But when a man is ill-begotten and foolish, and
hates the means to his own happiness, he naturally is not well fitted to
secure that of other people. Those who suffer by his folly are apt to
think him malicious, whereas he is the first to suffer himself and knows
that it was the force of circumstances and a certain pathetic
helplessness in his own soul that led him into his errors.

[Sidenote: People jealous of eminence.]

These errors, when they are committed by a weak and passionate ruler,
are not easily forgiven. His subjects attribute to him an intelligence
he probably lacks; they call him treacherous or cruel when he is very
likely yielding to lazy habits and to insidious traditions. They see in
every calamity that befalls them a proof that his interests are
radically hostile to theirs, whereas it is only his conduct that is so.
Accordingly, in proportion to their alertness and self-sufficiency, they
clamour for the right to govern themselves, and usually secure it.
Democratic government is founded on the decay of representative
eminence. It indicates that natural leaders are no longer trusted merely
because they are rich, enterprising, learned, or old. Their spontaneous
action would go awry. They must not be allowed to act without control.
Men of talent may be needed and used in a democratic state; they may be
occasionally _hired_; but they will be closely watched and directed by
the people, who fear otherwise to suffer the penalty of foolishly
intrusting their affairs to other men’s hands.

A fool, says a Spanish proverb, knows more at home than a wise man at
his neighbour’s. So democratic instinct assumes that, unless all those
concerned keep a vigilant eye on the course of public business and
frequently pronounce on its conduct, they will before long awake to the
fact that they have been ignored and enslaved. The implication is that
each man is the best judge of his own interests and of the means to
advance them; or at least that by making himself his own guide he can in
the end gain the requisite insight and thus not only attain his
practical aims, but also some political and intellectual dignity.

[Sidenote: It is representative.]

All just government pursues the general good; the choice between
aristocratic and democratic forms touches only the means to that end.
One arrangement may well be better fitted to one place and time, and
another to another. Everything depends on the existence or non-existence
of available practical eminence. The democratic theory is clearly wrong
if it imagines that eminence is not naturally representative. Eminence
is synthetic and represents what it synthesises. An eminence not
representative would not constitute excellence, but merely extravagance
or notoriety. Excellence in anything, whether thought, action, or
feeling, consists in nothing but representation, in standing for many
diffuse constituents reduced to harmony, so that the wise moment is
filled with an activity in which the upshot of the experience concerned
is mirrored and regarded, an activity just to all extant interests and
speaking in their total behalf. But anything approaching such true
excellence is as rare as it is great, and a democratic society,
naturally jealous of greatness, may be excused for not expecting true
greatness and for not even understanding what it is. A government is not
made representative or just by the mechanical expedient of electing its
members by universal suffrage. It becomes representative only by
embodying in its policy, whether by instinct or high intelligence, the
people’s conscious and unconscious interests.

[Sidenote: But subject to decay.]

Democratic theory seems to be right, however, about the actual failure
of theocracies, monarchies, and oligarchies to remain representative and
to secure the general good. The true eminence which natural leaders may
have possessed in the beginning usually declines into a conventional and
baseless authority. The guiding powers which came to save and express
humanity fatten in office and end by reversing their function. The
government reverts to the primeval robber; the church stands in the way
of all wisdom. Under such circumstances it is a happy thing if the
people possess enough initiative to assert themselves and, after
clearing the ground in a more or less summary fashion, allow some new
organisation, more representative of actual interests, to replace the
old encumbrances and tyrannies.

[Sidenote: Ancient citizenship a privilege.]

In the heroic ages of Greece and Rome patriotism was stimulated in
manifold ways. The city was a fatherland, a church, an army, and almost
a family. It had its own school of art, its own dialect, its own feasts,
its own fables. Every possible social interest was either embodied in
the love of country or, like friendship and fame, closely associated
with it. Patriotism could then be expected to sway every mind at all
capable of moral enthusiasm. Furthermore, only the flower of the
population were citizens. In rural districts the farmer might be a
freeman; but he probably had slaves whose work he merely superintended.
The meaner and more debasing offices, mining, sea-faring, domestic
service, and the more laborious part of all industries, were relegated
to slaves. The citizens were a privileged class. Military discipline and
the street life natural in Mediterranean countries, kept public events
and public men always under everybody’s eyes: the state was a bodily
presence. Democracy, when it arose in such communities, was still
aristocratic; it imposed few new duties upon the common citizens, while
it diffused many privileges and exemptions among them.

[Sidenote: Modern democracy industrial.]

The social democracy which is the ideal of many in modern times, on the
other hand, excludes slavery, unites whole nations and even all mankind
into a society of equals, and admits no local or racial privileges by
which the sense of fellowship may be stimulated. Public spirit could not
be sustained in such a community by exemptions, rivalries, or ambitions.
No one, indeed, would be a slave, everyone would have an elementary
education and a chance to demonstrate his capacity; but he would be
probably condemned to those occupations which in ancient republics were
assigned to slaves. At least at the opening of his career he would find
himself on the lowest subsisting plane of humanity, and he would
probably remain on it throughout his life. In other words, the citizens
of a social democracy would be all labourers; for even those who rose
to be leaders would, in a genuine democracy, rise from the ranks and
belong in education and habits to the same class as all the others.

[Sidenote: Dangers to current civilisation.]

Under such circumstances the first virtue which a democratic society
would have to possess would be enthusiastic diligence. The motives for
work which have hitherto prevailed in the world have been want,
ambition, and love of occupation: in a social democracy, after the first
was eliminated, the last alone would remain efficacious. Love of
occupation, although it occasionally accompanies and cheers every sort
of labour, could never induce men originally to undertake arduous and
uninteresting tasks, nor to persevere in them if by chance or
waywardness such tasks had been once undertaken. Inclination can never
be the general motive for the work now imposed on the masses. Before
labour can be its own reward it must become less continuous, more
varied, more responsive to individual temperament and capacity.
Otherwise it would not cease to repress and warp human faculties.

A state composed exclusively of such workmen and peasants as make up the
bulk of modern nations would be an utterly barbarous state. Every
liberal tradition would perish in it; and the rational and historic
essence of patriotism itself would be lost. The emotion of it, no doubt,
would endure, for it is not generosity that the people lack. They
possess every impulse; it is experience that they cannot gather, for in
gathering it they would be constituting those higher organs that make up
an aristocratic society. Civilisation has hitherto consisted in
diffusion and dilution of habits arising in privileged centres. It has
not sprung from the people; it has arisen in their midst by a variation
from them, and it has afterward imposed itself on them from above. All
its founders in antiquity passed for demi-gods or were at least inspired
by an oracle or a nymph. The vital genius thus bursting forth and
speaking with authority gained a certain ascendency in the world; it
mitigated barbarism without removing it. This is one fault, among
others, which current civilisation has; it is artificial. If social
democracy could breed a new civilisation out of the people, this new
civilisation would be profounder than ours and more pervasive. But it
doubtless cannot. What we have rests on conquest and conversion, on
leadership and imitation, on mastership and service. To abolish
aristocracy, in the sense of social privilege and sanctified authority
would be to cut off the source from which all culture has hitherto
flowed.

[Sidenote: Is current civilisation a good?]

Civilisation, however, although we are wont to speak the word with a
certain unction, is a thing whose value may be questioned. One way of
defending the democratic ideal is to deny that civilisation is a good.
In one sense, indeed, social democracy is essentially a reversion to a
more simple life, more Arcadian and idyllic than that which aristocracy
has fostered. Equality is more easily attained in a patriarchal age than
in an age of concentrated and intense activities. Possessions, ideal and
material, may be fewer in a simple community, but they are more easily
shared and bind men together in moral and imaginative bonds instead of
dividing them, as do all highly elaborate ways of living or thinking.
The necessaries of life can be enjoyed by a rural people, living in a
sparsely settled country, and among these necessaries might be counted
not only bread and rags, which everyone comes by in some fashion even in
our society, but that communal religion, poetry, and fellowship which
the civilised poor are so often without. If social democracy should
triumph and take this direction it would begin by greatly diminishing
the amount of labour performed in the world. All instruments of luxury,
many instruments of vain knowledge and art, would no longer be produced.
We might see the means of communication, lately so marvellously
developed, again disused; the hulks of great steamers rusting in
harbours, the railway bridges collapsing and the tunnels choked; while a
rural population, with a few necessary and perfected manufactures, would
spread over the land and abandon the great cities to ruin, calling them
seats of Babylonian servitude and folly.

Such anticipations may seem fantastic, and of course there is no
probability that a reaction against material progress should set in in
the near future, since as yet the tide of commercialism and population
continues everywhere to rise; but does any thoughtful man suppose that
these tendencies will be eternal and that the present experiment in
civilisation is the last the world will see?

[Sidenote: Horrors of materialistic democracy.]

If social democracy, however, refused to diminish labour and wealth and
proposed rather to accelerate material progress and keep every furnace
at full blast, it would come face to face with a serious problem. By
whom would the product be enjoyed? By those who created it? What sort of
pleasures, arts, and sciences would those grimy workmen have time and
energy for after a day of hot and unremitting exertion? What sort of
religion would fill their Sabbaths and their dreams? We see how they
spend their leisure to-day, when a strong aristocratic tradition and the
presence of a rich class still profoundly influence popular ideals.
Imagine those aristocratic influences removed, and would any head be
lifted above a dead level of infinite dulness and vulgarity? Would
mankind be anything but a trivial, sensuous, superstitious,
custom-ridden herd? There is no tyranny so hateful as a vulgar and
anonymous tyranny. It is all-permeating, all-thwarting; it blasts every
budding novelty and sprig of genius with its omnipresent and fierce
stupidity. Such a headless people has the mind of a worm and the claws
of a dragon. Anyone would be a hero who should quell the monster. A
foreign invader or domestic despot would at least have steps to his
throne, possible standing-places for art and intelligence; his
supercilious indifference would discountenance the popular gods, and
allow some courageous hand at last to shatter them. Social democracy at
high pressure would leave no room for liberty. The only freeman in it
would be one whose whole ideal was to be an average man.

[Sidenote: Timocracy or socialistic democracy.]

Perhaps, however, social democracy might take a more liberal form. It
might allow the benefits of civilisation to be integrated in eminent
men, whose influence in turn should direct and temper the general life.
This would be timocracy—a government by men of merit. The same
abilities which raised these men to eminence would enable them to
apprehend ideal things and to employ material resources for the common
advantage. They would formulate religion, cultivate the arts and
sciences, provide for government and all public conveniences, and
inspire patriotism by their discourse and example. At the same time a
new motive would be added to common labour, I mean ambition. For there
would be not only a possibility of greater reward but a possibility of
greater service. The competitive motive which socialism is supposed to
destroy would be restored in timocracy, and an incentive offered to
excellence and industry. The country’s resources would increase for the
very reason that somebody might conceivably profit by them; and everyone
would have at least an ideal interest in ministering to that complete
life which he or his children, or whoever was most capable of
appreciation, was actually to enjoy.

Such a timocracy (of which the Roman Church is a good example) would
differ from the social aristocracy that now exists only by the removal
of hereditary advantages. People would be born equal, but they would
grow unequal, and the only equality subsisting would be equality of
opportunity. If power remained in the people’s hands, the government
would be democratic; but a full development of timocracy would allow the
proved leader to gain great ascendancy. The better security the law
offered that the men at the top should be excellent, the less restraint
would it need to put upon them when once in their places. Their eminence
would indeed have been factitious and their station undeserved if they
were not able to see and do what was requisite better than the community
at large. An assembly has only the lights common to the majority of its
members, far less, therefore, than its members have when added together
and less even than the wiser part of them.

A timocracy would therefore seem to unite the advantages of all forms of
government and to avoid their respective abuses. It would promote
freedom scientifically. It might be a monarchy, if men existed fit to
be kings; but they would have to give signs of their fitness and their
honours would probably not be hereditary. Like aristocracy, it would
display a great diversity of institutions and superposed classes, a
stimulating variety in ways of living; it would be favourable to art and
science and to noble idiosyncrasies. Among its activities the
culminating and most conspicuous ones would be liberal. Yet there would
be no isolation of the aristocratic body; its blood would be drawn from
the people, and only its traditions from itself. Like social democracy,
finally, it would be just and open to every man, but it would not
depress humanity nor wish to cast everybody in a common mould.

[Sidenote: The difficulty the same as in all Socialism.]

There are immense difficulties, however, in the way of such a Utopia,
some physical and others moral. Timocracy would have to begin by
uprooting the individual from his present natural soil and transplanting
him to that in which his spirit might flourish best. This proposed
transfer is what makes the system ideally excellent, since nature is a
means only; but it makes it also almost impossible to establish, since
nature is the only efficacious power. Timocracy can arise only in the
few fortunate cases where material and social forces have driven men to
that situation in which their souls can profit most, and where they find
no influences more persuasive than those which are most liberating. It
is clear, for instance, that timocracy would exclude the family or
greatly weaken it. Soul and body would be wholly transferred to that
medium where lay the creature’s spiritual affinities; his origins would
be disregarded on principle, except where they might help to forecast
his disposition. Life would become heartily civic, corporate,
conventual; otherwise opportunities would not be equal in the beginning,
nor culture and happiness perfect in the end, and identical. We have
seen, however, what difficulties and dangers surround any revolution in
that ideal direction.

Even less perfect polities, that leave more to chance, would require a
moral transformation in mankind if they were to be truly successful.

A motive which now generates political democracy, impatience of
sacrifice, must, in a good social democracy, be turned into its
opposite. Men must be glad to labour unselfishly in the spirit of art or
of religious service: for if they labour selfishly, the higher organs of
the state would perish, since only a few can profit by them materially;
while if they neglect their work, civilisation loses that intensive
development which it was proposed to maintain. Each man would need to
forget himself and not to chafe under his natural limitations. He must
find his happiness in seeing his daily task grow under his hands; and
when, in speculative moments, he lifts his eyes from his labour, he must
find an ideal satisfaction in patriotism, in love for that complex
society to which he is contributing an infinitesimal service. He must
learn to be happy without wealth, fame, or power, and with no reward
save his modest livelihood and an ideal participation in his country’s
greatness. It is a spirit hardly to be maintained without a close
organisation and much training; and as military and religious
timocracies have depended on discipline and a minute rule of life, so an
industrial timocracy would have to depend on guilds and unions, which
would make large inroads upon personal freedom.

[Sidenote: The masses would have to be plebeian in position and
patrician in feeling.]

The question here suggests itself whether such a citizen, once having
accepted his humble lot, would be in a different position from the
plebeians in an aristocracy. The same subordination would be imposed
upon him, only the ground assigned for his submission would be no longer
self-interest and necessity, but patriotic duty. This patriotism would
have to be of an exalted type. Its end would not be, as in industrial
society, to secure the private interests of each citizen; its end would
be the glory and perfection of the state as imagination or philosophy
might conceive them. This glory and perfection would not be a benefit to
anyone who was not in some degree a philosopher and a poet. They would
seem, then, to be the special interests of an aristocracy, not indeed an
aristocracy of wealth or power, but an aristocracy of noble minds.
Those whose hearts could prize the state’s ideal perfection would be
those in whom its benefits would be integrated. And the common citizen
would find in their existence, and in his own participation in their
virtue, the sole justification for his loyalty.

Ideal patriotism is not secured when each man, although without natural
eminence, pursues his private interests. What renders man an imaginative
and moral being is that in society he gives new aims to his life which
could not have existed in solitude: the aims of friendship, religion,
science, and art. All these aims, in a well-knit state, are covered by
the single passion of patriotism; and then a conception of one’s
country, its history and mission becomes the touchstone of every ideal
impulse. Timocracy requires this kind of patriotism in everybody; so
that if public duty is not to become a sacrifice imposed on the many for
the sake of the few, as in aristocracy, the reason can only be that the
many covet, appreciate, and appropriate their country’s ideal glories,
quite as much as the favoured class ever could in any aristocracy.

[Sidenote: Organisation for ideal ends breeds fanaticism.]

Is this possible? What might happen if the human race were immensely
improved and exalted there is as yet no saying; but experience has given
no example of efficacious devotion to communal ideals except in small
cities, held together by close military and religious bonds and having
no important relations to anything external. Even this antique virtue
was short-lived and sadly thwarted by private and party passion. Where
public spirit has held best, as at Sparta or (to take a very different
type of communal passion) among the Jesuits, it has been paid for by a
notable lack of spontaneity and wisdom; such inhuman devotion to an
arbitrary end has made these societies odious. We may say, therefore,
that a zeal sufficient to destroy selfishness is, as men are now
constituted, worse than selfishness itself. In pursuing prizes for
themselves people benefit their fellows more than in pursuing such
narrow and irrational ideals as alone seem to be powerful in the world.
To ambition, to the love of wealth and honour, to love of a liberty
which meant opportunity for experiment and adventure, we owe whatever
benefits we have derived from Greece and Rome, from Italy and England.
It is doubtful whether a society which offered no personal prizes would
inspire effort; and it is still more doubtful whether that effort, if
actually stimulated by education, would be beneficent. For an
indoctrinated and collective virtue turns easily to fanaticism; it
imposes irrational sacrifices prompted by some abstract principle or
habit once, perhaps, useful; but that convention soon becomes
superstitious and ceases to represent general human excellence.

[Sidenote: Public spirit the life of democracy.]

Now it is in the spirit of social democracy to offer no prizes. Office
in it, being the reward of no great distinction, brings no great honour,
and being meanly paid it brings no great profit, at least while honestly
administered. All wealth in a true democracy would be the fruit of
personal exertion and would come too late to be nobly enjoyed or to
teach the art of liberal living. It would be either accumulated
irrationally or given away outright. And if fortunes could not be
transmitted or used to found a great family they would lose their chief
imaginative charm. The pleasures a democratic society affords are vulgar
and not even by an amiable illusion can they become an aim in life. A
life of pleasure requires an aristocratic setting to make it interesting
or really conceivable. Intellectual and artistic greatness does not need
prizes, but it sorely needs sympathy and a propitious environment.
Genius, like goodness (which can stand alone), would arise in a
democratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so
well fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial
and simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl
unbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than
that which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting
would be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and
inwardly rewarded. For such excellence to grow general mankind must be
notably transformed. If a noble and civilised democracy is to subsist,
the common citizen must be something of a saint and something of a hero.
We see therefore how justly flattering and profound, and at the same
time how ominous, was Montesquieu’s saying that the principle of
democracy is virtue.




CHAPTER VI

FREE SOCIETY


[Sidenote: Primacy of nature over spirit.]

Natural society unites beings in time and space; it fixes affection on
those creatures on which we depend and to which our action must be
adapted. Natural society begins at home and radiates over the world, as
more and more things become tributary to our personal being. In marriage
and the family, in industry, government, and war, attention is riveted
on temporal existences, on the fortunes of particular bodies, natural or
corporate. There is then a primacy of nature over spirit in social life;
and this primacy, in a certain sense, endures to the end, since all
spirit must be the spirit of something, and reason could not exist or be
conceived at all unless a material organism, personal or social, lay
beneath to give thought an occasion and a point of view, and to give
preference a direction. Things could not be near or far, worse or
better, unless a definite life were taken as a standard, a life lodged
somewhere in space and time. Reason is a principle of order appearing in
a subject-matter which in its subsistence and quantity must be an
irrational datum. Reason expresses purpose, purpose expresses impulse,
and impulse expresses a natural body with self-equilibrating powers.

At the same time, natural growths may be called achievements only
because, when formed, they support a joyful and liberal experience.
Nature’s works first acquire a meaning in the commentaries they provoke;
mechanical processes have interesting climaxes only from the point of
view of the life that expresses them, in which their ebb and flow grows
impassioned and vehement. Nature’s values are imputed to her
retroactively by spirit, which in its material dependence has a logical
and moral primacy of its own. In themselves events are perfectly
mechanical, steady, and fluid, not stopping where we see a goal nor
avoiding what we call failures. And so they would always have remained
in crude experience, if no cumulative reflection, no art, and no science
had come to dominate and foreshorten that equable flow of substance,
arresting it ideally in behalf of some rational interest.

Thus it comes to pass that rational interests have a certain ascendancy
in the world, as well as an absolute authority over it; for they arise
where an organic equilibrium has naturally established itself. Such an
equilibrium maintains itself by virtue of the same necessity that
produced it; without arresting the flux or introducing any miracle, it
sustains in being an ideal form. This form is what consciousness
corresponds to and raises to actual existence; so that significant
thoughts are something which nature necessarily lingers upon and seems
to serve. The being to whom they come is the most widely based and
synthetic of her creatures. The mind spreads and soars in proportion as
the body feeds on the surrounding world. Noble ideas, although rare and
difficult to attain, are not naturally fugitive.

[Sidenote: All experience at bottom liberal.]

Consciousness is not ideal merely in its highest phases; it is ideal
through and through. On one level as much as on another, it celebrates
an attained balance in nature, or grieves at its collapse; it prophesies
and remembers, it loves and dreams. It sees even nature from the point
of view of ideal interests, and measures the flux of things by ideal
standards. It registers its own movement, like that of its objects,
entirely in ideal terms, looking to fixed goals of its own imagining,
and using nothing in the operation but concretions in discourse. Primary
mathematical notions, for instance, are evidences of a successful
reactive method attained in the organism and translated in consciousness
into a stable grammar which has wide applicability and great
persistence, so that it has come to be elaborated ideally into
prodigious abstract systems of thought. Every experience of victory,
eloquence, or beauty is a momentary success of the same kind, and if
repeated and sustained becomes a spiritual possession.

[Sidenote: Social experience has its ideality too.]

Society also breeds its ideal harmonies. At first it establishes
affections between beings naturally conjoined in the world; later it
grows sensitive to free and spiritual affinities, to oneness of mind and
sympathetic purposes. These ideal affinities, although grounded like the
others on material relations (for sympathy presupposes communication),
do not have those relations for their theme but rest on them merely as
on a pedestal from which they look away to their own realm, as music,
while sustained by vibrating instruments, looks away from them to its
own universe of sound.

[Sidenote: The self an ideal.]

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination. Its
personages are all mythical, beginning with that brave protagonist who
calls himself I and speaks all the soliloquies. When most nearly
material these personages are human souls—the ideal life of particular
bodies—or floating mortal reputations—echoes of those ideal lives in
one another. From this relative substantiality they fade into notions of
country, posterity, humanity, and the gods. These figures all represent
some circle of events or forces in the real world; but such
representation, besides being mythical, is usually most inadequate. The
boundaries of that province which each spirit presides over are vaguely
drawn, the spirit itself being correspondingly indefinite. This
ambiguity is most conspicuous, perhaps, in the most absorbing of the
personages which a man constructs in this imaginative fashion—his idea
of himself. “There is society where none intrudes;” and for most men
sympathy with their imaginary selves is a powerful and dominant emotion.
True memory offers but a meagre and interrupted vista of past
experience, yet even that picture is far too rich a term for mental
discourse to bandy about; a name with a few physical and social
connotations is what must represent the man to his own thinkings. Or
rather it is no memory, however eviscerated, that fulfils that office. A
man’s notion of himself is a concretion in discourse for which his more
constant somatic feelings, his ruling interests, and his social
relations furnish most of the substance.

[Sidenote: Romantic egotism.]

The more reflective and self-conscious a man is the more completely will
his experience be subsumed and absorbed in his perennial “I.” If
philosophy has come to reinforce this reflective egotism, he may even
regard all nature as nothing but his half-voluntary dream and encourage
himself thereby to give even to the physical world a dramatic and
sentimental colour. But the more successful he is in stuffing everything
into his self-consciousness, the more desolate will the void become
which surrounds him. For self is, after all, but one term in a primitive
dichotomy and would lose its specific and intimate character were it no
longer contrasted with anything else. The egotist must therefore people
the desert he has spread about him, and he naturally peoples it with
mythical counterparts of himself. Sometimes, if his imagination is
sensuous, his alter-egos are incarnate in the landscape, and he creates
a poetic mythology; sometimes, when the inner life predominates, they
are projected into his own forgotten past or infinite future. He will
then say that all experience is really his own and that some
inexplicable illusion has momentarily raised opaque partitions in his
omniscient mind.

[Sidenote: Vanity.]

Philosophers less pretentious and more worldly than these have sometimes
felt, in their way, the absorbing force of self-consciousness. La
Rochefoucauld could describe _amour propre_ as the spring of all human
sentiments. _Amour propre_ involves preoccupation not merely with the
idea of self, but with that idea reproduced in other men’s minds; the
soliloquy has become a dialogue, or rather a solo with an echoing
chorus. Interest in one’s own social figure is to some extent a material
interest, for other men’s love or aversion is a principle read into
their acts; and a social animal like man is dependent on other men’s
acts for his happiness. An individual’s concern for the attitude society
takes toward him is therefore in the first instance concern for his own
practical welfare. But imagination here refines upon worldly interest.
What others think of us would be of little moment did it not, when
known, so deeply tinge what we think of ourselves. Nothing could better
prove the mythical character of self-consciousness than this extreme
sensitiveness to alien opinions; for if a man really knew himself he
would utterly despise the ignorant notions others might form on a
subject in which he had such matchless opportunities for observation.
Indeed, those opinions would hardly seem to him directed upon the
reality at all, and he would laugh at them as he might at the stock
fortune-telling of some itinerant gypsy.

As it is, however, the least breath of irresponsible and anonymous
censure lashes our self-esteem and sometimes quite transforms our plans
and affections. The passions grafted on wounded pride are the most
inveterate; they are green and vigorous in old age. We crave support in
vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that
sphere; for however persistent and passionate such prejudices may be, we
know too well that they are woven of thin air. A hostile word, by
starting a contrary imaginative current, buffets them rudely and
threatens to dissolve their being.

[Sidenote: Ambiguities of fame.]

The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to
deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination
almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have
no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which
reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame. The
direct object of this passion—that a name should survive in men’s
mouths to which no adequate idea of its original can be attached—seems
a thin and fantastic satisfaction, especially when we consider how
little we should probably sympathise with the creatures that are to
remember us. What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him
at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from
which everything he loved has departed? Yet, beneath this desire for
nominal longevity, apparently so inane, there may lurk an ideal ambition
of which the ancients cannot have been unconscious when they set so high
a value on fame. They often identified fame with immortality, a subject
on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since
prevailed.

[Sidenote: Its possible ideality.]

Fame, as a noble mind conceives and desires it, is not embodied in a
monument, a biography, or the repetition of a strange name by strangers;
it consists in the immortality of a man’s work, his spirit, his
efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world. When
Horace—no model of magnanimity—wrote his _exegi monumentum_, he was
not thinking that the pleasure he would continue to give would remind
people of his trivial personality, which indeed he never particularly
celebrated and which had much better lie buried with his bones. He was
thinking, of course, of that pleasure itself; thinking that the delight,
half lyric, half sarcastic, which those delicate cameos had given him
to carve would be perennially renewed in all who retraced them. Nay,
perhaps we may not go too far in saying that even that impersonal
satisfaction was not the deepest he felt; the deepest, very likely,
flowed from the immortality, not of his monument, but of the subject and
passion it commemorated; that tenderness, I mean, and that disillusion
with mortal life which rendered his verse immortal. He had expressed,
and in expressing appropriated, some recurring human moods, some mocking
renunciations; and he knew that his spirit was immortal, being linked
and identified with that portion of the truth. He had become a little
spokesman of humanity, uttering what all experience repeats more or less
articulately; and even if he should cease to be honoured in men’s
memories, he would continue to be unwittingly honoured and justified in
their lives.

What we may conceive to have come in this way even within a Horace’s
apprehension is undoubtedly what has attached many nobler souls to fame.
With an inversion of moral derivations which all mythical expression
involves we speak of fame as the reward of genius, whereas in truth
genius, the imaginative dominion of experience, is its own reward and
fame is but a foolish image by which its worth is symbolised. When the
Virgin in the Magnificat says, “Behold, from henceforth all generations
shall call me blessed,” the psalmist surely means to express a
spiritual exaltation exempt from vanity; he merely translates into a
rhetorical figure the fact that what had been first revealed to Mary
would also bless all generations. That the Church should in consequence
deem and pronounce her blessed is an incident describing, but not
creating, the unanimity in their religious joys. Fame is thus the
outward sign or recognition of an inward representative authority
residing in genius or good fortune, an authority in which lies the whole
worth of fame. Those will substantially remember and honour us who keep
our ideals, and we shall live on in those ages whose experience we have
anticipated.

Free society differs from that which is natural and legal precisely in
this, that it does not cultivate relations which in the last analysis
are experienced and material, but turns exclusively to unanimities in
meanings, to collaborations in an ideal world. The basis of free society
is of course natural, as we said, but free society has ideal goals.
Spirits cannot touch save by becoming unanimous. At the same time public
opinion, reputation, and impersonal sympathy reinforce only very general
feelings, and reinforce them vaguely; and as the inner play of sentiment
becomes precise, it craves more specific points of support or
comparison. It is in creatures of our own species that we chiefly scent
the aroma of inward sympathy, because it is they that are visibly moved
on the same occasions as ourselves; and it is to those among our
fellow-men who share our special haunts and habits that we feel more
precise affinities. Though the ground for such feeling is animal contact
and contagion, its deliverance does not revert to those natural
accidents, but concerns a represented sympathy in represented souls.
Friendship, springing from accidental association, terminates in a
consciousness of ideal and essential agreement.

[Sidenote: Comradeship.]

Comradeship is a form of friendship still akin to general sociability
and gregariousness. When men are “in the same boat together,” when a
common anxiety, occupation, or sport unites them, they feel their human
kinship in an intensified form without any greater personal affinity
subsisting between them. The same effect is produced by a common
estrangement from the rest of society. For this reason comradeship lasts
no longer than the circumstances that bring it about. Its constancy is
proportionate to the monotony of people’s lives and minds. There is a
lasting bond among schoolfellows because no one can become a boy again
and have a new set of playmates. There is a persistent comradeship with
one’s countrymen, especially abroad, because seldom is a man pliable and
polyglot enough to be at home among foreigners, or really to understand
them. There is an inevitable comradeship with men of the same breeding
or profession, however bad these may be, because habits soon monopolise
the man. Nevertheless a greater buoyancy, a longer youth, a richer
experience, would break down all these limits of fellowship. Such
clingings to the familiar are three parts dread of the unfamiliar and
want of resource in its presence, for one part in them of genuine
loyalty. Plasticity loves new moulds because it can fill them, but for a
man of sluggish mind and bad manners there is decidedly no place like
home.

[Sidenote: External conditions of friendship.]

Though comradeship is an accidental bond, it is the condition of ideal
friendship, for the ideal, in all spheres, is nothing but the accidental
confirming itself and generating its own standard. Men must meet to
love, and many other accidents besides conjunction must conspire to make
a true friendship possible. In order that friendship may fulfil the
conditions even of comradeship, it is requisite that the friends have
the same social status, so that they may live at ease together and have
congenial tastes. They must further have enough community of occupation
and gifts to give each an appreciation of the other’s faculty; for
qualities are not complementary unless they are qualities of the same
substance. Nothing must be actual in either friend that is not potential
in the other.

[Sidenote: Identity in sex required.]

For this reason, among others, friends are generally of the same sex,
for when men and women agree, it is only in their conclusions; their
reasons are always different. So that while intellectual harmony between
men and women is easily possible, its delightful and magic quality lies
precisely in the fact that it does not arise from mutual understanding,
but is a conspiracy of alien essences and a kissing, as it were, in the
dark. As man’s body differs from woman’s in sex and strength, so his
mind differs from hers in quality and function: they can co-operate but
can never fuse. The human race, in its intellectual life, is organised
like the bees: the masculine soul is a worker, sexually atrophied, and
essentially dedicated to impersonal and universal arts; the feminine is
a queen, infinitely fertile, omnipresent in its brooding industry, but
passive and abounding in intuitions without method and passions without
justice. Friendship with a woman is therefore apt to be more or less
than friendship: less, because there is no intellectual parity; more,
because (even when the relation remains wholly dispassionate, as in
respect to old ladies) there is something mysterious and oracular about
a woman’s mind which inspires a certain instinctive deference and puts
it out of the question to judge what she says by masculine standards.
She has a kind of sibylline intuition and the right to be irrationally
_à propos_. There is a gallantry of the mind which pervades all
conversation with a lady, as there is a natural courtesy toward children
and mystics; but such a habit of respectful concession, marking as it
does an intellectual alienation as profound as that which separates us
from the dumb animals, is radically incompatible with friendship.

[Sidenote: and in age.]

Friends, moreover, should have been young together. Much difference in
age defeats equality and forbids frankness on many a fundamental
subject; it confronts two minds of unlike focus: one near-sighted and
without perspective, the other seeing only the background of present
things. While comparisons in these respects may be interesting and
borrowings sometimes possible, lending the older mind life and the
younger mind wisdom, such intercourse has hardly the value of
spontaneous sympathy, in which the spark of mutual intelligence flies,
as it should, almost without words. Contagion is the only source of
valid mind-reading: you must imitate to understand, and where the
plasticity of two minds is not similar their mutual interpretations are
necessarily false. They idealise in their friends whatever they do not
invent or ignore, and the friendship which should have lived on energies
conspiring spontaneously together dies into conscious appreciation.

[Sidenote: Constituents of friendship.]

All these are merely permissive conditions for friendship; its positive
essence is yet to find. How, we may ask, does the vision of the general
_socius_, humanity, become specific in the vision of a particular friend
without losing its ideality or reverting to practical values? Of course,
individuals might be singled out for the special benefits they may have
conferred; but a friend’s only gift is himself, and friendship is not
friendship, it is not a form of free or liberal society, if it does not
terminate in an ideal possession, in an object loved for its own sake.
Such objects can be ideas only, not forces, for forces are subterranean
and instrumental things, having only such value as they borrow from
their ulterior effects and manifestations. To praise the utility of
friendship, as the ancients so often did, and to regard it as a
political institution justified, like victory or government, by its
material results, is to lose one’s moral bearings. The value of victory
or good government is rather to be found in the fact that, among other
things, it might render friendship possible. We are not to look now for
what makes friendship useful, but for whatever may be found in
friendship that may lend utility to life.

[Sidenote: Personal liking.]

The first note that gives sociability a personal quality and raises the
comrade into an incipient friend is doubtless sensuous affinity.
Whatever reaction we may eventually make on an impression, after it has
had time to soak in and to merge in some practical or intellectual
habit, its first assault is always on the senses, and no sense is an
indifferent organ. Each has, so to speak, its congenial rate of
vibration and gives its stimuli a varying welcome. Little as we may
attend to these instinctive hospitalities of sense, they betray
themselves in unjustified likes and dislikes felt for casual persons and
things, in the _je ne sais quoi_ that makes instinctive sympathy. Voice,
manner, aspect, hints of congenial tastes and judgments, a jest in the
right key, a gesture marking the right aversions, all these trifles
leave behind a pervasive impression. We reject a vision we find
indigestible and without congruity to our inner dream; we accept and
incorporate another into our private pantheon, where it becomes a
legitimate figure, however dumb and subsidiary it may remain.

In a refined nature these sensuous premonitions of sympathy are seldom
misleading. Liking cannot, of course, grow into friendship over night as
it might into love; the pleasing impression, even if retained, will lie
perfectly passive and harmless in the mind, until new and different
impressions follow to deepen the interest at first evoked and to remove
its centre of gravity altogether from the senses. In love, if the field
is clear, a single glimpse may, like Tristan’s potion, produce a violent
and irresistible passion; but in friendship the result remains more
proportionate to the incidental causes, discrimination is preserved,
jealousy and exclusiveness are avoided. That vigilant, besetting,
insatiable affection, so full of doubts and torments, with which the
lover follows his object, is out of place here; for the friend has no
property in his friend’s body or leisure or residual ties; he accepts
what is offered and what is acceptable, and the rest he leaves in peace.
He is distinctly not his brother’s keeper, for the society of friends is
free.

[Sidenote: The refracting human medium for ideas.]

Friendship may indeed come to exist without sensuous liking or
comradeship to pave the way; but unless intellectual sympathy and moral
appreciation are powerful enough to react on natural instinct and to
produce in the end the personal affection which at first was wanting,
friendship does not arise. Recognition given to a man’s talent or virtue
is not properly friendship. Friends must desire to live as much as
possible together and to share their work, thoughts, and pleasures.
Good-fellowship and sensuous affinity are indispensable to give
spiritual communion a personal accent; otherwise men would be
indifferent vehicles for such thoughts and powers as emanated from them,
and attention would not be in any way arrested or refracted by the human
medium through which it beheld the good.

[Sidenote: Affection based on the refraction.]

No natural vehicle, however, is indifferent; no natural organ is or
should be transparent. Transparency is a virtue only in artificial
instruments, organs in which no blood flows and whose intrinsic
operation is not itself a portion of human life. In looking through a
field-glass I do not wish to perceive the lenses nor to see rainbows
about their rim; yet I should not wish the eye itself to lose its
pigments and add no dyes to the bulks it discerns. The sense for colour
is a vital endowment and an ingredient in human happiness; but no
vitality is added by the intervention of further media which are not
themselves living organs.

A man is sometimes a coloured and sometimes a clear medium for the
energies he exerts. When a thought conveyed or a work done enters alone
into the observer’s experience, no friendship is possible. This is
always the case when the master is dead; for if his reconstructed
personality retains any charm, it is only as an explanation or conceived
nexus for the work he performed. In a philosopher or artist, too,
personality is merely instrumental, for, although in a sense pervasive,
a creative personality evaporates into its expression, and whatever part
of it may not have been translated into ideas is completely negligible
from the public point of view. That portion of a man’s soul which he has
not alienated and objectified is open only to those who know him
otherwise than by his works and do not estimate him by his public
attributions. Such persons are his friends. Into their lives he has
entered not merely through an idea with which his name may be
associated, nor through the fame of some feat he may have performed, but
by awakening an inexpressible animal sympathy, by the contagion of
emotions felt before the same objects. Estimation has been partly
arrested at its medium and personal relations have added their homely
accent to universal discourse. Friendship might thus be called ideal
sympathy refracted by a human medium, or comradeship and sensuous
affinity colouring a spiritual light.

[Sidenote: The medium must also be transparent.]

If we approach friendship from above and compare it with more ideal
loyalties, its characteristic is its animal warmth and its basis in
chance conjunctions; if we approach it from below and contrast it with
mere comradeship or liking, its essence seems to be the presence of
common ideal interests. That is a silly and effeminate friendship in
which the parties are always thinking of the friendship itself and of
how each stands in the other’s eyes; a sentimental fancy of that sort,
in which nothing tangible or ulterior brings people together, is rather
a feeble form of love than properly a friendship. In extreme youth such
a weakness may perhaps indicate capacity for friendship of a nobler
type, because when taste and knowledge have not yet taken shape, the
only way, often, in which ideal interests can herald themselves is in
the guise of some imagined union from which it is vaguely felt they
might be developed, just as in love sexual and social instincts mask
themselves in an unreasoning obsession, or as for mystic devotion every
ideal masks itself in God. All these sentimental feelings are at any
rate mere preludes, but preludes in fortunate cases to more
discriminating and solid interests, which such a tremulous overture may
possibly pitch on a higher key.

[Sidenote: Common interests indispensable.]

The necessity of backing personal attachment with ideal interests is
what makes true friendship so rare. It is found chiefly in youth, for
youth best unites the two requisite conditions—affectionate comradeship
and ardour in pursuing such liberal aims as may be pursued in common.
Life in camp or college is favourable to friendship, for there generous
activities are carried on in unison and yet leave leisure for playful
expansion and opportunity for a choice in friends. The ancients, so long
as they were free, spent their whole life in forum and palæstra, camp,
theatre, and temple, and in consequence could live by friendship even in
their maturer years; but modern life is unfavourable to its continuance.
What with business cares, with political bonds remote and invisible,
with the prior claims of family, and with individualities both of mind
and habit growing daily more erratic, early friends find themselves very
soon parted by unbridgeable chasms. For friendship to flourish personal
life would have to become more public and social life more simple and
humane.

[Sidenote: Friendship between man and wife.]

The tie that in contemporary society most nearly resembles the ancient
ideal of friendship is a well-assorted marriage. In spite of
intellectual disparity and of divergence in occupation, man and wife are
bound together by a common dwelling, common friends, common affection
for children, and, what is of great importance, common financial
interests. These bonds often suffice for substantial and lasting
unanimity, even when no ideal passion preceded; so that what is called a
marriage of reason, if it is truly reasonable, may give a fair promise
of happiness, since a normal married life can produce the sympathies it
requires.

[Sidenote: Between master and disciple.]

When the common ideal interests needed to give friendship a noble strain
become altogether predominant, so that comradeship and personal liking
may be dispensed with, friendship passes into more and more political
fellowships. Discipleship is a union of this kind. Without claiming any
share in the master’s private life, perhaps without having ever seen
him, we may enjoy communion with his mind and feel his support and
guidance in following the ideal which links us together. Hero-worship is
an imaginative passion in which latent ideals assume picturesque shapes
and take actual persons for their symbols. Such companionship, perhaps
wholly imaginary, is a very clear and simple example of ideal society.
The unconscious hero, to be sure, happens to exist, but his existence is
irrelevant to his function, provided only he be present to the
idealising mind. There is or need be no comradeship, no actual force or
influence transmitted from him. Certain capacities and tendencies in the
worshipper are brought to a focus by the hero’s image, who is thereby
first discovered and deputed to be a hero. He is an unmoved mover, like
Aristotle’s God and like every ideal to which thought or action is
directed.

The symbol, however, is ambiguous in hero-worship, being in one sense
ideal, the representation of an inner demand, and in another sense a
sensible experience, the representative of an external reality.
Accordingly the symbol, when highly prized and long contemplated, may
easily become an idol; that in it which is not ideal nor representative
of the worshipper’s demand may be imported confusedly into the total
adored, and may thus receive a senseless worship. The devotion which
was, in its origin, an ideal tendency grown conscious and expressed in
fancy may thus become a mechanical force vitiating that ideal. For this
reason it is very important that the first objects to fix the soul’s
admiration should be really admirable, for otherwise their accidental
blemishes will corrupt the mind to which they appear _sub specie boni_.

[Sidenote: Conflict between ideal and natural allegiance.]

Discipleship and hero-worship are not stable relations. Since the
meaning they embody is ideal and radiates from within outward, and since
the image to which that meaning is attributed is controlled by a real
external object, meaning and image, as time goes on, will necessarily
fall apart. The idol will be discredited. An ideal, ideally conceived
and known to be an ideal, a spirit worshipped in spirit and in truth,
will take the place of the pleasing phenomenon; and in regard to every
actual being, however noble, discipleship will yield to emulation, and
worship to an admiration more or less selective and critical.

[Sidenote: Automatic idealisation of heroes.]

A disembodied ideal, however, is unmanageable and vague; it cannot
exercise the natural and material suasion proper to a model we are
expected to imitate. The more fruitful procedure is accordingly to
idealise some historical figure or natural force, to ignore or minimise
in it what does not seem acceptable, and to retain at the same time all
the unobjectionable personal colour and all the graphic traits that can
help to give that model a persuasive vitality. This poetic process is
all the more successful for being automatic. It is in this way that
heroes and gods have been created. A legend or fable lying in the mind
and continually repeated gained insensibly at each recurrence some new
eloquence, some fresh congruity with the emotion it had already
awakened, and was destined to awake again. To measure the importance of
this truth the reader need only conceive the distance traversed from the
Achilles that may have existed to the hero in Homer, or from Jesus as he
might have been in real life, or even as he is in the gospels, to Christ
in the Church.




CHAPTER VII

PATRIOTISM


[Sidenote: The creative social environment, since it eludes sense, must
be represented symbolically.]

The mythical social idea most potent over practical minds is perhaps the
idea of country. When a tribe, enlarged and domiciled, has become a
state, much social feeling that was before evoked by things visible
loses its sensuous object. Yet each man remains no less dependent than
formerly on his nation, although less swayed by its visible presence and
example; he is no less concerned, materially and ideally, in the
fortunes of the community. If a sense for social relations is to endure,
some symbol must take the place of the moving crowd, the visible
stronghold, and the outspread fields and orchards that once made up his
country; some intellectual figment must arise to focus political
interests, no longer confined to the crops and the priest’s medicinal
auguries. It is altogether impossible that the individual should have a
discursive and adequate knowledge of statecraft and economy. Whatever
idea, then, he frames to represent his undistinguished political
relations becomes the centre of his patriotism.

When intelligence is not keen this idea may remain sensuous. The
visible instruments of social life—chieftains, armies, monuments, the
dialect and dress of the district, with all customs and pleasures
traditional there—these are what a sensuous man may understand by his
country. Bereft of these sensations he would feel lost and incapable;
the habits formed in that environment would be galled by any other. This
fondness for home, this dread of change and exile, is all the love of
country he knows. If by chance, without too much added thought, he could
rise to a certain poetic sentiment, he might feel attachment also to the
landscape, to the memorable spots and aspects of his native land. These
objects, which rhetoric calls sacred, might really have a certain
sanctity for him; a wave of pious emotion might run over him at the
sight of them, a pang when in absence they were recalled. These very
things, however, like the man who prizes them, are dependent on a much
larger system; and if patriotism is to embrace ideally what really
produces human well-being it should extend over a wider field and to
less picturable objects.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous limits of a native country, geographical and
moral.]

To define one’s country is not so simple a matter as it may seem. The
habitat of a man’s youth, to which actual associations may bind him, is
hardly his country until he has conceived the political and historical
forces that include that habitat in their sphere of influence and have
determined its familiar institutions. Such forces are numerous and
their spheres include one another like concentric rings. France, for
instance, is an uncommonly distinct and self-conscious nation, with a
long historic identity and a compact territory. Yet what is the France a
Frenchman is to think of and love? Paris itself has various quarters and
moral climates, one of which may well be loved while another is
detested. The provinces have customs, temperaments, political ideals,
and even languages of their own. Is Alsace-Lorraine beyond the pale of
French patriotism? And if not, why utterly exclude French-speaking
Switzerland, the Channel Islands, Belgium, or Quebec? Or is a Frenchman
rather to love the colonies by way of compensation? Is an Algerian Moor
or a native of Tonquin his true fellow-citizen? Is Tahiti a part of his
“country”? The truth is, if we look at the heart of the matter, a
Protestant born in Paris is less a Frenchman than is a Catholic born in
Geneva.

If we pass from geography to institutions the same vagueness exists.
France to one man represents the Revolution, to another the Empire, to a
third the Church, and the vestiges of the _ancien régime_. Furthermore,
how far into the past is patriotism to look? Is Charlemagne one of the
glories of French history? Is it Julius Cæsar or Vicingetorix that is to
warm the patriotic heart? Want of reflection and a blind subservience to
the colours of the map has led some historians to call Roman victories
defeats suffered by their country, even when that country is essentially
so Roman, for instance, as Spain. With as good reason might a Sicilian
or a Florentine chafe under the Latin conquest, or an American blush at
the invasion of his country by the Pilgrim Fathers. Indeed, even
geographically, the limits and the very heart of a man’s country are
often ambiguous. Was Alexander’s country Macedon or Greece? Was General
Lee’s the United States or Virginia? The ancients defined their country
from within outward; its heart was the city and its limits those of that
city’s dominion or affinities. Moderns generally define their country
rather stupidly by its administrative frontiers; and yet an Austrian
would have some difficulty in applying even this conventional criterion.

[Sidenote: Sentimental and political patriotism.]

The object of patriotism is in truth something ideal, a moral entity
definable only by the ties which a man’s imagination and reason can at
any moment recognise. If he has insight and depth of feeling he will
perceive that what deserves his loyalty is the entire civilisation to
which he owes his spiritual life and into which that life will presently
flow back, with whatever new elements he may have added. Patriotism
accordingly has two aspects: it is partly sentiment by which it looks
back upon the sources of culture, and partly policy, or allegiance to
those ideals which, being suggested by what has already been attained,
animate the better organs of society and demand further embodiment. To
love one’s country, unless that love is quite blind and lazy, must
involve a distinction between the country’s actual condition and its
inherent ideal; and this distinction in turn involves a demand for
changes and for effort. Party allegiance is a true form of patriotism.
For a party, at least in its intent, is an association of persons
advocating the same policy. Every thoughtful man must advocate some
policy, and unless he has the misfortune to stand quite alone in his
conception of public welfare he will seek to carry out that policy by
the aid of such other persons as advocate it also.

[Sidenote: The earth and the race the first objects of rational
loyalty.]

The springs of culture, which retrospective patriotism regards, go back
in the last instance to cosmic forces. The necessity that marshals the
stars makes possible the world men live in, and is the first general and
law-giver to every nation. The earth’s geography, its inexorable
climates with their flora and fauna, make a play-ground for the human
will which should be well surveyed by any statesman who wishes to judge
and act, not fantastically, but with reference to the real situation.
Geography is a most enlightening science. In describing the habitat of
man it largely explains his history. Animal battles give the right and
only key to human conflicts, for the superadded rational element in man
is not partisan, but on the contrary insinuates into his economy the
novel principle of justice and peace. As this leaven, however, can
mingle only with elements predisposed to receive it, the basis of reason
itself, in so far as it attains expression, must be sought in the
natural world. The fortunes of the human family among the animals thus
come to concern reason and to be the background of progress.

Within humanity the next sphere of interest for a patriot is the race
from which he is descended, with its traditional languages and
religions. Blood is the ground of character and intelligence. The fruits
of civilisation may, indeed, be transmitted from one race to another and
consequently a certain artificial homogeneity may be secured amongst
different nations; yet unless continual intermarriage takes place each
race will soon recast and vitiate the common inheritance. The fall of
the Roman Empire offered such a spectacle, when various types of
barbarism, with a more or less classic veneer, re-established themselves
everywhere. Perhaps modern cosmopolitanism, if not maintained by
commerce or by permanent conquest, may break apart in the same way and
yield to local civilisations no less diverse than Christendom and Islam.

[Sidenote: Race, when distinct, the greatest of distinctions.]

Community of race is a far deeper bond than community of language,
education, or government. Where one political system dominates various
races it forces their common culture to be external merely. This is
perhaps the secret of that strange recrudescence of national feeling,
apart often from political divisions, which has closely followed the
French Revolution and the industrial era. The more two different peoples
grow alike in externals the more conscious and jealous they become of
diversity in their souls; and where individuals are too insignificant to
preserve any personality or distinction of their own, they flock
together into little intentional societies and factious groups, in the
hope of giving their imagination, in its extremity, some little food and
comfort. Private nationalities and private religions are luxuries at
such a time in considerable demand. The future may possibly see in the
Occident that divorce between administrative and ideal groups which is
familiar in the Orient; so that under no matter what government and with
utter cosmopolitanism in industry and science, each race may guard its
own poetry, religion, and manners. Such traditions, however, would
always be survivals or revivals rather than genuine expressions of life,
because mind must either represent nature and the conditions of action
or else be content to persist precariously and without a function, like
a sort of ghost.

[Sidenote: “Pure” races may be morally sterile.]

Some races are obviously superior to others. A more thorough adjustment
to the conditions of existence has given their spirit victory, scope,
and a relative stability. It is therefore of the greatest importance not
to obscure this superiority by intermarriage with inferior stock, and
thus nullify the progress made by a painful evolution and a prolonged
sifting of souls. Reason protests as much as instinct against any
fusion, for instance, of white and black peoples. Mixture is in itself
no evil if the two nations, being approximately equal, but having
complementary gifts, can modify them without ultimate loss, and possibly
to advantage. Indeed the so-called pure races, since their purity has
gone with isolation and inexperience, have borne comparatively little
spiritual fruit. Large contact and concentrated living bring out native
genius, but mixture with an inferior stock can only tend to obliterate
it. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the English were never so great as
when they confronted other nations, reacting against them and at the
same time, perhaps, adopting their culture; but this greatness fails
inwardly whenever contact leads to amalgamation.

There is something unmistakably illiberal, almost superstitious, in
standing on race for its own sake, as if origins and not results were of
moral value. It matters nothing what blood a man has, if he has the
right spirit; and if there is some ground for identifying the two (since
monkeys, however educated, are monkeys still) it is only when blood
means character and capacity, and is tested by them, that it becomes
important. Nor is it unjust to level the individual, in his political
and moral status, with the race to which he belongs, if this race holds
an approved position. Individual gifts and good intentions have little
efficacy in the body politic if they neither express a great tradition
nor can avail to found one; and this tradition, as religion shows, will
falsify individual insights so soon as they are launched into the public
medium. The common soul will destroy a noble genius in absorbing it, and
therefore, to maintain progress, a general genius has to be invoked; and
a general genius means an exceptional and distinct race.

[Sidenote: True nationality direction on a definite ideal.]

Environment, education, fashion, may be all powerful while they last and
may make it seem a prejudice to insist on race, turning its assumed
efficacy into a sheer dogma, with fanatical impulses behind it; yet in
practice the question will soon recur: What shall sustain that
omnipotent fashion, education, or environment? Nothing is more
treacherous than tradition, when insight and force are lacking to keep
it warm. Under Roman dominion, the inhabitants of Sparta still submitted
to the laws of Lycurgus and their life continued to be a sort of
ritualistic shadow of the past. Those enfranchised helots thought they
were maintaining a heroic state when, in fact, they were only turning
its forms into a retrospective religion. The old race was practically
extinct; ephors, gymnasia, and common meals could do nothing to
revive it. The ways of the Roman world—a kindred promiscuous
population—prevailed over that local ritual and rendered it
perfunctory, because there were no longer any living souls to understand
that a man might place his happiness in his country’s life and care
nothing for Oriental luxury or Oriental superstition, things coming to
flatter his personal lusts and make him useless and unhappy.

Institutions without men are as futile as men without institutions.
Before race can be a rational object for patriotism there must exist a
_traditional genius_, handed down by inheritance or else by adoption,
when the persons adopted can really appreciate the mysteries they are
initiated into. Blood could be disregarded, if only the political ideal
remained constant and progress was sustained, the laws being modified
only to preserve their spirit. A state lives in any case by exchanging
persons, and all spiritual life is maintained by exchanging expressions.
Life is a circulation; it can digest whatever materials will assume a
form already determined ideally and enable that form to come forth more
clearly and be determined in more particulars. Stagnant matter
necessarily decays and in effect is false to the spirit no less than a
spirit that changes is false to itself.

[Sidenote: Country well represented by domestic and civic religion.]

The spirit of a race is a mythical entity expressing the individual soul
in its most constant and profound instincts and expanding it in the
direction in which correct representation is most easily possible, in
the direction of ancestors, kinsmen, and descendants. In ancient cities,
where patriotism was intense, it was expressed in a tribal and civic
religion. The lares, the local gods, the deified heroes associated with
them, were either ancestors idealised or ideals of manhood taking the
form of patrons and supernatural protectors. Jupiter Capitolinus and the
Spirit of Rome were a single object. To worship Jupiter in that Capitol
was to dedicate oneself to the service of Rome. A foreigner could no
more share that devotion than a neighbour could share the religion of
the hearth without sharing by adoption the life of the family. Paganism
was the least artificial of religions and the most poetical; its myths
were comparatively transparent and what they expressed was comparatively
real. In that religion patriotism and family duties could take
imaginable forms, and those forms, apart from the inevitable tinge of
superstition which surrounded them, did not materially vitiate the
allegiance due to the actual forces on which human happiness depends.

[Sidenote: Misleading identification of country with government.]

[Sidenote: Sporting or belligerent patriotism.]

What has driven patriotism, as commonly felt and conceived, so far from
rational courses and has attached it to vapid objects has been the
initial illegitimacy of all governments. Under such circumstances,
patriotism is merely a passion for ascendency. Properly it animates the
army, the government, the aristocracy; from those circles it can
percolate, not perhaps without the help of some sophistry and
intimidation, into the mass of the people, who are told that their
government’s fortunes are their own. Now the rabble has a great
propensity to take sides, promptly and passionately, in any spectacular
contest; the least feeling of affinity, the slightest emotional
consonance, will turn the balance and divert in one direction
sympathetic forces which, for every practical purpose, might just as
well have rushed the other way. Most governments are in truth private
societies pitted against one another in the international arena and
giving meantime at home exhibitions of eloquence and more rarely of
enterprise; but the people’s passions are easily enlisted in such a
game, of course on the side of their own government, just as each
college or region backs its own athletes, even to the extent of paying
their bills. Nations give the same kind of support to their fighting
governments, and the sporting passions and illusions concerned are what,
in the national game, is called patriotism.

Where parties and governments are bad, as they are in most ages and
countries, it makes practically no difference to a community, apart from
local ravages, whether its own army or the enemy’s is victorious in war,
nor does it really affect any man’s welfare whether the party he happens
to belong to is in office or not. These issues concern, in such cases,
only the army itself, whose lives and fortunes are at stake, or the
official classes, who lose their places when their leaders fall from
power. The private citizen in any event continues in such countries to
pay a maximum of taxes and to suffer, in all his private interests, a
maximum of vexation and neglect. Nevertheless, because he has some son
at the front, some cousin in the government, or some historical
sentiment for the flag and the nominal essence of his country, the
oppressed subject will glow like the rest with patriotic ardour, and
will decry as dead to duty and honour anyone who points out how perverse
is this helpless allegiance to a government representing no public
interest.

[Sidenote: Exclusive patriotism rational only when the government
supported is universally beneficent.]

In proportion as governments become good and begin to operate for the
general welfare, patriotism itself becomes representative and an
expression of reason; but just in the same measure does hostility to
that government on the part of foreigners become groundless and
perverse. A competitive patriotism involves ill-will toward all other
states and a secret and constant desire to see them thrashed and
subordinated. It follows that a good government, while it justifies this
governmental patriotism in its subjects, disallows it in all other men.
For a good government is an international benefit, and the prosperity
and true greatness of any country is a boon sooner or later to the whole
world; it may eclipse alien governments and draw away local populations
or industries, but it necessarily benefits alien individuals in so far
as it is allowed to affect them at all.

Animosity against a well-governed country is therefore madness. A
rational patriotism would rather take the form of imitating and
supporting that so-called foreign country, and even, if practicable, of
fusing with it. The invidious and aggressive form of patriotism, though
inspired generally only by local conceit, would nevertheless be really
justified if such conceit happened to be well grounded. A dream of
universal predominance visiting a truly virtuous and intelligent people
would be an aspiration toward universal beneficence. For every man who
is governed at all must be governed by others; the point is, that the
others, in ruling him, shall help him to be himself and give scope to
his congenial activities. When coerced in that direction he obeys a
force which, in the best sense of the word, _represents_ him, and
consequently he is truly free; nor could he be ruled by a more native
and rightful authority than by one that divines and satisfies his true
necessities.

[Sidenote: Accidents of birth and training affect the ideal.]

A man’s nature is not, however, a quantity or quality fixed unalterably
and _a priori_. As breeding and selection improve a race, so every
experience modifies the individual and offers a changed basis for future
experience. The language, religion, education, and prejudices acquired
in youth bias character and predetermine the directions in which
development may go on. A child might possibly change his country; a man
can only wish that he might change it. Therefore, among the true
interests which a government should represent, nationality itself must
be included.

[Sidenote: They are conditions and may contribute something.]

Mechanical forces, we must not weary of repeating, do not come merely to
vitiate the ideal; they come to create it. The historical background of
life is a part of its substance and the ideal can never grow
independently of its spreading roots. A sanctity hangs about the sources
of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginative. The ancients who
kissed the earth on returning to their native country expressed nobly
and passionately what every man feels for those regions and those
traditions whence the sap of his own life has been sucked in. There is a
profound friendliness in whatever revives primordial habits, however
they may have been overlaid with later sophistications. For this reason
the homelier words of a mother tongue, the more familiar assurances of
an ancestral religion, and the very savour of childhood’s dishes, remain
always a potent means to awaken emotion. Such ingrained influences, in
their vague totality, make a man’s true nationality. A government, in
order to represent the general interests of its subjects, must move in
sympathy with their habits and memories; it must respect their
idiosyncrasy for the same reason that it protects their lives. If
parting from a single object of love be, as it is, true dying, how much
more would a shifting of all the affections be death to the soul.

[Sidenote: They are not ends.]

Tenderness to such creative influences is a mark of profundity; it has
the same relation to political life that transcendentalism has to
science and morals; it shrinks back into radical facts, into centres of
vital radiation, and quickens the sense for inner origins. Nationality
is a natural force and a constituent in character which should be
reckoned with and by no means be allowed to miss those fruits which it
alone might bear; but, like the things it venerates, it is only a
starting-point for liberal life. Just as to be always talking about
transcendental points of reference, primordial reality, and the self to
which everything appears, though at first it might pass for spiritual
insight, is in the end nothing but pedantry and impotence, so to be
always harping on nationality is to convert what should be a recognition
of natural conditions into a ridiculous pride in one’s own oddities.
Nature has hidden the roots of things, and though botany must now and
then dig them up for the sake of comprehension, their place is still
under ground, if flowers and fruits are to be expected. The private
loyalties which a man must have toward his own people, grounding as they
alone can his morality and genius, need nevertheless to be seldom
paraded. Attention, when well directed, turns rather to making immanent
racial forces blossom out in the common medium and express themselves in
ways consonant with practical reason and universal progress. A man’s
feet must be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the
world.

What a statesman might well aim at would be to give the special
sentiments and gifts of his countrymen such a turn that, while
continuing all vital traditions, they might find less and less of what
is human alien to their genius. Differences in nationality, founded on
race and habitat, must always subsist; but what has been superadded
artificially by ignorance and bigotry may be gradually abolished in view
of universal relations better understood. There is a certain plane on
which all races, if they reach it at all, must live in common, the plane
of morals and science; which is not to say that even in those activities
the mind betrays no racial accent. What is excluded from science and
morals is not variety, but contradiction. Any community which had begun
to cultivate the Life of Reason in those highest fields would tend to
live rationally on all subordinate levels also; for with science and
morality rationally applied the best possible use would be made of every
local and historical accident. Where traditions had some virtue or
necessity about them they would be preserved; where they were remediable
prejudices they would be superseded.

[Sidenote: The symbol for country may be a man and may become an idol.]

At the birth of society instincts existed, needful to the animal and
having a certain glorious impetuosity about them, which prompted common
action and speech, and a public morality, and men were led to construct
myths that might seem to justify this co-operation. Paternal authority
could easily suggest one symbol for social loyalty: the chief, probably
a venerable and imperious personage, could be called a father and obeyed
as a natural master. His command might by convention be regarded as an
expression of the common voice, just as the father’s will is by nature
the representative of his children’s interests. Again, the members of
each community were distinguished from their enemies by many a sign and
custom; these signs and customs might also become a graphic symbol for
the common life.

Both these cases suggest how easily a symbol takes the place of its
object and becomes an idol. If the symbol happens to be a man there are
natural human sentiments awakened by him; and whatever respect his
character or gifts may inspire, whatever charm there may be in his
person, whatever graciousness he may add to his official favours or
commands, increase immensely his personal ascendency. A king has a great
opportunity to make himself loved. This scope given to private
inclination is what, to ordinary fancy, makes royalty enviable; few envy
its impersonal power and historic weight. Yet if a king were nothing but
a man surrounded by flatterers, who was cheered when he drove abroad,
there would be little stability in monarchy. A king is really the
state’s hinge and centre of gravity, the point where all private and
party ambitions meet and, in a sense, are neutralised. It is not easy
for factions to overturn him, for every other force in the state will
instinctively support him against faction. His elevation above everyone,
the identity of his sober interests with those of the state at large, is
calculated to make him the people’s natural representative; his word has
therefore a genuine authority, and his ascendency, not being invidious,
is able to secure internal peace, even when not enlightened enough to
insure prosperity or to avoid foreign wars. Accordingly, whenever a
monarchy is at all representative time has an irresistible tendency to
increase its prestige; the king is felt to be the guardian as well as
the symbol of all public greatness.

Meantime a double dislocation is possible here: patriotism may be wholly
identified with personal loyalty to the sovereign, while the sovereign
himself, instead of making public interests his own, may direct his
policy so as to satisfy his private passions. The first confusion leads
to a conflict between tradition and reason; the second to the ruin of
either the state or the monarchy. In a word, a symbol needs to remain
transparent and to become adequate; failing in either respect, it misses
its function.

[Sidenote: Feudal representation sensitive but partial.]

The feudal system offers perhaps the best illustration of a patriotism
wholly submerged in loyalty. The sense of mutual obligation and service
was very clear in this case; the vassal in swearing fealty knew
perfectly well what sort of a bargain he was striking. A feudal
government, while it lasted, was accordingly highly responsive and
responsible. If false to its calling, it could be readily disowned, for
it is easy to break an oath and to make new military associations,
especially where territorial units are small and their links accidental.
But this personal, conscious, and jealous subordination of man to man
constituted a government of insignificant scope. Military functions were
alone considered and the rest was allowed to shift for itself. Feudalism
could have been possible only in a barbarous age when the arts existed
on sufferance and lived on by little tentative resurrections. The feudal
lord was a genuine representative of a very small part of his vassal’s
interests. This slight bond sufficed, however, to give him a great
prestige and to stimulate in him all the habits and virtues of a
responsible master; so that in England, where vestiges of feudalism
abound to this day, there is an aristocracy not merely titular.

[Sidenote: Monarchical representation comprehensive but treacherous.]

A highly concentrated monarchy presents the exactly opposite phenomenon.
Here subordination is involuntary and mutual responsibility largely
unconscious. On the other hand, the scope of representation is very wide
and the monarch may well embody the whole life of the nation. A great
court, with officers of state and a standing army, is sensitive to
nothing so much as to general appearances and general results. The
invisible forces of industry, morality, and personal ambition that
really sustain the state are not studied or fomented by such a
government; so that when these resources begin to fail, the ensuing
catastrophes are a mystery to everybody. The king and his ministers
never cease wondering how they can be so constantly unfortunate.

So long, however, as the nation’s vital force is unspent and taxes and
soldiers are available in plenty, a great monarchy tends to turn those
resources to notable results. The arts and sciences are encouraged by
the patronage of men of breeding and affairs; they are disciplined into
a certain firmness and amplitude which artists and scholars, if left to
themselves, are commonly incapable of. Life is refined; religion itself,
unless fanaticism be too hopelessly in the ascendant, is co-ordinated
with other public interests and compelled to serve mankind; a liberal
life is made possible; the imagination is stimulated and set free by
that same brilliant concentration of all human energies which defeats
practical liberty. At the same time luxury and all manner of conceits
are part and parcel of such a courtly civilisation, and its best
products are the first to be lost; so that very likely the dumb forces
of society—hunger, conscience, and malice—will not do any great harm
when they destroy those treacherous institutions which, after giving the
spirit a momentary expression, had become an offence to both spirit and
flesh. Observers at the time may lament the collapse of so much
elegance and greatness; but nature has no memory and brushes away
without a qualm her card-castle of yesterday, if a new constructive
impulse possesses her to-day.

[Sidenote: Impersonal symbols no advantage.]

Where no suitable persons are found to embody the state’s unity, other
symbols have to be chosen. Besides the gods and their temples, there are
the laws which may, as among the Jews and Mohammedans, become as much a
fetich as any monarch, and one more long-lived; or else some traditional
policy of revenge or conquest, or even the country’s name or flag, may
serve this symbolic purpose. A trivial emblem, which no thinking man can
substitute for the thing signified, is not so great an advantage as at
first sight it might seem; for in the first place men are often
thoughtless and adore words and symbols with a terrible earnestness;
while, on the other hand, an abstract token, because of its natural
insipidity, can be made to stand for anything; so that patriotism, when
it uses pompous words alone for its stimulus, is very apt to be a cloak
for private interests, which the speaker may sincerely conceive to be
the only interests in question.

[Sidenote: Patriotism not self-interest, save to the social man whose
aims are ideal.]

The essence of patriotism is thus annulled, for patriotism does not
consist in considering the private and sordid interests of others as
well as one’s own, by a kind of sympathy which is merely vicarious or
epidemic selfishness; patriotism consists rather in being sensitive to
a set of interests which no one could have had if he had lived in
isolation, but which accrue to men conscious of living in society, and
in a society having the scope and history of a nation. It was the vice
of liberalism to believe that common interests covered nothing but the
sum of those objects which each individual might pursue alone; whereby
science, religion, art, language, and nationality itself would cease to
be matters of public concern and would appeal to the individual merely
as instruments. The welfare of a flock of sheep is secured if each is
well fed and watered, but the welfare of a human society involves the
partial withdrawal of every member from such pursuits to attend instead
to memory and to ideal possessions; these involve a certain conscious
continuity and organisation in the state not necessary for animal
existence. It is not for man’s interest to live unless he can live in
the spirit, because his spiritual capacity, when unused, will lacerate
and derange even his physical life. The brutal individualist falls into
the same error into which despots fall when they declare war out of
personal pique or tax the people to build themselves a pyramid, not
discerning their country’s interests, which they might have
appropriated, from interests of their own which no one else can share.

Democracies, too, are full of patriots of this lordly stripe, men whose
patriotism consists in joy at their personal possessions and in desire
to increase them. The resultant of general selfishness might conceivably
be a general order; but though intelligent selfishness, if universal,
might suffice for good government, it could not suffice for nationality.
Patriotism is an imaginative passion, and imagination is ingenuous. The
value of patriotism is not utilitarian, but ideal. It belongs to the
free forms of society and ennobles a man not so much because it nerves
him to work or to die, which the basest passions may also do, but
because it associates him, in working or dying, with an immortal and
friendly companion, the spirit of his race. This he received from his
ancestors tempered by their achievements, and may transmit to posterity
qualified by his own.




CHAPTER VIII

IDEAL SOCIETY


[Sidenote: The gregarious instinct all social instincts in suspense.]

To many beings—to almost all that people the earth and sky—each soul
is not attached by any practical interest. Some are too distant to be
perceived; the proximity of others passes unnoticed. It is far from
requisite, in pursuing safety, that every strange animal be regarded as
either a friend or an enemy. Wanton hostilities would waste ammunition
and idle attachments would waste time. Yet it often happens that some of
these beings, having something in common with creatures we are wont to
notice, since we stand to them in sexual, parental, or hostile
relations, cannot well go unobserved. Their presence fills us with a
vague general emotion, the arrested possibility at once of sexual, of
parental, and of hostile actions. This emotion is gregarious or
impersonally social. The flock it commonly regards may be described as
an aggregate in which parents and children have been submerged, in which
mates are not yet selected, and enemies not yet descried.

Gregarious sentiment is passive, watchful, expectant, at once powerful
and indistinct, troubled and fascinated by things merely possible. It
renders solitude terrible without making society particularly
delightful. A dull feeling of familiarity and comfort is all we can
reasonably attribute to uninterrupted trooping together. Yet banishment
from an accustomed society is often unbearable. A creature separated
from his group finds all his social instincts bereft of objects and of
possible exercise; the sexual, if by chance the sexual be at the time
active; the parental, with all its extensions; and the combative, with
all its supports. He is helpless and idle, deprived of all resource and
employment. Yet when restored to his tribe, he merely resumes a normal
existence. All particular feats and opportunities are still to seek.
Company is not occupation. Society is like the air, necessary to breathe
but insufficient to live on.

Similar beings herding together in the same places are naturally subject
to simultaneous reactions, and the sense of this common reaction makes
possible the conception of many minds having a common experience. The
elements of this experience they express to one another by signs. For
when spontaneous reactions occur together in many animals, each, knowing
well his own emotion, will inevitably take the perceived attitude and
gesture of his fellows for its expression—for his own attitude and
gesture he knows nothing of; and he will thus possess, without further
instruction, the outward sign for his inner experience.

[Sidenote: It gives rise to conscience or sympathy with the public
voice.]

It is see how a moral world can grow out of these primary intuitions.
Knowing, for instance, the expression of anger, a man may come to find
anger directed against himself; together with physical fear in the
presence of attack, he will feel the contagion of his enemy’s passion,
especially if his enemy be the whole group whose reactions he is wont to
share, and something in him will strive to be angry together with the
rest of the world. He will perfectly understand that indignation against
himself which in fact he instinctively shares. This self-condemning
emotion will be his sense of shame and his conscience. Words soon come
to give definition to such a feeling, which without expression in
language would have but little stability. For when a man is attracted to
an act, even if it be condemned by others, he views it as delightful and
eligible in itself; but when he is forced, by the conventional use of
words, to attach to that act an opprobrious epithet, an epithet which he
himself has always applied with scorn, he finds himself unable to
suppress the emotion connoted by the word; he cannot defend his
rebellious intuition against the tyranny of language; he is inwardly
confused and divided against himself, and out of his own mouth convicted
of wickedness.

A proof of the notable influence that language has on these emotions may
be found in their transformations. The connivance of a very few persons
is sufficient to establish among them a new application of eulogistic
terms; it will suffice to suppress all qualms in the pursuance of their
common impulse and to consecrate a new ideal of character. It is
accordingly no paradox that there should be honour among thieves,
kindness among harlots, and probity among fanatics. They have not lost
their conscience; they have merely introduced a flattering heresy into
the conventional code, to make room for the particular passion indulged
in their little world.

[Sidenote: Guises of public opinion.]

Sympathy with the general mind may also take other forms. Public
opinion, in a vivacious and clear-headed community, may be felt to be
the casual and irresponsible thing which in truth it is. Homer, for
instance, has no more solemn vehicle for it than the indefinite and
unaccountable [Greek: tis]. “So,” he tells us, “somebody or anybody
said.” In the Greek tragedians this unauthoritative entity was replaced
by the chorus, an assemblage of conventional persons, incapable of any
original perception, but possessing a fund of traditional lore, a just
if somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus was
therefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choir
of which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, the
tragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, if
ill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke in
archaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts.
These sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite of their
little pertinence to living issues, partly on account of the mystery
which enshrouded their forgotten passion and partly on account of the
fantastic interpretations which that pregnant obscurity allowed.

[Sidenote: Oracles and revelations.]

Far more powerful, however, are those embodiments of the general
conscience which religion furnishes in its first and spontaneous phase,
as when the Hebrew prophets dared to cry, “So saith the Lord.” Such
faith in one’s own inspiration is a more pliable oracle than tradition
or a tragic chorus, and more responsive to the needs and changes of the
hour. Occidental philosophers, in their less simple and less eloquent
manner, have often repeated that arrogant Hebraic cry: they have told us
in their systems what God thinks about the world. Such pretensions would
be surprising did we not remind ourselves of the obvious truth that what
men attribute to God is nothing but the ideal they value and grope for
in themselves, and that the commandments, mythically said to come from
the Most High, flow in fact from common reason and local experience.

If history did not enable us to trace this derivation, the ever-present
practical standard for faith would sufficiently indicate it; for no one
would accept as divine a revelation which he felt to be immoral or found
to be pernicious. And yet such a deviation into the maleficent is always
possible when a code is uprooted from its rational soil and
transplanted into a realm of imagination, where it is subject to all
sorts of arbitrary distortions. If the sexual instinct should attach us
(as in its extensions and dislocations it sometimes does) to beings
incapable of satisfying it or of uniting with us in propagating the
race, we should, of course, study to correct that aberration so that our
joys and desires might march in step with the possible progress of the
world. In the same way, if the gregarious instinct should bring us into
the imagined presence of companions that really did not exist, or on
whose attitude and co-operation our successes in no way depended, we
should try to lead back our sense of fellowship to its natural
foundations and possible sanctions.

Society exists so far as does analogous existence and community of ends.
We may, in refining the social instinct, find some fellowship in the
clouds and in the stars, for these, though remote, are companions of our
career. By poetic analogy we may include in the social world whatever
helps or thwarts our development, and is auxiliary to the energies of
the soul, even if that object be inanimate. Whatever spirit in the past
or future, or in the remotest regions of the sky, shares our love and
pursuit, say of mathematics or of music, or of any ideal object,
becomes, if we can somehow divine his existence, a partner in our joys
and sorrows, and a welcome friend.

[Sidenote: The ideal a measure for all existences and no existence
itself.]

Those ideal objects, however, for whose sake all revolutions in space
and time may be followed with interest, are not themselves members of
our society. The ideal to which all forces should minister is itself no
force or factor in its own realisation. Such a possible disposition of
things is a mere idea, eternal and inert, a form life might possibly
take on and the one our endeavours, if they were consistent, would wish
to impose on it. This ideal itself, however, has often been expressed in
some mythical figure or Utopia. So to express it is simply to indulge an
innocent instinct for prophecy and metaphor; but unfortunately the very
innocence of fancy may engage it all the more hopelessly in a tangle of
bad dreams. If we once identify our Utopia or other ideal with the real
forces that surround us, or with any one of them, we have fallen into an
illusion from which we shall emerge only after bitter disappointments;
and even when we have come out again into the open, we shall long carry
with us the desolating sense of wasted opportunities and vitiated
characters. For to have taken our purposes for our helpers is to have
defeated the first and ignored the second; it is to have neglected
rational labour and at the same time debauched social sense.

The religious extensions of society should therefore be carefully
watched; for while sometimes, as with the Hebrew prophets, religion
gives dramatic expression to actual social forces and helps to intensify
moral feeling, it often, as in mystics of all creeds and ages, deadens
the consciousness of real ties by feigning ties which are purely
imaginary. This self-deception is the more frequent because there float
before men who live in the spirit ideals which they look to with the
respect naturally rendered to whatever is true, beautiful, or good; and
the symbolic rendering of these ideals, which is the rational function
of religion, may be confused with its superstitious or utilitarian
part—with exploiting occult forces to aid us in the work of life.

Occult forces may indeed exist, and they may even be so disposed that
the ideal is served by their agency; but the most notable embodiment of
a principle is not itself a principle, being only an instance, and the
most exact fulfilment of a law is not a law, being simply an event. To
discover a law may meantime be the most interesting of events, and the
image or formula that expresses a principle may be the most welcome of
intellectual presences. These symbols, weighted with their wide
significance, may hold the mind and attract its energies into their
vortex; and human genius is certainly not at its worst when employed in
framing a good myth or a good argument. The lover of representation, be
he thinker or dramatist, moves by preference in an ideal society. His
communion with the world is half a soliloquy, for the personages in his
dialogue are private symbols, and being symbols they stand for what is
not themselves; the language he imputes to them is his own, though it
is their ways that prompt him to impute that language to them. Plastic
images of his own making and shifting are his sole means of envisaging
eternal principles and ultimate substances, things ideal and potential,
which can never become phenomenal in their own persons.

[Sidenote: Contrast between natural and intellectual bonds.]

It is an inspiring thought, and a true one, that in proportion as a
man’s interests become humane and his efforts rational, he appropriates
and expands a common life, which reappears in all individuals who reach
the same impersonal level of ideas—a level which his own influence may
help them to maintain. Patriotism envisages this ideal life in so far as
it is locally coloured and grounded in certain racial aptitudes and
traditions; but the community recognised in patriotism is imbedded in a
larger one embracing all living creatures. While in some respects we
find sympathy more complete the nearer home we remain, in another sense
there is no true companionship except with the universe. Instinctive
society, with its compulsory affections, is of course deeper and more
elementary than any free or intellectual union. Love is at once more
animal than friendship and more divine; and the same thing may be said
of family affection when compared with patriotism. What lies nearer the
roots of our being must needs enjoy a wider prevalence and engage the
soul more completely, being able to touch its depths and hush its
primordial murmurs.

On the other hand, the free spirit, the political and speculative
genius in man, chafes under those blind involutions and material bonds.
Natural, beneficent, sacred, as in a sense they may be, they somehow
oppress the intellect and, like a brooding mother, half stifle what they
feed. Something drives the youth afield, into solitude, into alien
friendships; only in the face of nature and an indifferent world can he
become himself. Such a flight from home and all its pieties grows more
urgent when there is some real conflict of temper or conscience between
the young man and what is established in his family; and this happens
often because, after all, the most beneficent conventions are but
mechanisms which must ignore the nicer sensibilities and divergences of
living souls.

[Sidenote: Appeal from man to God, from real to ideal society.]

Common men accept these spiritual tyrannies, weak men repine at them,
and great men break them down. But to defy the world is a serious
business, and requires the greatest courage, even if the defiance touch
in the first place only the world’s ideals. Most men’s conscience,
habits, and opinions are borrowed from convention and gather continual
comforting assurances from the same social consensus that originally
suggested them. To reverse this process, to consult one’s own experience
and elicit one’s own judgment, challenging those in vogue, seems too
often audacious and futile; but there are impetuous minds born to
disregard the chances against them, even to the extent of denying that
they are taking chances at all. For in the first instance it never
occurs to the inventor that he is the source of his new insight; he
thinks he has merely opened his eyes and seen what, by an inconceivable
folly, the whole world had grown blind to. Wise men in antiquity, he
imagines, saw the facts as he sees them, as the gods see them now, and
as all sane men shall see them henceforward.

Thus, if the innovator be a religious soul, grown conscious of some new
spiritual principle, he will try to find support for his inspiration in
some lost book of the law or in some early divine revelation corrupted,
as he will assert, by wicked men, or even in some direct voice from
heaven; no delusion will be too obvious, no re-interpretation too
forced, if it can help him to find external support somewhere for his
spontaneous conviction. To denounce one authority he needs to invoke
another, and if no other be found, he will invent or, as they say, he
will postulate one. His courage in facing the actual world is thus
supported by his ability to expand the world in imagination. In
separating himself from his fellow-men he has made a new companion out
of his ideal. An impetuous spirit when betrayed by the world will cry,
“I know that my redeemer liveth”; and the antiphonal response will come
more wistfully after reflection:

  “It fortifies my soul to know
  That though I wander, Truth is so.”

[Sidenote: Significant symbols revert to the concrete.]

The deceptions which nature practises on men are not always cruel. These
are also kindly deceptions which prompt him to pursue or expect his own
good when, though not destined to come in the form he looks for, this
good is really destined to come in some shape or other. Such, for
instance, are the illusions of romantic love, which may really terminate
in a family life practically better than the absolute and chimerical
unions which that love had dreamed of. Such, again, are those illusions
of conscience which attach unspeakable vague penalties and repugnances
to acts which commonly have bad results, though these are impossible to
forecast with precision. When disillusion comes, while it may bring a
momentary shock, it ends by producing a settled satisfaction unknown
before, a satisfaction which the coveted prize, could it have been
attained, would hardly have secured. When on the day of judgment, or
earlier, a man perceives that what he thought he was doing for the
Lord’s sake he was really doing for the benefit of the least, perhaps,
of the Lord’s creatures, his satisfaction, after a moment’s surprise,
will certainly be very genuine.

[Sidenote: Nature a symbol for destiny.]

Such kindly illusions are involved in the symbolic method by which
general relations and the inconceivably diffuse reality of things have
to be apprehended. The stars are in human thought a symbol for the
silent forces of destiny, really embodied in forms beyond our
apprehension; for who shall say what actual being may or may not
correspond to that potentiality of life or sensation which is all that
the external world can be to our science? When astrology invented the
horoscope it made an absurdly premature translation of celestial
hieroglyphics into that language of universal destiny which in the end
they may be made to speak. The perfect astronomer, when he understood at
last exactly what pragmatic value the universe has, and what fortunes
the stars actually forebode, would be pleasantly surprised to discover
that he was nothing but an astrologer grown competent and honest.

[Sidenote: Representative notions have also inherent values.]

Ideal society belongs entirely to this realm of kindly illusion, for it
is the society of symbols. Whenever religion, art, or science presents
us with an image or a formula, involving no matter how momentous a
truth, there is something delusive in the representation. It needs
translation into the detailed experience which it sums up in our own
past or prophecies elsewhere. This eventual change in form, far from
nullifying our knowledge, can alone legitimise it. A conception not
reducible to the small change of daily experience is like a currency not
exchangeable for articles of consumption; it is not a symbol, but a
fraud. And yet there is another aspect to the matter. Symbols are
presences, and they are those particularly congenial presences which we
have inwardly evoked and cast in a form intelligible and familiar to
human thinking. Their function is to give flat experience a rational
perspective, translating the general flux into stable objects and making
it representable in human discourse. They are therefore precious, not
only for their representative or practical value, implying useful
adjustments to the environing world, but even more, sometimes, for their
immediate or æsthetic power, for their kinship to the spirit they
enlighten and exercise.

This is prevailingly true in the fine arts which seem to express man
even more than they express nature; although in art also the symbol
would lose all its significance and much of its inward articulation if
natural objects and eventual experience could be disregarded in
constructing it. In music, indeed, this ulterior significance is reduced
to a minimum; yet it persists, since music brings an ideal object before
the mind which needs, to some extent, translation into terms no longer
musical—terms, for instance, of skill, dramatic passion, or moral
sentiment. But in music pre-eminently, and very largely in all the arts,
external propriety is adventitious; so much can the mere presence and
weight of a symbol fill the mind and constitute an absolute possession.

[Sidenote: Religion and science indirectly cognitive and directly
ideal.]

In religion and science the overt purpose of symbols is to represent
external truths. The inventors of these symbols think they are merely
uncovering a self-existent reality, having in itself the very form seen
in their idea. They do not perceive that the society of God or Nature
is an ideal society, nor that these phantoms, looming in their
imagination, are but significant figments whose existent basis is a
minute and indefinite series of ordinary perceptions. They consequently
attribute whatever value their genial syntheses may have to the object
as they picture it. The gods have, they fancy, the aspect and passions,
the history and influence which their myth unfolds; nature in its turn
contains hypostatically just those laws and forces which are described
by theory. Consequently the presence of God or Nature seems to the
mythologist not an ideal, but a real and mutual society, as if
collateral beings, endowed with the conceived characters, actually
existed as men exist. But this opinion is untenable. As Hobbes said, in
a phrase which ought to be inscribed in golden letters over the head of
every talking philosopher: _No discourse whatsoever can end in absolute
knowledge of fact_. Absolute knowledge of fact is immediate, it is
experiential. We should have to _become_ God or Nature in order to know
for a fact that they existed. Intellectual knowledge, on the other hand,
where it relates to existence, is faith only, a faith which in these
matters means trust. For the forces of Nature or the gods, if they had
crude existence, so that we might conceivably become what they are,
would lose that causal and that religious function which are their
essence respectively. They would be merely collateral existences, loaded
with all sorts of irrelevant properties, parts of the universal flux,
members of a natural society; and while as such they would have their
relative importance, they would be embraced in turn within an
intelligible system of relations, while their rights and dignities would
need to be determined by some supervening ideal. A nature existing in
act would require metaphysics—the account of a deeper nature—to
express its relation to the mind that knew and judged it. Any actual god
would need to possess a religion of his own, in order to fix his ideal
of conduct and his rights in respect to his creatures or rather, as we
should then be, to his neighbours. This situation may have no terrors
for the thoughtless; but it evidently introduces something deeper than
Nature and something higher than God, depriving these words of the best
sense in which a philosopher might care to use them.

[Sidenote: Their opposite outlook.]

The divine and the material are contrasted points of reference required
by the actual. Reason, working on the immediate flux of appearances,
reaches these ideal realms and, resting in them, perforce calls them
realities. One—the realm of causes—supplies appearances with a basis
and calculable order; the other—the realm of truth and
felicity—supplies them with a standard and justification. Natural
society may accordingly be contrasted with ideal society, not because
Nature is not, logically speaking, ideal too, but because in natural
society we ally ourselves consciously with our origins and
surroundings, in ideal society with our purposes. There is an immense
difference in spirituality, in ideality of the moral sort, between
gathering or conciliating forces for action and fixing the ends which
action should pursue. Both fields are ideal in the sense that
intelligence alone could discover or exploit them; yet to call nature
ideal is undoubtedly equivocal, since its ideal function is precisely to
be the substance and cause of the given flux, a ground-work for
experience which, while merely inferred and potential, is none the less
mechanical and material. The ideality of nature is indeed of such a sort
as to be forfeited if the trusty instrument and true antecedent of human
life were not found there. We should be frivolous and inconstant, taking
our philosophy for a game and not for method in living, if having set
out to look for the causes and practical order of things, and having
found them, we should declare that they were not _really_ casual or
efficient, on the strange ground that our discovery of them had been a
feat of intelligence and had proved a priceless boon. The absurdity
could not be greater if in moral science, after the goal of all effort
had been determined and happiness defined, we declared that this was not
_really_ the good.

Those who are shocked at the assertion that God and Nature are ideal,
and that their contrasted prerogatives depend on that fact, may, of
course, use the same words in a different way, making them synonymous,
and may readily “prove” that God or Nature exists materially and has
absolute being. We need but agree to designate by those terms the sum of
existences, whatever they (or it) may be to their own feeling. Then the
ontological proof asserts its rights unmistakably. Science and religion,
however, are superfluous if what we wish to learn is that there is
Something, and that All-there-is must assuredly be All-there-is.
Ecstasies may doubtless ensue upon considering that Being is and
Non-Being is not, as they are said to ensue upon long enough considering
one’s navel; but the Life of Reason is made of more variegated stuff.
Science, when it is not dialectical, describes an ideal order of
existences in space and time, such that all incidental facts, as they
come, may fill it in and lend it body. Religion, when pure, contemplates
some pertinent ideal of intelligence and goodness. Both religion and
science live in imaginative discourse, one being an aspiration and the
other a hypothesis. Both introduce into the mind an ideal society.

The Life of Reason is no fair reproduction of the universe, but the
expression of man alone. A theory of nature is nothing but a mass of
observations, made with a hunter’s and an artist’s eye. A mortal has no
time for sympathy with his victim or his model; and, beyond a certain
range, he has no capacity for such sympathy. As in order to live he must
devour one-half the world and disregard the other, so in order to think
and practically to know he must deal summarily and selfishly with his
materials; otherwise his intellect would melt again into endless and
irrevocable dreams. The law of gravity, because it so notably unifies
the motions of matter, is something which these motions themselves know
nothing of; it is a description of them in terms of human discourse.
Such discourse can never assure us absolutely that the motions it
forecasts will occur; the sensible proof must ensue spontaneously in its
own good time. In the interval our theory remains pure presumption and
hypothesis. Reliable as it may be in that capacity, it is no replica of
anything on its own level existing beyond. It creates, like all
intelligence, a secondary and merely symbolic world.

[Sidenote: In translating existence into human terms they give human
nature its highest exercise.]

When this diversity between the truest theory and the simplest fact,
between potential generalities and actual particulars, has been
thoroughly appreciated, it becomes clear that much of what is valued in
science and religion is not lodged in the miscellany underlying these
creations of reason, but is lodged rather in the rational activity
itself, and in the intrinsic beauty of all symbols bred in a genial
mind. Of course, if these symbols had no real points of reference, if
they were symbols of nothing, they could have no great claim to
consideration and no rational character; at most they would be agreeable
sensations. They are, however, at their best good symbols for a
diffused experience having a certain order and tendency; they render
that reality with a difference, reducing it to a formula or a myth, in
which its tortuous length and trivial detail can be surveyed to
advantage without undue waste or fatigue. Symbols may thus become
eloquent, vivid, important, being endowed with both poetic grandeur and
practical truth.

The facts from which this truth is borrowed, if they were rehearsed
unimaginatively, in their own flat infinity, would be far from arousing
the same emotions. The human eye sees in perspective; its glory would
vanish were it reduced to a crawling, exploring antenna. Not that it
loves to falsify anything. That to the worm the landscape might possess
no light and shade, that the mountain’s atomic structure should be
unpicturable, cannot distress the landscape gardener nor the poet; what
concerns them is the effect such things may produce in the human fancy,
so that the soul may live in a congenial world.

Naturalist and prophet are landscape painters on canvases of their own;
each is interested in his own perception and perspective, which, if he
takes the trouble to reflect, need not deceive him about what the world
would be if not foreshortened in that particular manner. This special
interpretation is nevertheless precious and shows up the world in that
light in which it interests naturalists or prophets to see it. Their
figments make their chosen world, as the painter’s apperceptions are
the breath of his nostrils.

[Sidenote: Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic.]

While the symbol’s applicability is essential to its worth—since
otherwise science would be useless and religion demoralising—its power
and fascination lie in its acquiring a more and more profound affinity
to the human mind, so long as it can do so without surrendering its
relevance to practice. Thus natural science is at its best when it is
most thoroughly mathematical, since what can be expressed mathematically
can speak a human language. In such science only the ultimate material
elements remain surds; all their further movement and complication can
be represented in that kind of thought which is most intimately
satisfactory and perspicuous. And in like manner, religion is at its
best when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritual
religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man,
overflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the place
usually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities. The human heart
is lifted above misfortune and encouraged to pursue unswervingly its
inmost ideal when no compromise is any longer attempted with what is not
moral or human, and Prometheus is honestly proclaimed to be holier than
Zeus. At that moment religion ceases to be superstitious and becomes a
rational discipline, an effort to perfect the spirit rather than to
intimidate it.

[Sidenote: Summary of this book.]

We have seen that society has three stages—the natural, the free, and
the ideal. In the natural stage its function is to produce the
individual and equip him with the prerequisites of moral freedom. When
this end is attained society can rise to friendship, to unanimity and
disinterested sympathy, where the ground of association is some ideal
interest, while this association constitutes at the same time a personal
and emotional bond. Ideal society, on the contrary, transcends
accidental conjunctions altogether. Here the ideal interests themselves
take possession of the mind; its companions are the symbols it breeds
and possesses for excellence, beauty, and truth. Religion, art, and
science are the chief spheres in which ideal companionship is found. It
remains for us to traverse these provinces in turn and see to what
extent the Life of Reason may flourish there.


*** End of Volume Two ***




REASON IN RELIGION

Volume Three of “The Life of Reason”


GEORGE SANTAYANA


hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




CONTENTS

REASON IN RELIGION


CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON

Religion is certainly significant, but not literally true.—All religion
is positive and particular.—It aims at the Life of Reason, but largely
fails to attain it.—Its approach imaginative.—When its poetic method
is denied its value is jeopardised.—It precedes science rather than
hinders it.—It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human. Pages 3-14


CHAPTER II

RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION

Felt causes not necessary causes.—Mechanism and dialectic ulterior
principles.—Early selection of categories.—Tentative rational
worlds.—Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.—A miracle, though
unexpected, more intelligible than a regular process.—Superstitions
come of haste to understand.—Inattention suffers them to
spread.—Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom. Pages
15-27


CHAPTER III

MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER

Fear created the gods.—Need also contributed.—The real evidences of
God’s existence.—Practice precedes theory in religion.—Pathetic,
tentative nature of religious practices.—Meanness and envy in the gods,
suggesting sacrifice.—Ritualistic arts.—Thank-offerings.—The
sacrifice of a contrite heart.—Prayer is not utilitarian in
essence.—Its supposed efficacy magical.—Theological puzzles.—A real
efficacy would be mechanical.—True uses of prayer.—It clarifies the
ideal.—It reconciles to the inevitable.—It fosters spiritual life by
conceiving it in its perfection.—Discipline and contemplation are their
own reward. Pages 28-48


CHAPTER IV

MYTHOLOGY

Status of fable in the mind.—It requires genius.—It only half
deceives.—Its interpretative essence.—Contrast with
science.—Importance of the moral factor.—Its submergence.—Myth
justifies magic.—Myths might be metaphysical.—They appear ready made,
like parts of the social fabric.—They perplex the
conscience.—Incipient myth in the Vedas.—Natural suggestions soon
exhausted.—They will be carried out in abstract fancy.—They may become
moral ideals.—The Sun-god moralised.—The leaven of religion is moral
idealism. Pages 49-68


CHAPTER V

THE HEBRAIC TRADITION

Phases of Hebraism.—Israel’s tribal monotheism.—Problems
involved.—The prophets put new wine in old bottles.—Inspiration and
authority.—Beginnings of the Church.—Bigotry turned into a
principle.—Penance accepted.—Christianity combines optimism and
asceticism.—Reason smothered between the two.—Religion made an
institution. Pages 69-82


CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC

The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.—A universal
religion must interpret the whole world.—Double appeal of
Christianity.—Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.—Hebrew philosophy
of history identified with Platonic cosmology.—The resulting orthodox
system.—The brief drama of things.—Mythology is a language and must be
understood to convey something by symbols. Pages 83-98


CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY

Need of paganising Christianity.—Catholic piety more human than the
liturgy.—Natural pieties.—Refuge taken in the supernatural.—The
episodes of life consecrated mystically.—Paganism chastened, Hebraism
liberalised.—The system post-rational and founded on despair.—External
conversion of the barbarians.—Expression of the northern genius within
Catholicism,—Internal discrepancies between the two.—Tradition and
instinct at odds in Protestantism.—The Protestant spirit remote from
that of the gospel.—Obstacles to humanism.—The Reformation and
counter-reformation.—Protestantism an expression of character.—It has
the spirit of life and of courage, but the voice of inexperience.—Its
emancipation from Christianity. Pages 99-126


CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH

Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.—But myth is confused
with the moral values it expresses.—Neo-Platonic revision.—It made
mythical entities of abstractions.—Hypostasis ruins ideals.—The Stoic
revision.—The ideal surrendered before the physical.—Parallel
movements in Christianity.—Hebraism, if philosophical, must be
pantheistic.—Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.—Truly
divine action limited to what makes for the good.—Need of an opposing
principle.—The standard of value is human.—Hope for happiness makes
belief in God. Pages 127-147


CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE

Suspense between hope and disillusion.—Superficial solution.—But from
what shall we be redeemed?—Typical attitude of St. Augustine.—He
achieves Platonism.—He identifies it with Christianity.—God the
good.—Primary and secondary religion.—Ambiguous efficacy of the good
in Plato.—Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.—The
Manicheans.—All things good by nature.—The doctrine of creation
demands that of the fall.—Original sin.—Forced abandonment of the
ideal.—The problem among the Protestants.—Pantheism accepted.—Plainer
scorn for the ideal.—The price of mythology is superstition. Pages
148-177


CHAPTER X

PIETY

The core of religion not theoretical.—Loyalty to the sources of our
being.—The pious Æneas.—An ideal background required.—Piety accepts
natural conditions and present tasks.—The leadership of instinct is
normal.—Embodiment essential to spirit.—Piety to the gods takes form
from current ideals.—The religion of humanity.—Cosmic piety. Pages
178-192


CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS

To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.—Spirituality
natural.—Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.—Spirit crossed by
instrumentalities.—One foe of the spirit is worldliness.—The case for
and against pleasure.—Upshot of worldly wisdom.—Two supposed escapes
from vanity: fanaticism and mysticism.—Both are irrational.—Is there a
third course?—Yes, for experience has intrinsic, inalienable
values.—For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard. Pages 193-213


CHAPTER XII

CHARITY

Possible tyranny of reason.—Everything has its rights.—Primary and
secondary morality.—Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.—The doom
of ancient republics.—Rational charity.—Its limits.—Its mythical
supports.—There is intelligence in charity.—Buddhist and Christian
forms of it.—Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural. Pages
214-228


CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE

The length of life a subject for natural science.—“Psychical”
phenomena.—Hypertrophies of sense.—These possibilities affect physical
existence only.—Moral grounds for the doctrine.—The necessary
assumption of a future.—An assumption no evidence.—A solipsistic
argument.—Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.—Or to
a divine principle in all beings.—In neither case is the individual
immortal.—Possible forms of survival.—Arguments from retribution and
need of opportunity.—Ignoble temper of both.—False optimistic
postulate involved.—Transition to ideality. Pages 229-250


CHAPTER XIV

IDEAL IMMORTALITY

Olympian immortality the first ideal.—Its indirect attainment by
reproduction.—Moral acceptance of this compromise.—Even vicarious
immortality intrinsically impossible.—Intellectual victory over
change.—The glory of it.—Reason makes man’s divinity and his
immortality.—It is the locus of all truths.—Epicurean immortality,
through the truth of existence.—Logical immortality, through objects of
thought.—Ethical immortality, through types of excellence. Pages 251-273


CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION

The failure of magic and of mythology.—Their imaginative value.—Piety
and spirituality justified.—Mysticism a primordial state of
feeling.—It may recur at any stage of culture.—Form gives substance
its life and value. Pages 274-279




REASON IN RELIGION




CHAPTER I

HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON


[Sidenote: Religion certainly significant.]

Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon’s,
that “a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in
philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.” In every age the
most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and
country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that
religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the
heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a
while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against
is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident,
and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they
yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a
world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that
their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of
their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world’s faith
was that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the
enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who
plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of
religion—something which the blindest half see—is not nearly
enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with
religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of
thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and
their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face
with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him
understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so
profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in
an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the
chief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the
best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is “so malapert as a
splenetic religion,” a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.

[Sidenote: But not literally true.]

At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he
forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men’s
minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges
them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better
conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time,
where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together.
Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the
poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by
the philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it
sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that
has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and
probably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a
historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In
the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some
difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new
convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which
is essentially as arbitrary as the old.

[Sidenote: All religion is positive and particular.]

The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not
more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no
religion in particular. A courier’s or a dragoman’s speech may indeed be
often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture
of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning
only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and
its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to
another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often
retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may
egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they
remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which
a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment’s probing of the
conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but
vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all
dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first
unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be
found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves
spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some
faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a
converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked
idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message
and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens
and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another
world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or
no—is what we mean by having a religion.

[Sidenote: It aims at the Life of Reason.]

What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call
religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two
is close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is
the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us
that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain
the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion.
Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational
life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the
Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be
subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and
makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same
thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and
transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of
Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of
emancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways
religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A
supernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon
earth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by
repeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in
the absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration
in the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved
may be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in
its way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common
objects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may lose
what is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what is
rational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may be
to those whose spirit can still live in their country and in their
ideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternal
objects of thought.

Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is
philosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if the
function of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is
performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many,
reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms,
and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer.
Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on
which, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideally
only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not
conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotions
on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects
which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings
some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to
the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into
them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution which
experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience
itself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate
principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this
struggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man toward
something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the
soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the soul
depends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and
direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art.
For these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and
piecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate
justification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has an
instinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chance
practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the
heart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the
direction of the ultimate.

[Sidenote: But largely fails to attain it.]

Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of
Reason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each
religion may prevail upon themselves to express satisfaction with its
results, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous
draughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various
religions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason
requires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have
one and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer
imaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable
essentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed
effort. The Greek oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our natural
ignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the
Christian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural
death, the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and
conditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for
the real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate
sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing
happiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a
one-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When
these come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed
vitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits
untrained in any natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches
the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to
fulfil.

[Sidenote: Its approach imaginative.]

What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to
rationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and
in its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationality
through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it
gives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts,
insinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginative
substitute for wisdom—I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit
of all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in
religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal
truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the
depth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its
contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that
of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked
poetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion to
their original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports of
objective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed upon
the world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if not
in space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religion
comes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering of
that moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks to
elucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding which
clings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merely
representations of experience as it is or should be, but are rather
information about experience or reality elsewhere—an experience and
reality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed by
reality and experience here.

[Sidenote: When its poetic method is denied its value is jeopardised.]

Thus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has;
only poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure value
to existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poetic
value of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself,
because religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sides
of life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and ideal
interpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinary
poetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part by
the abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightness
is taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world only
by imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition to
the mind’s furniture—an addition which might be useful and
ennobling—it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuading
mankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as that
rather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfaction
is naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul has
infinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems and
sentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomes
equivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic
representation of moral reality which may have a most important function
in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the
lessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous
incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is
strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and
in the conscience.

[Sidenote: It precedes science rather than hinders it.]

On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken
the place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve
situations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely
worse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical
slavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it.
Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may
happen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it.
We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and
natural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must
rather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative
insight which it has introduced into the world.

[Sidenote: It is merely symbolic and thoroughly human.]

We may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the function
which religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguising
or in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allow
ourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its various
conceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of many
sages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have lived
steadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself be
treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which
alone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to be
intolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religions
display. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would have
to be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with the
poetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety,
and variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approach
to total adequacy.

If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by
taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the
Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and
when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and
justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a
rabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for instance, was a
terrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping a
god who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in
recognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the
Greeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous,
monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. To
say God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the same
influence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all
existence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, in
nature, or in history. So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics
meets us at every step—the combination of monotheism with
polytheism—is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of
phrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral
things. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and
controversies lose all their bitterness. Each doctrine will simply
represent the moral plane on which they live who have devised or adopted
it. Religions will thus be better or worse, never true or false. We
shall be able to lend ourselves to each in turn, and seek to draw from
it the secret of its inspiration.




CHAPTER II

RATIONAL ELEMENTS IN SUPERSTITION


We need not impose upon ourselves the endless and repulsive task of
describing all the superstitions that have existed in the world. In his
impotence and laziness the natural man unites any notion with any other
in a loose causal relation. A single instance of juxtaposition, nay, the
mere notion and dream of such a combination, will suffice to arouse fear
or to prompt experimental action.

[Sidenote: Felt causes not necessary causes.]

When philosophers have objected to Hume’s account of causation that he
gave no sufficient basis for the _necessary_ influence of cause on
effect, they have indulged in a highly artificial supposition. They have
assumed that people actually regard causes as necessary. They suppose
that before we can feel the interdependence of two things in experience
we must have an unshakable conviction that their connection is necessary
and universal. But causation in such an absolute sense is no category of
practical thinking. It appears, if at all, only in dialectic, in ideal
applications of given laws to cases artificially simplified, where the
terms are so defined that their operation upon one another is involved
in the notion of them. So if we say that an unsupported weight _must_
fall to the ground, we have included in the word “weight” the notion of
a downward strain. The proposition is really trifling and identical. It
merely announces that things which tend to fall to the ground tend to
fall to the ground, and that heavy things are heavy. So, when we have
called a thing a cause, we have defined it as that which involves an
effect, and if the effect did not follow, the title of cause would no
longer belong to the antecedent. But the necessity of this sequence is
merely verbal. We have never, in the presence of the antecedent, the
assurance that the title of cause will accrue to it. Our expectation is
empirical, and we feel and assert nothing in respect to the necessity of
the expected sequence.

[Sidenote: Mechanism and dialectic ulterior principles.]

A cause, in real life, means a justifying circumstance. We are
absolutely without insight into the machinery of causation, notably in
the commonest cases, like that of generation, nutrition, or the
operation of mind on matter. But we are familiar with the more notable
superficial conditions in each case, and the appearance in part of any
usual phenomenon makes us look for the rest of it. We do not ordinarily
expect virgins to bear children nor prophets to be fed by ravens nor
prayers to remove mountains; but we may believe any of these things at
the merest suggestion of fancy or report, without any warrant from
experience, so loose is the bond and so external the relation between
the terms most constantly associated. A quite unprecedented occurrence
will seem natural and intelligible enough if it falls in happily with
the current of our thoughts. Interesting and significant events,
however, are so rare and so dependent on mechanical conditions
irrelevant to their value, that we come at last to wonder at their
self-justified appearance apart from that cumbrous natural machinery,
and to call them marvels, miracles, and things to gape at. We come to
adopt scientific hypotheses, at least in certain provinces of our
thought, and we lose our primitive openness and simplicity of mind.
Then, with an unjustified haste, we assert that miracles are impossible,
i.e., that nothing interesting and fundamentally natural can happen
unless all the usual, though adventitious, _mise-en-scène_ has been
prepared behind the curtain.

The philosopher may eventually discover that such machinery is really
needed and that even the actors themselves have a mechanism within them,
so that not only their smiles and magnificent gestures, but their heated
fancy itself and their conception of their rôles are but outer effects
and dramatic illusions produced by the natural stage-carpentry in their
brains. Yet such eventual scientific conclusions have nothing to do with
the tentative first notions of men when they begin to experiment in the
art of living. As the seeds of lower animals have to be innumerable, so
that in a chance environment a few may grow to maturity, so the seeds
of rational thinking, the first categories of reflection, have to be
multitudinous, in order that some lucky principle of synthesis may
somewhere come to light and find successful application. Science, which
thinks to make belief in miracles impossible, is itself belief in
miracles—in the miracles best authenticated by history and by daily
life.

[Sidenote: Early selection of categories.]

When men begin to understand things, when they begin to reflect and to
plan, they divide the world into the hateful and the delightful, the
avoidable and the attainable. And in feeling their way toward what
attracts them, or in escaping what they fear, they at first follow
passively the lead of instinct: they watch themselves live, or rather
sink without reserve into their living; their reactions are as little
foreseen and as naturally accepted as their surroundings. Their ideas
are incidents in their perpetual oscillation between apathy and passion.
The stream of animal life leaves behind a little sediment of knowledge,
the sand of that auriferous river; a few grains of experience remain to
mark the path traversed by the flood. These residual ideas and
premonitions, these first categories of thought, are of any and every
sort. All the contents of the mind and all the threads of relation that
weave its elements together are alike fitted, for all we can then see,
to give the clue to the labyrinth in which we find ourselves wandering.

There is _prima facie_ no ground for not trying to apply to experience
such categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as if
everything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. On
this principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they are
astonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aesthetic
categories and allow our reproductive imagination—by which memory is
fed—to bring under the unity of apperception only what can fall within
it harmoniously, completely, and delightfully. Such an understanding,
impervious to anything but the beautiful, might be a fine thing in
itself, but would not chronicle the fortunes of that organism to which
it was attached. It would yield an experience—doubtless a highly
interesting and elaborate experience—but one which could never serve as
an index to successful action. It would totally fail to represent its
conditions, and consequently would imply nothing about its continued
existence. It would be an experience irrelevant to conduct, no part,
therefore, of a Life of Reason, but a kind of lovely vapid music or
parasitic dream.

Now such dreams are in fact among the first and most absorbing
formations in the human mind. If we could penetrate into animal
consciousness we should not improbably find that what there accompanies
instinctive motions is a wholly irrelevant fancy, whose flaring up and
subsidence no doubt coincide with the presence of objects interesting to
the organism and causing marked reactions within it; yet this fancy may
in no way represent the nature of surrounding objects nor the eventual
results, for the animal’s consciousness, of its own present experience.

[Sidenote: Tentative rational worlds.]

The unlimited number of possible categories, their arbitrariness and
spontaneity, may, however, have this inconvenience, that the categories
may be irrelevant to one another no less than to the natural life they
ought to express. The experience they respectively synthesise may
therefore be no single experience. One pictured world may succeed
another in the sphere of sensibility, while the body whose sensibility
they compose moves in a single and constant physical cosmos. Each little
mental universe may be intermittent, or, if any part of it endures while
a new group of ideas comes upon the stage, there may arise
contradictions, discords, and a sense of lurking absurdity which will
tend to disrupt thought logically at the same time that the processes of
nutrition and the oncoming of new dreams tend to supplant it
mechanically. Such drifting categories have no mutual authority. They
replace but do not dominate one another, and the general conditions of
life—by conceiving which life itself might be surveyed—remain entirely
unrepresented.

What we mean, indeed, by the natural world in which the conditions of
consciousness are found and in reference to which mind and its purposes
can attain practical efficacy, is simply the world constructed by
categories found to yield a constant, sufficient, and consistent object.
Having attained this conception, we justly call it the truth and
measure the intellectual value of all other constructions by their
affinity to that rational vision.

Such a rational vision has not yet been attained by mankind, but it
would be absurd to say that because we have not fully nor even
proximately attained it, we have not gained any conception whatever of a
reliable and intelligible world. The modicum of rationality achieved in
the sciences gives us a hint of a perfect rationality which, if
unattainable in practice, is not inconceivable in idea. So, in still
more inchoate moments of reflection, our ancestors nursed even more
isolated, less compatible, less adequate conceptions than those which
leave our philosophers still unsatisfied. The categories they employed
dominated smaller regions of experience than do the categories of
history and natural science; they had far less applicability to the
conduct of affairs and to the happy direction of life as a whole. Yet
they did yield vision and flashes of insight. They lighted men a step
ahead in the dark places of their careers, and gave them at certain
junctures a sense of creative power and moral freedom. So that the
necessity of abandoning one category in order to use a better need not
induce us to deny that the worse category could draw the outlines of a
sort of world and furnish men with an approach to wisdom. If our
ancestors, by such means, could not dominate life as a whole, neither
can we, in spite of all progress. If literal truth or final
applicability cannot be claimed for their thought, who knows how many
and how profound the revolutions might be which our own thought would
have to suffer if new fields of perception or new powers of synthesis
were added to our endowment?

[Sidenote: Superstition a rudimentary philosophy.]

[Sidenote: A miracle, though unexpected, more intelligible than a
regular process.]

We sometimes speak as if superstition or belief in the miraculous was
disbelief in law and was inspired by a desire to disorganise experience
and defeat intelligence. No supposition could be more erroneous. Every
superstition is a little science, inspired by the desire to understand,
to foresee, or to control the real world. No doubt its hypothesis is
chimerical, arbitrary, and founded on a confusion of efficient causes
with ideal results. But the same is true of many a renowned philosophy.
To appeal to what we call the supernatural is really to rest in the
imaginatively obvious, in what we ought to call the natural, if natural
meant easy to conceive and originally plausible. Moral and individual
forces are more easily intelligible than mechanical universal laws. The
former domesticate events in the mind more readily and more completely
than the latter. A miracle is so far from being a contradiction to the
causal principle which the mind actually applies in its spontaneous
observations that it is primarily a better illustration of that
principle than an event happening in the ordinary course of nature. For
the ground of the miracle is immediately intelligible; we see the mercy
or the desire to vindicate authority, or the intention of some other
sort that inspired it. A mechanical law, on the contrary, is only a
record of the customary but reasonless order of things. A merely
inexplicable event, manifesting no significant purpose, would be no
miracle. What surprises us in the miracle is that, contrary to what is
usually the case, we can see a real and just ground for it. Thus, if the
water of Lourdes, bottled and sold by chemists, cured all diseases,
there would be no miracle, but only a new scientific discovery. In such
a case, we should no more know why we were cured than we now know why we
were created. But if each believer in taking the water thinks the effect
morally conditioned, if he interprets the result, should it be
favourable, as an answer to his faith and prayers, then the cure becomes
miraculous because it becomes intelligible and manifests the obedience
of nature to the exigencies of spirit. Were there no known ground for
such a scientific anomaly, were it a meaningless irregularity in events,
we should not call it a miracle, but an accident, and it would have no
relation to religion.

[Sidenote: Superstitions come of haste to understand.]

What establishes superstitions is haste to understand, rash confidence
in the moral intelligibility of things. It turns out in the end, as we
have laboriously discovered, that understanding has to be circuitous and
cannot fulfil its function until it applies mechanical categories to
existence. A thorough philosophy will become aware that moral
intelligibility can only be an incidental ornament and partial harmony
in the world. For moral significance is relative to particular interests
and to natures having a constitutional and definite bias, and having
consequently special preferences which it is chimerical to expect the
rest of the world to be determined by. The attempt to subsume the
natural order under the moral is like attempts to establish a government
of the parent by the child—something children are not averse to. But
such follies are the follies of an intelligent and eager creature,
restless in a world it cannot at once master and comprehend. They are
the errors of reason, wanderings in the by-paths of philosophy, not due
to lack of intelligence or of faith in law, but rather to a premature
vivacity in catching at laws, a vivacity misled by inadequate
information. The hunger for facile wisdom is the root of all false
philosophy. The mind’s reactions anticipate in such cases its sufficient
nourishment; it has not yet matured under the rays of experience, so
that both materials and guidance are lacking for its precocious
organising force. Superstitious minds are penetrating and narrow, deep
and ignorant. They apply the higher categories before the lower—an
inversion which in all spheres produces the worst and most pathetic
disorganisation, because the lower functions are then deranged and the
higher contaminated. Poetry anticipates science, on which it ought to
follow, and imagination rushes in to intercept memory, on which it ought
to feed. Hence superstition and the magical function of religion; hence
the deceptions men fall into by cogitating on things they are ignorant
of and arrogating to themselves powers which they have never learned to
exercise.

[Sidenote: Inattention suffers them to spread.]

It is now generally acknowledged that workers of miracles, prophets,
soothsayers, and inspired or divinely appointed men may, like
metaphysicians, be quite sincere and fully believe they possess the
powers which they pretend to display. In the case of the more
intelligent, however, this sincerity was seldom complete, but mixed with
a certain pitying or scornful accommodation to the vulgar mind.
Something unusual might actually have happened, in which case the
reference of it to the will that welcomed it (without, of course, being
able to command it unconditionally) might well seem reasonable. Or
something normal might have been interpreted fancifully, but to the
greater glory of God and edification of the faithful; in which case the
incidental error might be allowed to pass unchallenged out of respect
for the essential truths thus fortified in pious minds. The power of
habit and convention, by which the most crying inconsistencies and
hypocrisies are soon put to sleep, would facilitate these accommodations
and render them soon instinctive; while the world at large, entirely
hypnotised by the ceremonious event and its imaginative echoes, could
never come to close quarters with the facts at all, but could view them
only through accepted preconceptions. Thus elaborate machinery can arise
and long endure for the magical service of man’s interests. How deeply
rooted such conventions are, how natural it is that they should have
dominated even civilised society, may best be understood if we consider
the remnants of such habits in our midst—not among gypsies or
professional wonder-workers but among reflecting men.

[Sidenote: Genius may use them to convey an inarticulate wisdom.]

Some men of action, like Cæsar and Napoleon, are said to have been
superstitious about their own destiny. The phenomenon, if true, would be
intelligible. They were masterful men, men who in a remarkable degree
possessed in their consciousness the sign and sanction of what was
happening in the world. This endowment, which made them dominate their
contemporaries, could also reveal the sources and conditions of their
own will. They might easily come to feel that it was destiny—the total
movement of things—that inspired, crowned, and ruined them. But as they
could feel this only instinctively, not by a systematic view of all the
forces in play, they would attach their voluminous sense of fatality to
some chance external indication or to some ephemeral impulse within
themselves; so that what was essentially a profound but inarticulate
science might express itself in the guise of a superstition.

In like manner Socrates’ Demon (if not actually a playful fable by which
the sage expressed the negative stress of conscience, the “thou shalt
not” of all awe-inspiring precepts) might be a symbol for latent wisdom.
Socrates turned a trick, played upon him by his senses, into a message
from heaven. He taught a feeble voice—senseless like all ghostly
voices—to sanction precepts dictated by the truly divine element within
himself. It was characteristic of his modest piety to look for some
external sign to support reason; his philosophy was so human, and man is
obviously so small a part of the world, that he could reasonably
subordinate reason at certain junctures. Its abdication, however, was
half playful, for he could always find excellent grounds for what the
demon commanded.

In much the same manner the priests at Delphi, when they were prudent,
made of the Pythia’s ravings oracles not without elevation of tone and
with an obvious political tendency. Occasions for superstition which
baser minds would have turned to sheer lunacy or silly fears or
necromantic clap-trap were seized by these nobler natures for a good
purpose. A benevolent man, not inclined to scepticism, can always argue
that the gods must have commanded what he himself knows to be right; and
he thinks it religion on his part to interpret the oracle accordingly,
or even to prompt it. In such ways the most arbitrary superstitions take
a moral colour in a moral mind; something which can come about all the
more easily since the roots of reason and superstition are intertwined
in the mind, and society has always expressed and cultivated them
together.




CHAPTER III

MAGIC, SACRIFICE, AND PRAYER


[Sidenote: Fear created the gods.]

That fear first created the gods is perhaps as true as anything so brief
could be on so great a subject. To recognise an external power it is
requisite that we should find the inner stream and tendency of life
somehow checked or disturbed; if all went well and acceptably, we should
attribute divinity only to ourselves. The external is therefore evil
rather than good to early apprehension—a sentiment which still survives
in respect to matter; for it takes reflection to conceive that external
forces form a necessary environment, creating as well as limiting us,
and offering us as many opportunities as rebuffs. The first things which
a man learns to distinguish and respect are things with a will of their
own, things which resist his casual demands; and so the first sentiment
with which he confronts reality is a certain animosity, which becomes
cruelty toward the weak and fear and fawning before the powerful. Toward
men and animals and the docile parts of nature these sentiments soon
become defined accurately, representing the exact degree of friendliness
or use which we discover in these beings; and it is in practical terms,
expressing this relation to our interests, that we define their
characters. Much remains over, however, which we cannot easily define,
indomitable, ambiguous regions of nature and consciousness which we know
not how to face; yet we cannot ignore them, since it is thence that
comes what is most momentous in our fortunes—luck, disease, tempest,
death, victory. Thence come also certain mysterious visitations to the
inner mind—dreams, apparitions, warnings. To perceive these things is
not always easy, nor is it easy to interpret them, while the great
changes in nature which, perhaps, they forebode may indeed be watched
but cannot be met intelligently, much less prevented. The feeling with
which primitive man walks the earth must accordingly be, for the most
part, apprehension; and what he meets, beyond the well-conned ways of
his tribe and habitat, can be nothing but formidable spirits.

[Sidenote: Need also contributed.]

Impotence, however, has a more positive side. If the lightning and
thunder, startling us in our peace, suddenly reveal unwelcome powers
before which we must tremble, hunger, on the contrary, will torment us
with floating ideas, intermittent impulses to act, suggesting things
which would be wholly delightful if only we could find them, but which
it becomes intolerable to remain without. In this case our fear, if we
still choose to call it so, would be lest our cravings should remain
unsatisfied, or rather fear has given place to need; we recognise our
dependence on external powers not because they threaten but because they
forsake us.

[Sidenote: The real evidences of God’s existence.]

Obvious considerations like these furnish the proof of God’s existence,
not as philosophers have tried to express it after the fact and in
relation to mythical conceptions of God already current, but as mankind
originally perceived it, and (where religion is spontaneous) perceives
it still. There is such an order in experience that we find our desires
doubly dependent on something which, because it disregards our will, we
call an external power. Sometimes it overwhelms us with scourges and
wonders, so that we must marvel at it and fear; sometimes it removes, or
after removing restores, a support necessary to our existence and
happiness, so that we must cling to it, hope for it, and love it.
Whatever is serious in religion, whatever is bound up with morality and
fate, is contained in those plain experiences of dependence and of
affinity to that on which we depend. The rest is poetry, or mythical
philosophy, in which definitions not warranted in the end by experience
are given to that power which experience reveals. To reject such
arbitrary definitions is called atheism by those who frame them; but a
man who studies for himself the ominous and the friendly aspects of
reality and gives them the truest and most adequate expression he can is
repeating what the founders of religion did in the beginning. He is
their companion and follower more truly than are the apologists for
second-hand conceptions which these apologists themselves have never
compared with the facts, and which they prize chiefly for
misrepresenting actual experience and giving it imaginary extensions.

Religion is not essentially an imposture, though it might seem so if we
consider it as its defenders present it to us rather than as its
discoverers and original spokesmen uttered it in the presence of nature
and face to face with unsophisticated men. Religion is an interpretation
of experience, honestly made, and made in view of man’s happiness and
its empirical conditions. That this interpretation is poetical goes
without saying, since natural and moral science, even to-day, are
inadequate for the task. But the mythical form into which men cast their
wisdom was not chosen by them because they preferred to be imaginative;
it was not embraced, as its survivals are now defended, out of
sentimental attachment to grandiloquent but inaccurate thoughts.
Mythical forms were adopted because none other were available, nor could
the primitive mind discriminate at all between the mythical and the
scientific. Whether it is the myth or the wisdom it expresses that we
call religion is a matter of words. Certain it is that the wisdom is
alone what gives the myth its dignity, and what originally suggested it.
God’s majesty lies in his operation, not in his definition or his image.

[Sidenote: Practice precedes theory in religion.]

Fear and need, then, bring us into the presence of external powers,
conceived mythically, whose essential character is to be now terrible,
now auspicious. The influence is real and directly felt; the gods’
function is unmistakable and momentous, while their name and form, the
fabulous beings to which that felt influence is imputed, vary with the
resources of the worshipper’s mind and his poetic habits. The work of
expression, the creation of a fabulous environment to derive experience
from, is not, however, the first or most pressing operation employing
the religious mind. Its first business is rather the work of
propitiation; before we stop to contemplate the deity we hasten to
appease it, to welcome it, or to get out of its way. Cult precedes fable
and helps to frame it, because the feeling of need or fear is a
practical feeling, and the ideas it may awaken are only incidental to
the reactions it prompts. Worship is therefore earlier and nearer to the
roots of religion than dogma is.

[Sidenote: Pathetic, tentative nature of religious practices.]

At the same time, since those reactions which are directly efficacious
go to form arts and industrial habits, and eventually put before us the
world of science and common-sense, religious practice and thought are
confined to the sphere in which direct manipulation of things is
impossible. Cultus is always distinguishable from industry, even when
the worshipper’s motives are most sordid and his notions most material;
for in religious operations the changes worked or expected can never be
traced consecutively. There is a break, often a complete diversity and
disproportion, between effort and result. Religion is a form of rational
living more empirical, looser, more primitive than art. Man’s
consciousness in it is more immersed in nature, nearer to a vegetative
union with the general life; it bemoans division and celebrates harmony
with a more passive and lyrical wonder. The element of action proper to
religion is extremely arbitrary, and we are often at a loss to see in
what way the acts recommended conduce at all to the result foretold.

As theoretical superstition stops at any cause, so practical
superstition seizes on any means. Religion arises under high pressure:
in the last extremity, every one appeals to God. But in the last
extremity all known methods of action have proved futile; when resources
are exhausted and ideas fail, if there is still vitality in the will it
sends a supreme appeal to the supernatural. This appeal is necessarily
made in the dark: it is the appeal of a conscious impotence, of an
avowed perplexity. What a man in such a case may come to do to
propitiate the deity, or to produce by magic a result he cannot produce
by art, will obviously be some random action. He will be driven back to
the place where instinct and reason begin. His movement will be
absolutely experimental, altogether spontaneous. He will have no reason
for what he does, save that he must do something.

[Sidenote: Meanness and envy in the gods, suggesting sacrifice.]

What he will do, however, will not be very original; a die must fall on
some one of its six faces, shake it as much as you please. When Don
Quixote, seeking to do good absolutely at a venture, let the reins drop
on Rocinante’s neck, the poor beast very naturally followed the highway;
and a man wondering what will please heaven can ultimately light on
nothing but what might please himself. It is pathetic to observe how
lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the
deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been
drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to
be obeyed blindly and punctiliously—these have been thought points of
honour with the gods, for which they would dispense favours and
punishments on the most exorbitant scale. Indeed, the widespread
practice of sacrifice, like all mutilations and penances, suggests an
even meaner jealousy and malice in the gods; for the disciplinary
functions which these things may have were not aimed at in the
beginning, and would not have associated them particularly with
religion. In setting aside the fat for the gods’ pleasure, in
sacrificing the first-born, in a thousand other cruel ceremonies, the
idea apparently was that an envious onlooker, lurking unseen, might
poison the whole, or revenge himself for not having enjoyed it, unless a
part—possibly sufficient for his hunger—were surrendered to him
voluntarily. This onlooker was a veritable demon, treated as a man
treats a robber to whom he yields his purse that his life may be spared.

To call the gods envious has a certain symbolic truth, in that earthly
fortunes are actually precarious; and such an observation might inspire
detachment from material things and a kind of philosophy. But what at
first inspires sacrifice is a literal envy imputed to the gods, a spirit
of vengeance and petty ill-will; so that they grudge a man even the good
things which they cannot enjoy themselves. If the god is a tyrant, the
votary will be a tax-payer surrendering his tithes to secure immunity
from further levies or from attack by other potentates. God and man will
be natural enemies, living in a sort of politic peace.

[Sidenote: Ritualistic arts.]

Sacrifices are far from having merely this sinister meaning. Once
inaugurated they suggest further ideas, and from the beginning they had
happier associations. The sacrifice was incidental to a feast, and the
plenty it was to render safe existed already. What was a bribe, offered
in the spirit of barter, to see if the envious power could not be
mollified by something less than the total ruin of his victims, could
easily become a genial distribution of what custom assigned to each: so
much to the chief, so much to the god, so much to the husbandman. There
is a certain openness, and as it were the form of justice, in giving
each what is conventionally his due, however little he may really
deserve it. In religious observances this sentiment plays an important
part, and men find satisfaction in fulfilling in a seemly manner what is
prescribed; and since they know little about the ground or meaning of
what they do, they feel content and safe if at least they have done it
properly. Sacrifices are often performed in this spirit; and when a
beautiful order and religious calm have come to dignify the performance,
the mind, having meantime very little to occupy it, may embroider on the
given theme. It is then that fable, and new religious sentiments
suggested by fable, appear prominently on the scene.

[Sidenote: Thank-offerings.]

In agricultural rites, for instance, sacrifice will naturally be offered
to the deity presiding over germination; that is the deity that might,
perhaps, withdraw his favour with disastrous results. He commonly
proves, however, a kindly and responsive being, and in offering to him a
few sheaves of corn, some barley-cakes, or a libation from the vintage,
the public is grateful rather than calculating; the sacrifice has become
an act of thanksgiving. So in Christian devotion (which often follows
primitive impulses and repeats the dialectic of paganism in a more
speculative region) the redemption did not remain merely expiatory. It
was not merely a debt to be paid off and a certain quantum of suffering
to be endured which had induced the Son of God to become man and to take
up his cross. It was, so the subtler theologians declared, an act of
affection as much as of pity; and the spell of the doctrine over the
human heart lay in feeling that God wished to assimilate himself to man,
rather than simply from above to declare him forgiven; so that the
incarnation was in effect a rehabilitation of man, a redemption in
itself, and a forgiveness. Men like to think that God has sat at their
table and walked among them in disguise. The idea is flattering; it
suggests that the courtesy may some day be returned, and for those who
can look so deep it expresses pointedly the philosophic truth of the
matter. For are not the gods, too, in eternal travail after their ideal,
and is not man a part of the world, and his art a portion of the divine
wisdom? If the incarnation was a virtual redemption, the truest
incarnation was the laborious creation itself.

[Sidenote: The sacrifice of a contrite heart.]

If sacrifice, in its more amiable aspect, can become thanksgiving and an
expression of profitable dependence, it can suffer an even nobler
transformation while retaining all its austerity. Renunciation is the
corner-stone of wisdom, the condition of all genuine achievement. The
gods, in asking for a sacrifice, may invite us to give up not a part of
our food or of our liberty but the foolish and inordinate part of our
wills. The sacrifice may be dictated to us not by a jealous enemy
needing to be pacified but by a far-seeing friend, wishing we may not be
deceived. If what we are commanded to surrender is only what is doing us
harm, the god demanding the sacrifice is our own ideal. He has no
interests in the case other than our own; he is no part of the
environment; he is the goal that determines for us how we should proceed
in order to realise as far as possible our inmost aspirations. When
religion reaches this phase it has become thoroughly moral. It has
ceased to represent or misrepresent material conditions, and has learned
to embody spiritual goods.

Sacrifice is a rite, and rites can seldom be made to embody ideas
exclusively moral. Something dramatic or mystical will cling to the
performance, and, even when the effect of it is to purify, it will bring
about an emotional catharsis rather than a moral improvement. The mass
is a ritual sacrifice, and the communion is a part of it, having the
closest resemblance to what sacrifices have always been. Among the
devout these ceremonies, and the lyric emotions they awaken, have a
quite visible influence; but the spell is mystic, the god soon recedes,
and it would be purely fanciful to maintain that any permanent moral
effect comes from such an exercise. The Church has felt as much and
introduced the confession, where a man may really be asked to consider
what sacrifices he should make for his part, and in what practical
direction he should imagine himself to be drawn by the vague Dionysiac
influences to which the ritual subjects him.

[Sidenote: Prayer is not utilitarian in essence.]

As sacrifice expresses fear, prayer expresses need. Common-sense thinks
of language as something meant to be understood by another and to
produce changes in his disposition and behaviour, but language has
pre-rational uses, of which poetry and prayer are perhaps the chief. A
man overcome by passion assumes dramatic attitudes surely not intended
to be watched and interpreted; like tears, gestures may touch an
observer’s heart, but they do not come for that purpose. So the fund of
words and phrases latent in the mind flow out under stress of emotion;
they flow because they belong to the situation, because they fill out
and complete a perception absorbing the mind; they do not flow primarily
to be listened to. The instinct to pray is one of the chief avenues to
the deity, and the form prayer takes helps immensely to define the power
it is addressed to; indeed, it is in the act of praying that men
formulate to themselves what God must be, and tell him at great length
what they believe and what they expect of him. The initial forms of
prayer are not so absurd as the somewhat rationalised forms of it.
Unlike sacrifice, prayer seems to be justified by its essence and to be
degraded by the transformations it suffers in reflection, when men try
to find a place for it in their cosmic economy; for its essence is
poetical, expressive, contemplative, and it grows more and more
nonsensical the more people insist on making it a prosaic, commercial
exchange of views between two interlocutors.

Prayer is a soliloquy; but being a soliloquy expressing need, and being
furthermore, like sacrifice, a desperate expedient which men fly to in
their impotence, it looks for an effect: to cry aloud, to make vows, to
contrast eloquently the given with the ideal situation, is certainly as
likely a way of bringing about a change for the better as it would be to
chastise one’s self severely, or to destroy what one loves best, or to
perform acts altogether trivial and arbitrary. Prayer also is magic, and
as such it is expected to do work. The answer looked for, or one which
may be accepted instead, very often ensues; and it is then that
mythology begins to enter in and seeks to explain by what machinery of
divine passions and purposes that answering effect was produced.

[Sidenote: Its supposed efficacy magical.]

Magic is in a certain sense the mother of art, art being the magic that
succeeds and can establish itself. For this very reason mere magic is
never appealed to when art has been found, and no unsophisticated man
prays to have that done for him which he knows how to do for himself.
When his art fails, if his necessity still presses, he appeals to magic,
and he prays when he no longer can control the event, provided this
event is momentous to him. Prayer is not a substitute for work; it is a
desperate effort to work further and to be efficient beyond the range of
one’s powers. It is not the lazy who are most inclined to prayer; those
pray most who care most, and who, having worked hard, find it
intolerable to be defeated.

[Sidenote: Theological puzzles.]

No chapter in theology is more unhappy than that in which a material
efficacy is assigned to prayer. In the first place the facts contradict
the notion that curses can bring evil or blessings can cure; and it is
not observed that the most orthodox and hard-praying army wins the most
battles. The facts, however, are often against theology, which has to
rely on dialectical refinements to explain them away; but unfortunately
in this instance dialectic is no less hostile than experience. God must
know our necessities before we ask and, if he is good, must already have
decided what he would do for us. Prayer, like every other act, becomes
in a providential world altogether perfunctory and histrionic; we are
compelled to go through it, it is set down for us in the play, but it
lacks altogether that moral value which we assign to it. When our
prayers fail, it must be better than if they had succeeded, so that
prayer, with all free preference whatsoever, becomes an absurdity. The
trouble is much deeper than that which so many people find in
determinism. A physical predetermination, in making all things
necessary, leaves all values entire, and my preferences, though they
cannot be efficacious unless they express preformed natural forces, are
not invalidated ideally. It is still true that the world would have been
better to all eternity if my will also could have been fulfilled. A
providential optimism, on the contrary, not merely predetermines events
but discounts values; and it reduces every mortal aspiration, every
pang of conscience; every wish that things should be better than they
are, to a blind impertinence, nay, to a sacrilege. Thus, you may not
pray that God’s kingdom may come, but only—what is not a prayer but a
dogma—that it has come already. The mythology that pretends to justify
prayer by giving it a material efficacy misunderstands prayer completely
and makes it ridiculous, for it turns away from the heart, which prayer
expresses pathetically, to a fabulous cosmos where aspirations have been
turned into things and have thereby stifled their own voices.

[Sidenote: A real efficacy would be mechanical.]

The situation would not be improved if we surrendered that mystical
optimism, and maintained that prayer might really attract super-human
forces to our aid by giving them a signal without which they would not
have been able to reach us. If experience lent itself to such a theory
there would be nothing in it more impossible than in ordinary telepathy;
prayer would then be an art like conversation, and the exact personages
and interests would be discoverable to which we might appeal. A
celestial diplomacy might then be established not very unlike primitive
religions. Religion would have reverted to industry and science, to
which the grosser spirits that take refuge under it have always wished
to assimilate it. But is it really the office of religion to work upon
external powers and extract from them certain calculable effects? Is it
an art, like empiric medicine, and merely a dubious and mystic
industry? If so, it exists only by imperfection; were it better
developed it would coincide with those material and social arts with
which it is identical in essence. Successful religion, like successful
magic, would have passed into the art of exploiting the world.

[Sidenote: True uses of prayer.]

What successful religion really should pass into is contemplation,
ideality, poetry, in the sense in which poetry includes all imaginative
moral life. That this is what religion looks to is very clear in prayer
and in the efficacy which prayer consistently can have. In rational
prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its
welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it
accommodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it
conceives.

[Sidenote: It clarifies the ideal.]

If prayer springs from need it will naturally dwell on what would
satisfy that necessity; sometimes, indeed, it does nothing else but
articulate and eulogise what is most wanted and prized. This object will
often be particular, and so it should be, since Socrates’ prayer “for
the best” would be perfunctory and vapid indeed in a man whose life had
not been spent, like Socrates’, in defining what the best was. Yet any
particular good lies in a field of relations; it has associates and
implications, so that the mind dwelling on it and invoking its presence
will naturally be enticed also into its background, and will wander
there, perhaps to come upon greater goods, or upon evils which the
coveted good would make inevitable. An earnest consideration, therefore,
of anything desired is apt to enlarge and generalise aspiration till it
embraces an ideal life; for from almost any starting-point the limits
and contours of mortal happiness are soon descried. Prayer, inspired by
a pressing need, already relieves its importunity by merging it in the
general need of the spirit and of mankind. It therefore calms the
passions in expressing them, like all idealisation, and tends to make
the will conformable with reason and justice.

[Sidenote: It reconciles to the inevitable.]

A comprehensive ideal, however, is harder to realise than a particular
one: the rain wished for may fall, the death feared may be averted, but
the kingdom of heaven does not come. It is in the very essence of prayer
to regard a denial as possible. There would be no sense in defining and
begging for the better thing if that better thing had at any rate to be.
The possibility of defeat is one of the circumstances with which
meditation must square the ideal; seeing that my prayer may not be
granted, what in that case should I pray for next? Now the order of
nature is in many respects well known, and it is clear that all
realisable ideals must not transgress certain bounds. The practical
ideal, that which under the circumstances it is best to aim at and pray
for, will not rebel against destiny. Conformity is an element in all
religion and submission in all prayer; not because what must be is
best, but because the best that may be pursued rationally lies within
the possible, and can be hatched only in the general womb of being. The
prayer, “Thy will be done,” if it is to remain a prayer, must not be
degraded from its original meaning, which was that an unfulfilled ideal
should be fulfilled; it expressed aspiration after the best, not
willingness to be satisfied with, anything. Yet the inevitable must be
accepted, and it is easier to change the human will than the laws of
nature. To wean the mind from extravagant desires and teach it to find
excellence in what life affords, when life is made as worthy as
possible, is a part of wisdom and religion. Prayer, by confronting the
ideal with experience and fate, tends to render that ideal humble,
practical, and efficacious.

[Sidenote: It fosters spiritual life by conceiving it in its
perfection.]

A sense for human limitations, however, has its foil in the ideal of
deity, which is nothing but the ideal of man freed from those
limitations which a humble and wise man accepts for himself, but which a
spiritual man never ceases to feel as limitations. Man, for instance, is
mortal, and his whole animal and social economy is built on that fact,
so that his practical ideal must start on that basis, and make the best
of it; but immortality is essentially better, and the eternal is in many
ways constantly present to a noble mind; the gods therefore are
immortal, and to speak their language in prayer is to learn to see all
things as they do and as reason must, under the form of eternity. The
gods are furthermore no respecters of persons; they are just, for it is
man’s ideal to be so. Prayer, since it addresses deity, will in the end
blush to be selfish and partial; the majesty of the divine mind
envisaged and consulted will tend to pass into the human mind.

This use of prayer has not been conspicuous in Christian times, because,
instead of assimilating the temporal to the eternal, men have
assimilated the eternal to the temporal, being perturbed fanatics in
religion rather than poets and idealists. Pagan devotion, on the other
hand, was full of this calmer spirit. The gods, being frankly natural,
could be truly ideal. They embodied what was fairest in life and loved
men who resembled them, so that it was delightful and ennobling to see
their images everywhere, and to keep their names and story perpetually
in mind. They did not by their influence alienate man from his
appropriate happiness, but they perfected it by their presence. Peopling
all places, changing their forms as all living things must according to
place and circumstance, they showed how all kinds of being, if perfect
in their kind, might be perfectly good. They asked for a reverence
consistent with reason, and exercised prerogatives that let man free.
Their worship was a perpetual lesson in humanity, moderation, and
beauty. Something pre-rational and monstrous often peeped out behind
their serenity, as it does beneath the human soul, and there was
certainly no lack of wildness and mystic horror in their apparitions.
The ideal must needs betray those elemental forces on which, after all,
it rests; but reason exists to exorcise their madness and win them over
to a steady expression of themselves and of the good.

[Sidenote: Discipline and contemplation are their own reward.]


Prayer, in fine, though it accomplishes nothing material, constitutes
something spiritual. It will not bring rain, but until rain comes it may
cultivate hope and resignation and may prepare the heart for any issue,
opening up a vista in which human prosperity will appear in its
conditioned existence and conditional value. A candle wasting itself
before an image will prevent no misfortune, but it may bear witness to
some silent hope or relieve some sorrow by expressing it; it may soften
a little the bitter sense of impotence which would consume a mind aware
of physical dependence but not of spiritual dominion. Worship,
supplication, reliance on the gods, express both these things in an
appropriate parable. Physical impotence is expressed by man’s appeal for
help; moral dominion by belief in God’s omnipotence. This belief may
afterwards seem to be contradicted by events. It would be so in truth if
God’s omnipotence stood for a material magical control of events by the
values they were to generate. But the believer knows in his heart, in
spite of the confused explanations he may give of his feelings, that a
material efficacy is not the test of his faith. His faith will survive
any outward disappointment. In fact, it will grow by that discipline and
not become truly religious until it ceases to be a foolish expectation
of improbable things and rises on stepping-stones of its material
disappointments into a spiritual peace. What would sacrifice be but a
risky investment if it did not redeem us from the love of those things
which it asks us to surrender? What would be the miserable fruit of an
appeal to God which, after bringing us face to face with him, left us
still immersed in what we could have enjoyed without him? The real use
and excuse for magic is this, that by enticing us, in the service of
natural lusts, into a region above natural instrumentalities, it
accustoms us to that rarer atmosphere, so that we may learn to breathe
it for its own sake. By the time we discover the mechanical futility of
religion we may have begun to blush at the thought of using religion
mechanically; for what should be the end of life if friendship with the
gods is a means only? When thaumaturgy is discredited, the childish
desire to work miracles may itself have passed away. Before we weary of
the attempt to hide and piece out our mortality, our concomitant
immortality may have dawned upon us. While we are waiting for the
command to take up our bed and walk we may hear a voice saying: Thy sins
are forgiven thee.




CHAPTER IV

MYTHOLOGY


[Sidenote: Status of fable in the mind.]

Primitive thought has the form of poetry and the function of prose.
Being thought, it distinguishes objects from the experience that reveals
them and it aspires to know things as they are; but being poetical, it
attributes to those objects all the qualities which the experience of
them contains, and builds them out imaginatively in all directions,
without distinguishing what is constant and efficacious in them. This
primitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an
observation of things encumbered with all they can suggest to a dramatic
fancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common
root and raw material of both. Free poetry is a thing which early man is
too poor to indulge in; his wide-open eyes are too intently watching
this ominous and treacherous world. For pure science he has not enough
experience, no adequate power to analyse, remember, and abstract; his
soul is too hurried and confused, too thick with phantoms, to follow
abstemiously the practical threads through the labyrinth. His view of
things is immensely overloaded; what he gives out for description is
more than half soliloquy; but his expression of experience is for that
very reason adequate and quite sincere. Belief, which we have come to
associate with religion, belongs really to science; myths are not
believed in, they are conceived and understood. To demand belief for an
idea is already to contrast interpretation with knowledge; it is to
assert that that idea has scientific truth. Mythology cannot flourish in
that dialectical air; it belongs to a deeper and more ingenuous level of
thought, when men pored on the world with intense indiscriminate
interest, accepting and recording the mind’s vegetation no less than
that observable in things, and mixing the two developments together in
one wayward drama.

[Sidenote: It requires genius.]

A good mythology cannot be produced without much culture and
intelligence. Stupidity is not poetical. Nor is mythology essentially a
half-way house between animal vagueness in the soul and scientific
knowledge. It is conceivable that some race, not so dreamful as ours,
should never have been tempted to use psychic and passionate categories
in reading nature, but from the first should have kept its observations
sensuous and pure, elaborating them only on their own plane,
mathematically and dialectically. Such a race, however, could hardly
have had lyric or dramatic genius, and even in natural science, which
requires imagination, they might never have accomplished anything. The
Hebrews, denying themselves a rich mythology, remained without science
and plastic art; the Chinese, who seem to have attained legality and
domestic arts and a tutored sentiment without passing through such
imaginative tempests as have harassed us, remain at the same time
without a serious science or philosophy. The Greeks, on the contrary,
precisely the people with the richest and most irresponsible myths,
first conceived the cosmos scientifically, and first wrote rational
history and philosophy. So true it is that vitality in any mental
function is favourable to vitality in the whole mind. Illusions incident
to mythology are not dangerous in the end, because illusion finds in
experience a natural though painful cure. Extravagant error is unstable,
unless it be harmless and confined to a limbo remote from all
applications; if it touches experience it is stimulating and brief,
while the equipoise of dulness may easily render dulness eternal. A
developed mythology shows that man has taken a deep and active interest
both in the world and in himself, and has tried to link the two, and
interpret the one by the other. Myth is therefore a natural prologue to
philosophy, since the love of ideas is the root of both. Both are made
up of things admirable to consider.

[Sidenote: It only half deceives.]

Nor is the illusion involved in fabulous thinking always so complete and
opaque as convention would represent it. In taking fable for fact, good
sense and practice seldom keep pace with dogma. There is always a race
of pedants whose function it is to materialise everything ideal, but the
great world, half shrewdly, half doggedly, manages to escape their
contagion. Language may be entirely permeated with myth, since the
affinities of language have much to do with men gliding into such
thoughts; yet the difference between language itself and what it
expresses is not so easily obliterated. In spite of verbal traditions,
people seldom take a myth in the same sense in which they would take an
empirical truth. All the doctrines that have flourished in the world
about immortality have hardly affected men’s natural sentiment in the
face of death, a sentiment which those doctrines, if taken seriously,
ought wholly to reverse. Men almost universally have acknowledged a
Providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions
and fears in the presence of events; and yet, if Providence had ever
been really trusted, those preferences would all have lapsed, being seen
to be blind, rebellious, and blasphemous. Prayer, among sane people, has
never superseded practical efforts to secure the desired end; a proof
that the sphere of expression was never really confused with that of
reality. Indeed, such a confusion, if it had passed from theory to
practice, would have changed mythology into madness. With rare
exceptions this declension has not occurred and myths have been taken
with a grain of salt which not only made them digestible, but heightened
their savour.

It is always by its applicability to things known, not by its
revelation of things unknown and irrelevant, that a myth at its birth
appeals to mankind. When it has lost its symbolic value and sunk to the
level of merely false information, only an inert and stupid tradition
can keep it above water. Parables justify themselves but dogmas call for
an apologist. The genial offspring of prophets and poets then has to be
kept alive artificially by professional doctors. A thing born of fancy,
moulded to express universal experience and its veritable issues, has to
be hedged about by misrepresentation, sophistry, and party spirit. The
very apologies and unintelligent proofs offered in its defence in a way
confess its unreality, since they all strain to paint in more plausible
colours what is felt to be in itself extravagant and incredible.


[Sidenote: Its interpretative essence.]

Yet if the myth was originally accepted it could not be for this falsity
plainly written on its face; it was accepted because it was understood,
because it was seen to express reality in an eloquent metaphor. Its
function was to show up some phase of experience in its totality and
moral issue, as in a map we reduce everything geographically in order to
overlook it better in its true relations. Had those symbols for a moment
descended to the plane of reality they would have lost their meaning and
dignity; they would tell us merely that they themselves existed bodily,
which would be false, while about the real configuration of life they
would no longer tell us anything. Such an error, if carried through to
the end, would nullify all experience and arrest all life. Men would be
reacting on expressions and meeting with nothing to express. They would
all be like word-eating philosophers or children learning the catechism.

The true function of mythical ideas is to present and interpret events
in terms relative to spirit. Things have uses in respect to the will
which are direct and obvious, while the inner machinery of these same
things is intricate and obscure. We therefore conceive things roughly
and superficially by their eventual practical functions and assign to
them, in our game, some counterpart of the interest they affect in us.
This counterpart, to our thinking, constitutes their inward character
and soul. So conceived, soul and character are purely mythical, being
arrived at by dramatising events according to our own fancy and
interest. Such ideas may be adequate in their way if they cover all the
uses we may eventually find in the objects they transcribe for us
dramatically. But the most adequate mythology is mythology still; it
does not, like science, set things before us in the very terms they will
wear when they are gradually revealed to experience. Myth is expression,
it is not prophecy. For this reason myth is something on which the mind
rests; it is an ideal interpretation in which the phenomena are digested
and transmuted into human energy, into imaginative tissue.

[Sidenote: Contrast with science.]

Scientific formulas, on the contrary, cry aloud for retranslation into
perceptual terms; they are like tight-ropes, on which a man may walk but
on which he cannot stand still. These unstable symbols lead, however, to
real facts and define their experimental relations; while the mind
reposing contentedly in a myth needs to have all observation and
experience behind it, for it will not be driven to gather more. The
perfect and stable myth would rest on a complete survey and steady
focussing of all interests really affecting the one from whose point of
view the myth was framed. Then each physical or political unit would be
endowed with a character really corresponding to all its influence on
the thinker. This symbol would render the diffuse natural existences
which it represented in an eloquent figure; and since this figure would
not mislead practically it might be called true. But truth, in a myth,
means a sterling quality and standard excellence, not a literal or
logical truth. It will not, save by a singular accident, represent their
proper internal being, as a forthright unselfish intellect would wish to
know it. It will translate into the language of a private passion the
smiles and frowns which that passion meets with in the world.

[Sidenote: Importance of the moral factor.]

There are accordingly two factors in mythology, a moral consciousness
and a corresponding poetic conception of things. Both factors are
variable, and variations in the first, if more hidden, are no less
important than variations in the second. Had fable started with a clear
perception of human values, it would have gained immensely in
significance, because its pictures, however wrong the external notions
they built upon, would have shown what, in the world so conceived, would
have been the ideals and prizes of life. Thus Dante’s bad cosmography
and worse history do not detract from the spiritual penetration of his
thought, though they detract from its direct applicability. Had nature
and destiny been what Dante imagined, his conception of the values
involved would have been perfect, for the moral philosophy he brought
into play was Aristotelian and rational. So his poem contains a false
instance or imaginary rehearsal of true wisdom. It describes the Life of
Reason in a fantastic world. We need only change man’s situation to that
in which he actually finds himself, and let the soul, fathomed and
chastened as Dante left it, ask questions and draw answers from this
steadier dream.

[Sidenote: Its submergence.]

Myth travels among the people, and in their hands its poetic factor
tends to predominate. It is easier to carry on the dialectic or drama
proper to a fable than to confront it again with the facts and give them
a fresh and more genial interpretation. The poet makes the fable; the
sophist carries it on. Therefore historians and theologians discuss
chiefly the various forms which mythical beings have received, and the
internal logical or moral implications of those hypostases. They would
do better to attend instead to the moral factor. However interesting a
fable may be in itself, its religious value lies wholly in its revealing
some function which nature has in human life. Not the beauty of the god
makes him adorable, but his dispensing benefits and graces. Side by side
with Apollo (a god having moral functions and consequently inspiring a
fervent cult and tending himself to assume a moral character) there may
be a Helios or a Phaëthon, poetic figures expressing just as well the
sun’s physical operation, and no less capable, if the theologian took
hold of them, of suggesting psychological problems. The moral factor,
however, was not found in these minor deities. Only a verbal and
sensuous poetry had been employed in defining them; the needs and hopes
of mankind had been ignored. Apollo, on the contrary, in personifying
the sun, had embodied also the sun’s relations to human welfare. The
vitality, the healing, the enlightenment, the lyric joy flowing into
man’s heart from that highest source of his physical being are all
beautifully represented in the god’s figure and fable. The religion of
Apollo is therefore a true religion, as religions may be true: the
mythology which created the god rested on a deep, observant sense for
moral values, and drew a vivid, if partial, picture of the ideal,
attaching it significantly to its natural ground.

[Sidenote: Myth justifies magic.]

The first function of mythology is to justify magic. The weak hope on
which superstition hangs, the gambler’s instinct which divines in
phenomena a magic solicitude for human fortunes, can scarcely be
articulated without seeking to cover and justify itself by some fable. A
magic function is most readily conceived and defined by attributing to
the object intentions hostile or favourable to men, together with human
habits of passion and discourse. For lack of resources and observations,
reason is seldom able to discredit magic altogether. Reasonable men are
forced, therefore, in order to find some satisfaction, to make magic as
intelligible as possible by assimilating it to such laws of human action
as may be already mastered and familiar. Magic is thus reduced to a sort
of system, regulated by principles of its own and naturalised, as it
were, in the commonwealth of science.

[Sidenote: Myths might be metaphysical.]

Such an avowed and defended magic usually takes one of two forms. When
the miracle is interpreted dramatically, by analogy to human life, we
have mythology; when it is interpreted rationalistically, by analogy to
current logic or natural science, we have metaphysics or theosophy. The
metaphysical sort of superstition has never taken deep root in the
western world. Pythagorean mysteries and hypnotisations, although
periodically fashionable, have soon shrivelled in our too salubrious and
biting air. Even such charming exotics as Plato’s myths have not been
able to flourish without changing their nature and passing into ordinary
dramatic mythology—into a magic system in which all the forces, once
terms in moral experience, became personal angels and demons. Similarly
with the Christian sacraments: these magic rites, had they been
established in India among a people theosophically minded, might have
furnished cues to high transcendental mysteries. Baptism might have been
interpreted as a symbol for the purged and abolished will, and Communion
as a symbol for the escape from personality. But European races, though
credulous enough, are naturally positivistic, so that, when they were
called upon to elucidate their ceremonial mysteries, what they lit upon
was no metaphysical symbolism but a material and historical drama.
Communion became a sentimental interview between the devout soul and the
person of Christ; baptism became the legal execution of a mythical
contract once entered into between the first and second persons of the
Trinity. Thus, instead of a metaphysical interpretation, the extant
magic received its needful justification through myths.

[Sidenote: They appear ready made, like parts of the social fabric.]

When mythology first appears in western literature it already possesses
a highly articulate form. The gods are distinct personalities, with
attributes and histories which it is hard to divine the source of and
which suggest no obvious rational interpretation. The historian is
therefore in the same position as a child who inherits a great religion.
The gods and their doings are _prima facie_ facts in his world like any
other facts, objective beings that convention puts him in the presence
of and with which he begins by having social relations. He envisages
them with respect and obedience, or with careless defiance, long before
he thinks of questioning or proving their existence. The attitude he
assumes towards them makes them in the first instance factors in his
moral world. Much subsequent scepticism and rationalising philosophy
will not avail to efface the vestiges of that early communion with
familiar gods. It is hard to reduce to objects of science what are
essentially factors in moral intercourse. All thoughts on religion
remain accordingly coloured with passion, and are felt to be, above all,
a test of loyalty and an index to virtue. The more derivative,
unfathomable, and opaque is the prevalent idea of the gods, the harder
it is for a rational feeling to establish itself in their regard.
Sometimes the most complete historical enlightenment will not suffice to
dispel the shadow which their moral externality casts over the mind. In
vain do we discard their fable and the thin proofs of their existence
when, in spite of ourselves, we still live in their presence.

[Sidenote: They perplex the conscience.]

This pathetic phenomenon is characteristic of religious minds that have
outgrown their traditional faith without being able to restate the
natural grounds and moral values of that somehow precious system in
which they no longer believe. The dead gods, in such cases, leave
ghosts behind them, because the moral forces which the gods once
expressed, and which, of course, remain, remain inarticulate; and
therefore, in their dumbness, these moral forces persistently suggest
their only known but now discredited symbols. To regain moral
freedom—without which knowledge cannot be put to its rational use in
the government of life—we must rediscover the origin of the gods,
reduce them analytically to their natural and moral constituents, and
then proceed to rearrange those materials, without any quantitative
loss, in forms appropriate to a maturer reflection.

Of the innumerable and rather monotonous mythologies that have
flourished in the world, only the Græco-Roman and the Christian need
concern us here, since they are by far the best known to us and the best
defined in themselves, as well as the only two likely to have any
continued influence on the western mind. Both these systems pre-suppose
a long prior development. The gods of Greece and of Israel have a
full-blown character when we first meet them in literature. In both
cases, however, we are fortunate in being able to trace somewhat further
back the history of mythology, and do not depend merely on philosophic
analysis to reach the elements which we seek.

[Sidenote: Incipient myth in the Vedas.]

In the Vedic hymns there survives the record of a religion remarkably
like the Greek in spirit, but less dramatic and articulate in form. The
gods of the Vedas are unmistakably natural elements. Vulcan is there
nothing but fire, Jupiter nothing but the sky. This patriarchal people,
fresh from the highlands, had not yet been infected with the manias and
diseases of the jungle. It lived simply, rationally, piously, loving all
natural joys and delighted with all the instruments of a rude but pure
civilisation. It saluted without servility the forces of nature which
ministered to its needs. It burst into song in the presence of the
magnificent panorama spread out before it—day-sky and night-sky, dawn
and gloaming, clouds, thunder and rain, rivers, cattle and horses,
grain, fruit, fire, and wine. Nor were the social sanctities neglected.
Commemoration was made of the stages of mortal life, of the bonds of
love and kinship, of peace, of battle, and of mourning for the dead. By
a very intelligible figure and analogy the winds became shepherds, the
clouds flocks, the day a conqueror, the dawn a maid, the night a wise
sibyl and mysterious consort of heaven. These personifications were
tentative and vague, and the consequent mythology was a system of
rhetoric rather than of theology. The various gods had interchangeable
attributes, and, by a voluntary confusion, quite in the manner of later
Hindu poetry, each became on occasion any or all of the others.

Here the Indian pantheistic vertigo begins to appear. Many dark
superstitions, no doubt, bubbled up in the torrent of that plastic
reverie; for this people, clean and natural as on the whole it appears,
cannot have been without a long and ignoble ancestry. The Greeks
themselves, heirs to kindred general traditions, retained some childish
and obscene practices in their worship. But such hobgoblins naturally
vanish under a clear and beneficent sun and are scattered by healthy
mountain breezes. A cheerful people knows how to take them lightly, play
with them, laugh at them, and turn them again into figures of speech.
Among the early speakers of Sanskrit, even more than among the Greeks,
the national religion seems to have been nothing but a poetic
naturalism.

Such a mythology, however, is exceedingly plastic and unstable. If the
poet is observant and renews his impressions, his myths will become more
and more accurate descriptions of the facts, and his hypotheses about
phenomena will tend to be expressed more and more in terms of the
phenomena themselves; that is, will tend to become scientific. If, on
the contrary and as usually happens, the inner suggestions and fertility
of his fables absorb his interest, and he neglects to consult his
external perceptions any further, or even forgets that any such
perceptions originally inspired the myth, he will tend to become a
dramatic poet, guided henceforth in his fictions only by his knowledge
and love of human life.

[Sidenote: Natural suggestions soon exhausted.]

[Sidenote: They will be carried out in abstract fancy.]

When we transport ourselves in fancy to patriarchal epochs and Arcadian
scenes, we can well feel the inevitable tendency of the mind to
mythologise and give its myths a more and more dramatic character. The
phenomena of nature, unintelligible rationally but immensely impressive,
must somehow be described and digested. But while they compel attention
they do not, after a while, enlarge experience. Husbandmen’s lore is
profound, practical, poetic, superstitious, but it is singularly
stagnant. The cycle of natural changes goes its perpetual round and the
ploughman’s mind, caught in that narrow vortex, plods and plods after
the seasons. Apart from an occasional flood, drought, or pestilence,
nothing breaks his laborious torpor. The most cursory inspection of
field and sky yields him information enough for his needs. Practical
knowledge with him is all instinct and tradition. His mythology can for
that very reason ride on nature with a looser rein. If at the same time,
however, his circumstances are auspicious and he feels practically
secure, he will have much leisure to ripen inwardly and to think. He
hasten to unfold in meditation the abstract potentialities of his mind.
His social and ideal passions, his aptitude for art and fancy, will
arouse within him a far keener and more varied experience than his outer
life can supply. Yet all his fortunes continue to be determined by
external circumstances and to have for their theatre this given and
uncontrollable world. Some conception of nature and the gods—that is,
in his case, some mythology—must therefore remain before him always and
stand in his mind for the real forces controlling experience.

His moral powers and interests have meantime notably developed. His
sense for social relations has grown clear and full in proportion as his
observation of nature has sunk into dull routine. Consequently, the
myths by which reality is represented lose, so to speak, their
birthright and first nationality. They pass under the empire of abstract
cogitation and spontaneous fancy. They become naturalised in the mind.
The poet cuts loose from nature and works out instead whatever hints of
human character or romantic story the myth already supplies. Analogies
drawn from moral and passionate experience replace the further
portraiture of outer facts. Human tastes, habits, and dreams enter the
fable, expanding it into some little drama, or some mystic anagram of
mortal life. While in the beginning the sacred poet had transcribed
nothing but joyous perceptions and familiar industrial or martial
actions, he now introduces intrigue, ingenious adventures, and heroic
passions.

[Sidenote: They may become moral ideals.]

When we turn from the theology of the Vedas to that of Homer we see this
revolution already accomplished. The new significance of mythology has
obscured the old, and was a symbol for material facts has become a
drama, an apologue, and an ideal. Thus one function of mythology has
been nothing less than to carry religion over from superstition into
wisdom, from an excuse and apology for magic into an ideal
representation of moral goods. In his impotence and sore need a man
appeals to magic; this appeal he justifies by imagining a purpose and a
god behind the natural agency. But after his accounts with the phenomena
are settled by his own labour and patience, he continues to be
fascinated by the invisible spirit he has evoked. He cherishes this
image; it becomes his companion, his plastic and unaccountable witness
and refuge in all the exigencies of life. Dwelling in the mind
continually, the deity becomes acclimated there; the worship it receives
endows it with whatever powers and ideal faculties are most feared or
honoured by its votary. Now the thunder and the pestilence which were
once its essence come to be regarded as its disguises and its foils.
Faith comes to consist in disregarding what it was once religion to
regard, namely, the ways of fortune and the conditions of earthly
happiness. Thus the imagination sets up its ideals over against the
world that occasioned them, and mythology, instead of cheating men with
false and magic aids to action, moralises them by presenting an ideal
standard for action and a perfect object for contemplation.

[Sidenote: The sun-god moralised.]

If we consider again, for instance, Apollo’s various attributes and the
endless myths connected with his name, we shall find him changing his
essence and forgetting to be the material sun in order to become the
light of a cultivated spirit. At first he is the sky’s child, and has
the moon for twin sister. His mother is an impersonation of darkness and
mystery. He travels yearly from the hyperborean regions toward the
south, and daily he traverses the firmament in a chariot. He sleeps in a
sea-nymph’s bosom or rises from the dawn’s couch. In all this we see
clearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and its
motions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitably
to fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeed
compacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for the
original and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but to
entertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with their
assimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation is unavoidable in
a poet ignorant of physics, whom human life must supply with all his
vocabulary and similes. Fortunately in this need of introducing romance
into phenomena lies the leaven that is to leaven the lump, the subtle
influence that is to moralise religion. For presently Apollo becomes a
slayer of monsters (a function no god can perform until he has ceased to
be a monster himself), he becomes the lovely and valorous champion of
humanity, the giver of prophecy, of music, of lyric song, even the
patron of medicine and gymnastics.

[Sidenote: The leaven of religion is moral idealism.]

What a humane and rational transformation! The spirit of Socrates was
older than the man and had long been at work in the Greeks. Interest
had been transferred from nature to art, from the sources to the fruits
of life. We in these days are accustomed as a matter of course to
associate religion with ideal interests. Our piety, unlike our barbarous
pantheistic theology, has long lost sight of its rudimentary material
object, and habituated us to the worship of human sanctity and human
love. We have need all the more to remember how slowly and reluctantly
religion has suffered spiritualisation, how imperfectly as yet its
superstitious origin has been outgrown. We have need to retrace with the
greatest attention the steps by which a moral value has been insinuated
into what would otherwise be nothing but a medley of magic rites and
poetic physics. It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an age
that should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how to
conceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher’s
attention or a legislator’s mercy.




CHAPTER V

THE HEBRAIC TRADITION


[Sidenote: Phases of Hebraism.]

As the Vedas offer a glimpse into the antecedents of Greek mythology, so
Hebrew studies open up vistas into the antecedents of Christian dogma.
Christianity in its Patristic form was an adaptation of Hebrew religion
to the Græco-Roman world, and later, in the Protestant movement, a
readaptation of the same to what we may call the Teutonic spirit. In the
first adaptation, Hebrew positivism was wonderfully refined, transformed
into a religion of redemption, and endowed with a semi-pagan mythology,
a pseudo-Platonic metaphysics, and a quasi-Roman organisation. In the
second adaptation, Christianity received a new basis and standard in the
spontaneous faith of the individual; and, as the traditions thus
undermined in principle gradually dropped away, it was reduced by the
German theologians to a romantic and mystical pantheism. Throughout its
transformations, however, Christianity remains indebted to the Jews not
only for its founder, but for the nucleus of its dogma, cult, and
ethical doctrine. If the religion of the Jews, therefore, should
disclose its origin, the origin of Christianity would also be manifest.

Now the Bible, when critically studied, clearly reveals the source, if
not of the earliest religion of Israel, at least of those elements in
later Jewish faith which have descended to us and formed the kernel of
Christian revelation. The earlier Hebrews, as their own records depict
them, had a mythology and cultus extremely like that of other Semitic
peoples. It was natural religion—I mean that religion which naturally
expresses the imaginative life of a nation according to the conceptions
there current about the natural world and to the interest then uppermost
in men’s hearts. It was a religion without a creed or scripture or
founder or clergy. It consisted in local rites, in lunar feasts, in
soothsayings and oracles, in legends about divine apparitions
commemorated in the spots they had made holy. These spots, as in all the
rest of the world, were tombs, wells, great trees, and, above all, the
tops of mountains.

[Sidenote: Israel’s tribal monotheism.]

A wandering tribe, at once oppressed and aggressive, as Israel evidently
was from the beginning is conscious of nothing so much as of its tribal
unity. To protect the tribe is accordingly the chief function of its
god. Whatever character Jehovah may originally have had, whether a
storm-god of Sinai or of Ararat, or a sacred bull, or each of these by
affinity and confusion with the other, when the Israelites had once
adopted him as their god they could see nothing essential in him but his
power to protect them in the lands they had conquered. To this
exclusive devotion of Jehovah to Israel, Israel responded by a devotion
to Jehovah no less exclusive. They neglected, when at home, the worship
of every other divinity, and later even while travelling abroad; and
they tended to deny altogether, first the comparable power and finally
even the existence of other gods.

[Sidenote: Problems involved.]

Israel was a small people overshadowed by great empires, and its
political situation was always highly precarious. After a brief period
of comparative vigour under David and Solomon (a period afterward
idealised with that oriental imagination which, creating so few glories,
dreams of so many) they declined visibly toward an inevitable absorption
by their neighbours. But, according to the significance which religion
then had in Israel, the ruin of the state would have put Jehovah’s
honour and power in jeopardy. The nation and its god were like body and
soul; it occurred to no one as yet to imagine that the one could survive
the other. A few sceptical and unpatriotic minds, despairing of the
republic, might turn to the worship of Baal or of the stars invoked by
the Assyrians, hoping thus to save themselves and their private fortunes
by a timely change of allegiance. But the true Jew had a vehement and
unshakable spirit. He could not allow the waywardness of events to upset
his convictions or the cherished habits of his soul. Accordingly he
bethought himself of a new way of explaining and meeting the imminent
catastrophe.

The prophets, for to them the revolution in question was due, conceived
that the cause of Israel’s misfortunes might be not Jehovah’s weakness
but his wrath—a wrath kindled against the immorality, lukewarmness, and
infidelity of the people. Repentance and a change of life, together with
a purification of the cultus, would bring back prosperity. It was too
late, perhaps, to rescue the whole state. But a remnant might be saved
like a brand from the burning, to be the nucleus of a great restoration,
the seed of a mighty people that should live for ever in godliness and
plenty. Jehovah’s power would thus be vindicated, even if Israel were
ruined; nay, his power would be magnified beyond anything formerly
conceived, since now the great powers of Asia would be represented as
his instruments in the chastisement of his people.

[Sidenote: The prophets put new wine in old bottles.]

These views, if we regarded them from the standpoint common in theology
as attempts to re-express the primitive faith, would have to be
condemned as absolutely heretical and spurious. But the prophets were
not interpreting documents or traditions; they were publishing their own
political experience. They were themselves inspired. They saw the
identity of virtue and happiness, the dependence of success upon
conduct. This new truth they announced in traditional language by saying
that Jehovah’s favour was to be won only by righteousness and that vice
and folly alienated his goodwill. Their moral insight was genuine; yet
by virtue of the mythical expression they could not well avoid and in
respect to the old orthodoxy, their doctrine was a subterfuge, the first
of those after-thoughts and ingenious reinterpretations by which faith
is continually forced to cover up its initial blunders. For the Jews had
believed that with such a God they were safe in any case; but now they
were told that, to retain his protection, they must practice just those
virtues by which the heathen also might have been made prosperous and
great. It was a true doctrine, and highly salutary, but we need not
wonder that before being venerated the prophets were stoned.

The ideal of this new prophetic religion was still wholly material and
political. The virtues, emphasised and made the chief mark of a
religious life, were recommended merely as magic means to propitiate the
deity, and consequently to insure public prosperity. The thought that
virtue is a natural excellence, the ideal expression of human life,
could not be expected to impress those vehement barbarians any more than
it has impressed their myriad descendants and disciples, Jewish,
Christian, or Moslem. Yet superstitious as the new faith still remained,
and magical as was the efficacy it attributed to virtue, the fact that
virtue rather than burnt offerings was now endowed with miraculous
influence and declared to win the favour of heaven, proved two things
most creditable to the prophets: in the first place, they themselves
loved virtue, else they would hardly have imagined that Jehovah loved
it, or have believed it to be the only path to happiness; and in the
second place, they saw that public events depend on men’s character and
conduct, not on omens, sacrifices, or intercessions. There was
accordingly a sense for both moral and political philosophy in these
inspired orators. By assigning a magic value to morality they gave a
moral value to religion. The immediate aim of this morality—to
propitiate Jehovah—was indeed imaginary, and its ultimate aim—to
restore the kingdom of Israel—was worldly; yet that imaginary aim
covered, in the form of a myth, a sincere consecration to the ideal,
while the worldly purpose led to an almost scientific conception of the
principles and movement of earthly things.

[Sidenote: Inspiration and authority.]

To this transformation in the spirit of the law, another almost as
important corresponded in the letter. Scripture was codified,
proclaimed, and given out formally to be inspired by Jehovah and written
by Moses. That all traditions, legends, and rites were inspired and
sacred was a matter of course in antiquity. Nature was full of gods, and
the mind, with its unaccountable dreams and powers, could not be without
them. Its inventions could not be less oracular than the thunder or the
flight of birds. Israel, like every other nation, thought its traditions
divine. These traditions, however, had always been living and elastic;
the prophets themselves gave proof that inspiration was still a vital
and human thing. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that while
the prophets were preparing their campaign, under pressure of the same
threatened annihilation, the same puritanical party should have edited a
new code of laws and attributed it retroactively to Moses. While the
prophet’s lips were being touched by the coal of fire, the priests and
king in their conclave were establishing the Bible and the Church. It is
easy to suspect, from the accounts we have, that a pious fraud was
perpetrated on this occasion; but perhaps the finding of a forgotten
book of the Law and its proclamation by Josiah, after consulting a
certain prophetess, were not so remote in essence from prophetic
sincerity. In an age when every prophet, seeing what was needful
politically, could cry, “So saith the Lord,” it could hardly be
illegitimate for the priests, seeing what was expedient legally, to
declare, “So said Moses.” Conscience, in a primitive and impetuous
people, may express itself in an apocryphal manner which in a critical
age conscience would altogether exclude. It would have been hardly
conceivable that what was obviously right and necessary should not be
the will of Jehovah, manifested of old to the fathers in the desert and
now again whispered in their children’s hearts. To contrive a stricter
observance was an act at once of experimental prudence—a means of
making destiny, perhaps, less unfavourable—and an act of more fervent
worship—a renewal of faith in Jehovah, to whose hands the nation was
intrusted more solemnly and irrevocably than ever.

[Sidenote: Beginnings of the Church.]

This pious experiment failed most signally. Jerusalem was taken, the
Temple destroyed, and the flower of the people carried into exile. The
effect of failure, however, was not to discredit the Law and the
Covenant, now once for all adopted by the unshakable Jews. On the
contrary, when they returned from exile they re-established the
theocracy with greater rigour than ever, adding all the minute
observances, ritualistic and social, enshrined in Leviticus. Israel
became an ecclesiastical community. The Temple, half fortress, half
sanctuary, resounded with perpetual psalms. Piety was fed on a sense at
once of consecration and of guidance. All was prescribed, and to fulfil
the Law, precisely because it involved so complete and, as the world
might say, so arbitrary a regimen, became a precious sacrifice, a
continual act of religion.

[Sidenote: Bigotry turned into a principle.]

Dogmas are at their best when nobody denies them, for then their
falsehood sleeps, like that of an unconscious metaphor, and their moral
function is discharged instinctively. They count and are not defined,
and the side of them that is not deceptive is the one that comes
forward. What was condemnable in the Jews was not that they asserted the
divinity of their law, for that they did with substantial sincerity and
truth. Their crime is to have denied the equal prerogative of other
nations’ laws and deities, for this they did, not from critical insight
or intellectual scruples, but out of pure bigotry, conceit, and
stupidity. They did not want other nations also to have a god. The moral
government of the world, which the Jews are praised for having first
asserted, did not mean for them that nature shows a generic benevolence
toward life and reason wherever these arise. Such a moral government
might have been conceived by a pagan philosopher and was not taught in
Israel until, selfishness having been outgrown, the birds and the
heathen were also placed under divine protection. What the moral
government of things meant when it was first asserted was that Jehovah
expressly directed the destinies of heathen nations and the course of
nature itself for the final glorification of the Jews.

No civilised people had ever had such pretensions before. They all
recognised one another’s religions, if not as literally true (for some
familiarity is needed to foster that illusion), certainly as more or
less sacred and significant. Had the Jews not rendered themselves odious
to mankind by this arrogance, and taught Christians and Moslems the same
fanaticism, the nature of religion would not have been falsified among
us and we should not now have so much to apologise for and to retract.

[Sidenote: Penance accepted.]

Israel’s calamities, of which the prophets saw only the beginning,
worked a notable spiritualisation in its religion. The happy thought of
attributing misfortune to wickedness remained a permanent element in the
creed; but as no scrupulous administration of rites, no puritanism, no
good conscience, could avail to improve the political situation, it
became needful for the faithful to reconsider their idea of happiness.
Since holiness must win divine favour, and Israel was undoubtedly holy,
the marks of divine favour must be looked for in Israel’s history. To
have been brought in legendary antiquity out of Egypt was something; to
have been delivered from captivity in Babylon was more; yet these signs
of favour could not suffice unless they were at the same time emblems of
hope. But Jewish life had meantime passed into a new phase: it had
become pietistic, priestly, almost ascetic. Such is the might of
suffering, that a race whose nature and traditions were alike
positivistic could for the time being find it sweet to wash its hands
among the innocent, to love the beauty of the Lord’s house, and to
praise him for ever and ever. It was agreed and settled beyond cavil
that God loved his people and continually blessed them, and yet in the
world of men tribulation after tribulation did not cease to fall upon
them. There was no issue but to assert (what so chastened a spirit could
now understand) that tribulation endured for the Lord was itself
blessedness, and the sign of some mystical election. Whom the Lord
loveth he chasteneth; so the chosen children of God were, without
paradox, to be looked for among the most unfortunate of earth’s
children.

[Sidenote: Christianity combines optimism and asceticism.]

The prophets and psalmists had already shown some beginnings of this
asceticism or inverted worldliness. The Essenes and the early Christians
made an explicit reversal of ancient Jewish conceptions on this point
the corner-stone of their morality. True, the old positivism remained in
the background. Tribulation was to be short-lived. Very soon the kingdom
of God would be established and a dramatic exchange of places would
ensue between the proud and the humble. The mighty would be hurled from
their seat, the lowly filled with good things. Yet insensibly the
conception of a kingdom of God, of a theocracy, receded or became
spiritualised. The joys of it were finally conceived as immaterial
altogether, contemplative, and reserved for a life after death. Although
the official and literal creed still spoke of a day of judgment, a
resurrection of the body, and a New Jerusalem, these things were
instinctively taken by Christian piety in a more or less symbolic sense.
A longing for gross spectacular greatness, prolonged life, and many
children, after the good old Hebraic fashion, had really nothing to do
with the Christian notion of salvation. Salvation consisted rather in
having surrendered all desire for such things, and all expectation of
happiness to be derived from them. Thus the prophet’s doctrine that not
prosperity absolutely and unconditionally, but prosperity merited by
virtue, was the portion of God’s people changed by insensible gradations
to an ascetic belief that prosperity was altogether alien to virtue and
that a believer’s true happiness would be such as Saint Francis paints
it: upon some blustering winter’s night, after a long journey, to have
the convent door shut in one’s face with many muttered threats and
curses.

[Sidenote: Reason smothered between the two.]

In the history of Jewish and Christian ethics the pendulum has swung
between irrational extremes, without ever stopping at that point of
equilibrium at which alone rest is possible. Yet this point was
sometimes traversed and included in the gyrations of our tormented
ancestral conscience. It was passed, for example, at the moment when the
prophets saw that it was human interest that governed right and wrong
and conduct that created destiny. But the mythical form in which this
novel principle naturally presented itself to the prophets’ minds, and
the mixture of superstition and national bigotry which remained in their
philosophy, contaminated its truth and were more prolific and contagious
than its rational elements. Hence the incapacity of so much subsequent
thinking to reach clear ideas, and the failure of Christianity, with its
prolonged discipline and opportunities, to establish a serious moral
education. The perpetual painful readjustments of the last twenty
centuries have been adjustments to false facts and imaginary laws; so
that neither could a worthy conception of prosperity and of the good be
substituted for heathen and Hebrew crudities on that subject, nor could
the natural goals of human endeavour come to be recognised and
formulated, but all was left to blind impulse or chance tradition.

[Sidenote: Religion made an institution.]

These defeats of reason are not to be wondered at, if we may indeed
speak of the defeat of what never has led an army. The primitive
naturalism of the Hebrews was not yet superseded by prophetic doctrines
when a new form of materialism arose to stifle and denaturalise what was
rational in those doctrines. Even before hope of earthly empire to be
secured by Jehovah’s favour had quite vanished, claims had arisen to
supernatural knowledge founded on revelation. Mythology took a wholly
new shape and alliance with God acquired a new meaning and implication.
For mythology grew, so to speak, double; moral or naturalistic myths
were now reinforced by others of a historical character, to the effect
that the former myths had been revealed supernaturally. At the same time
the sign of divine protection and favour ceased to be primarily
political. Religion now chiefly boasted to possess the Truth, and with
the Truth to possess the secret of a perfectly metaphysical and
posthumous happiness. Revelation, enigmatically contained in Scripture,
found its necessary explication in theology, while the priests, now
guardians of the keys of heaven, naturally enlarged their authority over
the earth. In fine, the poetic legends and patriarchal worship that had
formerly made up the religion of Israel were transformed into two
concrete and formidable engines—the Bible and the Church.




CHAPTER VI

THE CHRISTIAN EPIC


[Sidenote: The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.]

Revolutions are ambiguous things. Their success is generally
proportionate to their power of adaptation and to the reabsorption
within them of what they rebelled against. A thousand reforms have left
the world as corrupt as ever, for each successful reform has founded a
new institution, and this institution has bred its new and congenial
abuses. What is capable of truly purifying the world is not the mere
agitation of its elements, but their organisation into a natural body
that shall exude what redounds and absorb or generate what is lacking to
the perfect expression of its soul.

Whence fetch this seminal force and creative ideal? It must evidently
lie already in the matter it is to organise; otherwise it would have no
affinity to that matter, no power over it, and no ideality or value in
respect to the existences whose standard and goal it was to be. There
can be no goods antecedent to the natures they benefit, no ideals prior
to the wills they define. A revolution must find its strength and
legitimacy not in the reformer’s conscience and dream but in the temper
of that society which he would transform; for no transformation is
either permanent or desirable which does not forward the spontaneous
life of the world, advancing those issues toward which it is already
inwardly directed. How should a gospel bring glad tidings, save by
announcing what was from the beginning native to the heart?

[Sidenote: A universal religion must interpret the whole world.]

No judgment could well be shallower, therefore, than that which condemns
a great religion for not being faithful to that local and partial
impulse which may first have launched it into the world. A great
religion has something better to consider: the conscience and
imagination of those it ministers to. The prophet who announced it first
was a prophet only because he had a keener sense and clearer premonition
than other men of their common necessities; and he loses his function
and is a prophet no longer when the public need begins to outrun his
intuitions. Could Hebraism spread over the Roman Empire and take the
name of Christianity without adding anything to its native inspiration?
Is it to be lamented that we are not all Jews? Yet what makes the
difference is not the teaching of Jesus—which is pure Hebraism reduced
to its spiritual essence—but the worship of Christ—something perfectly
Greek. Christianity would have remained a Jewish sect had it not been
made at once speculative, universal, and ideal by the infusion of Greek
thought, and at the same time plastic and devotional by the adoption of
pagan habits. The incarnation of God in man, and the divinisation of man
in God are pagan conceptions, expressions of pagan religious sentiment
and philosophy. Yet what would Christianity be without them? It would
have lost not only its theology, which might be spared, but its
spiritual aspiration, its artistic affinities, and the secret of its
metaphysical charity and joy. It would have remained unconscious, as the
Gospel is, that the hand or the mind of man can ever construct anything.
Among the Jews there were no liberal interests for the ideal to express.
They had only elementary human experience—the perpetual Oriental round
of piety and servitude in the bosom of a scorched, exhausted country. A
disillusioned eye, surveying such a world, could find nothing there to
detain it; religion, when wholly spiritual, could do nothing but succour
the afflicted, understand and forgive the sinful, and pass through the
sad pageant of life unspotted and resigned. Its pity for human ills
would go hand in hand with a mystic plebeian insensibility to natural
excellence. It would breathe what Tacitus, thinking of the liberal life,
could call _odium generis humani_; it would be inimical to human genius.

[Sidenote: Double appeal of Christianity.]

There were, we may say, two things in Apostolic teaching which rendered
it capable of converting the world. One was the later Jewish morality
and mysticism, beautifully expressed in Christ’s parables and maxims,
and illustrated by his miracles, those cures and absolutions which he
was ready to dispense, whatever their sins, to such as called upon his
name. This democratic and untrammelled charity could powerfully appeal
to an age disenchanted with the world, and especially to those lower
classes which pagan polity had covered with scorn and condemned to
hopeless misery. The other point of contact which early Christianity had
with the public need was the theme it offered to contemplation, the
philosophy of history which it introduced into the western world, and
the delicious unfathomable mysteries into which it launched the fancy.
Here, too, the figure of Christ was the centre for all eyes. Its
lowliness, its simplicity, its humanity were indeed, for a while,
obstacles to its acceptance; they did not really lend themselves to the
metaphysical interpretation which was required. Yet even Greek fable was
not without its Apollo tending flocks and its Demeter mourning for her
lost child and serving in meek disguise the child of another. Feeling
was ripe for a mythology loaded with pathos. The humble life, the
homilies, the sufferings of Jesus could be felt in all their
incomparable beauty all the more when the tenderness and tragedy of
them, otherwise too poignant, were relieved by the story of his
miraculous birth, his glorious resurrection, and his restored divinity.

[Sidenote: Hebrew metaphors become Greek myths.]

The gospel, thus grown acceptable to the pagan mind, was, however, but a
grain of mustard-seed destined to branch and flower in its new soil in
a miraculous manner. Not only was the Greek and Roman to refresh himself
under its shade, but birds of other climates were to build their nests,
at least for a season, in its branches. Hebraism, when thus expanded and
paganised, showed many new characteristics native to the minds which had
now adopted and transformed it. The Jews, for instance, like other
Orientals, had a figurative way of speaking and thinking; their poetry
and religion were full of the most violent metaphors. Now to the classic
mind violent and improper metaphors were abhorrent. Uniting, as it did,
clear reason with lively fancy, it could not conceive one thing to _be_
another, nor relish the figure of speech that so described it, hoping by
that unthinkable phrase to suggest its affinities. But the classic mind
could well conceive transformation, of which indeed nature is full; and
in Greek fables anything might change its form, become something else,
and display its plasticity, not by imperfectly being many things at
once, but by being the perfection of many things in succession. While
metaphor was thus unintelligible and confusing to the Greek,
metamorphosis was perfectly familiar to him. Wherever Hebrew tradition,
accordingly, used violent metaphors, puzzling to the Greek Christian, he
rationalised them by imagining a metamorphosis instead; thus, for
instance, the metaphors of the Last Supper, so harmless and vaguely
satisfying to an Oriental audience, became the doctrine of
transubstantiation—a doctrine where images are indeed lacking to
illustrate the concepts, but where the concepts themselves are not
confused. For that bread should _become_ flesh and wine blood is not
impossible, seeing that the change occurs daily in digestion; what the
assertion in this case contradicts is merely the evidence of sense.

Thus at many a turn in Christian tradition a metaphysical mystery takes
the place of a poetic figure; the former now expressing by a little
miraculous drama the emotion which the latter expressed by a tentative
phrase. And the emotion is thereby immensely clarified and strengthened;
it is, in fact, for the first time really expressed. For the idea that
Christ stands upon the altar and mingles still with our human flesh is
an explicit assertion that his influence and love are perpetual; whereas
the original parable revealed at most the wish and aspiration, contrary
to fact, that they might have been so. By substituting embodiment for
allegory, the Greek mind thus achieved something very congenial to its
habits: it imagined the full and adequate expression, not in words but
in existences, of the emotion to be conveyed. The Eucharist is to the
Last Supper what a centaur is to a horseman or a tragedy to a song.
Similarly a Dantesque conception of hell and paradise embodies in living
detail the innocent apologue in the gospel about a separation of the
sheep from the goats. The result is a chimerical metaphysics,
containing much which, in reference to existing facts, is absurd; but
that metaphysics, when taken for what it truly is, a new mythology,
utters the subtler secrets of the new religion not less ingeniously and
poetically than pagan mythology reflected the daily shifts in nature and
in human life.

[Sidenote: Hebrew philosophy of history identified with Platonic
cosmology.]

Metaphysics became not only a substitute for allegory but at the same
time a background for history. Neo-Platonism had enlarged, in a way
suited to the speculative demands of the time, the cosmos conceived by
Greek science. In an intelligible region, unknown to cosmography and
peopled at first by the Platonic ideas and afterward by Aristotle’s
solitary God, there was now the Absolute One, too exalted for any
predicates, but manifesting its essence in the first place in a supreme
Intelligence, the second hypostasis of a Trinity; and in the second
place in the Soul of the World, the third hypostasis, already relative
to natural existence. Now the Platonists conceived these entities to be
permanent and immutable; the physical world itself had a meaning and an
expressive value, like a statue, but no significant history. When the
Jewish notion of creation and divine government of the world presented
itself to the Greeks, they hastened to assimilate it to their familiar
notions of imitation, expression, finality, and significance. And when
the Christians spoke of Christ as the Son of God, who now sat at his
right hand in the heavens, their Platonic disciples immediately thought
of the Nous or Logos, the divine Intelligence, incarnate as they had
always believed in the whole world, and yet truly the substance and
essence of divinity. To say that this incarnation had taken place
pre-eminently, or even exclusively, in Christ was not an impossible
concession to make to pious enthusiasm, at least if the philosophy
involved in the old conception could be retained and embodied in the new
orthodoxy. Sacred history could thus be interpreted as a temporal
execution of eternal decrees, and the plan of salvation as an ideal
necessity. Cosmic scope and metaphysical meaning were given to Hebrew
tenets, so unspeculative in their original intention, and it became
possible even for a Platonic philosopher to declare himself a Christian.

[Sidenote: The resulting orthodox system.]

The eclectic Christian philosophy thus engendered constitutes one of the
most complete, elaborate, and impressive products of the human mind. The
ruins of more than one civilisation and of more than one philosophy were
ransacked to furnish materials for this heavenly Byzantium. It was a
myth circumstantial and sober enough in tone to pass for an account of
facts, and yet loaded with enough miracle, poetry, and submerged wisdom
to take the place of a moral philosophy and present what seemed at the
time an adequate ideal to the heart. Many a mortal, in all subsequent
ages, perplexed and abandoned in this ungovernable world, has set sail
resolutely for that enchanted island and found there a semblance of
happiness, its narrow limits give so much room for the soul and its
penitential soil breeds so many consolations. True, the brief time and
narrow argument into which Christian imagination squeezes the world must
seem to a speculative pantheist childish and poor, involving, as it
does, a fatuous perversion of nature and history and a ridiculous
emphasis laid on local events and partial interests. Yet just this
violent reduction of things to a human stature, this half-innocent,
half-arrogant assumption that what is important for a man must control
the whole universe, is what made Christian philosophy originally
appealing and what still arouses, in certain quarters, enthusiastic
belief in its beneficence and finality.

Nor should we wonder at this enduring illusion. Man is still in his
childhood; for he cannot respect an ideal which is not imposed on him
against his will, nor can he find satisfaction in a good created by his
own action. He is afraid of a universe that leaves him alone. Freedom
appals him; he can apprehend in it nothing but tedium and desolation, so
immature is he and so barren does he think himself to be. He has to
imagine what the angels would say, so that his own good impulses (which
create those angels) may gain in authority, and none of the dangers that
surround his poor life make the least impression upon him until he
hears that there are hobgoblins hiding in the wood. His moral life, to
take shape at all, must appear to him in fantastic symbols. The history
of these symbols is therefore the history of his soul.

[Sidenote: The brief drama of things.]

There was in the beginning, so runs the Christian story, a great
celestial King, wise and good, surrounded by a court of winged musicians
and messengers. He had existed from all eternity, but had always
intended, when the right moment should come, to create temporal beings,
imperfect copies of himself in various degrees. These, of which man was
the chief, began their career in the year 4004 B.C., and they would live
on an indefinite time, possibly, that chronological symmetry might not
be violated, until A.D. 4004. The opening and close of this drama were
marked by two magnificent tableaux. In the first, in obedience to the
word of God, sun, moon, and stars, and earth with all her plants and
animals, assumed their appropriate places, and nature sprang into being
with all her laws. The first man was made out of clay, by a special act
of God, and the first woman was fashioned from one of his ribs,
extracted while he lay in a deep sleep. They were placed in an orchard
where they often could see God, its owner, walking in the cool of the
evening. He suffered them to range at will and eat of all the fruits he
had planted save that of one tree only. But they, incited by a devil,
transgressed this single prohibition, and were banished from that
paradise with a curse upon their head, the man to live by the sweat of
his brow and the woman to bear children in labour. These children
possessed from the moment of conception the inordinate natures which
their parents had acquired. They were born to sin and to find disorder
and death everywhere within and without them.

At the same time God, lest the work of his hands should wholly perish,
promised to redeem in his good season some of Adam’s children and
restore them to a natural life. This redemption was to come ultimately
through a descendant of Eve, whose foot should bruise the head of the
serpent. But it was to be prefigured by many partial and special
redemptions. Thus, Noah was to be saved from the deluge, Lot from Sodom,
Isaac from the sacrifice, Moses from Egypt, the captive Jews from
Babylon, and all faithful souls from heathen forgetfulness and idolatry.
For a certain tribe had been set apart from the beginning to keep alive
the memory of God’s judgments and promises, while the rest of mankind,
abandoned to its natural depravity, sank deeper and deeper into crimes
and vanities. The deluge that came to punish these evils did not avail
to cure them. “The world was renewed[A] and the earth rose again above
the bosom of the waters, but in this renovation there remained eternally
some trace of divine vengeance. Until the deluge all nature had been
exceedingly hardy and vigorous, but by that vast flood of water which
God had spread out over the earth, and by its long abiding there, all
saps were diluted; the air, charged with too dense and heavy a moisture,
bred ranker principles of corruption. The early constitution of the
universe was weakened, and human life, from stretching as it had
formerly done to near a thousand years, grew gradually briefer. Herbs
and roots lost their primitive potency and stronger food had to be
furnished to man by the flesh of other animals.... Death gained upon
life and men felt themselves overtaken by a speedier chastisement. As
day by day they sank deeper in their wickedness, it was but right they
should daily, as it were, stick faster in their woe. The very change in
nourishment made manifest their decline and degradation, since as they
became feebler they became also more voracious and blood-thirsty.”

Henceforth there were two spirits, two parties, or, as Saint Augustine
called them, two cities in the world. The City of Satan, whatever its
artifices in art, war, or philosophy, was essentially corrupt and
impious. Its joy was but a comic mask and its beauty the whitening of a
sepulchre. It stood condemned before God and before man’s better
conscience by its vanity, cruelty, and secret misery, by its ignorance
of all that it truly behoved a man to know who was destined to
immortality. Lost, as it seemed, within this Babylon, or visible only
in its obscure and forgotten purlieus, lived on at the same time the
City of God, the society of all the souls God predestined to salvation;
a city which, however humble and inconspicuous it might seem on earth,
counted its myriad transfigured citizens in heaven, and had its
destinies, like its foundations, in eternity. To this City of God
belonged, in the first place, the patriarchs and the prophets who,
throughout their plaintive and ardent lives, were faithful to what
echoes still remained of a primeval revelation, and waited patiently for
the greater revelation to come. To the same city belonged the magi who
followed a star till it halted over the stable in Bethlehem; Simeon, who
divined the present salvation of Israel; John the Baptist, who bore
witness to the same and made straight its path; and Peter, to whom not
flesh and blood, but the spirit of the Father in heaven, revealed the
Lord’s divinity. For salvation had indeed come with the fulness of time,
not, as the carnal Jews had imagined it, in the form of an earthly
restoration, but through the incarnation of the Son of God in the Virgin
Mary, his death upon a cross, his descent into hell, and his
resurrection at the third day according to the Scriptures. To the same
city belonged finally all those who, believing in the reality and
efficacy of Christ’s mission, relied on his merits and followed his
commandment of unearthly love.

All history was henceforth essentially nothing but the conflict between
these two cities; two moralities, one natural, the other supernatural;
two philosophies, one rational, the other revealed; two beauties, one
corporeal, the other spiritual; two glories, one temporal, the other
eternal; two institutions, one the world, the other the Church. These,
whatever their momentary alliances or compromises, were radically
opposed and fundamentally alien to one another. Their conflict was to
fill the ages until, when wheat and tares had long flourished together
and exhausted between them the earth for whose substance they struggled,
the harvest should come; the terrible day of reckoning when those who
had believed the things of religion to be imaginary would behold with
dismay the Lord visibly coming down through the clouds of heaven, the
angels blowing their alarming trumpets, all generations of the dead
rising from their graves, and judgment without appeal passed on every
man, to the edification of the universal company and his own unspeakable
joy or confusion. Whereupon the blessed would enter eternal bliss with
God their master and the wicked everlasting torments with the devil whom
they served.

The drama of history was thus to close upon a second tableau: long-robed
and beatified cohorts passing above, amid various psalmodies, into an
infinite luminous space, while below the damned, howling, writhing, and
half transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in a fiery
furnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence, should thus be
finally divided in existence, each bearing its natural fruits and
manifesting its true nature.

Let the reader fill out this outline for himself with its thousand
details; let him remember the endless mysteries, arguments, martyrdoms,
consecrations that carried out the sense and made vital the beauty of
the whole. Let him pause before the phenomenon; he can ill afford, if he
wishes to understand history or the human mind, to let the apparition
float by unchallenged without delivering up its secret. What shall we
say of this Christian dream?

[Sidenote: Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey
something by symbols.]

Those who are still troubled by the fact that this dream is by many
taken for a reality, and who are consequently obliged to defend
themselves against it, as against some dangerous error in science or in
philosophy, may be allowed to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such,
however, is not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against the
miraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devouring his
children? We seek rather to honour the piety and to understand the
poetry embodied in those fables. If it be said that those fables are
believed by no one, I reply that those fables are or have been believed
just as unhesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no less
reasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our own ancestral
creeds. Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We
neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are
just, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no
indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while
we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no
arguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his own
loves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or should
be, in religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent Hebraic
pretensions there was no question among men about the national,
personal, and poetic character of religious allegiance. It could never
have been a duty to adopt a religion not one’s own any more than a
language, a coinage, or a costume not current in one’s own country. The
idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of
truth and life is simply an impossible idea. Whoever entertains it has
not come within the region of profitable philosophising on that subject.
His science is not wide enough to cover all existence. He has not
discovered that there can be no moral allegiance except to the ideal.
His certitude and his arguments are no more pertinent to the religious
question than would be the insults, blows, and murders to which, if he
could, he would appeal in the next instance. Philosophy may describe
unreason, as it may describe force; it cannot hope to refute them.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: Bossuet: Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Part II,
Chap. I.]




CHAPTER VII

PAGAN CUSTOM AND BARBARIAN GENIUS INFUSED INTO CHRISTIANITY


[Sidenote: Need of paganising Christianity.]

The western intellect, in order to accept the gospel, had to sublimate
it into a neo-Platonic system of metaphysics. In like manner the western
heart had to render Christianity congenial and adequate by a rich
infusion of pagan custom and sentiment. This adaptation was more gentle
and facile than might be supposed. We are too much inclined to impute an
abstract and ideal Christianity to the polyglot souls of early
Christians, and to ignore that mysterious and miraculous side of later
paganism from which Christian cultus and ritual are chiefly derived. In
the third century Christianity and devout paganism were, in a religious
sense, closely akin; each differed much less from the other than from
that religion which at other epochs had borne or should bear its own
name. Had Julian the Apostate succeeded in his enterprise he would not
have rescued anything which the admirers of classic paganism could at
all rejoice in; a disciple of Iamblichus could not but plunge headlong
into the same sea of superstition and dialectic which had submerged
Christianity. In both parties ethics were irrational and morals corrupt.
The political and humane religion of antiquity had disappeared, and the
question between Christians and pagans amounted simply to a choice of
fanaticisms. Reason had suffered a general eclipse, but civilisation,
although decayed, still subsisted, and a certain scholastic discipline,
a certain speculative habit, and many an ancient religious usage
remained in the world. The people could change their gods, but not the
spirit in which they worshipped them. Christianity had insinuated itself
almost unobserved into a society full of rooted traditions. The first
disciples had been disinherited Jews, with religious habits which men of
other races and interests could never have adopted intelligently; the
Church was accordingly wise enough to perpetuate in its practice at
least an indispensable minimum of popular paganism. How considerable
this minimum was a glance at Catholic piety will suffice to convince us.

[Sidenote: Catholic piety more human than the liturgy.]

The Græco-Jewish system of theology constructed by the Fathers had its
liturgical counterpart in the sacraments and in a devout eloquence which
may be represented to us fairly enough by the Roman missal and breviary.
This liturgy, transfused as it is with pagan philosophy and removed
thereby from the Oriental directness and formlessness of the Bible,
keeps for the most part its theological and patristic tone. Psalms
abound, Virgin, and saints are barely mentioned, a certain universalism
and concentration of thought upon the Redemption and its speculative
meaning pervades the Latin ritual sung behind the altar-rails. But any
one who enters a Catholic church with an intelligent interpreter will at
once perceive the immense distance which separates that official and
impersonal ritual from the daily prayers and practices of Catholic
people. The latter refer to the real exigences of daily life and serve
to express or reorganise personal passions. While mass is being
celebrated the old woman will tell her beads, lost in a vague rumination
over her own troubles; while the priests chant something unintelligible
about Abraham or Nebuchadnezzar, the housewife will light her
wax-candles, duly blessed for the occasion, before Saint Barbara, to be
protected thereby from the lightning; and while the preacher is
repeating, by rote, dialectical subtleties about the union of the two
natures in Christ’s person, a listener’s fancy may float sadly over the
mystery of love and of life, and (being himself without resources in the
premises) he may order a mass to be said for the repose of some departed
soul.

In a Catholic country, every spot and every man has a particular patron.
These patrons are sometimes local worthies, canonised by tradition or by
the Roman see, but no less often they are simply local appellations of
Christ or the Virgin, appellations which are known theoretically to
refer all to the same _numen_, but which practically possess diverse
religious values; for the miracles and intercessions attributed to the
Virgin under one title are far from being miracles and intercessions
attributable to her under another. He who has been all his life devout
to Loreto will not place any special reliance on the Pillar at
Saragossa. A bereaved mother will not fly to the Immaculate Conception
for comfort, but of course to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows. Each
religious order and all the laity more or less affiliated to it will
cultivate special saints and special mysteries. There are also
particular places and days on which graces are granted, as not on
others, and the quantity of such graces is measurable by canonic
standards. So many days of remitted penance correspond to a work of a
certain merit, for there is a celestial currency in which mulcts and
remissions may be accurately summed and subtracted by angelic recorders.
One man’s spiritual earnings may by gift be attributed and imputed to
another, a belief which may seem arbitrary and superstitious but which
is really a natural corollary to fundamental doctrines like the
atonement, the communion of saints, and intercession for the dead and
living.

[Sidenote: Natural pieties.]

Another phase of the same natural religion is seen in frequent
festivals, in the consecration of buildings, ships, fields, labours, and
seasons; in intercessions by the greater dead for the living and by the
living for the lesser dead—a perfect survival of heroes and penates on
the one hand and of pagan funeral rites and commemorations on the
other. Add Lent with its carnival, ember-days, all saints’ and all
souls’, Christmas with its magi or its Saint Nicholas, Saint Agnes’s and
Saint Valentine’s days with their profane associations, a saint for
finding lost objects and another for prospering amourettes, since all
great and tragic loves have their inevitable patrons in Christ and the
Virgin, in Mary Magdalene, and in the mystics innumerable. This, with
what more could easily be rehearsed, makes a complete paganism within
Christian tradition, a paganism for which little basis can be found in
the gospel, the mass, the breviary, or the theologians.

Yet these accretions were as well authenticated as the substructure, for
they rested on human nature. To feel, for instance, the special efficacy
of your village Virgin or of the miraculous Christ whose hermitage is
perched on the overhanging hill, is a genuine experience. The principle
of it is clear and simple. Those shrines, those images, the festivals
associated with them, have entered your mind together with your earliest
feelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with
the awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ were
invoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches
of irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mystic
resource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. When
the doctors blunder—as they commonly do—the saints may find a cure;
after all, the saints’ success in medicine seems to a crude empiricism
almost as probable as the physicians’. Special and local patrons are the
original gods, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmic
deities retain they retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those very
bonds with human interests and passionate desires which ancestral demons
once borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted,
or the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softened
toward their worshippers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreating
theology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, no
determinate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it nor
allied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortify
and define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigation
of evils or for assistance against them to the very being that has
decreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own.

[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural.]

Paganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religious
notions, optimistic and material; the worshipper expected his piety to
make his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and to
render harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But such
faith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced at
every turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life,
when they are understood at all, have to be understood on an opposite
principle, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished us
with a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a free
field and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion to
the supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far from
belonging. Now this retreat, in the case of classic paganism, took place
with the decay of military and political life and would have produced an
ascetic popular system, some compound of Oriental and Greek traditions,
even if Christianity had not intervened at that juncture and opportunely
pre-empted the ground.

[Sidenote: The episodes of life consecrated mystically.]

Christianity, as we have seen, had elements in it which gave it a
decisive advantage; its outlook was historical, not cosmic, and
consequently admitted a non-natural future for the individual and for
the Church; it was anti-political and looked for progress only in that
region in which progress was at that time possible, in the private soul;
it was democratic, feminine, and unworldly; its Oriental deity and
prophets had a primitive simplicity and pathos not found in pagan heroes
or polite metaphysical entities; its obscure Hebrew poetry opened, like
music, an infinite field for brooding fancy and presumption. The
consequence was a doubling of the world, so that every Christian led a
dual existence, one full of trouble and vanity on earth, which it was
piety in him to despise and neglect, another full of hope and
consolation in a region parallel to earth and directly above it, every
part of which corresponded to something in earthly life and could be
reached, so to speak, by a Jacob’s ladder upon which aspiration and
grace ascended and descended continually. Birth had its sacramental
consecration to the supernatural in baptism, growth in confirmation,
self-consciousness in confession, puberty in communion, effort in
prayer, defeat in sacrifice, sin in penance, speculation in revealed
wisdom, art in worship, natural kindness in charity, poverty in
humility, death in self-surrender and resurrection. When the mind grew
tired of contemplation the lips could still echo some pious petition,
keeping the body’s attitude and habit expressive of humility and
propitious to receiving grace; and when the knees and lips were
themselves weary, a candle might be left burning before the altar, to
witness that the desire momentarily forgotten was not extinguished in
the heart. Through prayer and religious works the absent could be
reached and the dead helped on their journey, and amid earthly
estrangements and injustices there always remained the church open to
all and the society of heaven.

[Sidenote: Paganism chastened, Hebraism liberalised.]

Nothing is accordingly more patent than that Christianity was paganised
by the early Church; indeed, the creation of the Church was itself what
to a Hebraising mind must seem a corruption, namely, a mixing of pagan
philosophy and ritual with the Gospel. But this sort of constitutive
corruption would more properly be called an adaptation, an absorption,
or even a civilisation of Hebraism; for by this marriage with paganism
Christianity fitted itself to live and work in the civilised world. By
this corruption it was completed and immensely improved, like
Anglo-Saxon by its corruption through French and Latin; for it is always
an improvement in religion, whose business is to express and inspire
spiritual sentiment, that it should learn to express and inspire that
sentiment more generously. Paganism was nearer than Hebraism to the Life
of Reason because its myths were more transparent and its temper less
fanatical; and so a paganised Christianity approached more closely that
ideality which constitutes religious truth than a bare and intense
Hebraism, in its hostility to human genius, could ever have done if
isolated and unqualified.

[Sidenote: The system post-rational and founded on despair.]

The Christianity which the pagans adopted, in becoming itself pagan,
remained a religion natural to their country and their heart. It
constituted a paganism expressive of their later and calamitous
experience, a paganism acquainted with sorrow, a religion that had
passed through both civilisation and despair, and had been reduced to
translating the eclipsed values of life into supernatural symbols. It
became a post-rational religion. Of course, to understand such a system
it is necessary to possess the faculties it exercises and the experience
it represents. Where life has not reached the level of reflection,
religion and philosophy must both be pre-rational; they must remain
crudely experimental, unconscious of the limits of excellence and life.
Under such circumstances it is obviously impossible that religion should
be reconstituted on a supernatural plane, or should learn to express
experience rather than impulse. Now the Christianity of the gospels was
itself post-rational; it had turned its back on the world. In this
respect the mixture with paganism altered nothing; it merely reinforced
the spiritualised and lyric despair of the Hebrews with the personal and
metaphysical despair of the Romans and Greeks. For all the later classic
philosophy—Stoic, Sceptic, or Epicurean—was founded on despair and was
post-rational. Pagan Christianity, or Catholicism, may accordingly be
said to consist of two elements: first, the genius of paganism, the
faculty of expressing spiritual experience in myth and external symbol,
and, second, the experience of disillusion, forcing that pagan
imagination to take wing from earth and to decorate no longer the
political and material circumstances of life, but rather to remove
beyond the clouds and constitute its realm of spirit beyond the veil of
time and nature, in a posthumous and metaphysical sphere. A mythical
economy abounding in points of attachment to human experience and in
genial interpretations of life, yet lifted beyond visible nature and
filling a reported world, a world believed in on hearsay or, as it is
called, on faith—that is Catholicism.

When this religion was established in the Roman Empire, that empire was
itself threatened by the barbarians who soon permeated and occupied it
and made a new and unhappy beginning to European history. They adopted
Christianity, not because it represented their religious needs or
inspiration, but because it formed part of a culture and a social
organisation the influence of which they had not, in their simplicity,
the means to withstand. During several ages they could only modify by
their misunderstandings and inertia arts wholly new to their lives.

[Sidenote: External conversion of the barbarians.]

What sort of religion these barbarians may previously have had is beyond
our accurate knowledge. They handed down a mythology not radically
different from the Græco-Roman, though more vaguely and grotesquely
conceived; and they recognised tribal duties and glories from which
religious sanctions could hardly have been absent. But a barbarian mind,
like a child’s, is easy to convert and to people with what stories you
will. The Northmen drank in with pleased astonishment what the monks
told them about hell and heaven, God the Father and God the Son, the
Virgin and the beautiful angels; they accepted the sacraments with vague
docility; they showed a qualified respect, often broken upon, it is
true, by instinctive rebellions, for a clergy which after all
represented whatever vestiges of learning, benevolence, or art still
lingered in the world. But this easy and boasted conversion was fanciful
only and skin-deep. A non-Christian ethics of valour and honour, a
non-Christian fund of superstition, legend, and sentiment, subsisted
always among mediæval peoples. Their soul, so largely inarticulate,
might be overlaid with churchly habits and imprisoned for the moment in
the panoply of patristic dogma; but pagan Christianity always remained a
religion foreign to them, accepted only while their minds continued in a
state of helpless tutelage. Such a foreign religion could never be
understood by them in its genuine motives and spirit. They were without
the experience and the plastic imagination which had given it birth. It
might catch them unawares and prevail over them for a time, but even
during that period it could not root out from barbarian souls anything
opposed to it which subsisted there. It was thus that the Roman Church
hatched the duck’s egg of Protestantism.

[Sidenote: Expression of the northern genius within Catholicism.]

In its native seats the Catholic system prompts among those who inwardly
reject it satire and indifference rather than heresy, because on the
whole it expresses well enough the religious instincts of the people.
Only those strenuously oppose it who hate religion itself. But among
converted barbarians the case was naturally different, and opposition to
the Church came most vehemently from certain religious natures whose
instincts it outraged or left unsatisfied. Even before heresy burst
forth this religious restlessness found vent in many directions. It
endowed Christianity with several beautiful but insidious gifts, several
incongruous though well-meant forms of expression. Among these we may
count Gothic art, chivalrous sentiment, and even scholastic philosophy.
These things came, as we know, ostensibly to serve Christianity, which
has learned to regard them as its own emanations. But in truth they
barbarised Christianity just as Greek philosophy and worship and Roman
habits of administration had paganised it in the beginning. And
barbarised Christianity, even before it became heretical, was something
new, something very different in temper and beauty from the pagan
Christianity of the South and East.

In the Catholicism of the Middle Ages, as it flourished in the North,
the barbarian soul, apprenticed to monkish masters, appeared in all its
childlike trust, originality, and humour. There was something touching
and grotesque about it. We seem to see a child playing with the toys of
age, his green hopes and fancies weaving themselves about an antique
metaphysical monument, the sanctuary of a decrepit world. The structure
of that monument was at first not affected, and even when it had been
undermined and partially ruined, its style could not be transformed,
but, clad in its northern ivy, it wore at once a new aspect. To races
without experience—that is, without cumulative traditions or a visible
past—Christianity could be nothing but a fairy story and a gratuitous
hope, as if they had been told about the Sultan of Timbuctoo and
promised that they should some day ride on his winged Arabian horses.
The tragic meaning of the Christian faith, its immense renunciation of
all things earthly and the merely metaphysical glory of its transfigured
life, commonly escaped their apprehension, as it still continues to do.
They listened open-mouthed to the missionary and accepted his
asseverations with unsuspecting emotion, like the Anglo-Saxon king who
likened the soul to a bird flying in and out of a tent at night, about
whose further fortunes any account would be interesting to hear. A seed
planted in such a virgin and uncultivated soil must needs bring forth
fruit of a new savour.

[Sidenote: Internal discrepancies between the two.]

In northern Christianity a fresh quality of brooding tenderness
prevailed over the tragic passion elsewhere characteristic of Catholic
devotion. Intricacy was substituted for dignity and poetry for rhetoric;
the basilica became an abbey and the hermitage a school. The feudal ages
were a wonderful seed-time in a world all gaunt with ruins. Horrors were
there mingled with delicacies and confusion with idyllic peace. It was
here a poet’s childhood passed amid the crash of war, there an
alchemist’s old age flickering away amid cobwebs and gibberish.
Something jocund and mischievous peeped out even in the cloister;
gargoyles leered from the belfry, while ivy and holly grew about the
cross. The Middle Ages were the true renaissance. Their Christianity was
the theme, the occasion, the excuse for their art and jollity, their
curiosity and tenderness; it was far from being the source of those
delightful inventions. The Crusades were not inspired by the Prince of
Peace, to whose honour they were fancifully and passionately dedicated;
so chivalry, Gothic architecture, and scholastic philosophy were profane
expressions of a self-discovering genius in a people incidentally
Christian. The barbarians had indeed been indoctrinated, they had been
introduced into an alien spiritual and historic medium, but they had not
been made over or inwardly tamed. It had perhaps been rendered easier
for them, by contact with an existing or remembered civilisation, to
mature their own genius, even in the act of confusing its expression
through foreign accretions. They had been thereby stimulated to civilise
themselves and encouraged also to believe themselves civilised somewhat
prematurely, when they had become heirs merely to the titles and
trappings of civilisation.

The process of finding their own art and polity, begun under foreign
guidance, was bound on the whole to diverge more and more from its Latin
model. It consisted now of imitation, now of revulsion and fanciful
originality; never was a race so much under the sway of fashions.
Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without
reason and imitation without benefit. It marks very clearly that margin
of irresponsible variation in manners and thoughts which among a people
artificially civilised may so easily be larger than the solid core. It
is characteristic of occidental society in mediæval and modern times,
because this society is led by people who, being educated in a foreign
culture, remain barbarians at heart. To this day we have not achieved a
really native civilisation. Our art, morals, and religion, though deeply
dyed in native feeling, are still only definable and, indeed,
conceivable by reference to classic and alien standards. Among the
northern races culture is even more artificial and superinduced than
among the southern; whence the strange phenomenon of snobbery in
society, affectation in art, and a violent contrast between the educated
and the uneducated, the rich and the poor, classes that live on
different intellectual planes and often have different religions. Some
educated persons, accordingly, are merely students and imbibers; they
sit at the feet of a past which, not being really theirs, can produce no
fruit in them but sentimentality. Others are merely _protestants_; they
are active in the moral sphere only by virtue of an inward rebellion
against something greater and overshadowing, yet repulsive and alien.
They are conscious truants from a foreign school of life.

[Sidenote: Tradition and instinct at odds in Protestantism.]

In the Protestant religion it is necessary to distinguish inner
inspiration from historical entanglements. Unfortunately, as the whole
doctrinal form of this religion is irrelevant to its spirit and imposed
from without, being due to the step-motherly nurture it received from
the Church, we can reach a conception of its inner spirit only by
studying its tendency and laws of change or its incidental expression in
literature and custom. Yet these indirect symptoms are so striking that
even an outsider, if at all observant, need not fear to misinterpret
them. Taken externally, Protestantism is, of course, a form of
Christianity; it retains the Bible and a more or less copious selection
of patristic doctrines. But in its spirit and inward inspiration it is
something quite as independent of Judea as of Rome. It is simply the
natural religion of the Teutons raising its head above the flood of
Roman and Judean influences. Its character may be indicated by saying
that it is a religion of pure spontaneity, of emotional freedom, deeply
respecting itself but scarcely deciphering its purposes. It is the
self-consciousness of a spirit in process of incubation, jealous of its
potentialities, averse to definitions and finalities of any kind because
it can itself discern nothing fixed or final. It is adventurous and
puzzled by the world, full of rudimentary virtues and clear fire,
energetic, faithful, rebellious to experience, inexpert in all matters
of art and mind. It boasts, not without cause, of its depth and purity;
but this depth and purity are those of any formless and primordial
substance. It keeps unsullied that antecedent integrity which is at the
bottom of every living thing and at its core; it is not acquainted with
that ulterior integrity, that sanctity, which might be attained at the
summit of experience through reason and speculative dominion. It
accordingly mistakes vitality, both in itself and in the universe, for
spiritual life.

[Sidenote: The Protestant spirit remote from that of the gospel.]

This underlying Teutonic religion, which we must call Protestantism for
lack of a better name, is anterior to Christianity and can survive it.
To identify it with the Gospel may have seemed possible so long as, in
opposition to pagan Christianity, the Teutonic spirit could appeal to
the Gospel for support. The Gospel has indeed nothing pagan about it,
but it has also nothing Teutonic; and the momentary alliance of two such
disparate forces must naturally cease with the removal of the common
enemy which alone united them. The Gospel is unworldly, disenchanted,
ascetic; it treats ecclesiastical establishments with tolerant contempt,
conforming to them with indifference; it regards prosperity as a danger,
earthly ties as a burden, Sabbaths as a superstition; it revels in
miracles; it is democratic and antinomian; it loves contemplation,
poverty, and solitude; it meets sinners with sympathy and heartfelt
forgiveness, but Pharisees and Puritans with biting scorn. In a word, it
is a product of the Orient, where all things are old and equal and a
profound indifference to the business of earth breeds a silent dignity
and high sadness in the spirit. Protestantism is the exact opposite of
all this. It is convinced of the importance of success and prosperity;
it abominates what is disreputable; contemplation seems to it idleness,
solitude selfishness, and poverty a sort of dishonourable punishment. It
is constrained and punctilious in righteousness; it regards a married
and industrious life as typically godly, and there is a sacredness to
it, as of a vacant Sabbath, in the unoccupied higher spaces which such
an existence leaves for the soul. It is sentimental, its ritual is
meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to
piety, and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a
sort of moral vocation. Its Evangelicalism lacks the notes, so prominent
in the gospel, of disillusion, humility, and speculative detachment. Its
benevolence is optimistic and aims at raising men to a conventional
well-being; it thus misses the inner appeal of Christian charity which,
being merely remedial in physical matters, begins by renunciation and
looks to spiritual freedom and peace.

Protestantism was therefore attached from the first to the Old
Testament, in which Hebrew fervour appears in its worldly and
pre-rational form. It is not democratic in the same sense as
post-rational religions, which see in the soul an exile from some other
sphere wearing for the moment, perhaps, a beggar’s disguise: it is
democratic only in the sense of having a popular origin and bending
easily to popular forces. Swayed as it is by public opinion, it is
necessarily conventional in its conception of duty and earnestly
materialistic; for the meaning of the word vanity never crosses the
vulgar heart. In fine, it is the religion of a race young, wistful, and
adventurous, feeling its latent potentialities, vaguely assured of an
earthly vocation, and possessing, like the barbarian and the healthy
child, pure but unchastened energies. Thus in the Protestant religion
the faith natural to barbarism appears clothed, by force of historical
accident, in the language of an adapted Christianity.

[Sidenote: Obstacles to humanism.]

As the Middle Ages advanced the new-born human genius which constituted
their culture grew daily more playful, curious, and ornate. It was
naturally in the countries formerly pagan that this new paganism
principally flourished. Religion began in certain quarters to be taken
philosophically; its relation to life began to be understood, that it
was a poetic expression of need, hope, and ignorance. Here prodigious
vested interests and vested illusions of every sort made dangerous the
path of sincerity. Genuine moral and religious impulses could not be
easily dissociated from a system of thought and discipline with which
for a thousand years they had been intimately interwoven. Scepticism,
instead of seeming, what it naturally is, a moral force, a tendency to
sincerity, economy, and fine adjustment of life and mind to
experience—scepticism seemed a temptation and a danger. This situation,
which still prevails in a certain measure, strikingly shows into how
artificial a posture Christianity has thrown the mind. If scepticism,
under such circumstances, by chance penetrated among the clergy, it was
not favourable to consistency of life, and it was the more certain to
penetrate among them in that their ranks, in a fat and unscrupulous age,
would naturally be largely recruited by men without conscience or ideal
ambitions. It became accordingly necessary to reform something; either
the gay world to suit the Church’s primitive austerity and asceticism,
or the Church to suit the world’s profane and general interests. The
latter task was more or less consciously undertaken by the humanists who
would have abated the clergy’s wealth and irrational authority, advanced
polite learning, and, while of course retaining Christianity—for why
should an ancestral religion be changed?—would have retained it as a
form of paganism, as an ornament and poetic expression of human life.
This movement, had it not been overwhelmed by the fanatical Reformation
and the fanatical reaction against it, would doubtless have met with
many a check from the Church’s sincere zealots; but it could have
overcome them and, had it been allowed to fight reason’s battle with
reason’s weapons, would ultimately have led to general enlightenment
without dividing Christendom, kindling venomous religious and national
passions, or vitiating philosophy.

[Sidenote: The Reformation and counter-reformation.]

It was not humanism, however, that was destined to restrain and soften
the Church, completing by critical reflection that paganisation of
Christianity which had taken place at the beginning instinctively and of
necessity. There was now another force in the field, the virgin
conscience and wilfulness of the Teutonic races, sincerely attached to
what they had assimilated in Christianity and now awakening to the fact
that they inwardly abhorred and rejected the rest. This situation, in so
uncritical an age, could be interpreted as a return to primitive
Christianity, though this had been in truth, as we may now perceive,
utterly opposed to the Teutonic spirit. Accordingly, the humanistic
movement was crossed and obscured by another, specifically religious and
ostensibly more Christian than the Church. Controversies followed, as
puerile as they were bloody; for it was not to be expected that the
peoples once forming the Roman Empire were going to surrender their
ancestral religion without a struggle and without resisting this new
barbarian invasion into their imaginations and their souls. They might
have suffered their Christianised paganism to fade with time; worldly
prosperity and arts might have weaned them gradually from their
supernaturalism, and science from their myths; but how were they to
abandon at once all their traditions, when challenged to do so by a
foreign supernaturalism so much poorer and cruder than their own? What
happened was that they intrenched themselves in their system, cut
themselves off from the genial influences that might have rendered it
innocuous, and became sectaries, like their opponents. Enlightenment was
only to come after a recrudescence of madness and by the mutual
slaughter of a fresh crop of illusions, usurpations, and tyrannies.

[Sidenote: Protestantism an expression of character.]

It would be easy to write, in a satirical vein, the history of
Protestant dogma. Its history was foreseen from the beginning by
intelligent observers. It consisted in a gradual and inevitable descent
into a pious scepticism. The attempt to cling to various intermediate
positions on the inclined plane that slopes down from ancient revelation
to private experience can succeed only for a time and where local
influences limit speculative freedom. You must slide smilingly down to
the bottom or, in horror at that eventuality, creep up again and reach
out pathetically for a resting-place at the top. To insist on this
rather obvious situation, as exhibited for instance in the Anglican
Church, would be to thresh straw and to study in Protestantism only its
feeble and accidental side. Its true essence is not constituted by the
Christian dogmas that at a given moment it chances to retain, but by the
spirit in which it constantly challenges the others, by the expression
it gives to personal integrity, to faith in conscience, to human
instinct courageously meeting the world. It rebels, for instance,
against the Catholic system of measurable sins and merits, with rewards
and punishments legally adjusted and controlled by priestly as well as
by divine prerogative. Such a supernatural mechanism seems to an
independent and uncowed nature a profanation and an imposture. Away, it
says, with all intermediaries between the soul and God, with all
meddlesome priestcraft and all mechanical salvation. Salvation shall be
by faith alone, that is, by an attitude and sentiment private to the
spirit, by an inner co-operation of man with the world. The Church shall
be invisible, constituted by all those who possess this necessary faith
and by no others. It really follows from this, although the conclusion
may not be immediately drawn, that religion is not an adjustment to
other facts or powers, or to other possibilities, than those met with in
daily life and in surrounding nature, but is rather a spiritual
adjustment to natural life, an insight into its principles, by which a
man learns to identify himself with the cosmic power and to share its
multifarious business no less than its ulterior security and calm.

[Sidenote: It has the spirit of life.]

Protestantism, in this perfectly instinctive trustfulness and
self-assertion, is not only prior to Christianity but more primitive
than reason and even than man. The plants and animals, if they could
speak, would express their attitude to their destiny in the Protestant
fashion. “He that formed us,” they would say, “lives and energises
within us. He has sealed a covenant with us, to stand by us if we are
faithful and strenuous in following the suggestions he whispers in our
hearts. With fidelity to ourselves and, what is the same thing, to him,
we are bound to prosper and to have life more and more abundantly for
ever.” This attitude, where it concerns religion, involves two
corollaries: first, what in accordance with Hebrew precedent may be
called symbolically faith in God, that is, confidence in one’s own
impulse and destiny, a confidence which the world in the end is sure to
reward; and second, abomination of all contrary religious tenets and
practices—of asceticism, for instance, because it denies the will; of
idolatry and myth, because they render divinity concrete rather than
relative to inner cravings and essentially responsive; finally of
tradition and institutional authority, because these likewise jeopardise
the soul’s experimental development as, in profound isolation, she
wrestles with reality and with her own inspiration.

[Sidenote: and of courage.]

In thus meeting the world the soul without experience shows a fine
courage proportionate to its own vigour. We may well imagine that lions
and porpoises have a more masculine assurance that God is on their side
than ever visits the breast of antelope or jelly-fish. This assurance,
when put to the test in adventurous living, becomes in a strong and
high-bred creature a refusal to be defeated, a gallant determination to
hold the last ditch and hope for the best in spite of appearances. It is
a part of Protestantism to be austere, energetic, unwearied in some
laborious task. The end and profit are not so much regarded as the mere
habit of self-control and practical devotion and steadiness. The point
is to accomplish something, no matter particularly what; so that
Protestants show on this ground some respect even for an artist when he
has once achieved success. A certain experience of ill fortune is only a
stimulus to this fidelity. So great is the antecedent trust in the world
that the world, as it appears at first blush, may be confidently defied.

[Sidenote: but the voice of inexperience.]

Hence, in spite of a theoretic optimism, disapproval and proscription
play a large part in Protestant sentiment. The zeal for righteousness,
the practical expectation that all shall be well, cannot tolerate
recognised evils. Evils must be abolished or at least hidden; they must
not offend the face of day and give the lie to universal sanctimony.
This austerity and repression, though they involve occasional hypocrisy,
lead also to substantial moral reconstruction. Protestantism, springing
from a pure heart, purifies convention and is a tonic to any society in
which it prominently exists. It has the secret of that honest simplicity
which belongs to unspoiled youth, that keen integrity native to the
ungalled spirit as yet unconscious of any duplicity in itself or of any
inward reason why it should fail. The only evils it recognises seem so
many challenges to action, so many conditions for some glorious
unthought-of victory. Such a religion is indeed profoundly ignorant, it
is the religion of inexperience, yet it has, at its core, the very
spirit of life. Its error is only to consider the will omnipotent and
sacred and not to distinguish the field of inevitable failure from that
of possible success. Success, however, would never be possible without
that fund of energy and that latent resolve and determination which
bring also faith in success. Animal optimism is a great renovator and
disinfectant in the world.

[Sidenote: Its emancipation from Christianity.]

It was this youthful religion—profound, barbaric, poetical—that the
Teutonic races insinuated into Christianity and substituted for that
last sigh of two expiring worlds. In the end, with the complete
crumbling away of Christian dogma and tradition, Absolute Egotism
appeared openly on the surface in the shape of German speculative
philosophy. This form, which Protestantism assumed at a moment of high
tension and reckless self-sufficiency, it will doubtless shed in turn
and take on new expressions; but that declaration of independence on the
part of the Teutonic spirit marks emphatically its exit from
Christianity and the end of that series of transformations in which it
took the Bible and patristic dogma for its materials. It now bids fair
to apply itself instead to social life and natural science and to
attempt to feed its Protean hunger directly from these more homely
sources.




CHAPTER VIII

CONFLICT OF MYTHOLOGY WITH MORAL TRUTH


[Sidenote: Myth should dissolve with the advance of science.]

That magic and mythology have no experimental sanction is clear so soon
as experience begins to be gathered together with any care. As magic
attempts to do work by incantations, so myth tries to attain knowledge
by playing with lies. The attempt is in the first instance inevitable
and even innocent, for it takes time to discriminate valid from
valueless fancies in a mind in which they spring up together, with no
intrinsic mark to distinguish them. The idle notion attracts attention
no less than the one destined to prove significant; often it pleases
more. Only watchful eyes and that rare thing, conscience applied to
memory, can pluck working notions from the gay and lascivious vegetation
of the mind, or learn to prefer Cinderella to her impudent sisters. If a
myth has some modicum of applicability or significance it takes root all
the more firmly side by side with knowledge. There are many subjects of
which man is naturally so ignorant that only mythical notions can seem
to do them justice; such, for instance, are the minds of other men.
Myth remains for this reason a constituent part even of the most
rational consciousness, and what can at present be profitably attempted
is not so much to abolish myth as to become aware of its mythical
character.

The mark of a myth is that it does not interpret a phenomenon in terms
capable of being subsumed under the same category with that phenomenon
itself, but fills it out instead with images that could never appear
side by side with it or complete it on its own plane of existence. Thus
if meditating on the moon I conceive her other side or the aspect she
would wear if I were travelling on her surface, or the position she
would assume in relation to the earth if viewed from some other planet,
or the structure she would disclose could she be cut in halves, my
thinking, however fanciful, would be on the scientific plane and not
mythical, for it would forecast possible perceptions, complementary to
those I am trying to enlarge. If, on the other hand, I say the moon is
the sun’s sister, that she carries a silver bow, that she is a virgin
and once looked lovingly on the sleeping Endymion, only the fool never
knew it—my lucubration is mythical; for I do not pretend that this
embroidery on the aspects which the moon actually wears in my feeling
and in the interstices of my thoughts could ever be translated into
perceptions making one system with the present image. By going closer to
that disc I should not see the silver bow, nor by retreating in time
should I come to the moment when the sun and moon were actually born of
Latona. The elements are incongruous and do not form one existence but
two, the first sensible, the other only to be enacted dramatically, and
having at best to the first the relation of an experience to its symbol.
These fancies are not fore-tastes of possible perceptions, but are free
interpretations or translations of the perceptions I have actually had.

Mythical thinking has its roots in reality, but, like a plant, touches
the ground only at one end. It stands unmoved and flowers wantonly into
the air, transmuting into unexpected and richer forms the substances it
sucks from the soil. It is therefore a fruit of experience, an ornament,
a proof of animal vitality; but it is no _vehicle_ for experience; it
cannot serve the purposes of transitive thought or action. Science, on
the other hand, is constituted by those fancies which, arising like
myths out of perception, retain a sensuous language and point to further
perceptions of the same kind; so that the suggestions drawn from one
object perceived are only ideas of other objects similarly perceptible.
A scientific hypothesis is one which represents something continuous
with the observed facts and conceivably existent in the same medium.
Science is a bridge touching experience at both ends, over which
practical thought may travel from act to act, from perception to
perception.

[Sidenote: But myth is confused with the moral values it expresses.]

To separate fable from knowledge nothing is therefore requisite except
close scrutiny and the principle of parsimony. Were mythology merely a
poetic substitute for natural science the advance of science would
sufficiently dispose of it. What remained over would, like the myths in
Plato, be at least better than total silence on a subject that interests
us and makes us think, although we have no means of testing our thoughts
in its regard. But the chief source of perplexity and confusion in
mythology is its confusion with moral truth. The myth which originally
was but a symbol substituted for empirical descriptions becomes in the
sequel an idol substituted for ideal values. This complication, from
which half the troubles of philosophy arise, deserves our careful
attention.

European history has now come twice upon the dissolution of mythologies,
first among the Stoics and then among the Protestants. The circumstances
in the two cases were very unlike; so were the mythical systems that
were discarded; and yet the issue was in both instances similar. Greek
and Christian mythology have alike ended in pantheism. So soon as the
constructions of the poets and the Fathers were seen to be ingenious
fictions, criticism was confronted with an obvious duty: to break up the
mythical compound furnished by tradition into its elements, putting on
one side what natural observation or actual history had supplied, and on
the other what dramatic imagination had added. For a cool and
disinterested observer the task, where evidence and records were not
wanting, would be simple enough. But the critic in this case would not
usually be cool or disinterested. His religion was concerned; he had no
other object to hang his faith and happiness upon than just this
traditional hybrid which his own enlightenment was now dissolving. To
which part should he turn for support? In which quarter should he
continue to place the object of his worship?

[Sidenote: Neo-Platonic revision.]

From the age of the Sophists to the final disappearance of paganism
nearly a thousand years elapsed. A thousand years from the infliction of
a mortal wound to the moment of extinction is a long agony. Religions do
not disappear when they are discredited; it is requisite that they
should be replaced. For a thousand years the augurs may have laughed,
they were bound nevertheless to stand at their posts until the monks
came to relieve them. During this prolonged decrepitude paganism lived
on inertia, by accretions from the Orient, and by philosophic
reinterpretations. Of these reinterpretations the first was that
attempted by Plato, and afterward carried out by the neo-Platonists and
Christians into the notion of a supernatural spiritual hierarchy;
above, a dialectical deity, the hypostasis of intellect and its
ontological phases; below, a host of angels and demons, hypostases of
faculties, moral influences, and evil promptings. In other words, in the
diremption of myths which yielded here a natural phenomenon to be
explained and there a moral value to be embodied, Platonism attached
divinity exclusively to the moral element. The ideas, which were
essentially moral functions, were many and eternal; their physical
embodiments were adventitious to them and constituted a lapse, a
misfortune to be wiped out by an eventual reunion of the alienated
nature with its own ideal. Religion in such a system necessarily meant
redemption. In this movement paganism turned toward the future, toward
supernatural and revealed religion, and away from its own naturalistic
principle. Revelation, as Plato himself had said, was needed to guide a
mind which distrusted phenomena and recoiled from earthly pursuits.

[Sidenote: It made mythical entities of abstractions.]

This religion had the strength of despair, but all else in it was
weakness. Apart from a revelation which, until Christianity appeared,
remained nebulous and arbitrary, there could be no means of maintaining
the existence of those hypostasised moral entities. The effort to
separate them from the natural functions which they evidently expressed
could not succeed while any critical acumen or independence subsisted in
the believer. Platonism, to become a religion, had to appeal to
superstition. Unity, for instance (which, according to Plato himself, is
a category applicable to everything concomitantly with the complementary
category of multiplicity, for everything, he says, is evidently both one
and many)—unity could not become the One, an independent and supreme
deity, unless the meaning and function of unity were altogether
forgotten and a foolish idolatry, agape at words, were substituted for
understanding. Some one had to come with an air of authority and report
his visions of the One before such an entity could be added to the
catalogue of actual existences. The reality of all neo-Platonic
hypostasis was thus dependent on revelation and on forgetting the
meaning once conveyed by the terms so mysteriously transfigured into
metaphysical beings.

[Sidenote: Hypostasis ruins ideals.]

This divorce of neo-Platonic ideas from the functions they originally
represented in human life and discourse was found in the end to defeat
the very interest that had prompted it—enthusiasm for the ideal.
Enthusiasm for the ideal had led Plato to treat all beauties as
stepping-stones toward a perfect beauty in which all their charms might
be present together, eternally and without alloy. Enthusiasm for the
ideal had persuaded him that mortal life was only an impeded effort to
fall back into eternity. These inspired but strictly unthinkable
suggestions fell from his lips in his zeal to express how much the
burden and import of experience exceeded its sensuous vehicle in
permanence and value. A thousand triangles revealed one pregnant
proportion of lines and areas; a thousand beds and bridles served one
perpetual purpose in human life, and found in fulfilling it their
essence and standard of excellence; a thousand fascinations taught the
same lesson and coalesced into one reverent devotion to beauty and
nobility wherever they might bloom. It was accordingly a poignant sense
for the excellence of real things that made Plato wish to transcend
them; his metaphysics was nothing but a visionary intuition of values,
an idealism in the proper sense of the word. But when the momentum of
such enthusiasm remained without its motive power, and its transcendence
without its inspiration in real experience, idealism ceased to be an
idealisation, an interpretation of reality reaching prophetically to its
goals. It became a super-numerary second physics, a world to which an
existence was attributed which could be hardly conceived and was
certainly supported by no evidence, while that significance which it
really possessed in reference to natural processes was ignored, or even
denied. An idealism which had consisted in understanding and
discriminating values now became a superstition incapable of discerning
existences. It added a prodigious fictitious setting to the cosmos in
which man had to operate; it obscured his real interests and possible
happiness by seeking to transport him into that unreal environment, with
its fantastic and disproportionate economy; and, worst of all, it
robbed the ideal of its ideality by tearing it up from its roots in
natural will and in experienced earthly benefits. For an ideal is not
ideal if it is the ideal of nothing. In that case it is only a ghostly
existence, with no more moral significance or authority in relation to
the observer than has any happy creature which may happen to exist
somewhere in the unknown reaches of the universe.

[Sidenote: The Stoic revision.]

Meantime, a second reinterpretation of mythology was attempted by the
Stoics. Instead of moving forward, like Plato, toward the
supernaturalism that was for so many ages to dominate the world, the
Stoics, with greater loyalty to pagan principles, reverted to the
natural forces that had been the chief basis for the traditional
deities. The progress of philosophy had given the Stoics a notion of the
cosmos such as the early Aryan could not have possessed when he recorded
and took to heart his scattered observations in the form of divine
influences, as many and various as the observations themselves. To the
Stoics the world was evidently one dynamic system. The power that
animated it was therefore one God. Accordingly, after explaining away
the popular myths by turning them somewhat ruthlessly into moral
apologues, they proceeded to identify Zeus with the order of nature.
This identification was supported by many traditional tendencies and
philosophic hints. The resulting concept, though still mythical, was
perhaps as rationalistic as the state of science at the time could
allow. Zeus had been from the beginning a natural force, at once serene
and formidable, the thunderer no less than the spirit of the blue. He
was the ruler of gods and men; he was, under limitations, a sort of
general providence. Anaxagoras, too, in proclaiming the cosmic function
of reason, had prepared the way for the Stoics in another direction.
This “reason,” which in Socrates and Plato was already a deity, meant an
order, an order making for the good. It was the name for a principle
much like that which Aristotle called Nature, an indwelling prophetic
instinct by which things strive after their perfection and happiness.
Now Aristotle observed this instinct, as behoved a disciple of Socrates,
in its specific cases, in which the good secured could be discriminated
and visibly attained. There were many souls, each with its provident
function and immutable guiding ideal, one for each man and animal, one
for each heavenly sphere, and one, the prime mover, for the highest
sphere of all. But the Stoics, not trained in the same humane and
critical school, had felt the unity, of things more dramatically and
vaguely in the realm of physics. Like Xenophanes of old, they gazed at
the broad sky and exclaimed, “The All is One.” Uniting these various
influences, they found it easy to frame a conception of Zeus, or the
world, or the universal justice and law, so as to combine in it a
dynamic unity with a provident reason. A world conceived to be material
and fatally determined was endowed with foresight of its own changes,
perfect internal harmony, and absolute moral dignity. Thus mythology,
with the Stoics, ended in pantheism.

[Sidenote: The ideal surrendered before the physical.]

By reducing their gods to a single divine influence, and identifying
this in turn with natural forces, the Stoics had, in one sense, saved
mythology. For no one would be inclined to deny existence or power to
the cosmos, to the body the soul of which was Zeus. Pantheism, taken
theoretically, is only naturalism poetically expressed. It therefore was
a most legitimate and congenial interpretation of paganism for a
rationalistic age. On the other hand, mythology had not been a mere
poetic physics; it had formulated the object of religion; it had
embodied for mankind its highest ideals in worshipful forms. It was when
this religious function was transferred to the god of pantheism that the
paradox and impossibility of the reform became evident. Nature neither
is nor can be man’s ideal. The substitution of nature for the
traditional and ideal object of religion involves giving nature moral
authority over man; it involves that element of Stoicism which is the
synonym of inhumanity. Life and death, good and ill fortune, happiness
and misery, since they flow equally from the universal order, shall be
declared, in spite of reason, to be equally good. True virtue shall be
reduced to conformity. He who has no ideal but that nature should
possess her actual constitution will be wise and superior to all
flattery and calamity; he will be equal in dignity to Zeus. He who has
any less conformable and more determinate interests will be a fool and a
worm.

The wise man will, meantime, perform all the offices of nature; he will
lend his body and his mind to her predestined labours. For pantheistic
morals, though post-rational, are not ascetic. In dislodging the natural
ideal from the mind, they put in its place not its supernatural
exaggeration but a curtailment of it inspired by despair. The passions
are not renounced on the ground that they impede salvation or some
visionary ecstasy; they are merely chilled by the sense that their
defeat, when actual, is also desirable. As all the gods have been
reduced to one substance or law, so all human treasures are reduced to
one privilege—that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by a
forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all
vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really
breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you
will be too stolid to perceive or too proud to share.

Thus the hereditary taint of mythology, the poison of lies, survived in
the two forms of philosophic paganism which it concerns us to study. In
Plato’s school, myth helped to hypostasise the ideas and, by divorcing
them from their natural basis, to deprive them of their significance and
moral function, and render the worship of them superstitious. In the
Stoa the surviving mythological element turned nature, when her unity
and order had been perceived, into an idol; so that the worship of her
blasted all humane and plastic ideals and set men upon a vain and
fanatical self-denial. Both philosophies were post-rational, as befitted
a decadent age and as their rival and heir, Christianity, was also.

[Sidenote: Parallel movements in Christianity.]

Christianity had already within itself a similar duality; being a
doctrine of redemption, like neo-Platonism, it tended to deny the
natural values of this life; but, being a doctrine of creation and
providential government, comparable in a way to the Stoic, it had an
ineradicable inward tendency toward pantheism, and toward a consequent
acceptance of both the goods and evils of this world as sanctioned and
required by providence.

[Sidenote: Hebraism, if philosophical, must be pantheistic.]

The horror which pantheism has always inspired in the Church is like
that which materialism inspires in sentimental idealists; they attack it
continually, not so much because anybody else defends it as because they
feel it to be implied unmistakably in half their own tenets. The
non-Platonic half of Christian theology, the Mosaic half, is bound to
become pantheism in the hands of a philosopher. The Jews were not
pantheists themselves, because they never speculated on the relation
which omnipotence stood in to natural forces and human acts. They
conceived Jehovah’s omnipotence dramatically, as they conceived
everything. He might pounce upon anything and anybody; he might subvert
or play with the laws of nature; he might laugh at men’s devices, and
turn them to his own ends; his craft and energy could not but succeed in
every instance; but that was not to say that men and nature had no will
of their own, and did not proceed naturally on their respective ways
when Jehovah happened to be busy elsewhere. So soon, however, as this
dramatic sort of omnipotence was made systematic by dialectic, so soon
as the doctrines of creation, omniscience, and providential government
were taken absolutely, pantheism was clearly involved. The consequences
to moral philosophy were truly appalling, for then the sins God punished
so signally were due to his own contrivance. The fervours of his saints,
the fate of his chosen people and holy temples, became nothing but a
puppet-show in his ironical self-consciousness.

[Sidenote: Pantheism, even when psychic, ignores ideals.]

The strangest part of this system, or what would seem so if its
antecedents were not known, is that it is only half-conscious of its
physical temper, and in calling itself an idealism (because it makes
perception and will the substance of their objects), thinks itself an
expression of human aspirations. This illusion has deep historical
roots. It is the last stage of a mythical philosophy which has been
earnestly criticising its metaphors, on the assumption that they were
not metaphorical; whereby it has stripped them of all significance and
reduced them at last to the bare principle of inversion. Nothing is any
longer idealised, yet all is still called an idealism. A myth is an
inverted image of things, wherein their moral effects are turned into
their dramatic antecedents—as when the wind’s rudeness is turned into
his anger. When the natural basis of moral life is not understood, myth
is the only way of expressing it theoretically, as eyes too weak to see
the sun face to face may, as Plato says, for a time study its image
mirrored in pools, and, as we may add, inverted there. So the good,
which in itself is spiritual only, is transposed into a natural power.
At first this amounts to an amiable misrepresentation of natural things;
the gods inhabit Mount Olympus and the Elysian Fields are not far west
of Cadiz. With the advance of geography the mythical facts recede, and
in a cosmography like Hegel’s, for instance, they have disappeared
altogether; but there remain the mythical values once ascribed to those
ideal objects but now transferred and fettered to the sad realities that
have appeared in their place. The titles of honour once bestowed on a
fabled world are thus applied to the real world by right of inheritance.

[Sidenote: Truly divine action limited to what makes for the good.]

Nothing could be clearer than the grounds on which pious men in the
beginning recognise divine agencies. We see, they say, the hand of God
in our lives. He has saved us from dangers, he has comforted us in
sorrow. He has blessed us with the treasures of life, of intelligence,
of affection. He has set around us a beautiful world, and one still more
beautiful within us. Pondering all these blessings, we are convinced
that he is mighty in the world and will know how to make all things good
to those who trust in him. In other words, pious men discern God in the
excellence of things. If all were well, as they hope it may some day be,
God would henceforth be present in everything. While good is mixed with
evil, he is active in the good alone. The pleasantness of life, the
preciousness of human possessions, the beauty and promise of the world,
are proof of God’s power; so is the stilling of tempests and the
forgiveness of sins. But the sin itself and the tempest, which
optimistic theology has to attribute just as much to God’s purposes, are
not attributed to him at all by pious feeling, but rather to his
enemies. In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God’s omnipotence,
his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every
Christian prayer. If the most pious of nations is engaged in war, and
suffers a great accidental disaster, such as it might expect to be safe
from, _Te deums_ are sung for those that were saved and _Requiems_ for
those that perished. God’s office, in both cases, is to save only. No
one seriously imagines that Providence does more than _govern_—that is,
watch over and incidentally modify the natural course of affairs—not
even in the other world, if fortunes are still changeable there.

[Sidenote: Need of an opposing principle.]

The criterion of divine activity could not be placed more squarely and
unequivocally in the good. Plato and Aristotle are not in this respect
better moralists than is an unsophisticated piety. God is the ideal, and
what manifests the ideal manifests God. Are you confident of the
permanence and triumph of the things you prize? Then you trust in God,
you live in the consciousness of his presence. The proof and measure of
rationality in the world, and of God’s power over it, is the extent of
human satisfactions. In hell, good people would disbelieve in God, and
it is impious of the trembling devils to believe in him there. The
existence of any evil—and if evil is felt it exists, for experience is
its locus—is a proof that some accident has intruded into God’s works.
If that loyalty to the good, which is the prerequisite of rationality,
is to remain standing, we must admit into the world, while it contains
anything practically evil, a principle, however minimised, which is not
rational. This irrational principle may be inertia in matter, accidental
perversity in the will, or ultimate conflict of interests. Somehow an
element of resistance to the rational order must be introduced
somewhere. And immediately, in order to distinguish the part furnished
by reason from its irrational alloy, we must find some practical test;
for if we are to show that there is a great and triumphant rationality
in the world, in spite of irrational accidents and brute opposition, we
must frame an idea of rationality different from that of being. It will
no longer do to say, with the optimists, the rational is the real, the
real is the rational. For we wish to make a distinction, in order to
maintain our loyalty to the good, and not to eviscerate the idea of
reason by emptying it of its essential meaning, which is action
addressed to the good and thought envisaging the ideal. To pious
feeling, the free-will of creatures, their power, active or passive, of
independent origination, is the explanation of all defects; and
everything which is not helpful to men’s purposes must be assigned to
their own irrationality as its cause. Herein lies the explanation of
that paradox in religious feeling which attributes sin to the free will,
but repentance and every good work to divine grace. Physically
considered—as theology must consider the matter—both acts and both
volitions are equally necessary and involved in the universal order; but
practical religion calls divine only what makes for the good. Whence it
follows at once that, both within and without us, what is done well is
God’s doing, and what is done ill is not.

[Sidenote: The standard of value is human.]

Thus what we may call the practical or Hebrew theory of cosmic
rationality betrays in plainest possible manner that reason is primarily
a function of human nature. Reason dwells in the world in so far as the
world is good, and the world is good in so far as it supports the wills
it generates—the excellence of each creature, the value of its life,
and the satisfaction of its ultimate desires. Thus Hebrew optimism could
be moral because, although it asserted in a sense the morality of the
universe, it asserted this only by virtue of a belief that the universe
supported human ideals. Undoubtedly much insistence on the greatness of
that power which made for righteousness was in danger of passing over
into idolatry of greatness and power, for whatever they may make. Yet
these relapses into Nature-worship are the more rare in that the Jews
were not a speculative people, and had in the end to endow even Job with
his worldly goods in order to rationalise his constancy. It was only by
a scandalous heresy that Spinoza could so change the idea of God as to
make him indifferent to his creatures; and this transformation, in spite
of the mystic and stoical piety of its author, passed very justly for
atheism; for that divine government and policy had been denied by which
alone God was made manifest to the Hebrews.

If Job’s reward seems to us unworthy, we must remember that we have
since passed through the discipline of an extreme moral idealism,
through a religion of sacrifice and sorrow. We should not confuse the
principle that virtue must somehow secure the highest good (for what
should not secure it would not be virtue) with the gross symbols by
which the highest good might be expressed at Jerusalem. That Job should
recover a thousand she-asses may seem to us a poor sop for his long
anguish of mind and body, and we may hardly agree with him in finding
his new set of children just as good as the old. Yet if fidelity had led
to no good end, if it had not somehow brought happiness to somebody,
that fidelity would have been folly. There is a noble folly which
consists in pushing a principle usually beneficent to such lengths as to
render it pernicious; and the pertinacity of Job would have been a case
of such noble folly if we were not somehow assured of its ultimate
fruits. In Christianity we have the same principle, save that the fruits
of virtue are more spiritually conceived; they are inward peace, the
silence of the passions, the possession of truth, and the love of God
and of our fellows. This is a different conception of happiness,
incomplete, perhaps, in a different direction. But were even this
attenuated happiness impossible to realise, all rationality would vanish
not merely from Christian charity and discipline, but from the whole
Christian theory of creation, redemption, and judgment. Without some
window open to heaven, religion would be more fantastic than worldliness
without being less irrational and vain.

[Sidenote: Hope for happiness makes belief in God.]

Revelation has intervened to bring about a conception of the highest
good which never could have been derived from an impartial synthesis of
human interests. The influence of great personalities and the fanaticism
of peculiar times and races have joined in imposing such variations from
the natural ideal. The rationality of the world, as Christianity
conceived it, is due to the plan of salvation; and the satisfaction of
human nature, however purified and developed, is what salvation means.
If an ascetic ideal could for a moment seem acceptable, it was because
the decadence and sophistication of the world had produced a great
despair in all noble minds; and they thought it better that an eye or a
hand which had offended should perish, and that they should enter blind
and maimed into the kingdom of heaven, than that, whole and seeing, they
should remain for ever in hell-fire. Supernatural, then, as the ideal
might seem, and imposed on human nature from above, it was yet accepted
only because nothing else, in that state of conscience and imagination,
could revive hope; nothing else seemed to offer an escape from the
heart’s corruption and weariness into a new existence.




CHAPTER IX

THE CHRISTIAN COMPROMISE


The human spirit has not passed in historical times through a more
critical situation or a greater revulsion than that involved in
accepting Christianity. Was this event favourable to the life of Reason?
Was it a progress in competence, understanding, and happiness? Any
absolute answer would be misleading. Christianity did not come to
destroy; the ancient springs were dry already, and for two or three
centuries unmistakable signs of decadence had appeared in every sphere,
not least in that of religion and philosophy. Christianity was a
reconstruction out of ruins. In the new world competence could only be
indirect, understanding mythical, happiness surreptitious; but all three
subsisted, and it was Christianity that gave them their necessary
disguises.

[Sidenote: Suspense between hope and disillusion.]

The young West had failed in its first great experiment, for, though
classic virtue and beauty and a great classic state subsisted, the force
that had created them was spent. Was it possible to try again? Was it
necessary to sit down, like the Orient, in perpetual flux and eternal
apathy? This question was answered by Christianity in a way, under the
circumstances, extremely happy. The Gospel, on which Christianity was
founded, had drawn a very sharp contrast between this world and the
kingdom of heaven—a phrase admitting many interpretations. From the
Jewish millennium or a celestial paradise it could shift its sense to
mean the invisible Church, or even the inner life of each mystical
spirit. Platonic philosophy, to which patristic theology was allied, had
made a contrast not less extreme between sense and spirit, between life
in time and absorption in eternity. Armed with this double dualism,
Christianity could preach both renunciation and hope, both asceticism
and action, both the misery of life and the blessing of creation. It
even enshrined the two attitudes in its dogma, uniting the Jewish
doctrine of a divine Creator and Governor of this world with that of a
divine Redeemer to lead us into another. Persons were not lacking to
perceive the contradiction inherent in such an eclecticism; and it was
the Gnostic or neo-Platonic party, which denied creation and taught a
pure asceticism, that had the best of the argument. The West, however,
would not yield to their logic. It might, in an hour of trouble and
weakness, make concessions to quietism and accept the cross, but it
would not suffer the naturalistic note to die out altogether. It
preferred an inconsistency, which it hardly perceived, to a complete
surrender of its instincts. It settled down to the conviction that God
created the world _and_ redeemed it; that the soul is naturally good
_and_ needs salvation.

[Sidenote: Superficial solution.]

This contradiction can be explained exoterically by saying that time and
changed circumstances separate the two situations: having made the world
perfect, God redeems it after it has become corrupt; and whereas all
things are naturally good, they may by accident lose their excellence,
and need to have it restored. There is, however, an esoteric side to the
matter. A soul that may be redeemed, a will that may look forward to a
situation in which its action will not be vain or sinful, is one that in
truth has never sinned; it has merely been thwarted. Its ambition is
rational, and what its heart desires is essentially good and ideal. So
that the whole classic attitude, the faith in action, art, and
intellect, is preserved under this protecting cuticle of dogma; nothing
was needed but a little courage, and circumstances somewhat more
favourable, for the natural man to assert himself again. A people
believing in the resurrection of the flesh in heaven will not be averse
to a reawakening of the mind on earth.

[Sidenote: But from what shall we be redeemed?]

Another pitfall, however, opens here. These contrasted doctrines may
change rôles. So long as by redemption we understand, in the mystic way,
exaltation above finitude and existence, because all particularity is
sin, to be redeemed is to abandon the Life of Reason; but redemption
might mean extrication from untoward accidents, so that a rational life
might be led under right conditions. Instead of being like Buddha, the
redeemer might be like Prometheus. In that case, however, the creator
would become like Zeus—a tyrant will responsible for our conditions
rather than expressive of our ideal. The doctrine of creation would
become pantheism and that of redemption, formerly ascetic, would
represent struggling humanity.

[Sidenote: Typical attitude of St. Augustine.]

The seething of these potent and ambiguous elements can be studied
nowhere better than in Saint Augustine. He is a more genial and complete
representative of Christianity than any of the Greek Fathers, in whom
the Hebraic and Roman vitality was comparatively absent. Philosophy was
only one phase of Augustine’s genius; with him it was an instrument of
zeal and a stepping-stone to salvation. Scarcely had it been born out of
rhetoric when it was smothered in authority. Yet even in that precarious
and episodic form it acquired a wonderful sweep, depth, and technical
elaboration. He stands at the watershed of history, looking over either
land; his invectives teach us almost as much of paganism and heresy as
his exhortations do of Catholicism. To Greek subtlety he joins Hebrew
fervour and monkish intolerance; he has a Latin amplitude and (it must
be confessed) coarseness of feeling; but above all he is the illumined,
enraptured, forgiven saint. In him theology, however speculative,
remains a vehicle for living piety; and while he has, perhaps, done more
than any other man to materialise Christianity, no one was ever more
truly filled with its spirit.

[Sidenote: He achieves Platonism.]

Saint Augustine was a thorough Platonist, but to reach that position he
had to pass in his youth through severe mental struggles. The difficult
triumph over the sensuous imagination by which he attained the
conception of intelligible objects was won only after long discipline
and much reading of Platonising philosophers. Every reality seemed to
him at first an object of sense: God, if he existed, must be
perceptible, for to Saint Augustine’s mind also, at this early and
sensuous stage of its development, _esse_ was _percipi_. He might never
have worked himself loose from these limitations, with which his vivid
fancy and not too delicate eloquence might easily have been satisfied,
had it not been for his preoccupation with theology. God must somehow be
conceived; for no one in that age of religious need and of theological
passion felt both more intensely than Saint Augustine. If sensible
objects alone were real, God must be somewhere discoverable in space; he
must either have a body like the human, or be the body of the universe,
or some subtler body permeating and moving all the rest.

These conceptions all offered serious dialectical difficulties, and,
what was more to the point, they did not satisfy the religious and
idealistic instinct which the whole movement of Saint Augustine’s mind
obeyed. So he pressed his inquiries farther. At length meditation, and
more, perhaps, that experience of the flux and vanity of natural things
on which Plato himself had built his heaven of ideas, persuaded him that
reality and substantiality, in any eulogistic sense, must belong rather
to the imperceptible and eternal. Only that which is never an object of
sense or experience can be the root and principle of experience and
sense. Only the invisible and changeless can be the substance of a
moving show. God could now be apprehended and believed in precisely
because he was essentially invisible: had he anywhere appeared he could
not be the principle of all appearance; had he had a body and a _locus_
in the universe, he could not have been its spiritual creator. The
ultimate objects of human knowledge were accordingly ideas, not things;
principles reached by the intellect, not objects by any possibility
offered to sense. The methodological concepts of science, by which we
pass from fact to fact and from past perception to future, did not
attract Augustine’s attention. He admitted, it is true, that there was a
subordinate, and to him apparently uninteresting, region governed by
“_certissima ratione vel experientia_,” and he even wished science to be
allowed a free hand within that empirical and logical sphere. A mystic
and allegorical interpretation of Scripture was to be invoked to avoid
the puerilities into which any literal interpretation—of the creation
in six days, for instance—would be sure to run. Unbelievers would thus
not be scandalised by mythical dogmas “concerning things which they
might have actually experienced, or discovered by sure calculation.”

Science was to have its way in the field of calculable experience; that
region could be the more readily surrendered by Augustine because his
attention was henceforth held by those ideal objects which he had so
laboriously come to conceive. These were concepts of the contemplative
reason or imagination, which envisages natures and eternal essences
behind the variations of experience, essences which at first receive
names, becoming thus the centres of rational discourse, then acquire
values, becoming guides to action and measures of achievement, and
finally attract unconditional worship, being regarded as the first
causes and ultimate goals of all existence and aspiration.

[Sidenote: He identifies it with Christianity.]

This purely Platonic philosophy, however, was not to stand alone. Like
every phase of Saint Augustine’s speculation, it came, as we have said,
to buttress or express some religious belief. But it is a proof of his
depth and purity of soul that his searching philosophic intuition did
more to spiritualise the dogmas he accepted from others than these
dogmas could do to denaturalise his spontaneous philosophy. Platonic
ideas had by that time long lost their moral and representative value,
their Socratic significance. They had become ontological entities,
whereas originally they had represented the rational functions of life.
This hypostasis of the rational, by which the rational abdicates its
meaning in the effort to acquire a metaphysical existence, had already
been carried to its extreme by the Neo-Platonists. But Saint Augustine,
while helpless as a philosopher to resist that speculative realism, was
able as a Christian to infuse into those dead concepts some of the human
blood which had originally quickened them. Metaphysics had turned all
human interests into mythical beings, and now religion, without at all
condemning or understanding that transformation, was going to adopt
those mythical beings and turn them again into moral influences. In
Saint Augustine’s mind, fed as it was by the Psalmist, the Platonic
figments became the Christian God, the Christian Church, and the
Christian soul, and thus acquired an even subtler moral fragrance than
that which they had lost when they were uprooted by a visionary
philosophy from the soil of Greek culture.

[Sidenote: God the good.]

Saint Augustine’s way of conceiving God is an excellent illustration of
the power, inherent in his religious genius and sincerity, of giving
life and validity to ideas which he was obliged to borrow in part from a
fabulous tradition and in part from a petrified metaphysics. God, to
him, was simply the ideal eternal object of human thought and love. All
ideation on an intellectual plane was a vague perception of the divine
essence. “The rational soul understands God, for it understands what
exists always unchanged.” ... “God is happiness; and in him and from
him and through him all things are happy which are happy at all. God is
the good and the beautiful.” He was never tired of telling us that God
is not true but the truth _(i.e._, the ideal object of thought in any
sphere), not good but the good _(i.e._, the ideal object of will in all
its rational manifestations). In other words, whenever a man, reflecting
on his experience, conceived the better or the best, the perfect and the
eternal, he conceived God, inadequately, of course, yet essentially,
because God signified the comprehensive ideal of all the perfections
which the human spirit could behold in itself or in its objects. Of this
divine essence, accordingly, every interesting thing was a
manifestation; all virtue and beauty were parcels of it, tokens of its
superabundant grace. Hence the inexhaustible passion of Saint Augustine
toward his God; hence the sweetness of that endless colloquy in prayer
into which he was continually relapsing, a passion and a sweetness which
no one will understand to whom God is primarily a natural power and only
accidentally a moral ideal.

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary religion.]

Herein lies the chief difference between those in whom religion is
spontaneous and primary—a very few—those in whom it is imitative and
secondary. To the former, divine things are inward values, projected by
chance into images furnished by poetic tradition or by external nature,
while to the latter, divine things are in the first instance objective
factors of nature or of social tradition, although they have come,
perhaps, to possess some point of contact with the interests of the
inner life on account of the supposed physical influence which those
super-human entities have over human fortunes. In a word, theology, for
those whose religion is secondary, is simply a false physics, a doctrine
about eventual experience not founded on the experience of the past.
Such a false physics, however, is soon discredited by events; it does
not require much experience or much shrewdness to discover that
supernatural beings and laws are without the empirical efficacy which
was attributed to them. True physics and true history must always tend,
in enlightened minds, to supplant those misinterpreted religious
traditions. Therefore, those whose reflection or sentiment does not
furnish them with a key to the moral symbolism and poetic validity
underlying theological ideas, if they apply their intelligence to the
subject at all, and care to be sincere, will very soon come to regard
religion as a delusion. Where religion is primary, however, all that
worldly dread of fraud and illusion becomes irrelevant, as it is
irrelevant to an artist’s pleasure to be warned that the beauty he
expresses has no objective existence, or as it would be irrelevant to a
mathematician’s reasoning to suspect that Pythagoras was a myth and his
supposed philosophy an abracadabra. To the religious man religion is
inwardly justified. God has no need of natural or logical witnesses, but
speaks himself within the heart, being indeed that ineffable attraction
which dwells in whatever is good and beautiful, and that persuasive
visitation of the soul by the eternal and incorruptible by which she
feels herself purified, rescued from mortality, and given an inheritance
in the truth. This is precisely what Saint Augustine knew and felt with
remarkable clearness and persistence, and what he expressed unmistakably
by saying that every intellectual perception is knowledge of God or has
God’s nature for its object.

Proofs of the existence of God are therefore not needed, since his
existence is in one sense obvious and in another of no religious
interest. It is obvious in the sense that the ideal is a term of moral
experience, and that truth, goodness, and beauty are inevitably
envisaged by any one whose life has in some measure a rational quality.
It is of no religious interest in the sense that perhaps some physical
or dynamic absolute might be scientifically discoverable in the dark
entrails of nature or of mind. The great difference between religion and
metaphysics is that religion looks for God at the top of life and
metaphysics at the bottom; a fact which explains why metaphysics has
such difficulty in finding God, while religion has never lost him.

This brings us to the grand characteristic and contradiction of Saint
Augustine’s philosophy, a characteristic which can be best studied,
perhaps, in him, although it has been inherited by all Christian
theology and was already present in Stoic and Platonic speculation,
when the latter had lost its ethical moorings. This is the idea that the
same God who is the ideal of human aspiration is also the creator of the
universe and its only primary substance.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous efficacy of the good in Plato.]

If Plato, when he wrote that fine and profound passage in the sixth book
of the Republic, where he says that the good is the cause of all
intelligence in the mind and of all intelligibility in the object, and
indeed the principle of all essence and existence—if Plato could have
foreseen what his oracular hyperbole was to breed in the world, we may
well believe that he would have expunged it from his pages with the same
severity with which he banished the poets from his State. In the lips of
Socrates, and at that juncture in the argument of the Republic, those
sentences have a legitimate meaning. The good is the principle of
benefit, and the philosophers who are to rule the state will not be
alienated by their contemplations from practical wisdom, seeing that the
idea of the good—_i.e._, of the advantageous, profitable, and
beneficial—is the highest concept of the whole dialectic, that in
reference to which all other ideas have place and significance. If we
ventured to extend the interpretation of the passage, retaining its
spirit, into fields where we have more knowledge than Plato could have,
we might say that the principle of the good generates essence and
existence, in the sense that all natural organs have functions and
utilities by which they establish themselves in the world, and that the
system of these useful functions is the true essence or idea of any
living thing. But the Socratic origin and sense of such a passage as
this, and of others (in the Timæus, for instance) allied to it, was soon
lost in the headlong idolatry which took possession of the neo-Platonic
school; and it was through this medium that Saint Augustine received his
Platonic inspiration. The good no longer meant, as it did to Plato, the
principle of benefit everywhere, but it meant the good Being; and this,
for a Christian, could naturally be none other than God; so that the
idea that the good was the creator of all essence and existence now
assumed a marvellously Mosaic significance. Here was one of those bits
of primeval revelation which, it was explained, had survived in the
heathen world. The hypostasis of moral conceptions, then, and of the
idea of the good in particular, led up from the Platonic side to the
doctrine of creation.

[Sidenote: Ambiguous goodness of the creator in Job.]

The history of the conception among the Jews was entirely different, the
element of goodness in the creator being there adventitious and the
element of power original. Jehovah for Job was a universal force,
justified primarily by his omnipotence; but this physical authority
would in the end, he hoped, be partly rationalised and made to clash
less scandalously with the authority of justice. Among the Greeks, as
was to be expected, the idea of justice was more independent and
entire; but once named and enshrined, that divinity, too, tended to
absoluteness, and could be confused with the physical basis of
existence. In the Stoic philosophy the latter actually gained the upper
hand, and the problem of Job reappeared on the horizon. It did not rise
into painful prominence, however, until Christian times, when absolute
moral perfection and absolute physical efficacy were predicated of God
with equal emphasis, if not among the people who never have conceived
God as either perfectly good or entirely omnipotent, at least among the
theologians. If not all felt the contradiction with equal acuteness, the
reason doubtless was that a large part of their thought was perfunctory
and merely apologetic: they did not quite mean what they said when they
spoke of perfect goodness; and we shall see how Saint Augustine himself,
when reduced to extremities, surrendered his loyalty to the moral ideal
rather than reconsider his traditional premisses.

[Sidenote: The Manicheans.]

How tenaciously, however, he clung to the moral in the religious, we can
see by the difficulty he had in separating himself from the Manicheans.
The Manicheans admitted two absolutes, the essence of the one being
goodness and of the other badness. This system was logically weak,
because these absolutes were in the first place two, which is one
contradiction, and in the second place relative, which is another. But
in spite of the pitfalls into which the Manicheans were betrayed by
their pursuit of metaphysical absolutes, they were supported by a moral
intuition of great truth and importance. They saw that an essentially
good principle could not have essential evil for its effect. These moral
terms are, we may ourselves feel sure, relative to existence and to
actual impulse, and it may accordingly be always misleading to make them
the essence of metaphysical realities: good and bad may be not
existences but qualities which existences have only in relation to
demands in themselves or in one another. Yet if we once launch, as many
metaphysicians would have us do, into the hypostasis of qualities and
relations, it is certainly better and more honest to make contradictory
qualities into opposed entities, and not to render our metaphysical
world unmeaning as well as fictitious by peopling it with concepts in
which the most important categories of life are submerged and
invalidated. Evil may be no more a metaphysical existence than good is;
both are undoubtedly mere terms for vital utilities and impediments; but
if we are to indulge in mythology at all, it is better that our
mythology should do symbolic justice to experience and should represent
by contrasted figures the ineradicable practical difference between the
better and the worse, the beautiful and the ugly, the trustworthy and
the fallacious. To discriminate between these things in practice is
wisdom, and it should be the part of wisdom to discriminate between them
in theory.

The Manicheans accordingly attributed what is good in the world to one
power and what is bad to another. The fable is transparent enough, and
we, who have only just learned to smile at a personal devil, may affect
to wonder that any one should ever have taken it literally. But in an
age when the assertive imagination was unchecked by any critical sense,
such a device at least avoided the scandal of attributing all the evils
and sins of this world to a principle essentially inviolate and pure. By
avoiding what must have seemed a blasphemy to Saint Augustine, as to
every one whose speculation was still relevant to his conscience and to
his practical idealism, the Manicheans thus prevailed on many to
overlook the contradictions which their system developed so soon as its
figments were projected into the sphere of absolute existences.

[Sidenote: All things good by nature.]

The horror with which an idealistic youth at first views the truculence
of nature and the turpitude of worldly life is capable of being softened
by experience. Time subdues our initial preferences by showing us the
complexity of moral relations in this world, and by extending our
imaginative sympathy to forms of existence and passion at first
repulsive, which from new and ultra-personal points of view may have
their natural sweetness and value. In this way, Saint Augustine was
ultimately brought to appreciate the catholicity and scope of those
Greek sages who had taught that all being was to itself good, that evil
was but the impediment of natural function, and that therefore the
conception of anything totally or essentially evil was only a petulance
or exaggeration in moral judgment that took, as it were, the bit in its
teeth, and turned an incidental conflict of interests into a
metaphysical opposition of natures. All definite being is in itself
congruous with the true and the good, since its constitution is
intelligible and its operation is creative of values. Were it not for
the limitations of matter and the accidental crowding and conflict of
life, all existing natures might subsist and prosper in peace and
concord, just as their various ideas live without contradiction in the
realm of conceptual truth. We may say of all things, in the words of the
Gospel, that their angels see the face of God. Their ideals are no less
cases of the good, no less instances of perfection, than is the ideal
locked in our private bosom. It is the part of justice and charity to
recognise this situation, in view of which we may justly say that evil
is always relative and subordinate to some constituted nature in itself
a standard of worth, a point of departure for the moral valuation of
eventual changes and of surrounding things. Evil is accordingly
accidental and unnatural; it follows upon the maladaptation of actions
to natures and of natures to one another. It can be no just ground for
the condemnation of any of those natural essences which only give rise
to it by their imperfect realisation.

The Semitic idea of creation could now receive that philosophical
interpretation which it so sadly needed. Primordially, and in respect to
what was positive in them, all things might he expressions of the good;
in their essence and ideal state they might be said to be created by
God. For God was the supreme ideal, to which all other goods were
subordinate and instrumental; and if we agree to make a cosmogony out of
morals and to hypostasise the series of rational ideals, taken in the
inverse order, into a series of efficient causes, it is clear that the
highest good, which is at the end of the moral scale, will now figure as
a first cause at the beginning of the physical sequence. This operation
is what is recorded and demanded in the doctrine of creation: a doctrine
which would lose its dogmatic force if we allowed either the moral
ideality or the physical efficacy of the creator to drop out of sight.
If the moral ideality is sacrificed, we pass to an ordinary pantheism,
while if the physical efficacy is surrendered, we take refuge in a
naturalistic idealism of the Aristotelian type, where the good is a
function of things and neither their substance nor their cause.

[Sidenote: The doctrine of creation demands that of the fall.]

To accept the doctrine of creation, after it had become familiar, was
not very hard, because the contradiction it contains could then be set
down to our imperfect apprehension. The unintelligibility of matters of
fact does not lead us to deny them, but merely to study them; and when
the creation was accepted as a fact, its unintelligibility became
merely a theological problem and a religious mystery, such as no mortal
philosophy can be without. But for Saint Augustine the situation was
wholly different. A doctrine of the creation had to be constructed: the
disparate ideas had to be synthesised which posterity was afterward to
regard as the obvious, if not wholly reconcilable, attributes of the
deity. The mystery could not then be recognised; it had to be made. And
Saint Augustine, with his vital religion, with his spontaneous adoration
of God the ideal, could not attribute to that ideal unimpeded efficacy
in the world. To admit that all natures were essentially good might
dispel the Manichean fancy about an Evil Absolute engaged in single
combat with an Absolute Good; but insight into the meaning and the
natural conditions of evil could only make its presence more obvious and
its origin more intimately bound up with the general constitution of the
world. Evil is only imperfection; but everything is imperfect. Conflict
is only maladaptation, but there is maladaptation everywhere. If we
assume, then, what the doctrine of creation requires, that all things at
first proceeded out of the potency of the good—their matter and form,
their distribution and their energies, being wholly attributable to the
attraction of the ultimately best—it is clear that some calamity must
have immediately supervened by which the fountains of life were defiled,
the strength of the ideal principle in living things weakened, and the
mortal conflict instituted which not only condemns all existent things
ultimately to perish, but hardly allows them, even while they painfully
endure, to be truly and adequately themselves.

Original sin, with the fall of the angels and of man for its mythical
ground, thus enters into the inmost web of Augustinian philosophy. This
fact cannot be too much insisted upon, for only by the immediate
introduction of original sin into the history of the world could a man
to whom God was still a moral term believe at all in the natural and
fundamental efficacy of God in the cosmos. The doctrine of the fall made
it possible for Saint Augustine to accept the doctrine of the creation.
Both belonged to the same mythical region in which the moral values of
life were made to figure as metaphysical agents; but when once the
metaphysical agency of the highest good was admitted into a poetic
cosmogony, it became imperative to admit also the metaphysical agency of
sin into it; for otherwise the highest good would be deprived of its
ideal and moral character, would cease to be the entelechy of rational
life, and be degraded into a flat principle of description or synthesis
for experience and nature as they actually are. God would thus become a
natural agent, like the fire of Heraclitus, in which human piety could
take an interest only by force of traditional inertia and
unintelligence, while the continued muttering of the ritual prevented
men from awaking to the disappearance of the god. The essence of deity,
as Augustine was inwardly convinced, was correspondence to human
aspiration, moral perfection, and ideality. God, therefore, as the
Manicheans, with Plato and Aristotle before them, had taught, could be
the author of good only; or, to express the same thing in less
figurative and misleading language, it was only the good in things that
could contribute to our idea of divinity. What was evil must, therefore,
be carried up into another concept, must be referred, if you will, to
another mythical agent; and this mythical agent in Saint Augustine’s
theology was named sin.

[Sidenote: Original sin.]

Everything in the world which obscured the image of the creator or
rebelled against his commandments (everything, that is, which prevented
in things the expression of their natural ideals) was due to sin. Sin
was responsible for disease of mind and body, for all suffering, for
death, for ignorance, perversity, and dulness. Sin was responsible—so
truly _original_ was it—for what was painful and wrong even in the
animal kingdom, and sin—such was the paradoxical apex of this inverted
series of causes—sin was responsible for sin itself. The insoluble
problems of the origin of evil and of freedom, in a world produced in
its every fibre by omnipotent goodness, can never be understood until we
remember their origin. They are artificial problems, unknown to
philosophy before it betook itself to the literal justification of
fables in which the objects of rational endeavour were represented as
causes of natural existence. The former are internal products of life,
the latter its external conditions. When the two are confused we reach
the contradiction confronting Saint Augustine, and all who to this day
have followed in his steps. The cause of everything must have been the
cause of sin, yet the principle of good could not be the principle of
evil. Both propositions were obviously true, and they were contradictory
only after the mythical identification of the God which meant the ideal
of life with the God which meant the forces of nature.

[Sidenote: Forced abandonment of the ideal.]

It would help us little, in trying to understand these doctrines, to
work over the dialectic of them, and to express the contradiction in
somewhat veiled terms or according to new pictorial analogies. Good and
evil, in the context of life, undoubtedly have common causes; but that
system which involves both is for that very reason not an ideal system,
and to represent it as such is simply to ignore the conscience and the
upward effort of life. The contradiction can be avoided only by
renouncing the meaning of one of the terms; either, that is, by no
longer regarding the good as an absolute creator, but merely as a
partial result or tendency in a living world whose life naturally
involves values, or else by no longer conceiving God as the ideal term
in man’s own existence. The latter is the solution adopted by
metaphysicians generally, and by Saint Augustine himself when hard
pressed by the exigencies of his double allegiance. God, he tells us, is
just, although not just as man is, _nor as man should be_. In other
words, God is to be called just even when he is unjust in the only sense
in which the word justice has a meaning among men. We are forced, in
fact, to obscure our moral concepts and make them equivocal in order to
be able to apply them to the efficient forces and actual habits of this
world. The essence of divinity is no longer moral excellence, but
ontological and dynamic relations to the natural world, so that the love
of God would have to become, not an exercise of reason and conscience,
as it naturally was with Saint Augustine, but a mystical intoxication,
as it was with Spinoza.

The sad effects of this degradation of God into a physical power are not
hard to trace in Augustine’s own doctrine and feeling. He became a
champion of arbitrary grace and arbitrary predestination to perdition.
The eternal damnation of innocents gave him no qualms; and in this we
must admire the strength of his logic, since if it is right that there
should be wrong at all, there is no particular reason for stickling at
the quantity or the enormity of it. And yet there are sentences which
for their brutality and sycophancy cannot be read without
pain—sentences inspired by this misguided desire to apologise for the
crimes of the universe. “Why should God not create beings that he
foreknew were to sin, when indeed in their persons and by their fates
he could manifest both what punishment their guilt deserved and what
free gifts he might bestow on them by his favour?” “Thinking it more
lordly and better to do well even in the presence of evil than not to
allow evil to exist at all.” Here the pitiful maxim of doing evil that
good may come is robbed of the excuse it finds in human limitations and
is made the first principle of divine morality. Repellent and contorted
as these ultimate metaphysical theories may seem, we must not suppose
that they destroyed in Saint Augustine that practical and devotional
idealism which they contradicted: the region of Christian charity is
fortunately far wider and far nearer home than that of Christian
apologetics. The work of practical redemption went on, while the
dialectics about the perfection of the universe were forgotten; and
Saint Augustine never ceased, by a happy inconsistency, to bewail the
sins and to combat the heresies which his God was stealthily nursing, so
that in their melodramatic punishment his glory might be more
beautifully manifested.

[Sidenote: The problem among the protestants.]

It was Saint Augustine, as we know, who, in spite of his fervid
Catholicism, was the favourite master of both Luther and Calvin. They
emphasised, however, his more fanatical side, and this very
predestinarian and absolutist doctrine which he had prevailed on himself
to accept. Here was the pantheistic leaven doing its work; and
concentration of attention on the Old Testament, given the reformers’
controversial and metaphysical habit of thought, could only precipitate
the inevitable. While popular piety bubbled up into all sorts of
emotional and captious sects, each with its pathetic insistence on some
text or on some whimsey, but all inwardly inspired by an earnest
religious hunger, academic and cultivated Protestantism became every day
more pale and rationalistic. Mediocre natures continued to rehearse the
old platitudes and tread the slippery middle courses of one orthodoxy or
another; but distinguished minds could no longer treat such survivals as
more than allegories, historic or mythical illustrations of general
spiritual truths. So Lessing, Goethe, and the idealists in Germany, and
after them such lay prophets as Carlyle and Emerson, had for
Christianity only an inessential respect. They drank their genuine
inspiration directly from nature, from history, from the total personal
apprehension they might have of life. In them speculative theology
rediscovered its affinity to neo-Platonism; in other words, Christian
philosophy was washed clean of its legendary alloy to become a pure
cosmic speculation. It was Gnosticism come again in a very different age
to men in an opposite phase of culture, but with its logic unchanged.
The creation was the self-diremption of the infinite into finite
expression, the fall was the self-discovery of this finitude, the
incarnation was the awakening of the finite to its essential infinity;
and here, a sufficient number of pages having been engrossed, the
matter generally hastened to a conclusion; for the redemption with its
means of application, once the central point in Christianity, was less
pliable to the new pantheistic interpretation. Neo-Platonism had indeed
cultivated asceticism, ecstasies, and a hope of reabsorption into the
One; but these things a modern, and especially a Teutonic, temperament
could hardly relish; and though absolutism in a sense must
discountenance all finite interests and dissolve all experience, in
theory, into a neutral whole, yet this inevitable mysticism remained, as
with the Stoics, sternly optimistic, in order to respond to the vital
social forces which Protestantism embodied. The ethical part of
neo-Platonism and the corresponding Christian doctrine of salvation had
accordingly to be discarded; for mystical as the northern soul may
gladly be in speculation, to satisfy its sentimentality, it hardly can
be mystical in action, since it has to satisfy also its interest in
success and its fidelity to instinct.

[Sidenote: Pantheism accepted.]

An absolutism which thus encourages and sanctions the natural will is
Stoical and pantheistic; it does not, like Indian and Platonic
absolutism, seek to suspend the will in view of some supernatural
destiny. Pantheism subordinates morally what it finds to be dependent in
existence; its religion bids human reason and interest abdicate before
cosmic forces, instead of standing out, like Buddhism and Christianity,
for salvation, for spiritual extrication, from a world which they
regard as delusive and fallen. The world of German absolutism, like the
Stoic world, was not fallen. On the contrary, it was divinely inspired
and altogether authoritative; he alone who did not find his place and
function in it was unholy and perverse. This world-worship, despising
heartily every finite and rational ideal, gives to impulse and fact,
whatever they may be, liberty to flourish under a divine warrant. Were
the people accepting such a system corrupt, it would sanction their
corruption, and thereby, most probably, lead to its own abandonment, for
it would bring on an ascetic and supernaturalistic reaction by which its
convenient sycophancy would be repudiated. But reflection and piety,
even if their object be material and their worship idolatrous, exalt the
mind and raise it above vulgar impulse. If you fetch from contemplation
a theoretic license to be base, your contemplative habit itself will
have purified you more than your doctrine will have power to degrade you
afresh, for training affects instinct much more than opinion can.
Antinomian theory can flourish blamelessly in a puritan soil, for there
it instinctively remains theoretical. And the Teutonic pantheists are
for the most part uncontaminated souls, puritan by training, and only
interested in furthering the political and intellectual efficiency of
the society in which they live. Their pantheism under these
circumstances makes them the more energetic and turns them into
practical positivists, docile to their social medium and apologists for
all its conventions. So that, while they write books to disprove
naturalism in natural philosophy where it belongs, in morals where
naturalism is treason they are themselves naturalists of the most
uncritical description, forgetting that only the interests of the finite
soul introduce such a thing as good and evil into the world, and that
nature and society are so far from being authoritative and divine that
they have no value whatever save by the services they may render to each
spirit in its specific and genuine ambitions.

[Sidenote: Plainer scorn for the ideal.]

Indeed, this pantheistic subordination of conscience to what happens to
exist, this optimism annulling every human ideal, betrays its immoral
tendency very clearly so soon as it descends from theological seminaries
into the lay world. Poets at first begin to justify, on its authority,
their favourite passions and to sing the picturesqueness of a
blood-stained world. “Practical” men follow, deprecating any reflection
which may cast a doubt on the providential justification of their chosen
activities, and on the invisible value of the same, however sordid,
brutal, or inane they may visibly be. Finally, politicians learn to
invoke destiny and the movement of the age to save themselves the
trouble of discerning rational ends and to colour their secret
indifference to the world’s happiness. The follies thus sanctioned
theoretically, because they are involved in a perfect world, would
doubtless be perpetrated none the less by the same persons had they
absorbed in youth a different religion; for conduct is rooted in deep
instincts which affect opinion more than opinion can avail to affect
them in turn. Yet there is an added indignity in not preserving a clear
and honest mind, and in quitting the world without having in some
measure understood and appreciated it.

[Sidenote: The price of mythology is superstition.]

Pantheism is mythical and has, as we have just seen, all the subversive
powers of ordinary superstition. It turns the natural world, man’s
stamping-ground and system of opportunities, into a self-justifying and
sacred life; it endows the blameless giant with an inhuman soul and then
worships the monstrous divinity it has fabricated. It thereby encounters
the same dilemma that defeats all mythology when it forgets its merely
poetic office and trespasses upon moral ground. It must either interpret
the natural world faithfully, attributing to the mythical deity the sort
of life that dramatically suits its visible behaviour, or if it
idealises and moralises the spectacle it must renounce the material
reality and efficacy of its gods. Either the cosmic power must cover the
actual goodness and badness in nature impartially, when to worship it
would be idolatrous, or it must cover only the better side of nature,
those aspects of it which support and resemble human virtue. In the
latter case it is human virtue that mythology is formulating in a
dramatic fiction, a human ideal that is being illustrated by a poet,
who selects for the purpose certain phases of nature and experience. By
this idealisation the affinity which things often have to man’s
interests may be brought out in a striking manner; but their total and
real mechanism is no better represented than that of animals in Æsop’s
fables. To detect the divergence it suffices to open the eyes; and while
nature may be rationally admired and cherished for so supporting the
soul, it is her eventual ministry to man that makes her admirable, not
her independent magnitude or antiquity. To worship nature as she really
is, with all her innocent crimes made intentional by our mythology and
her unfathomable constitution turned into a caricature of barbarian
passions, is to subvert the order of values and to falsify natural
philosophy. Yet this dislocation of reason, both in its conceptions and
in its allegiance, is the natural outcome of thinking on mythical lines.
A myth, by turning phenomena into expressions of thought and passion,
teaches man to look for models and goals of action in that external
world where reason can find nothing but instruments and materials.




CHAPTER X

PIETY


[Sidenote: The core of religion not theoretical.]

Hebraism is a striking example of a religion tending to discard
mythology and magic. It was a Hebraising apostle who said that true
religion and undefiled was to visit the fatherless and the widow, and do
other works of mercy. Although a complete religion can hardly remain
without theoretic and ritual expression, we must remember that after all
religion has other aspects less conspicuous, perhaps, than its
mythology, but often more worthy of respect. If religion be, as we have
assumed, an imaginative symbol for the Life of Reason, it should contain
not only symbolic ideas and rites, but also symbolic sentiments and
duties. And so it everywhere does in a notable fashion. Piety and
spirituality are phases of religion no less important than mythology, or
than those metaphysical spectres with which mythology terminates. It is
therefore time we should quite explicitly turn from religious ideas to
religious emotions, from imaginative history and science to imaginative
morals.

Piety, in its nobler and Roman sense, may be said to mean man’s
reverent attachment to the sources of his being and the steadying of his
life by that attachment. A soul is but the last bubble of a long
fermentation in the world. If we wish to live associated with permanent
racial interests we must plant ourselves on a broad historic and human
foundation, we must absorb and interpret the past which has made us, so
that we may hand down its heritage reinforced, if possible, and in no
way undermined or denaturalised. This consciousness that the human
spirit is derived and responsible, that all its functions are heritages
and trusts, involves a sentiment of gratitude and duty which we may call
piety.

[Sidenote: Loyalty to the sources of our being.]

The true objects of piety are, of course, those on which life and its
interests really depend: parents first, then family, ancestors, and
country; finally, humanity at large and the whole natural cosmos. But
had a lay sentiment toward these forces been fostered by clear knowledge
of their nature and relation to ourselves, the dutifulness or cosmic
emotion thereby aroused would have remained purely moral and historical.
As science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowed
poetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason and
duty. But man, in his perplexities and pressing needs, has plunged, once
for all, into imaginative courses through which it is our business to
follow him, to see if he may not eventually reach his goal even by
those by-paths and dark circumlocutions.

[Sidenote: The pious Æneas.]

What makes piety an integral part of traditional religions is the fact
that moral realities are represented in the popular mind by poetic
symbols. The awe inspired by principles so abstract and consequences so
remote and general is arrested at their conventional name. We have all
read in boyhood, perhaps with derision, about the pious Æneas. His piety
may have seemed to us nothing but a feminine sensibility, a faculty of
shedding tears on slight provocation. But in truth Æneas’s piety, as
Virgil or any Roman would have conceived it, lay less in his feelings
than in his function and vocation. He was bearing the Palladium of his
country to a new land, to found another Troy, so that the blood and
traditions of his ancestors might not perish. His emotions were only the
appropriate expression of his priestly office. The hero might have been
stern and stolid enough on his own martial ground, but since he bore the
old Anchises from the ruins of Ilium he had assumed a sacred mission.
Henceforth a sacerdotal unction and lyric pathos belonged rightfully to
his person. If those embers, so religiously guarded, should by chance
have been extinguished, there could never have been a Vestal fire nor
any Rome. So that all that Virgil and his readers, if they had any
piety, revered in the world had been hazarded in those legendary
adventures. It was not Æneas’s own life or private ambition that was at
stake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil’s own, was
ennobled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. It
was truly an epic destiny that inspired both poet and hero.

[Sidenote: An ideal background required.]

If we look closer, however, we shall see that mythical and magic
elements were requisite to lend this loftiness to the argument. Had
Æneas not been Venus’s son, had no prophetic instinct animated him, had
no Juno been planning the rise of Carthage, how could the future
destinies of this expedition have been imported into it, to lift it
above some piratical or desperate venture? Colonists passing in our day
to America or Australia might conceivably carry with them the seeds of
empires as considerable as Rome’s. But they would go out thinking of
their private livelihood and convenience, breaking or loosening whatever
pious bonds might unite them to the past, and quite irresponsibly laying
the foundations for an unknown future. A poet, to raise them to the
height of their unwitting function, would have to endow them with second
sight and a corresponding breadth of soul and purpose. He would need, in
a word, heroic figures and supernatural machinery.

Now, what supernatural machinery and heroic figures do for an epic poet
piety does for a race. It endows it, through mythical and magic symbols,
with something like a vision or representation of its past and future.
Religion is normally the most traditional and national of things. It
embodies and localises the racial heritage. Commandments of the law,
feasts and fasts, temples and the tombs associated with them, are so
many foci of communal life, so many points for the dissemination of
custom. The Sabbath, which a critical age might justify on hygienic
grounds, is inconceivable without a religious sanction. The craving for
rest and emotion expressed itself spontaneously in a practice which, as
it established itself, had to be sanctioned by fables till the recurrent
holiday, with all its humane and chastening influences, came to be
established on supernatural authority. It was now piety to observe it
and to commemorate in it the sacred duties and traditions of the race.
In this function, of course, lay its true justification, but the
mythical one had to be assigned, since the diffused prosaic advantages
of such a practice would never avail to impose it on irrational wills.
Indeed, to revert to our illustration, had Æneas foreseen in detail the
whole history of Rome, would not his faith in his divine mission have
been considerably dashed? The reality, precious and inestimable as on
the whole it was to humanity, might well have shocked him by its
cruelties, shames, and disasters. He would have wished to found only a
perfect nation and a city eternal indeed. A want of rationality and
measure in the human will, that has not learned to prize small
betterments and finite but real goods, compels it to deceive itself
about the rewards of life in order to secure them. That celestial
mission, those heavenly apparitions, those incalculable treasures
carried through many a storm, abused ÆEneas’s mind in order to nerve him
to his real duty. Yet his illusion was merely intellectual. The mission
undertaken was truly worth carrying out. Piety thus came to bear the
fruits of philanthropy in an age when the love of man was inconceivable.
A dull and visionary intellect could hit on no other way of justifying a
good instinct.

[Sidenote: Piety accepts natural conditions and present tasks.]

[Sidenote: The leadership of instinct is normal.]

Philosophers who harbour illusions about the status of intellect in
nature may feel that this leadership of instinct in moral life is a sort
of indignity, and that to dwell on it so insistently is to prolong
satire without wit. But the leadership of instinct, the conscious
expression of mechanism, is not merely a necessity in the Life of
Reason, it is a safeguard. Piety, in spite of its allegories, contains a
much greater wisdom than a half-enlightened and pert intellect can
attain. Natural beings have natural obligations, and the value of things
for them is qualified by distance and by accidental material
connections. Intellect would tend to gauge things impersonally by their
intrinsic values, since intellect is itself a sort of disembodied and
universal function; it would tend to disregard material conditions and
that irrational substratum of reason without which reason would have no
organs and no points of application. Piety, on the contrary, esteems
things apart from their intrinsic worth, on account of their relation to
the agent’s person and fortune. Yet such esteem is perfectly rational,
partiality in man’s affections and allegiance being justified by the
partial nature and local status of his life. Piety is the spirit’s
acknowledgment of its incarnation. So, in filial and parental affection,
which is piety in an elementary form, there is a moulding of will and
emotion, a check to irresponsible initiative, in obedience to the facts
of animal reproduction. Every living creature has an intrinsic and ideal
worth; he is the centre of actual and yet more of potential interests.
But this moral value, which even the remotest observer must recognise in
both parent and child, is not the ground of their specific affection for
each other, which no other mortal is called to feel their regard. This
affection is based on the incidental and irrational fact that the one
has this particular man for a father, and the other that particular man
for a son. Yet, considering the animal basis of human life, an
attachment resting on that circumstance is a necessary and rational
attachment.

This physical bond should not, indeed, disturb the intellect in its
proper function or warp its judgments; you should not, under guise of
tenderness, become foolish and attribute to your father or child greater
stature or cleverness or goodness than he actually possesses. To do so
is a natural foible but no part of piety or true loyalty. It is one
thing to lack a heart and another to possess eyes and a just
imagination. Indeed, piety is never so beautiful and touching, never so
thoroughly humane and invincible, as when it is joined to an impartial
intellect, conscious of the relativity involved in existence and able to
elude, through imaginative sympathy, the limits set to personal life by
circumstance and private duty. As a man dies nobly when, awaiting his
own extinction, he is interested to the last in what will continue to be
the interests and joys of others, so he is most profoundly pious who
loves unreservedly a country, friends, and associations which he knows
very well to be not the most beautiful on earth, and who, being wholly
content in his personal capacity with his natural conditions, does not
need to begrudge other things whatever speculative admiration they may
truly deserve. The ideal in this polyglot world, where reason can
receive only local and temporal expression, is to understand all
languages and to speak but one, so as to unite, in a manly fashion,
comprehension with propriety.

Piety is in a sense pathetic because it involves subordination to
physical accident and acceptance of finitude. But it is also noble and
eminently fruitful because, in subsuming a life under the general laws
of relativity, it meets fate with simple sincerity and labours in
accordance with the conditions imposed. Since man, though capable of
abstraction and impartiality, is rooted like a vegetable to one point
in space and time, and exists by limitation, piety belongs to the
equilibrium of his being. It resides, so to speak, at his centre of
gravity, at the heart and magnetic focus of his complex endowment. It
exercises there the eminently sane function of calling thought home. It
saves speculative and emotional life from hurtful extravagance by
keeping it traditional and social. Conventional absurdities have at
least this advantage, that they may be taken conventionally and may come
to be, in practice, mere symbols for their uses. Piety is more closely
linked with custom than with thought. It exercises an irrational
suasion, moralises by contagion, and brings an emotional peace.

[Sidenote: Embodiment essential to spirit.]

Patriotism is another form of piety in which its natural basis and
rational function may be clearly seen. It is right to prefer our own
essential to country to all others, because we are children and citizens
before we can be travellers or philosophers. Specific character is a
necessary point of origin for universal relations: a pure nothing can
have no radiation or scope. It is no accident for the soul to be
embodied; her very essence is to express and bring to fruition the
body’s functions and resources. Its instincts make her ideals and its
relations her world. A native country is a sort of second body, another
enveloping organism to give the will definition. A specific inheritance
strengthens the soul. Cosmopolitanism has doubtless its place, because a
man may well cultivate in himself, and represent in his nation,
affinities to other peoples, and such assimilation to them as is
compatible with personal integrity and clearness of purpose. Plasticity
to things foreign need not be inconsistent with happiness and utility at
home. But happiness and utility are possible nowhere to a man who
represents nothing and who looks out on the world without a plot of his
own to stand on, either on earth or in heaven. He wanders from place to
place, a voluntary exile, always querulous, always uneasy, always alone.
His very criticisms express no ideal. His experience is without
sweetness, without cumulative fruits, and his children, if he has them,
are without morality. For reason and happiness are like other
flowers—they wither when plucked.

[Sidenote: Piety to the gods takes form from current ideals.]

The object most commonly associated with piety is the gods. Popular
philosophy, inverting the natural order of ideas, thinks piety to the
gods the source of morality. But piety, when genuine, is rather an
incidental expression of morality. Its sources are perfectly natural. A
volitional life that reaches the level of reflection is necessarily
moral in proportion to the concreteness and harmony of its instincts.
The fruits which such harmonious instincts, expressed in consciousness,
may eventually bear, fruits which would be the aim of virtue, are not
readily imaginable, and the description of them has long ago been
intrusted to poets and mythologists. Thus the love of God, for example,
is said to be the root of Christian charity, but is in reality only its
symbol. For no man not having a superabundant need and faculty of loving
real things could have given a meaning to the phrase, “love of God,” or
been moved by it to any action. History shows in unequivocal fashion
that the God loved shifts his character with the shift in his
worshippers’ real affections. What the psalmist loves is the beauty of
God’s house and the place where his glory dwelleth. A priestly quietude
and pride, a grateful, meditative leisure after the storms of sedition
and war, some retired unity of mind after the contradictions of the
world—this is what the love of God might signify for the levites. Saint
John tells us that he who says he loves God and loves not his neighbour
is a liar. Here the love of God is an anti-worldly estimation of things
and persons, a heart set on that kingdom of heaven in which the humble
and the meek should be exalted. Again, for modern Catholicism the phrase
has changed its meaning remarkably and signifies in effect love for
Christ’s person, because piety has taken a sentimental turn and centred
on maintaining imaginary personal relations with the Saviour. How should
we conceive that a single supernatural influence was actually
responsible for moral effects themselves so various, and producing, in
spite of a consecutive tradition, such various notions concerning their
object and supposed source?

[Sidenote: The religion of humanity.]

Mankind at large is also, to some minds, an object of piety. But this
religion of humanity is rather a desideratum than a fact: humanity does
not actually appear to anybody in a religious light. The _nihil homine
homini utittus_ remains a signal truth, but the collective influence of
men and their average nature are far too mixed and ambiguous to fill the
soul with veneration. Piety to mankind must be three-fourths pity. There
are indeed specific human virtues, but they are those necessary to
existence, like patience and courage. Supported on these indispensable
habits, mankind always carries an indefinite load of misery and vice.
Life spreads rankly in every wrong and impracticable direction as well
as in profitable paths, and the slow and groping struggle with its own
ignorance, inertia, and folly, leaves it covered in every age of history
with filth and blood. It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s
wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.
There is a _fond_ of unhappiness in every bosom, but the depths are
seldom probed; and there is no doubt that sometimes frivolity and
sometimes sturdy habit helps to keep attention on the surface and to
cover up the inner void. Certain moralists, without meaning to be
satirical, often say that the sovereign cure for unhappiness is work.
Unhappily, the work they recommend is better fitted to dull pain than to
remove its cause. It occupies the faculties without rationalising the
life. Before mankind could inspire even moderate satisfaction, not to
speak of worship, its whole economy would have to be reformed, its
reproduction regulated, its thoughts cleared up, its affections
equalised and refined.

To worship mankind as it is would be to deprive it of what alone makes
it akin to the divine—its aspiration. For this human dust lives; this
misery and crime are dark in contrast to an imagined excellence; they
are lighted up by a prospect of good. Man is not adorable, but he
adores, and the object of his adoration may be discovered within him and
elicited from his own soul. In this sense the religion of humanity is
the only religion, all others being sparks and abstracts of the same.
The indwelling ideal lends all the gods their divinity. No power, either
physical or psychical, has the least moral prerogative nor any just
place in religion at all unless it supports and advances the ideal
native to the worshipper’s soul. Without moral society between the
votary and his god religion is pure idolatry; and even idolatry would be
impossible but for the suspicion that somehow the brute force exorcised
in prayer might help or mar some human undertaking.

[Sidenote: Cosmic piety.]

There is, finally, a philosophic piety which has the universe for its
object. This feeling, common to ancient and modern Stoics, has an
obvious justification in man’s dependence upon the natural world and in
its service to many sides of the mind. Such justification of cosmic
piety is rather obscured than supported by the euphemisms and
ambiguities in which these philosophers usually indulge in their attempt
to preserve the customary religious unction. For the more they personify
the universe and give it the name of God the more they turn it into a
devil. The universe, so far as we can observe it, is a wonderful and
immense engine; its extent, its order, its beauty, its cruelty, makes it
alike impressive. If we dramatise its life and conceive its spirit, we
are filled with wonder, terror, and amusement, so magnificent is that
spirit, so prolific, inexorable, grammatical, and dull. Like all animals
and plants, the cosmos has its own way of doing things, not wholly
rational nor ideally best, but patient, fatal, and fruitful. Great is
this organism of mud and fire, terrible this vast, painful, glorious
experiment. Why should we not look on the universe with piety? Is it not
our substance? Are we made of other clay? All our possibilities lie from
eternity hidden in its bosom. It is the dispenser of all our joys. We
may address it without superstitious terrors; it is not wicked. It
follows its own habits abstractedly; it can be trusted to be true to its
word. Society is not impossible between it and us, and since it is the
source of all our energies, the home of all our happiness, shall we not
cling to it and praise it, seeing that it vegetates so grandly and so
sadly, and that it is not for us to blame it for what, doubtless, it
never knew that it did? Where there is such infinite and laborious
potency there is room for every hope. If we should abstain from judging
a father’s errors or a mother’s foibles, why should we pronounce
sentence on the ignorant crimes of the universe, which have passed into
our own blood? The universe is the true Adam, the creation the true
fall; and as we have never blamed our mythical first parent very much,
in spite of the disproportionate consequences of his sin, because we
felt that he was but human and that we, in his place, might have sinned
too, so we may easily forgive our real ancestor, whose connatural sin we
are from moment to moment committing, since it is only the necessary
rashness of venturing to be without fore-knowing the price or the fruits
of existence.




CHAPTER XI

SPIRITUALITY AND ITS CORRUPTIONS


[Sidenote: To be spiritual is to live in view of the ideal.]

In honouring the sources of life, piety is retrospective. It collects,
as it were, food for morality, and fortifies it with natural and
historic nutriment. But a digestive and formative principle must exist
to assimilate this nutriment; a direction and an ideal have to be
imposed on these gathered forces. So that religion has a second and a
higher side, which looks to the end toward which we move as piety looks
to the conditions of progress and to the sources from which we draw our
energies. This aspiring side of religion may be called Spirituality.
Spirituality is nobler than piety, because what would fulfil our being
and make it worth having is what alone lends value to that being’s
source. Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the
substance and cause of all things. The gift of existence would be
worthless unless existence was good and supported at least a possible
happiness. A man is spiritual when he lives in the presence of the
ideal, and whether he eat or drink does so for the sake of a true and
ultimate good. He is spiritual when he envisages his goal so frankly
that his whole material life becomes a transparent and transitive
vehicle, an instrument which scarcely arrests attention but allows the
spirit to use it economically and with perfect detachment and freedom.

There is no need that this ideal should be pompously or mystically
described. A simple life is its own reward, and continually realises its
function. Though a spiritual man may perfectly well go through intricate
processes of thought and attend to very complex affairs, his single eye,
fixed on a rational purpose, will simplify morally the natural chaos it
looks upon and will remain free. This spiritual mastery is, of course,
no slashing and forced synthesis of things into a system of philosophy
which, even if it were thinkable, would leave the conceived logical
machine without ideality and without responsiveness to actual interests;
it is rather an inward aim and fixity in affection that knows what to
take and what to leave in a world over which it diffuses something of
its own peace. It threads its way through the landscape with so little
temptation to distraction that it can salute every irrelevant thing, as
Saint Francis did the sun and moon, with courtesy and a certain
affectionate detachment.

[Sidenote: Spirituality natural.]

Spirituality likes to say, Behold the lilies of the field! For its
secret has the same simplicity as their vegetative art; only
spirituality has succeeded in adding consciousness without confusing
instinct. This success, unfortunately so rare in man’s life as to seem
paradoxical, is its whole achievement. Spirituality ought to have been a
matter of course, since conscious existence has inherent value and there
is no intrinsic ground why it should smother that value in alien
ambitions and servitudes. But spirituality, though so natural and
obvious a thing, is subject, like the lilies’ beauty, to corruption. I
know not what army of microbes evidently invaded from the beginning the
soul’s physical basis and devoured its tissues, so that sophistication
and bad dreams entirely obscured her limpidity.

None the less, spirituality, or life in the ideal, must be regarded as
the fundamental and native type of all life; what deviates from it is
disease and incipient dissolution, and is itself what might plausibly
demand explanation and evoke surprise. The spiritual man should be quite
at home in a world made to be used; the firmament is spread over him
like a tent for habitation, and sublunary furniture is even more
obviously to be taken as a convenience. He cannot, indeed, remove
mountains, but neither does he wish to do so. He comes to endow the
mountains with a function, and takes them at that, as a painter might
take his brushes and canvas. Their beauty, their metals, their
pasturage, their defence—this is what he observes in them and
celebrates in his addresses to them. The spiritual man, though not
ashamed to be a beggar, is cognisant of what wealth can do and of what
it cannot. His unworldliness is true knowledge of the world, not so
much a gaping and busy acquaintance as a quiet comprehension and
estimation which, while it cannot come without intercourse, can very
well lay intercourse aside.

[Sidenote: Primitive consciousness may be spiritual.]

If the essence of life be spiritual, early examples of life would seem
to be rather the opposite. But man’s view of primitive consciousness is
humanly biassed and relies too much on partial analogies. We conceive an
animal’s physical life in the gross, and must then regard the momentary
feelings that accompany it as very poor expressions either of its extent
or conditions. These feelings are, indeed, so many ephemeral lives,
containing no comprehensive view of the animal’s fortunes. They
accordingly fail to realise our notion of a spiritual human life which
would have to be rational and to form some representation of man’s total
environment and interests. But it hardly follows that animal feelings
are not spiritual in their nature and, on their narrow basis, perfectly
ideal. The most ideal human passion is love, which is also the most
absolute and animal and one of the most ephemeral. Very likely, if we
could revert to an innocent and absorbed view of our early sensations,
we should find that each was a little spiritual universe like Dante’s,
with its internal hell, purgatory, and heaven. Cut off, as those
experiences were, from all vistas and from sympathy with things remote,
they would contain a closed circle of interests, a flying glimpse of
eternity. So an infant living in his mystical limbo, without trailing
in a literal sense any clouds of glory from elsewhere, might well repeat
on a diminutive scale the beatific vision, insomuch as the only function
of which he was conscious at all might be perfectly fulfilled by him and
felt in its ideal import. Sucking and blinking are ridiculous processes,
perhaps, but they may bring a thrill and satisfaction no less ideal than
do the lark’s inexhaustible palpitations. Narrow scope and low
representative value are not defects in a consciousness having a narrow
physical basis and comparatively simple conditions.

[Sidenote: Spirit crossed by instrumentalities.]

The spirit’s foe in man has not been simplicity, but sophistication. His
instincts, in becoming many, became confused, and in growing permanent,
grew feeble and subject to arrest and deviation. Nature, we may say,
threw the brute form back into her cauldron, to smelt its substance
again before pouring it into a rational mould. The docility which
instinct, in its feebleness, acquired in the new creature was to be
reason’s opportunity, but before the larger harmony could be established
a sorry chaos was bound to reign in the mind. Every peeping impulse
would drop its dark hint and hide its head in confusion, while some
pedantic and unjust law would be passed in its absence and without its
vote. Secondary activities, which should always be representative, would
establish themselves without being really such. Means would be pursued
as if they were ends, and ends, under the illusion that they were
forces, would be expected to further some activity, itself without
justification. So pedantry might be substituted for wisdom, tyranny for
government, superstition for morals, rhetoric for art.

This sophistication is what renders the pursuit of reason so perplexing
and prolonged a problem. Half-formed adjustments in the brain and in the
body politic are represented in consciousness by what are called
passions, prejudices, motives, animosities. None of these felt
ebullitions in the least understands its own causes, effects, or
relations, but is hatched, so to speak, on the wing and flutters along
in the direction of its momentary preference until it lapses, it knows
not why, or is crossed and overwhelmed by some contrary power. Thus the
vital elements, which in their comparative isolation in the lower
animals might have yielded simple little dramas, each with its obvious
ideal, its achievement, and its quietus, when mixed in the barbarous
human will make a boisterous medley. For they are linked enough together
to feel a strain, but not knit enough to form a harmony. In this way the
unity of apperception seems to light up at first nothing but disunion.
The first dawn of that rational principle which involves immortality
breaks upon a discovery of death. The consequence is that ideality seems
to man something supernatural and almost impossible. He finds himself at
his awakening so confused that he puts chaos at the origin of the world.
But only order can beget a world or evoke a sensation. Chaos is
something secondary, composed of conflicting organisations interfering
with one another. It is compounded like a common noise out of jumbled
vibrations, each of which has its period and would in itself be musical.
The problem is to arrange these sounds, naturally so tuneful, into
concerted music. So long as total discord endures human life remains
spasmodic and irresolute; it can find no ideal and admit no total
representation of nature. Only when the disordered impulses and
perceptions settle down into a trained instinct, a steady, vital
response and adequate preparation for the world, do clear ideas and
successful purposes arise in the mind. The Life of Reason, with all the
arts, then begins its career.

The forces at play in this drama are, first, the primary impulses and
functions represented by elementary values; second, the thin network of
signals and responses by which those functions are woven into a total
organ, represented by discursive thought and all secondary mental
figments, and, third, the equilibrium and total power of that new
organism in action represented by the ideal. Spirituality, which might
have resided in the elementary values, sensuous or passionate, before
the relational process supervened, can now exist only in the ultimate
activity to which these processes are instrumental. Obstacles to
spirituality in human life may accordingly take the form of an arrest
either at the elementary values—an entanglement in sense and
passion—or at the instrumental processes—an entanglement in what in
religious parlance is called “the world.”

[Sidenote: One foe of the spirit is worldliness.]

Worldly minds bristle with conventional morality (though in private they
may nurse a vice or two to appease wayward nature), and they are
rational in everything except first principles. They consider the
voluptuary a weak fool, disgraced and disreputable; and if they notice
the spiritual man at all—for he is easily ignored—they regard him as a
useless and visionary fellow. Civilisation has to work algebraically
with symbols for known and unknown quantities which only in the end
resume their concrete values, so that the journeymen and vulgar
middlemen of the world know only conventional goods. They are lost in
instrumentalities and are themselves only instruments in the Life of
Reason. Wealth, station, fame, success of some notorious and outward
sort, make their standard of happiness. Their chosen virtues are
industry, good sense, probity, conventional piety, and whatever else has
acknowledged utility and seemliness.

[Sidenote: The case for and against pleasure.]

In its strictures on pleasure and reverie this Philistia is perfectly
right. Sensuous living (and I do not mean debauchery alone, but the
palpitations of any poet without art or any mystic without discipline)
is not only inconsequential and shallow, but dangerous to honour and to
sincere happiness. When life remains lost in sense or reverts to it
entirely, humanity itself is atrophied. And humanity is tormented and
spoilt when, as more often happens, a man disbelieving in reason and out
of humour with his world, abandons his soul to loose whimseys and
passions that play a quarrelsome game there, like so many ill-bred
children. Nevertheless, compared with the worldling’s mental mechanism
and rhetoric, the sensualist’s soul is a well of wisdom. He lives
naturally on an animal level and attains a kind of good. He has free and
concrete pursuits, though they be momentary, and he has sincere
satisfactions. He is less often corrupt than primitive, and even when
corrupt he finds some justification for his captious existence. He
harvests pleasures as he goes which intrinsically, as we have seen, may
have the depth and ideality which nature breathes in all her oracles.
His experience, for that reason, though disastrous is interesting and
has some human pathos; it is easier to make a saint out of a libertine
than out of a prig. True, the libertine is pursued, like the animals, by
unforeseen tortures, decay, and abandonment, and he is vowed to a total
death; but in these respects the worldly man has hardly an advantage.
The Babels he piles up may indeed survive his person, but they are
themselves vain and without issue, while his brief life has been
meantime spent in slavery and his mind cramped with cant and foolish
ambitions. The voluptuary is like some roving creature, browsing on
nettles and living by chance; the worldling is like a beast of burden,
now ill-used and over-worked, now fatted, stalled, and richly
caparisoned. Æsop might well have described their relative happiness in
a fable about the wild ass and the mule.

[Sidenote: Upshot of worldly wisdom.]

Thus, even if the voluptuary is sometimes a poet and the worldling often
an honest man, they both lack reason so entirely that reflection revolts
equally against the life of both. Vanity, vanity, is their common
epitaph. Now, at the soul’s christening and initiation into the Life of
Reason, the first vow must always be to “renounce the pomps and vanities
of this wicked world.” A person to whom this means nothing is one to
whom, in the end, nothing has meaning. He has not conceived a highest
good, no ultimate goal is within his horizon, and it has never occurred
to him to ask what he is living for. With all his pompous soberness, the
worldly man is fundamentally frivolous; with all his maxims and cant
estimations he is radically inane. He conforms to religion without
suspecting what religion means, not being in the least open to such an
inquiry. He judges art like a parrot, without having ever stopped to
evoke an image. He preaches about service and duty without any
recognition of natural demands or any standard of betterment. His moral
life is one vast anacoluthon in which the final term is left out that
might have given sense to the whole, one vast ellipsis in which custom
seems to bridge the chasm left between ideas. He denies the values of
sense because they tempt to truancies from mechanical activity; the
values of reason he necessarily ignores because they lie beyond his
scope. He adheres to conventional maxims and material quantitative
standards; his production is therefore, as far as he himself is
concerned, an essential waste and his activity an essential tedium. If
at least, like the sensualist, he enjoyed the process and expressed his
fancy in his life, there would be something gained; and this sort of
gain, though over-looked in the worldling’s maxims, all of which have a
categorical tone, is really what often lends his life some propriety and
spirit. Business and war and any customary task may come to form, so to
speak, an organ whose natural function will be just that operation, and
the most abstract and secondary activity, like that of adding figures or
reading advertisements, may in this way become the one function proper
to some soul. There are Nibelungen dwelling by choice underground and
happy pedants in the upper air.

Facts are not wanting for these pillars of society to take solace in, if
they wish to defend their philosophy. The time will come, astronomers
say, when life will be extinct upon this weary planet. All the delights
of sense and imagination will be over. It is these that will have turned
out to be vain. But the masses of matter which the worldlings have
transformed with their machinery, and carried from one place to another,
will remain to bear witness of them. The collocation of atoms will
never be what it would have been if their feet had less continually
beaten the earth. They may have the proud happiness of knowing that,
when nothing that the spirit values endures, the earth may still
sometimes, because of them, cast a slightly different shadow across the
moon’s craters.

[Sidenote: Two supposed escapes from vanity:]

There is no more critical moment in the life of a man and a nation than
that in which they are first conscience-stricken and convicted of
vanity. Failure, exhaustion, confusion of aims, or whatever else it be
that causes a revulsion, brings them before a serious dilemma. Has the
vanity of life hitherto been essential or incidental? Are we to look for
a new ambition, free from all the illusions of natural impulse, or are
we rather to renounce all will indiscriminately and fall back upon
conformity and consummate indifference? As this question is answered in
one way or the other, two different types of unworldly religion arise.

[Sidenote: fanaticism.]

The first, which heralds a new and unimpeachable special hope, a highest
duty finally recognised and driving out all lesser motives and
satisfactions from the soul, refers vanity to perversity, to error, to a
sort of original misunderstanding of our own nature which has led us, in
pursuing our worldly interests, to pursue in truth our own destruction.
The vanity of life, according to this belief, has been accidental. The
taint of existence is not innate vanity but casual sin; what has misled
us is not the will in general but only the false and ignorant direction
of a will not recognising its only possible satisfaction. What religion
in this case opposes to the world is a special law, a special hope, a
life intense, ambitious, and aggressive, but excluding much which to an
ingenuous will might seem excellent and tempting. Worldliness, in a
word, is here met by fanaticism.

[Sidenote: and mysticism.]

The second type of unworldly religion does not propose to overwhelm the
old Adam by singleminded devotion to one selected interest, nor does it
refer vanity to an accidental error. On the contrary, it conceives that
any special interest, any claim made by a finite and mortal creature
upon an infinite world, is bound to be defeated. It is not special acts,
it conceives, which are sinful, but action and will themselves that are
intrinsically foolish. The cure lies in rescinding the passionate
interests that torment us, not in substituting for them another
artificial passion more imperious and merciless than the natural
passions it comes to devour. This form of religion accordingly meets
worldliness with mysticism. Holiness is not placed in conformity to a
prescriptive law, in pursuit of a slightly regenerated bliss, nor in
advancing a special institution and doctrine. Holiness for the mystic
consists rather in universal mildness and insight; in freedom from all
passion, bias, and illusion; in a disembodied wisdom which accepts the
world, dominates its labyrinths, and is able to guide others through
it, without pursuing, for its own part, any hope or desire.

[Sidenote: Both are irrational.]

If these two expedients of the conscience convicted of vanity were to be
subjected to a critical judgment, they would both be convicted of vanity
themselves. The case of fanaticism is not doubtful, for the choice it
makes of a special law or institution or posthumous hope is purely
arbitrary, and only to be justified by the satisfaction it affords to
those very desires which it boasts to supplant. An oracular morality or
revealed religion can hope to support its singular claims only by
showing its general conformity to natural reason and its perfect
beneficence in the world. Where such justification is wanting the system
fanatically embraced is simply an epidemic mania, a social disease for
the philosopher to study and, if possible, to cure. Every strong passion
tends to dislodge the others, so that fanaticism may often involve a
certain austerity, impetuosity, and intensity of life. This vigour,
however, is seldom lasting; fanaticism dries its own roots and becomes,
when traditionally established, a convention as arbitrary as any fashion
and the nest for a new brood of mean and sinister habits. The Pharisee
is a new worldling, only his little world is narrowed to a temple, a
tribe, and a clerical tradition.

Mysticism, as its meditative nature comports, is never so pernicious,
nor can it be brought so easily round to worldliness again. That its
beneficent element is purely natural and inconsistent with a denial of
will, we shall have occasion elsewhere to observe. Suffice it here to
point out, that even if a moral nihilism could be carried through and
all definite interests abandoned, the vanity of life would not be
thereby corrected, but merely exposed. When our steps had been retraced
to the very threshold of being, nothing better worth doing would have
been discovered on the way. That to suffer illusion is a bad thing might
ordinarily be taken for an axiom, because ordinarily we assume that true
knowledge and rational volition are possible; but if this assumption is
denied, the value of retracting illusions is itself impeached. When
vanity is represented as universal and salvation as purely negative,
every one is left free to declare that it is vain to renounce vanity and
sinful to seek salvation.

This result, fantastic though it may at first sight appear, is one which
mysticism actually comes to under certain circumstances. Absolute
pessimism and absolute optimism are opposite sentiments attached to a
doctrine identically the same. In either case no improvement is
possible, and the authority of human ideals is denied. To escape, to
stanch natural wounds, to redeem society and the private soul, are then
mistaken and pitiable ambitions, adding to their vanity a certain touch
of impiety. One who really believes that the world’s work is all
providentially directed and that whatever happens, no matter how
calamitous or shocking, happens by divine right, has a quietistic
excuse for license; to check energy by reason, and seek to limit and
choose its path, seems to him a puny rebellion against omnipotence,
which works through madness and crime in man no less than through
cataclysms in outer nature. Every particular desire is vain and bound,
perhaps, to be defeated; but the mystic, when caught in the expansive
mood, accepts this defeat itself as needful. Thus a refusal to
discriminate rationally or to accept human interests as the standard of
right may culminate in a convulsive surrender to passion, just as, when
caught in the contractile phase, the same mysticism may lead to
universal abstention.

[Sidenote: Is there a third course?]

Must unworldliness be either fanatical or mystical? That is a question
of supreme importance to the moral philosopher. On the answer to it
hangs the rationality of a spiritual life; nay, the existence of
spirituality itself among the types of human activity. For the fanatic
and mystic are only spiritual in appearance because they separate
themselves from the prevalent interests of the world, the one by a
special persistent aggression, the other by a general passivity and
unearthly calm. The fanatic is, notwithstanding, nothing but a worldling
too narrow and violent to understand the world, while the mystic is a
sensualist too rapt and voluptuous to rationalise his sensations. Both
represent arrested forms of common-sense, partial developments of a
perfectly usual sensibility. There is no divine inspiration in having
only one passion left, nor in dreamfully accepting or renouncing all the
passions together. Spirituality, if identified with such types, might
justly be called childish. There is an innocent and incredulous
childishness, with its useless eyes wide open, just as there is a
malevolent and peevish childishness, eaten up with some mischievous
whim. The man of experience and affairs can very quickly form an opinion
on such phenomena. He has no reason to expect superior wisdom in those
quarters. On the contrary, his own customary political and humane
standpoint gives him the only authoritative measure of their merits and
possible uses. “These sectaries and dreamers,” he will say to himself,
“cannot understand one another nor the role they themselves play in
society. It is for us to make the best of them we can, taking such
prudent measures as are possible to enlist the forces they represent in
works of common utility.”

[Sidenote: Yes; for experience has intrinsic inalienable values.]

The philosopher’s task, in these premisses, is to discover an escape
from worldliness which shall offer a rational advance over it, such as
fanaticism and mysticism cannot afford. Does the Life of Reason differ
from that of convention? Is there a spirituality really wiser than
common-sense? That there is appears in many directions. Worldliness is
arrest and absorption in the instrumentalities of life; but
instrumentalities cannot exist without ultimate purposes, and it
suffices to lift the eyes to those purposes and to question the will
sincerely about its essential preferences, to institute a catalogue of
rational goods, by pursuing any of which we escape worldliness. Sense
itself is one of these goods. The sensualist at least is not worldly,
and though his nature be atrophied in all its higher part, there is not
lacking, as we have seen, a certain internal and abstract spirituality
in his experience. He is a sort of sprightly and incidental mystic,
treating his varied succession of little worlds as the mystic does his
monotonous universe. Sense, moreover, is capable of many refinements, by
which physical existence becomes its own reward. In the disciplined play
of fancy which the fine arts afford, the mind’s free action justifies
itself and becomes intrinsically delightful. Science not only exercises
in itself the intellectual powers, but assimilates nature to the mind,
so that all things may nourish it. In love and friendship the liberal
life extends also to the heart. All these interests, which justify
themselves by their intrinsic fruits, make so many rational episodes and
patches in conventional life; but it must be confessed in all candour
that these are but oases in the desert, and that as the springs of life
are irrational, so its most vehement and prevalent interests remain
irrational to the end. When the pleasures of sense and art, of knowledge
and sympathy, are stretched to the utmost, what part will they cover and
justify of our passions, our industry, our governments, our religion?

It was a signal error in those rationalists who attributed their ideal
retrospectively to nature that they grotesquely imagined that people
were hungry so that they might enjoy eating, or curious in order to
delight in discovering the truth, or in love the better to live in
conscious harmony. Such a view forgets that all the forces of life work
originally and fundamentally _a tergo_, that experience and reason are
not the ground of preference but its result. In order to live men will
work disproportionately and eat all manner of filth without pleasure;
curiosity as often as not leads to illusion, and argument serves to
foster hatred of the truth; finally, love is notoriously a great
fountain of bitterness and frequently a prelude to crime and death. When
we have skimmed from life its incidental successes, when we have
harvested the moments in which existence justifies itself, its profound
depths remain below in their obscure commotion, depths that breed indeed
a rational efflorescence, but which are far from exhausted in producing
it, and continually threaten, on the contrary, to engulf it.

[Sidenote: For these the religious imagination must supply an ideal
standard.]

The spiritual man needs, therefore, something more than a cultivated
sympathy with the brighter scintillation of things. He needs to refer
that scintillation to some essential light, so that in reviewing the
motley aspects of experience he may not be reduced to culling
superciliously the flowers that please him, but may view in them all
only images and varied symbols of some eternal good. Spirituality has
never flourished apart from religion, except momentarily, perhaps, in
some master-mind, whose original intuitions at once became a religion to
his followers. For it is religion that knows how to interpret the casual
rationalities in the world and isolate their principle, setting this
principle up in the face of nature as nature’s standard and model. This
ideal synthesis of all that is good, this consciousness that over earth
floats its congenial heaven, this vision of perfection which gilds
beauty and sanctifies grief, has taken form, for the most part, in such
grossly material images, in a mythology so opaque and pseudo-physical,
that its ideal and moral essence has been sadly obscured; nevertheless,
every religion worthy of the name has put into its gods some element of
real goodness, something by which they become representative of those
scattered excellences and self-justifying bits of experience in which
the Life of Reason consists.

That happy constitution which human life has at its best moments—that,
says Aristotle, the divine life has continually. The philosopher thus
expressed with absolute clearness the principle which the poets had been
clumsily trying to embody from the beginning. Burdened as traditional
faiths might be with cosmological and fanciful matter, they still
presented in a conspicuous and permanent image that which made all good
things good, the ideal and standard of all excellence. By the help of
such symbols the spiritual man could steer and steady his judgment; he
could say, according to the form religion had taken in his country, that
the truly good was what God commanded, or what made man akin to the
divine, or what led the soul to heaven. Such expressions, though taken
more or less literally by a metaphysical intellect, did not wholly
forfeit their practical and moral meaning. God, for a long time, was
understood to command what in fact was truly important, the divine was
long the truly noble and beautiful, heaven hardly ever ceased to respond
to impersonal and ideal aspirations. Under those figures, therefore, the
ideals of life could confront life with clearness and authority. The
spiritual man, fixing his eyes on them, could live in the presence of
ultimate purposes and ideal issues. Before each immediate task, each
incidental pleasure, each casual success, he could retain his sweetness
and constancy, accepting what good these moments brought and laying it
on the altar of what they ought to bring.




CHAPTER XII

CHARITY


[Sidenote: Possible tyranny of reason.]

Those whom a genuine spirituality has freed from the foolish enchantment
of words and conventions and brought back to a natural ideal, have still
another illusion to vanquish, one into which the very concentration and
deepening of their life might lead them. This illusion is that they and
their chosen interests alone are important or have a legitimate place in
the moral world. Having discovered what is really good for themselves,
they assume that the like is good for everybody. Having made a tolerable
synthesis and purification of their own natures, they require every
other nature to be composed of the same elements similarly combined.
What they have vanquished in themselves they disregard in others; and
the consequence sometimes is that an impossibly simplified and
inconsiderate regimen is proposed to mankind, altogether
unrepresentative of their total interests. Spiritual men, in a word, may
fall into the aristocrat’s fallacy; they may forget the infinite animal
and vulgar life which remains quite disjointed, impulsive, and
short-winded, but which nevertheless palpitates with joys and sorrows,
and makes after all the bulk of moral values in this democratic world.

[Sidenote: Everything has its rights.]

After adopting an ideal it is necessary, therefore, without abandoning
it, to recognise its relativity. The right path is in such a matter
rather difficult to keep to. On the one hand lies fanatical insistence
on an ideal once arrived at, no matter how many instincts and interests
(the basis of all ideals) are thereby outraged in others and ultimately
also in one’s self. On the other hand lies mystical disintegration,
which leads men to feel so keenly the rights of everything in particular
and of the All in general, that they retain no hearty allegiance to any
human interest. Between these two abysses winds the narrow path of
charity and valour. The ultimate ideal is absolutely authoritative,
because if any ground were found to relax allegiance to it in any degree
or for any consideration, that ground would itself be the ideal, found
to be more nearly absolute and ultimate than the one, hastily so called,
which it corrected. The ultimate ideal, in order to maintain its
finality and preclude the possibility of an appeal which should dislodge
it from its place of authority, must have taken all interests into
consideration; it must be universally representative. Now, to take an
interest into consideration and represent it means to intend, as far as
possible, to secure the particular good which that particular interest
looks to, and never, whatever measures may be adopted, to cease to look
back on the elementary impulse as upon something which ought, if
possible, to have been satisfied, and which we should still go back and
satisfy now, if circumstances and the claims of rival interests
permitted.

Justice and charity are identical. To deny the initial right of any
impulse is not morality but fanaticism. However determined may be the
prohibition which reason opposes to some wild instinct, that prohibition
is never reckless; it is never inconsiderate of the very impulse which
it suppresses. It suppresses that impulse unwillingly, pitifully, under
stress of compulsion and _force majeure_; for reason, in representing
this impulse in the context of life and in relation to every other
impulse which, in its operation, it would affect mechanically, rejects
and condemns it; but it condemns it not by antecedent hate but by
supervening wisdom. The texture of the natural world, the conflict of
interests in the soul and in society, all of which cannot be satisfied
together, is accordingly the ground for moral restrictions and
compromises. Whatever the up-shot of the struggle may be, whatever the
verdict pronounced by reason, the parties to the suit must in justice
all be heard, and heard sympathetically.

[Sidenote: Primary and secondary morality.]

Herein lies the great difference between first-hand and second-hand
morality. The retailers of moral truth, the town-criers that go
shouting in the streets some sentence passed long ago in reason’s court
against some inadmissible desire, know nothing of justice or mercy or
reason—three principles essentially identical. They thunder conclusions
without remembering the premisses, and expose their precepts, daily, of
course, grown more thin and unrepresentative, to the aversion and
neglect of all who genuinely love what is good. The masters of life, on
the contrary, the first framers and discoverers of moral ideals, are
persons who disregard those worn conventions and their professional
interpreters: they are persons who have a fresh sense for the universal
need and cry of human souls, and reconstruct the world of duty to make
it fit better with the world of desire and of possible happiness.
Primary morality, inspired by love of something naturally good, is
accordingly charitable and ready to forgive; while secondary morality,
founded on prejudice, is fanatical and ruthless.

[Sidenote: Uncharitable pagan justice is not just.]

As virtue carries with it a pleasure which perfects it and without which
virtue would evidently be spurious and merely compulsory, so justice
carries with it a charity which is its highest expression, without which
justice remains only an organised wrong. Of justice without charity we
have a classic illustration in Plato’s Republic and in general in the
pagan world. An end is assumed, in this case an end which involves
radical injustice toward every interest not included in it; and then an
organism is developed or conceived that shall subserve that end, and
political justice is defined as the harmonious adjustment of powers and
functions within that organism. Reason and art suffice to discover the
right methods for reaching the chosen end, and the polity thus
established, with all its severities and sacrifices of personal will, is
rationally grounded. The chosen end, however, is arbitrary, and, in
fact, perverse; for to maintain a conventional city with stable
institutions and perpetual military efficiency would not secure human
happiness; nor (to pass to the individual virtue symbolised by such a
state) would the corresponding discipline of personal habits, in the
service of vested interests and bodily life, truly unfold the
potentialities of the human spirit.

Plato himself, in passing, acknowledges that his political ideal is
secondary and not ideal at all, since only luxury, corruption, and
physical accidents make a military state necessary; but his absorption
in current Greek questions made him neglect the initial question of all,
namely, how a non-military and non-competitive state might be
established, or rather how the remedial functions of the state might be
forestalled by natural justice and rendered unnecessary. The violence
which such a fallen ideal, with its iniquitous virtues, does to humanity
appeared only too clearly in the sequel, when Platonism took refuge in
the supernatural. The whole pagan world was convicted of injustice and
the cities for whose glory the greatest heroes had lived and died were
abandoned with horror. Only in a catacomb or a hermitage did there seem
to be any room for the soul. This revulsion, perverse in its own way,
expressed rightly enough the perversity of that unjust justice, those
worldly and arbitrary virtues, and that sad happiness which had enslaved
the world.

[Sidenote: The doom of ancient republics.]

Plato could never have answered the question whether his Republic had a
right to exist and to brush aside all other commonwealths; he could
never have justified the ways of man to the rest of creation nor (what
is more pertinent) to man’s more plastic and tenderer imagination. The
initial impulses on which his Republic is founded, which make war,
defensive and aggressive, the first business of the state, are not
irresistible impulses, they do not correspond to ultimate ends. Physical
life cannot justify itself; it cannot be made the purpose of those
rational faculties which it generates; these, on the contrary, are its
own end. The purpose of war must be peace; the purpose of competition a
more general prosperity; the purpose of personal life ideal
achievements. A polity which should not tend to abolish private lusts,
competition, and war would be an irrational polity. The organisation
which the ancients insisted on within each state, the sacrifices they
imposed on each class in the community for the general welfare, have to
be repeated in that greater commonwealth of which cities and nations are
citizens; for their own existence and prosperity depends on conciliating
inwardly all that may affect them and turning foreign forces, when
contact with them is inevitable, into friends. Duty and co-operation
must extend as far as do physical bonds, the function of reason being to
bring life into harmony with its conditions, so as to render it
self-perpetuating and free. This end can never be attained while the
scope of moral fellowship is narrower than that of physical interplay.
Ancient civilisation, brilliant in proportion to its inner integration,
was brief in proportion to its outer injustice. By defying the external
forces on which also a commonwealth depends, those commonwealths came to
premature extinction.

[Sidenote: Rational charity.]

There is accordingly a justice deeper and milder than that of pagan
states, a universal justice called charity, a kind of all-penetrating
courtesy, by which the limits of personal or corporate interests are
transgressed in imagination. Value is attributed to rival forms of life;
something of the intensity and narrowness inherent in the private will
is surrendered to admiration and solicitude for what is most alien and
hostile to one’s self. When this imaginative expansion ends in
neutralising the will altogether, we have mysticism; but when it serves
merely to co-ordinate felt interests with other actual interests
conceived sympathetically, and to make them converge, we have justice
and charity. Charity is nothing but a radical and imaginative justice.
So the Buddhist stretches his sympathy to all real beings and to many
imaginary monsters; so the Christian chooses for his love the diseased,
the sinful, the unlovely. His own salvation does not seem to either
complete unless every other creature also is redeemed and forgiven.

[Sidenote: Its limits.]

Such universal solicitude is rational, however, only when the beings to
which it extends are in practical efficient relations with the life that
would co-operate with theirs. In other words, charity extends only to
physical and discoverable creatures, whose destiny is interwoven
dynamically with our own. Absolute and irresponsible fancy can be the
basis of no duty. If not to take other real forces and interests into
account made classic states unstable and unjust, to take into
consideration purely imaginary forces yields a polity founded on
superstition, one unjust to those who live under it. A compromise made
with non-existent or irrelevant interests is a wrong to the real
interests on which that sacrifice is imposed gratuitously. All
sacrifices exacted by mere religion have accordingly been inhuman; at
best they have unintentionally made some amends by affording abstract
discipline or artistic forms of expression. The sacrifice must be
fruitful in the end and bring happiness to somebody: otherwise it
cannot long remain tender or beautiful.

[Sidenote: Its mythical supports.]

Charity is seldom found uncoloured by fables which illustrate it and
lend it a motive by which it can justify itself verbally.
Metempsychosis, heaven and hell, Christ’s suffering for every sinner,
are notions by which charity has often been guided and warmed. Like myth
everywhere, these notions express judgments which they do not originate,
although they may strengthen or distort them in giving them expression.
The same myths, in cruel hands, become goads to fanaticism. That natural
sensitiveness in which charity consists has many degrees and many
inequalities; the spirit bloweth where it listeth. Incidental
circumstances determine its phases and attachments in life. Christian
charity, for instance, has two chief parts: first, it hastens to relieve
the body; then, forgetting physical economy altogether, it proceeds to
redeem the soul. The bodily works of mercy which Christians perform with
so much tact and devotion are not such as philanthropy alone would
inspire; they are more and less than that. They are more, because they
are done with a certain disproportionate and absolute solicitude, quite
apart from ultimate benefit or a thought of the best distribution of
energies; they are also less, because they stop at healing, and cannot
pass beyond the remedial and incidental phase without ceasing to be
Christian. The poor, says Christian charity, we have always with us;
every man must be a sinner—else what obligation should he have to
repent?—and, in fine, this world is essentially the kingdom of Satan.
Charity comes only to relieve the most urgent bodily needs, and then to
wean the heart altogether from mortal interests. Thus Christianity
covers the world with hospitals and orphanages; but its only positive
labours go on in churches and convents, nor will it found schools, if
left to itself, to teach anything except religion. These offices may be
performed with more or less success, with more or less appeal to the
miraculous; but, with whatever mixture of magic and policy, Christian
charity has never aimed at anything but healing the body and saving the
soul.

[Sidenote: There is intelligence in charity.]

Christ himself, we may well feel, did not affect publicans and sinners,
ignorant people and children, in order to save them in the regimental
and prescriptive fashion adopted by the Church. He commanded those he
forgave to sin no more and those he healed to go, as custom would have
it, to the priest. He understood the bright good that each sinner was
following when he stumbled into the pit. For this insight he was loved.
To be rebuked in that sympathetic spirit was to be comforted; to be
punished by such a hand was to be made whole. The Magdalene was forgiven
because she had loved much; an absolution which rehabilitates the
primary longing that had driven her on, a longing not insulted but
comprehended in such an absolution, and purified by that comprehension.
It is a charitable salvation which enables the newly revealed deity to
be absolutely loved. Charity has this art of making men abandon their
errors without asking them to forget their ideals.

[Sidenote: Buddhist and Christian forms of it.]

In Buddhism the same charity wears a more speculative form. All beings
are to be redeemed from the illusion which is the fountain of their
troubles. None is to be compelled to assume irrationally an alien set of
duties or other functions than his own. Spirit is not to be incarcerated
perpetually in grotesque and accidental monsters, but to be freed from
all fatality and compulsion. The goal is not some more flattering
incarnation, but escape from incarnation altogether. Ignorance is to be
enlightened, passion calmed, mistaken destiny revoked; only what the
inmost being desiderates, only what can really quiet the longings
embodied in any particular will, is to occupy the redeemed mind. Here,
though creative reason is wholly wanting, charity is truly understood;
for it avails little to make of kindness a vicarious selfishness and to
use neighbourly offices to plunge our neighbour deeper into his
favourite follies. Such servile sympathy would make men one another’s
accomplices rather than friends. It would treat them with a weak
promiscuous favour, not with true mercy and justice. In charity there
can be nothing to repent of, as there so often is in natural love and in
partisan propaganda. Christians have sometimes interpreted charity as
zeal to bring men into their particular fold; or, at other times, when
enthusiasm for doctrine and institutes has cooled, they have interpreted
charity to be mere blind co-operation, no matter in what.

The Buddhists seem to have shown a finer sense in their ministry,
knowing how to combine universal sympathy with perfect spirituality.
There was no brow-beating in their call to conversion, no new tyranny
imposed of sanctioned by their promised deliverance. If they could not
rise to a positive conception of natural life, this inability but marks
the well-known limitations of Oriental fancy, which has never been able
to distinguish steadily that imagination which rests on and expresses
material life from that which, in its import, breaks loose from the
given conditions of life altogether, and is therefore monstrous and
dreamful. But at least Buddhism knew how to sound the heart and pierce
to the genuine principles of happiness and misery. If it did not venture
to interpret reason positively, it at least forbore to usurp its inward
and autonomous authority, and did not set up, in the name of salvation,
some new partiality, some new principle of distress and illusion. In
destroying worldliness this religion avoided imposture. The clearing it
made in the soul was soon overgrown again by the inexorable Indian
jungle; but had a virile intellect been at hand, it would have been free
to raise something solid and rational in the space so happily swept
clean of all accumulated rubbish.

[Sidenote: Apparent division of the spiritual and the natural.]

Against avarice, lust, and rancour, against cruel and vain national
ambitions, tenderer and more recollected minds have always sought some
asylum: but they have the seldom possessed enough knowledge of nature
and of human life to distinguish clearly the genuine and innocent goods
which they longed for, and their protest against “the world” has too
often taken on a mystical and irrational accent. Charity, for instance,
in its profounder deliverances, has become a protest against the
illusion of personality; whereby existence and action seem to be wholly
condemned after their principle has been identified with selfishness. An
artificial puzzle is thus created, the same concept, selfishness or an
irrational partiality and injustice in the will, being applied to two
principles of action, the one wrong and the other necessary. Every man
is necessarily the seat of his own desires, which, if truly fulfilled,
would bring him satisfaction; but the objects in which that satisfaction
may be found, and the forces that must co-operate to secure it, lie far
afield, and his life will remain cramped and self-destructive so long as
he does not envisage its whole basis and co-operate with all his
potential allies.

The rationality which would then be attained is so immensely exalted
above the microscopic vision and punctiform sensibility of those who
think themselves practical, that speculative natures seem to be
proclaiming another set of interests, another and quite miraculous life,
when they attempt to thaw out and vivify the vulgar mechanism; and the
sense of estrangement and contradiction often comes over the spiritually
minded themselves, making them confess sadly that the kingdom of heaven
is not of this world. As common morality itself falls easily into
mythical expressions and speaks of a fight between conscience and
nature, reason and the passions, as if these were independent in their
origin or could be divided in their operation, so spiritual life even
more readily opposes the ideal to the real, the revealed and heavenly
truth to the extant reality, as if the one could be anything but an
expression and fulfilment of the other. Being equal convinced that
spiritual life is authoritative and possible, and that it is opposed to
all that earthly experience has as yet supplied, the prophet almost
inevitably speaks of another world above the clouds and another
existence beyond the grave; he thus seeks to clothe in concrete and
imaginable form the ideal to which natural existence seems to him wholly
rebellious. Spiritual life comes to mean life abstracted from politics,
from art, from sense, even in the end from morality. Natural motives
and natural virtues are contrasted with those which are henceforth
called supernatural, and all the grounds and sanctions of right living
are transferred to another life. A doctrine of immortality thus becomes
the favourite expression of religion. By its variations and greater or
less transparency and ideality we can measure the degree of spiritual
insight which has been reached at any moment.




CHAPTER XIII

THE BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE


[Sidenote: The length of life a subject for natural science.]

At no point are the two ingredients of religion, superstition and moral
truth, more often confused than in the doctrine of immortality, yet in
none are they more clearly distinguishable. Ideal immortality is a
principle revealed to insight; it is seen by observing the eternal
quality of ideas and validities, and the affinity to them native to
reason or the cognitive energy of mind. A future life, on the contrary,
is a matter for faith or presumption; it is a prophetic hypothesis
regarding occult existences. This latter question is scientific and
empirical, and should be treated as such. A man is, forensically
speaking, the same man after the nightly break in his consciousness.
After many changes in his body and after long oblivion, parcels of his
youth may be revived and may come to figure again among the factors in
his action. Similarly, if evidence to that effect were available, we
might establish the resurrection of a given soul in new bodies or its
activity in remote places and times. Evidence of this sort has in fact
always been offered copiously by rumour and superstition. The operation
of departed spirits, like that of the gods, has been recognised in many
a dream, or message, or opportune succour. The Dioscuri and Saint James
the Apostle have appeared—preferably on white horses—in sundry
battles. Spirits duly invoked have repeated forgotten gossip and
revealed the places where crimes had been committed or treasure buried.
More often, perhaps, ghosts have walked the night without any ostensible
or useful purpose, apparently in obedience to some ghastly compulsion
that crept over them in death, as if a hesitating sickle had left them
still hanging to life by one attenuated fibre.

[Sidenote: “Psychical” phenomena.]

The mass of this evidence, ancient and modern, traditional and
statistical, is beneath consideration; the palpitating mood in which it
is gathered and received, even when ostensibly scientific, is such that
gullibility and fiction play a very large part in the report; for it is
not to be assumed that a man, because he speaks in the first person and
addresses a learned society, has lost the primordial faculty of lying.
When due allowance has been made, however, for legend and fraud, there
remains a certain residuum of clairvoyance and telepathy, and an
occasional abnormal obedience of matter to mind which might pass for
magic. There are unmistakable indications that in these regions we touch
lower and more rudimentary faculties. There seems to be, as is quite
natural, a sub-human sensibility in man, wherein ideas are connected
together by bonds so irrational and tenacious that they seem miraculous
to a mind already trained in practical and relevant thinking. This
sub-human sense, far from representing important truths more clearly
than ordinary apprehension can, reduces consciousness again to a tangle
of trivial impressions, shots of uncertain range, as if a skin had not
yet formed over the body. It emerges in tense and disorganised moments.
Its reports are the more trifling the more startingly literal their
veracity. It seems to represent a stratum of life beneath moral or
intellectual functions, and beneath all personality. When proof has been
found that a ghost has actually been seen, proof is required that the
phantom has been rightly recognised and named; and this imputed identity
is never demonstrable and in most cases impossible. So in the magic
cures which from time immemorial have been recorded at shrines of all
religions, and which have been attributed to wonder-workers of every
sect: the one thing certain about them is that they prove neither the
truth of whatever myth is capriciously associated with them, nor the
goodness or voluntary power of the miracle-worker himself. Healer and
medium are alike vehicles for some elemental energy they cannot control,
and which as often as not misses fire; at best they feel a power going
out of them which they themselves undergo, and which radiates from them
like electricity, to work, as chance will have it, good or evil in the
world. The whole operation lies, in so far as it really takes place at
all, on the lowest levels of unintelligence, in a region closely allied
to madness in consciousness and to sporadic organic impulses in the
physical sphere.

[Sidenote: Hypertrophies of sense.]

Among the blind, the retina having lost its function, the rest of the
skin is said to recover its primordial sensitiveness to distance and
light, so that the sightless have a clearer premonition of objects about
them than seeing people could have in the dark. So when reason and the
ordinary processes of sense are in abeyance a certain universal
sensibility seems to return to the soul; influences at other times not
appreciable make then a sensible impression, and automatic reactions may
be run through in response to a stimulus normally quite insufficient.
Now the complexity of nature is prodigious; everything that happens
leaves, like buried cities, almost indelible traces which an eye, by
chance attentive and duly prepared, can manage to read, recovering for a
moment the image of an extinct life. Symbols, illegible to reason, can
thus sometimes read themselves out in trance and madness. Faint vestiges
may be found in matter of forms which it once wore, or which, like a
perfume, impregnated and got lodgment within it. Slight echoes may
suddenly reconstitute themselves in the mind’s silence; and a
half-stunned consciousness may catch brief glimpses of long-lost and
irrelevant things. Real ghosts are such reverberations of the past,
exceeding ordinary imagination and discernment both in vividness and in
fidelity; they may not be explicable without appealing to material
influences subtler than those ordinarily recognised, as they are
obviously not discoverable without some derangement and hypertrophy of
the senses.

[Sidenote: These possibilities affect physical existence only.]

That such subtler influences should exist is entirely consonant with
reason and experience; but only a hankering tenderness for superstition,
a failure to appreciate the function both of religion and of science,
can lead to reverence for such oracular gibberish as these influences
provoke. The world is weary of experimenting with magic. In utter
seriousness and with immense solemnity whole races have given themselves
up to exploiting these shabby mysteries; and while a new survey of the
facts, in the light of natural science and psychology, is certainly not
superfluous, it can be expected to lead to nothing but a more detailed
and conscientious description of natural processes. The thought of
employing such investigations to save at the last moment religious
doctrines founded on moral ideas is a pathetic blunder; the obscene
supernatural has nothing to do with rational religion. If it were
discovered that wretched echoes of a past life could be actually heard
by putting one’s ear long enough to a tomb, and if (_per impossibile_)
those echoes could be legitimately attributed to another mind, and to
the very mind, indeed, whose former body was interred there, a
melancholy chapter would indeed be added to man’s earthly fortunes,
since it would appear that even after death he retained, under certain
conditions, a fatal attachment to his dead body and to the other
material instruments of his earthly life. Obviously such a discovery
would teach us more about dying than about immortality; the truths
disclosed, since they would be disclosed by experiment and observation,
would be psycho-physical truths, implying nothing about what a truly
disembodied life might be, if one were attainable; for a disembodied
life could by no possibility betray itself in spectres, rumblings, and
spasms. Actual thunders from Sinai and an actual discovery of two stone
tables would have been utterly irrelevant to the moral authority of the
ten commandments or to the existence of a truly supreme being. No less
irrelevant to a supramundane immortality is the length of time during
which human spirits may be condemned to operate on earth after their
bodies are quiet. In other words, spectral survivals would at most
enlarge our conception of the soul’s physical basis, spreading out the
area of its manifestations; they could not possibly, seeing the
survivals are physical, reveal the disembodied existence of the soul.

[Sidenote: Moral grounds for the doctrine. The necessary assumption of a
future.]

Such a disembodied existence, removed by its nature from the sphere of
empirical evidence, might nevertheless be actual, and grounds of a moral
or metaphysical type might be sought for postulating its reality. Life
and the will to live are at bottom identical. Experience itself is
transitive and can hardly arise apart from a forward effort and
prophetic apprehension by which adjustments are made to a future
unmistakably foreseen. This premonition, by which action seeks to
justify and explain itself to reflection, may be analysed into a group
of memories and sensations of movement, generating ideal expectations
which might easily be disappointed; but scepticism about the future can
hardly be maintained in the heat of action. A postulate acted on is an
act of genuine and dogmatic faith. I not only postulate a morrow when I
prepare for it, but ingenuously and heartily believe that the morrow
will come. This faith does not amount to certitude; I may confess, if
challenged, that before to-morrow I and the world and time itself might
conceivably come to an end together; but that idle possibility, so long
as it does not slacken action, will not disturb belief. Every moment of
life accordingly trusts that life will continue; and this prophetic
interpretation of action, so long as action lasts, amounts to continual
faith in futurity.

[Sidenote: An assumption no evidence.]

A sophist might easily transform this psychological necessity into a
dazzling proof of immortality. To believe anything, he might say, is to
be active; but action involves faith in a future and in the fruits of
action; and as no living moment can be without this confidence, belief
in extinction would be self-contradictory and at no moment a possible
belief. The question, however, is not whether every given moment has or
has not a specious future before it to which it looks forward, but
whether the realisation of such foresight, a realisation which during
waking life is roughly usual, is incapable of failing. Now expectation,
never without its requisite antecedents and natural necessity, often
lacks fulfilment, and never finds its fulfilment entire; so that the
necessity of a postulate gives no warrant for its verification.
Expectation and action are constantly suspended together; and what
happens whenever thought loses itself or stumbles, what happens whenever
in its shifts it forgets its former objects, might well happen at
crucial times to that train of intentions which we call a particular
life or the life of humanity. The prophecy involved in action is not
insignificant, but it is notoriously fallible and depends for its
fulfilment on external conditions. The question accordingly really is
whether a man expecting to live for ever or one expecting to die in his
time has the more representative and trustworthy notion of the future.
The question, so stated, cannot be solved by an appeal to evidence,
which is necessarily all on one side, but only by criticising the value
of evidence as against instinct and hope, and by ascertaining the
relative status which assumption and observation have in experience.

The transcendental compulsion under which action labours of envisaging a
future, and the animal instinct that clings to life and flees from death
as the most dreadful of evils are the real grounds why immortality seems
initially natural and good. Confidence in living for ever is anterior to
the discovery that all men are mortal and to the discovery that the
thinker is himself a man. These discoveries flatly contradict that
confidence, in the form in which it originally presents itself, and all
doctrines of immortality which adult philosophy can entertain are more
or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of
mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less
clumsily reconciled.

[Sidenote: A solipsistic argument.]

The most lordly and genuine fashion of asserting immortality would be to
proclaim one’s self an exception to the animal race and to point out
that the analogy between one’s singular self and others is altogether
lame and purely conventional. Any proud barbarian, with a tincture of
transcendental philosophy, might adopt this tone. “Creatures that
perish,” he might say, “are and can be nothing but puppets and painted
shadows in my mind. My conscious will forbids its own extinction; it
scorns to level itself with its own objects and instruments. The world,
which I have never known to exist without me, exists by my co-operation
and consent; it can never extinguish what lends it being. The death
prophetically accepted by weaklings, with such small insight and
courage, I mock and altogether defy: it can never touch me.”

Such solipsistic boasts may not have been heard in historic times from
the lips of men speaking in their own persons. Language has an
irresistible tendency to make thought communistic and ideally
transferable to others. It forbids a man to say of himself what it would
be ridiculous to hear from another. Now solipsism in another man is a
comic thing: and a mind, prompted perhaps by hell and heaven to speak
solipsistically, is stopped by the laughable echo of its own words, when
it remembers its bold sayings. Language, being social, resists a virgin
egotism and forbids it to express itself publicly, no matter how well
grounded it may be in transcendental logic and in animal instinct.
Social convention is necessarily materialistic, since the beginning of
all moral reasonableness consists in taming the transcendental conceit
native to a living mind, in attaching it to its body, and bringing the
will that thought itself absolute down to the rank of animals and men.
Otherwise no man would acknowledge another’s rights or even conceive his
existence.

[Sidenote: Absoluteness and immortality transferred to the gods.]

Primeval solipsism—the philosophy of untamed animal will—has
accordingly taken to the usual by-paths and expressed itself openly only
in myth or by a speculative abstraction in which the transcendental
spirit, for which all the solipsistic privileges were still claimed, was
distinguished from the human individual. The gods, it was said, were
immortal; and although on earth spirit must submit to the yoke and
service of matter, on whose occasions it must wait, yet there existed in
the ether other creatures more normally and gloriously compounded, since
their forms served and expressed their minds, which ruled also over the
elements and feared no assault from time. With the advent of this
mythology experience and presumption divided their realms; experience
was allowed to shape men’s notions of vulgar reality, but presumption,
which could not be silenced, was allowed to suggest a second sphere,
thinly and momentarily veiled to mortal sense, in which the premonitions
of will were abundantly realised.

This expedient had the advantage of endowing the world with creatures
that really satisfied human aspirations, such as at any moment they
might be. The gods possessed longevity, beauty, magic celerity of
movement, leisure, splendour of life, indefinite strength, and practical
omniscience. When the gods were also expressions for natural forces,
this function somewhat prejudiced their ideality, and they failed to
correspond perfectly to what their worshippers would have most
esteemed; but religious reformers tended to expunge naturalism from
theology and to represent the gods as entirely admirable. The Greek
gods, to be sure, always continued to have genealogies, and the fact of
having been born is a bad augury for immortality; but other religions,
and finally the Greek philosophers themselves, conceived unbegotten
gods, in whom the human rebellion against mutability was expressed
absolutely.

Thus a place was found in nature for the constant and perpetual element
which crude experience seems to contain or at least to suggest.
Unfortunately the immortal and the human were in this mythology wholly
divorced, so that while immortality was vindicated for something in the
universe it was emphatically denied to man and to his works.
Contemplation, to be satisfied with this situation, had to be heroically
unselfish and resigned; the gods’ greatness and glory had to furnish
sufficient solace for all mortal defeats. At the same time all criticism
had to be deprecated, for reflection would at once have pointed out that
the divine life in question was either a personification of natural
processes and thus really in flux and full of oblivion and imperfection,
or else a hypostasis of certain mental functions and ideals, which could
not really be conceived apart from the natural human life which they
informed and from which they had been violently abstracted.

[Sidenote: Or to a divine principle in all beings.]

Another expedient was accordingly found, especially by mystics and
critical philosophers, for uniting the mortal and immortal in existence
while still distinguishing them in essence. _Cur Deus Homo_ might be
said to be the theme of all such speculations. Plato had already found
the eternal in the form which the temporal puts on, or, if the phrase be
preferred, had seen in the temporal and existential nothing but an
individuated case of the ideal. The soul was immortal, unbegotten,
impassible; the bodies it successively inhabited and the experience it
gathered served merely to bring out its nature with greater or less
completeness. To somewhat the same effect the German transcendentalists
identified and distinguished the private and the universal spirit. What
lived in each man and in each moment was the Absolute—for nothing else
could really exist—and the expression which the Absolute there took on
was but a transitional phase of its total self-expression, which, could
it be grasped in its totality, would no longer seem subject to
contradiction and flux. An immortal agent therefore went through an
infinite series of acts, each transitory and relative to the others, but
all possessed of inalienable reality and eternal significance. In such
formulations the divorce was avoided between the intellectual and the
sensuous factor in experience—a divorce which the myth about immortal
gods and mortal men had introduced. On the other hand existential
immortality was abandoned; only an ideal permanence, only significance,
was allowed to any finite being, and the better or future world of which
ancient poets had dreamt, Olympus, and every other heaven, was
altogether abolished. There was an eternal universe where everything was
transitory and a single immortal spirit at no two moments the same. The
world of idealism realised no particular ideal, and least of all the
ideal of a natural and personal immunity from death.

[Sidenote: In neither case is the individual immortal.]

First, then, a man may refuse to admit that he must die at all; then,
abashed at the arrogance of that assertion, he may consider the immortal
life of other creatures, like the earth and stars, which seem subject to
no extinction, and he may ascribe to these a perpetual consciousness and
personality. Finally, confessing the fabulous character of those
deities, he may distinguish an immortal agent or principle within
himself, identify it with the inner principle of all other beings, and
contrast it with its varying and conditioned expressions. But scarcely
is this abstraction attained when he must perceive its worthlessness,
since the natural life, the concrete aims, and the personal career which
immortality was intended to save from dissolution are wholly alien to a
nominal entity which endures through all change, however fundamental,
and cohabits with every nature, however hostile and odious to humanity.
If immortality is to be genuine, what is immortal must be something
definite, and if this immortality is to concern life and not mere
significance or ideal definition, that which endures must be an
individual creature with a fixed nucleus of habits and demands, so that
its persistence may contain progress and achievement.

Herewith we may dismiss the more direct attempts to conceive and assert
a future life. Their failure drives us to a consideration of indirect
attempts to establish an unobservable but real immortality through
revelation and dogma. Such an immortality would follow on transmigration
or resurrection, and would be assigned to a supernatural sphere, a
second empirical world present to the soul after death, where her
fortunes would not be really conceivable without a reconstituted body
and a new material environment.

[Sidenote: Possible forms of survival.]

Many a man dies too soon and some are born in the wrong age or station.
Could these persons drink at the fountain of youth at least once more
they might do themselves fuller justice and cut a better figure at last
in the universe. Most people think they have stuff in them for greater
things than time suffers them to perform. To imagine a second career is
a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune; the poor soul wants another chance.
But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this
demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in
an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance,
write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my
living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no
heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my
epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled
in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual
motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of
epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if
hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the
same world corrected. Were I transformed into a cherub or transported
into a timeless ecstasy, it is hard to see in what sense I should
continue to exist. Those results might be interesting in themselves and
might enrich the universe; they would not prolong my life nor retrieve
my disasters.

For this reason a future life is after all best represented by those
frankly material ideals which most Christians—being Platonists—are
wont to despise. It would be genuine happiness for a Jew to rise again
in the flesh and live for ever in Ezekiel’s New Jerusalem, with its
ceremonial glories and civic order. It would be truly agreeable for any
man to sit in well-watered gardens with Mohammed, clad in green silks,
drinking delicious sherbets, and transfixed by the gazelle-like glance
of some young girl, all innocence and fire. Amid such scenes a man might
remain himself and might fulfil hopes that he had actually cherished on
earth. He might also find his friends again, which in somewhat generous
minds is perhaps the thought that chiefly sustains interest in a
posthumous existence. But to recognise his friends a man must find them
in their bodies, with their familiar habits, voices, and interests; for
it is surely an insult to affection to say that he could find them in an
eternal formula expressing their idiosyncrasy. When, however, it is
clearly seen that another life, to supplement this one, must closely
resemble it, does not the magic of immortality altogether vanish? Is
such a reduplication of earthly society at all credible? And the
prospect of awakening again among houses and trees, among children and
dotards, among wars and rumours of wars, still fettered to one
personality and one accidental past, still uncertain of the future, is
not this prospect wearisome and deeply repulsive? Having passed through
these things once and bequeathed them to posterity, is it not time for
each soul to rest? The universe doubtless contains all sorts of
experiences, better and worse than the human; but it is idle to
attribute to a particular man a life divorced from his circumstances and
from his body.

[Sidenote: Arguments from retribution and need of opportunity.]

Dogmas about such a posthumous experience find some shadowy support in
various illusions and superstitions that surround death, but they are
developed into articulate prophecies chiefly by certain moral demands.
One of these requires rewards and punishments more emphatic and sure
than those which conduct meets with in this world. Another requires
merely a more favourable and complete opportunity for the soul’s
development. Considerations like these are pertinent to moral
philosophy. It touches the notion of duty whether an exact hedonistic
retribution is to be demanded for what is termed merit and guilt: so
that without such supernatural remuneration virtue, perhaps, would be
discredited and deprived of a motive. It likewise touches the ideality
and nobleness of life whether human aims can be realised satisfactorily
only in the agent’s singular person, so that the fruits of effort would
be forth-with missed if the labourer himself should disappear.

[Sidenote: Ignoble temper of both.]

To establish justice in the world and furnish an adequate incentive to
virtue was once thought the chief business of a future life. The Hebraic
religions somewhat overreached themselves on these points: for the
grotesque alternative between hell and heaven in the end only aggravated
the injustice it was meant to remedy. Life is unjust in that it
subordinates individuals to a general mechanical law, and the deeper and
longer hold fate has on the soul, the greater that injustice. A
perpetual life would be a perpetual subjection to arbitrary power, while
a last judgment would be but a last fatality. That hell may have
frightened a few villains into omitting a crime is perhaps credible;
but the embarrassed silence which the churches, in a more sensitive age,
prefer to maintain on that wholesome doctrine—once, as they taught, the
only rational basis for virtue—shows how their teaching has to follow
the independent progress of morals. Nevertheless, persons are not
wanting, apparently free from ecclesiastical constraint, who still
maintain that the value of life depends on its indefinite prolongation.
By an artifice of reflection they substitute vanity for reason, and
selfish for ingenuous instincts in man. Being apparently interested in
nothing but their own careers, they forget that a man may remember how
little he counts in the world and suffer that rational knowledge to
inspire his purposes. Intense morality has always envisaged earthly
goods and evils, and even when a future life has been accepted vaguely,
it has never given direction to human will or aims, which at best it
could only proclaim more emphatically. It may indeed be said that no man
of any depth of soul has made his prolonged existence the touchstone of
his enthusiasms. Such an instinct is carnal, and if immortality is to
add a higher inspiration to life it must not be an immortality of
selfishness. What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk
below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live
for his children, for his art, or for country!

[Sidenote: False optimistic postulate involved.]

To turn these moral questions, however, into arguments for a physical
speculation, like that about human longevity, resurrection, or
metempsychosis, a hybrid principle is required: thus, even if we have
answered those moral questions in the conventional way and satisfied
ourselves that personal immortality is a postulate of ethics, we cannot
infer that immortality therefore exists unless we import into the
argument a tremendous optimistic postulate, to the effect that what is
requisite for moral rationality must in every instance be realised in
experience.

Such an optimistic postulate, however, as the reader must have
repeatedly observed, is made not only despite all experience but in
ignorance of the conditions under which alone ideals are framed and
retain their significance. Every ideal expresses individual and specific
tendencies, proper at some moment to some natural creature; every ideal
therefore has for its basis a part only of the dynamic world, so that
its fulfilment is problematical and altogether adventitious to its
existence and authority. To decide whether an ideal can be or will be
fulfilled we must examine the physical relation between such organic
forces as that ideal expresses and the environment in which those forces
operate; we may then perceive how far a realisation of the given aims is
possible, how far it must fail, and how far the aims in question, by a
shift in their natural basis, will lapse and yield to others, possibly
more capable of execution and more stable in the world. The question of
success is a question of physics. To say that an ideal will be
inevitably fulfilled simply because it is an ideal is to say something
gratuitous and foolish. Pretence cannot in the end avail against
experience.

[Sidenote: Transition to ideality.]

Nevertheless, it is important to define ideals even before their
realisation is known to be possible, because they constitute one of the
two factors whose interaction and adjustment is moral life, factors
which are complementary and diverse in function and may be independently
ascertained. The value of existences is wholly borrowed from their
ideality, without direct consideration of their fate, while the
existence of ideals is wholly determined by natural forces, without
direct relation to their fulfilment. Existence and ideal value can
therefore be initially felt and observed apart, although of course a
complete description would lay bare physical necessity in the ideals
entertained and inevitable ideal harmonies among the facts discovered.
Human life, lying as it does in the midst of a larger process, will
surely not be without some congruity with the universe. Every creature
lends potential values to a world in which it can satisfy some at least
of its demands and learn, perhaps, to modify the others. Happiness is
always a natural and an essentially possible thing, and a total despair,
since it ignores those goods which are attainable, can express only a
partial experience. But before considering in what ways a disciplined
soul might make its peace with reality, we may consider what an
undisciplined soul in the first instance desires; and from this
starting-point we may trace her chastening and education, observing the
ideal compensations which may console her for lost illusions.




CHAPTER XIV

IDEAL IMMORTALITY


[Sidenote: Olympian immortality the first ideal.]

In order to give the will to live frank and direct satisfaction, it
would have been necessary to solve the problem of perpetual motion in
the animal body, as nature has approximately solved it in the solar
system. Nutrition should have continually repaired all waste, so that
the cycle of youth and age might have repeated itself yearly in every
individual, like summer and winter on the earth. Nor are some hints of
such an equilibrium altogether wanting. Convalescence, sudden good
fortune, a belated love, and even the April sunshine or morning air,
bring about a certain rejuvenescence in man prophetic of what is not
ideally impossible—perpetuity and constant reinforcement in his vital
powers. Had nature furnished the elixir of life, or could art have
discovered it, the whole face of human society would have been changed.
The earth once full, no more children would have been begotten and
parental instincts would have been atrophied for want of function. All
men would have been contemporaries and, having all time before them for
travel and experiment, would have allied themselves eventually with what
was most congenial to them and would have come to be bound only by free
and friendly ties. They would all have been well known and would have
acted perpetually in their ultimate and true character, like the
immortal gods. One might have loved fixity, like Hestia, and another
motion, like Hermes; a third might have been untiring in the plastic
arts, like Hephæstus, or, like Apollo, in music; while the infinite
realms of mathematics and philosophy would have lain open to spirits of
a quality not represented in Homer’s pantheon.

That man’s primary and most satisfying ideal is something of this sort
is clear in itself, and attested by mythology; for the great use of the
gods is that they interpret the human heart to us, and help us, while we
conceive them, to discover our inmost ambition and, while we emulate
them, to pursue it. Christian fancy, because of its ascetic meagreness
and fear of life, has not known how to fill out the picture of heaven
and has left it mystical and vague; but whatever paradise it has
ventured to imagine has been modelled on the same primary ideal. It has
represented a society of eternal beings among which there was no
marriage nor giving in marriage and where each found his congenial
mansion and that perfected activity which brings inward peace.

After this easy fashion were death and birth conquered in the myths,
which truly interpreted the will to live according to its primary
intention, but in reality such direct satisfaction was impossible. A
total defeat, on the other hand, would have extinguished the will itself
and obliterated every human impulse seeking expression. Man’s existence
is proof enough that nature was not altogether unpropitious, but
offered, in an unlooked-for direction, some thoroughfare to the soul.
Roundabout imperfect methods were discovered by which something at least
of what was craved might be secured. The individual perished, yet not
without having segregated and detached a certain portion of himself
capable of developing a second body and mind. The potentialities of this
seminal portion, having been liberated long after the parent body had
begun to feel the shock of the world, could reach full expression after
the parent body had begun to decay; and the offspring needed not itself
to succumb before it had launched a third generation. A cyclical life or
arrested death, a continual motion by little successive explosions,
could thus establish itself and could repeat from generation to
generation a process not unlike nutrition; only that, while in nutrition
the individual form remains and the inner substance is renewed
insensibly, in reproduction the form is renewed openly and the inner
substance is insensibly continuous.

[Sidenote: Its indirect attainment by reproduction.]

Reproduction seems, from the will’s point of view, a marvellous
expedient involving a curious mixture of failure and success. The
individual, who alone is the seat and principle of will, is thereby
sacrificed, so that reproduction is no response to his original hopes
and aspirations; yet in a double way he is enticed and persuaded to be
almost satisfied: first, in that so like a counterfeit of himself
actually survives, a creature to which all his ideal interests may be
transmitted; and secondly, because a new and as it were a rival aim is
now insinuated into his spirit. For the impulse toward reproduction has
now become no less powerful, even if less constant, than the impulse
toward nutrition; in other words, the will to live finds itself in the
uncongenial yet inevitable company of the will to have an heir.
Reproduction thus partly entertains the desire to be immortal by giving
it a vicarious fulfilment, and partly cancels it by adding an impulse
and joy which, when you think of it, accepts mortality. For love,
whether sexual, parental, or fraternal, is essentially sacrificial, and
prompts a man to give his life for his friends. In thus losing his life
gladly he in a sense finds it anew, since it has now become a part of
his function and ideal to yield his place to others and to live
afterwards only in them. While the primitive and animal side of him may
continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of
extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a
new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future
he looks to should be enjoyed by others. When we consider such a natural
transformation and discipline of the will, when we catch even a slight
glimpse of nature’s resources and mysteries, how thin and verbal those
belated hopes must seem which would elude death and abolish sacrifice!
Such puerile dreams not only miss the whole pathos of human life, but
ignore those specifically mortal virtues which might console us for not
being so radiantly divine as we may at first have thought ourselves.
Nature, in denying us perennial youth, has at least invited us to become
unselfish and noble.

A first shift in aspiration, a capacity for radical altruism, thus
supervenes upon the lust to live and accompanies parental and social
interests. The new ideal, however, can never entirely obliterate the old
and primary one, because the initial functions which the old Adam
exclusively represented remain imbedded in the new life, and are its
physical basis. If the nutritive soul ceased to operate, the
reproductive soul could never arise; to be altruistic we must first be,
and spiritual interests can never abolish or cancel the material
existence on which they are grafted. The consequence is that death, even
when circumvented by reproduction and relieved by surviving impersonal
interests, remains an essential evil. It may be accepted as inevitable,
and the goods its intrusion leaves standing may be heartily appreciated
and pursued; but something pathetic and incomplete will always attach to
a life that looks to its own termination.

The effort of physical existence is not to accomplish anything definite
but merely to persist for ever. The will has its first law of motion,
corresponding to that of matter; its initial tendency is to continue to
operate in the given direction and in the given manner. Inertia is, in
this sense, the essence of vitality. To be driven from that perpetual
course is somehow to be checked, and an external and hostile force is
required to change a habit or an instinct as much as to deflect a star.
Indeed, nutrition itself, hunting, feeding, and digestion, are forced
activities, and the basis of passions not altogether congenial nor
ideal. Hunger is an incipient faintness and agony, and an animal that
needs to hunt, gnaw, and digest is no immortal, free, or essentially
victorious creature. His will is already driven into by-paths and
expedients; his primitive beatific vision has to be interrupted by
remedial action to restore it for a while, since otherwise it would
obviously degenerate rapidly through all stages of distress until its
total extinction.

[Sidenote: Moral acceptance of this compromise.]

The tasks thus imposed upon the protoplasmic will raise it, we may say,
to a higher level; to hunt is better sport, and more enlightening, than
to lie imbibing sunshine and air; and to eat is, we may well think, a
more positive and specific pleasure than merely to be. Such judgments,
however, show a human bias. They arise from incapacity to throw off
acquired organs. Those necessities which have led to the forms of life
which we happen to exemplify, and in terms of which our virtues are
necessarily expressed, seem to us, in retrospect, happy necessities,
since without them our conventional goods would not have come to appeal
to us. These conventional goods, however, are only compromises with
evil, and the will would never have taken to pursuing them if it had not
been dislodged and beaten back from its primary aims. Even food is, for
this reason, no absolute blessing; it is only the first and most
necessary of comforts, of restorations, of truces and reprieves in that
battle with death in which an ultimate defeat is too plainly inevitable;
for the pitcher that goes often to the well is at last broken, and a
creature that is forced to resist his inward collapse by adventitious
aids will some day find that these aids have failed him, and that inward
dissolution has become, for some mechanical reason, quite irresistible.
It is therefore not only the lazy or mystical will that chafes at the
need of material supports and deprecates anxieties about the morrow; the
most conventional and passionate mind, when it attains any refinement,
confesses the essential servitude involved in such preoccupations by
concealing or ignoring them as much as may be. We study to eat as if we
were not ravenous, to win as if we were willing to lose, and to treat
personal wants in general as merely compulsory and uninteresting
matters. Why dwell, we say to ourselves, on our stammerings and
failures? The intent is all, and the bungling circumlocutions we may be
driven to should be courteously ignored, like a stammerer’s troubles,
when once our meaning has been conveyed.

Even animal passions are, in this way, after-thoughts and expedients,
and although in a brutal age they seem to make up the whole of life,
later it appears that they would be gladly enough outgrown, did the
material situation permit it. Intellectual life returns, in its freedom,
to the attitude proper to primitive will, except that through the new
machinery underlying reason a more stable equilibrium has been
established with external forces, and the freedom originally absolute
has become relative to certain underlying adjustments, adjustments which
may be ignored but cannot be abandoned with impunity. Original action,
as seen in the vegetable, is purely spontaneous. On the animal level
instrumental action is added and chiefly attended to, so that the
creature, without knowing what it lives for, finds attractive tasks and
a sort of glory in the chase, in love, and in labour. In the Life of
Reason this instrumental activity is retained, for it is a necessary
basis for human prosperity and power, but the value of life is again
sought in the supervening free activity which that adjustment to
physical forces, or dominion over them, has made possible on a larger
scale. Every free activity would gladly persist for ever; and if any be
found that involves and aims at its own arrest or transformation, that
activity is thereby proved to be instrumental and servile, imposed from
without and not ideal.

[Sidenote: Even vicarious immortality intrinsically impossible.]

Not only is man’s original effort aimed at living for ever in his own
person, but, even if he could renounce that desire, the dream of being
represented perpetually by posterity is no less doomed. Reproduction,
like nutrition, is a device not ultimately successful. If extinction
does not defeat it, evolution will. Doubtless the fertility of whatever
substance may have produced us will not be exhausted in this single
effort; a potentiality that has once proved efficacious and been
actualised in life, though it should sleep, will in time revive again.
In some form and after no matter what intervals, nature may be expected
always to possess consciousness. But beyond this planet and apart from
the human race, experience is too little imaginable to be interesting.
No definite plan or ideal of ours can find its realisation except in
ourselves. Accordingly, a vicarious physical immortality always remains
an unsatisfactory issue; what is thus to be preserved is but a
counterfeit of our being, and even that counterfeit is confronted by
omens of a total extinction more or less remote. A note of failure and
melancholy must always dominate in the struggle against natural death.

[Sidenote: Intellectual victory over change.]

This defeat is not really problematical, or to be eluded by reviving
ill-digested hopes resting entirely on ignorance, an ignorance which
these hopes will wish to make eternal. We need not wait for our total
death to experience dying; we need not borrow from observation of
others’ demise a prophecy of our own extinction. Every moment
celebrates obsequies over the virtues of its predecessor; and the
possession of memory, by which we somehow survive in representation, is
the most unmistakable proof that we are perishing in reality. In
endowing us with memory, nature has revealed to us a truth utterly
unimaginable to the unflective creation, the truth of mortality.
Everything moves in the midst of death, because it indeed _moves_; but
it falls into the pit unawares and by its own action unmakes and
disestablishes itself, until a wonderful visionary faculty is added, so
that a ghost remains of what has perished to reveal that lapse and at
the same time in a certain sense to neutralise it. The more we reflect,
the more we live in memory and idea, the more convinced and penetrated
we shall be by the experience of death; yet, without our knowing it,
perhaps, this very conviction and experience will have raised us, in a
way, above mortality. That was a heroic and divine oracle which, in
informing us of our decay, made us partners of the gods’ eternity, and
by giving us knowledge poured into us, to that extent, the serenity and
balm of truth. As it is memory that enables us to feel that we are dying
and to know that everything actual is in flux, so it is memory that
opens to us an ideal immortality, unacceptable and meaningless to the
old Adam, but genuine in its own way and undeniably true. It is an
immortality in representation—a representation which envisages things
in their truth as they have in their own day possessed themselves in
reality. It is no subterfuge or superstitious effrontery, called to
disguise or throw off the lessons of experience; on the contrary, it is
experience itself, reflection itself, and knowledge of mortality. Memory
does not reprieve or postpone the changes which it registers, nor does
it itself possess a permanent duration; it is, if possible, less stable
and more mobile than primary sensation. It is, in point of existence,
only an internal and complex kind of sensibility. But in intent and by
its significance it plunges to the depths of time; it looks still on the
departed and bears witness to the truth that, though absent from this
part of experience, and incapable of returning to life, they
nevertheless existed once in their own right, were as living and actual
as experience is to-day, and still help to make up, in company with all
past, present, and future mortals, the filling and value of the world.

[Sidenote: The glory of it.]

As the pathos and heroism of life consists in accepting as an
opportunity the fate that makes our own death, partial or total,
serviceable to others, so the glory of life consists in accepting the
knowledge of natural death as an opportunity to live in the spirit. The
sacrifice, the self-surrender, remains real; for, though the
compensation is real, too, and at moments, perhaps, apparently
overwhelming, it is always incomplete and leaves beneath an incurable
sorrow. Yet life can never contradict its basis or reach satisfactions
essentially excluded by its own conditions. Progress lies in moving
forward from the given situation, and satisfying as well as may be the
interests that exist. And if some initial demand has proved hopeless,
there is the greater reason for cultivating other sources of
satisfaction, possibly more abundant and lasting. Now, reflection is a
vital function; memory and imagination have to the full the rhythm and
force of life. But these faculties, in envisaging the past or the ideal,
envisage the eternal, and the man in whose mind they predominate is to
that extent detached in his affections from the world of flux, from
himself, and from his personal destiny. This detachment will not make
him infinitely long-lived, nor absolutely happy, but it may render him
intelligent and just, and may open to him all intellectual pleasures and
all human sympathies.

There is accordingly an escape from death open to man; one not found by
circumventing nature, but by making use of her own expedients in
circumventing her imperfections. Memory, nay, perception itself, is a
first stage in this escape, which coincides with the acquisition and
possession of reason. When the meaning of successive perceptions is
recovered with the last of them, when a survey is made of objects whose
constitutive sensations first arose independently, this synthetic moment
contains an object raised above time on a pedestal of reflection, a
thought indefeasibly true in its ideal deliverance, though of course
fleeting in its psychic existence. Existence is essentially temporal
and life foredoomed to be mortal, since its basis is a process and an
opposition; it floats in the stream of time, never to return, never to
be recovered or repossessed. But ever since substance became at some
sensitive point intelligent and reflective, ever since time made room
and pause for memory, for history, for the consciousness of time, a god,
as it were, became incarnate in mortality and some vision of truth, some
self-forgetful satisfaction, became a heritage that moment could
transmit to moment and man to man. This heritage is humanity itself, the
presence of immortal reason in creatures that perish. Apprehension,
which makes man so like a god, makes him in one respect immortal; it
quickens his numbered moments with a vision of what never dies, the
truth of those moments and their inalienable values.

[Sidenote: Reason makes man’s divinity.]

To participate in this vision is to participate at once in humanity and
in divinity, since all other makes bonds are material and perishable,
but the bond between two thoughts that have grasped the same truth, of
two instants that have caught the same beauty, is a spiritual and
imperishable bond. It is imperishable simply because it is ideal and
resident merely in import and intent. The two thoughts, the two
instants, remain existentially different; were they not two they could
not come from different quarters to unite in one meaning and to behold
one object in distinct and conspiring acts of apprehension. Being
independent in existence, they can be united by the identity of their
burden, by the common worship, so to speak, of the same god. Were this
ideal goal itself an existence, it would be incapable of uniting
anything; for the same gulf which separated the two original minds would
open between them and their common object. But being, as it is, purely
ideal, it can become the meeting-ground of intelligences and render
their union ideally eternal. Among the physical instruments of thought
there may be rivalry and impact—the two thinkers may compete and
clash—but this is because each seeks his own physical survival and does
not love the truth stripped of its accidental associations and
provincial accent. Doctors disagree in so far as they are not truly
doctors, but, as Plato would say, seek, like sophists and wage-earners,
to circumvent and defeat one another. The conflict is physical and can
extend to the subject-matter only in so far as this is tainted by
individual prejudice and not wholly lifted from the sensuous to the
intellectual plane. In the ether there are no winds of doctrine. The
intellect, being the organ and source of the divine, is divine and
single; if there were many sorts of intellect, many principles of
perspective, they would fix and create incomparable and irrelevant
worlds. Reason is one in that it gravitates toward an object, called
truth, which could not have the function it has, of being a focus for
mental activities, if it were not one in reference to the operations
which converge upon it.

This unity in truth, as in reason, is of course functional only, not
physical or existential. The heats of thought and the thinkers are
innumerable; indefinite, too, the variations to which their endowment
and habits may be subjected. But the condition of spiritual communion or
ideal relevance in these intelligences is their possession of a method
and grammar essentially identical. Language, for example, is significant
in proportion to the constancy in meaning which words and locutions
preserve in a speaker’s mind at various times, or in the minds of
various persons. This constancy is never absolute. Therefore language is
never wholly significant, never exhaustively intelligible. There is
always mud in the well, if we have drawn up enough water. Yet in
peaceful rivers, though they flow, there is an appreciable degree of
translucency. So, from moment to moment, and from man to man, there is
an appreciable element of unanimity, of constancy and congruity of
intent. On this abstract and perfectly identical function science rests
together with every rational formation.

[Sidenote: and his immortality.]

The same function is the seat of human immortality. Reason lifts a
larger or smaller element in each man to the plane of ideality according
as reason more or less thoroughly leavens and permeates the lump. No man
is wholly immortal, as no philosophy is wholly true and no language
wholly intelligible; but only in so far as intelligible is a language a
language rather than a noise, only in so far as true is a philosophy
more than a vent for cerebral humours, and only in so far as a man is
rational and immortal is he a man and not a sensorium.

It is hard to convince people that they have such a gift as
intelligence. If they perceive its animal basis they cannot conceive its
ideal affinities or understand what is meant by calling it divine; if
they perceive its ideality and see the immortal essences that swim into
its ken, they hotly deny that it is an animal faculty, and invent
ultramundane places and bodiless persons in which it is to reside; as if
those celestial substances could be, in respect to thought, any less
material than matter or, in respect to vision and life, any less
instrumental than bodily organs. It never occurs to them that if nature
has added intelligence to animal life it is because they belong
together. Intelligence is a natural emanation of vitality. If eternity
could exist otherwise than as a vision in time, eternity would have no
meaning for men in the world, while the world, men, and time would have
no vocation or status in eternity. The travail of existence would be
without excuse, without issue or consummation, while the conceptions of
truth and of perfection would be without application to experience, pure
dreams about things preternatural and unreal, vacantly conceived, and
illogically supposed to have something to do with living issues. But
truth and perfection, for the very reason that they are not problematic
existences but inherent ideals, cannot be banished from discourse.
Experience may lose any of its data; it cannot lose, while it endures,
the terms with which it operates in becoming experience. Now, truth is
relevant to every opinion which looks to truth for its standard, and
perfection is envisaged in every cry for relief, in every effort at
betterment. Opinions, volitions, and passionate refusals fill human
life. So that when the existence of truth is denied, truth is given the
only status which it ever required—it is conceived.

[Sidenote: It is the locus of all truths.]

Nor can any better defense be found for the denial that nature and her
life have a status in eternity. This statement may not be understood,
but if grasped at all it will not be questioned. By having a status in
eternity is not meant being parts of an eternal existence, petrified or
congealed into something real but motionless. What is meant is only that
whatever exists in time, when bathed in the light of reflection,
acquires an indelible character and discloses irreversible relations;
every fact, in being recognised, takes its place in the universe of
discourse, in that ideal sphere of truth which is the common and
unchanging standard for all assertions. Language, science, art,
religion, and all ambitious dreams are compacted of ideas. Life is as
much a mosaic of notions as the firmament is of stars; and these ideal
and transpersonal objects, bridging time, fixing standards, establishing
values, constituting the natural rewards of all living, are the very
furniture of eternity, the goals and playthings of that reason which is
an instinct in the heart as vital and spontaneous as any other. Or
rather, perhaps, reason is a supervening instinct by which all other
instincts are interpreted, just as the _sensus communis_ or
transcendental unity of psychology is a faculty by which all perceptions
are brought face to face and compared. So that immortality is not a
privilege reserved for a part only of experience, but rather a relation
pervading every part in varying measure. We may, in leaving the subject,
mark the degrees and phases of this idealisation.

[Sidenote: Epicurean immortality, through the truth of existence.]

Animal sensation is related to eternity only by the truth that it has
taken place. The fact, fleeting as it is, is registered in ideal history
and no inventory of the world’s riches, no true confession of its
crimes, would ever be complete that ignored that incident. This
indefeasible character in experience makes a first sort of ideal
immortality, one on which those rational philosophers like to dwell who
have not speculation enough to feel quite certain of any other. It was a
consolation to the Epicurean to remember that, however brief and
uncertain might be his tenure of delight, the past was safe and the
present sure. “He lives happy,” says Horace, “and master over himself,
who can say daily, I have lived. To-morrow let Jove cover the sky with
black clouds or flood it with sunshine; he shall not thereby render
vain what lies behind, he shall not delete and make never to have
existed what once the hour has brought in its flight.” Such
self-concentration and hugging of the facts has no power to improve
them; it gives to pleasure and pain an impartial eternity, and rather
tends to intrench in sensuous and selfish satisfactions a mind that has
lost faith in reason and that deliberately ignores the difference in
scope and dignity which exists among various pursuits. Yet the
reflection is staunch and in its way heroic; it meets a vague and feeble
aspiration, that looks to the infinite, with a just rebuke; it points to
real satisfactions, experienced successes, and asks us to be content
with the fulfilment of our own wills. If you have seen the world, if you
have played your game and won it, what more would you ask for? If you
have tasted the sweets of existence, you should be satisfied; if the
experience has been bitter, you should be glad that it comes to an end.

Of course, as we have seen, there is a primary demand in man which death
and mutation contradict flatly, so that no summons to cease can ever be
obeyed with complete willingness. Even the suicide trembles and the
ascetic feels the stings of the flesh. It is the part of philosophy,
however, to pass over those natural repugnances and overlay them with as
much countervailing rationality as can find lodgment in a particular
mind. The Epicurean, having abandoned politics and religion and being
afraid of any far-reaching ambition, applied philosophy honestly enough
to what remained. Simple and healthy pleasures are the reward of simple
and healthy pursuits; to chafe against them because they are limited is
to import a foreign and disruptive element into the case; a healthy
hunger has its limit, and its satisfaction reaches a natural term.
Philosophy, far from alienating us from those values, should teach us to
see their perfection and to maintain them in our ideal. In other words,
the happy filling of a single hour is so much gained for the universe at
large, and to find joy and sufficiency in the flying moment is perhaps
the only means open to us for increasing the glory of eternity.

[Sidenote: Logical immortality, through objects of thought.]

Moving events, while remaining enshrined in this fashion in their
permanent setting, may contain other and less external relations to the
immutable. They may represent it. If the pleasures of sense are not
cancelled when they cease, but continue to satisfy reason in that they
once satisfied natural desires, much more will the pleasures of
reflection retain their worth, when we consider that what they aspired
to and reached was no momentary physical equilibrium but a permanent
truth. As Archimedes, measuring the hypothenuse, was lost to events,
being engaged in an event of much greater transcendence, so art and
science interrupt the sense for change by engrossing attention in its
issues and its laws. Old age often turns pious to look away from ruins
to some world where youth endures and where what ought to have been is
not overtaken by decay before it has quite come to maturity. Lost in
such abstract contemplations, the mind is weaned from mortal concerns.
It forgets for a few moments a world in which it has so little more to
do and so much, perhaps, still to suffer. As a sensation of pure light
would not be distinguishable from light itself, so a contemplation of
things not implicating time in their structure becomes, so far as its
own deliverance goes, a timeless existence. Unconsciousness of temporal
conditions and of the very flight of time makes the thinker sink for a
moment into identity with timeless objects. And so immortality, in a
second ideal sense, touches the mind.

[Sidenote: Ethical immortality, through types of excellence.]

The transitive phases of consciousness, however, have themselves a
reference to eternal things. They yield a generous enthusiasm and love
of good which is richer in consolation than either Epicurean
self-concentration or mathematical ecstasy. Events are more interesting
than the terms we abstract from them, and the forward movement of the
will is something more intimately real than is the catalogue of our past
experiences. Now the forward movement of the will is an avenue to the
eternal. What would you have? What is the goal of your endeavour? It
must be some success, the establishment of some order, the expression of
some experience. These points once reached, we are not left merely with
the satisfaction of abstract success or the consciousness of ideal
immortality. Being natural goals, these ideals are related to natural
functions. Their attainment does not exhaust but merely liberates, in
this instance, the function concerned, and so marks the perpetual point
of reference common to that function in all its fluctuations. Every
attainment of perfection in an art—as for instance in government—makes
a return to perfection easier for posterity, since there remains an
enlightening example, together with faculties predisposed by discipline
to recover their ancient virtue. The better a man evokes and realises
the ideal the more he leads the life that all others, in proportion to
their worth, will seek to live after him, and the more he helps them to
live in that nobler fashion. His presence in the society of immortals
thus becomes, so to speak, more pervasive. He not only vanquishes time,
by his own rationality, living now in the eternal, but he continually
lives again in all rational beings.

Since the ideal has this perpetual pertinence to mortal struggles, he
who lives in the ideal and leaves it expressed in society or in art
enjoys a double immortality. The eternal has absorbed him while he
lived, and when he is dead his influence brings others to the same
absorption, making them, through that ideal identity with the best in
him, reincarnations and perennial seats of all in him which he could
rationally hope to rescue from destruction. He can say, without any
subterfuge or desire to delude himself, that he shall not wholly die;
for he will have a better notion than the vulgar of what constitutes his
being. By becoming the spectator and confessor of his own death and of
universal mutation, he will have identified himself with what is
spiritual in all spirits and masterful in all apprehension; and so
conceiving himself, he may truly feel and know that he is eternal.




CHAPTER XV

CONCLUSION


[Sidenote: The failure of magic.]

The preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly by
Christianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rational
goal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer between
wisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, has there been so much of both. It
was a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic;
and the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, to
castigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of thereby
bending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a pathetic
spectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity of
evil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice or
deliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, if
lighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion when
it has tried to do man’s work for him has not only cheated hope, but
consumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.

[Sidenote: and of mythology.]

[Sidenote: Their imaginative value.]

No less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion the
function of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes
for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values
which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and
confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of
natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being
exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial
despair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved
wonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offset
their uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they have
occasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy has
given appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a mass
of hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of human
expression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, the
mind’s own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise in
self-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the
dispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universal
harmonies, has actually stimulated man’s moral nature: he has grown
larger by thinking himself so large.

Through the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religion
thus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; for
mythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions.
Human needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and to
conquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their very
ineptitude, rode somewhat lightly over particular issues and envisaged
rather distant goods, it was possible through them to give aspiration
and reflection greater scope than the meaner exigencies of life would
have permitted. Where custom ruled morals and a narrow empiricism
bounded the field of knowledge, it was partly a blessing that
imagination should be given an illegitimate sway. Without
misunderstanding, there might have been no understanding at all; without
confidence in supernatural support, the heart might never have uttered
its own oracles. So that in close association with superstition and
fable we find piety and spirituality entering the world.

[Sidenote: Piety and spirituality justified.]

Rational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessary
conditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simple
sanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep,
elemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours the
past, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the
strength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to the
future and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, as
was that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernatural
machinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims or
else is worthless.

[Sidenote: Mysticism a primordial state of feeling.]

There is one other phase or possible overtone of religion about which a
word might be added in conclusion. What is called mysticism is a certain
genial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mystic
smiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force of
his insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision,
but he is each of these things _in vacuo_, and in the absence of any
object.

Mysticism can exist, in varied degrees, at any stage of rational
development. Its presence is therefore no indication of the worth or
worthlessness of its possessor. This circumstance tends to obscure its
nature, which would otherwise be obvious enough. Seeing the greatest
saints and philosophers grow mystical in their highest flights, an
innocent observer might imagine that mysticism was an ultimate attitude,
which only his own incapacity kept him from understanding. But exactly
the opposite is the case. Mysticism is the most primitive of feelings
and only visits formed minds in moments of intellectual arrest and
dissolution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed,
to parody a phrase of Hegel’s, the only pure mystics are the brutes.
When articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guides
without kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardly
referred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from an
unknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such
an experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial
energies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as
at the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet
may have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth
and sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the
end, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate
experience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by the
elementary flood rising from beneath.

[Sidenote: It may recur at any stage of culture.]

Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to
incidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and be
the body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say
so, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and
interrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to the
surface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, the
rhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearance
of intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and a
psychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and
volcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for
those fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are
utterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leave
something standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if they
prepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers and
weeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there is
more evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism,
under the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit.

[Sidenote: Form gives substance its life and value.]

The feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in their
own name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality,
dependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness coming
forward and blotting out the scene. What mysticism destroys is, in a
sense, its only legitimate expression. The Life of Reason, in so far as
it is life, contains the mystic’s primordial assurances, and his
rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what
those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to
support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and
connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured and
natural happiness.


*** End of Volume Three ***




REASON IN ART

Volume Four of “The Life of Reason”


GEORGE SANTAYANA


hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




CONTENTS

REASON IN ART


CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE

Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.—Art is plastic
instinct conscious of its aims.—It is automatic.—So are the ideas it
expresses.—We are said to control whatever obeys us.—Utility is a
result.—The useful naturally stable.—Intelligence is docility.—Art is
reason propagating itself.—Beauty an incident in rational art,
inseparable from the others. Pages 3-17


CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART

Utility is ultimately ideal.—Work wasted and chances missed.—Ideals
must be interpreted, not prescribed.—The aim of industry is to live
well.—Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.—Servile arts may
grow spontaneous or their products may be renounced.—Art starts from
two potentialities: its material and its problem.—Each must be definite
and congruous with the other.—A sophism exposed.—Industry prepares
matter for the liberal arts.—Each partakes of the other. Pages 18-33


CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART

Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.—It combines utility
and automatism.—Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.—It is tamed
by contact with the world.—The dance.—Functions of gesture.—Automatic
music. Pages 34-43


CHAPTER IV

MUSIC

Music is a world apart.—It justifies itself.—It is vital and
transient.—Its physical affinities.—Physiology of music.—Limits of
musical sensibility.—The value of music is relative to them.—Wonders
of musical structure.—Its inherent emotions.—In growing specific they
remain unearthly.—They merge with common emotions, and express such as
find no object in nature.—Music lends elementary feelings an
intellectual communicable form.—All essences are in themselves good,
even the passions.—Each impulse calls for a possible congenial
world.—Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.—Music may do
so.—Instability the soul of matter.—Peace the triumph of
spirit.—Refinement is true strength. Pages 44-67


CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION

Sounds well fitted to be symbols.—Language has a structure independent
of things.—Words, remaining identical, serve to identify things that
change.—Language the dialectical garment of facts.—Words are wise
men’s counters.—Nominalism right in psychology and realism in
logic.—Literature moves between the extremes of music and
denotation.—Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have
affinity.—Syntax positively representative.—Yet it vitiates what it
represents.—Difficulty in subduing a living medium.—Language
foreshortens experience.—It is a perpetual mythology.—It may be apt or
inapt, with equal richness.—Absolute language a possible but foolish
art Pages 68-86


CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE

Force of primary expressions.—Its exclusiveness and
narrowness.—Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.—Inspiration
irresponsible.—Plato’s discriminating view.—Explosive and pregnant
expression.—Natural history of inspiration.—Expressions to be
understood must be recreated, and so changed.—Expressions may be recast
perversely, humourously, or sublimely.—The nature of prose.—It is more
advanced and responsible than poetry.—Maturity brings love of
practical truth.—Pure prose would tend to efface itself.—Form alone,
or substance alone, may be poetical.—Poetry has its place in the
medium.—It is the best medium possible.—Might it not convey what it is
best to know?—A rational poetry would exclude much now thought
poetical.—All apperception modifies its object.—Reason has its own
bias and method.—Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in
ultimate emotions.—An illustration.—Volume can be found in scope
better than in suggestion Pages 87-115


CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION

Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.—Such
effects fruitful.—Magic authority of man’s first creations.—Art brings
relief from idolatry.—Inertia in technique.—Inertia in
appreciation.—Adventitious effects appreciated first.—Approach to
beauty through useful structure.—Failure of adapted styles.—Not all
structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.—Structures designed for
display.—Appeal made by decoration.—Its natural rights.—Its alliance
with structure in Greek architecture.—Relations of the two in Gothic
art.—The result here romantic.—The mediæval artist.—Representation
introduced.—Transition to illustration. Pages 116-143


CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION

Psychology of imitation.—Sustained sensation involves
reproduction.—Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new
material.—Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.—How the
artist is inspired and irresponsible.—Need of knowing and loving the
subject rendered.—Public interests determine the subject of art, and
the subject the medium.—Reproduction by acting ephemeral.—demands of
sculpture.—It is essentially obsolete.—When men see groups and
backgrounds they are natural painters.—Evolution of painting.—Sensuous
and dramatic adequacy approached.—Essence of landscape-painting.—Its
threatened dissolution.—Reversion to pure decorative design.—Sensuous
values are primordial and so indispensable Pages 144-165


CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART

Art is subject to moral censorship.—Its initial or specific excellence
is not enough.—All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial
worth.—But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.—It is
liberal, and typical of perfect activity.—The ideal, when incarnate,
becomes subject to civil society.—Plato’s strictures: he exaggerates
the effect of myths.—His deeper moral objections.—Their
lightness.—Importance of æsthetic alternatives.—The importance of
æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.—The æsthetic temperament
requires tutelage.—Aesthetic values everywhere interfused.—They are
primordial.—To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.—They
flow naturally from perfect function.—Even inhibited functions, when
they fall into a new rhythm, yield new beauties.—He who loves beauty
must chasten it Pages 166-190


CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE

Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.—Taste gains in
authority as it is more and more widely based.—Different æsthetic
endowments may be compared in quantity or force.—Authority of vital
over verbal judgments.—Tastes differ also in purity or
consistency.—They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of
appeal.—Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar, or by
reporting the ultimate.—Good taste demands that art should be rational,
_i.e._, harmonious with all other interests.—A mere “work of art” a
baseless artifice.—Human uses give to works of art their highest
expression and charm.—The sad values of appearance.—They need to be
made prophetic of practical goods, which in turn would be suffused with
beauty Pages 191-215


CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS

Aesthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones, which in turn would be
suffused with beauty, yet prototypes of true perfections.—Pros and cons
of detached indulgences.—The happy imagination is one initially in line
with things, and brought always closer to them by experience.—Reason is
the principle of both art and happiness.—Only a rational society can
have sure and perfect arts.—Why art is now empty and
unstable.—Anomalous character of the irrational artist.—True art
measures and completes happiness. Pages 216-230




REASON IN ART




CHAPTER I

THE BASIS OF ART IN INSTINCT AND EXPERIENCE


[Sidenote: Man affects his environment, sometimes to good purpose.]

Man exists amid a universal ferment of being, and not only needs
plasticity in his habits and pursuits but finds plasticity also in the
surrounding world. Life is an equilibrium which is maintained now by
accepting modification and now by imposing it. Since the organ for all
activity is a body in mechanical relation to other material objects,
objects which the creature’s instincts often compel him to appropriate
or transform, changes in his habits and pursuits leave their mark on
whatever he touches. His habitat must needs bear many a trace of his
presence, from which intelligent observers might infer something about
his life and action. These vestiges of action are for the most part
imprinted unconsciously and aimlessly on the world. They are in
themselves generally useless, like footprints; and yet almost any sign
of man’s passage might, under certain conditions, interest a man. A
footprint could fill Robinson Crusoe with emotion, the devastation
wrought by an army’s march might prove many things to a historian, and
even the disorder in which a room is casually left may express very
vividly the owner’s ways and character.

Sometimes, however, man’s traces are traces of useful action which has
so changed natural objects as to make them congenial to his mind.
Instead of a footprint we might find an arrow; instead of a disordered
room, a well-planted orchard—things which would not only have betrayed
the agent’s habits, but would have served and expressed his intent. Such
propitious forms given by man to matter are no less instrumental in the
Life of Reason than are propitious forms assumed by man’s own habit or
fancy. Any operation which thus humanises and rationalises objects is
called art.

[Sidenote: Art is plastic instinct conscious of its aim.]

All art has an instinctive source and a material embodiment. If the
birds in building nests felt the utility of what they do, they would be
practising an art; and for the instinct to be called rational it would
even suffice that their traditional purpose and method should become
conscious occasionally. Thus weaving is an art, although the weaver may
not be at every moment conscious of its purpose, but may be carried
along, like any other workman, by the routine of his art; and language
is a rational product, not because it always has a use or meaning, but
because it is sometimes felt to have one. Arts are no less automatic
than instincts, and usually, as Aristotle observed, less thoroughly
purposive; for instincts, being transmitted by inheritance and imbedded
in congenital structure, have to be economically and deeply organised.
If they go far wrong they constitute a burden impossible to throw off
and impossible to bear. The man harassed by inordinate instincts
perishes through want, vice, disease, or madness. Arts, on the contrary,
being transmitted only by imitation and teaching, hover more lightly
over life. If ill-adjusted they make less havoc and cause less drain.
The more superficial they are and the more detached from practical
habits, the more extravagant and meaningless they can dare to become; so
that the higher products of life are the most often gratuitous. No
instinct or institution was ever so absurd as is a large part of human
poetry and philosophy, while the margin of ineptitude is much broader in
religious myth than in religious ethics.

[Sidenote: It is automatic.]

Arts are instincts bred and reared in the open, creative habits acquired
in the light of reason. Consciousness accompanies their formation; a
certain uneasiness or desire and a more or less definite conception of
what is wanted often precedes their full organisation. That the need
should be felt before the means for satisfying it have been found has
led the unreflecting to imagine that in art the need produces the
discovery and the idea the work. Causes at best are lightly assigned by
mortals, and this particular superstition is no worse than any other.
The data—the plan and its execution—as conjoined empirically in the
few interesting cases which show successful achievement, are made into a
law, in oblivion of the fact that in more numerous cases such
conjunction fails wholly or in part, and that even in the successful
cases other natural conditions are present, and must be present, to
secure the result. In a matter where custom is so ingrained and
supported by a constant apperceptive illusion, there is little hope of
making thought suddenly exact, or exact language not paradoxical. We
must observe, however, that only by virtue of a false perspective do
ideas seems to govern action, or is a felt necessity the mother of
invention. In truth invention is the child of abundance, and the genius
or vital premonition and groping which achieve art, simultaneously
achieve the ideas which that art embodies; or, rather, ideas are
themselves products of an inner movement which has an automatic
extension outwards; and this extension manifests the ideas. Mere craving
has no lights of its own to prophesy by, no prescience of what the world
may contain that would satisfy, no power of imagining what would allay
its unrest. Images and satisfactions have to come of themselves; then
the blind craving, as it turns into an incipient pleasure, first
recognises its object. The pure will’s impotence is absolute, and it
would writhe for ever and consume itself in darkness if perception gave
it no light and experience no premonition.

[Sidenote: So are the ideas it expresses.]

Now, a man cannot draw bodily from external perception the ideas he is
supposed to create or invent; and as his will or uneasiness, before he
creates the satisfying ideas, is by hypothesis without them, it follows
that creation or invention is automatic. The ideas come of themselves,
being new and unthought-of figments, similar, no doubt, to old
perceptions and compacted of familiar materials, but reproduced in a
novel fashion and dropping in their sudden form from the blue. However
instantly they may be welcomed, they were not already known and never
could have been summoned. In the stock example, for instance, of groping
for a forgotten name, we know the context in which that name should lie;
we feel the environment of our local void; but what finally pops into
that place, reinstated there by the surrounding tensions, is itself
unforeseen, for it was just this that was forgotten. Could we have
invoked the name we should not have needed to do so, having it already
at our disposal. It is in fact a palpable impossibility that any idea
should call itself into being, or that any act or any preference should
be its own ground. The responsibility assumed for these things is not a
determination to conceive them before they are conceived (which is a
contradiction in terms) but an embrace and appropriation of them once
they have appeared. It is thus that ebullitions in parts of our nature
become touchstones for the whole; and the incidents within us seem
hardly our own work till they are accepted and incorporated into the
main current of our being. All invention is tentative, all art
experimental, and to be sought, like salvation, with fear and trembling.
There is a painful pregnancy in genius, a long incubation and waiting
for the spirit, a thousand rejections and futile birth-pangs, before the
wonderful child appears, a gift of the gods, utterly undeserved and
inexplicably perfect. Even this unaccountable success comes only in rare
and fortunate instances. What is ordinarily produced is so base a
hybrid, so lame and ridiculous a changeling, that we reconcile ourselves
with difficulty to our offspring and blush to be represented by our
fated works.

[Sidenote: We are said to control whatever obeys us.]

The propensity to attribute happy events to our own agency, little as we
understand what we mean by it, and to attribute only untoward results to
external forces, has its ground in the primitive nexus of experience.
What we call ourselves is a certain cycle of vegetative processes,
bringing a round of familiar impulses and ideas; this stream has a
general direction, a conscious vital inertia, in harmony with which it
moves. Many of the developments within it are dialectical; that is, they
go forward by inner necessity, like an egg hatching within its shell,
warmed but undisturbed by an environment of which they are wholly
oblivious; and this sort of growth, when there is adequate consciousness
of it, is felt to be both absolutely obvious and absolutely free. The
emotion that accompanies it is pleasurable, but is too active and proud
to call itself a pleasure; it has rather the quality of assurance and
right. This part of life, however, is only its courageous core; about it
play all sorts of incidental processes, allying themselves to it in more
or less congruous movement. Whatever peripheral events fall in with the
central impulse are accordingly lost in its energy and felt to be not so
much peripheral and accidental as inwardly grounded, being, like the
stages of a prosperous dialectic, spontaneously demanded and instantly
justified when they come.

The sphere of the self’s power is accordingly, for primitive
consciousness, simply the sphere of what happens well; it is the entire
unoffending and obedient part of the world. A man who has good luck at
dice prides himself upon it, and believes that to have it is his destiny
and desert. If his luck were absolutely constant, he would say he had
the _power_ to throw high; and as the event would, by hypothesis,
sustain his boast, there would be no practical error in that assumption.
A will that never found anything to thwart it would think itself
omnipotent; and as the psychological essence of omniscience is not to
suspect there is anything which you do not know, so the psychological
essence of omnipotence is not to suspect that anything can happen which
you do not desire. Such claims would undoubtedly be made if experience
lent them the least colour; but would even the most comfortable and
innocent assurances of this sort cease to be precarious? Might not any
moment of eternity bring the unimagined contradiction, and shake the
dreaming god?

[Sidenote: Utility is a result.]

Utility, like significance, is an eventual harmony in the arts and by no
means their ground. All useful things have been discovered as the
Lilliputians discovered roast pig; and the casual feat has furthermore
to be supported by a situation favourable to maintaining the art. The
most useful act will never be repeated unless its secret remains
embodied in structure. Practice and endeavour will not help an artist to
remain long at his best; and many a performance is applauded which
cannot be imitated. To create the requisite structure two preformed
structures are needed: one in the agent, to give him skill and
perseverance, and another in the material, to give it the right
plasticity. Human progress would long ago have reached its goal if every
man who recognised a good could at once appropriate it, and possess
wisdom for ever by virtue of one moment’s insight. Insight,
unfortunately, is in itself perfectly useless and inconsequential; it
can neither have produced its own occasion nor now insure its own
recurrence. Nevertheless, being proof positive that whatever basis it
needs is actual, insight is also an indication that the extant
structure, if circumstances maintain it, may continue to operate with
the same moral results, maintaining the vision which it has once
supported.

[Sidenote: The useful naturally stable.]

When men find that by chance they have started a useful change in the
world, they congratulate themselves upon it and call their persistence
in that practice a free activity. And the activity is indeed rational,
since it subserves an end. The happy organisation which enables us to
continue in that rational course is the very organisation which enabled
us to initiate it. If this new process was formed under external
influences, the same influences, when they operate again, will
reconstitute the process each time more easily; while if it was formed
quite spontaneously, its own inertia will maintain it quietly in the
brain and bring it to the surface whenever circumstances permit. This is
what is called learning by experience. Such lessons are far from
indelible and are not always at command. Yet what has once been done may
be repeated; repetition reinforces itself and becomes habit; and a clear
memory of the benefit once attained by fortunate action, representing as
it does the trace left by that action in the system, and its harmony
with the man’s usual impulses (for the action is felt to be
_beneficial_), constitutes a strong presumption that the act will be
repeated automatically on occasion; _i.e._, that it has really been
learned. Consciousness, which willingly attends to results only, will
judge either the memory or the benefit, or both confusedly, to be the
ground of this readiness to act; and only if some hitch occurs in the
machinery, so that rational behaviour fails to takes place, will a
surprised appeal be made to material accidents, or to a guilty
forgetfulness or indocility in the soul.

[Sidenote: Intelligence is docility.]

The idiot cannot learn from experience at all, because a new process, in
his liquid brain, does not modify structure; while the fool uses what he
has learned only inaptly and in frivolous fragments, because his
stretches of linked experience are short and their connections insecure.
But when the cerebral plasm is fresh and well disposed and when the
paths are clear, attention is consecutive and learning easy; a multitude
of details can be gathered into a single cycle of memory or of potential
regard. Under such circumstances action is the unimpeded expression of
healthy instinct in an environment squarely faced. Conduct from the
first then issues in progress, and, by reinforcing its own organisation
at each rehearsal, makes progress continual. For there will subsist not
only a readiness to act and a great precision in action, but if any
significant circumstance has varied in the conditions or in the
interests at stake, this change will make itself felt; it will check the
process and prevent precipitate action. Deliberation or well-founded
scruple has the same source as facility—a plastic and quick
organisation. To be sensitive to difficulties and dangers goes with
being sensitive to opportunities.

[Sidenote: Art is reason propagating itself.]

Of all reason’s embodiments art is therefore the most splendid and
complete. Merely to attain categories by which inner experience may be
articulated, or to feign analogies by which a universe may be conceived,
would be but a visionary triumph if it remained ineffectual and went
with no actual remodelling of the outer world, to render man’s dwelling
more appropriate and his mind better fed and more largely transmissible.
Mind grows self-perpetuating only by its expression in matter. What
makes progress possible is that rational action may leave traces in
nature, such that nature in consequence furnishes a better basis for the
Life of Reason; in other words progress is art bettering the conditions
of existence. Until art arises, all achievement is internal to the
brain, dies with the individual, and even in him spends itself without
recovery, like music heard in a dream. Art, in establishing instruments
for human life beyond the human body, and moulding outer things into
sympathy with inner values, establishes a ground whence values may
continually spring up; the thatch that protects from to-day’s rain will
last and keep out to-morrow’s rain also; the sign that once expresses an
idea will serve to recall it in future.

Not only does the work of art thus perpetuate its own function and
produce a better experience, but the process of art also perpetuates
itself, because it is teachable. Every animal learns something by
living; but if his offspring inherit only what he possessed at birth,
they have to learn life’s lessons over again from the beginning, with at
best some vague help given by their parents’ example. But when the
fruits of experience exist in the common environment, when new
instruments, unknown to nature, are offered to each individual for his
better equipment, although he must still learn for himself how to live,
he may learn in a humaner school, where artificial occasions are
constantly open to him for expanding his powers. It is no longer merely
hidden inner processes that he must reproduce to attain his
predecessors’ wisdom; he may acquire much of it more expeditiously by
imitating their outward habit—an imitation which, furthermore, they
have some means of exacting from him. Wherever there is art there is a
possibility of training. A father who calls his idle sons from the
jungle to help him hold the plough, not only inures them to labour but
compels them to observe the earth upturned and refreshed, and to watch
the germination there; their wandering thought, their incipient
rebellions, will be met by the hope of harvest; and it will not be
impossible for them, when their father is dead, to follow the plough of
their own initiative and for their own children’s sake. So great is the
sustained advance in rationality made possible by art which, being
embodied in matter, is teachable and transmissible by training; for in
art the values secured are recognised the more easily for having been
first enjoyed when other people furnished the means to them; while the
maintenance of these values is facilitated by an external tradition
imposing itself contagiously or by force on each new generation.

[Sidenote: Beauty an incident in rational art.]

Art is action which transcending the body makes the world a more
congenial stimulus to the soul. All art is therefore useful and
practical, and the notable æsthetic value which some works of art
possess, for reasons flowing for the most part out of their moral
significance, is itself one of the satisfactions which art offers to
human nature as a whole. Between sensation and abstract discourse lies a
region of deployed sensibility or synthetic representation, a region
where more is seen at arm’s length than in any one moment could be felt
at close quarters, and yet where the remote parts of experience, which
discourse reaches only through symbols, are recovered and recomposed in
something like their native colours and experienced relations. This
region, called imagination, has pleasures more airy and luminous than
those of sense, more massive and rapturous than those of intelligence.
The values inherent in imagination, in instant intuition, in sense
endowed with form, are called æsthetic values; they are found mainly in
nature and living beings, but often also in man’s artificial works, in
images evoked by language, and in the realm of sound.

[Sidenote: Inseparable from the others.]

Productions in which an æsthetic value is or is supposed to be
prominent take the name of fine art; but the work of fine art so defined
is almost always an abstraction from the actual object, which has many
non-æsthetic functions and values. To separate the æsthetic element,
abstract and dependent as it often is, is an artifice which is more
misleading than helpful; for neither in the history of art nor in a
rational estimate of its value can the æsthetic function of things be
divorced from the practical and moral. What had to be done was, by
imaginative races, done imaginatively; what had to be spoken or made,
was spoken or made fitly, lovingly, beautifully. Or, to take the matter
up on its psychological side, the ceaseless experimentation and ferment
of ideas, in breeding what it had a propensity to breed, came sometimes
on figments that gave it delightful pause; these beauties were the first
knowledges and these arrests the first hints of real and useful things.
The rose’s grace could more easily be plucked from its petals than the
beauty of art from its subject, occasion, and use. An æsthetic
fragrance, indeed, all things may have, if in soliciting man’s senses or
reason they can awaken his imagination as well; but this middle zone is
so mixed and nebulous, and its limits are so vague, that it cannot well
be treated in theory otherwise than as it exists in fact—as a phase of
man’s sympathy with the world he moves in. If art is that element in the
Life of Reason which consists in modifying its environment the better
to attain its end, art may be expected to subserve all parts of the
human ideal, to increase man’s comfort, knowledge, and delight. And as
nature, in her measure, is wont to satisfy these interests together, so
art, in seeking to increase that satisfaction, will work simultaneously
in every ideal direction. Nor will any of these directions be on the
whole good, or tempt a well-trained will, if it leads to estrangement
from all other interests. The æsthetic good will be accordingly hatched
in the same nest with the others, and incapable of flying far in a
different air.




CHAPTER II

RATIONALITY OF INDUSTRIAL ART


[Sidenote: Utility is ultimately ideal.]

If there were anything wholly instrumental or merely useful its
rationality, such as it was, would be perfectly obvious. Such a thing
would be exhaustively defined by its result and conditioned exclusively
by its expediency. Yet the value of most human arts, mechanical as they
may appear, has a somewhat doubtful and mixed character. Naval
architecture, for instance, serves a clear immediate purpose. Yet to
cross the sea is not an ultimate good, and the ambition or curiosity
that first led man, being a land-animal, to that now vulgar adventure,
has sometimes found moralists to condemn it. A vessel’s true excellence
is more deeply conditioned than the ship-wright may imagine when he
prides himself on having made something that will float and go. The best
battle-ship, or racing yacht, or freight steamer, might turn out to be a
worse thing for its specific excellence, if the action it facilitated
proved on the whole maleficent, and if war or racing or trade could be
rightly condemned by a philosopher. The rationality of ship-building has
several sets of conditions: the patron’s demands must be first
fulfilled; then the patron’s specifications have to be judged by the
purpose he in turn has in mind; this purpose itself has to be justified
by his ideal in life, and finally his ideal by its adequacy to his total
or ultimate nature. Error on any of these planes makes the ultimate
product irrational; and if a finer instinct, even in the midst of
absorbing subsidiary action, warns a man that he is working against his
highest good, his art will lose its savour and its most skilful products
will grow hateful, even to his immediate apprehension, infected as they
will be by the canker of folly.

[Sidenote: Work wasted and chances missed.]

Art thus has its casuistry no less than morals, and philosophers in the
future, if man should at last have ceased to battle with ghosts, might
be called upon to review material civilisation from its beginnings,
testing each complication by its known ultimate fruits and reaching in
this way a purified and organic ideal of human industry, an ideal which
education and political action might help to embody. If nakedness or a
single garment were shown to be wholesomer and more agreeable than
complicated clothes, weavers and tailors might be notably diminished in
number. If, in another quarter, popular fancy should sicken at last of
its traditional round of games and fictions, it might discover infinite
entertainment in the play of reality and truth, and infinite novelties
to be created by fruitful labour; so that many a pleasure might be found
which is now clogged by mere apathy and unintelligence. Human genius,
like a foolish Endymion, lies fast asleep amid its opportunities,
wasting itself in dreams and disinheriting itself by negligence.

[Sidenote: Ideals must be interpreted, not prescribed.]

Descriptive economy, however, will have to make great progress before
the concrete ethics of art can be properly composed. History, conceived
hitherto as a barbarous romance, does not furnish sufficient data by
which the happiness of life under various conditions may be soberly
estimated. Politics has receded into the region of blind impulse and
factional interests, and would need to be reconstituted before it could
approach again that scientific problem which Socrates and his great
disciples would have wished it to solve. Meantime it may not be
premature to say something about another factor in practical philosophy,
namely, the ultimate interests by which industrial arts and their
products have to be estimated. Even before we know the exact effects of
an institution we can fix to some extent the purposes which, in order to
be beneficent, it will have to subserve, although in truth such
antecedent fixing of aims cannot go far, seeing that every operation
reacts on the organ that executes it, thereby modifying the ideal
involved. Doubtless the most industrial people would still wish to be
happy and might accordingly lay down certain principles which its
industry should never transgress, as for instance that production should
at any price leave room for liberty, leisure, beauty, and a spirit of
general co-operation and goodwill. But a people once having become
industrial will hardly be happy if sent back to Arcadia; it will have
formed busy habits which it cannot relax without tedium; it will have
developed a restlessness and avidity which will crave matter, like any
other kind of hunger. Every experiment in living qualifies the initial
possibilities of life, and the moralist would reckon without his host if
he did not allow for the change which forced exercise makes in instinct,
adjusting it more or less to extant conditions originally, perhaps,
unwelcome. It is too late for the highest good to prescribe flying for
quadrupeds or peace for the sea waves.

What antecedent interest does mechanical art subserve? What is the
initial and commanding ideal of life by which all industrial
developments are to be proved rational or condemned as vain? If we look
to the most sordid and instrumental of industries we see that their
purpose is to produce a foreordained result with the minimum of effort.
They serve, in a word, to cheapen commodities. But the value of such an
achievement is clearly not final; it hangs on two underlying ideals, one
demanding abundance in the things produced and the other diminution in
the toil required to produce them. At least the latter interest may in
turn be analysed further, for to diminish toil is itself no absolute
good; it is a good only when such diminution in one sphere liberates
energies which may be employed in other fields, so that the total human
accomplishment may be greater. Doubtless useful labour has its natural
limits, for if overdone any activity may impair the power of enjoying
both its fruits and its operation. Yet in so far as labour can become
spontaneous and in itself delightful it is a positive benefit; and to
its intrinsic value must be added all those possessions or useful
dispositions which it may secure. Thus one ideal—to diminish
labour—falls back into the other—to diffuse occasions for enjoyment.
The aim is not to curtail occupation but rather to render occupation
liberal by supplying it with more appropriate objects.

[Sidenote: The aim of industry is to live well.]

It is then liberal life, fostered by industry and commerce or involved
in them, that alone can justify these instrumental pursuits. Those
philosophers whose ethics is nothing but sentimental physics like to
point out that happiness arises out of work and that compulsory
activities, dutifully performed, underlie freedom. Of course matter or
force underlies everything; but rationality does not accrue to spirit
because mechanism supports it; it accrues to mechanism in so far as
spirit is thereby called into existence; so that while values derive
existence only from their causes, causes derive value only from their
results. Functions cannot be exercised until their organs exist and are
in operation, so that what is primary in the order of genesis is always
last and most dependent in the order of worth. The primary substance of
things is their mere material; their first cause is their lowest
instrument. Matter has only the values of the forms which it assumes,
and while each stratification may create some intrinsic ideal and
achieve some good, these goods are dull and fleeting in proportion to
their rudimentary character and their nearness to protoplasmic thrills.
Where reason exists life cannot, indeed, be altogether slavish; for any
operation, however menial and fragmentary, when it is accompanied by
ideal representation of the ends pursued and by felt success in
attaining them, becomes a sample and anagram of all freedom.
Nevertheless to arrest attention on a means is really illiberal, though
not so much by what such an interest contains as by what it ignores.
Happiness in a treadmill is far from inconceivable; but for that
happiness to be rational the wheel should be nothing less than the whole
sky from which influences can descend upon us. There would be meanness
of soul in being content with a smaller sphere, so that not everything
that was relevant to our welfare should be envisaged in our thoughts and
purposes. To be absorbed by the incidental is the animal’s portion; to
be confined to the instrumental is the slave’s. For though within such
activity there may be a rational movement, the activity ends in a fog
and in mere physical drifting. Happiness has to be begged of fortune or
found in mystical indifference: it is not yet subtended by rational art.

[Sidenote: Some arts, but no men, are slaves by nature.]

The Aristotelian theory of slavery, in making servile action wholly
subservient, sins indeed against persons, but not against arts. It sins
against persons because there is inconsiderate haste in asserting that
whole classes of men are capable of no activities, except the physical,
which justify themselves inherently. The lower animals also have
physical interests and natural emotions. A man, if he deserves the name,
must be credited with some rational capacity: prospect and retrospect,
hope and the ideal portraiture of things, must to some extent employ
him. Freedom to cultivate these interests is then his inherent right. As
the lion vindicates his prerogative to ferocity and dignity, so every
rational creature vindicates his prerogative to spiritual freedom. But a
too summary classification of individuals covers, in Aristotle, a just
discrimination among the arts. In so far as a man’s occupation is merely
instrumental and justified only externally, he is obviously a slave and
his art at best an evil necessity. For the operation is by hypothesis
not its own end; and if the product, needful for some ulterior purpose,
had been found ready made in nature, the other and self-justifying
activities could have gone on unimpeded, without the arrest or
dislocation which is involved in first establishing the needful
conditions for right action. If air had to be manufactured, as dwellings
must be, or breathing to be learned like speech, mankind would start
with an even greater handicap and would never have come within sight of
such goals as it can now pursue. Thus all instrumental and remedial
arts, however indispensable, are pure burdens; and progress consists in
abridging them as much as is possible without contracting the basis for
moral life.

[Sidenote: Servile arts may grow spontaneous or their products may be
renounced.]

This needful abridgment can take place in two directions. The art may
become instinctive, unconscious of the utility that backs it and
conscious only of the solicitation that leads it on. In that measure
human nature is adapted to its conditions; lessons long dictated by
experience are actually learned and become hereditary habits. So
inclination to hunt and fondness for nursing children have passed into
instincts in the human race; and what if it were a forced art would be
servile, by becoming spontaneous has risen to be an ingredient in ideal
life; for sport and maternity are human ideals. In an opposite direction
servile arts may be abridged by a lapse of the demand which required
them. The servile art of vine-dressers, for instance, would meet such a
fate if the course of history, instead of tending to make the vintage an
ideal episode and to create worshippers of Bacchus and Priapus, tended
rather to bring about a distaste for wine and made the whole industry
superfluous. This solution is certainly less happy than the other,
insomuch as it suppresses a function instead of taking it up into
organic life; yet life to be organic has to be exclusive and finite; it
has to work out specific tendencies in a specific environment; and
therefore to surrender a particular impeded impulse may involve a clear
gain, if only a compensating unimpeded good thereby comes to light
elsewhere. If wine disappeared, with all its humane and symbolic
consecrations, that loss might bring an ultimate gain, could some less
treacherous friend of frankness and merriment be thereby brought into
the world.

In practice servile art is usually mitigated by combining these two
methods; the demand subserved, being but ill supported, learns to
restrain itself and be less importunate; while at the same time habit
renders the labour which was once unwilling largely automatic, and even
overlays it with ideal associations. Human nature is happily elastic;
there is hardly a need that may not be muffled or suspended, and hardly
an employment that may not be relieved by the automatic interest with
which it comes to be pursued. To this automatic interest other
palliatives are often added, sometimes religion, sometimes mere dulness
and resignation; but in these cases the evil imposed is merely
counterbalanced or forgotten, it is not remedied. Reflective and
spiritual races minimise labour by renunciation, for they find it easier
to give up its fruits than to justify its exactions. Among energetic and
self-willed men, on the contrary, the demand for material progress
remains predominant, and philosophy dwells by preference on the
possibility that a violent and continual subjection in the present might
issue in a glorious future dominion. This possible result was hardly
realised by the Jews, nor long maintained by the Greeks and Romans, and
it remains to be seen whether modern industrialism can achieve it. In
fact, we may suspect that success only comes when a nation’s external
task happens to coincide with its natural genius, so that a minimum of
its labour is servile and a maximum of its play is beneficial. It is in
such cases that we find colossal achievements and apparently
inexhaustible energies. Prosperity is indeed the basis of every ideal
attainment, so that prematurely to recoil from hardship, or to be
habitually conscious of hardship at all, amounts to renouncing
beforehand all earthly goods and all chance of spiritual greatness. Yet
a chance is no certainty. When glory requires Titanic labours it often
finds itself in the end buried under a pyramid rather than raised upon a
pedestal. Energies which are not from the beginning self-justifying and
flooded with light seldom lead to ideal greatness.

[Sidenote: Art starts from two potentialities: its material and its
problem.]

The action to which industry should minister is accordingly liberal or
spontaneous action; and this one condition of rationality in from two
the arts. But a second condition is implicit in the first: freedom means
freedom in some operation, ideality means the ideality of something
embodied and material. Activity, achievement, a passage from prospect
to realisation, is evidently essential to life. If all ends were already
reached, and no art were requisite, life could not exist at all, much
less a Life of Reason. No politics, no morals, no thought would be
possible, for all these move towards some ideal and envisage a goal to
which they presently pass. The transition is the activity, without which
achievement would lose its zest and indeed its meaning; for a situation
could never be achieved which had been given from all eternity. The
ideal is a concomitant emanation from the natural and has no other
possible status. Those human possessions which are perennial and of
inalienable value are in a manner potential possessions only. Knowledge,
art, love are always largely in abeyance, while power is absolutely
synonymous with potentiality. Fruition requires a continual recovery, a
repeated re-establishment of the state we enjoy. So breath and
nutrition, feeling and thought, come in pulsations; they have only a
periodic and rhythmic sort of actuality. The operation may be sustained
indefinitely, but only if it admits a certain internal oscillation.

A creature like man, whose mode of being is a life or experience and not
a congealed ideality, such as eternal truth might show, must accordingly
find something to do; he must operate in an environment in which
everything is not already what he is presently to make it. In the actual
world this first condition of life is only too amply fulfilled; the real
difficulty in man’s estate, the true danger to his vitality, lies not
in want of work but in so colossal a disproportion between demand and
opportunity that the ideal is stunned out of existence and perishes for
want of hope. The Life of Reason is continually beaten back upon its
animal sources, and nations are submerged in deluge after deluge of
barbarism. Impressed as we may well be by this ancient experience, we
should not overlook the complementary truth which under more favourable
circumstances would be as plain as the other: namely, that our deepest
interest is after all to live, and we could not live if all acquisition,
assimilation, government, and creation had been made impossible for us
by their foregone realisation, so that every operation was forestalled
by the given fact. The distinction between the ideal and the real is one
which the human ideal itself insists should be preserved. It is an
essential expression of life, and its disappearance would be tantamount
to death, making an end to voluntary transition and ideal
representation. All objects envisaged either in vulgar action or in the
airiest cognition must be at first ideal and distinct from the given
facts, otherwise action would have lost its function at the same moment
that thought lost its significance. All life would have collapsed into a
purposeless datum.

The ideal requires, then, that opportunities should be offered for
realising it through action, and that transition should be possible to
it from a given state of things. One form of such transition is art,
where the ideal is a possible and more excellent form to be given to
some external substance or medium. Art needs to find a material
relatively formless which its business is to shape; and this initial
formlessness in matter is essential to art’s existence. Were there no
stone not yet sculptured and built into walls, no sentiment not yet
perfectly uttered in poetry, no distance or oblivion yet to be abolished
by motion or inferential thought, activity of all sorts would have lost
its occasion. Matter, or actuality in what is only potentially ideal, is
therefore a necessary condition for realising an ideal at all.

[Sidenote: Each must be definite and congruous with the other.]

This potentiality, however, in so far as the ideal requires it, is a
quite definite disposition. Absolute chaos would defeat life as surely
as would absolute ideality. Activity, in presupposing material
conditions, presupposes them to be favourable, so that a movement
towards the ideal may actually take place. Matter, which from the point
of view of a given ideal is merely its potentiality, is in itself the
potentiality of every other ideal as well; it is accordingly responsible
to no ideal in particular and proves in some measure refractory to all.
It makes itself felt, either as an opportune material or as an
accidental hindrance, only when it already possesses definite form and
affinities; given in a certain quantity, quality, and order, matter
feeds the specific life which, if given otherwise, it would impede or
smother altogether.

[Sidenote: A sophism exposed]

Art, in calling for materials, calls for materials plastic to its
influence and definitely predisposed to its ends. Unsuitableness in the
data far from grounding action renders it abortive, and no expedient
could be more sophistical than that into which theodicy, in its
desperate straits, has sometimes been driven, of trying to justify as
conditions for ideal achievement the very conditions which make ideal
achievement impossible. The given state from which transition is to take
place to the ideal must support that transition; so that the desirable
want of ideality which plastic matter should possess is merely relative
and strictly determined. Art and reason find in nature the background
they require; but nature, to be wholly justified by its ideal functions,
would have to subserve them perfectly. It would have to offer to reason
and art a sufficient and favourable basis; it would have to feed sense
with the right stimuli at the right intervals, so that art and reason
might continually flourish and be always moving to some new success. A
poet needs emotions and perceptions to translate into language, since
these are his subject-matter and his inspiration; but starvation,
physical or moral, will not help him to sing. One thing is to meet with
the conditions inherently necessary for a given action; another thing is
to meet with obstacles fatal to the same. A propitious formlessness in
matter is no sort of evil; and evil is so far from being a propitious
formlessness in matter that it is rather an impeding form which matter
has already assumed.

[Sidenote: Industry prepares matter for the liberal arts.]

Out of this appears, with sufficient clearness, the rational function
which the arts possess. They give, as nature does, a form to matter, but
they give it a more propitious form. Such success in art is possible
only when the materials and organs at hand are in a large measure
already well disposed; for it can as little exist with a dull organ as
with no organ at all, while there are winds in which every sail must be
furled. Art depends upon profiting by a bonanza and learning to sail in
a good breeze, strong enough for speed and conscious power but placable
enough for dominion and liberty of soul. Then perfection in action can
be attained and a self-justifying energy can emerge out of apathy on the
one hand and out of servile and wasteful work on the other. Art has
accordingly two stages: one mechanical or industrial, in which untoward
matter is better prepared, or impeding media are overcome; the other
liberal, in which perfectly fit matter is appropriated to ideal uses and
endowed with a direct spiritual function. A premonition or rehearsal of
these two stages may be seen in nature, where nutrition and reproduction
fit the body for its ideal functions, whereupon sensation and
cerebration make it a direct organ of mind. Industry merely gives nature
that form which, if more thoroughly humane, she might have originally
possessed for our benefit; liberal arts bring to spiritual fruition the
matter which either nature or industry has prepared and rendered
propitious. This spiritual fruition consists in the activity of turning
an apt material into an expressive and delightful form, thus filling the
world with objects which by symbolising ideal energies tend to revive
them under a favouring influence and therefore to strengthen and refine
them.

[Sidenote: Each partakes of the other]

It remains merely to note that all industry contains an element of fine
art and all fine art an element of industry; since every proximate end,
in being attained, satisfies the mind and manifests the intent that
pursued it; while every operation upon a material, even one so volatile
as sound, finds that material somewhat refractory. Before the product
can attain its ideal function many obstacles to its transparency and
fitness have to be removed. A certain amount of technical and
instrumental labour is thus involved in every work of genius, and a
certain genius in every technical success.




CHAPTER III

EMERGENCE OF FINE ART


[Sidenote: Art is spontaneous action made stable by success.]

Action which is purely spontaneous is merely tentative. Any experience
of success or utility which might have preceded, if it availed to make
action sure, would avail to make it also intentional and conscious of
its ulterior results. Now the actual issue which an action is destined
to have, since it is something future and problematical, can exert no
influence on its own antecedents; but if any picture of what the issue
is likely to be accompanies the heat and momentum of action, that
picture being, of all antecedents in the operation, the one most easily
remembered and described, may be picked out as essential, and dignified
with the name of motive or cause. This will not happen to every
prophetic idea; we may live in fear and trembling as easily as with an
arrogant consciousness of power. The difference flows from the greater
or lesser affinity that happens to exist between expectation and
instinct. Action remains always, in its initial phase, spontaneous and
automatic; it retains an inwardly grounded and perfectly blind tendency
of its own; but this tendency may agree or clash with the motor
impulses subtending whatever ideas may at the same time people the
fancy. If the blind and the ideal impulses agree, spontaneous action is
voluntary and its result intentional; if they clash, the ideas remain
speculative and idle, random, ineffectual wishes; while the result, not
being referable to any idea, is put down to fate. The sense of power,
accordingly, shows either that events have largely satisfied desire, so
that natural tendency goes hand in hand with the suggestions of
experience, or else that experience has not been allowed to count at all
and that the future is being painted _a priori_. In the latter case the
sense of power is illusory. Action will then never really issue in the
way intended, and even thought will only seem to make progress by
constantly forgetting its original direction.

Though life, however, is initially experimental and always remains
experimental at bottom, yet experiment fortifies certain tendencies and
cancels others, so that a gradual sediment of habit and wisdom is formed
in the stream of time. Action then ceases to be merely tentative and
spontaneous, and becomes art. Foresight begins to accompany practice
and, as we say, to guide it. Purpose thus supervenes on useful impulse,
and conscious expression on self-sustaining automatism. Art lies between
two extremes. On the one side is purely spontaneous fancy, which would
never foresee its own works and scarcely recognise or value them after
they had been created, since at the next moment the imaginative current
would as likely as not have faced about and might be making in the
opposite direction; and on the other side is pure utility, which would
deprive the work of all inherent ideality, and render it inexpressive of
anything in man save his necessities. War, for instance, is an art when,
having set itself an ideal end, it devises means of attaining it; but
this ideal end has for its chief basis some failure in politics and
morals. War marks a weakness and disease in human society, and its best
triumphs are glorious evils—cruel and treacherous remedies, big with
new germs of disease. War is accordingly a servile art and not
essentially liberal; whatever inherent values its exercise may have
would better be realised in another medium. Yet out of the pomp and
circumstance of war fine arts may arise—music, armoury, heraldry, and
eloquence. So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic
value and becomes expressive. On the other hand, spontaneous action
leads to art when it acquires a rational function. Thus utterance, which
is primarily automatic, becomes the art of speech when it serves to mark
crises in experience, making them more memorable and influential through
their artificial expression; but expression is never art while it
remains expressive to no purpose.

[Sidenote: It combines utility and automatism.]

A good way of understanding the fine arts would be to study how they
grow, now out of utility, now out of automatism. We should thus see
more clearly how they approach their goal, which can be nothing but the
complete superposition of these two characters. If all practice were art
and all art perfect, no action would remain compulsory and not justified
inherently, while no creative impulse would any longer be wasteful or,
like the impulse to thrum, symptomatic merely and irrelevant to
progress. It is by contributing to the Life of Reason and merging into
its substance that art, like religion or science, first becomes worthy
of praise. Each element comes from a different quarter, bringing its
specific excellence and needing its peculiar purification and
enlightenment, by co-ordination with all the others; and this process of
enlightenment and purification is what we call development in each
department. The meanest arts are those which lie near the limit either
of utility or of automatic self-expression. They become nobler and more
rational as their utility is rendered spontaneous or their spontaneity
beneficent.

[Sidenote: Automatism fundamental and irresponsible.]

The spontaneous arts are older than the useful, since man must live and
act before he can devise instruments for living and acting better. Both
the power to construct machines and the end which, to be useful, they
would have to serve, need to be given in initial impulse. There is
accordingly a vast amount of irresponsible play and loose experiment in
art, as in consciousness, before these gropings acquire a settled habit
and function, and rationality begins. The farther back we go into
barbarism the more we find life and mind busied with luxuries; and
though these indulgences may repel a cultivated taste and seem in the
end cruel and monotonous, their status is really nearer to that of
religion and spontaneous art than to that of useful art or of science.
Ceremony, for instance, is compulsory in society and sometimes truly
oppressive, yet its root lies in self-expression and in a certain
ascendency of play which drags all life along into conventional channels
originally dug out in irresponsible bursts of action. This occurs
inevitably and according to physical analogies. Bodily organs grow
automatically and become necessary moulds of life. We must either find a
use for them or bear as best we may the idle burden they impose. Of such
burdens the barbarian carries the greatest possible sum; and while he
paints the heavens with his grotesque mythologies, he encumbers earth
with inventions and prescriptions almost as gratuitous. The fiendish
dances and shouts, the cruel initiations, mutilations, and sacrifices in
which savages indulge, are not planned by them deliberately nor
justified in reflection. Men find themselves falling into these
practices, driven by a tradition hardly distinguishable from instinct.
In its periodic fury the spirit hurries them into wars and orgies, quite
as it kindles sudden flaming visions in their brains, habitually so
torpid. The spontaneous is the worst of tyrants, for it exercises a
needless and fruitless tyranny in the guise of duty and inspiration.
Without mitigating in the least the subjection to external forces under
which man necessarily labours, it adds a new artificial subjection to
his own false steps and childish errors.

[Sidenote: It is tamed by contact with the world.]

This mental vegetation, this fitful nervous groping, is nevertheless a
sign of life, out of which art emerges by discipline and by a gradual
application to real issues. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream
of the actual world; he is a highly suggestible mind hypnotised by
reality. Even barbaric genius may find points of application in the
world. These points will be more numerous the more open the eyes have
been, the more docile and intelligent the mind is that gathers and
renders back its impressions in a synthetic and ideal form. Intuition
will then represent, at least symbolically, an actual situation. Grimace
and gesture and ceremony will be modified by a sense of their effect;
they will become artful and will transform their automatic
expressiveness into ideal expression. They will become significant of
what it is intended to communicate and important to know; they will have
ceased to be irresponsible exercises and vents for passing feeling, by
which feeling is dissipated, as in tears, without being embodied and
intellectualised, as in a work of art.

[Sidenote: The dance.]

[Sidenote: Functions of gesture.]

The dance is an early practice that passes after this fashion into an
art. A prancing stallion may transfigure his movements more beautifully
than man is capable of doing; for the springs and limits of effect are
throughout mechanical, and man, in more than one respect, would have to
become a centaur before he could rival the horse’s prowess. Human
instinct is very imperfect in this direction, and grows less happy the
more artificial society becomes; most dances, even the savage ones, are
somewhat ridiculous. A rudimentary instinct none the less remains, which
not only involves a faculty of heightened and rhythmic motion, but also
assures a direct appreciation of such motion when seen in others. The
conscious agility, _fougue_, and precision which fill the performer
become contagious and delight the spectator as well. There are indeed
dances so ugly that, like those of contemporary society, they cannot be
enjoyed unless they are shared; they yield pleasures of exercise only,
or at best of movement in unison. But when man was nearer to the animal
and his body and soul were in happier conjunction, when society, too,
was more compulsive over the individual, he could lend himself more
willingly and gracefully to being a figure in the general pageant of the
world. The dance could then detach itself from its early association
with war and courtship and ally itself rather to religion and art. From
being a spontaneous vent for excitement, or a blind means of producing
it, the dance became a form of discipline and conscious social
control—a cathartic for the soul; and this by a quite intelligible
transition. Gesture, of which the dance is merely a pervasive use, is an
incipient action. It is conduct in the groping stage, before it has lit
on its purpose, as can be seen unmistakably in all the gesticulation of
love and defiance. In this way the dance is attached to life initially
by its physiological origin. Being an incipient act, it naturally leads
to its own completion and may arouse in others the beginnings of an
appropriate response. Gesture is only less catching and less eloquent
than action itself. But gesture, while it has this power of suggesting
action and stimulating the response which would be appropriate if the
action took place, may be arrested in the process of execution, since it
is incipient only; it will then have revealed an intention and betrayed
a state of mind. Thus it will have found a function which action itself
can seldom fulfil. When an act is done, indications of what it was to be
are superfluous; but indications of possible acts are in the highest
degree useful and interesting. In this way gesture assumes the rôle of
language and becomes a means of rational expression. It remains
suggestive and imitable enough to convey an idea, but not enough to
precipitate a full reaction; it feeds that sphere of merely potential
action which we call thought; it becomes a vehicle for intuition.

Under these circumstances, to tread the measures of a sacred dance, to
march with an army, to bear one’s share in any universal act, fills the
heart with a voluminous silent emotion. The massive suggestion, the
pressure of the ambient will, is out of all proportion to the present
call for action. Infinite resources and definite premonitions are thus
stored up in the soul; and merely to have moved solemnly together is the
best possible preparation for living afterwards, even if apart, in the
consciousness of a general monition and authority.

[Sidenote: Automatic music.]

Parallel to this is the genesis and destiny of music, an art originally
closely intertwined with the dance. The same explosive forces that
agitate the limbs loosen the voice; hand, foot, and throat mark their
wild rhythm together. Birds probably enjoy the pulsation of their
singing rather than its sound. Even human music is performed long before
it is listened to, and is at first no more an art than sighing. The
original emotions connected with it are felt by participation in the
performance—a participation which can become ideal only because, at
bottom, it is always actual. The need of exercise and self-expression,
the force of contagion and unison, bears the soul along before an
artistic appreciation of music arises; and we may still observe among
civilised races how music asserts itself without any æsthetic intent, as
when the pious sing hymns in common, or the sentimental, at sea, cannot
refrain from whining their whole homely repertory in the moonlight. Here
as elsewhere, instinct and habit are phases of the same inner
disposition. What has once occurred automatically on a given occasion
will be repeated in much the same form when a similar occasion recurs.
Thus impulse, reinforced by its own remembered expression, passes into
convention. Savages have a music singularly monotonous, automatic, and
impersonal; they cannot resist the indulgence, though they probably have
little pleasure in it. The same thing happens with customary sounds as
with other prescribed ceremonies; to omit them would be shocking and
well-nigh impossible, yet to repeat them serves no end further than to
avoid a sense of strangeness or inhibition. These automatisms, however,
in working themselves out, are not without certain retroactive effects:
they leave the system exhausted or relieved, and they have meantime
played more or less agreeably on the senses. The music we make
automatically we cannot help hearing incidentally; the sensation may
even modify the expression, since sensation too has its physical side.
The expression is reined in and kept from becoming vagrant, in
proportion as its form and occasion are remembered. The automatic
performer, being henceforth controlled more or less by reflection and
criticism, becomes something of an artist: he trains himself to be
consecutive, impressive, agreeable; he begins to compare his
improvisation with its subject and function, and thus he develops what
is called style and taste.




CHAPTER IV

MUSIC


[Sidenote: Music is a world apart.]

Sound readily acquires ideal values. It has power in itself to engross
attention and at the same time may be easily diversified, so as to
become a symbol for other things. Its direct empire is to be compared
with that of stimulants and opiates, yet it presents to the mind, as
these do not, a perception that corresponds, part by part, with the
external stimulus. To hear is almost to understand. The process we
undergo in mathematical or dialectical thinking is called understanding,
because a natural sequence is there adequately translated into ideal
terms. Logical connections seem to be internally justified, while only
the fact that we perceive them here and now, with more or less facility,
is attributed to brute causes. Sound approaches this sort of ideality;
it presents to sense something like the efficacious structure of the
object. It is almost mathematical; but like mathematics it is adequate
only by being abstract; and while it discloses point by point one strain
in existence, it leaves many other strains, which in fact are interwoven
with it, wholly out of account. Music is accordingly, like mathematics,
very nearly a world by itself; it contains a whole gamut of experience,
from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies. Yet this
second existence, this life in music, is no mere ghost of the other; it
has its own excitements, its quivering alternatives, its surprising
turns; the abstract energy of it takes on so much body, that in
progression or declension it seems quite as impassioned as any animal
triumph or any moral drama.

[Sidenote: It justifies itself.]

That a pattering of sounds on the ear should have such moment is a fact
calculated to give pause to those philosophers who attempt to explain
consciousness by its utility, or who wish to make physical and moral
processes march side by side from all eternity. Music is essentially
useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends
utility to its conditions. That the way in which idle sounds run
together should matter so much is a mystery of the same order as the
spirit’s concern to keep a particular body alive, or to propagate its
life. Such an interest is, from an absolute point of view, wholly
gratuitous; and so long as the natural basis and expressive function of
spirit are not perceived, this mystery is baffling. In truth the order
of values inverts that of causes; and experience, in which all values
lie, is an ideal resultant, itself ineffectual, of the potencies it can
conceive. Delight in music is liberal; it makes useful the organs and
processes that subserve it. These agencies, when they support a
conscious interest in their operation, give that operation its first
glimmering justification, and admit it to the rational sphere. Just so
when organic bodies generate a will bent on their preservation, they add
a value and a moral function to their equilibrium. In vain should we ask
for what purpose existences arise, or become important; that purpose, to
be such, must already have been important to some existence; and the
only question that can be asked or answered is what recognised
importance, what ideal values, actual existences involve.

[Sidenote: It is vital and transient.]

We happen to breathe, and on that account are interested in breathing;
and it is no greater marvel that, happening to be subject to intricate
musical sensations, we should be in earnest about these too. The human
ear discriminates sounds with ease; what it hears is so diversified that
its elements can be massed without being confused, or can form a
sequence having a character of its own, to be appreciated and
remembered. The eye too has a field in which clear distinctions and
relations appear, and for that reason is an organ favourable to
intelligence; but what gives music its superior emotional power is its
rhythmic advance. Time is a medium which appeals more than space to
emotion. Since life is itself a flux, and thought an operation, there is
naturally something immediate and breathless about whatever flows and
expands. The visible world offers itself to our regard with a certain
lazy indifference. “Peruse me,” it seems to say, “if you will. I am
here; and even if you pass me by now and later find it to your advantage
to resurvey me, I may still be here.” The world of sound speaks a more
urgent language. It insinuates itself into our very substance, and it is
not so much the music that moves us as we that move with it. Its rhythms
seize upon our bodily life, to accelerate or to deepen it; and we must
either become inattentive altogether or remain enslaved.

[Sidenote: Its physical affinities.]

This imperious function in music has lent it functions which are far
from æsthetic. Song can be used to keep in unison many men’s efforts, as
when sailors sing as they heave; it can make persuasive and obvious
sentiments which, if not set to music, might seem absurd, as often in
love songs and in psalmody. It may indeed serve to prepare the mind for
any impression whatever, and render the same more intense when it comes.
Music was long used before it was loved or people took pains to refine
it. It would have seemed as strange in primitive times to turn utterance
into a fine art as now to make æsthetic paces out of mourning or
child-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magical
and suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to
be beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy
employment to souls without a language and with little interest in the
real world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more or
less at random, are too much carried away by their performance to
conceive its effect; they cry far too loud and too unceasingly to
listen. A contagious tradition carries them along and controls them, in
a way, as they improvise; the assembly is hardly an audience; all are
performers, and the crowd is only a stimulus that keeps every one
dancing and howling in emulation. This unconsidered flow of early art
remains present, more or less, to the end. Instead of vague custom we
have schools, and instead of swaying multitudes academic example; but
many a discord and mannerism survive simply because the musician is so
suggestible, or so lost in the tumult of production, as never to
reconsider what he does, or to perceive its wastefulness.

Nevertheless an inherent value exists in all emitted sounds, although
barbaric practice and theory are slow to recognise it. Each tone has its
quality, like jewels of different water; every cadence has its vital
expression, no less inherent in it than that which comes in a posture or
in a thought. Everything audible thrills merely by sounding, and though
this perceptual thrill be at first overpowered by the effort and
excitement of action, yet it eventually fights its way to the top.
Participation in music may become perfunctory or dull for the great
majority, as when hymns are sung in church; a mere suggestion of action
will doubtless continue to colour the impression received, for a
tendency to act is involved in perception; but this suggestion will be
only an over-tone or echo behind an auditory feeling. Some performers
will be singled out from the crowd; those whom the public likes to hear
will be asked to continue alone; and soon a certain suasion will be
exerted over them by the approval or censure of others, so that
consciously or unconsciously they will train themselves to please.

[Sidenote: Physiology of music.]

The musical quality of sounds has a simple physical measure for its
basis; and the rate of vibration is complicated by its sweep or
loudness, and by concomitant sounds. What a rich note is to a pure and
thin one, that a chord is to a note; nor is melody wholly different in
principle, for it is a chord rendered piece-meal. Time intervenes, and
the harmony is deployed; so that in melody rhythm is added, with its
immense appeal, to the cumulative effect already secured by rendering
many notes together. The heightened effect which a note gets by figuring
in a phrase, or a phrase in a longer passage, comes of course from the
tensions established and surviving in the sensorium—a case, differently
shaded, of chords and overtones. The difference is only that the more
emphatic parts of the melody survive clearly to the end, while the
detail, which if perceived might now clash, is largely lost, and out of
the preceding parts perhaps nothing but a certain swing and potency is
present at the close. The mind has been raked and set vibrating in an
unusual fashion, so that the _finale_ comes like a fulfilment after much
premonition and desire, whereas the same event, unprepared for, might
hardly have been observed. The whole technique of music is but an
immense elaboration of this principle. It deploys a sensuous harmony by
a sort of dialectic, suspending and resolving it, so that the parts
become distinct and their relation vital.

[Sidenote: Limits of musical sensibility.]

Such elaboration often exceeds the synthetic power of all but the best
trained minds. Both in scope and in articulation musical faculty varies
prodigiously. There is no fixed limit to the power of sustaining a given
conscious process while new features appear in the same field; nor is
there any fixed limit to the power of recovering, under changed
circumstances, a process that was formerly suspended. A whole symphony
might be felt at once, if the musician’s power of sustained or
cumulative hearing could stretch so far. As we all survey two notes and
their interval in one sensation (actual experience being always
transitive and pregnant, and its terms ideal), so a trained mind might
survey a whole composition. This is not to say that time would be
transcended in such an experience; the apperception would still have
duration and the object would still have successive features, for
evidently music not arranged in time would not be music, while all
sensations with a recognisable character occupy more than an instant in
passing. But the passing sensation, throughout its lapse, presents some
experience; and this experience, taken at any point, may present a
temporal sequence with any number of members, according to the synthetic
and analytic power exerted by the given mind. What is tedious and
formless to the inattentive may seem a perfect whole to one who, as they
say, takes it all in; and similarly what is a frightful deafening
discord to a sense incapable of discrimination, for one who can hear the
parts may break into a celestial chorus. A musical education is
necessary for musical judgment. What most people relish is hardly music;
it is rather a drowsy revery relieved by nervous thrills.

[Sidenote: The value of music is relative to them.]

The degree to which music should be elaborated depends on the capacity
possessed by those it addresses. There are limits to every man’s
synthetic powers, and to stretch those powers to their limit is
exhausting. Excitement then becomes a debauch; it leaves the soul less
capable of habitual harmony. Especially is such extreme tension
disastrous when, as in music, nothing remains to be the fruit of that
mighty victory; the most pregnant revelation sinks to an illusion and is
discredited when it cannot maintain its inspiration in the world’s
presence. Everything has its own value and sets up its price; but others
must judge if that price is fair, and sociability is the condition of
all rational excellence. There is therefore a limit to right complexity
in music, a limit set not by the nature of music itself, but by its
place in human economy. This limit, though clear in principle, is
altogether variable in practice; duly cultivated people will naturally
place it higher than the unmusical would. In other words, popular music
needs to be simple, although elaborate music may be beautiful to the
few. When elaborate music is the fashion among people to whom all music
is a voluptuous mystery, we may be sure that what they love is
voluptuousness or fashion, and not music itself.

[Sidenote: Wonders of musical structure.]

Beneath its hypnotic power music, for the musician, has an intellectual
essence. Out of simple chords and melodies, which at first catch only
the ear, he weaves elaborate compositions that by their form appeal also
to the mind. This side of music resembles a richer versification; it may
be compared also to mathematics or to arabesques. A moving arabesque
that has a vital dimension, an audible mathematics, adding sense to
form, and a versification that, since it has no subject-matter, cannot
do violence to it by its complex artifices—these are types of pure
living, altogether joyful and delightful things. They combine life with
order, precision with spontaneity; the flux in them has become
rhythmical and its freedom has passed into a rational choice, since it
has come in sight of the eternal form it would embody. The musician,
like an architect or goldsmith working in sound, but freer than they
from material trammels, can expand for ever his yielding labyrinth;
every step opens up new vistas, every decision—how unlike those made in
real life!—multiplies opportunities, and widens the horizon before him,
without preventing him from going back at will to begin afresh at any
point, to trace the other possible paths leading thence through various
magic landscapes. Pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is
balanced by its entire spontaneity, and, while it has no external
significance, it bears no internal curse. It is something to which a few
spirits may well surrender themselves, sure that in a liberal
commonwealth they will be thanked for their ideal labour, the fruits of
which many may enjoy. Such excursions into ultra-mundane regions, where
order is free, refine the mind and make it familiar with perfection. By
analogy an ideal form comes to be conceived and desiderated in other
regions, where it is not produced so readily, and the music heard, as
the Pythagoreans hoped, makes the soul also musical.

[Sidenote: Its inherent emotions.]

It must be confessed, however, that a world of sounds and rhythms, all
about nothing, is a by-world and a mere distraction for a political
animal. Its substance is air, though the spell of it may have moral
affinities. Nevertheless this ethereal art may be enticed to earth and
married with what is mortal. Music interests humanity most when it is
wedded to human events. The alliance comes about through the emotions
which music and life arouse in common. For sound, in sweeping through
the body and making felt there its kinetic and potential stress,
provokes no less interest than does any other physical event or
premonition. Music can produce emotion as directly as can fighting or
love. If in the latter instances the body’s whole life may be in
jeopardy, this fact is no explanation of our concern; for many a danger
is not felt and there is no magic in the body’s future condition, that
it should now affect the soul. What touches the soul is the body’s
condition at the moment; and this is altered no less truly by a musical
impression than by some protective or reproductive act. If emotions
accompany the latter, they might as well accompany the former; and in
fact they do. Nor is music the only idle cerebral commotion that enlists
attention and presents issues no less momentous for being quite
imaginary; dreams do the same, and seldom can the real crises of life so
absorb the soul, or prompt it to such extreme efforts, as can delirium
in sickness, or delusion in what passes for health.

[Sidenote: In growing specific they remain unearthly.]

There is perhaps no emotion incident to human life that music cannot
render in its abstract medium by suggesting the pang of it; though of
course music cannot describe the complex situation which lends earthly
passions their specific colour. It is by fusion with many suggested
emotions that sentiment grows definite; this fusion can hardly come
about without ideas intervening, and certainly it could never be
sustained or expressed without them. Occasions define feelings; we can
convey a delicate emotion only by delicately describing the situation
which brings it on. Music, with its irrelevant medium, can never do this
for common life, and the passions, as music renders them, are always
general. But music has its own substitute for conceptual distinctness.
It makes feeling specific, nay, more delicate and precise than
association with things could make it, by uniting it with musical form.
We may say that besides suggesting abstractly all ordinary passions,
music creates a new realm of form far more subtly impassioned than is
vulgar experience. Human life is confined to a dramatic repertory which
has already become somewhat classical and worn, but music has no end of
new situations, shaded in infinite ways; it moves in all sorts of bodies
to all sorts of adventures. In life the ordinary routine of destiny
beats so emphatic a measure that it does not allow free play to feeling;
we cannot linger on anything long enough to exhaust its meaning, nor can
we wander far from the beaten path to catch new impressions. But in
music there are no mortal obligations, no imperious needs calling us
back to reality. Here nothing beautiful is extravagant, nothing
delightful unworthy. Musical refinement finds no limit but its own
instinct, so that a thousand shades of what, in our blundering words, we
must call sadness or mirth, find in music their distinct expression.
Each phrase, each composition, articulates perfectly what no human
situation could embody. These fine emotions are really new; they are
altogether musical and unexampled in practical life; they are native to
the passing cadence, absolute postures into which it throws the soul.

[Sidenote: They merge with common emotions, and express such as find no
object in nature.]

There is enough likeness, however, between musical and mundane feeling
for the first to be used in entertaining the second. Hence the singular
privilege of this art: to give form to what is naturally inarticulate
and express those depths of human nature which can speak no language
current in the world. Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it
remains about nothing to the end. What rescues a part of our passions
from this pathological plight, and gives them some other function than
merely to be, is the ideal relevance, the practical and mutually
representative character, which they sometimes acquire. All experience
is pathological if we consider its ground; but a part of it is also
rational if we consider its import. The words I am now writing have a
meaning not because at this moment they are fused together in my animal
soul as a dream might fuse them, however incongruous the situation they
depict might be in waking life; they are significant only if this
moment’s product can meet and conspire with some other thought speaking
of what elsewhere exists, and uttering an intuition that from time to
time may be actually recovered. The art of distributing interest among
the occasions and vistas of life so as to lend them a constant worth,
and at the same time to give feeling an ideal object, is at bottom the
sole business of education; but the undertaking is long, and much
feeling remains unemployed and unaccounted for. This objectless emotion
chokes the heart with its dull importunity; now it impedes right action,
now it feeds and fattens illusion. Much of it radiates from primary
functions which, though their operation is half known, have only base or
pitiful associations in human life; so that they trouble us with deep
and subtle cravings, the unclaimed _Hinterland_ of life. When music,
either by verbal indications or by sensuous affinities, or by both at
once, succeeds in tapping this fund of suppressed feeling, it
accordingly supplies a great need. It makes the dumb speak, and plucks
from the animal heart potentialities of expression which might render
it, perhaps, even more than human.

[Sidenote: Music lends elementary feelings an intellectual communicable
form.]

By its emotional range music is appropriate to all intense occasions: we
dance, pray, and mourn to music, and the more inadequate words or
external acts are to the situation, the more grateful music is. As the
only bond between music and life is emotion, music is out of place only
where emotion itself is absent. If it breaks in upon us in the midst of
study or business it becomes an interruption or alternative to our
activity, rather than an expression of it; we must either remain
inattentive or pass altogether into the realm of sound (which may be
unemotional enough) and become musicians for the nonce. Music brings its
sympathetic ministry only to emotional moments; there it merges with
common existence, and is a welcome substitute for descriptive ideas,
since it co-operates with us and helps to deliver us from dumb
subjection to influences which we should not know how to meet otherwise.
There is often in what moves us a certain ruthless persistence, together
with a certain poverty of form; the power felt is out of proportion to
the interest awakened, and attention is kept, as in pain, at once
strained and idle. At such a moment music is a blessed resource. Without
attempting to remove a mood that is perhaps inevitable, it gives it a
congruous filling. Thus the mood is justified by an illustration or
expression which seems to offer some objective and ideal ground for its
existence; and the mood is at the same time relieved by absorption in
that impersonal object. So entertained, the feeling settles. The passion
to which at first we succumbed is now tamed and appropriated. We have
digested the foreign substance in giving it a rational form: its
energies are merged in that strength by which we freely operate.

In this way the most abstract of arts serves the dumbest emotions.
Matter which cannot enter the moulds of ordinary perception, capacities
which a ruling instinct usually keeps under, flow suddenly into this
new channel. Music is like those branches which some trees put forth
close to the ground, far below the point where the other boughs
separate; almost a tree by itself, it has nothing but the root in common
with its parent. Somewhat in this fashion music diverts into an abstract
sphere a part of those forces which abound beneath the point at which
human understanding grows articulate. It nourishes on saps which other
branches of ideation are too narrow or rigid to take up. Those
elementary substances the musician can spiritualise by his special
methods, taking away their reproach and redeeming them from blind
intensity.

[Sidenote: All essences are in themselves good, even the passions.]

There is consequently in music a sort of Christian piety, in that it
comes not to call the just but sinners to repentance, and understands
the spiritual possibilities in outcasts from the respectable world. If
we look at things absolutely enough, and from their own point of view,
there can be no doubt that each has its own ideal and does not question
its own justification. Lust and frenzy, revery or despair, fatal as they
may be to a creature that has general ulterior interests, are not
perverse in themselves: each searches for its own affinities, and has a
kind of inertia which tends to maintain it in being, and to attach or
draw in whatever is propitious to it. Feelings are as blameless as so
many forms of vegetation; they can be poisonous only to a different
life. They are all primordial motions, eddies which the universal flux
makes for no reason, since its habit of falling into such attitudes is
the ground-work and exemplar for nature and logic alike. That such
strains should exist is an ultimate datum; justification cannot be
required of them, but must be offered to each of them in turn by all
that enters its particular orbit. There is no will but might find a
world to disport itself in and to call good, and thereupon boast to have
created that in which it found itself expressed. But such satisfaction
has been denied to the majority; the equilibrium of things has at least
postponed their day. Yet they are not altogether extinguished, since the
equilibrium of things is mechanical and results from no preconcerted
harmony such as would have abolished everything contrary to its own
perfection. Many ill-suppressed possibilities endure in matter, and peep
into being through the crevices, as it were, of the dominant world.
Weeds they are called by the tyrant, but in themselves they are aware of
being potential gods. Why should not every impulse expand in a congenial
paradise? Why should each, made evil now only by an adventitious
appellation or a contrary fate, not vindicate its own ideal? If there is
a piety towards things deformed, because it is not they that are
perverse, but the world that by its laws and arbitrary standards decides
to treat them as if they were, how much more should there be a piety
towards things altogether lovely, when it is only space and matter that
are wanting for their perfect realisation?

[Sidenote: Each impulse calls for a possible congenial world.]

Philosophers talk of self-contradiction, but there is evidently no such
thing, if we take for the self what is really vital, each propulsive,
definite strain of being, each nucleus for estimation and for pleasure
and pain. Bach impulse may be contradicted, but not by itself; it may
find itself opposed, in a theatre which it has entered it knows not how,
by violent personages that it has never wished to encounter. The
environment it calls for is congenial with it: and by that environment
it could never be thwarted or condemned. The lumbering course of events
may indeed involve it in rum, and a mind with permanent interests to
defend may at once rule out everything inconsistent with possible
harmonies; but such rational judgments come from outside and represent a
compromise struck with material forces. Moral judgments and conflicts
are possible only in the mind that represents many interests
synthetically: in nature, where primary impulses collide, all conflict
is physical and all will innocent. Imagine some ingredient of humanity
loosed from its oppressive environment in human economy: it would at
once vegetate and flower into some ideal form, such as we see
exuberantly displayed in nature. If we can only suspend for a moment the
congested traffic in the brain, these initial movements will begin to
traverse it playfully and show their paces, and we shall live in one of
those plausible worlds which the actual world has made impossible.

[Sidenote: Literature incapable of expressing pure feelings.]

Man possesses, for example, a native capacity for joy. There are
moments, in friendship or in solitude, when joy is realised; but the
occasions are often trivial and could never justify in reflection the
feelings that then happen to bubble up. Nor can pure joy be long
sustained: cross-currents of lassitude or anxiety, distracting
incidents, irrelevant associations, trouble its course and make it
languish, turning it before long into dulness or melancholy. Language
cannot express a joy that shall be full and pure; for to keep the purity
nothing would have to be named which carried the least suggestion of
sadness with it, and, in the world that human language refers to, such a
condition would exclude every situation possible. “O joy, O joy,” would
be the whole ditty: hence some dialecticians, whose experience is
largely verbal, think whatever is pure necessarily thin.

[Sidenote: Music may do so.]

That feeling should be so quickly polluted is, however, a superficial
and earthly accident. Spirit is clogged by what it flows through, but at
its springs it is both limpid and abundant. There is matter enough in
joy for many a universe, though the actual world has not a single form
quite fit to embody it, and its too rapid syllables are excluded from
the current hexameter. Music, on the contrary, has a more flexible
measure; its prosody admits every word. Its rhythms can explicate every
emotion, through all degrees of complexity and volume, without once
disavowing it. Thus unused matter, which is not less fertile than that
which nature has absorbed, comes to fill out an infinity of ideal forms.
The joy condemned by practical exigencies to scintillate for a moment
uncommunicated, and then, as it were, to be buried alive, may now find
an abstract art to embody it and bring it before the public, formed into
a rich and constant object called a musical composition. So art succeeds
in vindicating the forgotten regions of spirit: a new spontaneous
creation shows how little authority or finality the given creation has.

[Sidenote: Instability the soul of matter.]

What is true of joy is no less true of sorrow, which, though it arises
from failure in some natural ideal, carries with it a sentimental ideal
of its own. Even confusion can find in music an expression and a
catharsis. That death or change should grieve does not follow from the
material nature of these phenomena. To change or to disappear might be
as normal a tendency as to move; and it actually happens, when nothing
ideal has been attained, that _not to be thus_ is the whole law of
being. There is then a nameless satisfaction in passing on; which is the
virtual ideal of pain and mere willing. Death and change acquire a
tragic character when they invade a mind which is not ready for them in
all its parts, so that those elements in it which are still vigorous,
and would maintain somewhat longer their ideal identity, suffer violence
at the hands of the others, already mastered by decay and willing to be
self-destructive. Thus a man whose physiological complexion involves
more poignant emotion than his ideas can absorb—one who is
sentimental—will yearn for new objects that may explain, embody, and
focus his dumb feelings; and these objects, if art can produce them,
will relieve and glorify those feelings in the act of expressing them.
Catharsis is nothing more.

[Sidenote: Peace the triumph of spirit.]

There would be no pleasure in expressing pain, if pain were not
dominated through its expression. To know how just a cause we have for
grieving is already a consolation, for it is already a shift from
feeling to understanding. By such consideration of a passion, the
intellectual powers turn it into subject-matter to operate upon. All
utterance is a feat, all apprehension a discovery; and this intellectual
victory, sounding in the midst of emotional struggles, hushes some part
of their brute importunity. It is at once sublime and beneficent, like a
god stilling a tempest. Melancholy can in this way be the food of art;
and it is no paradox that such a material may be beautiful when a fit
form is imposed upon it, since a fit form turns anything into an
agreeable object; its beauty runs as deep as its fitness, and stops
where its adaptation to human nature begins to fail. Whatever can
interest may prompt to expression, as it may have satisfied curiosity;
and the mind celebrates a little triumph whenever it can formulate a
truth, however unwelcome to the flesh, or discover an actual force,
however unfavourable to given interests. As meditation on death and on
life make equally for wisdom, so the expression of sorrow and joy make
equally for beauty. Meditation and expression are themselves congenial
activities with an intrinsic value which is not lessened if what they
deal with could have been abolished to advantage. If once it exists, we
may understand and interpret it; and this reaction will serve a double
purpose. At first, in its very act, it will suffuse and mollify the
unwelcome experience by another, digesting it, which is welcome; and
later, by the broader adjustment which it will bring into the mind, it
will help us to elude or confront the evils thus laid clearly before us.

Catharsis has no such effect as a sophistical optimism wishes to
attribute to it; it does not show us that evil is good, or that calamity
and crime are things to be grateful for: so forced an apology for evil
has nothing to do with tragedy or wisdom; it belongs to apologetics and
an artificial theodicy. Catharsis is rather the consciousness of how
evil evils are, and how besetting; and how possible goods lie between
and involve serious renunciations. To understand, to accept, and to use
the situation in which a mortal may find himself is the function of art
and reason. Such mastery is desirable in itself and for its fruits; it
does not make itself responsible for the chaos of goods and evils that
it supervenes upon. Whatever writhes in matter, art strives to give form
to; and however unfavourable the field may be for its activity, it does
what it can there, since no other field exists in which it may labour.

[Sidenote: Refinement is true strength.]

Sad music pleases the melancholy because it is sad and other men because
it is music. When a composer attempts to reproduce complex conflicts in
his score he will please complex or disordered spirits for expressing
their troubles, but other men only for the order and harmony he may have
brought out of that chaos. The chaos in itself will offend, and it is no
part of rational art to produce it. As well might a physician poison in
order to give an antidote, or maim in order to amputate. The subject
matter of art is life, life as it actually is; but the function of art
is to make life better. The depth to which an artist may find current
experience to be sunk in discord and confusion is not his special
concern; his concern is, in some measure, to lift experience out. The
more barbarous his age, the more drastic and violent must be his
operation. He will have to shout in a storm. His strength must needs, in
such a case, be very largely physical and his methods sensational. In a
gentler age he may grow nobler, and blood and thunder will no longer
seem impressive. Only the weak are obliged to be violent; the strong,
having all means at command, need not resort to the worst. Refined art
is not wanting in power if the public is refined also. And as
refinement comes only by experience, by comparison, by subordinating
means to ends and rejecting what hinders, it follows that a refined mind
will really possess the greater volume, as well as the subtler
discrimination. Its ecstasy without grimace, and its submission without
tears, will hold heaven and earth better together—and hold them better
apart—than could a mad imagination.




CHAPTER V

SPEECH AND SIGNIFICATION


[Sidenote: Sounds well fitted to be symbols.]

Music rationalises sound, but a more momentous rationalising of sound is
seen in language. Language is one of the most useful of things, yet the
greater part of it still remains (what it must all have been in the
beginning) useless and without ulterior significance. The musical side
of language is its primary and elementary side. Man is endowed with
vocal organs so plastic as to emit a great variety of delicately varied
sounds; and by good fortune his ear has a parallel sensibility, so that
much vocal expression can be registered and confronted by auditory
feeling. It has been said that man’s pre-eminence in nature is due to
his possessing hands; his modest participation in the ideal world may
similarly be due to his possessing tongue and ear. For when he finds
shouting and vague moaning after a while fatiguing, he can draw a new
pleasure from uttering all sorts of labial, dental, and gutteral sounds.
Their rhythms and oppositions can entertain him, and he can begin to use
his lingual gamut to designate the whole range of his perceptions and
passions.

Here we touch upon one of the great crises in creation. As nutrition at
first established itself in the face of waste, and reproduction in the
face of death, so representation was able, by help of vocal symbols, to
confront that dispersion inherent in experience, which is something in
itself ephemeral. Merely to associate one thing with another brings
little gain; and merely to have added a vocal designation to fleeting
things—a designation which of course would have been taken for a part
of their essence—would in itself have encumbered phenomena without
rendering them in any way more docile to the will. But the encumbrance
in this instance proved to be a wonderful preservative and means of
comparison. It actually gave each moving thing its niche and cenotaph in
the eternal. For the universe of vocal sounds was a field, like that of
colour or number, in which the elements showed relations and transitions
easy to dominate. It was a key-board over which attention could run back
and forth, eliciting many implicit harmonies. Henceforth when various
sounds had been idly associated with various things, and identified with
them, the things could, by virtue of their names, be carried over
mentally into the linguistic system; they could be manipulated there
ideally, and vicariously preserved in representation. Needless to say
that the things themselves remained unchanged all the while in their
efficacy and mechanical succession, just as they remain unchanged in
those respects when they pass for the mathematical observer into their
measure or symbol; but as this reduction to mathematical form makes them
calculable, so their earlier reduction to words rendered them comparable
and memorable, first enabling them to figure in discourse at all.

[Sidenote: Language has a structure independent of things.]

Language had originally no obligation to subserve an end which we may
sometimes measure it by now, and depute to be its proper function,
namely, to stand for things and adapt itself perfectly to their
structure. In language as in every other existence idealism precedes
realism, since it must be a part of nature living its own life before it
can become a symbol for the rest and bend to external control. The vocal
and musical medium is, and must always remain, alien, to the spatial.
What makes terms correspond and refer to one another is a relation
eternally disparate from the relation of propinquity or derivation
between existences. Yet when sounds were attached to an event or
emotion, the sounds became symbols for that disparate fact. The net of
vocal relations caught that natural object as a cobweb might catch a
fly, without destroying or changing it. The object’s quality passed to
the word at the same time that the word’s relations enveloped the
object; and thus a new weight and significance was added to sound,
previously nothing but a dull music. A conflict at once established
itself between the drift proper to the verbal medium and that proper to
the designated things; a conflict which the whole history of language
and thought has embodied and which continues to this day.

[Sidenote: Words remaining identical, serve to identify things that
change.]

Suppose an animal going down to a frozen river which he had previously
visited in summer. Marks of all sorts would awaken in him an old train
of reactions; he would doubtless feel premonitions of satisfied thirst
and the splash of water. On finding, however, instead of the fancied
liquid, a mass of something like cold stone, he would be disconcerted.
His active attitude would be pulled up short and contradicted. In his
fairyland of faith and magic the old river would have been simply
annihilated, the dreamt-of water would have become a vanished ghost, and
this ice for the moment the hard reality. He would turn away and live
for a while on other illusions. When this shock was overgrown by time
and it was summer again, the original habit might, however, reassert
itself once more. If he revisited the stream, some god would seem to
bring back something from an old familiar world; and the chill of that
temporary estrangement, the cloud that for a while had made the good
invisible, would soon be gone and forgotten.

If we imagine, on the contrary, that this animal could speak and had
from the first called his haunt _the river_, he would have repeated its
name on seeing it even when it was frozen, for he had not failed to
recognise it in that guise. The variation afterwards noticed, upon
finding it hard, would seem no total substitution, but a _change_; for
it would be the same river, once flowing, that was now congealed. An
identical word, covering all the identical qualities in the phenomena
and serving to abstract them, would force the inconsistent qualities in
those phenomena to pass for accidents; and the useful proposition could
at once be framed that the same river may be sometimes free and
sometimes frozen.

[Sidenote: Language the dialectical garment of facts.]

This proposition is true, yet it contains much that is calculated to
offend a scrupulous dialectician. Its language and categories are not
purely logical, but largely physical and representative. The notion that
what changes nevertheless endures is a remarkable hybrid. It arises when
rigid ideal terms are imposed on evanescent existence. Feelings, taken
alone, would show no identities; they would be lost in changing, or be
woven into the infinite feeling of change. Notions, taken alone, would
allow no lapse, but would merely lead attention about from point to
point over an eternal system of relations. Power to understand the
world, logical or scientific mastery of existence, arises only by the
forced and conventional marriage of these two essences, when the actual
flux is ideally suspended and an ideal harness is loosely flung upon
things. For this purpose words are an admirable instrument. They have
dialectical relations based on an ideal import, or tendency to
definition, which makes their essence their signification; yet they can
be freely bandied about and applied for a moment to the ambiguous things
that pass through existence.

[Sidenote: Words are wise men’s counters.]

Had men been dumb, an exchange and circulation of images need not have
been wanting, and associations might have arisen between ideals in the
mind and corresponding reactive habits in the body. What words add is
not power of discernment or action, but a medium of intellectual
exchange. Language is like money, without which specific relative values
may well exist and be felt, but cannot be reduced to a common
denominator. And as money must have a certain intrinsic value of its own
in order that its relation to other values may be stable, so a word, by
which a thing is represented in discourse, must be a part of that
thing’s context, an ingredient in the total apparition it is destined to
recall. Words, in their existence, are no more universal than gold by
nature is a worthless standard of value in other things. Words are a
material accompaniment of phenomena, at first an idle accompaniment, but
one which happens to subserve easily a universal function. Some other
element in objects might conceivably have served for a common
denominator between them; but words, just by virtue of their
adventitious, detachable status, and because they are so easily compared
and manipulated in the world of sound, were singularly well fitted for
this office. They are not vague, as any common quality abstracted from
things would necessarily become; and though vagueness is a quality only
too compatible with perception, so that vague ideas can exist without
end, this vagueness is not what makes them universal in their functions.
It is one thing to perceive an ill-determined form and quite another to
attribute to it a precise general predicate. Words, distinct in their
own category and perfectly recognisable, can accordingly perform very
well the function of embodying a universal; for they can be identified
in turn with many particulars and yet remain throughout particular
themselves.

[Sidenote: Nominalism right in psychology and realism in logic]

The psychology of nominalism is undoubtedly right where it insists that
every image is particular and every term, in its existential aspect, a
_flatum vocis_; but nominalists should have recognised that images may
have any degree of vagueness and generality when measured by a
conceptual standard. A figure having obviously three sides and three
corners may very well be present to the mind when it is impossible to
say whether it is an equilateral or a rectangular triangle. Functional
or logical universality lies in another sphere altogether, being a
matter of intent and not of existence. When we say that “universals
alone exist in the mind” we mean by “mind” something unknown to
Berkeley; not a bundle of psychoses nor an angelic substance, but quick
intelligence, the faculty of discourse. Predication is an act,
understanding a spiritual and transitive operation: its existential
basis may well be counted in psychologically and reduced to a stream of
immediate presences; but its meaning can be caught only by another
meaning, as life only can exemplify life. Vague or general images are as
little universal as sounds are; but a sound better than a flickering
abstraction can serve the intellect in its operation of comparison and
synthesis. Words are therefore the body of discourse, of which the soul
is understanding.

[Sidenote: Literature moves between the extremes of music and
denotation.]

The categories of discourse are in part merely representative, in part
merely grammatical, and in part attributable to both spheres. Euphony
and phonetic laws are principles governing language without any
reference to its meaning; here speech is still a sort of music. At the
other extreme lies that ultimate form of prose which we see in
mathematical reasoning or in a telegraphic style, where absolutely
nothing is rhetorical and speech is denuded of every feature not
indispensable to its symbolic rôle. Between these two extremes lies the
broad field of poetry, or rather of imaginative or playful expression,
where the verbal medium is a medium indeed, having a certain
transparency, a certain reference to independent facts, but at the same
time elaborates the fact in expressing it, and endows it with affinities
alien to its proper nature. A pun is a grotesque example of such
diremption, where ambiguities belonging only to speech are used to
suggest impossible substitutions in ideas. Less frankly, language
habitually wrests its subject-matter in some measure from its real
context and transfers it to a represented and secondary world, the world
of logic and reflection. Concretions in existence are subsumed, when
named, under concretions in discourse. Grammar lays violent hands upon
experience, and everything becomes a prey to wit and fancy, a material
for fiction and eloquence. Man’s intellectual progress has a poetic
phase, in which he imagines the world; and then a scientific phase, in
which he sifts and tests what he has imagined.

[Sidenote: Sound and object, in their sensuous presence, may have
affinity.]

In what measure do inflection and syntax represent anything in the
subject-matter of discourse? In what measure are they an independent
play of expression, a quasi-musical, quasi-mathematical veil interposed
between reflection and existence? One who knows only languages of a
single family can give but a biassed answer to this question. There are
doubtless many approaches to correct symbolism in language, which
grammar may have followed up at different times in strangely different
ways. That the medium in every art has a character of its own, a
character limiting its representative value, may perhaps be safely
asserted, and this intrinsic character in the medium antedates and
permeates all representation. Phonetic possibilities and phonetic habits
belong, in language, to this indispensable vehicle; what the throat and
lips can emit easily and distinguishably, and what sequences can appeal
to the ear and be retained, depend alike on physiological conditions;
and no matter how convenient or inconvenient these conditions may be for
signification, they will always make themselves felt and may sometimes
remain predominant. In poetry they are still conspicuous. Euphony,
metre, and rhyme colour the images they transmit and add a charm wholly
extrinsic and imputed. In this immersion of the message in the medium
and in its intrinsic movement the magic of poetry lies; and the miracle
grows as there is more or less native analogy between the medium’s
movement and that of the subject-matter.

Both language and ideas involve processes in the brain. The two
processes may be wholly disparate if we regard their objects only and
forget their seat, as Athena is in no way linked to an elephant’s tusk;
yet in perception all processes are contiguous and exercise a single
organism, in which they may find themselves in sympathetic or
antipathetic vibration. On this circumstance hangs that subtle congruity
between subject and vehicle which is otherwise such a mystery in
expression. If to think of Athena and to look on ivory are congruous
physiological processes, if they sustain or heighten each other, then to
represent Athena in ivory will be a happy expedient, in which the very
nature of the medium will already be helping us forward. Scent and form
go better together, for instance, in the violet or the rose than in the
hyacinth or the poppy: and being better compacted for human perception
they seem more expressive and can be linked more unequivocally with
other sources of feeling. So a given vocal sound may have more or less
analogy to the thing it is used to signify; this analogy may be obvious,
as in onomatopoeia, or subtle, as when short, sharp sounds go with
decision, or involved rhythms and vague reverberations with a floating
dream. What seems exquisite to one poet may accordingly seem vapid to
another, when the texture of experience in the two minds differs, so
that a given composition rustles through one man’s fancy as a wind might
through a wood, but finds no sympathetic response in the other organism,
nerved as it may be, perhaps, to precision in thought and action.

[Sidenote: Syntax positively representative.]

The structure of language, when it passes beyond the phonetic level,
begins at once to lean upon existences and to imitate the structure of
things. We distinguish the parts of speech, for instance, in
subservience to distinctions which we make in ideas. The feeling or
quality represented by an adjective, the relation indicated by a verb,
the substance or concretion of qualities designated by a noun, are
diversities growing up in experience, by no means attributable to the
mere play of sound. The parts of speech are therefore representative.
Their inflection is representative too, since tenses mark important
practical differences in the distribution of the events described, and
cases express the respective rôles played by objects in the operation.
“I struck him and he will strike me,” renders in linguistic symbols a
marked change in the situation; the variation in phrase is not
rhetorical. Language here, though borrowed no doubt from ancestral
poetry, has left all revery far behind, and has been submerged in the
Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: Yet it vitiates what it represents.]

The medium, however, constantly reasserts itself. An example may be
found in gender, which, clearly representative in a measure, cuts loose
in language from all genuine representation and becomes a feature in
abstract linguistic design, a formal characteristic in expression.
Contrasted sentiments permeate an animal’s dealings with his own sex and
with the other; nouns and adjectives represent this contrast by taking
on masculine and feminine forms. The distinction is indeed so important
that wholly different words—man and woman, bull and cow—stand for the
best-known animals of different sex; while adjectives, where declension
is extinct, as in English, often take on a connotation of gender and are
applied to one sex only—as we say a beautiful woman, but hardly a
beautiful man. But gender in language extends much farther than sex, and
even if by some subtle analogy all the masculine and feminine nouns in a
language could be attached to something suggesting sex in the objects
they designate, yet it can hardly be maintained that the elaborate
concordance incident upon that distinction is representative of any felt
quality in the things. So remote an analogy to sex could not assert
itself pervasively. Thus Horace says:

  Quis _multa_ gracilis te puer in _rosa_
  perfusis liquidis urget odoribus
  _grato_, Pyrrha, sub _antro_?

Here we may perceive why the rose was instinctively made feminine, and
we may grant that the bower, though the reason escape us, was somehow
properly masculine; but no one would urge that a _profusion_ of roses
was also intrinsically feminine, or that the _pleasantness_ of a bower
was ever specifically masculine to sense. The epithets _multa_ and
_grato_ take their gender from the nouns, even though the quality they
designate fails to do so. Their gender is therefore non-representative
and purely formal; it marks an intra-linguistic accommodation. The
medium has developed a syntactical structure apart from any intrinsic
significance thereby accruing to its elements. Artificial concordance in
gender does not express gender: it merely emphasises the grammatical
links in the phrases and makes greater variety possible in the
arrangement of words.

[Sidenote: Difficulty in subduing a living medium.]

This example may prepare us to understand a general principle: that
language, while essentially significant viewed in its function, is
indefinitely wasteful, being mechanical and tentative in its origin. It
overloads itself, and being primarily music, and a labyrinth of sounds,
it develops an articulation and method of its own, which only in the
end, and with much inexactness, reverts to its function of expression.
How great the possibilities of effect are in developing a pure medium we
can best appreciate in music; but in language a similar development goes
on while it is being applied to representing things. The organ is
spontaneous, the function adventitious and superimposed. Rhetoric and
utility keep language going, as centrifugal and centripetal forces keep
a planet in its course. Euphony, verbal analogy, grammatical fancy,
poetic confusion, continually drive language afield, in its own
tangential direction; while the business of life, in which language is
employed, and the natural lapse of rhetorical fashions, as continually
draw it back towards convenience and exactitude.

[Sidenote: Language foreshortens experience.]

Between music and bare symbolism language has its florid expansion.
Until music is subordinated, speech has little sense; it can hardly tell
a story or indicate an object unequivocally. Yet if music were left
behind altogether, language would pass into a sort of algebra or vocal
shorthand, without literary quality; it would become wholly indicative
and record facts without colouring them ideally. This medium and its
intrinsic development, though they make the bane of reproduction, make
the essence of art; they give representation a new and specific value
such as the object, before representation, could not have possessed.
Consciousness itself is such a medium in respect to diffuse existence,
which it foreshortens and elevates into synthetic ideas. Reason, too, by
bringing the movement of events and inclinations to a head in single
acts of reflection, thus attaining to laws and purposes, introduces into
life the influence of a representative medium, without which life could
never pass from a process into an art. Language acquires scope in the
same way, by its kindly infidelities; its metaphors and syntax lend
experience perspective. Language vitiates the experience it expresses,
but thereby makes the burden of one moment relevant to that of another.
The two experiences, identified roughly with the same concretion in
discourse, are pronounced similar or comparable in character. Thus a
proverb, by its verbal pungency and rhythm, becomes more memorable than
the event it first described would ever have been if not translated into
an epigram and rendered, so to speak, applicable to new cases; for by
that translation the event has become an idea.

[Sidenote: It is a perpetual mythology.]

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature. Music, which in
a certain sense is a mass of pure forms, must leave its “ideas” imbedded
in their own medium—they are musical ideas—and cannot impose them on
any foreign material, such as human affairs. Science, on the contrary,
seeks to disclose the bleak anatomy of existence, stripping off as much
as possible the veil of prejudice and words. Literature takes a middle
course and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be
futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making
music thereby significant. Literary art in the end rejects all unmeaning
nourishes, all complications that have no counterpart in things or no
use in expressing their relations; at the same time it aspires to digest
that reality to which it confines itself, making it over into ideal
substance and material for the mind. It looks at things with an
incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which
they never are) and almost into persons, grouping them by their
imaginative or moral affinities and retaining in them chiefly what is
incidental to their being, namely, the part they may chance to play in
man’s adventures.

Such literary art demands a subject-matter other than the literary
impulse itself. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds,
as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs.
His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration; he must
wait for automatic musical tendencies to ferment in his mind, proving it
to be fertile in devices, comparisons, and bold assimilations. Yet
inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to
something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the
real world, not to encumber it; and it needs to render its native
agility practical and to attach its volume of feeling to what is
momentous in human life. Literature has its piety, its conscience; it
cannot long forget, without forfeiting all dignity, that it serves a
burdened and perplexed creature, a human animal struggling to persuade
the universal Sphinx to propose a more intelligible riddle.
Irresponsible and trivial in its abstract impulse, man’s simian chatter
becomes noble as it becomes symbolic; its representative function lends
it a serious beauty, its utility endows it with moral worth.

[Sidenote: It may be apt or inapt, with equal richness.]

[Sidenote: Absolute language a possible but foolish art.]

These relations, in determining the function of language, determine the
ideal which its structure should approach. Any sort of grammar and
rhetoric, the most absurd and inapplicable as well as the most
descriptive, can be spontaneous; fit organisms are not less natural than
those that are unfit. Felicitous genius is so called because it meets
experience half-way. A genius which flies in the opposite direction,
though not less fertile internally, is externally inept and is called
madness. Ineptitude is something which language needs to shake off.
Better surrender altogether some verbal categories and start again, in
that respect, with a clean slate, than persist in any line of
development that alienates thought from reality. The language of birds
is excellent in its way, and those ancient sages who are reported to
have understood it very likely had merely perceived that it was not
meant to be intelligible; for it is not to understand nature to reduce
her childishly to a human scale. Man, who is merged in universal nature
at the roots of his being, is not without profound irrational intuitions
by which he can half divine her secret processes; and his heart, in its
own singing and fluttering, might not wholly misinterpret the birds. But
human discourse is not worth having if it is mere piping, and helps not
at all in mastering things; for man is intelligent, which is another way
of saying that he aspires to envisage in thought what he is dealing with
in action. Discourse that absolved itself from that observant duty would
not be cognitive; and in failing to be cognitive it would fail to redeem
the practical forces it ignored from their brute externality, and to
make them tributary to the Life of Reason. Thus its own dignity and
continued existence depend on its learning to express momentous facts,
facts important for action and happiness; and there is nothing which so
quickly discredits itself as empty rhetoric and dialectic, or poetry
that wanders in dim and private worlds. If pure music, even with its
immense sensuous appeal, is so easily tedious, what a universal yawn
must meet the verbiage which develops nothing but its own iridescence.
Absolute versification and absolute dialectic may have their place in
society; they give play to an organ that has its rights like any other,
and that, after serving for a while in the economy of life, may well
claim a holiday in which to disport itself irresponsibly among the fowls
of the air and the lilies of the field. But the exercise is trivial;
and if its high priests go through their mummeries with a certain
unction, and pretend to be wafted by them into a higher world, the
phenomenon is neither new nor remarkable. Language is a wonderful and
pliant medium, and why should it not lend itself to imposture? A
systematic abuse of words, as of other things, is never without some
inner harmony or propriety that makes it prosper; only the man who looks
beyond and sees the practical results awakes to the villainy of it. In
the end, however, those who play with words lose their labour, and
pregnant as they feel themselves to be with new and wonderful universes,
they cannot humanise the one in which they live and rather banish
themselves from it by their persistent egotism and irrelevance.




CHAPTER VI

POETRY AND PROSE


[Sidenote: Force of primary expressions.]

There is both truth and illusion in the saying that primitive poets are
sublime. Genesis and the Iliad (works doubtless backed by a long
tradition) are indeed sublime. Primitive men, having perhaps developed
language before the other arts, used it with singular directness to
describe the chief episodes of life, which was all that life as yet
contained. They had frank passions and saw things from single points of
view. A breath from that early world seems to enlarge our natures, and
to restore to language, which we have sophisticated, all its
magnificence and truth. But there is more, for (as we have seen)
language is spontaneous; it constitutes an act before it registers an
observation. It gives vent to emotion before it is adjusted to things
external and reduced, as it were, to its own echo rebounding from a
refractory world. The lion’s roar, the bellowing of bulls, even the
sea’s cadence has a great sublimity. Though hardly in itself poetry, an
animal cry, when still audible in human language, renders it also the
unanswerable, the ultimate voice of nature. Nothing can so pierce the
soul as the uttermost sigh of the body. There is no utterance so
thrilling as that of absolute impulse, if absolute impulse has learned
to speak at all. An intense, inhospitable mind, filled with a single
idea, in which all animal, social, and moral interests are fused
together, speaks a language of incomparable force. Thus the Hebrew
prophets, in their savage concentration, poured into one torrent all
that their souls possessed or could dream of. What other men are wont to
pursue in politics, business, religion, or art, they looked for from one
wave of national repentance and consecration. Their age, swept by this
ideal passion, possessed at the same time a fresh and homely vocabulary;
and the result was an eloquence so elemental and combative, so
imaginative and so bitterly practical, that the world has never heard
its like. Such single-mindedness, with such heroic simplicity in words
and images, is hardly possible in a late civilisation. Cultivated poets
are not unconsciously sublime.

[Sidenote: Its exclusiveness and narrowness.]

The sublimity of early utterances should not be hailed, however, with
unmixed admiration. It is a sublimity born of defect or at least of
disproportion. The will asserts itself magnificently; images, like
thunder-clouds, seem to cover half the firmament at once. But such a
will is sadly inexperienced; it has hardly tasted or even conceived any
possible or high satisfactions. Its lurid firmament is poor in stars. To
throw the whole mind upon something is not so great a feat when the
mind has nothing else to throw itself upon. Every animal when goaded
becomes intense; and it is perhaps merely the apathy in which mortals
are wont to live that keeps them from being habitually sublime in their
sentiments. The sympathy that makes a sheep hasten after its fellows, in
vague alarm or in vague affection; the fierce premonitions that drive a
bull to the heifer; the patience with which a hen sits on her eggs; the
loyalty which a dog shows to his master—what thoughts may not all these
instincts involve, which it needs only a medium of communication to
translate into poetry?

Man, though with less wholeness of soul, enacts the same dramas. He
hears voices on all occasions; he incorporates what little he observes
of nature into his verbal dreams; and as each new impulse bubbles to the
surface he feels himself on the verge of some inexpressible heaven or
hell. He needs but to abandon himself to that seething chaos which
perpetually underlies conventional sanity—a chaos in which memory and
prophecy, vision and impersonation, sound and sense, are inextricably
jumbled together—to find himself at once in a magic world,
irrecoverable, largely unmeaning, terribly intricate, but, as he will
conceive, deep, inward, and absolutely real. He will have reverted, in
other words, to crude experience, to primordial illusion. The movement
of his animal or vegetative mind will be far from delightful; it will be
unintelligent and unintelligible; nothing in particular will be
represented therein; but it will be a movement in the soul and for the
soul, as exciting and compulsive as the soul’s volume can make it. In
this muddy torrent words also may be carried down; and if these words
are by chance strung together into a cadence, and are afterwards written
down, they may remain for a memento of that turbid moment. Such words we
may at first hesitate to call poetry, since very likely they are
nonsense; but this nonsense will have some quality—some rhyme or
rhythm—that makes it memorable (else it would not have survived); and
moreover the words will probably show, in their connotation and order,
some sympathy with the dream that cast them up. For the man himself, in
whom such a dream may be partly recurrent, they may consequently have a
considerable power of suggestion, and they may even have it for others,
whenever the rhythm and incantation avail to plunge them also into a
similar trance.

[Sidenote: Rudimentary poetry an incantation or charm.]

Memorable nonsense, or sound with a certain hypnotic power, is the
really primitive and radical form of poetry. Nor is such poetry yet
extinct: children still love and compose it and every genuine poet, on
one side of his genius, reverts to it from explicit speech. As all
language has acquired its meaning, and did not have it in the beginning,
so the man who launches a new locution, the poet who creates a symbol,
must do so without knowing what significance it may eventually acquire,
and conscious at best only of the emotional background from which it
emerged. Pure poetry is pure experiment; and it is not strange that
nine-tenths of it should be pure failure. For it matters little what
unutterable things may have originally gone together with a phrase in
the dreamer’s mind; if they were not uttered and the phrase cannot call
them back, this verbal relic is none the richer for the high company it
may once have kept. Expressiveness is a most accidental matter. What a
line suggests at one reading, it may never suggest again even to the
same person. For this reason, among others, poets are partial to their
own compositions; they truly discover there depths of meaning which
exist for nobody else. Those readers who appropriate a poet and make him
their own fall into a similar illusion; they attribute to him what they
themselves supply, and whatever he reels out, lost in his own personal
revery, seems to them, like _sortes biblicoe_, written to fit their own
case.

[Sidenote: Inspiration irresponsible.]

Justice has never been done to Plato’s remarkable consistency and
boldness in declaring that poets are inspired by a divine madness and
yet, when they transgress rational bounds, are to be banished from an
ideal republic, though not without some marks of Platonic regard.
Instead of fillets, a modern age might assign them a coterie of
flattering dames, and instead of banishment, starvation; but the result
would be the same in the end. A poet is inspired because what occurs in
his brain is a true experiment in creation. His apprehension plays with
words and their meanings as nature, in any spontaneous variation, plays
with her own structure. A mechanical force shifts the kaleidoscope; a
new direction is given to growth or a new gist to signification. This
inspiration, moreover, is mad, being wholly ignorant of its own issue;
and though it has a confused fund of experience and verbal habit on
which to draw, it draws on this fund blindly and quite at random,
consciously possessed by nothing but a certain stress and pregnancy and
the pains, as it were, of parturition. Finally the new birth has to be
inspected critically by the public censor before it is allowed to live;
most probably it is too feeble and defective to prosper in the common
air, or is a monster that violates some primary rule of civic existence,
tormenting itself to disturb others.

[Sidenote: Plato’s discriminating view.]

Plato seems to have exaggerated the havoc which these poetic dragons can
work in the world. They are in fact more often absurd than venomous, and
no special legislation is needed to abolish them. They soon die quietly
of universal neglect. The poetry that ordinarily circulates among a
people is poetry of a secondary and conventional sort that propagates
established ideas in trite metaphors. Popular poets are the parish
priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since
converted public. Plato’s quarrel was not so much with poetic art as
with ancient myth and emotional laxity: he was preaching a crusade
against the established church. For naturalistic deities he wished to
substitute moral symbols; for the joys of sense, austerity and
abstraction. To proscribe Homer was a marked way of protesting against
the frivolous reigning ideals. The case is much as if we should now
proscribe the book of Genesis, on account of its mythical cosmogony, or
in order to proclaim the philosophic truth that the good, being an
adequate expression to be attained by creation, could not possibly have
preceded it or been its source. We might admit at the same time that
Genesis contains excellent images and that its poetic force is
remarkable; so that if serious misunderstanding could be avoided the
censor might be glad to leave it in everybody’s hands. Plato in some
such way recognised that Homer was poetical and referred his works,
mischievous as they might prove incidentally, to divine inspiration.
Poetic madness, like madness in prophecy or love, bursts the body of
things to escape from it into some ideal; and even the Homeric world,
though no model for a rational state, was a cheerful heroic vision,
congenial to many early impulses and dreams of the mind.

[Sidenote: Explosive and pregnant expression.]

Homer, indeed, was no primitive poet; he was a consummate master, the
heir to generations of discipline in both life and art. This appears in
his perfect prosody, in his limpid style, in his sense for proportion,
his abstentions, and the frank pathos of his portraits and principles,
in which there is nothing gross, subjective, or arbitrary. The
inspirations that came to him never carried him into crudeness or
absurdity. Every modern poet, though the world he describes may be more
refined in spots and more elaborate, is less advanced in his art; for
art is made rudimentary not by its date but by its irrationality. Yet
even if Homer had been primitive he might well have been inspired, in
the same way as a Bacchic frenzy or a mystic trance; the most blundering
explosions may be justified antecedently by the plastic force that is
vented in them. They may be expressive, in the physical sense of this
ambiguous word; for, far as they may be from conveying an idea, they may
betray a tendency and prove that something is stirring in the soul.
Expressiveness is often sterile; but it is sometimes fertile and capable
of reproducing in representation the experience from which it sprang. As
a tree in the autumn sheds leaves and seeds together, so a ripening
experience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barren
and without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience
over into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there.
Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the
latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first
is idle self-manifestation, the second rational art.

[Sidenote: Natural history of inspiration.]

Self-manifestation, so soon as it is noted and accepted as such, seems
to present the same marvel as any ideal success. Such self-manifestation
is incessant, many-sided, unavoidable; yet it seems a miracle when its
conditions are looked back upon from the vantage ground of their result.
By reading spirit out of a work we turn it into a feat of inspiration.
Thus even the crudest and least coherent utterances, when we suspect
some soul to be groping in them, and striving to address us, become
oracular; a divine afflatus breathes behind their gibberish and they
seem to manifest some deep intent. The miracle of creation or
inspiration consists in nothing but this, that an external effect should
embody an inner intention. The miracle, of course, is apparent only, and
due to an inverted and captious point of view. In truth the tendency
that executed the work was what first made its conception possible; but
this conception, finding the work responsive in some measure to its
inner demand, attributes that response to its own magic prerogative.
Hence the least stir and rumble of formative processes, when it
generates a soul, makes itself somehow that soul’s interpreter; and dim
as the spirit and its expression may both remain, they are none the less
in profound concord, a concord which wears a miraculous providential
character when it is appreciated without being understood.

[Sidenote: Expressions to be understood must be recreated, and so
changed.]

Primitive poetry is the basis of all discourse. If we open any ancient
book we come at once upon an elaborate language, and on divers
conventional concepts, of whose origin and history we hear nothing. We
must read on, until by dint of guessing and by confronting instances we
grow to understand those symbols. The writer was himself heir to a
linguistic tradition which he made his own by the same process of
adoption and tentative use by which we, in turn, interpret his phrases:
he understood what he heard in terms of his own experience, and
attributed to his predecessors (no matter what their incommunicable
feelings may have been) such ideas as their words generated in his own
thinking. In this way expressions continually change their sense; they
can communicate a thought only by diffusing a stimulus, and in passing
from mouth to mouth they will wholly reverse their connotation, unless
some external object or some recurring human situation gives them a
constant standard, by which private aberrations may be checked. Thus in
the first phrase of Genesis, “In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth,” the words have a stable meaning only in so far as they
are indicative and bring us back to a stable object. What “heavens” and
“earth” stand for can be conveyed by gestures, by merely pointing up and
down; but beyond that sensuous connotation their meaning has entirely
changed since they were here written; and no two minds, even to-day,
will respond to these familiar words with exactly the same images.
“Beginning” and “created” have a superficial clearness, though their
implications cannot be defined without precipitating the most intricate
metaphysics, which would end in nothing but a proof that both terms were
ambiguous and unthinkable. As to the word “God,” all mutual
understanding is impossible. It is a floating literary symbol, with a
value which, if we define it scientifically, becomes quite algebraic. As
no experienced object corresponds to it, it is without fixed indicative
force, and admits any sense which its context in any mind may happen to
give it. In the first sentence of Genesis its meaning, we may safely
say, is “a masculine being by whom heaven and earth were created.” To
fill out this implication other instances of the word would have to be
gathered, in each of which, of course, the word would appear with a new
and perhaps incompatible meaning.

[Sidenote: Expressions may be recast perversely, humorously, or
sublimely.]

Whenever a word appears in a radically new context it has a radically
new sense: the expression in which it so figures is a poetic figment, a
fresh literary creation. Such invention is sometimes perverse, sometimes
humorous, sometimes sublime; that is, it may either buffet old
associations without enlarging them, or give them a plausible but
impossible twist, or enlarge them to cover, with unexpected propriety, a
much wider or more momentous experience. The force of experience in any
moment—if we abstract from represented values—is emotional; so that
for sublime poetry what is required is to tap some reservoir of feeling.
If a phrase opens the flood-gates of emotion, it has made itself most
deeply significant. Its discursive range and clearness may not be
remarkable; its emotional power will quite suffice. For this reason
again primitive poetry may be sublime: in its inchoate phrases there is
affinity to raw passion and their very blindness may serve to bring that
passion back. Poetry has body; it represents the volume of experience as
well as its form, and to express volume a primitive poet will rely
rather on rhythm, sound, and condensed suggestion than on discursive
fulness or scope.

[Sidenote: The nature of prose.]

The descent from poetry to prose is in one sense a progress. When use
has worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an
indifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become
prosaic; it has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely
instrumental. In poetry feeling is transferred by contagion; in prose it
is communicated by bending the attention upon determinate objects; the
one stimulates and the other informs. Under the influence of poetry
various minds radiate from a somewhat similar core of sensation, from
the same vital mood, into the most diverse and incommunicable images.
Interlocutors speaking prose, on the contrary, pelt and besiege one
another with a peripheral attack; they come into contact at sundry
superficial points and thence push their agreement inwards, until
perhaps a practical coincidence is arrived at in their thought.
Agreement is produced by controlling each mind externally, through a
series of checks and little appeals to possible sensation; whereas in
poetry the agreement, where it exists, is vague and massive; there is an
initial fusion of minds under hypnotic musical influences, from which
each listener, as he awakes, passes into his own thoughts and
interpretations. In prose the vehicle for communication is a
conventional sign, standing in the last analysis for some demonstrable
object or controllable feeling. By marshalling specific details a
certain indirect suasion is exercised on the mind, as nature herself, by
continual checks and denials, gradually tames the human will. The
elements of prose are always practical, if we run back and reconstruct
their primitive essence, for at bottom every experience is an original
and not a copy, a nucleus for ideation rather than an object to which
ideas may refer. It is when these stimulations are shaken together and
become a system of mutual checks that they begin to take on ideally a
rhythm borrowed from the order in which they actually recurred. Then a
prophetic or representative movement arises in thought. Before this
comes about, experience remains a constantly renovated dream, as poetry
to the end conspires to keep it. For poetry, while truly poetical, never
loses sight of initial feelings and underlying appeals; it is
incorrigibly transcendental, and takes every present passion and every
private dream in turn for the core of the universe. By creating new
signs, or by recasting and crossing those which have become
conventional, it keeps communication massive and instinctive, immersed
in music, and inexhaustible by clear thought.


[Sidenote: It is more advanced and responsible than poetry.]

Lying is a privilege of poets because they have not yet reached the
level on which truth and error are discernible. Veracity and
significance are not ideals for a primitive mind; we learn to value them
as we learn to live, when we discover that the spirit cannot be wholly
free and solipsistic. To have to distinguish fact from fancy is so great
a violence to the inner man that not only poets, but theologians and
philosophers, still protest against such a distinction. They urge (what
is perfectly true for a rudimentary creature) that facts are mere
conceptions and conceptions full-fledged facts; but this interesting
embryonic lore they apply, in their intellectual weakness, to retracting
or undermining those human categories which, though alone fruitful or
applicable in life, are not congenial to their half-formed imagination.
Retreating deeper into the inner chaos, they bring to bear the whole
momentum of an irresponsible dialectic to frustrate the growth of
representative ideas: In this they are genuine, if somewhat belated,
poets, experimenting anew with solved problems, and fancying how
creation might have moved upon other lines. The great merit that prose
shares with science is that it is responsible. Its conscience is a new
and wiser imagination, by which creative thought is rendered cumulative
and progressive; for a man does not build less boldly or solidly if he
takes the precaution of building in baked brick. Prose is in itself
meagre and bodiless, merely indicating the riches of the world. Its
transparency helps us to look through it to the issue, and the signals
it gives fill the mind with an honest assurance and a prophetic art far
nobler than any ecstasy.

[Sidenote: Maturity brings love of practical truth.]

As men of action have a better intelligence than poets, if only their
action is on a broad enough stage, so the prosaic rendering of
experience has the greater value, if only the experience rendered covers
enough human interests. Youth and aspiration indulge in poetry; a mature
and masterful mind will often despise it, and prefer to express itself
laconically in prose. It is clearly proper that prosaic habits should
supervene in this way on the poetical; for youth, being as yet little
fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the
half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone
beautiful and worthy of homage. Time modifies this sentiment in two
directions. It breeds lassitude and indifference towards impracticable
ideals, originally no less worthy than the practicable. Ideals which
cannot be realised, and are not fed at least by partial realisations,
soon grow dormant. Life-blood passes to other veins; the urgent and
palpitating interests of life appear in other quarters. While things
impossible thus lose their serious charm, things actual reveal their
natural order and variety; these not only can entertain the mind
abstractly, but they can offer a thousand material rewards in
observation and action. In their presence, a private dream begins to
look rather cheap and hysterical. Not that existence has any dignity or
prerogative in the presence of will, but that will itself, being
elastic, grows definite and firm when it is fed by success; and its
formed and expressible ideals then put to shame the others, which have
remained vague for want of practical expression. Mature interests centre
on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution; it is at such points
that the ideal can be really served. The individual’s dream straightens
and reassures itself by merging with the dream of humanity. To dwell, as
irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without
representative or ulterior value, then seems a waste of time. Fiction
becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of
incompetent whimper, a childish fore-shortening of the outspread world.

[Sidenote: Pure prose would tend to efface itself.]

On the other hand, prose has a great defect, which is abstractness. It
drops the volume of experience in finding bodiless algebraic symbols by
which to express it. The verbal form, instead of transmitting an image,
seems to constitute it, in so far as there is an image suggested at
all; and the ulterior situation is described only in the sense that a
change is induced in the hearer which prepares him to meet that
situation. Prose seems to be a use of language in the service of
material life. It would tend, in that case, to undermine its own basis;
for in proportion as signals for action are quick and efficacious they
diminish their sensuous stimulus and fade from consciousness. Were
language such a set of signals it would be something merely
instrumental, which if made perfect ought to be automatic and
unconscious. It would be a buzzing in the ears, not a music native to
the mind. Such a theory of language would treat it as a necessary evil
and would look forward hopefully to the extinction of literature, in
which it would recognise nothing ideal. There is of course no reason to
deprecate the use of vocables, or of any other material agency, to
expedite affairs; but an art of speech, if it is to add any ultimate
charm to life, has to supervene upon a mere code of signals. Prose,
could it be purely representative, would be ideally superfluous. A
literary prose accordingly owns a double allegiance, and its life is
amphibious. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a
language that lends the message an intrinsic value, and makes it
delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or
practice. Prose is in that measure a fine art. It might be called poetry
that had become pervasively representative, and was altogether faithful
to its rational function.

[Sidenote: Form alone, or substance alone, may be poetical.]

We may therefore with good reason distinguish prosaic form from prosaic
substance. A novel, a satire, a book of speculative philosophy, may have
a most prosaic exterior; every phrase may convey its idea economically;
but the substance may nevertheless be poetical, since these ideas may be
irrelevant to all ulterior events, and may express nothing but the
imaginative energy that called them forth. On the other hand, a poetic
vehicle in which there is much ornamental play of language and rhythm
may clothe a dry ideal skeleton. So those tremendous positivists, the
Hebrew prophets, had the most prosaic notions about the goods and evils
of life. So Lucretius praised, I will not say the atoms merely, but even
fecundity and wisdom. The motives, to take another example, which Racine
attributed to his personages, were prosaically conceived; a physiologist
could not be more exact in his calculations, for even love may be made
the mainspring in a clock-work of emotions. Yet that Racine was a born
poet appears in the music, nobility, and tenderness of his medium; he
clothed his intelligible characters in magical and tragic robes; the
aroma of sentiment rises like a sort of pungent incense between them and
us, and no dramatist has ever had so sure a mastery over transports and
tears.

[Sidenote: Poetry has its place in the medium.]

In the medium a poet is at home; in the world he tries to render, he is
a child and a stranger. Poetic notions are false notions; in so far as
their function is representative they are vitiated by containing
elements not present in things. Truth is a jewel which should not be
painted over; but it may be set to advantage and shown in a good light.
The poetic way of idealising reality is dull, bungling, and impure; a
better acquaintance with things renders such flatteries ridiculous. That
very effort of thought by which opaque masses of experience were first
detached from the flux and given a certain individuality, seeks to
continue to clarify them until they become as transparent as possible.
To resist this clarification, to love the chance incrustations that
encumber human ideas, is a piece of timid folly, and poetry in this
respect is nothing but childish confusion. Poetic apprehension is a
makeshift, in so far as its cognitive worth is concerned; it is exactly,
in this respect, what myth is to science. Approaching its subject-matter
from a distance, with incongruous categories, it translates it into some
vague and misleading symbol rich in emotions which the object as it is
could never arouse and is sure presently to contradict. What lends these
hybrid ideas their temporary eloquence and charm is their congruity with
the mind that breeds them and with its early habits. Falsification, or
rather clouded vision, gives to poetry a more human accent and a readier
welcome than to truth. In other words, it is the medium that asserts
itself; the apperceptive powers indulge their private humours, and
neglect the office to which they were assigned once for all by their
cognitive essence.

[Sidenote: It is the best medium possible.]

That the medium should so assert itself, however, is no anomaly, the
cognitive function being an ulterior one to which ideas are by no means
obliged to conform. Apperception is itself an activity or art, and like
all others terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart from
its utilities. If we abstract, then, from the representative function
which may perhaps accrue to speech, and regard it merely as an operation
absorbing energy and occasioning delight, we see that poetic language is
language at its best. Its essential success consists in fusing ideas in
charming sounds or in metaphors that shine by their own brilliance.
Poetry is an eloquence justified by its spontaneity, as eloquence is a
poetry justified by its application. The first draws the whole soul into
the situation, and the second puts the whole situation before the soul.

[Sidenote: Might it not convey what it is best to know?]

Is there not, we may ask, some ideal form of discourse in which
apperceptive life could be engaged with all its volume and transmuting
power, and in which at the same time no misrepresentation should be
involved? Transmutation is not erroneous when it is intentional;
misrepresentation does not please for being false, but only because
truth would be more congenial if it resembled such a fiction. Why
should not discourse, then, have nothing but truth in its import and
nothing but beauty in its form? With regard to euphony and grammatical
structure there is evidently nothing impossible in such an ideal; for
these radical beauties of language are independent of the
subject-matter. They form the body of poetry; but the ideal and
emotional atmosphere which is its soul depends on things external to
language, which no perfection in the medium could modify. It might seem
as if the brilliant substitutions, the magic suggestions essential to
poetry, would necessarily vanish in the full light of day. The light of
day is itself beautiful; but would not the loss be terrible if no other
light were ever suffered to shine?

[Sidenote: A rational poetry would exclude much now thought poetical.]

The Life of Reason involves sacrifice. What forces yearn for the ideal,
being many and incompatible, have to yield and partly deny themselves in
order to attain any ideal at all. There is something sad in all possible
attainment so long as the rational virtue (which wills such attainment)
is not pervasive; and even then there is limitation to put up with, and
the memory of many a defeat. Rational poetry is possible and would be
infinitely more beautiful than the other; but the charm of unreason, if
unreason seem charming, it certainly could not preserve. In what human
fancy demands, as at present constituted, there are irrational
elements. The given world seems insufficient; impossible things have to
be imagined, both to extend its limits and to fill in and vivify its
texture. Homer has a mythology without which experience would have
seemed to him undecipherable; Dante has his allegories and his mock
science; Shakespeare has his romanticism; Goethe his symbolic characters
and artificial machinery. All this lumber seems to have been somehow
necessary to their genius; they could not reach expression in more
honest terms. If such indirect expression could be discarded, it would
not be missed; but while the mind, for want of a better vocabulary, is
reduced to using these symbols, it pours into them a part of its own
life and makes them beautiful. Their loss is a real blow, while the
incapacity that called for them endures; and the soul seems to be
crippled by losing its crutches.

[Sidenote: All apperception modifies its object.]

There are certain adaptations and abbreviations of reality which thought
can never outgrow. Thought is representative; it enriches each soul and
each moment with premonitions of surrounding existences. If discourse is
to be significant it must transfer to its territory and reduce to its
scale whatever objects it deals with: in other words, thought has a
point of view and cannot see the world except in perspective. This point
of view is not, for reason, locally or naturally determined; sense alone
is limited in that material fashion, being seated in the body and
looking thence centrifugally upon things in so far as they come into
dynamic relations with that body. Intelligence, on the contrary, sallies
from that physical stronghold and consists precisely in shifting and
universalising the point of view, neutralising all local, temporal, or
personal conditions. Yet intelligence, notwithstanding, has its own
centre and point of origin, not explicitly in space or in a natural
body, but in some specific interest or moral aim. It translates animal
life into moral endeavour, and what figured in the first as a local
existence figures in the second as a specific good. Reason accordingly
has its essential bias, and looks at things as they affect the
particular form of life which reason expresses; and though all reality
should be ultimately swept by the eye of reason, the whole would still
be surveyed by a particular method, from a particular starting-point,
for a particular end; nor would it take much shrewdness to perceive that
this nucleus for discourse and estimation, this ideal life, corresponds
in the moral world to that animal body which gave sensuous experience
its seat and centre; so that rationality is nothing but the ideal
function or aspect of natural life. Reason is universal in its outlook
and in its sympathies: it is the faculty of changing places ideally and
representing alien points of view; but this very self-transcendence
manifests a certain special method in life, an equilibrium which a
far-sighted being is able to establish between itself and its
comprehended conditions. Reason remains to the end essentially human
and, in its momentary actuality, necessarily personal.

[Sidenote: Reason has its own bias and method.]

We have here an essential condition of discourse which renders it at
bottom poetical. Selection and applicability govern all thinking, and
govern it in the interests of the soul. Reason is itself a specific
medium; so that prose can never attain that perfect transparency and
mere utility which we were attributing to it. We should not wish to know
“things in themselves,” even if we were able. What it concerns us to
know about them is merely the service or injury they are able to do us,
and in what fashion they can affect our lives. To know this would be, in
so far, truly to know them; but it would be to know them through our own
faculties and through their supposed effects; it would be to know them
by their appearance. A singular proof of the frivolous way in which
philosophers often proceed, when they think they are particularly
profound, is seen in this puzzle, on which they solemnly ask us to fix
our thoughts: How is it possible to know reality, if all we can attain
in experience is but appearance? The meaning of knowledge, which is an
intellectual and living thing, is here forgotten, and the notion of
sensation, or bodily possession, is substituted for it; so what we are
really asked to consider is how, had we no understanding, we should be
able to understand what we endure. It is by conceiving what we endure to
be the appearance of something beyond us, that we reach knowledge that
something exists beyond us, and that it plays in respect to us a
determinate rôle. There could be no knowledge of reality if what
conveyed that knowledge were not felt to be appearance; nor can a medium
of knowledge better than appearance be by any possibility conceived. To
have such appearances is what makes realities knowable. Knowledge
transcends sensation by relating it to other sensation, and thereby
rising to a supersensuous plane, the plane of principles and causes by
which sensibles are identified in character and distributed in
existence. These principles and causes are what we call the intelligible
or the real world; and the sensations, when they have been so
interpreted and underpinned, are what we call experience.

[Sidenote: Rational poetry would envelop exact knowledge in ultimate
emotions.]

If a poet could clarify the myths he begins with, so as to reach
ultimate scientific notions of nature and life, he would still be
dealing with vivid feeling and with its imaginative expression. The
prosaic landscape before him would still be a work of art, painted on
the human brain by human reason. If he found that landscape
uninteresting, it would be because he was not really interested in life;
if he found it dull and unpoetical, he would be manifesting his small
capacity and childish whims. Tragic, fatal, intractable, he might well
feel that the truth was; but these qualities have never been absent from
that half-mythical world through which poets, for want of a rational
education, have hitherto wandered. A rational poet’s vision would have
the same moral functions which myth was asked to fulfil, and fulfilled
so treacherously; it would employ the same ideal faculties which myth
expressed in a confused and hasty fashion. More detail would have been
added, and more variety in interpretation. To deal with so great an
object, and retain his mastery over it, a poet would doubtless need a
robust genius. If he possessed it, and in transmuting all existence
falsified nothing, giving that picture of everything which human
experience in the end would have drawn, he would achieve an ideal
result. In prompting mankind to imagine, he would be helping them to
live. His poetry, without ceasing to be a fiction in its method and
ideality, would be an ultimate truth in its practical scope. It would
present in graphic images the total efficacy of real things. Such a
poetry would be more deeply rooted in human experience than is any
casual fancy, and therefore more appealing to the heart. Such a poetry
would represent more thoroughly than any formula the concrete burden of
experience; it would become the most trustworthy of companions. The
images it had worked out would confront human passion more intelligibly
than does the world as at present conceived, with its mechanism half
ignored and its ideality half invented; they would represent vividly the
uses of nature, and thereby make all natural situations seem so many
incentives to art.

[Sidenote: An illustration.]

Rational poetry is not wholly unknown. When Homer mentions an object,
how does he render it poetical? First, doubtless, by the euphony of its
name or the sensuous glow of some epithet coupled with it. Sometimes,
however, even this ornamental epithet is not merely sensuous; it is very
likely a patronymic, the name of some region or some mythical ancestor.
In other words, it is a signal for widening our view and for conceiving
the object, not only vividly and with pause, but in an adequate historic
setting. Macbeth tells us that his dagger was “unmannerly breeched in
gore.” Achilles would not have amused himself with such a metaphor, even
if breeches had existed in his day, but would rather have told us whose
blood, on other occasions, had stained the same blade, and perhaps what
father or mother had grieved for the slaughtered hero, or what brave
children remained to continue his race. Shakespeare’s phrase is
ingenious and fanciful; it dazzles for a moment, but in the end it seems
violent and crude. What Homer would have said, on the contrary, being
simple and true, might have grown, as we dwelt upon it, always more
noble, pathetic, and poetical. Shakespeare, too, beneath his occasional
absurdities of plot and diction, ennobles his stage with actual history,
with life painted to the quick, with genuine human characters, politics,
and wisdom; and surely these are not the elements that do least credit
to his genius. In every poet, indeed, there is some fidelity to nature,
mixed with that irrelevant false fancy with which poetry is sometimes
identified; and the degree in which a poet’s imagination dominates
reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.

[Sidenote: Volume can be found in scope better than in suggestion.]

Before prosaic objects are descried, the volume and richness needful for
poetry lie in a blurred and undigested chaos; but after the common world
has emerged and has called on prose to describe it, the same volume and
richness may be recovered; and a new and clarified poetry may arise
through synthesis. Scope is a better thing than suggestion, and more
truly poetical. It has expressed what suggestion pointed to and felt in
the bulk: it possesses what was yearned for. A real thing, when all its
pertinent natural associates are discerned, touches wonder, pathos, and
beauty on every side; the rational poet is one who, without feigning
anything unreal, perceives these momentous ties, and presents his
subject loaded with its whole fate, missing no source of worth which is
in it, no ideal influence which it may have. Homer remains, perhaps, the
greatest master in this art. The world he glorified by showing in how
many ways it could serve reason and beauty was but a simple world, and
an equal genius in these days might be distracted by the Babel about
him, and be driven, as poets now are, into incidental dreams. Yet the
ideal of mastery and idealisation remains the same, if any one could
only attain it: mastery, to see things as they are and dare to describe
them ingenuously; idealisation, to select from this reality what is
pertinent to ultimate interests and can speak eloquently to the soul.




CHAPTER VII

PLASTIC CONSTRUCTION


[Sidenote: Automatic expression often leaves traces in the outer world.]

We have seen how arts founded on exercise and automatic self-expression
develop into music, poetry, and prose. By an indirect approach they come
to represent outer conditions, till they are interwoven in a life which
has in some measure gone out to meet its opportunities and learned to
turn them to an ideal use. We have now to see how man’s reactive habits
pass simultaneously into art in a wholly different region. Spontaneous
expression, such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal system
vents itself, as it were, by the way. At the same time animal economy
has playful manifestations concerned with outer things, such as
burrowing or collecting objects. These practices are not less
spontaneous than the others, and no less expressive; but they seem more
external because the traces they leave on the environment are more
clearly marked.

To change an object is the surest and most glorious way of changing a
perception. A shift in posture may relieve the body, and in that way
satisfy, but the new attitude is itself unstable. Its pleasantness,
like its existence, is transient, and scarcely is a movement executed
when both its occasion and its charm are forgotten. Self-expression by
exercise, in spite of its pronounced automatism, is therefore something
comparatively passive and inglorious. A man has hardly _done_ anything
when he has laughed or yawned. Even the inspired poet retains something
of this passivity: his work is not his, but that of a restless,
irresponsible spirit passing through him, and hypnotising him for its
own ends. Of the result he has no profit, no glory, and little
understanding. So the mystic also positively gloats on his own
nothingness, and puts his whole genuine being in a fancied
instrumentality and subordination to something else. Far more virile and
noble is the sense of having actually done something, and left at least
the temporary stamp of one’s special will on the world. To chop a stick,
to catch a fly, to pile a heap of sand, is a satisfying action; for the
sand stays for a while in its novel arrangement, proclaiming to the
surrounding level that we have made it our instrument, while the fly
will never stir nor the stick grow together again in all eternity. If
the impulse that has thus left its indelible mark on things is constant
in our own bosom, the world will have been permanently improved and
humanised by our action. Nature cannot but be more favourable to those
ideas which have once found an efficacious champion.

[Sidenote: Such effects fruitful.]

Plastic impulses find in this way an immediate sanction in the sense of
victory and dominion which they carry with them; it is so evident a
proof of power in ourselves to see things and animals bent out of their
habitual form and obedient instead to our idea. But a far weightier
sanction immediately follows. Man depends on things for his experience,
yet by automatic action he changes these very things so that it becomes
possible that by his action he should promote his welfare. He may, of
course, no less readily precipitate his ruin. The animal is more subject
to vicissitudes than the plant, which makes no effort to escape them or
to give chase to what it feeds upon. The greater perils of action,
however, are in animals covered partly by fertility, partly by
adaptability, partly by success. The mere possibility of success, in a
world governed by natural selection, is an earnest of progress.
Sometimes, in impressing the environment, a man will improve it: which
is merely to say that a change may sometimes fortify the impulse which
brought it about. As soon as this retroaction is perceived and the act
is done with knowledge of its ensuing benefits, plastic impulse becomes
art, and the world begins actually to change in obedience to reason.

One respect, for instance, in which man depends on things is for the
æsthetic quality of his perceptions. If he happens, by a twist of the
hand, to turn a flowering branch into a wreath, thereby making it more
interesting, he will have discovered a decorative art and initiated
himself auspiciously into the practice of it. Experimentation may
follow, and whenever the new form given to the object improves
it—_i.e._, increases its interest for the eye—the experimenter will
triumph and will congratulate himself on his genius. The garland so
arranged will be said to express the taste it satisfies; insight and
reason will be mythically thought to have guided the work by which they
are sustained in being. It is no small harmony, however, that they
should be sustained by it. The consonances man introduces into nature
will follow him wherever he goes. It will no longer be necessary that
nature should supply them spontaneously, by a rare adventitious harmony
with his demands. His new habit will habitually rear-range her chance
arrangements, and his path will be marked by the beauties he has strewn
it with. So long as the same plastic impulse continues operative it will
be accompanied by knowledge and criticism of its happy results.
Self-criticism, being a second incipient artistic impulse, contrasting
itself with the one which a work embodies, may to some extent modify the
next performance. If life is drawn largely into this deepening channel,
physical proficiency and its ideal sanctions will develop more or less
harmoniously into what is called a school of art.

[Sidenote: Magic authority of man’s first creations.]

The first felt utilities by which plastic instinct is sanctioned are of
course not distinctly æsthetic, much less distinctly practical; they
are magical. A stone cut into some human or animal semblance fascinates
the savage eye much more than would a useful tool or a beautiful idol.
The man wonders at his own work, and petrifies the miracle of his art
into miraculous properties in its product. Primitive art is incredibly
conservative; its first creations, having once attracted attention,
monopolise it henceforth and nothing else will be trusted to work the
miracle. It is a sign of stupidity in general to stick to physical
objects and given forms apart from their ideal functions, as when a
child cries for a broken doll, even if a new and better one is at hand
to replace it. Inert associations establish themselves, in such a case,
with that part of a thing which is irrelevant to its value—its material
substance or perhaps its name. Art can make no progress in such a
situation. A man remains incorrigibly unhappy and perplexed, cowed, and
helpless, because not intelligent enough to readjust his actions; his
idol must be the self-same hereditary stock, or at least it must have
the old sanctified rigidity and stare. Plastic impulse, as yet sporadic,
is overwhelmed by a brute idolatrous awe at mere existence and
actuality. What is, what has always been, what chance has associated
with one person, alone seems acceptable or conceivable.

[Sidenote: Art brings relief from idolatry.]

Idolatry is by no means incident to art; art, on the contrary, is a
release from idolatry. A cloud, an animal, a spring, a stone, or the
whole heaven, will serve the pure idolater’s purpose to perfection;
these things have existence and a certain hypnotic power, so that he may
make them a focus for his dazed contemplation. When the mind takes to
generalities it finds the same fascination in Being or in the Absolute,
something it needs no art to discover. The more indeterminate,
immediate, and unutterable the idol is, the better it induces panic
self-contraction and a reduction of all discourse to the infinite
intensity of zero. When idolaters pass from trying to evoke the
Absolutely Existent to apostrophising the sun or an ithyphallic bull
they have made an immense progress in art and religion, for now their
idols represent some specific and beneficent function in nature,
something propitious to ideal life and to its determinate expression.
Isaiah is very scornful of idols made with hands, because they have no
physical energy. He forgets that perhaps they represent something, and
so have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have
unless they too become representative and express some ideal. Isaiah’s
conception of Jehovah, for instance, is itself a poetic image, the work
of man’s brain; and the innocent worship of it would not be idolatry, if
that conception represented something friendly to human happiness and to
human art. The question merely is whether the sculptor’s image or the
prophet’s stands for the greater interest and is a more adequate symbol
for the good. The noblest art will be the one, whether plastic or
literary or dialectical, which creates figments most truly
representative of what is momentous in human life. Similarly the least
idolatrous religion would be the one which used the most perfect art,
and most successfully abstracted the good from the real.

[Sidenote: Inertia in technique.]

Conservatism rules also in those manufactures which are tributary to
architecture and the smaller plastic arts. Utility makes small headway
against custom, not only when custom has become religion, but even when
it remains inert and without mythical sanction. To admit or trust
anything new is to overcome that inertia which is a general law in the
brain no less than elsewhere, and which may be distinguished in
reflection into a technical and a social conservatism. Technical
conservatism appears, for instance, in a man’s handwriting, which is so
seldom improved, even when admitted, perhaps, to be execrable. Every
artist has his tricks of execution, every school its hereditary,
irrational processes. These refractory habits are to blame for the rare
and inimitable quality of genius; they impose excellence on one man and
refuse it to a million. A happy physiological structure, by creating a
mannerism under the special circumstances favourable to expression, may
lift a man, perhaps inferior in intelligence, to heights which no
insight can attain with inferior organs. As a voice is necessary for
singing, so a certain quickness of eye and hand is needed for good
execution in the plastic arts. The same principle goes deeper.
Conception and imagination are themselves automatic and run in grooves,
so that only certain forms in certain combinations will ever suggest
themselves to a given designer. Every writer’s style, too, however
varied within limits, is single and monotonous compared with the ideal
possibilities of expression. Genius at every moment is confined to the
idiom it is creating.

[Sidenote: Inertia in appreciation.]

Social inertia is due to the same causes working in the community at
large. The fancy, for instance, of building churches in the shape of a
cross has largely determined Christian architecture. Builders were
prevented by a foregone suggestion in themselves and by their patrons’
demands from conceiving any alternative to that convention. Early
pottery, they say, imitates wicker-work, and painted landscape was for
ages not allowed to exist without figures, although even the old masters
show plainly enough in their backgrounds that they could love landscape
for its own sake. When one link with humanity has been rendered explicit
and familiar, people assume that by no other means can humanity be
touched at all; even if at the same time their own heart is expanding to
the highest raptures in a quite different region. The severer Greeks
reprobated music without words; Saint Augustine complained of chants
that rendered the sacred text unintelligible; the Puritans regarded
elaborate music as diabolical, little knowing how soon some of their
descendants would find religion in nothing else. A stupid convention
still looks on material and mathematical processes as somehow
distressing and ugly, and systems of philosophy, artificially
mechanical, are invented to try to explain natural mechanism away;
whereas in no region can the spirit feel so much at home as among
natural causes, or realise so well its universal affinities, or so
safely enlarge its happiness. Mechanism is the source of beauty. It is
not necessary to look so high as the stars to perceive this truth: the
action of an animal’s limbs or the movement of a waterfall will prove it
to any one who has eyes and can shake himself loose from verbal
prejudices, those debris of old perceptions which choke all fresh
perception in the soul. Irrational hopes, irrational shames, irrational
decencies, make man’s chief desolation. A slight knocking of fools’
heads together might be enough to break up the ossifications there and
start the blood coursing again through possible channels. Art has an
infinite range; nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so
persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most
satisfaction.

[Sidenote: Adventitious effects appreciated first.]

Since construction grows rational slowly and by indirect pressure, we
may expect that its most superficial merits will be the first
appreciated. Ultimate beauty in a building would consist, of course, in
responding simultaneously to all the human faculties affected: to the
eye, by the building’s size, form, and colour; to the imagination, by
its fitness and ideal expression. Of all grounds for admiration those
most readily seized are size, elaboration, splendour of materials, and
difficulties or cost involved. Having built or dug in the conventional
way a man may hang before his door some trophy of battle or the chase,
bearing witness to his prowess; just as people now, not thinking of
making their rooms beautiful, fill them with photographs of friends or
places they have known, to suggest and reburnish in their minds their
interesting personal history, which even they, unstimulated, might tend
to forget. That dwelling will seem best adorned which contains most
adventitious objects; bare and ugly will be whatever is not concealed by
something else. Again, a barbarous architect, without changing his
model, may build in a more precious material; and his work will be
admired for the evidence it furnishes of wealth and wilfulness. As a
community grows luxurious and becomes accustomed to such display, it may
come to seem strange and hideous to see a wooden plate or a pewter
spoon. A beautiful house will need to be in marble and the sight of
plebeian brick will banish all satisfaction.

Less irrational, and therefore less vulgar, is the wonder aroused by
great bulk or difficulty in the work. Exertions, to produce a great
result, even if it be material, must be allied to perseverance and
intelligent direction. Roman bridges and aqueducts, for instance, gain
a profound emotional power when we see in their monotonous arches a
symbol of the mightiest enterprise in history, and in their decay an
evidence of its failure. Curiosity is satisfied, historic imagination is
stimulated, tragic reflection is called forth. We cannot refuse
admiration to a work so full of mind, even if no great plastic beauty
happens to distinguish it. It is at any rate beautiful enough, like the
sea or the skeleton of a mountain. We may rely on the life it has made
possible to add more positive charms and clothe it with imaginative
functions. Modern engineering works often have a similar value; the
force and intelligence they express merge in an æsthetic essence, and
the place they hold in a portentous civilisation lends them an almost
epic dignity. New York, since it took to doing business in towers, has
become interesting to look at from the sea; nor is it possible to walk
through the overshadowed streets without feeling a pleasing wonder. A
city, when enough people swarm in it, is as fascinating as an ant-hill,
and its buildings, whatever other charms they may have, are at least as
curious and delightful as sea-shells or birds’ nests. The purpose of
improvements in modern structures may be economic, just as the purpose
of castles was military; but both may incidentally please the
contemplative mind by their huge forms and human associations.

[Sidenote: Approach to beauty through useful structure.]

Of the two approaches which barbaric architecture makes to beauty—one
through ornamentation and the other through mass—the latter is in
general the more successful. An engineer fights with nature hand to
hand: he is less easily extravagant than a decorator; he can hardly ever
afford to be absurd. He becomes accordingly more rapidly civilised and
his work acquires, in spite of itself, more rationality and a more
permanent charm. A self-sustaining structure, in art as in life, is the
only possible basis for a vital ideal. When the framework is determined,
when it is tested by trial and found to stand and serve, it will
gradually ingratiate itself with the observer; affinities it may have in
his memory or apperceptive habits will come to light; they will help him
to assimilate the new vision and will define its æsthetic character.
Whatever beauty its lines may have will become a permanent possession
and whatever beauties they exclude will be rejected by a faithful
artist, no matter how sorely at first they may tempt him. Not that these
excluded beauties would not be really beautiful; like fashions, they
would truly please in their day and very likely would contain certain
absolute excellences of form or feeling which an attentive eye could
enjoy at any time. Yet if appended to a structure they have no function
in, these excellences will hardly impose themselves on the next builder.
Being adventitious they will remain optional, and since fancy is quick,
and exotic beauties are many, there will be no end to the variations, in
endless directions, which art will undergo. Caprice will follow caprice
and no style will be developed.

[Sidenote: Failure of adapted styles.]

A settled style is perhaps in itself no desideratum. A city that should
be a bazaar of all possible architectures, adding a multitude of new
inventions to samples of every historical style, might have a certain
interest; yet carnival can hardly be enjoyed all the year round and
there is a certain latent hideousness in masquerades in spite of their
glitter. Not only are the effects juxtaposed incongruous, but each apart
is usually shallow and absurd. A perruque cannot bring back courtly
manners, and a style of architecture, when revived, is never quite
genuine; adaptations have to be introduced and every adaptation, the
bolder it is, runs the greater risk of being extravagant. Nothing is
more pitiable than the attempts people make, who think they have an
exquisite sensibility, to live in a house all of one period. The
connoisseur, like an uncritical philosopher, boasts to have patched his
dwelling perfectly together, but he has forgotten himself, its egregious
inhabitant. Nor is he merely a blot in his own composition; his presence
secretly infects and denaturalises everything in it. Ridiculous himself
in such a setting, he makes it ridiculous too by his æsthetic pose and
appreciations; for the objects he has collected or reproduced were once
used and prized in all honesty, when life and inevitable tradition had
brought them forth, while now they are studied and exhibited, relics of
a dead past and evidences of a dead present. Historic remains and
restorations might well be used as one uses historic knowledge, to serve
some living interest and equip the mind for the undertakings of the
hour. An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
Ideas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideas
and have not been congealed into memories. Incorporated into a design
that calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as words
that still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. All
depends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so firm and genuine
an appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is still
serviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead.

[Sidenote: Not all structure beautiful, nor all beauty structural.]

An artist may be kept true to his style either by ignorance of all
others or by love of his own. This fidelity is a condition of progress.
When he has learned to appreciate whatever is æsthetically appreciable
in his problem, he can go on to refine his construction, to ennoble, and
finally to decorate it. As fish, flesh, and fowl have specific forms,
each more or less beautiful and adorned, so every necessary structure
has its specific character and its essential associations. Taking his
cue from these, an artist may experiment freely; he may emphasise the
structure in the classic manner and turn its lines into ornament, adding
only what may help to complete and unite its suggestions. This
puritanism in design is rightly commended, but its opposite may be
admirable too. We may admit that nudity is the right garment for the
gods, but it would hardly serve the interests of beauty to legislate
that all mortals should always go naked. The veil that conceals natural
imperfections may have a perfection of its own. Maxims in art are
pernicious; beauty is here the only commandment. And beauty is a free
natural gift. When it has appeared, we may perceive that its influence
is rational, since it both expresses and fosters a harmony of
impressions and impulses in the soul; but to take any mechanism
whatever, and merely because it is actual or necessary to insist that it
is worth exhibiting, and that by divine decree it shall be pronounced
beautiful, is to be quite at sea in moral philosophy.

Beauty is adventitious, occasional, incidental, in human products no
less than in nature. Works of art are automatic figments which nature
fashions through man. It is impossible they should be wholly beautiful,
as it is impossible that they should offer no foothold or seed-plot for
beauty at all. Beauty is everywhere potential and in a way pervasive
because existence itself presupposes a modicum of harmony, first within
the thing and then between the thing and its environment. Of this
environment the observer’s senses are in this case an important part.
Man can with difficulty maintain senses quite out of key with the
stimuli furnished by the outer world. They would then be useless
burdens to his organism. On the other side, even artificial structures
must be somehow geometrical or proportional, because only such
structures hold physically together. Objects that are to be esteemed by
man must further possess or acquire some function in his economy;
otherwise they would not be noticed nor be so defined as to be
recognisable. Out of these physical necessities beauty may grow; but an
adjustment must first take place between the material stimulus and the
sense it affects. Beauty is something spiritual and, being such, it
rests not on the material constitution of each existence taken apart,
but on their conspiring ideally together, so that each furthers the
other’s endeavour. Structure by itself is no more beautiful than
existence by itself is good. They are only potentialities or conditions
of excellence.

[Sidenote: Structures designed for display.]

An architect, when his main structure is uninteresting, may have
recourse to a subsidiary construction. The façade, or a part of it, or
the interior may still have a natural form that lends itself to
elaboration. This beautiful feature may be developed so as to ignore or
even conceal the rest; then the visible portion may be entirely
beautiful, like the ideal human figure, though no pledges be given
concerning the anatomy within. Many an Italian palace has a false front
in itself magnificent. We may chance to observe, however, that it
overtops its backing, perhaps an amorphous rambling pile in quite
another material. What we admire is not so much a façade as a triumphal
gateway, set up in front of the house to be its ambassador to the world,
wearing decidedly richer apparel than its master can afford at home.
This was not vanity in the Italians so much as civility to the public,
to whose taste this flattering embassy was addressed. However our moral
sense may judge the matter, it is clear that two separate monuments
occupied the architect in such cases, if indeed inside and outside were
actually designed by the same hand. Structure may appear in each
independently and may be frankly enough expressed. The most beautiful
façades, even if independent of their building, are buildings
themselves, and since their construction is decorative there is the
greater likelihood that their decoration should be structural.

In relation to the house, however, the façade in such an extreme case
would be an abstract ornament; and so, though the ornament be structural
within its own lines, we have reverted to the style of building where
construction is one thing and decoration another. Applied ornament has
an indefinite range and there would be little profit in reasoning about
it. Philosophy can do little more at this point than expose the
fallacies into which dogmatic criticism is apt to fall. Everything is
true decoration which truly adorns, and everything adorns which enriches
the impression and pleasantly entertains the eye. There is a decorative
impulse as well as a sense for decoration. As I sit idle my stick makes
meaningless marks upon the sand; or (what is nearer to the usual origin
of ornament) I make a design out of somebody’s initials, or symbolise
fantastically something lying in my thoughts. We place also one thing
upon another, the better to see and to think of two things at once.

[Sidenote: Appeal made by decoration.]

To love decoration is to enjoy synthesis: in other words, it is to have
hungry senses and unused powers of attention. This hunger, when it
cannot well be fed by recollecting things past, relishes a profusion of
things simultaneous. Nothing is so much respected by unintelligent
people as elaboration and complexity. They are simply dazed and overawed
at seeing at once so much more than they can master. To overwhelm the
senses is, for them, the only way of filling the mind. It takes
cultivation to appreciate in art, as in philosophy, the consummate value
of what is simple and finite, because it has found its pure function and
ultimate import in the world. What is just, what is delicately and
silently adjusted to its special office, and thereby in truth to all
ultimate issues, seems to the vulgar something obvious and poor. What
astonishes them is the crude and paradoxical jumble of a thousand
suggestions in a single view. As the mystic yearns for an infinitely
glutted consciousness that feels everything at once and is not put to
the inconvenience of any longer thinking or imagining, so the barbarian
craves the assault of a myriad sensations together, and feels replete
and comfortable when a sort of infinite is poured into him without ideal
mediation. As ideal mediation is another name for intelligence, so it is
the condition of elegance. Intelligence and elegance naturally exist
together, since they both spring from a subtle sense for absent and
eventual processes. They are sustained by experience, by nicety in
foretaste and selection. Before ideality, however, is developed, volume
and variety must be given bodily or they cannot be given at all. At that
earlier stage a furious ornamentation is the chief vehicle for beauty.

[Sidenote: Its natural rights.]

That the ornate may be very beautiful, that in fact what is to be
completely beautiful needs to be somehow rich, is a fact of experience
which further justifies the above analysis. For sensation is the matter
of ideas; all representation is such only in its function; in its
existence it remains mere feeling. Decoration, by stimulating the
senses, not only brings a primary satisfaction with it, independent of
any that may supervene, but it furnishes an element of effect which no
higher beauty can ever render unwelcome or inappropriate, since any
higher beauty, in moving the mind, must give it a certain sensuous and
emotional colouring. Decoration is accordingly an independent art, to be
practised for its own sake, in obedience to elementary plastic
instincts. It is fundamental in design, for everything structural or
significant produces in the first instance some sensuous impression and
figures as a spot or pattern in the field of vision. The fortunate
architect is he who has, for structural skeleton in his work, a form in
itself decorative and beautiful, who can carry it out in a beautiful
material, and who finally is suffered to add so much decoration as the
eye may take in with pleasure, without losing the expression and
lucidity of the whole.

It is impossible, however, to imagine beforehand what these elements
should be or how to combine them. The problem must exist before its
solution can be found. The forms of good taste and beauty which a man
can think of or esteem are limited by the scope of his previous
experience. It would be impossible to foresee or desire a beauty which
had not somehow grown up of itself and been recognised receptively. A
satisfaction cannot be conceived ideally when neither its organ nor its
occasion has as yet arisen. That ideal conception, to exist, would have
to bring both into play. The fine arts are butter to man’s daily bread;
there is no conceiving or creating them except as they spring out of
social exigencies. Their types are imposed by utility: their
ornamentation betrays the tradition that happens to envelop and
diversify them; their expression and dignity are borrowed from the
company they keep in the world.

[Sidenote: Its alliance with structure in Greek architecture.]

The Greek temple, for instance, if we imagine it in its glory, with all
its colour and furniture, was a type of human art at its best, where
decoration, without in the least restricting itself, took naturally an
exquisitely subordinate and pervasive form: each detail had its own
splendour and refinement, yet kept its place in the whole. Structure and
decoration were alike traditional and imposed by ulterior practical or
religious purposes; yet, by good fortune and by grace of that
rationality which unified Greek life, they fell together easily into a
harmony such as imagination could never have devised had it been invited
to decree pleasure-domes for non-existent beings. Had the Greek gods
been hideous, their images and fable could not so readily have
beautified the place where they were honoured; and had the structural
theme and uses of the temple been more complicated, they would not have
lent themselves so well to decoration without being submerged beneath
it.

[Sidenote: Relations of the two in Gothic art.]

In some ways the ideal Gothic church attained a similar perfection,
because there too the structure remained lucid and predominant, while it
was enriched by many necessary appointments—altars, stalls, screens,
chantries—which, while really the _raison d’être_ of the whole edifice,
æsthetically regarded, served for its ornaments. It may be doubted,
however, whether Gothic construction was well grounded enough in utility
to be a sound and permanent basis for beauty; and the extreme
instability of Gothic style, the feverish, inconstancy of architects
straining after effects never, apparently, satisfactory when achieved,
shows that something was wrong and artificial in the situation. The
structure, in becoming an ornament, ceased to be anything else and could
be discarded by any one whose fancy preferred a different image.

For this reason a building like the cathedral of Amiens, where a
structural system is put through consistently, is far from representing
mediæval art in its full and ideal essence; it is rather an incidental
achievement, a sport in which an adventitious interest is, for a moment,
emphasised overwhelmingly. Intelligence here comes to the fore, and a
sort of mathematical virtuosity: but it was not mathematical virtuosity
nor even intelligence to which, in Christian art, the leading rôle
properly belonged. What structural elucidation did for church
architecture was much like what scholastic elucidation did for church
dogma: it insinuated a logic into the traditional edifice which was far
from representing its soul or its genuine value. The dialectic
introduced might be admirable in itself, in its lay and abstruse
rationality; but it could not be applied to the poetic material in hand
without rendering it absurd and sterile. The given problem was
scientifically carried out, but the given problem was itself fantastic.
To vault at such heights and to prop that vault with external buttresses
was a gratuitous undertaking. The result was indeed interesting, the
ingenuity and method exhibited were masterly in their way; yet the
result was not proportionate in beauty to the effort required; it was
after all a technical and a vain triumph.

[Sidenote: The result here romantic.]

The true magic of that very architecture lay not in its intelligible
structure but in the bewildering incidental effects which that structure
permitted. The part in such churches is better than the symmetrical
whole; often incompleteness and accretions alone give grace or
expression, to the monument. A cross vista where all is wonder, a side
chapel where all is peace, strike the key-note here; not that
punctilious and wooden repetition of props and arches, as a builder’s
model might boast to exhibit them. Perhaps the most beautiful Gothic
interiors are those without aisles, if what we are considering is their
proportion and majesty; elsewhere the structure, if perceived at all, is
too artificial and strange to be perceived intuitively and to have the
glow of a genuine beauty. There is an over-ingenious mechanism, redeemed
by its colour and the thousand intervening objects, when these have not
been swept away. Glazed and painted as Gothic churches were meant to be,
they were no doubt exceedingly gorgeous. When we admire their structural
scheme we are perhaps nursing an illusion like that which sentimental
classicists once cherished when they talked about the purity of white
marble statues and the ideality of their blank and sightless eyes. What
we treat as a supreme quality may have been a mere means to mediæval
builders, and a mechanical expedient: their simple hearts were set on
making their churches, for God’s glory and their own, as large, as high,
and as rich as possible. After all, an uninterrupted tradition attached
them to Byzantium; and it was the sudden passion for stained glass and
the goldsmith’s love of intricate fineness—which the Saracens also had
shown—that carried them in a century from Romanesque to flamboyant. The
structure was but the inevitable underpinning for the desired display.
If these sanctuaries, in their spoliation and ruin, now show us their
admirable bones, we should thank nature for that rational skeleton,
imposed by material conditions on an art which in its life-time was
goaded on only by a pious and local emulation, and wished at all costs
to be sumptuous and astonishing.

[Sidenote: The mediæval artist.]

It was rather in another direction that groping mediæval art reached its
most congenial triumphs. That was an age, so to speak, of epidemic
privacy; social contagion was irresistible, yet it served only to make
each man’s life no less hard, narrow, and visionary than that of every
one else. Like bees in a hive, each soul worked in its separate cell by
the same impulse as every other. Each was absorbed in saving itself
only, but according to a universal prescription. This isolation in
unanimity appears in those patient and childlike artists who copied each
his leaf or flower, or imagined each his curious angels and devils,
taking what was told of them so much to heart that his rendering became
deeply individual. The lamp of sacrifice—or perhaps rather of
ignorance—burned in every workshop; much labour was wasted in
forgetfulness of the function which the work was to perform, yet a
certain pathos and expression was infused into the detail, on which all
invention and pride had to be lavished. Carvings and statues at
impossible elevations, minute symbols hidden in corners, the choice for
architectural ornament of animal and vegetable forms, copied as
attentively and quaintly as possible—all this shows how abstractedly
the artist surrendered himself to the given task. He dedicated his
genius like the widow’s mite, and left the universal composition to
Providence.

Nor was this humility, on another side, wholly pious and sacrificial.
The Middle Ages were, in their way, merry, sturdy, and mischievous. A
fresh breath, as of convalescence, breathed through their misery. Never
was spring so green and lovely as when men greeted it in a cloistered
garden, with hearts quite empty and clean, only half-awakened from a
long trance of despair. It mattered little at such a moment where a work
was to figure or whether any one should ever enjoy it. The pleasure and
the function lay here, in this private revelation, in this playful
dialogue between a bit of nature and a passing mood. When a Greek
workman cut a volute or a moulding, he was not asked to be a poet; he
was merely a scribe, writing out what some master had composed before
him. The spirit of his art, if that was called forth consciously at
all, could be nothing short of intelligence. Those lines and none other,
he would say to himself, are requisite and sufficient: to do less would
be unskilful, to do more would be perverse. But the mediæval craftsman
was irresponsible in his earnestness. The whole did not concern him, for
the whole was providential and therefore, to the artist, irrelevant. He
was only responsible inwardly, to his casual inspiration, to his
individual model, and his allotted block of stone. With these he carried
on, as it were, an ingenuous dialectic, asking them questions by a blow
of the hammer, and gathering their oracular answers experimentally from
the result. Art, like salvation, proceeded by a series of little
miracles; it was a blind work, half stubborn patience, half unmerited
grace. If the product was destined to fill a niche in the celestial
edifice, that was God’s business and might be left to him: what
concerned the sculptor was to-day’s labour and joy, with the shrewd
wisdom they might bring after them.

[Sidenote: Representation introduced.]

Gothic ornament was accordingly more than ornament; it was sculpture. To
the architect sculpture and painting are only means of variegating a
surface; light and shade, depth and elaboration, are thereby secured and
aid him in distributing his masses. For this reason geometrical or
highly conventionalised ornament is all the architect requires. If his
decorators furnish more, if they insist on copying natural forms or
illustrating history, that is their own affair. Their humanity will
doubtless give them, as representative artists, a new claim on human
regard, and the building they enrich in their pictorial fashion will
gain a new charm, just as it would gain by historic associations or by
the smell of incense clinging to its walls. When the arts superpose
their effects the total impression belongs to none of them in
particular; it is imaginative merely or in the broadest sense poetical.
So the monumental function of Greek sculpture, and the interpretations
it gave to national myths, made every temple a storehouse of poetic
memories. In the same way every great cathedral became a pious
story-book. Construction, by admitting applied decoration, offers a
splendid basis and background for representative art. It is in their
decorative function that construction and representation meet; they are
able to conspire in one ideal effect by virtue of the common appeal
which they unwittingly make to the senses. If construction were not
decorative it could never ally itself imaginatively to decoration; and
decoration in turn would never be willingly representative if the forms
which illustration requires were not decorative in themselves.

[Sidenote: Transition to illustration.]

Illustration has nevertheless an intellectual function by which it
diverges altogether from decoration and even, in the narrowest sense
of the word, from art: for the essence of illustration lies neither
in use nor in beauty. The illustrator’s impulse is to reproduce
and describe given objects. He wishes in the first place to force
observers—overlooking all logical scruples—to call his work by the
name of its subject matter; and then he wishes to inform them further,
through his representation, and to teach them to apprehend the real
object as, in its natural existence, it might never have been
apprehended. His first task is to translate the object faithfully into
his special medium; his second task, somewhat more ambitious, is so to
penetrate into the object during that process of translation that this
translation may become at the same time analytic and imaginative, in
that it signalises the object’s structure and emphasises its ideal
suggestions. In such reproduction both hand and mind are called upon to
construct and build up a new apparition; but here construction has
ceased to be chiefly decorative or absolute in order to become
representative. The æsthetic element in art has begun to recede before
the intellectual; and sensuous effects, while of course retained and
still studied, seem to be impressed into the service of ideas.




CHAPTER VIII

PLASTIC REPRESENTATION


[Sidenote: Psychology of imitation.]

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen
that it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow
mind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting
of plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its
prevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of
human biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a
motor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to
execute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea,
apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some
impulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is
seen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two
phenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by an
artificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural
history, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for
consciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves
motion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior
events which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it
at the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If
the image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it would
refer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even
if it _meant_ to refer to something ulterior it would, under those
circumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected
it with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. It
might _feel_ significant, like a dream, but its significance would be
vain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events
that logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all.
This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode
is not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in
themselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the
soil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For
the idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the
ulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so
that the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially
to the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.

[Sidenote: Sustained sensation involves reproduction.]

In some such fashion we may come to conceive how imitative art is simply
the perfection and fulfilment of sensation. The act of apperception in
which a sensation is reflected upon and understood is already an
internal reproduction. The object is retraced and gone over in the
mind, not without quite perceptible movements in the limbs, which sway,
as it were, in sympathy with the object’s habit. Presumably this
incipient imitation of the object is the physical basis for apperception
itself; the stimulus, whatever devious courses it may pursue,
reconstitutes itself into an impulse to render the object again, as we
acquire the accent which we often hear. This imitation sometimes has the
happiest results, in that the animal fights with one that fights, and
runs after one that runs away from him. All this happens initially, as
we may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventual
profit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulates
hunger or lust, movements important for preservation will quickly
follow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, are
supported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before a
practical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic force
is in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life is
play in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefit
supervene only occasionally and at a higher level.

[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new
material.]

Imitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repetition of the
object that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate the
model by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, but
reproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function.
In these latter circumstances lies the imitative essence of the second
image: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin the
other’s copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so that
it becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in its
environment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of a
situation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarily
imitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simply
modified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive their
will and their independent existence, not without growing similar to
them in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in his
soul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consists
precisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has its
collateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipient
repeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. The
imitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies in
a different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality and
specific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does its
ideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. It
has a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing the
forms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a new
purpose.

If I imitate mankind by following their fashions, I add one to the
million and improve nothing: but if I imitate them under proper
inhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them,
and, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlarge
my own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically depends
upon. Assimilation is a way of drifting through the flux or of letting
it drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is a
principle of progress. To grow by accumulating passions and fancies is
at best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might
be. But to make the accretions which time brings to your being
representative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow in
dignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universe
without ceasing to be a mind.

[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.]

A product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane than
the original existences it introduces to one another—the ignorant
individual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body into
physical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This is
the case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit,
though the response may then be slavish and the representation vague.
Sheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are not
alone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has a
felt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority when
they appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and a
conscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, the
stimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a single
sense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracing
the object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. It
constitutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing’s
structure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leaves
behind it a power to reconstitute the process it involved. It leaves an
efficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquired
need not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself out
spontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed is
sketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitation
rounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct to
keep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun.

[Sidenote: How the artist is inspired and irresponsible.]

The secret of representative genius is simple enough. All hangs on
intense, exhaustive, rehearsed sensation. To paint is a way of letting
vision work; nor should the amateur imagine that while he lacks
technical knowledge he can have in his possession all the ideal burden
of an art. His reaction will be personal and adventitious, and he will
miss the artist’s real inspiration and ignore his genuine successes. You
may instruct a poet about literature, but his allegiance is to emotion.
You may offer the sculptor your comparative observations on style and
taste; he may or may not care to listen, but what he knows and loves is
the human body. Critics are in this way always one stage behind or
beyond the artist; their operation is reflective and his is direct. In
transferring to his special medium what he has before him his whole mind
is lost in the object; as the marksman, to shoot straight, looks at the
mark. How successful the result is, or how appealing to human nature, he
judges afterwards, as an outsider might, and usually judges ill; since
there is no life less apt to yield a broad understanding for human
affairs or even for the residue of art itself, than the life of a man
inspired, a man absorbed, as the genuine artist is, in his own travail.
But into this travail, into this digestion and reproduction of the thing
seen, a critic can hardly enter. Having himself the ulterior office of
judge, he must not hope to rival nature’s children in their sportiveness
and intuition.

In an age of moral confusion, these circumstances may lead to a strange
shifting of rôles. The critic, feeling that something in the artist has
escaped him, may labour to put himself in the artist’s place. If he
succeeded, the result would only be to make him a biographer; he would
be describing in words the very intuitions which the artist had rendered
in some other medium. To understand how the artist felt, however, is not
criticism; criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.
Its function may be chiefly to awaken certain emotions in the beholder,
to deepen in him certain habits of apperception; but even this most
æsthetic element in a work’s operation does not borrow its value from
the possible fact that the artist also shared those habits and emotions.
If he did, and if they are desirable, so much the better for him; but
his work’s value would still consist entirely in its power to propagate
such good effects, whether they were already present in him or not. All
criticism is therefore moral, since it deals with benefits and their
relative weight. Psychological penetration and reconstructed biography
may be excellent sport; if they do not reach historic truth they may at
least exercise dramatic talent. Criticism, on the other hand, is a
serious and public function; it shows the race assimilating the
individual, dividing the immortal from the mortal part of a soul.

[Sidenote: Need of knowing and loving the subject rendered.]

Representation naturally repeats those objects which are most
interesting in themselves. Even the medium, when a choice is possible,
is usually determined by the sort of objects to be reproduced.
Instruments lose their virtue with their use and a medium of
representation, together with its manipulation, is nothing but a
vehicle. It is fit if it makes possible a good rendition. All
accordingly hangs on what life has made interesting to the senses, on
what presents itself persuasively to the artist for imitation; and
living arts exist only while well-known, much-loved things imperatively
demand to be copied, so that their reproduction has some honest
non-æsthetic interest for mankind. Although subject matter is often said
to be indifferent to art, and an artist, when his art is secondary, may
think of his technique only, nothing is really so poor and melancholy as
art that is interested in itself and not in its subject. If any remnant
of inspiration or value clings to such a performance, it comes from a
surviving taste for something in the real world. Thus the literature
that calls itself purely æsthetic is in truth prurient; without this
half-avowed weakness to play upon, the coloured images evoked would have
had nothing to marshall or to sustain them.

[Sidenote: Public interests determine the subject of art, and the
subject the medium.]

A good way to understand schools and styles and to appreciate their
respective functions and successes is to consider first what region of
nature preoccupied the age in which they arose. Perception can cut the
world up into many patterns, which it isolates and dignifies with the
name of things. It must distinguish before it can reproduce and the
objects which attention distinguishes are of many strange sorts. Thus
the single man, the hero, in his acts of prowess or in his readiness,
may be the unit and standard in discourse. It will then be his image
that will preoccupy the arts. For such a task the most adequate art is
evidently sculpture, for sculpture is the most complete of imitations.
In no other art can apprehension render itself so exhaustively and with
such recuperative force. Sculpture retains form and colour, with all
that both can suggest, and it retains them in their integrity, leaving
the observer free to resurvey them from any point of view and drink in
their quality exhaustively.

[Sidenote: Reproduction by acting ephemera.]

The movement and speech which are wanting, the stage may be called upon
to supply; but it cannot supply them without a terrible sacrifice, for
it cannot give permanence to it expression. Acting is for this reason an
inferior art, not perhaps in difficulty and certainly not in effect, but
inferior in dignity, since the effort of art is to keep what is
interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal, and this ideal
is half frustrated if the representation is itself fleeting and the
rendering has no firmer subsistence than the inspiration that gave it
birth. By making himself, almost in his entirety, the medium of his art,
the actor is morally diminished, and as little of him remains in his
work, when this is good, as of his work in history. He lends himself
without interest, and after being Brutus at one moment and Falstaff at
another, he is not more truly himself. He is abolished by his creations,
which nevertheless cannot survive him.

[Sidenote: High demands of sculpture.]

Being so adequate a rendering of its object, sculpture demands a perfect
mastery over it and is correspondingly difficult. It requires taste and
training above every other art; for not only must the material form be
reproduced, but its motor suggestions and moral expression must be
rendered; things which in the model itself are at best transitory, and
which may never be found there if a heroic or ideal theme is proposed.
The sculptor is obliged to have caught on the wing attitudes momentarily
achieved or vaguely imagined; yet these must grow firm and harmonious
under his hand. Nor is this enough; for sculpture is more dependent than
other arts on its model. If the statue is to be ideal, _i.e._, if it is
to express the possible motions and vital character of its subject, the
model must itself be refined. Training must have cut in the flesh those
lines which are to make the language and eloquence of the marble.
Trivial and vulgar forms, such as modern sculpture abounds in, reflect
an undisciplined race of men, one in which neither soul nor body has
done anything well, because the two have done nothing together. The
frame has remained gross or awkward, while the face has taken on a tense
expression, betraying loose and undignified habits of mind. To carve
such a creature is to perpetuate a caricature. The modern sculptor is
stopped short at the first conception of a figure; if he gives it its
costume, it is grotesque; if he strips it, it is unmeaning and pitiful.

[Sidenote: It is essentially obsolete.]

Greece was in all these respects a soil singularly favourable to
sculpture. The success there achieved was so conspicuous that two
thousand years of essential superfluity have not availed to extirpate
the art. Plastic impulse is indeed immortal, and many a hand, even
without classic example, would have fallen to modelling. In the middle
ages, while monumental sculpture was still rudely reminiscent,
ornamental carving arose spontaneously. Yet at every step the
experimental sculptor would run up against disaster. What could be seen
in the streets, while it offered plenty of subjects, offered none that
could stimulate his talent. His patrons asked only for illustration and
applied ornament; his models offered only the smirk and sad humour of a
stunted life. Here and there his statues might attain a certain
sweetness and grace, such as painting might perfectly well have
rendered; but on the whole sculpture remained decorative and infantile.

The Renaissance brought back technical freedom and a certain
inspiration, unhappily a retrospective and exotic one. The art cut
praiseworthy capers in the face of the public, but nobody could teach
the public itself to dance. If several great temperaments, under the
auspices of fashion, could then call up a magic world in which bodies
still spoke a heroic language, that was a passing dream. Society could
not feed such an artificial passion, nor the schools transmit an
arbitrary personal style that responded to nothing permanent in social
conditions. Academies continued to offer prizes for sculpture, the nude
continued to be seen in studios, and equestrian or other rhetorical
statues continued occasionally to be erected in public squares. Heroic
sculpture, however, in modern society, is really an anomaly and
confesses as much by being a failure. No personal talent avails to
rescue an art from laboured insignificance when it has no steadying
function in the moral world, and must waver between caprice and
convention. Where something modest and genuine peeped out was in
portraiture, and also at times in that devotional sculpture in wood
which still responded to a native interest and consequently kept its
sincerity and colour. Pious images may be feeble in the extreme, but
they have not the weakness of being merely æsthetic. The purveyor of
church wares has a stated theme; he is employed for a purpose; and if he
has enough technical resource his work may become truly beautiful: which
is not to say that he will succeed if his conceptions are without
dignity or his style without discretion. There are good _Mater
dolorosas_; there is no good _Sacred Heart_.

[Sidenote: When men see groups and backgrounds they are natural
painters.]

It may happen, however, that people are not interested in subjects that
demand or allow reproduction in bulk. The isolated figure or simple
group may seem cold apart from its natural setting. In rendering an
action you may need to render its scene, if it is the circumstance that
gives it value rather than the hero. You may also wish to trace out the
action through a series of episodes with many figures. In the latter
case you might have recourse to a bas-relief, which, although durable,
is usually a thankless work; there is little in it that might not be
conveyed in a drawing with distinctness. As some artists, like Michael
Angelo, have carried the sculptor’s spirit into painting, many more,
when painting is the prevalent and natural art, have produced carved
pictures. It may be said that any work is essentially a picture which is
conceived from a single quarter and meant to be looked at only in one
light. Objects in such a case need not be so truly apperceived and
appropriated as they would have to be in true sculpture. One aspect
suffices: the subject presented is not so much constructed as dreamt.

[Sidenote: Evolution of painting.]

The whole history of painting may be strung on this single thread—the
effort to reconstitute impressions, first the dramatic impression and
then the sensuous. A summary and symbolic representation of things is
all that at first is demanded; the point is to describe something
pictorially and recall people’s names and actions. It is characteristic
of archaic painting to be quite discursive and symbolic; each figure is
treated separately and stuck side by side with the others upon a golden
ground. The painter is here smothered in the recorder, in the annalist;
only those perceptions are allowed to stand which have individual names
or chronicle facts mentioned in the story. But vision is really more
sensuous and rich than report, if art is only able to hold vision in
suspense and make it explicit. When painting is still at this stage, and
is employed on hieroglyphics, it may reach the maximum of decorative
splendour. Whatever sensuous glow finer representations may later
acquire will be not sensuous merely, but poetical; Titians, Murillos,
or Turners are _colourists in representation_, and their canvases would
not be particularly warm or luminous if they represented nothing human
or mystical or atmospheric. A stained-glass window or a wall of tiles
can outdo them for pure colour and decorative magic. Leaving decoration,
accordingly, to take care of itself and be applied as sense may from
time to time require, painting goes on to elaborate the symbols with
which it begins, to make them symbolise more and more of what their
object contains. A catalogue of persons will fall into a group, a group
will be fused into a dramatic action. Conventional as the separate
figures may still be, their attitudes and relations will reconstitute
the dramatic impression. The event will be rendered in its own language;
it will not, to be recognised, have to appeal to words. Thus a symbolic
crucifixion is a crucifixion only because we know by report that it is;
a plastic crucifixion would first teach us, on the contrary, what a real
crucifixion might be. It only remains to supply the aerial medium and
make dramatic truth sensuous truth also.

[Sidenote: Sensuous and dramatic adequacy approached.]

To work up a sensation intellectually and reawaken all its passionate
associations is to reach a new and more exciting sensation which we call
emotion or thought. As in poetry there are two stages, one pregnant and
prior to prose and another posterior and synthetic, so in painting we
have not only a reversion to sense but an ulterior synthesis of the
sensuous, its interpretation in a dramatic or poetic vision. Archaic
painting, with its abstract rendering of separate things, is the prose
of design. It would not be beautiful at all but for its colour and
technical feeling—that expression of candour and satisfaction which may
pervade it, as it might a Latin rhyme. To correct this thinness and
dislocation, to restore life without losing significance, painting must
proceed to accumulate symbol upon symbol, till the original impression
is almost restored, but so restored that it contains all the
articulation which a thorough analysis had given it. Such painting as
Tintoretto’s or Paolo Veronese’s records impressions as a cultivated
sense might receive them. It glows with visible light and studies the
sensuous appearance, but it contains at the same time an intelligent
expression of all those mechanisms, those situations and passions, with
which the living world is diversified. It is not a design in spots,
meant merely to outdo a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience,
meant to outshine the reality.

In order to reconstitute the image we may take an abstract
representation or hieroglyphic and gradually increase its depth and its
scope. As the painter becomes aware of what at first he had ignored, he
adds colour to outline, modelling to colour, and finally an observant
rendering of tints and values. This process gives back to objects their
texture and atmosphere, and the space in which they lie. From a
representation which is statuesque in feeling and which renders figures
by furnishing a visible inventory of their parts and attributes, the
artist passes to considering his figures more and more as parts of a
whole and as moving in an ambient ether. They tend accordingly to lose
their separate emphasis, in order to be like flowers in a field or trees
in a forest. They become elements, interesting chiefly by their
interplay, and shining by a light which is mutually reflected.

[Sidenote: Essence of landscape-painting.]

When this transformation is complete the painting is essentially a
landscape. It may not represent precisely the open country; it may even
depict an interior, like Velasquez’s Meninas. But the observer, even in
the presence of men and artificial objects, has been overcome by the
medium in which they swim. He is seeing the air and what it happens to
hold. He is impartially recreating from within all that nature puts
before him, quite as if his imagination had become their diffused
material substance. Whatever individuality and moral value these bits of
substance may have they acquire for him, as for nature, incidentally and
by virtue of ulterior relations consequent on their physical being. If
this physical being is wholly expressed, the humanity and morality
involved will be expressed likewise, even if expressed unawares. Thus a
profound and omnivorous reverie overflows the mind; it devours its
objects or is absorbed into them, and the mood which this active
self-alienation brings with it is called the spirit of the scene, the
sentiment of the landscape.

Perception and art, in this phase, easily grow mystical; they are
readily lost in primordial physical sympathies. Although at first a
certain articulation and discursiveness may be retained in the picture,
so that the things seen in their atmosphere and relations may still be
distinguished clearly, the farther the impartial absorption in them
goes, the more what is inter-individual rises and floods the individual
over. All becomes light and depth and air, and those particular objects
threaten to vanish which we had hoped to make luminous, breathing, and
profound. The initiated eye sees so many nameless tints and surfaces,
that it can no longer select any creative limits for things. There cease
to be fixed outlines, continuous colours, or discrete existences in
nature.

[Sidenote: Its threatened dissolution.]

An artist, however, cannot afford to forget that even in such a case
units and divisions would have to be introduced by him into his work. A
man, in falling back on immediate reality, or immediate appearance, may
well feel his mind’s articulate grammar losing its authority, but that
grammar must evidently be reasserted if from the immediate he ever
wishes to rise again to articulate mind; and art, after all, exists for
the mind and must speak humanly. If we crave something else, we have not
so far to go: there is always the infinite about us and the animal
within us to absolve us from human distinctions.

Moreover, it is not quite true that the immediate has no real diversity.
It evidently suggests the ideal terms into which we divide it, and it
sustains our apprehension itself, with all the diversities this may
create. To what I call right and left, light and darkness, a real
opposition must correspond in any reality which is at all relevant to my
experience; so that I should fail to integrate my impression, and to
absorb the only reality that concerns me, if I obliterated those points
of reference which originally made the world figured and visible. Space
remains absolutely dark, for all the infinite light which we may declare
to be radiating through it, until this light is concentrated in one body
or reflected from another; and a landscape cannot be so much as vaporous
unless mists are distinguishable in it, and through them some known
object which they obscure. In a word, landscape is always, in spite of
itself, a collection of particular representations. It is a mass of
hieroglyphics, each the graphic symbol for some definite human sensation
or reaction; only these symbols have been extraordinarily enriched and
are fused in representation, so that, like instruments in an orchestra,
they are merged in the voluminous sensation they constitute together, a
sensation in which, for attentive perception, they never cease to exist.

[Sidenote: Reversion to pure decorative design.]

Impatience of such control as reality must always exercise over
representation may drive painting back to a simpler function. When a
designer, following his own automatic impulse, conventionalises a form,
he makes a legitimate exchange, substituting fidelity to his
apperceptive instincts for fidelity to his external impressions. When a
landscape-painter, revolting against a tedious discursive style, studies
only masses of colour and abstract systems of lines, he retains
something in itself beautiful, although no longer representative,
perhaps, of anything in nature. A pure impression cannot be
illegitimate; it cannot be false until it pretends to represent
something, and then it will have ceased to be a simple feeling, since
something in it will refer to an ulterior existence, to which it ought
to conform. This ulterior existence (since intelligence is life
understanding its own conditions) can be nothing in the end but what
produced that impression. Sensuous life, however, has its value within
itself; its pleasures are not significant. Representative art is
accordingly in a sense secondary; beauty and expression begin farther
back. They are present whenever the outer stimulus agreeably strikes an
organ and thereby arouses a sustained image, in which the consciousness
of both stimulation and reaction is embodied. An abstract design in
outline and colour will amply fulfil these conditions, if sensuous and
motor harmonies are preserved in it, and if a sufficient sweep and depth
of reaction is secured. Stained-glass, tapestry, panelling, and in a
measure all objects, by their mere presence and distribution, have a
decorative function. When sculpture and painting cease to be
representative they pass into the same category. Decoration in turn
merges in construction; and so all art, like the whole Life of Reason,
is joined together at its roots, and branches out from the vital
processes of sensation and reaction. Diversity arises centrifugally,
according to the provinces explored and the degree of mutual checking
and control to which the various extensions are subjected.

[Sidenote: Sensuous values are primordial and so indispensable.]

Organisation, both internal and adaptive, marks the dignity and
authority which each art may have attained; but this advantage,
important as is must seem to a philosopher or a legislator, is not what
the artist chiefly considers. His privilege is to remain capricious in
his response to the full-blown universe of science and passion, and to
be still sensuous in his highest imaginings. He cares for structure only
when it is naturally decorative. He thinks gates were invented for the
sake of triumphal arches, and forests for the sake of poets and deer.
Representation, with all it may represent, means to him simply what it
says to his emotions. In all this the artist, though in one sense
foolish, in another way is singularly sane; for, after all, everything
must pass through the senses, and life, whatever its complexity, remains
always primarily a feeling.

To render this feeling delightful, to train the senses to their highest
potency and harmony in operation, is to begin life well. Were the
foundations defective and subject to internal strain there could be
little soundness in the superstructure. Æsthetic activity is far from
being a late or adventitious ornament in human economy; it is an
elementary factor, the perfection of an indispensable vehicle. Whenever
science or morals have done violence to sense they have decreed their
own dissolution. To sense a rebellious appeal will presently be
addressed, and the appeal will go against rash and empty dogmas. A keen
æsthetic sensibility and a flourishing art mark the puberty of reason.
Fertility comes later, after a marriage with the practical world. But a
sensuous ripening is needed first, such as myth and ornament betray in
their exuberance. A man who has no feeling for feeling and no felicity
in expression will hardly know what he is about in his further
undertakings. He will have missed his first lesson in living
spontaneously and well. Not knowing himself, he will be all hearsay and
pedantry. He may fall into the superstition of supposing that what gives
life value can be something external to life. Science and morals are
themselves arts that express natural impulses and find experimental
rewards. This fact, in betraying their analogy to æsthetic activity,
enables them also to vindicate their excellence.




CHAPTER IX

JUSTIFICATION OF ART


[Sidenote: Art is subject to moral censorship.]

It is no longer the fashion among philosophers to decry art. Either its
influence seems to them too slight to excite alarm, or their systems are
too lax to subject anything to censure which has the least glamour or
ideality about it. Tired, perhaps, of daily resolving the conflict
between science and religion, they prefer to assume silently a harmony
between morals and art. Moral harmonies, however, are not given; they
have to be made. The curse of superstition is that it justifies and
protracts their absence by proclaiming their invisible presence. Of
course a rational religion could not conflict with a rational science;
and similarly an art that was wholly admirable would necessarily play
into the hands of progress. But as the real difficulty in the former
case lies in saying what religion and what science would be truly
rational, so here the problem is how far extant art is a benefit to
mankind, and how far, perhaps, a vice or a burden.

[Sidenote: Its initial or specific excellence is not enough.]

That art is _prima facie_ and in itself a good cannot be doubted. It is
a spontaneous activity, and that settles the question. Yet the function
of ethics is precisely to revise _prima facie_ judgments of this kind
and to fix the ultimate resultant of all given interests, in so far as
they can be combined. In the actual disarray of human life and desire,
wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to
pour into the supreme mixture. The extent to which æsthetic values are
allowed to colour the resultant or highest good is a point of great
theoretic importance, not only for art but for general philosophy. If
art is excluded altogether or given only a trivial rôle, perhaps as a
necessary relaxation, we feel at once that a philosophy so judging human
arts is ascetic or post-rational. It pretends to guide life from above
and from without; it has discredited human nature and mortal interests,
and has thereby undermined itself, since it is at best but a partial
expression of that humanity which it strives to transcend. If, on the
contrary, art is prized as something supreme and irresponsible, if the
poetic and mystic glow which it may bring seems its own complete
justification, then philosophy is evidently still prerational or,
rather, non-existent; for the beasts that listened to Orpheus belong to
this school.

To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and
æsthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so. Intoxication is a
sad business, at least for a philosopher; for you must either drown
yourself altogether, or else when sober again you will feel somewhat
fooled by yesterday’s joys and somewhat lost in to-day’s vacancy. The
man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to
elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence. He is vexed
at conditions of excellence that make him conscious of his own
incompetence and failure. Rather than consider his function, he
proclaims his self-sufficiency. A way foolishness has of revenging
itself is to excommunicate the world.

It is in the world, however, that art must find its level. It must
vindicate its function in the human commonwealth. What direct acceptable
contribution does it make to the highest good? What sacrifices, if any,
does it impose? What indirect influence does it exert on other
activities? Our answer to these questions will be our apology for art,
our proof that art belongs to the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: All satisfactions, however hurtful, have an initial worth.]

When moralists deprecate passion and contrast it with reason, they do
so, if they are themselves rational, only because passion is so often
“guilty,” because it works havoc so often in the surrounding world and
leaves, among other ruins, “a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed.” Were
there no danger of such after-effects within and without the sufferer,
no passion would be reprehensible. Nature is innocent, and so are all
her impulses and moods when taken in isolation; it is only on meeting
that they blush. If it be true that matter is sinful, the logic of this
truth is far from being what the fanatics imagine who commonly propound
it. Matter is sinful only because it is insufficient, or is wastefully
distributed. There is not enough of it to go round among the legion of
hungry ideas. To embody or enact an idea is the only way of making it
actual; but its embodiment may mutilate it, if the material or the
situation is not propitious. So an infant may be maimed at birth, when
what injures him is not being brought forth, but being brought forth in
the wrong manner. Matter has a double function in respect to existence;
essentially it enables the spirit to be, yet chokes it incidentally. Men
sadly misbegotten, or those who are thwarted at every step by the times’
penury, may fall to thinking of matter only by its defect, ignoring the
material ground of their own aspirations. All flesh will seem to them
weak, except that forgotten piece of it which makes their own spiritual
strength. Every impulse, however, had initially the same authority as
this censorious one, by which the others are now judged and condemned.

[Sidenote: But, on the whole, artistic activity is innocent.]

If a practice can point to its innocence, if it can absolve itself from
concern for a world with which it does not interfere, it has justified
itself to those who love it, though it may not yet have recommended
itself to those who do not. Now art, more than any other considerable
pursuit, more even than speculation, is abstract and inconsequential.
Born of suspended attention, it ends in itself. It encourages sensuous
abstraction, and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world.
Nor does it really do so in a notable degree. Social changes do not
reach artistic expression until after their momentum is acquired and
their other collateral effects are fully predetermined. Scarcely is a
school of art established, giving expression to prevailing sentiment,
when this sentiment changes and makes that style seem empty and
ridiculous. The expression has little or no power to maintain the
movement it registers, as a waterfall has little or no power to bring
more water down. Currents may indeed cut deep channels, but they cannot
feed their own springs—at least not until the whole revolution of
nature is taken into account.

In the individual, also, art registers passions without stimulating
them; on the contrary, in stopping to depict them it steals away their
life; and whatever interest and delight it transfers to their expression
it subtracts from their vital energy. This appears unmistakably in
erotic and in religious art. Though the artist’s avowed purpose here be
to arouse a practical impulse, he fails in so far as he is an artist in
truth; for he then will seek to move the given passions only through
beauty, but beauty is a rival object of passion in itself. Lascivious
and pious works, when beauty has touched them, cease to give out what is
wilful and disquieting in their subject and become altogether
intellectual and sublime. There is a high breathlessness about beauty
that cancels lust and superstition. The artist, in taking the latter for
his theme, renders them innocent and interesting, because he looks at
them from above, composes their attitudes and surroundings harmoniously,
and makes them food for the mind. Accordingly it is only in a refined
and secondary stage that active passions like to amuse themselves with
their æsthetic expression. Unmitigated lustiness and raw fanaticism will
snarl at pictures. Representations begin to interest when crude passions
recede, and feel the need of conciliating liberal interests and adding
some intellectual charm to their dumb attractions. Thus art, while by
its subject it may betray the preoccupations among which it springs up,
embodies a new and quite innocent interest.

[Sidenote: It is liberal.]

This interest is more than innocent, it is liberal. Not being concerned
with material reality so much as with the ideal, it knows neither
ulterior motives nor quantitative limits; the more beauty there is the
more there can be, and the higher one artist’s imagination soars the
better the whole flock flies. In æsthetic activity we have accordingly
one side of rational life; sensuous experience is dominated there as
mechanical or social realities ought to be dominated in science and
politics. Such dominion comes of having faculties suited to their
conditions and consequently finding an inherent satisfaction in their
operation. The justification of life must be ultimately intrinsic; and
wherever such self-justifying experience is attained, the ideal has been
in so far embodied. To have realised it in a measure helps us to realise
it further; for there is a cumulative fecundity in those goods which
come not by increase of force or matter, but by a better organisation
and form.

[Sidenote: and typical of perfect activity.]

Art has met, on the whole, with more success than science or morals.
Beauty gives men the best hint of ultimate good which their experience
as yet can offer; and the most lauded geniuses have been poets, as if
people felt that those seers, rather than men of action or thought, had
lived ideally and known what was worth knowing. That such should be the
case, if the fact be admitted, would indeed prove the rudimentary state
of human civilisation. The truly comprehensive life should be the
statesman’s, for whom perception and theory might be expressed and
rewarded in action. The ideal dignity of art is therefore merely
symbolic and vicarious. As some people study character in novels, and
travel by reading tales of adventure, because real life is not yet so
interesting to them as fiction, or because they find it cheaper to make
their experiments in their dreams, so art in general is a rehearsal of
rational living, and recasts in idea a world which we have no present
means of recasting in reality. Yet this rehearsal reveals the glories of
a possible performance better than do the miserable experiments until
now executed on the reality.

When we consider the present distracted state of government and
religion, there is much relief in turning from them to almost any art,
where what is good is altogether and finally good, and what is bad is at
least not treacherous. When we consider further the senseless rivalries,
the vanities, the ignominy that reign in the “practical” world, how
doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an
excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man’s ambition
is consistent with every other man’s and even favourable to it! It is
indeed so in art; for we must not import into its blameless labours the
bickerings and jealousies of criticism. Critics quarrel with other
critics, and that is a part of philosophy. With an artist no sane man
quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child’s eyes. As nature,
being full of seeds, rises into all sorts of crystallisations, each
having its own ideal and potential life, each a nucleus of order and a
habitation for the absolute self, so art, though in a medium poorer than
pregnant matter, and incapable of intrinsic life, generates a semblance
of all conceivable beings. What nature does with existence, art does
with appearance; and while the achievement leaves us, unhappily, much
where we were before in all our efficacious relations, it entirely
renews our vision and breeds a fresh world in fancy, where all form has
the same inner justification that all life has in the real world. As no
insect is without its rights and every cripple has his dream of
happiness, so no artistic fact, no child of imagination, is without its
small birthright of beauty. In this freer element, competition does not
exist and everything is Olympian. Hungry generations do not tread down
the ideal but only its spokesmen or embodiments, that have cast in their
lot with other material things. Art supplies constantly to contemplation
what nature seldom affords in concrete experience—the union of life and
peace.

[Sidenote: The ideal, when incarnate, becomes subject to civil society.]

[Sidenote: Plato’s strictures: he exaggerates the effect of myths.]

The ideal, however, would not come down from the empyrean and be
conceived unless somebody’s thought were absorbed in the conception. Art
actually segregates classes of men and masses of matter to serve its
special interests. This involves expense; it impedes some possible
activities and imposes others. On this ground, from the earliest times
until our own, art has been occasionally attacked by moralists, who have
felt that it fostered idolatry or luxury or irresponsible dreams. Of
these attacks the most interesting is Plato’s, because he was an artist
by temperament, bred in the very focus of artistic life and discussion,
and at the same time a consummate moral philosopher. His æthetic
sensibility was indeed so great that it led him, perhaps, into a
relative error, in that he overestimated the influence which art can
have on character and affairs. Homer’s stories about the gods can
hardly have demoralised the youths who recited them. No religion has
ever given a picture of deity which men could have imitated without the
grossest immorality. Yet these shocking representations have not had a
bad effect on believers. The deity was opposed to their own vices; those
it might itself be credited with offered no contagious example. In spite
of the theologians, we know by instinct that in speaking of the gods we
are dealing in myths and symbols. Some aspect of nature or some law of
life, expressed in an attribute of deity, is what we really regard, and
to regard such things, however sinister they may be, cannot but chasten
and moralise us. The personal character that such a function would
involve, if it were exercised willingly by a responsible being, is
something that never enters our thoughts. No such painful image comes to
perplex the plain sense of instinctive, poetic religion. To give moral
importance to myths, as Plato tended to do, is to take them far too
seriously and to belittle what they stand for. Left to themselves they
float in an ineffectual stratum of the brain. They are understood and
grow current precisely by not being pressed, like an idiom or a
metaphor. The same æsthetic sterility appears at the other end of the
scale, where fancy is anything but sacred. A Frenchman once saw in
“Punch and Judy” a shocking proof of British brutality, destined further
to demoralise the nation; and yet the scandal may pass. That black
tragedy reflects not very pretty manners, but puppets exercise no
suasion over men.

[Sidenote: His deeper moral objections.]

To his supersensitive censure of myths Plato added strictures upon music
and the drama: to excite passions idly was to enervate the soul. Only
martial or religious strains should be heard in the ideal republic.
Furthermore, art put before us a mere phantom of the good. True
excellence was the function things had in use; the horseman knew the
bridle’s value and essence better than the artisan did who put it
together; but a painted bridle would lack even this relation to utility.
It would rein in no horse, and was an impertinent sensuous reduplication
of what, even when it had material being, was only an instrument and a
means.

This reasoning has been little understood, because Platonists so soon
lost sight of their master’s Socratic habit and moral intent. They
turned the good into an existence, making it thereby unmeaning. Plato’s
dialectic, if we do not thus abolish the force of its terms, is
perfectly cogent: representative art has indeed no utility, and, if the
good has been identified with efficiency in a military state, it can
have no justification. Plato’s Republic was avowedly a fallen state, a
church militant, coming sadly short of perfection; and the joy which
Plato as much as any one could feel in sensuous art he postponed, as a
man in mourning might, until life should be redeemed from baseness.

[Sidenote: Their rightness.]

Never have art and beauty received a more glowing eulogy than is implied
in Plato’s censure. To him nothing was beautiful that was not beautiful
to the core, and he would have thought to insult art—the remodelling of
nature by reason—if he had given it a narrower field than all practice.
As an architect who had fondly designed something impossible, or which
might not please in execution, would at once erase it from the plan and
abandon it for the love of perfect beauty and perfect art, so Plato
wished to erase from pleasing appearance all that, when its operation
was completed, would bring discord into the world. This was done in the
ultimate interest of art and beauty, which in a cultivated mind are
inseparable from the vitally good. It is mere barbarism to feel that a
thing is æsthetically good but morally evil, or morally good but hateful
to perception. Things partially evil or partially ugly may have to be
chosen under stress of unfavourable circumstances, lest some worse thing
come; but if a thing were ugly it would _thereby_ not be wholly good,
and if it were _altogether_ good it would perforce be beautiful.

To criticise art on moral grounds is to pay it a high compliment by
assuming that it aims to be adequate, and is addressed to a
comprehensive mind. The only way in which art could disallow such
criticism would be to protest its irresponsible infancy, and admit that
it was a more or less amiable blatancy in individuals, and not _art_ at
all. Young animals often gambol in a delightful fashion, and men also
may, though hardly when they intend to do so. Sportive self-expression
can be prized because human nature contains a certain elasticity and
margin for experiment, in which waste activity is inevitable and may be
precious: for this license may lead, amid a thousand failures, to some
real discovery and advance. Art, like life, should be free, since both
are experimental. But it is one thing to make room for genius and to
respect the sudden madness of poets through which, possibly, some god
may speak, and it is quite another not to judge the result by rational
standards. The earth’s bowels are full of all sorts of rumblings; which
of the oracles drawn thence is true can be judged only by the light of
day. If an artist’s inspiration has been happy, it has been so because
his work can sweeten or ennoble the mind and because its total effect
will be beneficent. Art being a part of life, the criticism of art is a
part of morals.

[Sidenote: Importance of æsthetic alternatives.]

Maladjustments in human society are still so scandalous, they touch
matters so much more pressing than fine art, that maladjustments in the
latter are passed over with a smile, as if art were at any rate an
irresponsible miraculous parasite that the legislator had better not
meddle with. The day may come, however, if the state is ever reduced to
a tolerable order, when questions of art will be the most urgent
questions of morals, when genius at last will feel responsible, and the
twist given to imagination will seem the most crucial thing in life.
Under a thin disguise, the momentous character of imaginative choices
has already been fully recognised by mankind. Men have passionately
loved their special religions, languages, and manners, and preferred
death to a life flowering in any other fashion. In justifying this
attachment forensically, with arguments on the low level of men’s named
and consecrated interests, people have indeed said, and perhaps come to
believe, that their imaginative interests were material interests at
bottom, thinking thus to give them more weight and legitimacy; whereas
in truth material life itself would be nothing worth, were it not, in
its essence and its issue, ideal.

It was stupidly asserted, however, that if a man omitted the prescribed
ceremonies or had unauthorised dreams about the gods, he would lose his
battles in this world and go to hell in the other. He who runs can see
that these expectations are not founded on any evidence, on any
observation of what actually occurs; they are obviously a _mirage_
arising from a direct ideal passion, that tries to justify itself by
indirection and by falsehoods, as it has no need to do. We all read
facts in the way most congruous with our intellectual habit, and when
this habit drives us to effulgent creations, absorbing and expressing
the whole current of our being, it not merely biasses our reading of
this world but carries us into another world altogether, which we posit
instead of the real one, or beside it.

Grotesque as the blunder may seem by which we thus introduce our poetic
tropes into the sequence of external events or existences, the blunder
is intellectual only; morally, zeal for our special rhetoric may not be
irrational. The lovely Phoebus is no fact for astronomy, nor does he
stand behind the material sun, in some higher heaven, physically
superintending its movements; but Phoebus is a fact in his own region, a
token of man’s joyful piety in the presence of the forces that really
condition his welfare. In the region of symbols, in the world of poetry,
Phoebus has his inalienable rights. Forms of poetry are forms of human
life. Languages express national character and enshrine particular ways
of seeing and valuing events. To make substitutions and extensions in
expression is to give the soul, in her inmost substance, a somewhat new
constitution. A method of apperception is a spontaneous variation in
mind, perhaps the origin of a new moral species.

The value apperceptive methods have is of course largely representative,
in that they serve more or less aptly to dominate the order of events
and to guide action; but quite apart from this practical value,
expressions possess a character of their own, a sort of vegetative life,
as languages possess euphony. Two reports of the same fact may be
equally trustworthy, equally useful as information, yet they may embody
two types of mental rhetoric, and this diversity in genius may be of
more intrinsic importance than the raw fact it works upon. The
non-representative side of human perception may thus be the most
momentous side of it, because it represents, or even constitutes, the
man. After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we can
make of them or what they can make of us. There is consequently nothing
fitted to colour human happiness more pervasively than art does, nor to
express more deeply the mind’s internal habit. In educating the
imagination art crowns all moral endeavour, which from the beginning is
a species of art, and which becomes a fine art more completely as it
works in a freer medium.

[Sidenote: The importance of æsthetic goods varies with temperaments.]

How great a portion of human energies should be spent on art and its
appreciation is a question to be answered variously by various persons
and nations. There is no ideal _à priori_; an ideal can but express, if
it is genuine, the balance of impulses and potentialities in a given
soul. A mind at once sensuous and mobile will find its appropriate
perfection in studying and reconstructing objects of sense. Its
rationality will appear chiefly on the plane of perception, to render
the circle of visions which makes up its life as delightful as possible.
For such a man art will be the most satisfying, the most significant
activity, and to load him with material riches or speculative truths or
profound social loyalties will be to impede and depress him. The
irrational is what does not justify itself in the end; and the born
artist, repelled by the soberer and bitterer passions of the world, may
justly call them irrational. They would not justify themselves in his
experience; they make grievous demands and yield nothing in the end
which is intelligible to him. His picture of them, if he be a dramatist,
will hardly fail to be satirical; fate, frailty, illusion will be his
constant themes. If his temperament could find political expression, he
would minimise the machinery of life and deprecate any calculated
prudence. He would trust the heart, enjoy nature, and not frown too
angrily on inclination. Such a Bohemia he would regard as an ideal world
in which humanity might flourish congenially.

[Sidenote: The æsthetic temperament requires tutelage.]

A puritan moralist, before condemning such an infantile paradise, should
remember that a commonwealth of butterflies actually exists. It is not
any inherent wrongness in such an ideal that makes it unacceptable, but
only the fact that human butterflies are not wholly mercurial and that
even imperfect geniuses are but an extreme type in a society whose
guiding ideal is based upon a broader humanity than the artist
represents. Men of science or business will accuse the poet of folly,
on the very grounds on which he accuses them of the same. Each will seem
to the other to be obeying a barren obsession. The statesman or
philosopher who should aspire to adjust their quarrel could do so only
by force of intelligent sympathy with both sides, and in view of the
common conditions in which they find themselves. What ought to be done
is that which, when done, will most nearly justify itself to all
concerned. Practical problems of morals are judicial and political
problems. Justice can never be pronounced without hearing the parties
and weighing the interests at stake.

[Sidenote: Æsthetic values everywhere interfused.]

A circumstance that complicates such a calculation is this: æesthetic
and other interests are not separable units, to be compared externally;
they are rather strands interwoven in the texture of everything.
Æsthetic sensibility colours every thought, qualifies every allegiance,
and modifies every product of human labour. Consequently the love of
beauty has to justify itself not merely intrinsically, or as a
constituent part of life more or less to be insisted upon; it has to
justify itself also as an influence. A hostile influence is the most
odious of things. The enemy himself, the alien creature, lies in his own
camp, and in a speculative moment we may put ourselves in his place and
learn to think of him charitably; but his spirit in our own souls is
like a private tempter, a treasonable voice weakening our allegiance to
our own duty. A zealot might allow his neighbours to be damned in
peace, did not a certain heretical odour emitted by them infect the
sanctuary and disturb his own dogmatic calm. In the same way practical
people might leave the artist alone in his oasis, and even grant him a
pittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoological
garden, did he not intrude into their inmost conclave and vitiate the
abstract cogency of their designs. It is not so much art in its own
field that men of science look askance upon, as the love of glitter and
rhetoric and false finality trespassing upon scientific ground; while
men of affairs may well deprecate a rooted habit of sensuous absorption
and of sudden transit to imaginary worlds, a habit which must work havoc
in their own sphere. In other words, there is an element of poetry
inherent in thought, in conduct, in affection; and we must ask ourselves
how far this ingredient is an obstacle to their proper development.

[Sidenote: They are primordial.]

The fabled dove who complained, in flying, of the resistance of the air,
was as wise as the philosopher who should lament the presence and
influence of sense. Sense is the native element and substance of
experience; all its refinements are still parts of it existentially; and
whatever excellence belongs specifically to sense is a preliminary
excellence, a value antecedent to any which thought or action can
achieve. Science and morals have but representative authority; they are
principles of ideal synthesis and safe transition; they are bridges
from moment to moment of sentience. Their function is indeed universal
and their value overwhelming, yet their office remains derivative or
secondary, and what they serve to put in order has previously its
intrinsic worth. An æsthetic bias is native to sense, being indeed
nothing but its form and potency; and the influence which æsthetic
habits exercise on thought and action should not be regarded as an
intrusion to be resented, but rather as an original interest to be built
upon and developed. Sensibility contains the distinctions which reason
afterward carries out and applies; it is sensibility that involves and
supports primitive diversities, such as those between good and bad, here
and there, fast and slow, light and darkness. There are complications
and harmonies inherent in these oppositions, harmonies which æsthetic
faculty proceeds to note; and from these we may then construct others,
not immediately presentable, which we distinguish by attributing them to
reason. Reason may well outflank and transform æsthetic judgments, but
can never undermine them. Its own materials are the perceptions which if
full and perfect are called beauties. Its function is to endow the parts
of sentience with a consciousness of the system in which they lie, so
that they may attain a mutual relevance and ideally support one another.
But what could relevance or support be worth if the things to be
buttressed were themselves worthless? It is not to organise pain,
ugliness, and boredom that reason can be called into the world.

[Sidenote: To superpose them adventitiously is to destroy them.]

When a practical or scientific man boasts that he has laid aside
æsthetic prejudices and is following truth and utility with a single
eye, he can mean, if he is judicious, only that he has not yielded to
æsthetic preference after his problem was fixed, nor in an arbitrary and
vexatious fashion. He has not consulted taste when it would have been in
bad taste to do so. If he meant that he had rendered himself altogether
insensible to æsthetic values, and that he had proceeded to organise
conduct or thought in complete indifference to the beautiful, he would
be simply proclaiming his inhumanity and incompetence. A right
observance of æsthetic demands does not obstruct utility nor logic; for
utility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty that
ran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to an
exquisite sense. Æsthetic vice is not favourable to æsthetic faculty: it
is an impediment to the greatest æsthetic satisfactions. And so when by
yielding to a blind passion for beauty we derange theory and practice,
we cut ourselves off from those beauties which alone could have
satisfied our passion. What we drag in so obstinately will bring but a
cheap and unstable pleasure, while a double beauty will thereby be lost
or obscured—first, the unlooked-for beauty which a genuine and stable
system of things could not but betray, and secondly the coveted beauty
itself, which, being imported here into the wrong context, will be
rendered meretricious and offensive to good taste. If a jewel worn on
the wrong finger sends a shiver through the flesh, how disgusting must
not rhetoric be in diplomacy or unction in metaphysics!

[Sidenote: They flow naturally from perfect function.]

The poetic element inherent in thought, affection, and conduct is prior
to their prosaic development and altogether legitimate. Clear,
well-digested perception and rational choices follow upon those primary
creative impulses, and carry out their purpose systematically. At every
stage in this development new and appropriate materials are offered for
æsthetic contemplation. Straightness, for instance, symmetry, and rhythm
are at first sensuously defined; they are characters arrested by
æsthetic instinct; but they are the materials of mathematics. And long
after these initial forms have disowned their sensuous values, and
suffered a wholly dialectical expansion or analysis, mathematical
objects again fall under the æsthetic eye, and surprise the senses by
their emotional power. A mechanical system, such as astronomy in one
region has already unveiled, is an inexhaustible field for æsthetic
wonder. Similarly, in another sphere, sensuous affinity leads to
friendship and love, and makes us huddle up to our fellows and feel
their heart-beats; but when human society has thereupon established a
legal and moral edifice, this new spectacle yields new imaginative
transports, tragic, lyric, and religious. Æsthetic values everywhere
precede and accompany rational activity, and life is, in one aspect,
always a fine art; not by introducing inaptly æsthetic vetoes or
æsthetic flourishes, but by giving to everything a form which, implying
a structure, implies also an ideal and a possible perfection. This
perfection, being felt, is also a beauty, since any process, though it
may have become intellectual or practical, remains for all that a vital
and sentient operation, with its inherent sensuous values. Whatever is
to be representative in import must first be immediate in existence;
whatever is transitive in operation must be at the same time actual in
being. So that an æsthetic sanction sweetens all successful living;
animal efficiency cannot be without grace, nor moral achievement without
a sensible glory.

[Sidenote: Even inhibited functions, when they fall into a new rhythm,
yield new beauties.]

These vital harmonies are natural; they are neither perfect nor
preordained. We often come upon beauties that need to be sacrificed, as
we come upon events and practical necessities without number that are
truly regrettable. There are a myriad conflicts in practice and in
thought, conflicts between rival possibilities, knocking inopportunely
and in vain at the door of existence. Owing to the initial
disorganisation of things, some demands continually prove to be
incompatible with others arising no less naturally. Reason in such cases
imposes real and irreparable sacrifices, but it brings a stable
consolation if its discipline is accepted. Decay, for instance, is a
moral and æsthetic evil; but being a natural necessity it can become the
basis for pathetic and magnificent harmonies, when once imagination is
adjusted to it. The hatred of change and death is ineradicable while
life lasts, since it expresses that self-sustaining organisation in a
creature which we call its soul; yet this hatred of change and death is
not so deeply seated in the nature of things as are death and change
themselves, for the flux is deeper than the ideal. Discipline may attune
our higher and more adaptable part to the harsh conditions of being, and
the resulting sentiment, being the only one which can be maintained
successfully, will express the greatest satisfactions which can be
reached, though not the greatest that might be conceived or desired. To
be interested in the changing seasons is, in this middling zone, a
happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom
discovers these possible accommodations, as circumstances impose them;
and education ought to prepare men to accept them.

[Sidenote: He who loves beauty must chasten it.]

It is for want of education and discipline that a man so often insists
petulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those which
might find some satisfaction in the world and might produce in him some
pertinent culture. Untutored self-assertion may even lead him to deny
some fact that should have been patent, and plunge him into needless
calamity. His Utopias cheat him in the end, if indeed the barbarous
taste he has indulged in clinging to them does not itself lapse before
the dream is half formed. So men have feverishly conceived a heaven only
to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous. Theodicies that
were to demonstrate an absolute cosmic harmony have turned the universe
into a tyrannous nightmare, from which we are glad to awake again in
this unintentional and somewhat tractable world. Thus the fancies of
effeminate poets in violating science are false to the highest art, and
the products of sheer confusion, instigated by the love of beauty, turn
out to be hideous. A rational severity in respect to art simply weeds
the garden; it expresses a mature æsthetic choice and opens the way to
supreme artistic achievements. To keep beauty in its place is to make
all things beautiful.




CHAPTER X

THE CRITERION OF TASTE


[Sidenote: Dogmatism is inevitable but may be enlightened.]

Dogmatism in matters of taste has the same status as dogmatism in other
spheres. It is initially justified by sincerity, being a systematic
expression of a man’s preferences; but it becomes absurd when its basis
in a particular disposition is ignored and it pretends to have an
absolute or metaphysical scope. Reason, with the order which in every
region it imposes on life, is grounded on an animal nature and has no
other function than to serve the same; and it fails to exercise its
office quite as much when it oversteps its bounds and forgets whom it is
serving as when it neglects some part of its legitimate province and
serves its master imperfectly, without considering all his interests.

Dialectic, logic, and morals lose their authority and become inept if
they trespass upon the realm of physics and try to disclose existences;
while physics is a mere idea in the realm of poetic meditation. So the
notorious diversities which human taste exhibits do not become
conflicts, and raise no moral problem, until their basis or their
function has been forgotten, and each has claimed a right to assert
itself exclusively. This claim is altogether absurd, and we might fail
to understand how so preposterous an attitude could be assumed by
anybody did we not remember that every young animal thinks himself
absolute, and that dogmatism in the thinker is only the speculative side
of greed and courage in the brute. The brute cannot surrender his
appetites nor abdicate his primary right to dominate his environment.
What experience and reason may teach him is merely how to make his
self-assertion well balanced and successful. In the same way taste is
bound to maintain its preferences but free to rationalise them. After a
man has compared his feelings with the no less legitimate feelings of
other creatures, he can reassert his own with more complete authority,
since now he is aware of their necessary ground in his nature, and of
their affinities with whatever other interests his nature enables him to
recognise in others and to co-ordinate with his own.

[Sidenote: Taste gains in authority as it is more and more widely
based.]

A criterion of taste is, therefore, nothing but taste itself in its more
deliberate and circumspect form. Reflection refines particular
sentiments by bringing them into sympathy with all rational life. There
is consequently the greatest possible difference in authority between
taste and taste, and while delight in drums and eagle’s feathers is
perfectly genuine and has no cause to blush for itself, it cannot be
compared in scope or representative value with delight in a symphony or
an epic. The very instinct that is satisfied by beauty prefers one
beauty to another; and we have only to question and purge our æsthetic
feelings in order to obtain our criterion of taste. This criterion will
be natural, personal, autonomous; a circumstance that will give it
authority over our own judgment—which is all moral science is concerned
about—and will extend its authority over other minds also, in so far as
their constitution is similar to ours. In that measure what is a genuine
instance of reason in us, others will recognise for a genuine expression
of reason in themselves also.

[Sidenote: Different æsthetic endowments may be compared in quantity or
force.]

Æsthetic feeling, in different people, may make up a different fraction
of life and vary greatly in volume. The more nearly insensible a man is
the more incompetent he becomes to proclaim the values which sensibility
might have. To beauty men are habitually insensible, even while they are
awake and rationally active. Tomes of æsthetic criticism hang on a few
moments of real delight and intuition. It is in rare and scattered
instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for
habitual comfort to remembering her past favours. An æsthetic glow may
pervade experience, but that circumstance is seldom remarked; it figures
only as an influence working subterraneously on thoughts and judgments
which in themselves take a cognitive or practical direction. Only when
the æsthetic ingredient becomes predominant do we exclaim, How
beautiful! Ordinarily the pleasures which formal perception gives remain
an undistinguished part of our comfort or curiosity.

[Sidenote: Authority of vital over verbal judgments]

Taste is formed in those moments when æsthetic emotion is massive and
distinct; preferences then grown conscious, judgments then put into
words, will reverberate through calmer hours; they will constitute
prejudices, habits of apperception, secret standards for all other
beauties. A period of life in which such intuitions have been frequent
may amass tastes and ideals sufficient for the rest of our days. Youth
in these matters governs maturity, and while men may develop their early
impressions more systematically and find confirmations of them in
various quarters, they will seldom look at the world afresh or use new
categories in deciphering it. Half our standards come from our first
masters, and the other half from our first loves. Never being so deeply
stirred again, we remain persuaded that no objects save those we then
discovered can have a true sublimity. These high-water marks of æsthetic
life may easily be reached under tutelage. It may be some eloquent
appreciations read in a book, or some preference expressed by a gifted
friend, that may have revealed unsuspected beauties in art or nature;
and then, since our own perception was vicarious and obviously inferior
in volume to that which our mentor possessed, we shall take his
judgments for our criterion, since they were the source and exemplar of
all our own. Thus the volume and intensity of some appreciations,
especially when nothing of the kind has preceded, makes them
authoritative over our subsequent judgments. On those warm moments hang
all our cold systematic opinions; and while the latter fill our days and
shape our careers it is only the former that are crucial and alive.

A race which loves beauty holds the same place in history that a season
of love or enthusiasm holds in an individual life. Such a race has a
pre-eminent right to pronounce upon beauty and to bequeath its judgments
to duller peoples. We may accordingly listen with reverence to a Greek
judgment on that subject, expecting that what might seem to us wrong
about it is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range; it
will suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead of
merely studying its relics, for us to understand, for instance, that
imitation is a fundamental principle in art, and that any rational
judgment on the beautiful must be a moral and political judgment,
enveloping chance æsthetic feelings and determining their value. What
most German philosophers, on the contrary, have written about art and
beauty has a minimal importance: it treats artificial problems in a
grammatical spirit, seldom giving any proof of experience or
imagination. What painters say about painting and poets about poetry is
better than lay opinion; it may reveal, of course, some petty jealousy
or some partial incapacity, because a special gift often carries with it
complementary defects in apprehension; yet what is positive in such
judgments is founded on knowledge and avoids the romancing into which
litterateurs and sentimentalists will gladly wander. The specific values
of art are technical values, more permanent and definite than the
adventitious analogies on which a stray observer usually bases his
views. Only a technical education can raise judgments on musical
compositions above impertinent auto-biography. The Japanese know the
beauty of flowers, and tailors and dressmakers have the best sense for
the fashions. We ask them for suggestions, and if we do not always take
their advice, it is not because the fine effects they love are not
genuine, but because they may not be effects which we care to produce.

[Sidenote: Tastes differ also in purity or consistency.]

This touches a second consideration, besides the volume and vivacity of
feeling, which enters into good taste. What is voluminous may be
inwardly confused or outwardly confusing. Excitement, though on the
whole and for the moment agreeable, may verge on pain and may be, when
it subsides a little, a cause of bitterness. A thing’s attractions may
be partly at war with its ideal function. In such a case what, in our
haste, we call a beauty becomes hateful on a second view, and according
to the key of our dissatisfaction we pronounce that effect meretricious,
harsh, or affected. These discords appear when elaborate things are
attempted without enough art and refinement; they are essentially in bad
taste. Rudimentary effects, on the contrary, are pure, and though we may
think them trivial when we are expecting something richer, their defect
is never intrinsic; they do not plunge us, as impure excitements do,
into a corrupt artificial conflict. So wild-flowers, plain chant, or a
scarlet uniform are beautiful enough; their simplicity is a positive
merit, while their crudity is only relative. There is a touch of
sophistication and disease in not being able to fall back on such things
and enjoy them thoroughly, as if a man could no longer relish a glass of
water. Your true epicure will study not to lose so genuine a pleasure.
Better forego some artificial stimulus, though that, too, has its charm,
than become insensible to natural joys. Indeed, ability to revert to
elementary beauties is a test that judgment remains sound.

Vulgarity is quite another matter. An old woman in a blonde wig, a dirty
hand covered with jewels, ostentation without dignity, rhetoric without
cogency, all offend by an inner contradiction. To like such things we
should have to surrender our better intuitions and suffer a kind of
dishonour. Yet the elements offensively combined may be excellent in
isolation, so that an untrained or torpid mind will be at a loss to
understand the critic’s displeasure. Oftentimes barbaric art almost
succeeds, by dint of splendour, in banishing the sense of confusion and
absurdity; for everything, even reason, must bow to force. Yet the
impression remains chaotic, and we must be either partly inattentive or
partly distressed. Nothing could show better than this alternative how
mechanical barbaric art is. Driven by blind impulse or tradition, the
artist has worked in the dark. He has dismissed his work without having
quite understood it or really justified it to his own mind. It is rather
his excretion than his product. Astonished, very likely, at his own
fertility, he has thought himself divinely inspired, little knowing that
clear reason is the highest and truest of inspirations. Other men,
observing his obscure work, have then honoured him for profundity; and
so mere bulk or stress or complexity have produced a mystical wonder by
which generation after generation may be enthralled. Barbaric art is
half necromantic; its ascendancy rests in a certain measure on
bewilderment and fraud.

To purge away these impurities nothing is needed but quickened
intelligence, a keener spiritual flame. Where perception is adequate,
expression is so too, and if a man will only grow sensitive to the
various solicitations which anything monstrous combines, he will
thereby perceive its monstrosity. Let him but enact his sensations, let
him pause to make explicit the confused hints that threaten to stupefy
him; he will find that he can follow out each of them only by rejecting
and forgetting the others. To free his imagination in any direction he
must disengage it from the contrary intent, and so he must either purify
his object or leave it a mass of confused promptings. Promptings
essentially demand to be carried out, and when once an idea has become
articulate it is not enriched but destroyed if it is still identified
with its contrary. Any complete expression of a barbarous theme will,
therefore, disengage its incompatible elements and turn it into a number
of rational beauties.

[Sidenote: They differ, finally, in pertinence, and in width of appeal.]

When good taste has in this way purified and digested some turgid
medley, it still has a progress to make. Ideas, like men, live in
society. Not only has each a will of its own and an inherent ideal, but
each finds itself conditioned for its expression by a host of other
beings, on whose co-operation it depends. Good taste, besides being
inwardly clear, has to be outwardly fit. A monstrous ideal devours and
dissolves itself, but even a rational one does not find an immortal
embodiment simply for being inwardly possible and free from
contradiction. It needs a material basis, a soil and situation
propitious to its growth. This basis, as it varies, makes the ideal vary
which is simply its expression; and therefore no ideal can be
ultimately fixed in ignorance of the conditions that may modify it. It
subsists, to be sure, as an eternal possibility, independently of all
further earthly revolutions. Once expressed, it has revealed the
inalienable values that attach to a certain form of being, whenever that
form is actualised. But its expression may have been only momentary, and
that eternal ideal may have no further relevance to the living world. A
criterion of taste, however, looks to a social career; it hopes to
educate and to judge. In order to be an applicable and a just law, it
must represent the interests over which it would preside.

There are many undiscovered ideals. There are many beauties which
nothing in this world can embody or suggest. There are also many once
suggested or even embodied, which find later their basis gone and
evaporate into their native heaven. The saddest tragedy in the world is
the destruction of what has within it no inward ground of dissolution,
death in youth, and the crushing out of perfection. Imagination has its
bereavements of this kind. A complete mastery of existence achieved at
one moment gives no warrant that it will be sustained or achieved again
at the next. The achievement may have been perfect; nature will not on
that account stop to admire it. She will move on, and the meaning which
was read so triumphantly in her momentary attitude will not fit her new
posture. Like Polonius’s cloud, she will always suggest some new ideal,
because she has none of her own.

In lieu of an ideal, however, nature has a constitution, and this, which
is a necessary ground for ideals, is what it concerns the ideal to
reckon with. A poet, spokesman of his full soul at a given juncture,
cannot consider eventualities or think of anything but the message he is
sent to deliver, whether the world can then hear it or not. God, he may
feel sure, understands him, and in the eternal the beauty he sees and
loves immortally justifies his enthusiasm. Nevertheless, critics must
view his momentary ebullition from another side. They do not come to
justify the poet in his own eyes; he amply relieves them, of such a
function. They come only to inquire how significant the poet’s
expressions are for humanity at large or for whatever public he
addresses. They come to register the social or representative value of
the poet’s soul. His inspiration may have been an odd cerebral rumbling,
a perfectly irrecoverable and wasted intuition; the exquisite quality it
doubtless had to his own sense is now not to the purpose. A work of art
is a public possession; it is addressed to the world. By taking on a
material embodiment, a spirit solicits attention and claims some kinship
with the prevalent gods. Has it, critics should ask, the affinities
needed for such intercourse? Is it humane, is it rational, is it
representative? To its inherent incommunicable charms it must add a
kind of courtesy. If it wants other approval than its own, it cannot
afford to regard no other aspiration.

This scope, this representative faculty or wide appeal, is necessary to
good taste. All authority is representative; force and inner consistency
are gifts on which I may well congratulate another, but they give him no
right to speak for me. Either æsthetic experience would have remained a
chaos—which it is not altogether—or it must have tended to conciliate
certain general human demands and ultimately all those interests which
its operation in any way affects. The more conspicuous and permanent a
work of art is, the more is such an adjustment needed. A poet or
philosopher may be erratic and assure us that he is inspired; if we
cannot well gainsay it, we are at least not obliged to read his works.
An architect or a sculptor, however, or a public performer of any sort,
that thrusts before us a spectacle justified only in his inner
consciousness, makes himself a nuisance. A social standard of taste must
assert itself here, or else no efficacious and cumulative art can exist
at all. Good taste in such matters cannot abstract from tradition,
utility, and the temper of the world. It must make itself an interpreter
of humanity and think esoteric dreams less beautiful than what the
public eye might conceivably admire.

[Sidenote: Art may grow classic by idealising the familiar.]

There are various affinities by which art may acquire a representative
or classic quality. It may do so by giving form to objects which
everybody knows, by rendering experiences that are universal and
primary. The human figure, elementary passions, common types and crises
of fate—these are facts which pass too constantly through apperception
not to have a normal æthetic value. The artist who can catch that effect
in its fulness and simplicity accordingly does immortal work. This sort
of art immediately becomes popular; it passes into language and
convention so that its æsthetic charm is apparently worn down. The old
images after a while hardly stimulate unless they be presented in some
paradoxical way; but in that case attention will be diverted to the
accidental extravagance, and the chief classic effect will be missed. It
is the honourable fate or euthanasia of artistic successes that they
pass from the field of professional art altogether and become a portion
of human faculty. Every man learns to be to that extent an artist;
approved figures and maxims pass current like the words and idioms of a
mother-tongue, themselves once brilliant inventions. The lustre of such
successes is not really dimmed, however, when it becomes a part of man’s
daily light; a retrogression from that habitual style or habitual
insight would at once prove, by the shock it caused, how precious those
ingrained apperceptions continued to be.

[Sidenote: or by reporting the ultimate.]

Universality may also be achieved, in a more heroic fashion, by art that
expresses ultimate truths, cosmic laws, great human ideals. Virgil and
Dante are classic poets in this sense, and a similar quality belongs to
Greek sculpture and architecture. They may not cause enthusiasm in
everybody; but in the end experience and reflection renew their charm;
and their greatness, like that of high mountains, grows more obvious
with distance. Such eminence is the reward of having accepted discipline
and made the mind a clear anagram of much experience. There is a great
difference between the depth of expression so gained and richness or
realism in details. A supreme work presupposes minute study, sympathy
with varied passions, many experiments in expression; but these
preliminary things are submerged in it and are not displayed side by
side with it, like the foot-notes to a learned work, so that the
ignorant may know they have existed.

Some persons, themselves inattentive, imagine, for instance, that Greek
sculpture is abstract, that it has left out all the detail and character
which they cannot find on the surface, as they might in a modern work.
In truth it contains those features, as it were, in solution and in the
resultant which, when reduced to harmony, they would produce. It
embodies a finished humanity which only varied exercises could have
attained, for as the body is the existent ground for all possible
actions, in which as actions they exist only potentially, so a perfect
body, such as a sculptor might conceive, which ought to be ready for all
excellent activities, cannot present them all in act but only the
readiness for them. The features that might express them severally must
be absorbed and mastered, hidden like a sword in its scabbard, and
reduced to a general dignity or grace. Though such immersed eloquence be
at first overlooked and seldom explicitly acknowledged, homage is
nevertheless rendered to it in the most unmistakable ways. When lazy
artists, backed by no great technical or moral discipline, think they,
too, can produce masterpieces by summary treatment, their failure shows
how pregnant and supreme a thing simplicity is. Every man, in proportion
to his experience and moral distinction, returns to the simple but
inexhaustible work of finished minds, and finds more and more of his own
soul responsive to it.

Human nature, for all its margin of variability, has a substantial core
which is invariable, as the human body has a structure which it cannot
lose without perishing altogether; for as creatures grow more complex a
greater number of their organs become vital and indispensable. Advanced
forms will rather die than surrender a tittle of their character; a fact
which is the physical basis for loyalty and martyrdom. Any deep
interpretation of oneself, or indeed of anything, has for that reason a
largely representative truth. Other men, if they look closely, will make
the same discovery for themselves. Hence distinction and profundity, in
spite of their rarity, are wont to be largely recognised. The best men
in all ages keep classic traditions alive. These men have on their side
the weight of superior intelligence, and, though they are few, they
might even claim the weight of numbers, since the few of all ages, added
together, may be more than the many who in any one age follow a
temporary fashion. Classic work is nevertheless always national, or at
least characteristic of its period, as the classic poetry of each people
is that in which its language appears most pure and free. To translate
it is impossible; but it is easy to find that the human nature so
inimitably expressed in each masterpiece is the same that, under
different circumstance, dictates a different performance. The deviations
between races and men are not yet so great as is the ignorance of self,
the blindness to the native ideal, which prevails in most of them. Hence
a great man of a remote epoch is more intelligible than a common man of
our own time.

[Sidenote: Good taste demands that art should be rational, _i.e._,
harmonious with all other interests.]

Both elementary and ultimate judgments, then, contribute to a standard
of taste; yet human life lies between these limits, and an art which is
to be truly adjusted to life should speak also for the intermediate
experience. Good taste is indeed nothing but a name for those
appreciations which the swelling incidents of life recall and
reinforce. Good taste is that taste which is a good possession, a friend
to the whole man. It must not alienate him from anything except to ally
him to something greater and more fertile in satisfactions. It will not
suffer him to dote on things, however seductive, which rob him of some
nobler companionship. To have a foretaste of such a loss, and to reject
instinctively whatever will cause it, is the very essence of refinement.
Good taste comes, therefore, from experience, in the best sense of that
word; it comes from having united in one’s memory and character the
fruit of many diverse undertakings. Mere taste is apt to be bad taste,
since it regards nothing but a chance feeling. Every man who pursues an
art may be presumed to have some sensibility; the question is whether he
has breeding, too, and whether what he stops at is not, in the end,
vulgar and offensive. Chance feeling needs to fortify itself with
reasons and to find its level in the great world. When it has added
fitness to its sincerity, beneficence to its passion, it will have
acquired a right to live. Violence and self-justification will not pass
muster in a moral society, for vipers possess both, and must
nevertheless be stamped out. Citizenship is conferred only on creatures
with human and co-operative instincts. A civilised imagination has to
understand and to serve the world.

The great obstacle which art finds in attempting to be rational is its
functional isolation. Sense and each of the passions suffers from a
similar independence. The disarray of human instincts lets every
spontaneous motion run too far; life oscillates between constraint and
unreason. Morality too often puts up with being a constraint and even
imagines such a disgrace to be its essence. Art, on the contrary, as
often hugs unreason for fear of losing its inspiration, and forgets that
it is itself a rational principle of creation and order. Morality is
thus reduced to a necessary evil and art to a vain good, all for want of
harmony among human impulses. If the passions arose in season, if
perception fed only on those things which action should be adjusted to,
turning them, while action proceeded, into the substance of ideas—then
all conduct would be voluntary and enlightened, all speculation would be
practical, all perceptions beautiful, and all operations arts. The Life
of Reason would then be universal.

To approach this ideal, so far as art is concerned, would involve
diffusing its processes and no longer confining them to a set of dead
and unproductive objects called works of art.

[Sidenote: A mere “work of art” a baseless artifice.]

Why art, the most vital and generative of activities, should produce a
set of abstract images, monuments to lost intuitions, is a curious
mystery. Nature gives her products life, and they are at least equal to
their sources in dignity. Why should mind, the actualisation of nature’s
powers, produce something so inferior to itself, reverting in its
expression to material being, so that its witnesses seem so many fossils
with which it strews its path? What we call museums—mausoleums, rather,
in which a dead art heaps up its remains—are those the places where the
Muses intended to dwell? We do not keep in show-cases the coins current
in the world. A living art does not produce curiosities to be collected
but spiritual necessaries to be diffused.

Artificial art, made to be exhibited, is something gratuitous and
sophisticated, and the greater part of men’s concern about it is
affectation. There is a genuine pleasure in planning a work, in
modelling and painting it; there is a pleasure in showing it to a
sympathetic friend, who associates himself in this way with the artist’s
technical experiment and with his interpretation of some human episode;
and there might be a satisfaction in seeing the work set up in some
appropriate space for which it was designed, where its decorative
quality might enrich the scene, and the curious passer-by might stop to
decipher it. The pleasures proper to an ingenuous artist are spontaneous
and human; but his works, once delivered to his patrons, are household
furniture for the state. Set up to-day, they are outworn and replaced
to-morrow, like trees in the parks or officers in the government. A
community where art was native and flourishing would have an
uninterrupted supply of such ornaments, furnished by its citizens in
the same modest and cheerful spirit in which they furnish other
commodities. Every craft has its dignity, and the decorative and
monumental crafts certainly have their own; but such art is neither
singular nor pre-eminent, and a statesman or reformer who should raise
somewhat the level of thought or practice in the state would do an
infinitely greater service.

[Sidenote: Human uses give to works of art their highest expression and
charm.]

The joys of creating are not confined, moreover, to those who create
things without practical uses. The merely æsthetic, like rhyme and
fireworks, is not the only subject that can engage a playful fancy or be
planned with a premonition of beautiful effects. Architecture may be
useful, sculpture commemorative, poetry reflective, even, music, by its
expression, religious or martial. In a word, practical exigencies, in
calling forth the arts, give them moral functions which it is a pleasure
to see them fulfil. Works may not be æsthetic in their purpose, and yet
that fact may be a ground for their being doubly delightful in execution
and doubly beautiful in effect. A richer plexus of emotions is concerned
in producing or contemplating something humanly necessary than something
idly conceived. What is very rightly called a _sense_ for fitness is a
vital experience, involving æsthetic satisfactions and æsthetic shocks.
The more numerous the rational harmonies are which are present to the
mind, the more sensible movements will be going on there to give
immediate delight; for the perception or expectation of an ulterior good
is a present good also. Accordingly nothing can so well call forth or
sustain attention as what has a complex structure relating it to many
complex interests. A work woven out of precious threads has a deep
pertinence and glory; the artist who creates it does not need to
surrender his practical and moral sense in order to indulge his
imagination.

The truth is that mere sensation or mere emotion is an indignity to a
mature human being. When we eat, we demand a pleasant vista, flowers, or
conversation, and failing these we take refuge in a newspaper. The
monks, knowing that men should not feed silently like stalled oxen,
appointed some one to read aloud in the refectory; and the Fathers,
obeying the same civilised instinct, had contrived in their theology
intelligible points of attachment for religious emotion. A refined mind
finds as little happiness in love without friendship as in sensuality
without love; it may succumb to both, but it accepts neither. What is
true of mere sensibility is no less true of mere fancy. The Arabian
Nights—futile enough in any case—would be absolutely intolerable if
they contained no Oriental manners, no human passions, and no convinced
epicureanism behind their miracles and their tattle. Any absolute work
of art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion has
about it a certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a
blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasures.
Art, so long as it needs to be a dream, will never cease to prove a
disappointment. Its facile cruelty, its narcotic abstraction, can never
sweeten the evils we return to at home; it can liberate half the mind
only by leaving the other half in abeyance. In the mere artist, too,
there is always something that falls short of the gentleman and that
defeats the man.

[Sidenote: The sad values of appearance.]

Surely it is not the artistic impulse in itself that involves such lack
of equilibrium. To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is
one of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren and
superficial character of this imposed form: fine art is a play of
appearance. Appearance, for a critical philosophy, is distinguished from
reality by its separation from the context of things, by its immediacy
and insignificance. A play of appearance is accordingly some little
closed circle in experience, some dream in which we lose ourselves by
ignoring most of our interests, and from which we awake into a world in
which that lost episode plays no further part and leaves no heirs. Art
as mankind has hitherto practised it falls largely under this head and
too much resembles an opiate or a stimulant. Life and history are not
thereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal is
extracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheap
material, like words or marble. The only precious materials are flesh
and blood, for these alone can defend and propagate the ideal which has
once informed them.

Artistic creation shows at this point a great inferiority to natural
reproduction, since its product is dead. Fine art shapes inert matter
and peoples the mind with impotent ghosts. What influence it has—for
every event has consequences—is not pertinent to its inspiration. The
art of the past is powerless even to create similar art in the present,
unless similar conditions recur independently. The moments snatched for
art have been generally interludes in life and its products parasites in
nature, the body of them being materially functionless and the soul
merely represented. To exalt fine art into a truly ideal activity we
should have to knit it more closely with other rational functions, so
that to beautify things might render them more useful and to represent
them most imaginatively might be to see them in their truth. Something
of the sort has been actually attained by the noblest arts in their
noblest phases. A Sophocles or a Leonardo dominates his dreamful vehicle
and works upon the real world by its means. These small centres, where
interfunctional harmony is attained, ought to expand and cover the whole
field. Art, like religion, needs to be absorbed in the Life of Reason.

[Sidenote: They need to be made prophetic of practical goods.]

What might help to bring about this consummation would be, on the one
side, more knowledge; on the other, better taste. When a mind is filled
with important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things,
it cannot relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it.
Myth and metaphor remain beautiful so long as they are the most adequate
or graphic means available for expressing the facts, but so soon as they
cease to be needful and sincere they become false finery. The same thing
happens in the plastic arts. Unless they spring from love of their
subject, and employ imagination only to penetrate into that subject and
interpret it with a more inward sympathy and truth, they become
conventional and overgrown with mere ornament. They then seem ridiculous
to any man who can truly conceive what they represent. So in putting
antique heroes on the stage we nowadays no longer tolerate a modern
costume, because the externals of ancient life are too well known to us;
but in the seventeenth century people demanded in such personages
intelligence and nobleness, since these were virtues which the ancients
were clothed with in their thought. A knowledge that should be at once
full and appreciative would evidently demand fidelity in both matters.
Knowledge, where it exists, undermines satisfaction in what does
violence to truth, and it renders such representations grotesque. If
knowledge were general and adequate the fine arts would accordingly be
brought round to expressing reality.

[Sidenote: which in turn would be suffused with beauty.]

At the same time, if the rendering of reality is to remain artistic, it
must still study to satisfy the senses; but as this study would now
accompany every activity, taste would grow vastly more subtle and
exacting. Whatever any man said or did or made, he would be alive to its
æsthetic quality, and beauty would be a pervasive ingredient in
happiness. No work would be called, in a special sense, a work of art,
for all works would be such intrinsically; and even instinctive mimicry
and reproduction would themselves operate, not when mischief or idleness
prompted, but when some human occasion and some general utility made the
exercise of such skill entirely delightful. Thus there would need to be
no division of mankind into mechanical blind workers and half-demented
poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make
who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate reward of human
action. All arts would be practised together and merged in the art of
life, the only one wholly useful or fine among them.




CHAPTER XI

ART AND HAPPINESS


[Sidenote: Æsthetic harmonies are parodies of real ones.]

The greatest enemy harmony can have is a premature settlement in which
some essential force is wholly disregarded. This excluded element will
rankle in the flesh; it will bring about no end of disorders until it is
finally recognised and admitted into a truly comprehensive regimen. The
more numerous the interests which a premature settlement combines the
greater inertia will it oppose to reform, and the more self-righteously
will it condemn the innocent pariah that it leaves outside.

Art has had to suffer much Pharisaical opposition of this sort.
Sometimes political systems, sometimes religious zeal, have excluded it
from their programme, thereby making their programme unjust and
inadequate. Yet of all premature settlements the most premature is that
which the fine arts are wont to establish. A harmony in appearance only,
one that touches the springs of nothing and has no power to propagate
itself, is so partial and momentary a good that we may justly call it an
illusion. To gloat on rhythms and declamations, to live lost in
imaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off from
practical dominion and from rational happiness. A lovely dream is an
excellent thing in itself, but it leaves the world no less a chaos and
makes it by contrast seem even darker than it did. By dwelling in its
mock heaven art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that any
irresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict. For this reason
it sometimes passes for a misfortune in a family if a son insists on
being a poet or an actor. Such gifts suggest too much incompetence and
such honours too much disrepute. A man does not avoid real evils by
having visionary pleasures, but besides exposing himself to the real
evils quite unprotected, he probably adds fancied evils to them in
generous measure. He becomes supersensitive, envious, hysterical; the
world, which was perhaps carried away at first by his ecstasies, at the
next moment merely applauds his performance, then criticises it
superciliously, and very likely ends by forgetting it altogether.

Thus the fine arts are seldom an original factor in human progress. If
they express moral and political greatness, and serve to enhance it,
they acquire a certain dignity; but so soon as this expressive function
is abandoned they grow meretricious. The artist becomes an abstracted
trifler, and the public is divided into two camps: the dilettanti, who
dote on the artist’s affectations, and the rabble, who pay him to grow
coarse. Both influences degrade him and he helps to foster both. An
atmosphere of dependence and charlatanry gathers about the artistic
attitude and spreads with its influence. Religion, philosophy, and
manners may in turn be infected with this spirit, being reduced to a
voluntary hallucination or petty flattery. Romanticism, ritualism,
æstheticism, symbolism are names this disease has borne at different
times as it appeared in different circles or touched a different object.
Needless to say that the arts themselves are the first to suffer. That
beauty which should have been an inevitable smile on the face of
society, an overflow of genuine happiness and power, has to be imported,
stimulated artificially, and applied from without; so that art becomes a
sickly ornament for an ugly existence.

[Sidenote: yet prototypes of true perfections.]

Nevertheless, æsthetic harmony, so incomplete in its basis as to be
fleeting and deceptive, is most complete in its form. This so partial
synthesis is a synthesis indeed, and just because settlements made in
fancy are altogether premature, and ignore almost everything in the
world, in type they can be the most perfect settlements. The artist,
being a born lover of the good, a natural breeder of perfections, clings
to his insight. If the world calls his accomplishments vain, he can,
with better reason, call vain the world’s cumbrous instrumentalities, by
which nothing clearly good is attained. Appearances, he may justly urge,
are alone actual. All forces, substances, realities, and principles are
inferred and potential only and in the moral scale mere instruments to
bring perfect appearances about. To have grasped such an appearance, to
have embodied a form in matter, is to have justified for the first time
whatever may underlie appearance and to have put reality to some use. It
is to have begun to live. As the standard of perfection is internal and
is measured by the satisfaction felt in realising it, every artist has
tasted, in his activity, what activity essentially is. He has moulded
existence into the likeness of thought and lost himself in that ideal
achievement which, so to speak, beckons all things into being. Even if a
thousand misfortunes await him and a final disappointment, he has been
happy once. He may be inclined to rest his case there and challenge
practical people to justify in the same way the faith that is in them.

[Sidenote: Pros and cons of detached indulgences.]

That a moment of the most perfect happiness should prove a source of
unhappiness is no paradox to any one who has observed the world. A hope,
a passion, a crime, is a flash of vitality. It is inwardly congruous
with the will that breeds it, yet the happiness it pictures is so
partial that even while it is felt it may be overshadowed by sinister
forebodings. A certain unrest and insecurity may consciously harass it.
With time, or by a slight widening in the field of interest, this
submerged unhappiness may rise to the surface. If, as is probable, it is
caused or increased by the indulgence which preceded, then the only
moment in which a good was tasted, the only vista that had opened
congenially before the mind, will prove a new and permanent curse. In
this way love often misleads individuals, ambition cities, and religion
whole races of men. That art, also, should often be an indulgence, a
blind that hides reality from ill-balanced minds and ultimately
increases their confusion, is by no means incompatible with art’s ideal
essence. On the contrary, such a result is inevitable when ideality is
carried at all far upon a narrow basis. The more genuine and excellent
the vision the greater havoc it makes if, being inadequate, it
establishes itself authoritatively in the soul. Art, in the better
sense, is a condition of happiness for a practical and labouring
creature, since without art he remains a slave; but it is one more
source of unhappiness for him so long as it is not squared with his
necessary labours and merely interrupts them. It then alienates him from
his world without being able to carry him effectually into a better one.

[Sidenote: The happy imagination is one initially in line with things.]

The artist is in many ways like a child. He seems happy, because his
life is spontaneous, yet he is not competent to secure his own good. To
be truly happy he must be well bred, reared from the cradle, as it were,
under propitious influences, so that he may have learned to love what
conduces to his development. In that rare case his art will expand as
his understanding ripens; he will not need to repent and begin again on
a lower key. The ideal artist, like the ideal philosopher, has all time
and all existence for his virtual theme. Fed by the world he can help to
mould it, and his insight is a kind of wisdom, preparing him as science
might for using the world well and making it more fruitful. He can then
be happy, not merely in the sense of having now and then an ecstatic
moment, but happy in having light and resource enough within him to cope
steadily with real things and to leave upon them the vestige of his
mind.

[Sidenote: and brought always closer to them by experience.]

One effect of growing experience is to render what is unreal
uninteresting. Momentous alternatives in life are so numerous and the
possibilities they open up so varied that imagination finds enough
employment of a historic and practical sort in trying to seize them. A
child plans Towers of Babel; a mature architect, in planning, would lose
all interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The
conditions of existence, after they are known and accepted, become
conditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each place, for each
situation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal. It need not go
afield to import something exotic. It need make no sacrifices to whim
and to personal memories. It rather breeds out of the given problem a
new and singular solution, thereby exercising greater invention than
would be requisite for framing an arbitrary ideal and imposing it at all
costs on every occasion.

[Sidenote: Reason is the principle of both art and happiness.]

In other words, a happy result can be secured in art, as in life, only
by intelligence. Intelligence consists in having read the heart and
deciphered the promptings latent there, and then in reading the world
and deciphering its law and constitution, to see how and where the
heart’s ideal may be embodied. Our troubles come from the colossal
blunders made by our ancestors (who had worse ancestors of their own) in
both these interpretations, blunders which have come down to us in our
blood and in our institutions. The vices thus transmitted cloud our
intelligence. We fail in practical affairs when we ignore the conditions
of action and we fail in works of imagination when we concoct what is
fantastic and without roots in the world.

The value of art lies in making people happy, first in practising the
art and then in possessing its product. This observation might seem
needless, and ought to be so; but if we compare it with what is commonly
said on these subjects, we must confess that it may often be denied and
more often, perhaps, may not be understood. Happiness is something men
ought to pursue, although they seldom do so; they are drawn away from it
at first by foolish impulses and afterwards by perverse laws. To secure
happiness conduct would have to remain spontaneous while it learned not
to be criminal; but the fanatical attachment of men, now to a fierce
liberty, now to a false regimen, keeps them barbarous and wretched. A
rational pursuit of happiness—which is one thing with progress or with
the Life of Reason—would embody that natural piety which leaves to the
episodes of life their inherent values, mourning death, celebrating
love, sanctifying civic traditions, enjoying and correcting nature’s
ways. To discriminate happiness is therefore the very soul of art, which
expresses experience without distorting it, as those political or
metaphysical tyrannies distort it which sanctify unhappiness. A free
mind, like a creative imagination, rejoices at the harmonies it can find
or make between man and nature; and, where it finds none, it solves the
conflict so far as it may and then notes and endures it with a shudder.

A morality organised about the human heart in an ingenuous and sincere
fashion would involve every fine art and would render the world
pervasively beautiful—beautiful in its artificial products and
beautiful in its underlying natural terrors. The closer we keep to
elementary human needs and to the natural agencies that may satisfy
them, the closer we are to beauty. Industry, sport, and science, with
the perennial intercourse and passions of men, swarm with incentives to
expression, because they are everywhere creating new moulds of being and
compelling the eye to observe those forms and to recast them ideally.
Art is simply an adequate industry; it arises when industry is carried
out to the satisfaction of all human demands, even of those incidental
sensuous demands which we call æsthetic and which a brutal industry, in
its haste, may despise or ignore.

Arts responsive in this way to all human nature would be beautiful
according to reason and might remain beautiful long. Poetic beauty
touches the world whenever it attains some unfeigned harmony either with
sense or with reason; and the more unfeignedly human happiness was made
the test of all institutions and pursuits, the more beautiful they would
be, having more numerous points of fusion with the mind, and fusing with
it more profoundly. To distinguish and to create beauty would then be no
art relegated to a few abstracted spirits, playing with casual fancies;
it would be a habit inseparable from practical efficiency. All
operations, all affairs, would then be viewed in the light of ultimate
interests, and in their deep relation to human good. The arts would thus
recover their Homeric glory; touching human fate as they clearly would,
they would borrow something of its grandeur and pathos, and yet the
interest that worked in them would be warm, because it would remain
unmistakably animal and sincere.

[Sidenote: Only a rational society can have sure and perfect arts.]

The principle that all institutions should subserve happiness runs
deeper than any cult for art and lays the foundation on which the latter
might rest safely. If social structure were rational its free expression
would be so too. Many observers, with no particular philosophy to
adduce, feel that the arts among us are somehow impotent, and they look
for a better inspiration, now to ancient models, now to the raw
phenomena of life. A dilettante may, indeed, summon inspiration whence
he will; and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy;
but if what is hoped for is a genuine, native, inevitable art, a great
revolution would first have to be worked in society. We should have to
abandon our vested illusions, our irrational religions and patriotisms
and schools of art, and to discover instead our genuine needs, the forms
of our possible happiness. To call for such self-examination seems
revolutionary only because we start from a sophisticated system, a
system resting on traditional fashions and superstitions, by which the
will of the living generation is misinterpreted and betrayed. To shake
off that system would not subvert order but rather institute order for
the first time; it would be an _Instauratio Magna_, a setting things
again on their feet.

We in Christendom are so accustomed to artificial ideals and to
artificial institutions, kept up to express them, that we hardly
conceive how anomalous our situation is, sorely as we may suffer from
it. We found academies and museums, as we found missions, to fan a flame
that constantly threatens to die out for lack of natural fuel. Our overt
ideals are parasites in the body politic, while the ideals native to the
body politic, those involved in our natural structure and situation,
are either stifled by that alien incubus, leaving civic life barbarous,
or else force their way up, unremarked or not justly honoured as ideals.
Industry and science and social amenities, with all the congruous
comforts and appurtenances of contemporary life, march on their way, as
if they had nothing to say to the spirit, which remains entangled in a
cobweb of dead traditions. An idle pottering of the fancy over obsolete
forms—theological, dramatic, or plastic—makes that by-play to the
sober business of life which men call their art or their religion; and
the more functionless and gratuitous this by-play is the more those who
indulge in it think they are idealists. They feel they are champions of
what is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy
herself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book instead of
planting their seeds in the garden.

[Sidenote: Why art is now empty and unstable.]

It is clear that gratuitous and functionless habits cannot bring
happiness; they do not constitute an activity at once spontaneous and
beneficent, such as noble art is an instance of. Those habits may indeed
give pleasure; they may bring extreme excitement, as madness notably
does, though it is in the highest degree functionless and gratuitous.
Nor is such by-play without consequences, some of which might
conceivably be fortunate. What is functionless is so called for being
worthless from some ideal point of view, and not conducing to the
particular life considered. But nothing real is dissociated from the
universal flux; everything—madness and all unmeaning cross-currents in
being—count in the general process and discharge somewhere, not without
effect, the substance they have drawn for a moment into their little
vortex. So our vain arts and unnecessary religions are not without real
effects and not without a certain internal vitality. When life is
profoundly disorganised it may well happen that only in detached
episodes, only in moments snatched for dreaming in, can men see the blue
or catch a glimpse of something like the ideal. In that case their
esteem for their irrelevant visions may be well grounded, and their thin
art and far-fetched religion may really constitute what is best in their
experience. In a pathetic way these poor enthusiasms may be justified,
but only because the very conception of a rational life lies entirely
beyond the horizon.

[Sidenote: Anomalous character of the irrational artist.]

It is no marvel, when art is a brief truancy from rational practice,
that the artist himself should be a vagrant, and at best, as it were, an
infant prodigy. The wings of genius serve him only for an escapade,
enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical
abysses. But such an erratic workman does not deserve the name of artist
or master; he has burst convention only to break it, not to create a new
convention more in harmony with nature. His originality, though it may
astonish for a moment, will in the end be despised and will find no
thoroughfare. He will meantime be wretched himself, torn from the roots
of his being by that cruel, unmeaning inspiration; or, if too rapt to
see his own plight, he will be all the more pitied by practical men, who
cannot think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that do not
strengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity.

Art, in its nobler acceptation, is an achievement, not an indulgence. It
prepares the world in some sense to receive the soul, and the soul to
master the world; it disentangles those threads in each that can be
woven into the other. That the artist should be eccentric, homeless,
dreamful may almost seem a natural law, but it is none the less a
scandal. An artist’s business is not really to cut fantastical capers or
be licensed to play the fool. His business is simply that of every keen
soul to build well when it builds, and to speak well when it speaks,
giving practice everywhere the greatest possible affinity to the
situation, the most delicate adjustment to every faculty it affects. The
wonder of an artist’s performance grows with the range of his
penetration, with the instinctive sympathy that makes him, in his mortal
isolation, considerate of other men’s fate and a great diviner of their
secret, so that his work speaks to them kindly, with a deeper assurance
than they could have spoken with to themselves. And the joy of his great
sanity, the power of his adequate vision, is not the less intense
because he can lend it to others and has borrowed it from a faithful
study of the world.

[Sidenote: True art measures and completes happiness.]

If happiness is the ultimate sanction of art, art in turn is the best
instrument of happiness. In art more directly than in other activities
man’s self-expression is cumulative and finds an immediate reward; for
it alters the material conditions of sentience so that sentience becomes
at once more delightful and more significant. In industry man is still
servile, preparing the materials he is to use in action. In action
itself, though he is free, he exerts his influence on a living and
treacherous medium and sees the issue at each moment drift farther and
farther from his intent. In science he is an observer, preparing himself
for action in another way, by studying its results and conditions. But
in art he is at once competent and free; he is creative. He is not
troubled by his materials, because he has assimilated them and may take
them for granted; nor is he concerned with the chance complexion of
affairs in the actual world, because he is making the world over, not
merely considering how it grew or how it will consent to grow in future.
Nothing, accordingly, could be more delightful than genuine art, nor
more free from remorse and the sting of vanity. Art springs so
completely from the heart of man that it makes everything speak to him
in his own language; it reaches, nevertheless, so truly to the heart of
nature that it co-operates with her, becomes a parcel of her creative
material energy, and builds by her instinctive hand. If the various
formative impulses afoot in the world never opposed stress to stress and
made no havoc with one another, nature might be called an unconscious
artist. In fact, just where such a formative impulse finds support from
the environment, a consciousness supervenes. If that consciousness is
adequate enough to be prophetic, an art arises. Thus the emergence of
arts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature’s success
and of mortal happiness.


*** End of Volume Four ***




REASON IN SCIENCE

Volume Five of “The Life of Reason”


GEORGE SANTAYANA


hê gar noy enhergeia zôhê




CONTENTS

REASON IN SCIENCE


CHAPTER I

TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE

Science still young.—Its miscarriage in Greece.—Its timid reappearance
in modern times.—Distinction between science and myth.—Platonic status
of hypothesis.—Meaning of verification.—Possible validity of
myths.—Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.—But science follows
the movement of its subject-matter.—Moral value of science.—Its
continuity with common knowledge.—Its intellectual essence.—Unity of
science.—In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of
waste.—Sciences converge from different points of origin.—Two chief
kinds of science, physics and dialectic.—Their mutual
implication.—Their coöperation.—No science _a priori_.—Role of
criticism. Pages 3-38


CHAPTER II

HISTORY

History an artificial memory.—Second sight requires control.—Nature
the theme common to various memories.—Growth of legend.—No history
without documents.—The aim is truth.—Indirect methods of attaining
it.—Historical research a part of physics.—Verification here
indirect.—Futile ideal to survey all facts.—Historical theory.—It is
arbitrary.—A moral critique of the past is possible.—How it might be
just.—Transition to historical romance.—Possibility of genuine
epics.—Literal truth abandoned.—History exists to be transcended.—Its
great rôle. Pages 39-68


CHAPTER III

MECHANISM

Recurrent forms in nature.—Their discovery makes the flux
calculable.—Looser principles tried first.—Mechanism for the most part
hidden.—Yet presumably pervasive.—Inadequacy of consciousness.—Its
articulation inferior to that of its objects.—Science consequently
retarded, and speculation rendered necessary.—Dissatisfaction with
mechanism partly natural, and partly artificial.—Biassed judgments
inspired by moral inertia.—Positive emotions proper to
materialism.—The material world not dead nor ugly, nor especially
cruel.—Mechanism to be judged by its fruits. Pages 69-94


CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD

Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.—Men of science not
speculative.—Confusion in semi-moral subjects.—“Physic of metaphysic
begs defence.”—Evolution by mechanism.—Evolution by ideal
attraction.—If species are evolved they cannot guide
evolution.—Intrusion of optimism.—Evolution according to Hegel.—The
conservative interpretation.—The radical one.—Megalomania.—Chaos in
the theory of mind.—Origin of self-consciousness.—The notion of
spirit.—The notion of sense.—Competition between the two.—The rise of
scepticism. Pages 95-125


CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY

Mind reading not science.—Experience a reconstruction.—The honest art
of education.—Arbitrary readings of the mind.—Human nature appealed to
rather than described.—Dialectic in psychology.—Spinoza on the
passions.—A principle of estimation cannot govern events.—Scientific
psychology a part of biology.—Confused attempt to detach the psychic
element.—Differentia of the psychic.—Approach to irrelevant
sentience.—Perception represents things in their practical relation to
the body.—Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.—Attempt at
idealistic physics.—Association not efficient.—It describes
coincidences.—Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in
dialectic.—Suggestion a fancy name for automatism, and will
another.—Double attachment of mind to nature.—Is the subject-matter of
psychology absolute being?—Sentience is representable only in
fancy.—The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not
sentience, are also real.—Mind knowable and important in so far as it
represents other things. Pages 126-166


CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT

Dialectic better than physics.—Maladjustments to nature render physics
conspicuous and unpleasant.—Physics should be largely virtual, and
dialectic explicit.—Intent is vital and indescribable.—It is analogous
to flux in existence.—It expresses natural life.—It has a material
basis.—It is necessarily relevant to earth.—The basis of intent
becomes appreciable in language.—Intent starts from a datum, and is
carried by a feeling.—It demands conventional expression.—A fable
about matter and form. Pages 167-186


CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC

Dialectic elaborates given forms.—Forms are abstracted from existence
by intent.—Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous
intent.—The fact that mathematics applies to existence is
empirical.—Its moral value is therefore contingent.—Quantity submits
easily to dialectical treatment—Constancy and progress in
intent.—Intent determines the functional essence of objects.—Also the
scope of ideals.—Double status of mathematics.—Practical rôle of
dialectic.—Hegel’s satire on dialectic.—Dialectic expresses a given
intent.—Its empire is ideal and autonomous. Pages 187-209


CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY

Empirical alloy in dialectic.—Arrested rationality in morals.—Its
emotional and practical power.—Moral science is an application of
dialectic, not a part of anthropology.—Estimation the soul of
philosophy.—Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.—A choice
of proverbs.—Their various representative value.—Conflict of partial
moralities.—The Greek ideal.—Imaginative exuberance and political
discipline.—Sterility of Greek example.—Prerational morality among the
Jews.—The development of conscience.—Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek
aims.—Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no programme.
Pages 210-232


CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS

Moral passions represent private interests.—Common ideal interests may
supervene.—To this extent there is rational society.—A rational
morality not attainable, but its principle clear.—It is the logic of an
autonomous will.—Socrates’ science.—Its opposition to sophistry and
moral anarchy.—Its vitality.—Genuine altruism is natural
self-expression.—Reason expresses impulses, but impulses reduced to
harmony.—Self-love artificial.—The sanction of reason is
happiness.—Moral science impeded by its chaotic data, and its
unrecognised scope.—Fallacy in democratic hedonism.—Sympathy a
conditional duty.—All life, and hence right life, finite and
particular. Pages 233-261


CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY

Socratic ethics retrospective.—Rise of disillusioned moralities.—The
illusion subsisting in them.—Epicurean refuge in pleasure.—Stoic
recourse to conformity.—Conformity the core of Islam, enveloped in
arbitrary doctrines.—The latter alone lend it practical force.—Moral
ambiguity in pantheism.—Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a
mythology.—A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of
dialectic.—The Hebraic cry for redemption.—The two factors meet in
Christianity.—Consequent eclecticism.—The negation of naturalism never
complete.—Spontaneous values rehabilitated.—A witness out of
India.—Dignity of post-rational morality.—Absurdities nevertheless
involved.—The soul of positivism in all ideals.—Moribund dreams and
perennial realities. Pages 262-300


CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE

Various modes of revising science.—Science its own best
critic.—Obstruction by alien traditions.—Needless anxiety for moral
interests.—Science an imaginative and practical art.—Arrière-pensée in
transcendentalism.—Its romantic sincerity.—Its constructive
impotence.—Its dependence on common-sense.—Its futility.—Ideal
science is self-justified.—Physical science is presupposed in
scepticism.—It recurs in all understanding of perception.—Science
contains all trustworthy knowledge.—It suffices for the Life of Reason.
Pages 301-320




REASON IN SCIENCE




CHAPTER I

TYPES AND AIMS OF SCIENCE


[Sidenote: Science still young.]

Science is so new a thing and so far from final, it seems to the layman
so hopelessly accurate and extensive, that a moralist may well feel some
diffidence in trying to estimate its achievements and promises at their
human worth. The morrow may bring some great revolution in science, and
is sure to bring many a correction and many a surprise. Religion and art
have had their day; indeed a part of the faith they usually inspire is
to believe that they have long ago revealed their secret. A critic may
safely form a judgment concerning them; for even if he dissents from the
orthodox opinion and ventures to hope that religion and art may assume
in the future forms far nobler and more rational than any they have
hitherto worn, still he must confess that art and religion have had
several turns at the wheel; they have run their course through in
various ages and climes with results which anybody is free to estimate
if he has an open mind and sufficient interest in the subject. Science,
on the contrary, which apparently cannot exist where intellectual
freedom is denied, has flourished only twice in recorded times: once
for some three hundred years in ancient Greece, and again for about the
same period in modern Christendom. Its fruits have scarcely begun to
appear; the lands it is discovering have not yet been circumnavigated,
and there is no telling what its ultimate influence will be on human
practice and feeling.

[Sidenote: Its miscarriage in Greece.]

The first period in the life of science was brilliant but ineffectual.
The Greeks’ energy and liberty were too soon spent, and the very
exuberance of their genius made its expression chaotic. Where every mind
was so fresh and every tongue so clever no scientific tradition could
arise, and no laborious applications could be made to test the value of
rival notions and decide between them. Men of science were mere
philosophers. Each began, not where his predecessor had ended, but at
the very beginning. Another circumstance that impeded the growth of
science was the forensic and rhetorical turn proper to Greek
intelligence. This mental habit gave a tremendous advantage in
philosophy to the moralist and poet over the naturalist or
mathematician. Hence what survived in Greece after the heyday of
theoretic achievement was chiefly philosophies of life, and these—at
the death of liberty—grew daily more personal and ascetic. Authority in
scientific matters clung chiefly to Plato and Aristotle, and this not
for the sake of their incomparable moral philosophy—for in ethics that
decadent age preferred the Stoics and Epicureans—but just for those
rhetorical expedients which in the Socratic school took the place of
natural science. Worse influences in this field could hardly be
imagined, since Plato’s physics ends in myth and apologue, while
Aristotle’s ends in nomenclature and teleology.

All that remained of Greek physics, therefore, was the conception of
what physics should be—a great achievement due to the earlier
thinkers—and certain hints and guesses in that field. The elements of
geometry had also been formulated, while the Socratic school bequeathed
to posterity a well-developed group of moral sciences, rational in
principle, but destined to be soon overlaid with metaphysical and
religious accretions, so that the dialectical nerve and reasonableness
of them were obliterated, and there survived only miscellaneous
conclusions, fragments of wisdom built topsy-turvy into the new mythical
edifice. It is the sad task reserved for historical criticism to detach
those sculptured stones from the rough mass in which they have been
embedded and to rearrange them in their pristine order, thus
rediscovering the inner Socratic principle of moral philosophy, which is
nothing but self-knowledge—a circumspect, systematic utterance of the
speaker’s mind, disclosing his implicit meaning and his ultimate
preferences.

[Sidenote: Its timid reappearance in modern times.]

At its second birth science took a very different form. It left cosmic
theories to pantheistic enthusiasts like Giordano Bruno, while in sober
laborious circles it confined itself to specific discoveries—the
earth’s roundness and motion about the sun, the laws of mechanics, the
development and application of algebra, the invention of the calculus,
and a hundred other steps forward in various disciplines. It was a
patient siege laid to the truth, which was approached blindly and
without a general, as by an army of ants; it was not stormed
imaginatively as by the ancient Ionians, who had reached at once the
notion of nature’s dynamic unity, but had neglected to take possession
in detail of the intervening tracts, whence resources might be drawn in
order to maintain the main position.

Nevertheless, as discoveries accumulated, they fell insensibly into a
system, and philosophers like Descartes and Newton arrived at a general
physics. This physics, however, was not yet meant to cover the whole
existent world, or to be the genetic account of all things in their
system. Descartes excluded from his physics the whole mental and moral
world, which became, so far as his science went, an inexplicable
addendum. Similarly Newton’s mechanical principles, broad as they were,
were conceived by him merely as a parenthesis in theology. Not until the
nineteenth century were the observations that had been accumulated given
their full value or in fact understood; for Spinoza’s system, though
naturalistic in spirit, was still dialectical in form, and had no
influence on science and for a long time little even on speculation.

Indeed the conception of a natural order, like the Greek cosmos, which
shall include all existences—gods no less than men, if gods actually
exist—is one not yet current, although it is implied in every
scientific explanation and is favoured by two powerful contemporary
movements which, coming from different quarters, are leading men’s minds
back to the same ancient and obvious naturalism. One of these movements
is the philosophy of evolution, to which Darwin gave such an
irresistible impetus. The other is theology itself, where it has been
emancipated from authority and has set to work to square men’s
conscience with history and experience. This theology has generally
passed into speculative idealism, which under another name recognises
the universal empire of law and conceives man’s life as an incident in a
prodigious natural process, by which his mind and his interests are
produced and devoured. This “idealism” is in truth a system of
immaterial physics, like that of Pythagoras or Heraclitus. While it
works with fantastic and shifting categories, which no plain naturalist
would care to use, it has nothing to apply those categories to except
what the naturalist or historian may already have discovered and
expressed in the categories of common prose. German idealism is a
translation of physical evolution into mythical language, which
presents the facts now in the guise of a dialectical progression, now in
that of a romantic drama. In either case the facts are the same, and
just those which positive knowledge has come upon. Thus many who are not
brought to naturalism by science are brought to it, quite unwillingly
and unawares, by their religious speculations.

[Sidenote: Distinction between science and myth.]

The gulf that yawns between such idealistic cosmogonies and a true
physics may serve to make clear the divergence in principle which
everywhere divides natural science from arbitrary conceptions of things.
This divergence is as far as possible from lying in the merit of the two
sorts of theory. Their merit, and the genius and observation required to
frame them, may well be equal, or an imaginative system may have the
advantage in these respects. It may even be more serviceable for a while
and have greater pragmatic value, so long as knowledge is at best
fragmentary, and no consecutive or total view of things is attempted by
either party. Thus in social life a psychology expressed in terms of
abstract faculties and personified passions may well carry a man farther
than a physiological psychology would. Or, again, we may say that there
was more experience and love of nature enshrined in ancient mythology
than in ancient physics; the observant poet might then have fared better
in the world than the pert and ignorant materialist. Nor does the
difference between science and myth lie in the fact that the one is
essentially less speculative than the other. They are differently
speculative, it is true, since myth terminates in unverifiable notions
that might by chance represent actual existences; while science
terminates in concepts or laws, themselves not possibly existent, but
verified by recurring particular facts, belonging to the same experience
as those from which the theory started.

[Sidenote: Platonic status of hypothesis.]

The laws formulated by science—the transitive figments describing the
relation between fact and fact—possess only a Platonic sort of reality.
They are more real, if you will, than the facts themselves, because they
are more permanent, trustworthy, and pervasive; but at the same time
they are, if you will, not real at all, because they are incompatible
with immediacy and alien to brute existence. In declaring what is true
of existences they altogether renounce existence on their own behalf.
This situation has made no end of trouble in ill-balanced minds, not
docile to the diversities and free complexity of things, but bent on
treating everything by a single method. They have asked themselves
persistently the confusing question whether the matter or the form of
things is the reality; whereas, of course, both elements are needed,
each with its incommensurable kind of being. The material element alone
is existent, while the ideal element is the sum of all those
propositions which are true of what exists materially. Anybody’s
_knowledge_ of the truth, being a complex and fleeting feeling, is of
course but a moment of existence or material being, which whether found
in God or man is as far as possible from being that truth itself which
it may succeed in knowing.

[Sidenote: Meaning of verification.]

The true contrast between science and myth is more nearly touched when
we say that science alone is capable of verification. Some ambiguity,
however, lurks in this phrase, since verification comes to a method only
vicariously, when the particulars it prophesies are realised in sense.
To verify a theory as if it were not a method but a divination of occult
existences would be to turn the theory into a myth and then to discover
that what the myth pictured had, by a miracle, an actual existence also.
There is accordingly a sense in which myth admits substantiation of a
kind that science excludes. The Olympic hierarchy might conceivably
exist bodily; but gravitation and natural selection, being schemes of
relation, can never exist substantially and on their own behoof.
Nevertheless, the Olympic hierarchy, even if it happened to exist, could
not be proved to do so unless it were a part of the natural world open
to sense; while gravitation and natural selection, without being
existences, can be verified at every moment by concrete events occurring
as those principles require. A hypothesis, being a discursive device,
gains its utmost possible validity when its discursive value is
established. It _is_ not, it merely _applies_; and every situation in
which it is found to apply is a proof of its truth.

The case would not be different with fables, were their basis and
meaning remembered. But fables, when hypostatised, forget that they,
too, were transitive symbols and boast to reveal an undiscoverable
reality. A dogmatic myth is in this sorry plight: that the more evidence
it can find to support it the more it abrogates its metaphysical
pretensions, while the more it insists on its absolute truth the less
relevance it has to experience and the less meaning. To try to support
fabulous dogmas by evidence is tantamount to acknowledging that they are
merely scientific hypotheses, instruments of discourse, and methods of
expression. But in that case their truth would no longer be supposed to
lie in the fact that somewhere beyond the range of human observation
they descended bodily to the plane of flying existence, and were
actually enacted there. They would have ceased to resemble the society
of Olympus, which to prove itself real would need to verify itself,
since only the gods and those mortals admitted to their conclave could
know for a fact that that celestial gathering existed. On the contrary,
a speculation that could be supported by evidence would be one that
might be made good without itself descending to the plane of immediacy,
but would be sufficiently verified when diffuse facts fall out as it had
led us to expect. The myth in such a case would have become transparent
again and relevant to experience, which could continually serve to
support or to correct it. Even if somewhat overloaded and poetical, it
would be in essence a scientific theory. It would no longer terminate in
itself; it would point forward, leading the thinker that used it to
eventual facts of experience, facts which his poetic wisdom would have
prepared him to meet and to use.

[Sidenote: Possible validity of myths.]

If I say, for instance, that Punishment, limping in one leg, patiently
follows every criminal, the myth is obvious and innocent enough. It
reveals nothing, but, what is far better, it means something. I have
expressed a truth of experience and pointed vaguely to the course which
events may be expected to take under given circumstances. The
expression, though mythical in form, is scientific in effect, because it
tends to surround a given phenomenon (the crime) with objects on its own
plane—other passions and sensations to follow upon it. What would be
truly mythical would be to stop at the figure of speech and maintain, by
way of revealed dogma, that a lame goddess of vindictive mind actually
follows every wicked man, her sword poised in mid-air. Sinking into that
reverie, and trembling at its painted truth, I should be passing to the
undiscoverable and forgetting the hard blows actually awaiting me in the
world. Fable, detaining the mind too long in the mesh of expression,
would have become metaphysical dogma. I should have connected the given
fact with imagined facts, which even if by chance real—for such a
goddess may, for all we know, actually float in the fourth
dimension—are quite supernumerary in my world, and never, by any
possibility, can become parts or extensions of the experience they are
thought to explain. The gods are demonstrable only as hypotheses, but as
hypotheses they are not gods.

[Sidenote: Any dreamed-of thing might be experienced.]

The same distinction is sometimes expressed by saying that science deals
only with objects of possible experience. But this expression is
unfortunate, because everything thinkable, no matter how mythical and
supernatural or how far beyond the range of mortal senses, is an object
of _possible_ experience. Tritons and sea-horses might observe one
another and might feel themselves live. The thoughts and decrees said to
occupy the divine mind from all eternity would certainly be phenomena
there; they would be experienced things. Were fables really as
metaphysical and visionary as they pretend to be, were they not all the
while and in essence mere symbols for natural situations, they would be
nothing but reports about other alleged parts of experience. A real
Triton, a real Creator, a real heaven would obviously be objects open to
properly equipped senses and seats of much vivid experience. But a
Triton after all has something to do with the Ægean and other earthly
waters; a Creator has something to do with the origin of man and of his
habitat; heaven has something to do with the motives and rewards of
moral action. This relevance to given experience and its objects is what
cuts those myths off from their blameless and gratuitous rôle of
reporting experiences that might be going on merrily enough somewhere
else in the universe. In calling them myths and denying that what they
describe falls within the purview of science, we do not assert that,
absolutely taken, they could not be objects of a possible experience.
What we mean is rather that no matter how long we searched the sea
waves, in which it is the essence of our Tritons to disport themselves,
we should never find Tritons there; and that if we traced back the
history of man and nature we should find them always passing by natural
generation out of slightly different earlier forms and never appearing
suddenly, at the fiat of a vehement Jehovah swimming about in a chaos;
and finally that if we considered critically our motives and our ideals,
we should find them springing from and directed upon a natural life and
its functions, and not at all on a disembodied and timeless ecstasy.
Those myths, then, while they intrinsically refer to facts in the given
world, describe those facts in incongruous terms. They are symbols, not
extensions, for the experience we know.

[Sidenote: But science follows the movement of its subject-matter.]

A chief characteristic of science, then, is that in supplementing given
facts it supplements them by adding other facts belonging to the same
sphere, and eventually discoverable by tracing the given object in its
own plane through its continuous transformations. Science expands
speculatively, by the aid of merely instrumental hypotheses, objects
given in perception until they compose a congruous, self-supporting
world, all parts of which might be observed consecutively. What a
scientific hypothesis interpolates among the given facts—the atomic
structure of things, for instance—might come in time under the direct
fire of attention, fixed more scrupulously, longer, or with better
instruments upon those facts themselves. Otherwise the hypothesis that
assumed that structure would be simply false, just as a hypothesis that
the interior of the earth is full of molten fire would be false if on
inspection nothing were found there but solid rock. Science does not
merely prolong a habit of inference; it verifies and solves the
inference by reaching the fact inferred.

The contrast with myth at this point is very interesting; for in myth
the facts are themselves made vehicles, and knowledge is felt to
terminate in an independent existence on a higher or deeper level than
any immediate fact; and this circumstance is what makes myth impossible
to verify and, except by laughter, to disprove. If I attributed the
stars’ shining to the diligence of angels who lighted their lamps at
sunset, lest the upper reaches of the world should grow dangerous for
travellers, and if I made my romance elaborate and ingenious enough, I
might possibly find that the stars’ appearance and disappearance could
continue to be interpreted in that way. My myth might always suggest
itself afresh and might be perennially appropriate. But it would never
descend, with its charming figures, into the company of its evidences.
It would never prove that what it terminated in was a fact, as in my
metaphysical faith I had deputed and asserted it to be. The angels would
remain notional, while my intent was to have them exist; so that the
more earnestly I held to my fable the more grievously should I be
deceived. For even if seraphic choirs existed in plenty on their own
emotional or musical plane of being, it would not have been their
hands—if they had hands—that would have lighted the stars I saw; and
this, after all, was the gist and starting-point of my whole fable and
its sole witness in my world. A myth might by chance be a revelation,
did what it talks of have an actual existence somewhere else in the
universe; but it would need to be a revelation in order to be true at
all, and would then be true only in an undeserved and spurious fashion.
Any representative and provable validity which it might possess would
assimulate it to science and reduce it to a mere vehicle and instrument
for human discourse. It would evaporate as soon as the prophecies it
made were fulfilled, and it would claim no being and no worship on its
own account. Science might accordingly be called a myth conscious of its
essential ideality, reduced to its fighting weight and valued only for
its significance.

[Sidenote: Moral value of science.]

A symptom of the divergence between myth and science may be found in the
contrary emotions which they involve. Since in myth we interpret
experience in order to interpret it, in order to delight ourselves by
turning it poetically into the language and prosody of our own life, the
emotion we feel when we succeed is artistic; myth has a dramatic charm.
Since in science, on the contrary, we employ notional machinery, in
itself perhaps indifferent enough, in order to arrive at eventual facts
and to conceive the aspect which given things would actually wear from a
different point of view in space or time, the emotion we feel when we
succeed is that of security and intellectual dominion; science has a
rational value. To see better what we now see, to see by anticipation
what we should see actually under other conditions, is wonderfully to
satisfy curiosity and to enlighten conduct. At the same time, scientific
thinking involves no less inward excitement than dramatic fiction does.
It summons before us an even larger number of objects in their fatal
direction upon our interests. Were science adequate it would indeed
absorb those passions which now, since they must be satisfied somehow,
have to be satisfied by dramatic myths. To imagine how things might have
been would be neither interesting nor possible if we knew fully how
things are. All pertinent dramatic emotion, joyous or tragic, would then
inhere in practical knowledge. As it is, however, science abstracts from
the more musical overtones of things in order to trace the gross and
basal processes within them; so that the pursuit of science seems
comparatively dry and laborious, except where at moments the vista opens
through to the ultimate or leads back to the immediate. Then, perhaps,
we recognise that in science we are surveying all it concerns us to
know, and in so doing are becoming all that it profits us to be. Mere
amusement in thought as in sportive action is tedious and illiberal: it
marks a temperament so imperfectly educated that it prefers idle to
significant play and a flimsy to a solid idea.

[Sidenote: Its continuity with common knowledge.]

The fact that science follows the subject-matter in its own movement
involves a further consequence: science differs from common knowledge in
scope only, not in nature. When intelligence arises, when the flux of
things begins to be mitigated by representation of it and objects are at
last fixed and recognisable, there is science. For even here, in the
presence of a datum something virtual and potential is called up,
namely, what the given thing was a moment ago, what it is growing into,
or what it is contrasted with in character. As I walk round a tree, I
learn that the parts still visible, those that have just disappeared
and those now coming into view, are continuous and belong to the same
tree.

This declaration, though dialectic might find many a mare’s nest in its
language, is a safe and obvious enough expression of knowledge. It
involves terms, however, which are in the act of becoming potential.
What is just past, what is just coming, though sensibly continuous with
what is present, are partially infected with nonentity. After a while
human apprehension can reach them only by inference, and to count upon
them is frankly to rely on theory. The other side of the tree, which
common sense affirms to exist unconditionally, will have to be
represented in memory or fancy; and it may never actually be observed by
any mortal. Yet, if I continued my round, I should actually observe it
and know it by experience; and I should find that it had the same status
as the parts now seen, and was continuous with them. My assertion that
it exists, while certainly theoretical and perhaps false, is accordingly
scientific in type. Science, when it has no more scope than this, is
indistinguishable from common sense. The two become distinct only when
the facts inferred cannot be easily verified or have not yet been merged
with the notion representing the given object in most men’s minds.

Where science remains consciously theoretical (being as yet contrasted
with ordinary apperception and current thought), it is, ideally
considered, a _pis aller_, an expedient to which a mind must have
recourse when it lacks power and scope to hold all experience in hand
and to view the wide world in its genuine immediacy. As oblivescence is
a gradual death, proper to a being not ideally master of the universal
flux, but swamped within it, so science is an artificial life, in which
what cannot be perceived directly (because personal limitations forbid)
may be regarded abstractly, yet efficaciously, in what we think and do.
With better faculties the field of possible experience could be better
dominated, and fewer of its parts, being hidden from sight, would need
to be mapped out symbolically on that sort of projection which we call
scientific inference. The real relations between the parts of nature
would then be given in intuition, from which hypothesis, after all, has
borrowed its schemata.

[Sidenote: Its intellectual essence.]

Science is a half-way house between private sensation and universal
vision. We should not forget to add, however, that the universal vision
in question, if it were to be something better than private sensation or
passive feeling in greater bulk, would have to be intellectual, just as
science is; that is, it would have to be practical and to survey the
flux from a given standpoint, in a perspective determined by special and
local interests. Otherwise the whole world, when known, would merely be
re-enacted in its blind immediacy without being understood or subjected
to any purpose. The critics of science, when endowed with any
speculative power, have always seen that what is hypothetical and
abstract in scientific method is somehow servile and provisional;
science being a sort of telegraphic wire through which a meagre report
reaches us of things we would fain observe and live through in their
full reality. This report may suffice for approximately fit action; it
does not suffice for ideal knowledge of the truth nor for adequate
sympathy with the reality. What commonly escapes speculative critics of
science, however, is that in transcending hypothesis and reaching
immediacy again we should run a great risk of abandoning knowledge and
sympathy altogether; for if we _became_ what we now represent so
imperfectly, we should evidently no longer represent it at all. We
should not, at the end of our labours, have at all enriched our own
minds by adequate knowledge of what surrounds us, nor made our wills
just in view of alien but well-considered interests. We should have lost
our own essence and substituted for it, not something higher than
indiscriminate being, but only indiscriminate being in its flat, blind,
and selfish infinity. The ideality, the representative faculty, would
have gone out in our souls, and our perfected humanity would have
brought us back to protoplasm.

In transcending science, therefore, we must not hope to transcend
knowledge, nor in transcending selfishness to abolish finitude. Finitude
is the indispensable condition of unselfishness as well as of
selfishness, and of speculative vision no less than of hypothetical
knowledge. The defect of science is that it is inadequate or abstract,
that the account it gives of things is not full and sensuous enough; but
its merit is that, like sense, it makes external being present to a
creature that is concerned in adjusting itself to its environment, and
informs that creature about things other than itself. Science, if
brought to perfection, would not lose its representative or ideal
essence. It would still survey and inform, but it would survey
everything at once and inform the being it enlightened about all that
could affect its interests. It would thus remain practical in effect and
speculative in character. In losing its accidental limitations it would
not lose its initial bias, its vital function. It would continue to be a
rational activity, guiding and perfecting a natural being.

Perfect knowledge of things would be as far as possible from identifying
the knower with them, seeing that for the most part—even when we call
them human—they have no knowledge of themselves. Science, accordingly,
even when imperfect, is a tremendous advance on absorption in sense and
a dull immediacy. It begins to enrich the mind and gives it some
inkling, at least, of that ideal dominion which each centre of
experience might have if it had learned to regard all others, and the
relation connecting it with them, both in thought and in action. Ideal
knowledge would be an inward state corresponding to a perfect
adjustment of the body to all forces affecting it. If the adjustment was
perfect the inward state would regard every detail in the objects
envisaged, but it would see those details in a perspective of its own,
adding to sympathetic reproduction of them a consciousness of their
relation to its own existence and perfection.

[Sidenote: Unity of science.]

The fact that science expresses the character and relation of objects in
their own terms has a further important consequence, which serves again
to distinguish science from metaphorical thinking. If a man tries to
illustrate the nature of a thing by assimilating it to something else
which he happens to have in mind at the same time, it is obvious that a
second man, whose mind is differently furnished, may assimilate the same
object to a quite different idea: so myths are centrifugal, and the more
elaborate and delicate they are the more they diverge, like
well-developed languages. The rude beginnings of myth in every age and
country bear a certain resemblance, because the facts interpreted are
similar and the minds reading them have not yet developed their special
grammar of representation. But two highly developed mythical
systems—two theologies, for instance, like the Greek and the
Indian—will grow every day farther and farther apart. Science, on the
contrary, whatever it may start with, runs back into the same circle of
facts, because it follows the lead of the subject-matter, and is
attentive to its inherent transformations.

If men’s fund of initial perceptions, then, is alike, their science is
sure to be so; while the embroideries they make upon perception out of
their own resources will differ as much as do the men themselves. Men
asleep, said Heraclitus, live each in his own world, but awake they live
in the same world together. To be awake is nothing but to be dreaming
under control of the object; it is to be pursuing science to the
comparative exclusion of mere mental vegetation and spontaneous myth.
Thus if our objects are the same, our science and our waking lives will
coincide; or if there is a natural diversity in our discoveries, because
we occupy different points in space and time and have a varying range of
experience, these diversities will nevertheless supplement one another;
the discovery that each has made will be a possible discovery for the
others also. So a geographer in China and one in Babylonia may at first
make wholly unlike maps; but in time both will take note of the
Himalayas, and the side each approaches will slope up to the very crest
approached by the other. So science is self-confirming, and its most
disparate branches are mutually illuminating; while in the realm of
myth, until it is surveyed scientifically, there can be nothing but
mutual repulsion and incapacity to understand. Languages and religions
are necessarily rivals, but sciences are necessarily allies.

[Sidenote: In existence, judged by reflection, there is a margin of
waste.]

The unity of science can reach no farther than does coherent experience;
and though coherence be a condition of experience in the more pregnant
sense of the word—in the sense in which the child or the fool has no
experience—existence is absolutely free to bloom as it likes, and no
logic can set limits or prescribe times for its irresponsible presence.
A great deal may accordingly exist which cannot be known by science, or
be reached from the outside at all. This fact perhaps explains why
science has as yet taken so little root in human life: for even within
the limits of human existence, which are tolerably narrow, there is
probably no little incoherence, no little lapsing into what, from any
other point of view, is inconceivable and undiscoverable. Science, for
instance, can hardly reach the catastrophes and delights, often so
vivid, which occur in dreams; for even if a physiological psychology
should some day be able to find the causes of these phenomena, and so to
predict them, it would never enter the dream-world persuasively, in a
way that the dreamer could appreciate and understand, while he continued
to dream. This is because that dream-world and the waking world present
two disjointed landscapes, and the figures they contain belong to quite
different genealogies—like the families of Zeus and of Abraham. Science
is a great disciplinarian, and misses much of the sport which the
absolute is free to indulge in. If there is no inner congruity and
communion between two fields, science cannot survey them both; at best
in tracing the structure of things presented in one of them, it may come
upon some detail which may offer a basis or lodgment for the entire
fabric of the other, which will thus be explained _ab extra_; as the
children of Abraham might give an explanation for Zeus and his progeny,
treating them as a phenomenon in the benighted minds of some of Japhet’s
children.

This brings the Olympian world within the purview of science, but does
so with a very bad grace. For suppose the Olympian gods really
existed—and there is nothing impossible in that supposition—they would
not be allowed to have any science of their own; or if they did, it
would threaten the children of Abraham with the same imputed unreality
with which the latter boast to have extinguished Olympus. In order,
then, that two regions of existence should be amenable to a science
common to both and establishing a mutual rational representation between
them, it is requisite that the two regions should be congruous in
texture and continuous inwardly: the objects present in each must be
transformations of the objects present in the other. As this condition
is not always fulfilled, even within a man’s personal fortunes, it is
impossible that all he goes through should be mastered by science or
should accrue to him ideally and become part of his funded experience.
Much must be lost, left to itself, and resigned to the unprofitable
flux that produced it.

[Sidenote: Sciences converge from different points of origin.]

A consequence of this incoherence in experience is that science is not
absolutely single but springs up in various places at once, as a certain
consistency or method becomes visible in this or that direction. These
independent sciences might, conceivably, never meet at all; each might
work out an entirely different aspect of things and cross the other, as
it were, at a different level. This actually happens, for instance, in
mathematics as compared with history or psychology, and in morals as
compared with physics. Nevertheless, the fact that these various
sciences are all human, and that here, for instance, we are able to
mention them in one breath and to compare their natures, is proof that
their spheres touch somehow, even if only peripherally. Since common
knowledge, which knows of them all, is itself an incipient science, we
may be sure that some continuity and some congruity obtains between
their provinces. Some aspect of each must coincide with some aspect of
some other, else nobody who pursued any one science would so much as
suspect the existence of the rest. Great as may be the aversion of
learned men to one another, and comprehensive as may be their ignorance,
they are not positively compelled to live in solitary confinement, and
the key of their prison cells is at least in their own pocket.

[Sidenote: Two chief kinds of science, physics and dialectic.]

Some sciences, like chemistry and biology, or biology and anthropology,
are parted only, we presume, by accidental gaps in human knowledge; a
more minute and better directed study of these fields would doubtless
disclose their continuity with the fields adjoining. But there is one
general division in science which cuts almost to the roots of human
experience. Human understanding has used from the beginning a double
method of surveying and arresting ideally the irreparable flux of being.
One expedient has been to notice and identify similarities of character,
recurrent types, in the phenomena that pass before it or in its own
operations; the other expedient has been to note and combine in one
complex object characters which occur and reappear together. The latter
feat which is made easy by the fact that when various senses are
stimulated at once the inward instinctive reaction—which is felt by a
primitive mind more powerfully than any external image—is one and not
consciously divisible.

The first expedient imposes on the flux what we call ideas, which are
concretions in discourse, terms employed in thought and language. The
second expedient separates the same flux into what we call things, which
are concretions in existence, complexes of qualities subsisting in space
and time, having definable dynamic relations there and a traceable
history. Carrying out this primitive diversity in reflection science
has moved in two different directions. By refining concretions in
discourse it has attained to mathematics, logic, and the dialectical
developments of ethics; by tracing concretions in existence it has
reached the various natural and historical sciences. Following ancient
usage, I shall take the liberty of calling the whole group of sciences
which elaborates ideas _dialectic_, and the whole group that describes
existences _physics_.

The contrast between ideal science or dialectic and natural science or
physics is as great as the understanding of a single experience could
well afford; yet the two kinds of science are far from independent. They
touch at their basis and they co-operate in their results. Were
dialectic made clearer or physics deeper than it commonly is, these
points of contact would doubtless be multiplied; but even as they stand
they furnish a sufficient illustration of the principle that all science
develops objects in their own category and gives the mind dominion over
the flux of matter by discovering its form.

[Sidenote: Their mutual implication.]

That physics and dialectic touch at their basis may be shown by a double
analysis. In the first place, it is clear that the science of existence,
like all science, is itself discourse, and that before concretions in
existence can be discovered, and groups of coexistent qualities can be
recognised, these qualities themselves must be arrested by the mind,
noted, and identified in their recurrences. But these terms, bandied
about in scientific discourse, are so many essences and pure ideas: so
that the inmost texture of natural science is logical, and the whole
force of any observation made upon the outer world lies in the constancy
and mutual relations of the terms it is made in. If down did not mean
down and motion motion, Newton could never have taken note of the fall
of his apple. Now the constancy and relation of meanings is something
_meant_, it is something created by insight and intent and is altogether
dialectical; so that the science of existence is a portion of the art of
discourse.

On the other hand discourse, in its operation, is a part of existence.
That truth or logical cogency is not itself an existence can be proved
dialectically,[A] and is obvious to any one who sees for a moment what
truth means, especially if he remembers at the same time that all
existence is mutable, which it is the essence of truth not to be. But
the knowledge or discovery of truth is an event in time, an incident in
the flux of existence, and therefore a matter for natural science to
study.

Furthermore, every term which dialectic uses is originally given
embodied; in other words, it is given as an element in the actual flux,
it conies by illustration. Though meaning is the object of an ideal
function, and signification is inwardly appreciable only in terms of
signification, yet the ideal leap is made from a material datum: that in
which signification is seen is a fact. Or to state the matter somewhat
differently, truth is not self-generating; if it were it would be a
falsehood.

Its eternity, and the infinitude of propositions it contains, remain
potential and unapproachable until their incidence is found in
existence. Form cannot of itself decide which of all possible forms
shall be real; in their ideality, and without reference to their
illustration in things, all consistent propositions would be equally
valid and equally trivial. Important truth is truth about something, not
truth about truth; and although a single datum might suffice to give
foothold and pertinence to an infinity of truths, as one atom would
posit all geometry, geometry, if there were no space, would be, if I may
say so, all of the fourth dimension, and arithmetic, if there were no
pulses or chasms in being, would be all algebra. Truth depends upon
facts for its perspective, since facts select truths and decide which
truths shall be mere possibilities and which shall be the eternal forms
of actual things. The dialectical world would be a trackless desert if
the existent world had no arbitrary constitution. Living dialectic comes
to clarify existence; it turns into meanings the actual forms of things
by reflecting upon them, and by making them intended subjects of
discourse.

[Sidenote: Their co-operation.]

Dialectic and physics, thus united at their basis, meet again in their
results. In mechanical science, which is the best part of physics,
mathematics, which is the best part of dialectic, plays a predominant
rôle; it furnishes the whole method of understanding wherever there is
any real understanding at all. In psychology and history, too, although
dialectic is soon choked by the cross-currents of nature, it furnishes
the little perspicuousness which there is. We understand actions and
mental developments when the purposes or ideas contained in any stage
are carried out logically in the sequel; it is when conduct and growth
are rational, that is, when they are dialectical, that we think we have
found the true secret and significance of them. It is the evident ideal
of physics, in every department, to attain such an insight into causes
that the effects actually given may be thence _deduced_; and deduction
is another name for dialectic. To be sure, the dialectic applicable to
material processes and to human life is one in which the terms and the
categories needed are still exceedingly numerous and vague: a little
logic is all that can be read into the cataract of events. But the hope
of science, a hope which is supported by every success it scores, is
that a simpler law than has yet been discovered will be found to connect
units subtler than those yet known; and that in these finer terms the
universal mechanism may be exhaustively rendered. Mechanism is the ideal
of physics, because it is the infusion of a maximum of mathematical
necessity into the flux of real things. It is the aspiration of natural
science to be as dialectical as possible, and thus, in their ideal, both
branches of science are brought together.

That the ideal of dialectic is to apply to existence and thereby to
coincide with physics is in a sense no less true, although dialecticians
may be little inclined to confess it. The direct purpose of deduction is
to elucidate an idea, to develop an import, and nothing can be more
irrelevant in this science than whether the conclusion is verified in
nature or not. But the direct purpose of dialectic is not its ultimate
justification. Dialectic is a human pursuit and has, at bottom, a moral
function; otherwise, at bottom, it would have no value. And the moral
function and ultimate justification of dialectic is to further the Life
of Reason, in which human thought has the maximum practical validity,
and may enjoy in consequence the richest ideal development. If dialectic
takes a turn which makes it inapplicable in physics, which makes it
worthless for mastering experience, it loses all its dignity: for
abstract cogency has no dignity if the subject-matter into which it is
introduced is trivial. In fact, were dialectic a game in which the
counters were not actual data and the conclusions were not possible
principles for understanding existence, it would not be a science at
all. It would resemble a counterfeit paper currency, without intrinsic
value and without commercial convenience. Just as a fact without
implications is not a part of science, so a method without application
would not be.

The free excursions of dialectic into non-natural regions may be wisely
encouraged when they satisfy an interest which is at bottom healthy and
may, at least indirectly, bring with it excellent fruits. As musicians
are an honour to society, so are dialecticians that have a single heart
and an exquisite patience. But somehow the benefit must redound to
society and to practical knowledge, or these abstracted hermits will
seem at first useless and at last mad. The logic of nonsense has a
subtle charm only because it can so easily be turned into the logic of
common sense. Empty dialectic is, as it were, the ballet of science: it
runs most neatly after nothing at all.

[Sidenote: No science _a priori_.]

Both physics and dialectic are contained in common knowledge, and when
carried further than men carry them daily life these sciences remain
essentially inevitable and essentially fallible. If science deserves
respect, it is not for being oracular but for being useful and
delightful, as seeing is. Understanding is nothing but seeing under and
seeing far. There is indeed a great mystery in knowledge, but this
mystery is present in the simplest memory or presumption. The sciences
have nothing to supply more fundamental than vulgar thinking or, as it
were, preliminary to it. They are simply elaborations of it; they accept
its pre-suppositions and carry on its ordinary processes. A pretence on
the philosopher’s part that he could get behind or below human thinking,
that he could underpin, so to speak, his own childhood and the inherent
conventions of daily thought, would be pure imposture. A philosopher
can of course investigate the history of knowledge, he can analyse its
method and point out its assumptions; but he cannot know by other
authority than that which the vulgar know by, nor can his knowledge
begin with other unheard-of objects or deploy itself in advance over an
esoteric field. Every deeper investigation presupposes ordinary
perception and uses some at least of its data. Every possible discovery
_extends_ human knowledge. None can base human knowledge anew on a
deeper foundation or prefix an ante-experimental episode to experience.
We may construct a theory as disintegrating as we please about the
dialectical or empirical conditions of the experience given; we may
disclose its logical stratification or physical antecedents; but every
idea and principle used in such a theory must be borrowed from current
knowledge as it happens to lie in the philosopher’s mind.

[Sidenote: Role of criticism.]

If these speculative adventures do not turn out well, the scientific man
is free to turn about and become the critic and satirist of his foiled
ambitions. He may exhaust scepticism and withdraw into the citadel of
immediate feeling, yielding bastion after bastion to the assaults of
doubt. When he is at last perfectly safe from error and reduced to
speechless sensibility, he will perceive, however, that he is also
washed clean of every practical belief: he would declare himself
universally ignorant but for a doubt whether there be really anything to
know. This metaphysical exercise is simply one of those “fallings from
us, vanishings, blank misgivings of a creature moving about in worlds
not realised” which may visit any child. So long as the suspension of
judgment lasts, knowledge is surely not increased; but when we remember
that the enemy to whom we have surrendered is but a ghost of our own
evoking, we easily reoccupy the lost ground and fall back into an
ordinary posture of belief and expectation. This recovered faith has no
new evidences to rest on. We simply stand where we stood before we began
to philosophise, only with a better knowledge of the lines we are
holding and perhaps with less inclination to give them up again for no
better reason than the undoubted fact that, in a speculative sense, it
is always possible to renounce them.

Science, then, is the attentive consideration of common experience; it
is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same
order as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its
test is found, like theirs, in actual intuition, which sometimes
consists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is
merely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more
accurate of meaning from meaning and purpose from purpose. It generates
in the mind, for each vulgar observation, a whole brood of suggestions,
hypotheses, and inferences. The sciences bestow, as is right and
fitting, infinite pains upon that experience which in their absence
would drift by unchallenged or misunderstood. They take note, infer, and
prophesy. They compare prophecy with event; and altogether they
supply—so intent are they on reality—every imaginable background and
extension for the present dream.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote A: For instance, in Plato’s “Parmenides,” where it is shown
that the ideas are not in the mind. We may gather from what is there
said that the ideas cannot be identified with any embodiment of them,
however perfect, since an idea means a nature common to all its possible
embodiments and remains always outside of them. This is what Plato meant
by saying that the ideas lay apart from phenomena and were what they
were in and for themselves. They were mere forms and not, as a
materialised Platonism afterward fancied, images in the mind of some
psychological deity. The gods doubtless know the ideas, as Plato tells
us in the same place: these are the common object of their thought and
of ours; hence they are not anybody’s thinking process, which of course
would be in flux and phenomenal. Only by being ideal (_i.e._, by being a
goal of intellectual energy and no part of sensuous existence) can a
term be common to various minds and serve to make their deliverances
pertinent to one another.

That truth is no existence might also be proved as follows: Suppose that
nothing existed or (if critics carp at that phrase), that a universe did
not exist. It would then be true that all existences were wanting, yet
this truth itself would endure; therefore truth is not an existence. An
attempt might be made to reverse this argument by saying that since it
would still “be” true that nothing existed, the supposition is
self-contradictory, for the truth would “be” or exist in any case. Truth
would thus be turned into an opinion, supposed to subsist eternally in
the ether. The argument, however, is a bad sophism, because it falsifies
the intent of the terms used. Somebody’s opinion is not what is meant by
the truth, since every opinion, however long-lived, may be false.
Furthermore, the notion that it might have been true that nothing
existed is a perfectly clear notion. The nature of dialectic is entirely
corrupted when sincerity is lost. No intent can be self-contradictory,
since it fixes its own object, but a man may easily contradict himself
by wavering between one intent and another.]




CHAPTER II

HISTORY


[Sidenote: History an artificial memory.]

The least artificial extension of common knowledge is history. Personal
recollection supplies many an anecdote, anecdotes collected and freely
commented upon make up memoirs, and memoirs happily combined make not
the least interesting sort of history. When a man recalls any episode in
his career, describes the men that flourished in his youth, or laments
the changes that have since taken place, he is an informal historian. He
would become one in a formal and technical sense if he supplemented and
controlled his memory by ransacking papers, and taking elaborate pains
to gather evidence on the events he wished to relate. This systematic
investigation, especially when it goes back to first sources, widens the
basis for imaginative reconstruction. It buttresses somewhat the frail
body of casual facts that in the first instance may have engaged an
individual’s attention.

History is nothing but assisted and recorded memory. It might almost be
said to be no science at all, if memory and faith in memory were not
what science necessarily rests on. In order to sift evidence we must
rely on some witness, and we must trust experience before we proceed to
expand it. The line between what is known scientifically and what has
to be assumed in order to support that knowledge is impossible to draw.
Memory itself is an internal rumour; and when to this hearsay within the
mind we add the falsified echoes that reach us from others, we have but
a shifting and unseizable basis to build upon. The picture we frame of
the past changes continually and grows every day less similar to the
original experience which it purports to describe.

[Sidenote: Second sight requires control.]

It is true that memory sometimes, as in a vision, seems to raise the
curtain upon the past and restore it to us in its pristine reality. We
may imagine at such moments experience can never really perish, but,
though hidden by chance from the roving eye, endures eternally in some
spiritual sphere. Such bodily recovery of the past, however, like other
telepathic visions, can never prove its own truth. A lapse into by-gone
perception, a sense of living the past over with all its vivid minutiæ
and trivial concomitants, might involve no true repetition of anything
that had previously existed. It might be a fresh experience altogether.
The sense of knowing constitutes only a working presumption for
experiment to start with; until corroboration comes that presumption can
claim no respect from the outsider.

[Sidenote: Nature the theme common to various memories.]

While memory remains a private presumption, therefore, it can be
compared with nothing else that might test its veracity. Only when
memory is expressed and, in the common field of expression, finds itself
corroborated by another memory, does it rise somewhat in dignity and
approach scientific knowledge. Two presumptions, when they coincide,
make a double assurance. While memory, then, is the basis of all
historical knowledge, it is not called history until it enters a field
where it can be supported or corrected by evidence. This field is that
natural world which all experiences, in so far as they are rational,
envisage together. Assertions relating to events in that world can
corroborate or contradict one another—something that would be
impossible if each memory, like the plot of a novel, moved in a sphere
of its own. For memory to meet memory, the two must present objects
which are similar or continuous: then they can corroborate or correct
each other and help to fix the order of events as they really
happened—that is, as they happened independently of what either memory
may chance to represent. Thus even the most miraculous and direct
recovery of the past needs corroboration if it is to be systematically
credited; but to receive corroboration it must refer to some event in
nature, in that common world in space and time to which other memories
and perceptions may refer also. In becoming history, therefore, memory
becomes a portion of natural science. Its assertions are such that any
natural science may conceivably support or contradict them.

[Sidenote: Growth of legend.]

Nature and its transformations, however, form too serried and
complicated a system for our wayward minds to dominate if left to their
spontaneous workings. Whatever is remembered or conceived is at first
vaguely believed to have its place in the natural order, all myth and
fable being originally localised within the confines of the material
world and made to pass for a part of early history. The method by which
knowledge of the past is preserved is so subject to imaginative
influence that it cannot avail to exclude from history anything that the
imagination may supply. In the growth of legend a dramatic rhythm
becomes more and more marked. What falls in with this rhythm is
reproduced and accentuated whenever the train of memory is started anew.
The absence of such cadences would leave a sensible gap—a gap which the
momentum of ideation is quick to fill up with some appropriate image.
Whatever, on the other hand, cannot be incorporated into the dominant
round of fancies is consigned more and more to oblivion.

This consolidation of legend is not intentional. It is ingenuous and for
the most part inevitable. When we muse about our own past we are
conscious of no effort to give it dramatic unity; on the contrary, the
excitement and interest of the process consist in seeming to discover
the hidden eloquence and meaning of the events themselves. When a man of
experience narrates the wonders he has seen, we listen with a certain
awe, and believe in him for his miracles as we believe in our own memory
for its arts. A bard’s mechanical and ritualistic habits usually put all
judgment on his own part to sleep; while the sanctity attributed to the
tale, as it becomes automatically more impressive, precludes tinkering
with it intentionally. Especially the allegories and marvels with which
early history is adorned are not ordinarily invented with malice
prepense. They are rather discovered in the mind, like a foundling,
between night and morning. They are divinely vouchsafed. Each time the
tale is retold it suffers a variation which is not challenged, since it
is memory itself that has varied. The change is discoverable only if
some record of the narrative in its former guise, or some physical
memorial of the event related, survives to be confronted with the
modified version. The modified version itself can make no comparisons.
It merely inherits the name and authority of its ancestor. The innocent
poet believes his own lies.

Legends consequently acquire a considerable eloquence and dramatic
force. These beauties accrue spontaneously, because rhythm and ideal
pertinence, in which poetic merit largely lies, are natural formative
principles for speech and memory. As symmetry in material structures is
a ground for strength, and hills by erosion are worn to pyramids, so it
is in thoughts. Yet the stability attained is not absolute, but only
such stability as the circumstances require. Dramatic effect is not
everywhere achieved, nor is it missed by the narrator where it is
wanting, so that even the oldest and best-pruned legends are full of
irrelevant survivals, contradictions, and scraps of nonsense. These
literary blemishes are like embedded fossils and tell of facts which the
mechanism of reproduction, for some casual reason, has not obliterated.
The recorder of verbal tradition religiously sets down its
inconsistencies and leaves in the transfigured chronicle many tell-tale
incidents and remarks which, like atrophied organs in an animal body,
reveal its gradual formation. Art and a deliberate pursuit of unction or
beauty would have thrown over this baggage. The automatic and pious
minstrel carries it with him to the end.

[Sidenote: No history without documents.]

For these reasons there can be no serious history until there are
archives and preserved records, although sometimes a man in a privileged
position may compose interesting essays on the events and persons of his
own time, as his personal experience has presented them to him. Archives
and records, moreover, do not absolve a speculative historian from
paying the same toll to the dramatic unities and making the same
concessions to the laws of perspective which, in the absence of
documents, turn tradition so soon into epic poetry. The principle that
elicits histories out of records is the same that breeds legends out of
remembered events. In both cases the facts are automatically
foreshortened and made to cluster, as it were providentially, about a
chosen interest. The historian’s politics, philosophy, or romantic
imagination furnishes a vital nucleus for reflection. All that falls
within that particular vortex is included in the mental picture, the
rest is passed over and tends to drop out of sight. It is not possible
to say, nor to think, everything at once; and the private interest which
guides a man in selecting his materials imposes itself inevitably on the
events he relates and especially on their grouping and significance.

History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.
The conditions of expression and even of memory dragoon the facts and
put a false front on diffuse experience. What is interesting is brought
forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of
events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are
endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their
actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual
achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain
buried in absolute oblivion. Such falsification is inevitable, and an
honest historian is guilty of it only against his will. He would wish,
as he loves the truth, to see and to render it entire. But the limits of
his book and of his knowledge force him to be partial. It is only a very
great mind, seasoned by large wisdom, that can lend such an accent and
such a carrying-power to a few facts as to make them representative of
all reality.

[Sidenote: The aim is truth.]

Some historians, indeed, are so frankly partisan or cynical that they
avowedly write history with a view to effect, either political or
literary. Moralising historians belong to this school, as well as those
philosophers who worship evolution. They sketch every situation with
malice and twist it, as if it were an argument, to bring out a point,
much as fashionable portrait-painters sometimes surcharge the
characteristic, in order to make a bold effect at a minimum expense of
time and devotion. And yet the truly memorable aspect of a man is that
which he wears in the sunlight of common day, with all his generic
humanity upon him. His most interesting phase is not that which he might
assume under the lime-light of satirical or literary comparisons. The
characteristic is after all the inessential. It marks a peripheral
variation in the honest and sturdy lump. To catch only the heartless
shimmer of individuality is to paint a costume without the body that
supports it. Therefore a broad and noble historian sets down all within
his apperception. His literary interests are forgotten; he is wholly
devoted to expressing the passions of the dead. His ideal, emanating
from his function and chosen for no extraneous reason, is to make his
heroes think and act as they really thought and acted in the world.

Nevertheless the opposite happens, sometimes to a marked and even
scandalous degree. As legend becomes in a few generations preposterous
myth, so history, after a few rehandlings and condensations, becomes
unblushing theory. Now theory—when we use the word for a schema of
things’ relations and not for contemplation of them in their detail and
fulness—is an expedient to cover ignorance and remedy confusion. The
function of history, if it could be thoroughly fulfilled, would be to
render theory unnecessary. Did we possess a record of all geological
changes since the creation we should need no geological theory to
suggest to us what those changes must have been. Hypothesis is like the
rule of three: it comes into play only when one of the terms is unknown
and needs to be inferred from those which are given. The ideal
historian, since he would know all the facts, would need no hypotheses,
and since he would imagine and hold all events together in their actual
juxtapositions he would need no classifications. The intentions, acts,
and antecedents of every mortal would be seen in their precise places,
with no imputed qualities or scope; and when those intentions had been
in fact fulfilled, the fulfilments too would occupy their modest
position in the rank and file of marching existence. To omniscience the
idea of cause and effect would be unthinkable. If all things were
perceived together and co-existed for thought, as they actually flow
through being, on one flat phenomenal level, what sense would there be
in saying that one element had compelled another to appear? The relation
of cause is an instrument necessary to thought only when thought is
guided by presumption. We say, “If this thing had happened, that other
thing would have followed”—a hypothesis which would lapse and become
unmeaning had we always known all the facts. For no supposition contrary
to fact would then have entered discourse.

[Sidenote: Indirect methods of attaining it.]

This ideal of direct omniscience is, however, impossible to attain; not
merely accidental frailties, but the very nature of things stands in the
way. Experience cannot be suspended or sustained in being, because its
very nucleus is mobile and in shifting cannot retain its past phases
bodily, but only at best some trace or representation of them. Memory
itself is an expedient by which what is hopelessly lost in its totality
may at least be partly kept in its beauty or significance; and
experience can be enlarged in no other way than by carrying into the
moving present the lesson and transmitted habit of much that is past.
History is naturally reduced to similar indirect methods of recovering
what has lapsed. The historian’s object may be to bring the past again
before the mind in all its living reality, but in pursuing that object
he is obliged to appeal to inference, to generalisation, and to dramatic
fancy. We may conveniently distinguish in history, as it is perforce
written by men, three distinct elements, which we may call historical
investigation, historical theory, and historical romance.

[Sidenote: Historical research a part of physics.]

Historical investigation is the natural science of the past. The
circumstance that its documents are usually literary may somewhat
disguise the physical character and the physical principles of this
science; but when a man wishes to discover what really happened at a
given moment, even if the event were somebody’s thought; he has to read
his sources, not for what they say, but for what they imply. In other
words, the witnesses cannot be allowed merely to speak for themselves,
after the gossiping fashion familiar in Herodotus; their testimony has
to be interpreted according to the laws of evidence. The past needs to
be reconstructed out of reports, as in geology or archæology it needs to
be reconstructed out of stratifications and ruins. A man’s memory or the
report in a newspaper is a fact justifying certain inferences about its
probable causes according to laws which such phenomena betray in the
present when they are closely scrutinised. This reconstruction is often
very difficult, and sometimes all that can be established in the end is
merely that the tradition before us is certainly false; somewhat as a
perplexed geologist might venture on no conclusion except that the state
of the earth’s crust was once very different from what it is now.

[Sidenote: Verification here indirect.]

A natural science dealing with the past labours under the disadvantage
of not being able to appeal to experiment. The facts it terminates upon
cannot be recovered, so that they may verify in sense the hypothesis
that had inferred them. The hypothesis can be tested only by current
events; it is then turned back upon the past, to give assurance of facts
which themselves are hypothetical and remain hanging, as it were, to the
loose end of the hypothesis itself. A hypothetical fact is a most
dangerous creature, since it lives on the credit of a theory which in
turn would be bankrupt if the fact should fail. Inferred past facts are
more deceptive than facts prophesied, because while the risk of error in
the inference is the same, there is no possibility of discovering that
error; and the historian, while really as speculative as the prophet,
can never be found out.

Most facts known to man, however, are reached by inference, and their
reality may be wisely assumed so long as the principle by which they
are inferred, when it is applied in the present, finds complete and
constant verification. Presumptions involved in memory and tradition
give the first hypothetical facts we count upon; the relations which
these first facts betray supply the laws by which facts are to be
concatenated; and these laws may then be used to pass from the first
hypothetical facts to hypothetical facts of a second order, forming a
background and congruous extension to those originally assumed. This
expansion of discursive science can go on for ever, unless indeed the
principles of inference employed in it involve some present existence,
such as a skeleton in a given tomb, which direct experience fails to
verify. Then the theory itself is disproved and the whole galaxy of
hypothetical facts which clustered about it forfeit their credibility.

[Sidenote: Futile ideal to survey all facts.]

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character
of events throughout past time in all places. The task is frankly
superhuman, because no block of real existence, with its infinitesimal
detail, can be recorded, nor if somehow recorded could it be dominated
by the mind; and to carry on a survey of this social continuum _ad
infinitum_ would multiply the difficulty. The task might also be called
infrahuman, because the sort of omniscience which such complete
historical science would achieve would merely furnish materials for
intelligence: it would be inferior to intelligence itself. There are
many things which, as Aristotle says, it is better not to know than to
know—namely, those things which do not count in controlling the mind’s
fortunes nor enter into its ideal expression. Such is the whole flux of
immediate experience in other minds or in one’s own past; and just as it
is better to forget than to remember a nightmare or the by-gone
sensations of sea-sickness, so it is better not to conceive the sensuous
pulp of alien experience, something infinite in amount and insignificant
in character.

An attempt to rehearse the inner life of everybody that has ever lived
would be no rational endeavour. Instead of lifting the historian above
the world and making him the most consummate of creatures, it would
flatten his mind out into a passive after-image of diffuse existence,
with all its horrible blindness, strain, and monotony. Reason is not
come to repeat the universe but to fulfil it. Besides, a complete survey
of events would perforce register all changes that have taken place in
matter since time began, the fields of geology, astronomy, palæontology,
and archæology being all, in a sense, included in history. Such learning
would dissolve thought in a vertigo, if it had not already perished of
boredom. Historical research is accordingly a servile science which may
enter the Life of Reason to perform there some incidental service, but
which ought to lapse as soon as that service is performed.

[Sidenote: Historical theory.]

The profit of studying history lies in something else than in a dead
knowledge of what happens to have happened. A seductive alternative
might be to say that the profit of it lies in _understanding_ what has
happened, in perceiving the principles and laws that govern social
evolution, or the meaning which events have. We are hereby launched upon
a region of physico-ethical speculation where any man with a genius for
quick generalisation can swim at ease. To find the one great cause why
Borne fell, especially if no one has ever thought of it before, or to
expound the true import of the French Revolution, or to formulate in
limpid sentences the essence of Greek culture—what could be more
tempting or more purely literary? It would ill become the author of this
book to decry allegorical expressions, or a cavalierlike fashion of
dismissing whole periods and tendencies with a verbal antithesis. We
must have exercises in apperception, a work of imagination must be taken
imaginatively, and a landscape painter must be suffered to be, at his
own risk, as impressionistic as he will. If Raphael, when he was
designing the _School of Athens_, had said to himself that Aristotle
should point down to a fact and Plato up to a meaning, or when designing
the _Disputa_ had conceived that the proudest of intellects, weary of
argument and learning, should throw down his books and turn to
revelation for guidance, there would have been much historical
pertinence in those conceptions; yet the figures would have been
allegorical, contracting into a decorative design events that had been
dispersed through centuries and emotions that had only cropped up here
and there, with all manner of variations and alloys, when the particular
natural situation had made them inevitable. So the Renaissance might be
spoken of as a person and the Reformation as her step-sister, and
something might be added about the troubles of their home life; but
would it be needful in that case to enter a warning that these units
were verbal merely, and that the phenomena and the forces really at work
had been multitudinous and infinitesimal?

[Sidenote: It is arbitrary.]

In fine, historical terms mark merely rhetorical unities, which have no
dynamic cohesion, and there are no historical laws which are not at
bottom physical, like the laws of habit—those expressions of Newton’s
first law of motion. An essayist may play with historical apperception
as long as he will and always find something new to say, discovering the
ideal nerve and issue of a movement in a different aspect of the facts.
The truly proportionate, constant, efficacious relations between things
will remain material. Physical causes traverse the moral units at which
history stops, determining their force and duration, and the order, so
irrelevant to intent, in which they succeed one another. Even the single
man’s life and character have subterranean sources; how should the outer
expression and influence of that character have sources more
superficial than its own? Yet we cannot trace mechanical necessity down
to the more stable units composing a personal mechanism, and much less,
therefore, to those composing a complex social evolution. We accordingly
translate the necessity, obviously lurking under life’s commonplace yet
unaccountable shocks, into verbal principles, names for general
impressive results, that play some rôle in our ideal philosophy. Each of
these idols of the theatre is visible only on a single stage and to duly
predisposed spectators. The next passion affected will throw a
differently coloured calcium light on the same pageant, and there will
be no end of rival evolutions and incompatible ideal principles crossing
one another at every interesting event.

Such a manipulation of history, when made by persons who underestimate
their imaginative powers, ends in asserting that events have directed
themselves prophetically upon the interests which they arouse. Apart
from the magic involved and the mockery of all science, there is a
difficulty here which even a dramatic idealist ought to feel. The
interests affected are themselves many and contrary. If history is to be
understood teleologically, which of all the possible ends it might be
pursuing shall we think really endowed with regressive influence and
responsible for the movement that is going to realise it? Did Columbus,
for instance, discover America so that George Washington might exist and
that some day football and the Church of England may prevail throughout
the world? Or was it (as has been seriously maintained) in order that
the converted Indians of South America might console Saint Peter for the
defection of the British and Germans? Or was America, as Hegel believed,
ideally superfluous, the absolute having become self-conscious enough
already in Prussia? Or shall we say that the real goal is at an infinite
distance and unimaginable by us, and useless, therefore, for
understanding anything?

In truth, whatever plausibility the providential view of a given
occurrence may have is dependent on the curious limitation and
selfishness of the observer’s estimations. Sheep are providentially
designed for men; but why not also for wolves, and men for worms and
microbes? If the historian is willing to accept such a suggestion, and
to become a blind worshipper of success, applauding every issue, however
lamentable for humanity, and calling it admirable tragedy, he may seem
for a while to save his theory by making it mystical; yet presently this
last illusion will be dissipated when he loses his way in the maze and
finds that all victors perish in their turn and everything, if you look
far enough, falls back into the inexorable vortex. This is the sort of
observation that the Indian sages made long ago; it is what renders
their philosophy, for all its practical impotence, such an irrefragable
record of experience, such a superior, definitive perception of the
flux. Beside it, our progresses of two centuries and our philosophies of
history, embracing one-quarter of the earth for three thousand years,
seem puerile vistas indeed. Shall all eternity and all existence be for
the sake of what is happening here to-day, and to me? Shall we strive
manfully to the top of this particular wave, on the ground that its foam
is the culmination of all things for ever?

There is a sense, of course, in which definite political plans and moral
aspirations may well be fulfilled by events. Our ancestors, sharing and
anticipating our natures, may have had in many respects our actual
interests in view, as we may have those of posterity. Such ideal
co-operation extends far, where primary interests are concerned; it is
rarer and more qualified where a fine and fragile organisation is
required to support the common spiritual life. Even in these cases, the
aim pursued and attained is not the force that operates, since the
result achieved had many other conditions besides the worker’s intent,
and that intent itself had causes which it knew nothing of. Every
“historical force” pompously appealed to breaks up on inspection into a
cataract of miscellaneous natural processes and minute particular
causes. It breaks into its mechanical constituents and proves to have
been nothing but an _effet d’ensemble_ produced on a mind whose habits
and categories are essentially rhetorical.

[Sidenote: A moral critique of the past is possible.]

This sort of false history or philosophy of history might be purified,
like so many other things, by self-knowledge. If the philosopher in
reviewing events confessed that he was scrutinising them in order to
abstract from them whatever tended to illustrate his own ideals, as he
might look over a crowd to find his friends, the operation would become
a perfectly legitimate one. The events themselves would be left for
scientific inference to discover, where credible reports did not testify
to them directly; and the causes of events would be left to some theory
of natural evolution, to be stated, according to the degree of knowledge
attained, in terms more and more exact and mechanical. In the presence
of the past so defined imagination and will, however, would not abdicate
their rights, and a sort of retrospective politics, an estimate of
events in reference to the moral ideal which they embodied or betrayed,
might supervene upon positive history. This estimate of evolution might
well be called a philosophy of history, since it would be a higher
operation performed on the results of natural science, to give a needful
basis and illustration to the ideal. The present work is an essay in
that direction.

[Sidenote: How it might be just.]

The ideal which in such a review would serve as the touchstone for
estimation, if it were an enlightened ideal, would recognise its own
natural basis, and therefore would also recognise that under other
conditions other ideals, no less legitimate, may have arisen and may
have been made the standard for a different judgment on the world.
Historical investigation, were its resources adequate, would reveal to
us what these various ideals have been. Every animal has his own, and
whenever individuals or nations have become reflective they have known
how to give articulate expression to theirs. That all these ideals could
not have been realised in turn or together is an immense misfortune, the
irremediable half-tragedy of life, by which we also suffer. In
estimating the measure of success achieved anywhere a liberal historian,
who does not wish to be bluntly irrational, will of course estimate it
from _all_ these points of view, considering all real interests
affected, in so far as he can appreciate them. This is what is meant by
putting the standard of value, not in some arbitrary personal dogma but
in a variegated omnipresent happiness.

It is by no means requisite, therefore, in disentangling the Life of
Reason, to foresee what ultimate form the good might some day take, much
less to make the purposes of the philosopher himself, his time, or his
nation the test of all excellence. This test is the perpetual
concomitant ideal of the life it is applied to. As all could not be well
in the world if my own purposes were defeated, so the general excellence
of things would be heightened if other men’s purposes also had been
fulfilled. Each will is a true centre for universal estimation. As each
will, therefore, comes to expression, real and irreversible values are
introduced into the world, and the historian, in estimating what has
been hitherto achieved, needs to make himself the spokesman for all past
aspirations.

If the Egyptian poets sang well, though that conduces not at all to our
advantage, and though all those songs are now dumb, the Life of Reason
was thereby increased once for all in pith and volume. Brief erratic
experiments made in living, if they were somewhat successful in their
day, remain successes always: and this is the only kind of success that
in the end can be achieved at all. The philosopher that looks for what
is good in history and measures the past by the scale of reason need be
no impertinent dogmatist on that account. Reason would not be reason but
passion if it did not make all passions in all creatures constituents of
its own authority. The judgments it passes on existence are only the
judgments which existence, so far, has passed on itself, and these are
indelible and have their proportionate weight though others of many
different types may surround or succeed them.

[Sidenote: Transition to historical romance.]

To inquire what everybody has thought about the world, and into what
strange shapes every passionate dream would fain have transformed
existence, might be merely a part of historical investigation. These
facts of preference and estimation might be made to stand side by side
with all other facts in that absolute physical order which the universe
must somehow possess. In the reference book of science they would all
find their page and line. But it is not for the sake of making vain
knowledge complete that historians are apt to linger over heroic
episodes and commanding characters in the world’s annals. It is not even
in the hope of discovering just to what extent and in how many
directions experience has been a tragedy. The mathematical balance of
failure and success, even if it could be drawn with accuracy, would not
be a truth of moral importance, since whatever that balance might be for
the world at large, success and benefit here, from the living point of
view, would be equally valid and delightful; and however good or however
bad the universe may be it is always worth while to make it better.

What engages the historian in the reconstruction of moral life, such as
the past contained, is that he finds in that life many an illustration
of his own ideals, or even a necessary stimulus in defining what his
ideals are. Where his admiration and his sympathy are awakened, he sees
noble aims and great achievements, worthy of being minutely studied and
brought vividly before later generations. Very probably he will be led
by moral affinities with certain phases of the past to attribute to
those phases, in their abstraction and by virtue of their moral dignity,
a material efficacy which they did not really have; and his interest in
history’s moral will make him turn history itself into a fable. This
abuse may be abated, however, by having recourse to impartial historical
investigation, that will restore to the hero all his circumstantial
impotence, and to the glorious event all its insignificant causes.
Certain men and certain episodes will retain, notwithstanding, their
intrinsic nobility; and the historian, who is often a politician and a
poet rather than a man of science, will dwell on those noble things so
as to quicken his own sense for greatness and to burnish in his soul
ideals that may have remained obscure for want of scrutiny or may have
been tarnished by too much contact with a sordid world.

[Sidenote: Possibility of genuine epics.]

History so conceived has the function of epic or dramatic poetry. The
moral life represented may actually have been lived through; but that
circumstance is incidental merely and what makes the story worth telling
is its pertinence to the political or emotional life of the present. To
revive past moral experience is indeed wellnigh impossible unless the
living will can still covet or dread the same issues; historical romance
cannot be truthful or interesting when profound changes have taken place
in human nature. The reported acts and sentiments of early peoples lose
their tragic dignity in our eyes when they lose their pertinence to our
own aims. So that a recital of history with an eye to its dramatic
values is possible only when that history is, so to speak, our own, or
when we assimilate it to ours by poetic license.

The various functions of history have been generally carried on
simultaneously and with little consciousness of their profound
diversity. Since historical criticism made its appearance, the romantic
interest in the past, far from abating, has fed eagerly on all the
material incidents and private gossip of remote times. This sort of
petty historical drama has reflected contemporary interests, which have
centred so largely in material possessions and personal careers; while
at the same time it has kept pace with the knowledge of minutiæ attained
by archæology. When historical investigation has reached its limits a
period of ideal reconstruction may very likely set in. Indeed were it
possible to collect in archives exhaustive accounts of everything that
has ever happened, so that the curious man might always be informed on
any point of fact that interested him, historical imagination might grow
free again in its movements. Not being suspected of wishing to distort
facts which could so easily be pointed to, it might become more
conscious of its own moral function, and it might turn unblushingly to
what was important and inspiring in order to put it with dramatic force
before the mind. Such a treatment of history would reinstate that epic
and tragic poetry which has become obsolete; it might well be written in
verse, and would at any rate be frankly imaginative; it might furnish a
sort of ritual, with scientific and political sanctions, for public
feasts. Tragedies and epics are such only in name if they do not deal
with the highest interests and destinies of a people; and they could
hardly deal with such ideals in an authoritative and definite way,
unless they found them illustrated in that people’s traditions.

[Sidenote: Literal truth abandoned.]

Historic romance is a work of art, not of science, and its fidelity to
past fact is only an expedient, often an excellent and easy one, for
striking the key-note of present ideals. The insight attained, even when
it is true insight into what some one else felt in some other age, draws
its force and sublimity from current passions, passions potential in the
auditor’s soul. Mary Queen of Scots, for instance, doubtless repeated,
in many a fancied dialogue with Queen Elizabeth, the very words that
Schiller puts into her mouth in the central scene of his play, “_Denn
ich bin Euer König!_” Yet the dramatic force of that expression, its
audacious substitution of ideals for facts, depends entirely on the
scope which we lend it. Different actors and different readers would
interpret it differently. Some might see in it nothing but a sally in a
woman’s quarrel, reading it with the accent of mere spite and
irritation. Then the tragedy, not perhaps without historic truth, would
be reduced to a loud comedy. Other interpreters might find in the
phrase the whole feudal system, all the chivalry, legality, and
foolishness of the Middle Ages. Then the drama would become more
interesting, and the poor queen’s cry, while that of a mind
sophisticated and fanatical, would have great pathos and keenness. To
reach sublimity, however, that moment would have to epitomise ideals
which we deeply respected. We should have to believe in the sanctity of
canon law and in the divine right of primogeniture. That a woman may
have been very unhappy or that a state may have been held together by
personal allegiance does not raise the fate of either to the tragic
plane, unless “laws that are not of to-day nor yesterday,” aspirations
native to the heart, shine through those legendary misfortunes.

It would matter nothing to the excellence of Schiller’s drama which of
these interpretations might have been made by Mary Stuart herself at any
given moment; doubtless her attitude toward her rival was coloured on
different occasions by varying degrees of political insight and moral
fervour. The successful historical poet would be he who caught the most
significant attitude which a person in that position could possibly have
assumed, and his Mary Stuart, whether accidentally resembling the real
woman or not, would be essentially a mythical person. So Electra and
Antigone and Helen of Troy are tragic figures absolved from historical
accuracy, although possibly if the personages of heroic times were known
to us we might find that our highest imagination had been anticipated
in their consciousness.

[Sidenote: History exists to be transcended.]

Of the three parts into which the pursuit of history may be
divided—investigation, theory, and story-telling—not one attains ideal
finality. Investigation is merely useful, because its intrinsic
ideal—to know every detail of everything—is not rational, and its
acceptable function can only be to offer accurate information upon such
points as are worth knowing for some ulterior reason. Historical theory,
in turn, is a falsification of causes, since no causes are other than
mechanical; it is an arbitrary foreshortening of physics, and it
dissolves in the presence either of adequate knowledge or of clear
ideals. Finally, historical romance passes, as it grows mature, into
epics and tragedies, where the moral imagination disengages itself from
all allegiance to particular past facts. Thus history proves to be an
imperfect field for the exercise of reason; it is a provisional
discipline; its values, with the mind’s progress, would empty into
higher activities. The function of history is to lend materials to
politics and to poetry. These arts need to dominate past events, the
better to dominate the present situation and the ideal one. A good book
of history is one that helps the statesman to formulate and to carry out
his plans, or that helps the tragic poet to conceive what is most
glorious in human destiny. Such a book, as knowledge and ignorance are
now mingled, will have to borrow something from each of the methods by
which history is commonly pursued. Investigation will be necessary,
since the needful facts are not all indubitably known; theory will be
necessary too, so that those facts may be conceived in their pertinence
to public interests, and the latter may thereby be clarified; and
romance will not be wholly excluded, because the various activities of
the mind about the same matter cannot be divided altogether, and a
dramatic treatment is often useful in summarising a situation, when all
the elements of it cannot be summoned up in detail before the mind.

[Sidenote: Its great rôle.]

Fragmentary, arbitrary, and insecure as historical conceptions must
remain, they are nevertheless highly important. In human consciousness
the indispensable is in inverse ratio to the demonstrable. Sense is the
foundation of everything. Without sense memory would be both false and
useless. Yet memory rather than sense is knowledge in the pregnant
acceptation of the word; for in sense object and process are hardly
distinguished, whereas in memory significance inheres in the datum, and
the present vouches for the absent. Similarly history, which is derived
from memory, is superior to it; for while it merely extends memory
artificially it shows a higher logical development than memory has and
is riper for ideal uses. Trivial and useless matter has dropped out.
Inference has gone a step farther, thought is more largely
representative, and testimony conveyed by the reports of others or
found in monuments leads the speculative mind to infer events that must
have filled the remotest ages. This information is not passive or idle
knowledge; it truly _informs_ or shapes the mind, giving it new
aptitudes. As an efficacious memory modifies instinct, by levelling it
with a wider survey of the situation, so a memory of what human
experience has been, a sense of what it is likely to be under specific
circumstances, gives the will a new basis. What politics or any large
drama deals with is a will cast into historic moulds, an imagination
busy with what we call great interests. Great interests are a gift which
history makes to the heart. A barbarian is no less subject to the past
than is the civic man who knows what his past is and means to be loyal
to it; but the barbarian, for want of a trans-personal memory, crawls
among superstitions which he cannot understand or revoke and among
persons whom he may hate or love, but whom he can never think of raising
to a higher plane, to the level of a purer happiness. The whole dignity
of human endeavour is thus bound up with historic issues; and as
conscience needs to be controlled by experience if it is to become
rational, so personal experience itself needs to be enlarged ideally if
the failures and successes it reports are to touch impersonal interests.




CHAPTER III

MECHANISM


[Sidenote: Recurrent forms in nature.]

A retrospect over human experience, if a little extended, can hardly
fail to come upon many interesting recurrences. The seasons make their
round and the generations of men, like the forest leaves, repeat their
career. In this its finer texture history undoubtedly repeats itself. A
study of it, in registering so many recurrences, leads to a description
of habit, or to natural history. To observe a recurrence is to divine a
mechanism. It is to analyse a phenomenon, distinguishing its form, which
alone recurs, from its existence, which is irrevocable; and that the
flux of phenomena should turn out, on closer inspection, to be composed
of a multitude of recurring forms, regularly interwoven, is the ideal of
mechanism. The forms, taken ideally and in themselves, are what
reflection first rescues from the flux and makes a science of; they
constitute that world of eternal relations with which dialectic is
conversant. To note here and there some passing illustration of these
forms is one way of studying experience. The observer, the poet, the
historian merely _define_ what they see. But these incidental
illustrations of form (called by Plato phenomena) may have a method in
their comings and goings, and this method may in turn be definable. It
will be a new sort of constant illustrated in the flux; and this we call
a law. If events could be reduced to a number of constant forms moving
in a constant medium according to a constant law, a maximum of constancy
would be introduced into the flux, which would thereby be proved to be
mechanical.

The form of events, abstracted from their material presence, becomes a
general mould to which we tend to assimilate new observations. Whatever
in particular instances may contravene the accredited rule, we attribute
without a qualm to unknown variations in the circumstances, thus saving
our faith in order at all hazards and appealing to investigation to
justify the same. Only when another rule suggests itself which leaves a
smaller margin unaccounted for in the phenomena do we give up our first
generalisation. Not even the rudest superstition can be criticised or
dislodged scientifically save by another general rule, more exact and
trustworthy than the superstition. The scepticism which comes from
distrust of abstraction and disgust with reckoning of any sort is not a
scientific force; it is an intellectual weakness.

Generalities are indeed essential to understanding, which is apt to
impose them hastily upon particulars. Confirmation is not needed to
create prejudice. It suffices that a vivid impression should once have
cut its way into the mind and settled there in a fertile soil; it will
entwine itself at once with its chance neighbours and these adventitious
relations will pass henceforth for a part of the fact. Repetition,
however, is a good means of making or keeping impressions vivid and
almost the only means of keeping them unchanged. Prejudices, however
refractory to new evidence, evolve inwardly of themselves. The mental
soil in which they lie is in a continual ferment and their very vitality
will extend their scope and change their application. Generalisations,
therefore, when based on a single instance, will soon forget it and
shift their ground, as unchecked words shift their meaning. But when a
phenomenon actually recurs the generalisations founded on it are
reinforced and kept identical, and prejudices so sustained by events
make man’s knowledge of nature.

[Sidenote: Their discovery makes the flux calculable.]

Natural science consists of general ideas which look for verification in
events, and which find it. The particular instance, once noted, is
thrown aside like a squeezed orange, its significance in establishing
some law having once been extracted. Science, by this flight into the
general, lends immediate experience an interest and scope which its
parts, taken blindly, could never possess; since if we remained sunk in
the moments of existence and never abstracted their character from their
presence, we should never know that they had any relation to one
another. We should feel their incubus without being able to distinguish
their dignities or to give them names. By analysing what we find and
abstracting what recurs from its many vain incidents we can discover a
sustained structure within, which enables us to foretell what we may
find in future. Science thus articulates experience and reveals its
skeleton.

Skeletons are not things particularly congenial to poets, unless it be
for the sake of having something truly horrible to shudder at and to
frighten children with: and so a certain school of philosophers exhaust
their rhetoric in convincing us that the objects known to science are
artificial and dead, while the living reality is infinitely rich and
absolutely unutterable. This is merely an ungracious way of describing
the office of thought and bearing witness to its necessity. A body is
none the worse for having some bones in it, even if they are not all
visible on the surface. They are certainly not the whole man, who
nevertheless runs and leaps by their leverage and smooth turning in
their sockets; and a surgeon’s studies in dead anatomy help him
excellently to set a living joint. The abstractions of science are
extractions of truths. Truths cannot of themselves constitute existence
with its irrational concentration in time, place, and person, its
hopeless flux, and its vital exuberance; but they can be true of
existence; they can disclose that structure by which its parts cohere
materially and become ideally inferable from one another.

[Sidenote: Looser principles tried first.]

Science becomes demonstrable in proportion as it becomes abstract. It
becomes in the same measure applicable and useful, as mathematics
witnesses, whenever the abstraction is judiciously made and has seized
the profounder structural features in the phenomenon. These features are
often hard for human eyes to discern, buried as they may be in the
internal infinitesimal texture of things. Things accordingly seem to
move on the world’s stage in an unaccountable fashion, and to betray
magic affinities to what is separated from them by apparent chasms. The
types of relation which the mind may observe are multifarious. Any
chance conjunction, any incidental harmony, will start a hypothesis
about the nature of the universe and be the parent image of a whole
system of philosophy. In self-indulgent minds most of these standard
images are dramatic, and the cue men follow in unravelling experience is
that offered by some success or failure of their own. The sanguine,
having once found a pearl in a dunghill, feel a glorious assurance that
the world’s true secret is that everything in the end is ordered for
everybody’s benefit—and that is optimism. The atrabilious, being ill at
ease with themselves, see the workings everywhere of insidious sin, and
conceive that the world is a dangerous place of trial. A somewhat more
observant intellect may decide that what exists is a certain number of
definite natures, each striving to preserve and express itself; and in
such language we still commonly read political events and our friend’s
actions. At the dawn of science a Thales, observing the ways and the
conditions of things somewhat more subtly, will notice that rain,
something quite adventitious to the fields, is what covers them with
verdure, that the slime breeds life, that a liquid will freeze to stone
and melt to air; and his shrewd conclusion will be that everything is
water in one disguise or another. It is only after long accumulated
observation that we can reach any exact law of nature; and this law we
hardly think of applying to living things. These have not yet revealed
the secret of their structure, and clear insight is vouchsafed us only
in such regions as that of mathematical physics, where cogency in the
ideal system is combined with adequacy to explain the phenomena.

[Sidenote: Mechanism for the most part hidden.]

These exact sciences cover in the gross the field in which human life
appears, the antecedents of this life, and its instruments. To a
speculative mind, that had retained an ingenuous sense of nature’s
inexhaustible resources and of man’s essential continuity with other
natural things, there could be no ground for doubting that similar
principles (could they be traced in detail) would be seen to preside
over all man’s action and passion. A thousand indications, drawn from
introspection and from history, would be found to confirm this
speculative presumption. It is not only earthquakes and floods, summer
and winter, that bring human musings sharply to book. Love and ambition
are unmistakable blossomings of material forces, and the more intense
and poetical a man’s sense is of his spiritual condition the more loudly
will he proclaim his utter dependence on nature and the identity of the
moving principle in him and in her.

Mankind and all its works are undeniably subject to gravity and to the
law of projectiles; yet what is true of these phenomena in bulk seems to
a superficial observation not to be true of them in detail, and a person
may imagine that he subverts all the laws of physics whenever he wags
his tongue. Only in inorganic matter is the ruling mechanism open to
human inspection: here changes may be seen to be proportionate to the
elements and situation in which they occur. Habit here seems perfectly
steady and is called necessity, since the observer is able to deduce it
unequivocally from given properties in the body and in the external
bodies acting upon it. In the parts of nature which we call living and
to which we impute consciousness, habit, though it be fatal enough, is
not so exactly measurable and perspicuous. Physics cannot account for
that minute motion and pullulation in the earth’s crust of which human
affairs are a portion. Human affairs have to be surveyed under
categories lying closer to those employed in memory and legend. These
looser categories are of every sort—grammatical, moral, magical—and
there is no knowing when any of them will apply or in what measure.
Between the matters covered by the exact sciences and vulgar experience
there remains, accordingly, a wide and nebulous gulf. Where we cannot
see the mechanism involved in what happens we have to be satisfied with
an empirical description of appearances as they first fall together in
our apprehension; and this want of understanding in the observer is what
popular philosophy calls intelligence in the world.

[Sidenote: Yet presumably pervasive.]

That this gulf is apparent only, being due to inadequacy and confusion
in human perception rather than to incoherence in things, is a
speculative conviction altogether trustworthy. Any one who can at all
catch the drift of experience—moral no less than physical—must feel
that mechanism rules the whole world. There are doubleness and diversity
enough in things to satiate the greatest lover of chaos; but that a
cosmos nevertheless underlies the superficial play of sense and opinion
is what all practical reason must assume and what all comprehended
experience bears witness to. A cosmos does not mean a disorder with
which somebody happens to be well pleased; it means a necessity from
which every one must draw his happiness. If a principle is efficacious
it is to that extent mechanical. For to be efficacious a principle must
apply necessarily and proportionately; it must assure us that where the
factors are the same as on a previous occasion the quotient will be the
same also.

Now, in order that the flux of things should contain a repetition,
elements must be identified within it; these identical elements may then
find themselves in an identical situation, on which the same result may
ensue which ensued before. If the elements were not constant and
recognisable, or if their relations did not suffice to determine the
succeeding event, no observation could be transferred with safety from
the past to the future. Thus art and comprehension would be defeated
together. Novelties in the world are not lacking, because the elements
entering at any moment into a given combination have never before
entered into a combination exactly similar. Mechanism applies to the
matter and minute texture of things; but its applying there will create,
at each moment, fresh ideal wholes, formal unities which mind emanates
from and represents. The result will accordingly always be unprecedented
in the total impression it produces, in exact proportion to the
singularity of the situation in hand. Mechanical processes are not like
mathematical relations, because they _happen_. What they express the
form of is a flux, not a truth or an ideal necessity. The situation may
therefore always be new, though produced from the preceding situation by
rules which are invariable, since the preceding situation was itself
novel.

Mechanism might be called the dialectic of the irrational. It is such a
measure of intelligibility as is compatible with flux and with
existence. Existence itself being irrational and change unintelligible,
the only necessity they are susceptible of is a natural or empirical
necessity, impinging at both ends upon brute matters of fact. The
existential elements, their situation, number, affinities, and mutual
influence all have to be begged before calculation can begin. When these
surds have been accepted at their face value, inference may set to work
among them; yet the inference that mechanism will continue to reign will
not amount to certain knowledge until the event inferred has come to
give it proof. Calculation in physics differs from pure dialectic in
that the ultimate object it looks to is not ideal. Theory here must
revert to the immediate flux for its sanction, whereas dialectic is a
centrifugal emanation from existence and never returns to its point of
origin. It remains suspended in the ether of those eternal relations
which forms have, even when found embedded in matter.

[Sidenote: Inadequacy of consciousness.]

If the total flux is continuous and naturally intelligible, why is the
part felt by man so disjointed and opaque? An answer to this question
may perhaps be drawn from the fact that consciousness apparently arises
to express the functions only of extremely complicated organisms. The
basis of thought is vastly more elaborate than its deliverance. It takes
a wonderful brain and exquisite senses to produce a few stupid ideas.
The mind starts, therefore, with a tremendous handicap. In order to
attain adequate practical knowledge it would have to represent clearly
its own conditions; for the purpose of mind is its own furtherance and
perfection, and before that purpose could be fulfilled the mind’s
interests would have to become parallel to the body’s fortunes. This
means that the body’s actual relations in nature would have to become
the mind’s favourite themes in discourse. Had this harmony been
attained, the more accurately and intensely thought was exercised the
more stable its status would become and the more prosperous its
undertakings, since lively thought would then be a symptom of health in
the body and of mechanical equilibrium with the environment.

The body’s actual relations, however, on which health depends, are
infinitely complex and immensely extended. They sweep the whole material
universe and are intertwined most closely with all social and passionate
forces, with their incalculable mechanical springs. Meantime the mind
begins by being a feeble and inconsequent ghost. Its existence is
intermittent and its visions unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own
interests or the situations that might support or defeat those
interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic
image which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus the
parasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably
insufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge
altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one
hand it lapses into dreams which, while obviously irrelevant to
practice, express the mind’s vegetative instincts; hence art and
mythology, which substitute play-worlds for the real one on correlation
with which human prosperity and dignity depend. On the other hand, the
mind becomes wedded to conventional objects which mark, perhaps, the
turning-points of practical life and plot the curve of it in a schematic
and disjointed fashion, but which are themselves entirely opaque and, as
we say, material. Now as matter is commonly a name for things not
understood, men materially minded are those whose ideas, while
practical, are meagre and blind, so that their knowledge of nature, if
not invalid, is exceedingly fragmentary. This grossness in common sense,
like irrelevance in imagination, springs from the fact that the mind’s
representative powers are out of focus with its controlling conditions.

[Sidenote: Its articulation inferior to that of its objects.]

In other words, sense ought to correspond in articulation with the
object to be represented—otherwise the object’s structure, with the
fate it imports; cannot be transferred into analogous ideas. Now the
human senses are not at all fitted to represent an organism on the scale
of the human body. They catch its idle gestures but not the inner
processes which control its action. The senses are immeasurably too
gross. What to them is a _minimum visibile_, a just perceptible atom, is
in the body’s structure, very likely, a system of worlds, the inner
cataclysms of which count in producing that so-called atom’s behaviour
and endowing it with affinities apparently miraculous. What must the
seed of animals contain, for instance, to be the ground, as it
notoriously is, for every physical and moral property of the offspring?
Or what must the system of signals and the reproductive habit in a brain
be, for it to co-ordinate instinctive movements, learn tricks, and
remember? Our senses can represent at all adequately only such objects
as the solar system or a work of human architecture, where the unit’s
inner structure and fermentation may be provisionally neglected in
mastering the total. The architect may reckon in bricks and the
astronomer in planets and yet foresee accurately enough the practical
result. In a word, only what is extraordinarily simple is intelligible
to man, while only what is extraordinarily complex can support
intelligence. Consciousness is essentially incompetent to understand
what most concerns it, its own vicissitudes, and sense is altogether out
of scale with the objects of practical interest in life.

[Sidenote: Science consequently retarded.]

One consequence of this profound maladjustment is that science is hard
to attain and is at first paradoxical. The change of scale required is
violent and frustrates all the mind’s rhetorical habits. There is a
constant feeling of strain and much flying back to the mother-tongue of
myth and social symbol. Every wrong hypothesis is seized upon and is
tried before any one will entertain the right one. Enthusiasm for
knowledge is chilled by repeated failures and a great confusion cannot
but reign in philosophy. A man with an eye for characteristic features
in various provinces of experience is encouraged to deal with each upon
a different principle; and where these provinces touch or actually fuse,
he is at a loss what method of comprehension to apply. There sets in,
accordingly, a tendency to use various methods at once or a different
one on each occasion, as language, custom, or presumption seems to
demand. Science is reduced by philosophers to plausible discourse, and
the more plausible the discourse is, by leaning on all the heterogeneous
prejudices of the hour, the more does it foster the same and discourage
radical investigation.

Thus even Aristotle felt that good judgment and the dramatic habit of
things altogether excluded the simple physics of Democritus. Indeed, as
things then stood, Democritus had no right to his simplicity, except
that divine right which comes of inspiration. His was an indefensible
faith in a single radical insight, which happened nevertheless to be
true. To justify that insight forensically it would have been necessary
to change the range of human vision, making it telescopic in one region
and microscopic in another; whereby the objects so transfigured would
have lost their familiar aspect and their habitual context in discourse.
Without such a startling change of focus nature can never seem
everywhere mechanical. Hence, even to this day, people with broad human
interests are apt to discredit a mechanical philosophy. Seldom can
penetration and courage in thinking hold their own against the
miscellaneous habits of discourse; and nobody remembers that moral
values must remain captious, and imaginative life ignoble and dark, so
long as the whole basis and application of them is falsely conceived.
Discoveries in science are made only by near-sighted specialists, while
the influence of public sentiment and policy still works systematically
against enlightenment.

[Sidenote: and speculation rendered necessary.]

The maladaptation of sense to its objects has a second consequence: that
speculation is in a way nobler for man than direct perception. For
direct perception is wholly inadequate to render the force, the reality,
the subtle relations of the object perceived, unless this object be a
shell only, like a work of fine art, where nothing counts but the
surface. Since the function of perception is properly to give
understanding and dominion, direct perception is a defeat and, as it
were, an insult to the mind, thus forced to busy itself about so
unintelligible and dense an apparition. Æsthetic enthusiasm cares
nothing about what the object inwardly is, what is its efficacious
movement and real life. It revels selfishly in the harmonies of
perception itself, harmonies which perhaps it attributes to the object
through want of consideration. These æsthetic objects, which have no
intrinsic unity or cohesion, lapse in the most melancholy and
inexplicable fashion before our eyes. Then we cry that beauty wanes,
that life is brief, and that its prizes are deceptive. Our minds have
fed on casual aspects of nature, like tints in sunset clouds.
Imaginative fervour has poured itself out exclusively on these
apparitions, which are without relevant backing in the world; and long,
perhaps, before this life is over, which we called too brief, we begin
to pine for another, where just those images which here played so
deceptively on the surface of the flux may be turned into fixed and
efficacious realities. Meantime speculation amuses us with prophecies
about what such realities might be. We look for them, very likely, in
the wrong place, namely, in human poetry and eloquence, or at best in
dialectic; yet even when stated in these mythical terms the hidden world
divined in meditation seems nobler and, as we say, more real than the
objects of sense. For we hope, in those speculative visions, to reach
the permanent, the efficacious, the stanch principles of experience,
something to rely on in prospect and appeal to in perplexity.

Science, in its prosaic but trustworthy fashion, passes likewise beyond
the dreamlike unities and cadences which sense discloses; only, as
science aims at controlling its speculation by experiment, the hidden
reality it discloses is exactly like what sense perceives, though on a
different scale, and not observable, perhaps, without a magic carpet of
hypothesis, to carry the observer to the ends of the universe or,
changing his dimensions, to introduce him into those infinitesimal
abysses where nature has her workshop. In this region, were it
sufficiently explored, we might find just those solid supports and
faithful warnings which we were looking for with such ill success in our
rhetorical speculations. The machinery disclosed would not be human; it
would be machinery. But it would for that very reason serve the purpose
which made us look for it instead of remaining, like the lower animals,
placidly gazing on the pageants of sense, till some unaccountable pang
forced us to spasmodic movement. It is doubtless better to find material
engines—not necessarily inanimate, either—which may really serve to
bring order, security, and progress into our lives, than to find
impassioned or ideal spirits, that can do nothing for us except, at
best, assure us that they are perfectly happy.

[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction with mechanism partly natural.]

The reigning aversion to mechanism is partly natural and partly
artificial. The natural aversion cannot be wholly overcome. Like the
aversion to death, to old age, to labour, it is called forth by man’s
natural situation in a world which was not made for him, but in which he
grew. That the efficacious structure of things should not be
intentionally spectacular nor poetical, that its units should not be
terms in common discourse, nor its laws quite like the logic of passion,
is of course a hard lesson to learn. The learning, however—not to speak
of its incidental delights—is so extraordinarily good for people that
only with that instruction and the blessed renunciations it brings can
clearness, dignity, or virility enter their minds. And of course, if the
material basis of human strength could be discovered and better
exploited, the free activity of the mind would be not arrested but
enlarged. Geology adds something to the interest of landscape, and
botany much to the charm of flowers; natural history increases the
pleasure with which we view society and the justice with which we judge
it. An instinctive sympathy, a solicitude for the perfect working of any
delicate thing, as it makes the ruffian tender to a young child, is a
sentiment inevitable even toward artificial organisms. Could we better
perceive the fine fruits of order, the dire consequences of every
specific cruelty or jar, we should grow doubly considerate toward all
forms; for we exist through form, and the love of form is our whole real
inspiration.

[Sidenote: and partly artificial.]

The artificial prejudice against mechanism is a fruit of party spirit.
When a myth has become the centre or sanction for habits and
institutions, these habits and institutions stand against any conception
incompatible with that myth. It matters nothing that the values the
myth was designed to express may remain standing without it, or may be
transferred to its successor. Social and intellectual inertia is too
great to tolerate so simple an evolution. It divides opinions not into
false and true but into high and low, or even more frankly into those
which are acceptable and comforting to its ruffled faith and those which
are dangerous, alarming, and unfortunate. Imagine Socrates “viewing with
alarm” the implications of an argument! This artificial prejudice is
indeed modern and will not be eternal. Ancient sages, when they wished
to rebuke the atheist, pointed to the very heavens which a sentimental
religion would nowadays gladly prove to be unreal, lest the soul should
learn something of their method. Yet the Ptolemaic spheres were no more
manlike and far less rich in possibilities of life than the Copernican
star-dust. The ancients thought that what was intelligible was divine.
Order was what they meant by intelligence, and order productive of
excellence was what they meant by reason. When they noticed that the
stars moved perpetually and according to law, they seriously thought
they were beholding the gods. The stars as we conceive them are not in
that sense perfect. But the order which nature does not cease to
manifest is still typical of all order, and is sublime. It is from these
regions of embodied law that intelligibility and power combined come to
make their covenant with us, as with all generations.

[Sidenote: Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.]

The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to
materialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a
primary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears
as a destructive force and in the incongruous rôle of a critic. One
dogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end only
in insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and
irrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion.
But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next
turn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried
may rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a
later day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine
sceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate
and observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate,
the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not
necessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being
absolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all,
criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our
dogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice.
Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the
dogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no
scruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough
examination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible
expression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So
approached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with
it, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The
emotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains.
Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved
to have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing
inadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality
has, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing
except the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what
it is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge
of physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is
itself an achievement and a new resource.

[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.]

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion,
merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror
may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into
everything that we know. Materialism has its distinct æsthetic and
emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even
reversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it
accidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit
of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your
romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes
most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have
nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the
faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold
water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His
delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and
beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be
of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a
museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in
their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas.
Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon
over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely
interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable
those absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the
sentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active,
joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without a
touch of scorn.

To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics that
accompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, like
other merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended to
withdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated.
Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with
hosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils
born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which
man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe,
laughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage,
that it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherly
understanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote’s absurdities and
misadventures does not mock the hero’s intent. His ardour was admirable,
but the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, and
happiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason.

[Sidenote: The material world not dead nor ugly,]

Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have
generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter.
If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance
and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds
which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in
could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving
rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature’s
meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled
they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their
judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man
is not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor
every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature
dead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not
obviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and
hot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the
sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions
of self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take
off the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome
bleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough
in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them;
and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the
features of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is
not therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer
aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty
being an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and
living which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.

[Sidenote: nor especially cruel.]

It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man
and all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the
natural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror,
is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in
experience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to
the eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can
touch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at
the thought of a merely natural existence is something truly
hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so
intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious
satisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual
torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his
infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that
might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them.
A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we
understood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that
pursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical
expression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a
mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another
man seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take
for granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh
when we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that
introduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.

[Sidenote: Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.]

The death of individuals, as we observe daily in nature, does not
prevent the reappearance of life; and if we choose to indulge in
arbitrary judgments on a subject where data fail us, we may as
reasonably wish that there might be less life as that there might be
more. The passion for a large and permanent population in the universe
is not obviously rational; at a great distance a man must view
everything, including himself, under the form of eternity, and when life
is so viewed its length or its diffusion becomes a point of little
importance. What matters then is quality. The reasonable and humane
demand to make of the world is that such creatures as exist should not
be unhappy and that life, whatever its quantity, should have a quality
that may justify it in its own eyes. This just demand, made by
conscience and not by an arbitrary fancy, the world described by
mechanism does not fulfil altogether, for adjustments in it are
tentative, and much friction must precede and follow upon any vital
equilibrium attained. This imperfection, however, is actual, and no
theory can overcome it except by verbal fallacies and scarcely deceptive
euphemisms. What mechanism involves in this respect is exactly what we
find: a tentative appearance of life in many quarters, its disappearance
in some, and its reinforcement and propagation in others, where the
physical equilibrium attained insures to it a natural stability and a
natural prosperity.




CHAPTER IV

HESITATIONS IN METHOD


[Sidenote: Mechanism restricted to one-half of existence.]

When Democritus proclaimed the sovereignty of mechanism, he did so in
the oracular fashion proper to an ancient sage. He found it no harder to
apply his atomic theory to the mind and to the gods than to solids and
fluids. It sufficed to conceive that such an explanation might be
possible, and to illustrate the theory by a few scattered facts and
trenchant hypotheses. When Descartes, after twenty centuries of verbal
physics, reintroduced mechanism into philosophy, he made a striking
modification in its claims. He divided existence into two independent
regions, and it was only in one, in the realm of extended things, that
mechanism was expected to prevail. Mental facts, which he approached
from the side of abstracted reflection and Platonic ideas, seemed to him
obviously non-extended, even when they represented extension; and with
them mechanism could have nothing to do. Descartes had recovered in the
science of mechanics a firm nucleus for physical theory, a stronghold
from which it had become impossible to dislodge scientific methods.
There, at any rate, form, mass, distance, and other mathematical
relations governed the transformation of things. Yet the very clearness
and exhaustiveness of this mechanical method, as applied to gross masses
in motion, made it seem essentially inapplicable to anything else.
Descartes was far too radical and incisive a thinker, however, not to
feel that it must apply throughout nature. Imaginative difficulties due
to the complexity of animal bodies could not cloud his rational insight.
Animal bodies, then, were mere machines, cleancut and cold engines like
so many anatomical manikins. They explained themselves and all their
operations, talking and building temples being just as truly a matter of
physics as the revolution of the sky. But the soul had dropped out, and
Descartes was the last man to ignore the soul. There had dropped out
also the secondary qualities of matter, all those qualities, namely,
which are negligible in mechanical calculations. Mechanism was in truth
far from universal; all mental facts and half the properties of matter,
as matter is revealed to man, came into being without asking leave; they
were interlopers in the intelligible universe. Indeed, Descartes was
willing to admit that these inexplicable bystanders might sometimes put
their finger in the pie, and stir the material world judiciously so as
to give it a new direction, although without adding to its substance or
to its force.

The situation so created gave the literary philosophers an excellent
chance to return to the attack and to swallow and digest the new-born
mechanism in their facile systems. Theologians and metaphysicians in one
quarter and psychologists in another found it easy and inevitable to
treat the whole mechanical world as a mere idea. In that case, it is
true, the only existences that remained remained entirely without
calculable connections; everything was a divine trance or a shower of
ideas falling by chance through the void. But this result might not be
unwelcome. It fell in well enough with that love of emotional issues,
that want of soberness and want of cogency, which is so characteristic
of modern philosophers. Christian theology still remained the background
and chief point of reference for speculation; if its eclectic dogmas
could be in part supported or in part undermined, that constituted a
sufficient literary success, and what became of science was of little
moment in comparison.

[Sidenote: Men of science not speculative.]

Science, to be sure, could very well take care of itself and proceeded
in its patient course without caring particularly what status the
metaphysicians might assign to it. Not to be a philosopher is even an
advantage for a man of science, because he is then more willing to adapt
his methods to the state of knowledge in his particular subject, without
insisting on ultimate intelligibility; and he has perhaps more joy of
his discoveries than he might have if he had discounted them in his
speculations. Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton
to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing
that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural
history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate
processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.
Even in chemistry, while measure and proportion are better felt, the
ultimate units and the radical laws are still problematical. The recent
immense advances in science have been in acquaintance with nature rather
than in insight. Greater complexity, greater regularity, greater
_naturalness_ have been discovered everywhere; the profound analogies in
things, their common evolution, have appeared unmistakably; but the
inner texture of the process has not been laid bare.

This cautious peripheral attack, which does so much honour to the
scientific army and has won it so many useful victories, is another
proof that science is nothing but common knowledge extended. It is
willing to reckon in any terms and to study any subject-matter; where it
cannot see necessity it will notice law; where laws cannot be stated it
will describe habits; where habits fail it will classify types; and
where types even are indiscernible it will not despise statistics. In
this way studies which are scientific in spirit, however loose their
results, may be carried on in social matters, in political economy, in
anthropology, in psychology. The historical sciences, also, philology
and archæology, have reached tentatively very important results; it is
enough that an intelligent man should gather in any quarter a rich fund
of information, for the movement of his subject to pass somehow to his
mind: and if his apprehension follows that movement—not breaking in
upon it with extraneous matter—it will be scientific apprehension.

[Sidenote: Confusion in semi-moral subjects.]

What confuses and retards science in these ambiguous regions is the
difficulty of getting rid of the foreign element, or even of deciding
what the element native to the object is. In political economy, for
instance, it is far from clear whether the subject is moral, and
therefore to be studied and expressed dialectically, or whether it is
descriptive, and so in the end a matter of facts and of mechanics. Are
you formulating an interest or tracing a sequence of events? And if both
simultaneously, are you studying the world in order to see what acts, in
a given situation, would serve your purpose and so be right, or are you
taking note of your own intentions, and of those of other people, in
order to infer from them the probable course of affairs? In the first
case you are a moralist observing nature in order to use it; you are
defining a policy, and that definition is not knowledge of anything
except of your own heart. Neither you nor any one else may ever take
such a single-minded and unchecked course in the world as the one you
are excogitating. No one may ever have been guided in the past by any
such absolute plan.

For this same reason, if (to take up the other supposition) you are a
naturalist studying the actual movement of affairs, you would do well
not to rely on the conscious views or intentions of anybody. A natural
philosopher is on dangerous ground when he uses psychological or moral
terms in his calculation. If you use such terms—and to forbid their use
altogether would be pedantic—you should take them for conventional
literary expressions, covering an unsolved problem; for these views and
intentions have a brief and inconsequential tenure of life and their
existence is merely a sign for certain conjunctions in nature, where
processes hailing from afar have met in a man, soon to pass beyond him.
If they figure as causes in nature, it is only because they represent
the material processes that have brought them into being. The
existential element in mental facts is not so remote from matter as
Descartes imagined. Even if we are not prepared to admit with Democritus
that matter is what makes them up (as it well might if “matter” were
taken in a logical sense)[B] we should agree that their substance is in
mechanical flux, and that their form, by which they become moral
unities, is only an ideal aspect of that moving substance. Moral
unities are created by a point of view, as right and left are, and for
that reason are not efficacious; though of course the existences they
enclose, like the things lying to the left and to the right, move in
unison with the rest of nature.

People doubtless do well to keep an eye open for morals when they study
physics, and _vice versa_, since it is only by feeling how the two
spheres hang together that the Life of Reason can be made to walk on
both feet. Yet to discriminate between the two is no scholastic
subtlety. There is the same practical inconvenience in taking one for
the other as in trying to gather grapes from thistles. A hybrid science
is sterile. If the reason escapes us, history should at least convince
us of the fact, when we remember the issue of Aristotelian physics and
of cosmological morals. Where the subject-matter is ambiguous and the
method double, you have scarcely reached a result which seems plausible
for the moment, when a rival school springs up, adopting and bringing
forward the submerged element in your view, and rejecting your
achievement altogether. A seesaw and endless controversy thus take the
place of a steady, co-operative advance. This disorder reigns in morals,
metaphysics, and psychology, and the conflicting schools of political
economy and of history loudly proclaim it to the world.

[Sidenote: “Physic of metaphysic begs defence.”]

The modesty of men of science, their aversion (or incapacity) to carry
their principles over into speculation, has left the greater part of
physics or the theory of existence to the metaphysicians. What they have
made of it does not concern us here, since the result has certainly not
been a science; indeed they have obscured the very notion that there
should be a science of all existence and that metaphysics, if it is more
than a name for ultimate physics, can be nothing but dialectic, which
does not look toward existence at all. But the prevalence of a mythical
physics, purporting to describe the structure of the universe in terms
quite other than those which scientific physics could use, has affected
this scientific physics and seriously confused it. Its core, in
mechanics, to be sure, could not be touched; and the detail even of
natural history and chemistry could not be disfigured: but the general
aspect of natural history could be rendered ambiguous in the doctrine of
evolution; while in psychology, which attempted to deal with that half
of the world which Descartes had not subjected to mechanism, confusion
could hold undisputed sway.

[Sidenote: Evolution by mechanism.]

There is a sense in which the notion of evolution is involved in any
mechanical system. Descartes indeed had gone so far as to describe, in
strangely simple terms, how the world, with all its detail, might have
been produced by starting any motion anywhere in the midst of a plenum
at rest. The idea of evolution could not be more curtly put forth; so
much so that Descartes had to arm himself against the inevitable charge
that he was denying the creation, by protesting that his doctrine was a
supposition contrary to fact, and that though the world _might_ have
been so formed, it was really created as Genesis recorded. Moreover, in
antiquity, every Ionian philosopher had conceived a gradual
crystallisation of nature; while Empedocles, in his magnificent oracles,
had anticipated Darwin’s philosophy without Darwin’s knowledge. It is
clear that if the forces that hold an organism together are mechanical,
and therefore independent of the ideal unities they subtend, those
forces suffice to explain the origin of the organism, and can have
produced it. Darwin’s discoveries, like every other advance in physical
insight, are nothing but filling for that abstract assurance. They show
us how the supposed mechanism really works in one particular field, in
one stage of its elaboration. As earlier naturalists had shown us how
mechanical causes might produce the miracle of the sunrise and the
poetry of the seasons, so Darwin showed us how similar causes might
secure the adaptation of animals to their habitat. Evolution, so
conceived, is nothing but a detailed account of mechanical origins.

[Sidenote: Evolution by ideal attraction.]

At the same time the word evolution has a certain pomp and glamour about
it which fits ill with so prosaic an interpretation. In the unfolding of
a bud we are wont to see, as it were, the fulfilment of a predetermined
and glorious destiny; for the seed was an epitome or condensation of a
full-blown plant and held within it, in some sort of potential guise,
the very form which now peeps out in the young flower. Evolution
suggests a prior involution or contraction and the subsequent
manifestation of an innate ideal. Evolution should move toward a fixed
consummation the approaches to which we might observe and measure. Yet
evolution, in this prophetic sense of the word, would be the exact
denial of what Darwin, for instance, was trying to prove. It would be a
return to Aristotelian notions of heredity and potential being; for it
was the essence of Aristotle’s physics—of which his theology was an
integral part and a logical capping—that the forms which beings
approached pre-existed in other beings from which they had been
inherited, and that the intermediate stages during which the butterfly
shrank to a grub could not be understood unless we referred them to
their origin and their destiny. The physical essence and potency of
seeds lay in their ideal relations, not in any actual organisation they
might possess in the day of their eclipse and slumber. An egg evolved
into a chicken not by mechanical necessity—for an egg had a
comparatively simple structure—but by virtue of an ideal harmony in
things; since it was natural and fitting that what had come from a hen
should lead on to a hen again. The ideal nature possessed by the parent,
hovering over the passive seed, magically induced it to grow into the
parent’s semblance; and growth was the gradual approach to the
perfection which this ancestral essence prescribed. This was why
Aristotle’s God, though in character an unmistakable ideal, had to be at
the same time an actual existence; since the world would not have known
which way to move or what was its inner ideal, unless this ideal,
already embodied somewhere else, drew it on and infused movement and
direction into the world’s structureless substance.

The underlying Platonism in this magical physics is obvious, since the
natures that Aristotle made to rule the world were eternal natures. An
individual might fail to be a perfect man or a perfect monkey, but the
specific human or simian ideal, by which he had been formed in so far as
he was formed at all, was not affected by this accidental resistance in
the matter at hand, as an adamantine seal, even if at times the wax by
defect or impurity failed to receive a perfect impression, would remain
unchanged and ready to be stamped perpetually on new material.

[Sidenote: If species are evolved they cannot guide evolution.]

The contrast is obvious between this Platonic physics and a naturalism
like that of Darwin. The point of evolution, as selection produces it,
is that new species may arise. The very title of Darwin’s book “The
Origin of Species” is a denial of Aristotelianism and, in the pregnant
sense, of evolution. It suggests that the type approached by each
generation may differ from that approached by the previous one; that
not merely the degree of perfection, but the direction of growth, may
vary. The individual is not merely unfolded from an inner potentiality
derived from a like ancestor and carrying with it a fixed eternal ideal,
but on the contrary the very ground plan of organisation may gradually
change and a new form and a new ideal may appear. Spontaneous
variations—of course mechanically caused[C]—may occur and may modify
the hereditary form of animals. These variations, superposed upon one
another, may in time constitute a nature wholly unlike its first
original. This accidental, cumulative evolution accordingly justifies a
declaration of moral liberty. I am not obliged to aspire to the nature
my father aspired to, for the ground of my being is partly new. In me
nature is making a novel experiment. I am the adoring creator of a new
spiritual good. My duties have shifted with my shifting faculties, and
the ideal which I propose to myself, and alone can honestly propose, is
unprecedented, the expression of a moving existence and without
authority beyond the range of existences congruous with mine.

[Sidenote: Intrusion of optimism.]

All that is scientific or Darwinian in the theory of evolution is
accordingly an application of mechanism, a proof that mechanism lies at
the basis of life and morals. The Aristotelian notion of development,
however, was too deeply rooted in tradition for it to disappear at a
breath. Evolution as conceived by Hegel, for instance, or even by
Spencer, retained Aristotelian elements, though these were disguised and
hidden under a cloud of new words. Both identify evolution with
progress, with betterment; a notion which would naturally be prominent
in any one with enlightened sympathies living in the nineteenth century,
when a new social and intellectual order was forcing itself on a world
that happened largely to welcome the change, but a notion that has
nothing to do with natural science. The fittest to live need not be
those with the most harmonious inner life nor the best possibilities.
The fitness might be due to numbers, as in a political election, or to
tough fibre, as in a tropical climate. Of course a form of being that
circumstances make impossible or hopelessly laborious had better dive
under and cease for the moment to be; but the circumstances that render
it inopportune do not render it essentially inferior. Circumstances
have no power of that kind; and perhaps the worst incident in the
popular acceptance of evolution has been a certain brutality thereby
introduced into moral judgment, an abdication of human ideals, a mocking
indifference to justice, under cover of respect for what is bound to be,
and for the rough economy of the world. Disloyalty to the good in the
guise of philosophy had appeared also among the ancients, when their
political ethics had lost its authority, just as it appeared among us
when the prestige of religion had declined. The Epicureans sometimes
said that one should pursue pleasure because all the animals did so, and
the Stoics that one should fill one’s appointed place in nature, because
such was the practice of clouds and rivers.

[Sidenote: Evolution according to Hegel.]

Hegel possessed a keen scent for instability in men’s attitudes and
opinions; he had no need of Darwin’s facts to convince him that in moral
life, at least, there were no permanent species and that every posture
of thought was an untenable half-way station between two others. His
early contact with Protestant theology may have predisposed him to that
opinion. At any rate he had no sympathy with that Platonism that allowed
everything to have its eternal ideal, with which it might ultimately be
identified. Such ideals would be finite, they would arrest the flux, and
they would try to break loose from their enveloping conditions. Hegel
was no moralist in the Socratic sense, but a naturalist seeking
formulas for the growth of moral experience. Instead of questioning the
heart, he somewhat satirically described its history. At the same time
he was heir to that mythology which had deified the genetic or physical
principle in things, and though the traditional myths suffered cruel
operations at his hands, and often died of explanation, the mythical
principle itself remained untouched and was the very breath of his
nostrils. He never doubted that the formula he might find for the growth
of experience would be also the ultimate good. What other purpose could
the world have than to express the formula according to which it was
being generated?

In this honest conviction we see the root, perhaps, of that distaste for
correct physics that prevails among many who call themselves idealists.
If physics were for some reason to be adored, it would be disconcerting
to find in physics nothing but atoms and a void. It is hard to
understand, however, why a fanciful formula expressing the evolution of
this perturbed universe, and painting it no better than it is, should be
more worshipful than an exact formula meant to perform the same office.
A myth that enlarged the world and promised a complete transformation of
its character might have its charms; but the improvement is not obvious
that accrues by making the drift of things, just as it drifts, its own
standard. Yet for Hegel it mattered nothing how unstable all ideals
might be, since the only use of them was to express a principle of
transition, and this principle was being realised, eternally and
unawares, by the self-devouring and self-transcending purposes rolling
in the flux.

[Sidenote: The conservative interpretation.]

This philosophy might not be much relished if it were more frankly
expressed; yet something of the sort floats vaguely before most minds
when they think of evolution. The types of being change, they say: in
this sense the Aristotelian notion of a predetermined form unfolding
itself in each species has yielded to a more correct and more dynamic
physics. But the changes, so people imagine, express a predetermined
ideal, no longer, of course, the ideal of these specific things, but one
overarching the cosmic movement. The situation might be described by
saying that this is Aristotle’s view adapted to a world in which there
is only one species or only one individual. The earlier phases of life
are an imperfect expression of the same nature which the later phases
express more fully. Hence the triumphant march of evolution and the
assumption that whatever is later is necessarily better than what went
before. If a child were simply the partial expression of a man, his
single desire would be to grow up, and when he was grown up he would
embody all he had been striving for and would be happy for ever after.
So if man were nothing but a halting reproduction of divinity and
destined to become God, his whole destiny would be fulfilled by
apotheosis. If this apotheosis, moreover, were an actual future event,
something every man and animal was some day to experience, evolution
might really have a final goal, and might lead to a new and presumably
better sort of existence—existence in the eternal. Somewhat in this
fashion evolution is understood by the party that wish to combine it
with a refreshed patristic theology.

[Sidenote: The radical one.]

There is an esoteric way, however, of taking these matters which is more
in sympathy both with natural evolution and with transcendental
philosophy. If we assert that evolution is infinite, no substantive goal
can be set to it. The goal will be the process itself, if we could only
open our eyes upon its beauty and necessity. The apotheosis will be
retroactive, nay, it has already taken place. The insight involved is
mystical, yet in a way more just to the facts than any promise of
ulterior blisses. For it is not really true that a child has no other
ideal than to become a man. Childhood has many an ideal of its own, many
a beauty and joy irrelevant to manhood, and such that manhood is
incapable of retaining or containing them. If the ultimate good is
really to contain and retain all the others, it can hardly be anything
but their totality—the infinite history of experience viewed under the
form of eternity. At that remove, however, the least in the kingdom of
Heaven is even as the greatest, and the idea of evolution, as of time,
is “taken up into a higher unity.” There could be no real pre-eminence
in one man’s works over those of another; and if faith, or insight into
the equal service done by all, still seemed a substantial privilege
reserved for the elect, this privilege, too, must be an illusion, since
those who do not know how useful and necessary they are must be as
useful and necessary as those who do. An absolute preference for
knowledge or self-consciousness would be an unmistakably human and
finite ideal—something to be outgrown.

[Sidenote: Megalomania.]

What practically survives in these systems, when their mysticism and
naturalism have had time to settle, is a clear enough standard. It is a
standard of inclusion and quantity. Since all is needful, and the
justifying whole is infinite, there would seem to be a greater dignity
in the larger part. As the best copy of a picture, other things being
equal, would be one that represented it all, so the best expression of
the world, next to the world itself, would be the largest portion of it
any one could absorb. Progress would then mean annexation. Growth would
not come by expressing better an innate soul which involved a particular
ideal, but by assimilating more and more external things till the
original soul, by their influence, was wholly recast and unrecognisable.
This moral agility would be true merit; we should always be “striving
onward.” Life would be a sort of demonic vortex, boiling at the centre
and omnivorous at the circumference, till it finally realised the
supreme vocation of vortices, to have “their centre everywhere and their
circumference nowhere.” This somewhat troubled situation might seem
sublime to us, transformed as we too should be; and so we might reach
the most remarkable and doubtless the “highest” form of
optimism—optimism in hell.

[Sidenote: Chaos in the theory of mind.]

Confusing as these cross-currents and revulsions may prove in the field
where mechanism is more or less at home, in the field of material
operations, they are nothing to the primeval chaos that still broods
over the other hemisphere, over the mental phase of existence. The
difficulty is not merely that no mechanism is discovered or acknowledged
here, but that the phenomena themselves are ambiguous, and no one seems
to know when he speaks of mind whether he means something formal and
ideal, like Platonic essences and mathematical truths, or reflection and
intelligence, or sensation possessing external causes and objects, or
finally that ultimate immediacy or brute actuality which is
characteristic of any existence. Other even vaguer notions are doubtless
often designated by the word psychical; but these may suffice for us to
recognise the initial dilemmas in the subject and the futility of trying
to build a science of mind, or defining the relation of mind to matter,
when it is not settled whether mind means the form of matter, as with
the Platonists, or the effect of it, as with the materialists, or the
seat and false knowledge of it, as with the transcendentalists, or
perhaps after all, as with the pan-psychists, mind means exactly matter
itself.[D]

[Sidenote: Origin of self-consciousness.]

To see how equivocal everything is in this region, and possibly to catch
some glimpse of whatever science or sciences might some day define it,
we may revert for a moment to the origin of human notions concerning the
mind. If either everything or nothing that men came upon in their
primitive day-dream had been continuous in its own category and
traceable through the labyrinth of the world, no mind and no
self-consciousness need ever have appeared at all. The world might have
been as magical as it pleased; it would have remained single, one
budding sequence of forms with no transmissible substance beneath them.
These forms might have had properties we now call physical and at the
same time qualities we now call mental or emotional; there is nothing
originally incongruous in such a mixture, chaotic and perverse as it may
seem from the vantage-ground of subsequent distinctions. Existence might
as easily have had any other form whatsoever as the one we discover it
to have in fact. And primitive men, not having read Descartes, and not
having even distinguished their waking from their dreaming life nor
their passions from their environment, might well stand in the presence
of facts that seem to us full of inward incongruity and contradiction;
indeed, it is only because original data were of that chaotic sort that
we call ourselves intelligent for having disentangled them and assigned
them to distinct sequences and alternative spheres.

The ambiguities and hesitations of theory, down to our own day, are not
all artificial or introduced gratuitously by sophists. Even where
prejudice obstructs progress, that prejudice itself has some ancient and
ingenuous source. Our perplexities are traces of a primitive total
confusion; our doubts are remnants of a quite gaping ignorance. It was
impossible to say whether the phantasms that first crossed this earthly
scene were merely instinct with passion or were veritable passions
stalking through space. Material and mental elements, connections
natural and dialectical, existed mingled in that chaos. Light was as yet
inseparable from inward vitality and pain drew a visible cloud across
the sky. Civilised life is that early dream partly clarified; science is
that dense mythology partly challenged and straightened out.

The flux, however, was meantime full of method, if only discrimination
and enlarged experience could have managed to divine it. Its
inconstancy, for one thing, was not so entire that no objects could be
fixed within it, or marshalled in groups, like the birds that flock
together. Animals could be readily distinguished from the things about
them, their rate of mobility being so much quicker; and one animal in
particular would at once be singled out, a more constant follower than
any dog, and one whose energies were not merely felt but often
spontaneously exerted—a phenomenon which appeared in no other part of
the world. This singular animal every one called himself. One object was
thus discovered to be the vehicle for perceiving and affecting all the
others, a movable seat or tower from which the world might be surveyed.

[Sidenote: The notion of spirit.]

The external influences to which this body, with its discoursing mind,
seemed to be subject were by no means all visible and material. Just as
one’s own body was moved by passions and thoughts which no one else
could see—and this secrecy was a subject for much wonder and
self-congratulation—so evidently other things had a spirit within or
above them to endow them with wit and power. It was not so much to
contain sensation that this spirit was needed (for the body could very
well feel) as to contrive plans of action and discharge sudden force
into the world on momentous occasions. How deep-drawn, how far-reaching,
this spirit might be was not easily determined; but it seemed to have
unaccountable ways and to come and go from distant habitations. Things
past, for instance, were still open to its inspection; the mind was not
credited with constructing a fresh image of the past which might more or
less resemble that past; a ray of supernatural light, rather, sometimes
could pierce to the past itself and revisit its unchangeable depths. The
future, though more rarely, was open to spirit in exactly the same
fashion; destiny could on occasion be observed. Things distant and
preternatural were similarly seen in dreams. There could be no doubt
that all those objects existed; the only question was where they might
lie and in what manner they might operate. A vision was a visitation and
a dream was a journey. The spirit was a great traveller, and just as it
could dart in every direction over both space and time, so it could
come thence into a man’s presence or even into his body, to take
possession of it. Sense and fancy, in a word, had not been
distinguished. As to be aware of vision is a great sign of imagination,
so to be aware of imagination is a great sign of understanding.

The spirit had other prerogatives, of a more rational sort. The truth,
the right were also spirits; for though often invisible and denied by
men, they could emerge at times from their invisible lairs to deal some
quick blow and vindicate their divinity. The intermittance proper to
phenomena is universal and extreme; only the familiar conception of
nature, in which the flux becomes continuous, now blinds us in part to
that fact. But before the days of scientific thinking only those things
which were found unchanged and which seemed to lie passive were
conceived to have had in the interval a material existence. More
stirring apparitions, instead of being referred to their material
constituents and continuous basis in nature, were referred to spirit. We
still say, for instance, that war _comes on_. That phrase would once
have been understood literally. War, being something intermittent, must
exist somehow unseen in the interval, else it would not return; that
rage, so people would have fancied, is therefore a spirit, it is a god.
Mars and Ares long survived the phase of thought to which they owed
their divinity; and believers had to rely on habit and the witness of
antiquity to support their irrational faith. They little thought how
absolutely simple and inevitable had been the grammar by which those
figures, since grown rhetorical, had been first imposed upon the world.

[Sidenote: The notion of sense.]

Another complication soon came to increase this confusion. When material
objects were discovered and it became clear that they had comparatively
fixed natures, it also became clear that with the motions of one’s body
all other things seemed to vary in ways which did not amount to a
permanent or real metamorphosis in them; for these things might be found
again unchanged. Objects, for instance, seemed to grow smaller when we
receded from them, though really, as we discovered by approaching and
measuring them anew, they had remained unchanged. These private aspects
or views of things were accordingly distinguished from the things
themselves, which were lodged in an intelligible sphere, raised above
anybody’s sensibility and existing independently. The variable aspects
were due to the body; they accompanied its variations and depended on
its presence and organs. They were conceived vaguely to exist in one’s
head or, if they were emotional, in one’s heart; but anatomy would have
had some difficulty in finding them there. They constituted what is
properly called the mind—the region of sentience, emotion, and
soliloquy.

The mind was the region where those aspects which real things present
to the body might live and congregate. So understood, it was avowedly
and from the beginning a realm of mere appearance and depended entirely
on the body. It should be observed, however, that the limbo of divine
and ideal things, which is sometimes also called the mind, is very far
from depending obviously on the body and is said to do so only by a late
school of psychological sceptics. To primitive apprehension spirit, with
its ideal prerogatives, was something magical and oracular. Its
prophetic intuitions were far from being more trivial than material
appearances. On the contrary those intuitions were momentous and
inspiring. Their scope was indefinite and their value incalculable in
every sense of the word. The disembodied spirit might well be immortal,
since absent and dead things were familiar to it. It was by nature
present wherever truth and reality might be found. It was prophetic; the
dreams it fell into were full of auguries and secret affinities with
things to come. Myth and legend, hatched in its womb, were felt to be
divinely inspired, and genius seemed to be the Muses’ voice heard in a
profound abstraction, when vulgar perception yielded to some kind of
clairvoyance having a higher authority than sense. Such a spirit might
naturally be expected to pass into another world, since it already dwelt
there at intervals, and brought thence its mysterious reports. Its
incursions into the physical sphere alone seemed miraculous and sent a
thrill of awe through the unaccustomed flesh.

[Sidenote: Competition between the two.]

The ideal element in the world was accordingly regarded at first as
something sacred and terrifying. It was no vulgar presence or private
product, and though its destiny might be to pass half the time, like
Persephone, under ground, it could not really be degraded. The human
mind, on the other hand, the region of sentience and illusion, was a
familiar affair enough. This familiarity, indeed, for a long time bred
contempt and philosophers did not think the personal equation of
individuals, or the refraction of things in sense, a very important or
edifying subject for study. In time, however, sentience had its revenge.
As each man’s whole experience is bound to his body no less than is the
most trivial optical illusion, the sphere of sense is the transcendental
ground or _ratio cognoscendi_ of every other sphere. It suffices,
therefore, to make philosophy retrospective and to relax the practical
and dogmatic stress under which the intellect operates, for all the
discoveries made through experience to collapse into the experience in
which they were made. A complete collapse of objects is indeed
inconvenient, because it would leave no starting-point for reasoning and
no faith in the significance of reason itself; but partial collapses,
now in the region of physics, now in that of logic and morals, are very
easy and exciting feats for criticism to perform.

Passions when abstracted from their bodily causes and values when
removed from their objects will naturally fall into the body’s mind, and
be allied with appearances. Shrewd people will bethink themselves to
attribute almost all the body’s acts to some preparatory intention or
motive in its mind, and thus attain what they think knowledge of human
nature. They will encourage themselves to live among dramatic fictions,
as when absorbed in a novel; and having made themselves at home in this
upper story of their universe, they will find it amusing to deny that it
has a ground floor. The chance of conceiving, by these partial reversals
of science, a world composed entirely without troublesome machinery is
too tempting not to be taken up, whatever the ulterior risks; and
accordingly, when once psychological criticism is put in play, the
sphere of sense will be enlarged at the expense of the two rational
worlds, the material and the ideal.

[Sidenote: The rise of scepticism.]

Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things,
will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal
realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no
place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with
decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will
be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic
has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of
sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that
it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists
will declare that all body is a part of some body’s mind. Thus, by a
curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless
contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction
and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be
quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the
things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The
intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its
ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into
the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once
extricated a world.

The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow
the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we
shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous
monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly
transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of
place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or
discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So
administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will
not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief
will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a
belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not
entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance.
But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology
itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for
physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in
bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish
in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the
effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A
calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior,
would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive
sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary
objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think
about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to
addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the
beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might
well have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a
practical universe.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote B: The term “matter” (which ought before long to reappear in
philosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it
commonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus
or the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its
particles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given
hypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only
because this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that
the hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its
constitution.

On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means
something good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in
discourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of
every existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like
everything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual
love, for instance, differs _materially_ from the mere idea or
possibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of
it were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a
grander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical
will. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence
or presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain
and dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the
premises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute
existence. The surd in experience—its non-ideal element—is not an
indifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling
it pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or
rejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the
surd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible
quantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of
perfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important
factors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a
serious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world.

Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to
the dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for
substance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse
for this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a
piece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere
material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is
matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and
non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything
could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of
things.]

[Footnote C: It has been suggested—what will not party spirit
contrive?—that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because
not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical
sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free,
these acts might deflect evolution—like Descartes’ soul acting on the
pineal gland—into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and
gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary
implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It
may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely
free, _i.e._, intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way
quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were
kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not
be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic
destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to
Aristotelian physics again.]

[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because
they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable
was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a
multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the
latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be
contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we
are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to
apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative
aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically
governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the
substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of
thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any
material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our
idealists, in their eagerness to show that _Gefuehl ist Alles_, have
thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression
and wishing to make it a stuff.

There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful
name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any
actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to
rely on the _system_ into which that material has fallen; the
substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its
intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form
depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations
which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.]




CHAPTER V

PSYCHOLOGY


[Sidenote: Mind reading not science.]

If psychology is a science, many things that books of psychology contain
should be excluded from it. One is social imagination. Nature, besides
having a mechanical form and wearing a garment of sensible qualities,
makes a certain inner music in the beholder’s mind, inciting him to
enter into other bodies and to fancy the new and profound life which he
might lead there. Who, as he watched a cat basking in the sun, has not
passed into that vigilant eye and felt all the leaps potential in that
luxurious torpor? Who has not attributed some little romance to the
passer-by? Who has not sometimes exchanged places even with things
inanimate, and drawn some new moral experience from following the
movement of stars or of daffodils? All this is idle musing or at best
poetry; yet our ordinary knowledge of what goes on in men’s minds is
made of no other stuff. True, we have our own mind to go by, which
presumably might be a fair sample of what men’s minds are; but
unfortunately our notion of ourselves is of all notions the most biassed
and idealistic. If we attributed to other men only such obvious
reasoning, sound judgment, just preferences, honest passions, and
blameless errors as we discover in ourselves, we should take but an
insipid and impractical view of mankind.

In fact, we do far better: for what we impute to our fellow-men is
suggested by their conduct or by an instant imitation of their gesture
and expression. These manifestations, striking us in all their novelty
and alien habit, and affecting our interests in all manner of awkward
ways, create a notion of our friends’ natures which is extremely vivid
and seldom extremely flattering.

Such romancing has the cogency proper to dramatic poetry; it is
persuasive only over the third person, who has never had, but has always
been about to have, the experience in question. Drawn from the potential
in one’s self, it describes at best the possible in others. The thoughts
of men are incredibly evanescent, merely the foam of their labouring
natures; and they doubtless vary much more than our trite
classifications allow for. This is what makes passions and fashions,
religions and philosophies, so hard to conceive when once the trick of
them is a little antiquated. Languages are hardly more foreign to one
another than are the thoughts uttered in them. We should give men credit
for originality at least in their dreams, even if they have little of it
to show elsewhere; and as it was discovered but recently that all
memories are not furnished with the like material images, but often
have no material images whatever, so it may have to be acknowledged that
the disparity in men’s soliloquies is enormous, and that some races,
perhaps, live content without soliloquising at all.

[Sidenote: Experience a reconstruction.]

Nevertheless, in describing what happens, or in enforcing a given view
of things, we constantly refer to universal experience as if everybody
was agreed about what universal experience is and had personally
gathered it all since the days of Adam. In fact, each man has only his
own, the remnant saved from his personal acquisitions. On the basis of
this his residual endowment, he has to conceive all nature, with
whatever experiences may have fallen there to the lot of others.
Universal experience is a comfortable fiction, a distinctly ideal
construction, and no fund available for any one to draw from; which of
course is not to deny that tradition and books, in transmitting
materially the work of other generations, tend to assimilate us also to
their mind. The result of their labours, in language, learning, and
institutions, forms a hothouse in which to force our seedling fancy to a
rational growth; but the influence is physical, the environment is
material, and its ideal background or significance has to be inferred by
us anew, according to our imaginative faculty and habits. Past
experience, apart from its monuments, is fled for ever out of mortal
reach. It is now a parcel of the motionless ether, of the ineffectual
truth about what once was. To know it we must evoke it within ourselves,
starting from its inadequate expressions still extant in the world. This
reconstruction is highly speculative and, as Spinoza noted, better
evidence of what we are than of what other men have been.

[Sidenote: The honest art of education.]

When we appeal to general experience, then, what we really have to deal
with is our interlocutor’s power of imagining that experience; for the
real experience is dead and ascended into heaven, where it can neither
answer nor hear. Our agreements or divergences in this region do not
touch science; they concern only friendship and unanimity. All our
proofs are, as they say in Spain, pure conversation; and as the purpose
and best result can be only to kindle intelligence and propagate an
ideal art, the method should be Socratic, genial, literary. In these
matters, the alternative to imagination is not science but sophistry. We
may perhaps entangle our friends in their own words, and force them for
the moment to say what they do not mean, and what it is not in their
natures to think; but the bent bow will spring back, perhaps somewhat
sharply, and we shall get little thanks for our labour. There would be
more profit in taking one another frankly by the hand and walking
together along the outskirts of real knowledge, pointing to the material
facts which we all can see, nature, the monuments, the texts, the actual
ways and institutions of men; and in the presence of such a stimulus,
with the contagion of a common interest, the plastic mind would respond
of itself to the situation, and we should be helping one another to
understand whatever lies within the range of our fancy, be it in
antiquity or in the human heart. That would be a true education; and
while the result could not possibly be a science, not even a science of
people’s states of mind, it would be a deepening of humanity in
ourselves and a wholesome knowledge of our ignorance.

[Sidenote: Arbitrary readings of the mind.]

In what is called psychology this loose, imaginative method is often
pursued, although the field covered may be far narrower. Any generic
experience of which a writer pretends to give an exact account must be
reconstructed _ad hoc_; it is not the experience that necessitates the
description, but the description that recalls the experience, defining
it in a novel way. When La Rochefoucauld says, for instance, that there
is something about our friend’s troubles that secretly pleases us, many
circumstances in our own lives, or in other people’s, may suddenly recur
to us to illustrate that _aperçu_; and we may be tempted to say, There
is a truth. But is it a scientific truth? Or is it merely a bit of
satire, a ray from a literary flashlight, giving a partial clearness for
a moment to certain jumbled memories? If the next day we open a volume
of Adam Smith, and read that man is naturally benevolent, that he cannot
but enact and share the vicissitudes of his fellow-creatures, and that
another man’s imminent danger or visible torment will cause in him a
distress little inferior to that felt by the unfortunate sufferer, we
shall probably think this a truth also, and a more normal and a
profounder truth than the other. But is it a law? Is it a scientific
discovery that can lead us to definite inferences about what will happen
or help us to decompose a single event, accurately and without
ambiguity, into its component forces? Not only is such a thing
impossible, but the Scotch philosopher’s amiable generalities, perhaps
largely applicable to himself and to his friends of the eighteenth
century, may fail altogether to fit an earlier or a later age; and every
new shade of brute born into the world will ground a new “theory of the
moral sentiments.”

The whole cogency of such psychology, therefore, lies in the ease with
which the hearer, on listening to the analysis, recasts something in his
own past after that fashion. These endless rival apperceptions regard
facts that, until they are referred to their mechanical ground, show no
continuity and no precision in their march. The apperception of them,
consequently, must be doubly arbitrary and unstable, for there is no
method in the subject-matter and there is less in the treatment of it.
The views, however, are far from equal in value. Some may be more
natural, eloquent, enlightening, than others; they may serve better the
essential purpose of reflection, which is to pick out and bring forward
continually out of the past what can have a value for the present. The
spiritual life in which this value lies is practical in its
associations, because it understands and dominates what touches action;
yet it is contemplative in essence, since successful action consists in
knowing what you are attempting and in attempting what you can find
yourself achieving. Plan and performance will alike appeal to
imagination and be appreciated through it; so that what trains
imagination refines the very stuff that life is made of. Science is
instrumental in comparison, since the chief advantage that comes of
knowing accurately is to be able, with safety, to imagine freely. But
when it is science and accurate knowledge that we pursue, we should not
be satisfied with literature.

[Sidenote: Human nature appealed to rather than described.]

When discourse on any subject would be persuasive, it appeals to the
interlocutor to think in a certain dynamic fashion, inciting him, not
without leading questions, to give shape to his own sentiments.
Knowledge of the soul, insight into human nature and experience, are no
doubt requisite in such an exercise; yet this insight is in these cases
a vehicle only, an instinctive method, while the result aimed at is
agreement on some further matter, conviction and enthusiasm, rather than
psychological information. Thus if I declare that the storms of winter
are not so unkind as benefits forgot, I say something which if true has
a certain psychological value, for it could be inferred from that
assertion that resentment is generally not proportionate to the injury
received but rather to the surprise caused, so that it springs from our
own foolishness more than from other people’s bad conduct. Yet my
observation was not made in the interest of any such inferences: it was
made to express an emotion of my own, in hopes of kindling in others a
similar emotion. It was a judgment which others were invited to share.
There was as little exact science about it as if I had turned it into
frank poetry and exclaimed, “Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind!” Knowledge
of human nature might be drawn even from that apostrophe, and a very
fine shade of human feeling is surely expressed in it, as Shakespeare
utters it; but to pray or to converse is not for that reason the same
thing as to pursue science.

Now it constantly happens in philosophic writing that what is supposed
to go on in the human mind is described and appealed to in order to
support some observation or illustrate some argument—as continually,
for instance, in the older English critics of human nature, or in these
very pages. What is offered in such cases is merely an invitation to
think after a certain fashion. A way of grasping or interpreting some
fact is suggested, with a more or less civil challenge to the reader to
resist the suasion of his own experience so evoked and represented. Such
a method of appeal may be called psychological, in the sense that it
relies for success on the total movement of the reader’s life and mind,
without forcing a detailed assent through ocular demonstration or pure
dialectic; but the psychology of it is a method and a resource rather
than a doctrine. The only doctrine aimed at in such philosophy is a
general reasonableness, a habit of thinking straight from the elements
of experience to its ultimate and stable deliverance. This is what in
his way a poet or a novelist would do. Fiction swarms with such sketches
of human nature and such renderings of the human mind as a critical
philosopher depends upon for his construction. He need not be interested
in the pathology of individuals nor even in the natural history of man;
his effort is wholly directed toward improving the mind’s economy and
infusing reason into it as one might religion, not without diligent
self-examination and a public confession of sin. The human mind is
nobody’s mind in particular, and the science of it is necessarily
imaginative. No one can pretend in philosophic discussion any more than
in poetry that the experience described is more than typical. It is
given out not for a literal fact, existing in particular moments or
persons, but for an imaginative expression of what nature and life have
impressed on the speaker. In so far as others live in the same world
they may recognise the experience so expressed by him and adopt his
interpretation; but the aptness of his descriptions and analyses will
not constitute a science of mental states, but rather—what is a far
greater thing—the art of stimulating and consolidating reflection in
general.

[Sidenote: Dialectic in psychology.]

There is a second constituent of current psychology which is indeed a
science, but not a science of matters of fact—I mean the dialectic of
ideas. The character of father, for example, implies a son, and this
relation, involved in the ideas both of son and of father, implies
further that a transmitted essence or human nature is shared by both.
Every idea, if its logical texture is reflected upon, will open out into
a curious world constituted by distinguishing the constituents of that
idea more clearly and making explicit its implicit structure and
relations. When an idea has practical intent and is a desire, its
dialectic is even more remarkable. If I love a man I thereby love all
those who share whatever makes me love him, and I thereby hate whatever
tends to deprive him of this excellence. If it should happen, however,
that those who resembled him most in amiability—say by flattering me no
less than he did—were precisely his mortal enemies, the logic of my
affections would become somewhat involved. I might end either by
striving to reconcile the rivals or by discovering that what I loved was
not the man at all, but only an office exercised by him in my regard
which any one else might also exercise.

These inner lucubrations, however, while they lengthen the moment’s
vista and deepen present intent, give no indication whatever about the
order or distribution of actual feelings. They are out of place in a
psychology that means to be an account of what happens in the world. For
these dialectical implications do not actually work themselves out. They
have no historical or dynamic value. The man that by mistake or courtesy
I call a father may really have no son, any more than Herodotus for
being the father of history; or having had a son, he may have lost him;
or the creature sprung from his loins may be a misshapen idiot, having
nothing ideal in common with his parent. Similarly my affection for a
friend, having causes much deeper than discourse, may cling to him
through all transformations in his qualities and in his attitude toward
me; and it may never pass to others for resembling him, nor take, in all
its days, a Platonic direction. The impulse on which that dialectic was
based may exhaust its physical energy, and all its implications may be
nipped in the bud and be condemned for ever to the limbo of things
unborn.

[Sidenote: Spinoza on the passions.]

Spinoza’s account of the passions is a beautiful example of dialectical
psychology, beautiful because it shows so clearly the possibilities and
impossibilities in such a method. Spinoza began with self-preservation,
which was to be the principle of life and the root of all feelings. The
violence done to physics appears in this beginning. Self-preservation,
taken strictly, is a principle not illustrated in nature, where
everything is in flux, and where habits destructive or dangerous to the
body are as conspicuous as protective instincts. Physical mechanism
requires reproduction, which implies death, and it admits suicide.
Spinoza himself, far too noble a mind to be fixed solely on preserving
its own existence, was compelled to give self-preservation an
extravagant meaning in order to identify it with “intellectual love of
God” or the happy contemplation of that natural law which destroyed all
individuals. To find the self-preserving man you must take him after he
has ceased to grow and before he has begun to love. Self-preservation,
being thus no principle of natural history, the facts or estimations
classed under that head need to be referred instead to one of two other
principles—either to mechanical equilibrium and habit, or to
dialectical consistency in judgment.

Self-preservation might express, perhaps, the values which conceived
events acquire in respect to a given attitude of will, to an arrested
momentary ideal. The actual state of any animal, his given instincts and
tensions, are undoubtedly the point of origin from which all changes and
relations are morally estimated; and if this attitude is afterward
itself subjected to estimation, that occurs by virtue of its affinity or
conflict with the living will of another moment. Valuation is
dialectical, not descriptive, nor contemplative of a natural process. It
might accordingly be developed by seeing what is implied in the
self-preservation, or rather expression, of a will which by that
dialectic would discover its ideal scope.

Such a principle, however, could never explain the lapse of that
attitude itself. A natural process cannot be governed by the ideal
relations which conceived things acquire by being represented in one of
its moments. Spinoza, however, let himself wander into this path and
made the semblance of an attempt, indeed not very deceptive, to trace
the sequence of feelings by their mutual implication. The changes in
life were to be explained by what the crystallised posture of life might
be at a single instant. The arrow’s flight was to be deduced from its
instantaneous position. A passion’s history was to be the history of
what would have been its expression if it had had no history at all.

[Sidenote: A principle of estimation cannot govern events.]

A man suffered by destiny to maintain for ever a single unchanged
emotion might indeed think out its multifarious implications much in
Spinoza’s way. It is in that fashion that parties and sects, when
somewhat stable, come to define their affinities and to know their
friends and enemies all over the universe of discourse. Suppose, for
instance, that I feel some titillation on reading a proposition
concerning the contrast between Paul’s idea of Peter and Peter’s idea of
himself, a titillation which is accompanied by the idea of Spinoza, its
external cause. Now he who loves an effect must proportionately love
its cause, and titillation accompanied by the idea of its external cause
is, Spinoza has proved, what men call love. I therefore find that I love
Spinoza. Having got so far, I may consider further, referring to another
demonstration in the book, that if some one gives Spinoza joy—Hobbes,
for instance—my delight in Spinoza’s increased perfection, consequent
upon his joy and my love of him, accompanied by the idea of Hobbes, its
external cause, constitutes love on my part for the redoubtable Hobbes
as well. Thus the periphery of my affections may expand indefinitely,
till it includes the infinite, the ultimate external cause of all my
titillations. But how these interesting discoveries are interrupted
before long by a desire for food, or by an indomitable sense that Hobbes
and the infinite are things I do _not_ love, is something that my
dialectic cannot deduce; for it was the values radiating from a given
impulse, the implications of its instant object, that were being
explicated, not at all the natural forces that carry a man through that
impulse and beyond it to the next phase of his dream, a phase which if
it continues the former episode must continue it spontaneously, by grace
of mechanical forces.

When dialectic is thus introduced into psychology, an intensive
knowledge of the heart is given out for distributive knowledge of
events. Such a study, when made by a man of genius, may furnish good
spiritual reading, for it will reveal what our passions mean and what
sentiments they would lead to if they could remain fixed and dictate all
further action. This insight may make us aware of strange
inconsistencies in our souls, and seeing how contrary some of our ideals
are to others and how horrible, in some cases, would be their ultimate
expression, we may be shocked into setting our house in order; and in
trying to understand ourselves we may actually develop a self that can
be understood. Meantime this inner discipline will not enlighten us
about the march of affairs. It will not give us a key to evolution,
either in ourselves or in others. Even while we refine our aspirations,
the ground they sprang from will be eaten away beneath our feet. Instead
of developing yesterday’s passion, to-day may breed quite another in its
place; and if, having grown old and set in our mental posture, we are
incapable of assuming another, and are condemned to carrying on the
dialectic of our early visions into a new-born world, to be a
schoolmaster’s measuring-rod for life’s infinite exuberance, we shall
find ourselves at once in a foreign country, speaking a language that
nobody understands. No destiny is more melancholy than that of the
dialectical prophet, who makes more rigid and tyrannous every day a
message which every day grows less applicable and less significant.

[Sidenote: Scientific psychology a part of biology.]

That remaining portion of psychology which is a science, and a science
of matters of fact, is physiological; it belongs to natural history and
constitutes the biology of man. Soul, which was not originally
distinguished from life, is there studied in its natural operation in
the body and in the world. Psychology then remains what it was in
Aristotle’s _De Anima_—an ill-developed branch of natural science,
pieced out with literary terms and perhaps enriched by occasional
dramatic interpretations. The specifically mental or psychic element
consists in the feeling which accompanies bodily states and natural
situations. This feeling is discovered and distributed at the same time
that bodies and other material objects are defined; for when a man
begins to decipher permanent and real things, and to understand that
they are merely material, he thereby sets apart, in contrast with such
external objects, those images and emotions which can no longer enter
into the things’ texture. The images and emotions remain, however,
attached to those things, for they are refractions of them through
bodily organs, or effects of their presence on the will, or passions
fixed upon them as their object.

In parts of biology which do not deal with man observers do not hesitate
to refer in the same way to the pain, the desire, the intention, which
they may occasionally read in an animal’s aspect. Darwin, for instance,
constantly uses psychical language: his birds love one another’s plumage
and their æsthetic charms are factors in natural selection. Such little
fables do not detract from the scientific value of Darwin’s
observations, because we see at once what the fables mean. The
description keeps close enough to the facts observed for the reader to
stop at the latter, rather than at the language in which they are
stated. In the natural history of man such interpretation into mental
terms, such microscopic romance, is even easier and more legitimate,
because language allows people, perhaps before their feelings are long
past, to describe them in terms which are understood to refer directly
to mental experience. The sign’s familiarity, to be sure, often hides in
these cases a great vagueness and unseizableness in the facts; yet a
beginning in defining distinctly the mental phase of natural situations
has been made in those small autobiographies which introspective writers
sometimes compose, or which are taken down in hospitals and laboratories
from the lips of “subjects.” What a man under special conditions may say
he feels or thinks adds a constituent phase to his natural history; and
were these reports exact and extended enough, it would become possible
to enumerate the precise sensations and ideas which accompany every
state of body and every social situation.

[Sidenote: Confused attempt to detach the psychic element.]

This advantage, however, is the source of that confusion and sophistry
which distinguish the biology of man from the rest of physics. Attention
is there arrested at the mental term, in forgetfulness of the situation
which gave it warrant, and an invisible world, composed of these
imagined experiences, begins to stalk behind nature and may even be
thought to exist independently. This metaphysical dream may be said to
have two stages: the systematic one, which is called idealism, and an
incidental one which pervades ordinary psychology, in so far as mental
facts are uprooted from their basis and deprived of their expressive or
spiritual character, in order to be made elements in a dynamic scheme.
This battle of feelings, whether with atoms or exclusively with their
own cohorts, might be called a primitive materialism, rather than an
idealism, if idealism were to retain its Platonic sense; for forms and
realisations are taken in this system for substantial elements, and are
made to figure either as a part or as the whole of the world’s matter.

[Sidenote: Differentia of the psychic.]

Phenomena specifically mental certainly exist, since natural phenomena
and ideal truths are concentrated and telescoped in apprehension,
besides being weighted with an emotion due to their effect on the person
who perceives them. This variation, which reality suffers in being
reported to perception, turns the report into a mental fact
distinguishable from its subject-matter. When the flux is partly
understood and the natural world has become a constant presence, the
whole flux itself, as it flowed originally, comes to be called a mental
flux, because its elements and method are seen to differ from the
elements and method embodied in material objects or in ideal truth. The
primitive phenomena are now called mental because they all deviate from
the realities to be ultimately conceived. To call the immediate mental
is therefore correct and inevitable when once the ultimate is in view;
but if the immediate were all, to call it mental would be unmeaning.

The visual image of a die, for instance, has at most three faces, none
of them quite square; no hired artificer is needed to produce it; it
cannot be found anywhere nor shaken in any box; it lasts only for an
instant; thereafter it disappears without a trace—unless it flits back
unaccountably through the memory—and it leaves no ponderable dust or
ashes to attest that it had a substance. The opposite of all this is
true of the die itself. But were no material die in existence, the image
itself would be material; for, however evanescent, it would occupy
space, have geometrical shape, colour, and magic dynamic destinies. Its
transformations as it rolled on the idea of a table would be
transformations in nature, however unaccountable by any steady law. Such
material qualities a mental fact can retain only in the spiritual form
of representation. A representation of matter is immaterial, but a
material image, when no object exists, is a material fact. If the
Absolute, to take an ultimate case, perceived nothing but space and
atoms (perceiving itself, if you will, therein), space and atoms would
be its whole nature, and it would constitute a perfect materialism. The
fact that materialism was true would not of itself constitute an
idealism worth distinguishing from its opposite. For a vehicle or locus
exists only when it makes some difference to the thing it carries,
presenting it in a manner not essential to its own nature.

[Sidenote: Approach to irrelevant sentience.]

The qualification of being by the mental medium may be carried to any
length. As the subject-matter recedes the mental datum ceases to have
much similarity or inward relevance to what is its cause or its meaning.
The report may ultimately become, like pure pain or pleasure, almost
wholly blind and irrelevant to any world; yet such emotion is none the
less immersed in matter and dependent on natural changes both for its
origin and for its function, since a significant pleasure or pain makes
comments on the world and involves ideals about what ought to be
happening there.

Mental facts synchronise with their basis, for no thought hovers over a
dead brain and there is no vision in a dark chamber; but their tenure of
life is independent of that of their objects, since thought may be
prophetic or reminiscent and is intermittent even when its object enjoys
a continuous existence. Mental facts are similar to their objects, since
things and images have, intrinsically regarded, the same constitution;
but images do not move in the same plane with things and their parts are
in no proportionate dynamic relation to the parts of the latter.
Thought’s place in nature is exiguous, however broad the landscape it
represents; it touches the world tangentially only, in some ferment of
the brain. It is probably no atom that supports the soul (as Leibnitz
imagined), but rather some cloud of atoms shaping or remodelling an
organism. Mind in this case would be, in its physical relation to
matter, what it feels itself to be in its moral attitude toward the
same; a witness to matter’s interesting aspects and a realisation of its
forms.

[Sidenote: Perception represents things in their practical relation to
the body.]

Mental facts, moreover, are highly selective; especially does this
appear in respect to the dialectical world, which is in itself infinite,
while the sum of human logic and mathematics, though too long for most
men’s patience, is decidedly brief. If we ask ourselves on what
principle this selection and foreshortening of truth takes place in the
mind, we may perhaps come upon the real bond and the deepest contrast
between mind and its environment. The infinity of formal truth is
disregarded in human thought when it is irrelevant to practice and to
happiness; the infinity of nature is represented there in violent
perspective, centring about the body and its interests. The seat and
starting-point of every mental survey is a brief animal life. A mind
seems, then, to be a consciousness of the body’s interests, expressed in
terms of what affects that body, as if in the Babel of nature a man
heard only the voices that pronounced his name. A mind is a private
view; it is gathered together in proportion as physical sensibility
extends its range and makes one stretch of being after another tributary
to the animal’s life, and in proportion also as this sensibility is
integrated, so that every organ in its reaction enlists the resources of
every other organ as well. A personal will and intelligence thus arise;
and they direct action from within with a force and freedom which are
exactly proportionate to the material forces, within and without the
body, which the soul has come to represent.

In other words, mind raises to an actual existence that _form_ in
material processes which, had the processes remained wholly material,
would have had only ideal or imputed being—as the stars would not have
been divided into the signs of the Zodiac but for the fanciful eye of
astrologers. Automata might arise and be destroyed without any value
coming or going; only a form-loving observer could say that anything
fortunate or tragic had occurred, as poets might at the budding or
withering of a flower. Some of nature’s automata, however, love
themselves, and comment on the form they achieve or abandon; these
constellations of atoms are genuine beasts. Their consciousness and
their interest in their own individuality rescues that individuality
from the realm of discourse and from having merely imputed limits.

[Sidenote: Mind the existence in which form becomes actual.]

That the basis of mind lies in the body’s interests rather than in its
atoms may seem a doctrine somewhat too poetical for psychology; yet may
not poetry, superposed on material existence and supported by it, be
perhaps the key to mind? Such a view hangs well together with the
practical and prospective character of consciousness, with its total
dependence on the body, its cognitive relevance to the world, and its
formal disparity from material being. Mind does not accompany body like
a useless and persistent shadow; it is significant and it is
intermittent. Much less can it be a link in physiological processes,
processes irrelevant to its intent and incompatible with its immaterial
essence. Consciousness seems to arise when the body assumes an attitude
which, being an attitude, supervenes upon the body’s elements and cannot
be contained within them. This attitude belongs to the whole body in its
significant operation, and the report of this attitude, its expression,
requires survey, synthesis, appreciation—things which constitute what
we call mentality. This remains, of course, the mentality of that
material situation; it is the voice of that particular body in that
particular pass. The mind therefore represents its basis, but this basis
(being a _form_ of material existence and not matter itself) is neither
vainly reduplicated by representation nor used up materially in the
process.

Representation is far from idle, since it brings to focus those
mechanical unities which otherwise would have existed only potentially
and at the option of a roving eye. In evoking consciousness nature makes
this delimination real and unambiguous; there are henceforth actual
centres and actual interests in the mechanical flux. The flux continues
to be mechanical, but the representation of it supervening has created
values which, being due to imputation, could not exist without being
imputed, while at the same time they could not have been imputed without
being attached to one object or event rather than to another. Material
dramas are thus made moral and raised to an existence of their own by
being expressed in what we call the souls of animals and men; a mind is
the entelechy of an organic body.[E] It is a region where form breeds an
existence to express it, and destiny becomes important by being felt.
Mind adds to being a new and needful witness so soon as the constitution
of being gives foothold to apperception of its movement, and offers
something in which it is possible to ground an interest.

That Aristotle has not been generally followed in views essentially so
natural and pregnant as these is due no doubt to want of thoroughness in
conceiving them, not only on the part of his readers but even on his
own part; for he treated the soul, which should be on his own theory
only an expression and an unmoved mover, as a power and an efficient
cause. Analysis had not gone far enough in his day to make evident that
all dynamic principles are mechanical and that mechanism can obtain only
among objects; but by this time it should no longer seem doubtful that
mental facts can have no connection except through their material basis
and no mutual relevance except through their objects.

[Sidenote: Attempt at idealistic physics.]

There is indeed a strange half-assumption afloat, a sort of reserved
faith which every one seems to respect but nobody utters, to the effect
that the mental world has a mechanism of its own, and that ideas
intelligently produce and sustain one another. Systematic idealists, to
be sure, have generally given a dialectical or moral texture to the
cosmos, so that the passage from idea to idea in experience need not be
due, in their physics, to any intrinsic or proportionate efficacy in
these ideas themselves. The march of experience is not explained at all
by such high cosmogonies. They abandon that practical calculation to
some science of illusion that has to be tolerated in this provisional
life. Their own understanding is of things merely in the gross, because
they fall in with some divine plan and produce, unaccountably enough,
some interesting harmony. Empirical idealists, on the contrary, in
making a metaphysics out of psychology, hardly know what they do. The
laws of experience which they refer to are all laws of physics. It is
only the “possibilities” of sensation that stand and change according to
law; the sensations themselves, if not referred to those permanent
possibilities, would be a chaos worse than any dream.

Correct and scrupulous as empiricism may be when it turns its face
backward and looks for the seat, the criterion, and the elements of
knowledge, it is altogether incoherent and self-inhibited when it looks
forward. It can believe in nothing but in what it conceives, if it would
rise at all above a stupid immersion in the immediate; yet the relations
which attach the moments of feeling together are material relations,
implying the whole frame of nature. Psychology can accordingly conceive
nothing but the natural world, with its diffuse animation, since this is
the only background that the facts suggest or that, in practice, anybody
can think of. If empiricism trusted the intellect, and consented to
immerse flying experience in experience understood, it would become
ordinary science and ordinary common sense. Deprecating this result, for
no very obvious reason, it has to balance itself on the thin edge of an
unwilling materialism, with a continual protestation that it does not
believe in anything that it thinks. It is wholly entangled in the
prevalent sophism that a man must renounce a belief when he discovers
how he has formed it, and that our ancestors—at least the remoter
ones—begin to exist when we discover them.

When Descartes, having composed a mechanical system of the world, was
asked by admiring ladies to say something about the passions, what came
into his mind was characteristically simple and dialectical. Life, he
thought, was a perpetual conflict between reason and the emotions. The
soul had its own natural principle to live by, but was diverted from
that rational path by the waves of passion that beat against it and
sometimes flooded it over. That was all his psychology. Ideal entities
in dramatic relations, in a theatre which had to be borrowed, of course,
from the other half of the world; because while a material mechanism
might be conceived without minds in it, minds in action could not be
conceived without a material mechanism—at least a represented
one—lying beneath and between. Spinoza made a great improvement in the
system by attaching the mind more systematically to the body, and
studying the parts which organ and object played in qualifying
knowledge; but his conception of mental unities and mental processes
remained literary, or at best, as we have seen, dialectical. No shadow
of a principle at once psychic and genetic appeared in his philosophy.
All mind was still a transcript of material facts or a deepening of
moral relations.

[Sidenote: Association not efficient]

The idea of explaining the flow of ideas without reference to bodies
appeared, however, in the principle of association. This is the nearest
approach that has yet been made to a physics of disembodied
mind—something which idealism sadly needs to develop. A terrible
incapacity, however, appears at once in the principle of association;
for even if we suppose that it could account for the flow of ideas, it
does not pretend to supply any basis for sensations. And as the more
efficient part of association—association by contiguity—is only a
repetition in ideas of the order once present in impressions, the whole
question about the march of mental experience goes back to what
association does not touch, namely, the origin of sensations. What
everybody assumed, of course, was that the order and quality of
sensations were due to the body; but their derivation was not studied.
Hume ignored it as much as possible, and Berkeley did not sacrifice a
great deal when he frankly suggested that the production of sensation
must be the direct work of God.

This tendency not to recognise the material conditions of mind showed
itself more boldly in the treatment of ideation. We are not plainly
aware (in spite of headaches, fatigue, sleep, love, intoxication, and
madness) that the course of our thoughts is as directly dependent on the
body as is their inception. It was therefore possible, without glaring
paradox, to speak as if ideas caused one another. They followed, in
recurring, the order they had first had in experience, as when we learn
something by heart. Why, a previous verse being given, we should
sometimes be unable to repeat the one that had often followed it before,
there was no attempt to explain: it sufficed that reverie often seemed
to retrace events in their temporal order. Even less dependent on
material causes seemed to be the other sort of association, association
by similarity. This was a feat for the wit and the poet, to jump from
China to Peru, by virtue of some spark of likeness that might flash out
between them.

[Sidenote: It describes coincidences.]

Much natural history has been written and studied with the idea of
finding curious facts. The demand has not been for constant laws or
intelligibility, but for any circumstance that could arrest attention or
divert the fancy. In this spirit, doubtless, instances of association
were gathered and classified. It was the young ladies’ botany of mind.
Under association could be gathered a thousand interesting anecdotes, a
thousand choice patterns of thought. Talk of the wars, says Hobbes, once
led a man to ask what was the value of a Roman penny. But why only once?
The wars must have been often mentioned when the delivering up of King
Charles did not enter any mind; and when it did, this would not have led
any one to think of Judas and the thirty pence, unless he had been a
good royalist and a good Christian—and then only by a curious accident.
It was not these ideas, then, in their natural capacity that suggested
one another; but some medium in which they worked, once in the world,
opened those particular avenues between them. Nevertheless, no one cared
to observe that each fact had had many others, never recalled,
associated with it as closely as those which were remembered. Nor was
the matter taken so seriously that one needed to ask how, among all
similar things, similarity could decide which should be chosen; nor how
among a thousand contiguous facts one rather than another should be
recalled for contiguity’s sake.

[Sidenote: Understanding is based on instinct and expressed in
dialectic.]

The best instance, perhaps, of regular association might be found in
language and its meaning; for understanding implies that each word
habitually calls up its former associates. Yet in what, psychologically
considered, does understanding a word consist? What concomitants does
the word “horse” involve in actual sentience? Hardly a clear image such
as a man might paint; for the name is not confined to recalling one view
of one animal obtained at one moment. Perhaps all that recurs is a vague
sense of the environment, in nature and in discourse, in which that
object lies. The word “kite” would immediately make a different region
warm in the world through which the mind was groping. One would turn in
idea to the sky rather than to the ground, and feel suggestions of a
more buoyant sort of locomotion.

Understanding has to be described in terms of its potential outcome,
since the incandescent process itself, as it exists in transit, will
not suffer stable terms to define it. Potentiality is something which
each half of reality reproaches the other with; things are potential to
feeling because they are not life, and feelings are potential to science
because they elude definition. To understand, therefore, is to know what
to do and what to say in the sign’s presence; and this practical
knowledge is far deeper than any echo casually awakened in fancy at the
same time. Instinctive recognition has those echoes for the most
superficial part of its effect. Because I understand what “horse” means,
the word can make me recall some episode in which a horse once figured.
This understanding is instinctive and practical and, if the phrase may
be pardoned, it is the body that understands. It is the body, namely,
that contains the habit and readiness on which understanding hangs; and
the sense of understanding, the instant rejection of whatever clashes
and makes nonsense in that context, is but a transcript of the body’s
education. Actual mind is all above board; it is all speculative,
vibrant, the fruit and gift of those menial subterranean processes. Some
generative processes may be called psychic in that they minister to mind
and lend it what little continuity it can boast of; but they are not
processes in consciousness. Processes in consciousness are æsthetic or
dialectical processes, focussing a form rather than ushering in an
existence. Mental activity has a character altogether alien to
association: it is spiritual, not mechanical; an entelechy, not a
genesis.

[Sidenote: Suggestion a fancy name for automatism,]

For these and other reasons association has fallen into some disrepute;
but it is not easy to say what, in absolute psychology, has come to take
its place. If we speak of suggestion, a certain dynamic turn seems to be
given to the matter; yet in what sense a perception suggests its future
development remains a mystery. That a certain ripening and expansion of
consciousness goes on in man, not guided by former collocations of
ideas, is very true; for we do not fall in love for the first time
because this person loved and these ardent emotions have been habitually
associated in past experience. And any impassioned discourse, opening at
every turn into new vistas, shows the same sort of vegetation. Yet to
observe that consciousness is automatic is not to disclose the mechanism
by which it evolves. The theory of spontaneous growth offers less
explanation of events, if that be possible, than the theory of
association. It is perhaps a better description of the facts, since at
least it makes no attempt to deduce them from one another.

[Sidenote: and will another.]

If, on the contrary, a relation implied in the burden or will of the
moment be invoked, the connection established, so far as it goes, is
dialectical. Where a dialectical correspondence is not found, a material
cause would have to be appealed to, Such a half-dialectical psychology
would be like Schopenhauer’s, quite metaphysical. It might be a great
improvement on an absolute psychology, because it would restore, even if
in mythical terms, a background and meaning to life. The unconscious
Absolute Will, the avid Genius of the Species, the all-attracting
Platonic Ideas are fabulous; but beneath them it is not hard to divine
the forces of nature. This volitional school supplies a good
stepping-stone from metaphysics back to scientific psychology. It
remains merely to substitute instinct for will, and to explain that
instinct—or even will, if the term be thought more consoling—is merely
a word covering that operative organisation in the body which controls
action, determines affinities, dictates preferences, and sustains
ideation.

[Sidenote: Double attachment of mind to nature.]

What scientific psychology has to attempt—for little has been
accomplished—may be reduced to this: To develop physiology and
anthropology until the mechanism of life becomes clear, at least in its
general method, and then to determine, by experiment and by well-sifted
testimony, what conscious sublimation each of those material situations
attains, if indeed it attains any. There will always remain, no doubt,
many a region where the machinery of nature is too fine for us to trace
or eludes us by involving agencies that we lack senses to perceive. In
these regions where science is denied we shall have to be satisfied with
landscape-painting. The more obvious results and superficial harmonies
perceived in those regions will receive names and physics will be
arrested at natural history. Where these unexplained facts are mental it
will not be hard to do more systematically what common sense has done
already, and to attach them, as we attach love or patriotism, to the
natural crises that subtend them.

This placing of mental facts is made easy by the mental facts
themselves, since the connection of mind with nature is double, and even
when the derivation of a feeling is obscure we have but to study its
meaning, allowing it to tell us what it is interested in, for a
roundabout path to lead us safely back to its natural basis. It is
superfluous to ask a third person what circumstances produce hunger:
hunger will lead you unmistakably enough to its point of origin, and its
extreme interest in food will not suffer you long to believe that want
of nourishment has nothing to do with its cause. And it is not otherwise
with higher emotions and ideas. Nothing but sophistry can put us in
doubt about what conscience represents; for conscience does not say,
square the circle, extinguish mankind so as to stop its sufferings, or
steal so as to benefit your heirs. It says, Thou shalt not kill, and it
also says, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God who brought thee out of
the land of Egypt. So that conscience, by its import and incidence,
clearly enough declares what it springs from—a social tradition; and
what it represents—the interests, real or imaginary, of the community
in which you were reared.

Where psychology depends on literature, where both its units and its
method are poetical, there can be no talk of science. We may as justly,
or as absurdly, speak of the spirit of an age or of a religion as of a
man’s character or a river’s god. Particulars in illustration may have
good historic warrant, but the unities superimposed are ideal. Such
metaphors may be very useful, for a man may ordinarily be trusted to
continue his practices and a river its beneficent or disastrous floods;
and since those rhetorical forms have no existence in nature we may
continue to frame them as may be most convenient for discourse.

[Sidenote: Is the subject-matter of psychology absolute being?]

When psychology is a science, then, it describes the flying
consciousness that accompanies bodily life. It is the science of feeling
or absolute appearance, taken exactly as it seems or feels. Does such a
psychology, we may be tempted to ask, constitute scientific knowledge of
reality? Is it at last the true metaphysics? This question would have to
be answered in the negative, yet not without some previous
discriminations. There is honesty in the conviction that sentience is a
sort of absolute; it is something which certainly exists. The first
Cartesian axiom applies to it, and to feel, even doubtfully, that
feeling existed would be to posit its existence. The science that
describes sentience describes at least a part of existence. Yet this
self-grounding of consciousness is a suspicious circumstance: it renders
it in one sense the typical reality and in another sense perhaps the
sorriest illusion.

[Sidenote: Sentience is representable only in fancy]

“Reality” is an ambiguous term. If we mean by it the immediate, then
sentience would be a part if not the whole of reality; for what we mean
by sentience or consciousness is the immediate in so far as we contain
it, and whatever self-grounded existence there may be elsewhere can be
conceived by us only mythically and on that analogy, as if it were an
extension or variation of sentience. Psychology would then be knowledge
of reality, for even when consciousness contains elaborate thoughts that
might be full of illusions, psychology takes them only as so much
feeling, and in that capacity they are real enough. At the same time,
while our science terminates upon mere feeling, it can neither discover
nor describe that feeling except in terms of something quite different;
and the only part of psychology that perhaps penetrates to brute
sentience is the part that is not scientific. The knowledge that science
reaches about absolute states of mind is relative knowledge; these
states of mind are approached from without and are defined by their
surrounding conditions and by their ideal objects. They are known by
being enveloped in processes of which they themselves are not aware.
Apart from this setting, the only feeling known is that which is
endured. After the fact, or before, or from any other point of vantage,
it cannot be directly revealed; at best it may be divined and
re-enacted. Even this possible repetition would not constitute knowledge
unless the imaginative reproduction were identified with or attributed
to some natural fact; so that an adventitious element would always
attach to any recognised feeling, to any feeling reported to another
mind. It could not be known at all unless something were known about it,
so that it might not pass, as otherwise it would, for a mere ingredient
of present sentience.

It is precisely by virtue of this adventitious element that the
re-enacted feeling takes its place in nature and becomes an object of
knowledge. Science furnishes this setting; the jewel—precious or
false—must be supplied by imagination. Romance, dramatic myth, is the
only instrument for knowing this sort of “reality.” A flying moment, if
at all _understood_ or underpinned, or if seen in its context, would be
not known absolutely as it had been felt, but would be known
scientifically and as it lay in nature. But dramatic insight, striving
to pierce through the machinery of the world and to attain and repeat
what dreams may be going on at its core, is no science; and the very
notion that the dreams are internal, that they make the interior or
substance of bodies, is a crude materialistic fancy. Body, on the
contrary, is the substance or instrument of mind, and has to be looked
for beneath it. The mind is itself ethereal and plays about the body as
music about a violin, or rather as the sense of a page about the print
and paper. To look for it _within_ is not to understand what we are
looking for.

Knowledge of the immediate elsewhere is accordingly visionary in its
method, and furthermore, if, by a fortunate chance, it be true in fact,
it is true only of what in itself is but appearance; for the immediate,
while absolutely real in its stress or presence, is indefinitely
ignorant and false in its deliverance. It knows itself, but in the worst
sense of the word knowledge; for it knows nothing of what is true about
it, nothing of its relations and conditions. To pierce to this blind
“reality” or psychic flux, which is nothing but flying appearance, we
must rely on fortune, or an accidental harmony between imitative fancy
in us now and original sentience elsewhere. It is accordingly at least
misleading to give the name of “reality” to this appearance, which is
entirely lost and inconsequential in its being, without trace of its own
status, and consequently approachable or knowable only by divination, as
a dream might call to another dream.

[Sidenote: The conditions and objects of sentience, which are not
sentience, are also real.]

It is preferable to give a more Platonic meaning to the word and to let
“reality” designate not what is merely felt diffusely but what is true
about those feelings. Then dramatic fancy, psychology of the sympathetic
sort, would not be able to reach reality at all. On the other hand
scientific psychology, together with all other sciences, would have
reality for its object; for it would disclose what really was true about
sentient moments, without stopping particularly to sink abstractedly
into their inner quality or private semblance. It would approach and
describe the immediate as a sentient factor in a natural situation, and
show us to what extent that situation was represented in that feeling.
This representation, by which the dignity and interest of pure sentience
would be measured, might be either pictorial or virtual; that is, a
conscious moment might represent the environing world either
scientifically, by understanding its structure, or practically, by
instinctive readiness to meet it.

[Sidenote: Mind knowable and important in so far as it represents other
things.]

What, for instance, is the reality of Napoleon? Is it what a telepathic
poet, a complete Browning, might reconstruct? Is it Napoleon’s life-long
soliloquy? Or to get at the reality should we have to add, as scientific
psychology would, the conditions under which he lived, and their
relation to his casual feelings? Obviously if Napoleon’s thoughts had
had no reference to the world we should not be able to recover them; or
if by chance such thoughts fell some day to our share, we should
attribute them to our own mental luxuriance, without suspecting that
they had ever visited another genius. Our knowledge of his life, even
where it is imaginative, depends upon scientific knowledge for its
projection; and his fame and immortality depend on the degree to which
his thoughts, being rooted in the structure of the world and pertinent
to it, can be rationally reproduced in others and attributed to him.
Napoleon’s consciousness might perhaps be more justly identified with
the truth or reality of him than could that of most people, because he
seems to have been unusually cognisant of his environment and master of
the forces at work in it and in himself. He understood his causes and
function, and knew that he had _arisen_, like all the rest of history,
and that he stood for the transmissible force and authority of greater
things. Such a consciousness can be known in proportion as we, too,
possess knowledge, and is worth the pains; something which could not be
said of the absolute sentience of Dick or Harry, which has only material
being, brute existence, without relevance to anything nor understanding
of itself.

The circumstances, open to science, which surround consciousness are
thus real attributes of a man by which he is truly known and
distinguished. Appearances are the qualities of reality, else realities
would be without place, time, character, or interrelation. In knowing
that Napoleon was a Corsican, a short man with a fine countenance, we
know appearances only; but these appearances are true of the reality.
And if the presumable inner appearances, Napoleon’s long soliloquy, were
separated from the others, those inner appearances would not belong to
Napoleon nor have any home in the knowable world. That which physics,
with its concomitant psychology, might discover in a man is the sum of
what is true about him, seeing that a man is a concretion in existence,
the fragment of a world, and not a definition. Appearances define the
constituent elements of his reality, which could not be better known
than through their means.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote E: Aristotle called the soul the first entelechy of such a
body. This first entelechy is what we should call life, since it is
possessed by a man asleep. The French I know but do not use is in its
first entelechy; the French I am actually speaking is in its second.
Consciousness is therefore the second or actualised entelechy of its
body.]




CHAPTER VI

THE NATURE OF INTENT


[Sidenote: Dialectic better than physics.]

Common knowledge passes from memory to history and from history to
mechanism; and having reached that point it may stop to look back, not
without misgivings, over the course it has traversed, and thus become
psychology. These investigations, taken together, constitute physics, or
the science of existence. But this is only half of science and on the
whole the less interesting and less fundamental half. No existence is of
moment to a man, not even his own, unless it touches his will and
fulfils or thwarts his intent. Unless he is concerned that existences
should be of specific kinds, unless he is interested in form, he can
hardly be interested in being. At the very least in terms of pleasure
versus pain, light versus darkness, comfort versus terror, the flying
moment must be loaded with obloquy or excellence if its passage is not
to remain a dead fact, and to sink from the sphere of actuality
altogether into that droning limbo of potentialities which we call
matter. Being which is indifferent to form is only the material of
being. To exist is nothing if you have nothing to do, if there is
nothing to choose or to distinguish, or if those things which belong to
a chosen form are not gathered into it before your eyes, to express what
we call a truth or an excellence.

Existence naturally precedes any idealisation of it which men can
contrive (since they, at least, must exist first), yet in the order of
values knowledge of existence is subsidiary to knowledge of ideals. If
it be true that a good physics is as yet the predominant need in
science, and that man is still most troubled by his ignorance of matters
of fact, this circumstance marks his illiberal condition. Without
knowledge of existence nothing can be done; but nothing is really done
until something else is known also, the use or excellence that existence
may have. It is a great pity that those finer temperaments that are
naturally addressed to the ideal should have turned their energies to
producing bad physics, or to preventing others from establishing natural
truths; for if physics were established on a firm basis the idealists
would for the first time have a free field. They might then recover
their proper function of expressing the mind honestly, and disdain the
sorry attempt to prolong confusion and to fish in troubled waters.

[Sidenote: Maladjustments to nature render physics conspicuous and
unpleasant.]

Perhaps if physical truth had not been so hugely misrepresented in men’s
faith and conduct, it would not need to be minutely revealed or
particularly emphasised. When the conditions surrounding life are not
rightly faced by instinct they are inevitably forced upon reflection
through painful shocks; and for a long time the new habit thus forced
upon men brings to consciousness not so much the movement of
consciousness itself as the points at which its movement impinges on the
external world and feels checks and frictions. Physics thus becomes
inordinately conspicuous (as when philology submerges the love of
letters) for lack of a good disposition that should allow us to take
physics for granted. Much in nature is delightful to know and to keep in
mind, but much also (the whole infinite remainder) is obscure and
uninteresting; and were we practically well adjusted to its issue we
might gladly absolve ourselves from studying its processes. In a world
that in extent and complexity so far outruns human energies, physical
knowledge ought to be largely virtual; that is, nature ought to be
represented by a suitable attitude toward it, by the attitude which
reason would dictate were knowledge complete, and not by explicit ideas.

[Sidenote: Physics should be largely virtual.]

The ancients were happily inspired when they imagined that beyond the
gods and the fixed stars the cosmos came to an end, for the empyrean
beyond was nothing in particular, nothing to trouble one’s self about.
Many existences are either out of relation to man altogether or have so
infinitesimal an influence on his experience that they may be
sufficiently represented there by an atom of star-dust; and it is
probable that if, out of pure curiosity, we wished to consider very
remote beings and had the means of doing so, we should find the detail
of existence in them wholly incommensurable with anything we can
conceive. Such beings could be known virtually only, in that we might
speak of them in the right key, representing them in appropriate
symbols, and might move in their company with the right degree of
respectful indifference.

[Sidenote: and dialectic explicit.]

The present situation of science, however, reverses the ideal one.
Physics, in so far as it exists, is explicit, and at variance with our
acquired attitude toward things; so that we may justly infer, by the
shock our little knowledge gives us, that our presumptions and
assumptions have been so egregious that more knowledge would give us
still greater shocks. Meantime dialectic, or knowledge of ideal things,
remains merely virtual. The ideal usually comes before us only in
revulsions which we cannot help feeling against some scandalous
situation or some intolerable muddle. We have no time or genius left,
after our agitated soundings and balings, to think of navigation as a
fine art, or to consider freely the sea and sky or the land we are
seeking. The proper occupation of the mind is gone, or rather not
initiated.

A further bad consequence of this illiberal state is that, among many
who have, in spite of the times, adoration in their souls, to adore
physics, to worship Being, seems a philosophical religion, whereas, of
course, it is the essence of idolatry. The true God is an object of
intent, an ideal of excellence and knowledge, not a term belonging to
sense or to probable hypothesis or to the prudent management of affairs.
After we have squared our accounts with nature and taken sufficient
thought for our bodily necessities, the eyes can be lifted for the first
time to the eternal. The rest was superstition and the quaking use of a
false physics. That appeal to the supernatural which while the danger
threatens is but forlorn medicine, after the blow has fallen may turn to
sublime wisdom. This wisdom has cast out the fear of material evils, and
dreads only that the divine should not come down and be worthily
entertained among us. In art, in politics, in that form of religion
which is superior, and not inferior, to politics and art, we define and
embody intent; and the intent embodied dignifies the work and lends
interest to its conditions. So, in science, it is dialectic that makes
physics speculative and worthy of a free mind. The baser utilities of
material knowledge would leave life itself perfectly vain, if they did
not help it to take on an ideal shape. Ideal life, in so far as it
constitutes science, is dialectical. It consists in seeing how things
hang together perspicuously and how the later phases of any process fill
out—as in good music—the tendency and promise of what went before.
This derivation may be mathematical or it may be moral; but in either
case the data and problem define the result, dialectic being insight
into their inherent correspondence.

[Sidenote: Intent is vital and indescribable.]

Intent is one of many evidences that the intellect’s essence is
practical. Intent is action in the sphere of thought; it corresponds to
transition and derivation in the natural world. Analytic psychology is
obliged to ignore intent, for it is obliged to regard it merely as a
feeling; but while the feeling of intent is a fact like any other,
intent itself is an aspiration, a passage, the recognition of an object
which not only is not a part of the feeling given but is often incapable
of being a feeling or a fact at all. What happened to motion under the
Eleatic analysis happens to intent under an anatomising reflection. The
parts do not contain the movement of transition which makes them a
whole. Moral experience is not expressible in physical categories,
because while you may give place and date for every feeling that
something is important or is absurd, you cannot so express what these
feelings have discovered and have wished to confide to you. The
importance and the absurdity have disappeared. Yet it is this
pronouncement concerning what things are absurd or important that makes
the intent of those judgments. To touch it you have to enter the moral
world; that is, you have to bring some sympathetic or hostile judgment
to bear on those you are considering and to meet intent, not by noting
its existence, but by estimating its value, by collating it with your
own intent. If some one says two and two are five, you are no
counter-mathematician when you conscientiously put it down that he said
so. Your science is not relevant to his intent until you run some risk
yourself in that arena and say, No: two and two are four.

[Sidenote: It is analogous to flux in existence]

Feelings and ideas, when plucked and separately considered, do not
retain the intent that made them cognitive or living; yet in their
native medium they certainly lived and knew. If this ideality or
transcendence seems a mystery, it is such only in the sense in which
every initial or typical fact is mysterious. Every category would be
unthinkable if it were not actually used. The mystery in this instance
has, however, all that can best serve to make a mystery homely and
amiable. It is supported by a strong analogy to other familiar
mysteries. The fact that intellect has intent, and does not constitute
or contain what it envisages, is like the fact that time flows, that
bodies gravitate, that experience is gathered, or that existence is
suspended between being and not being. Propagation in animals is
mysterious and familiar in the same fashion. Cognition, too, is an
expedient for vanquishing instability. As reproduction circumvents
mortality and preserves a semblance of permanence in the midst of
change, so intent regards what is not yet, or not here, or what exists
no longer. Thus the pulverisation proper to existence is vanquished by
thought, which in a moment announces or commemorates other moments,
together with the manner of their approach or recession. The mere image
of what is absent constitutes no knowledge of it; a dream is not
knowledge of a world like it existing elsewhere; it is simply another
more fragile world. What renders the image cognitive is the intent that
projects it and deputes it to be representative. It is cognitive only in
use, when it is the vehicle of an assurance which may be right or wrong,
because it takes something ulterior for its standard.

[Sidenote: It expresses natural life.]

We may give intent a somewhat more congenial aspect if we remember that
thought comes to animals in proportion to their docility in the world
and to their practical competence. The more plastic a being is to
experience, so long as he retains vital continuity and a cumulative
structure, the more intelligent he becomes. Intelligence is an
expression of adaptation, of impressionable and prophetic structure.
What wonder, then, that intelligence should speak of the things that
inspire it and that lend it its oracular and practical character,
namely, of things at that moment absent and merely potential, in other
words, of the surrounding world? Mere feeling might suffice to translate
into consciousness each particle of protoplasm in its isolation; but to
translate the relations of that particle to what is not itself and to
express its response to those environing presences, intent and conscious
signification are required. Intellect transcends the given and means
the absent because life, of which intellect is the fulfilment or
entelechy, is itself absorbed from without and radiated outward. As life
depends on an equilibrium of material processes which reach far beyond
the individual they sustain in being, so intent is a recognition of
outlying existences which sustain in being that very sympathy by which
they are recognised. Intent and life are more than analogous. If we use
the word life in an ideal sense, the two are coincident, for, as
Aristotle says, the act proper to intellect is life.[F] The flux is so
pervasive, so subtle in its persistency, that even those miracles which
suspend it must somehow share its destiny. Intent bridges many a chasm,
but only by leaping across. The life that is sustained for years, the
political or moral purpose that may bind whole races together, is
condemned to be partly a memory and partly a plan and wholly an ideal.
Its scope is nothing but the range to which it can continually extend
its sympathies and its power of representation. Its moments have nothing
in common except their loyalties and a conspiring interest in what is
not themselves.

[Sidenote: It has a material basis.]

This moral energy, so closely analogous to physical interplay, is of
course not without a material basis. Spiritual sublimation does not
consist in not using matter but in using it up, in making it all useful.
When life becomes rational it continues to be mechanical and to take up
room and energy in the natural world. That new direction of attention
upon form which finds in facts instances of ideas, does not occur
without a certain heat and labour in the brain. In its most intimate and
supernatural functions intellect has natural conditions. In dreams and
madness intent is confused and wayward, in idiocy it is suspended
altogether; nor has discourse any other pledge that it is addressing
kindred interlocutors except that which it receives from the disposition
and habit of bodies. People who have not yet been born into the world
have not yet begun to think about it.

There is, of course, an inner dialectical relevance among all
propositions that have the same ideal theme, no matter how remote or
unknown to one another those who utter the propositions may be; but the
medium in which this infinite dialectical network is woven is
motionless, and indifferent to the direction in which thought might
traverse it; in other words, it is not discourse or intelligence but
eternal truth. From the point of view of experience this prior
dialectical relation of form to form is merely potential; for the
thoughts between which it would obtain need never exist or be enacted.
There is society only among incarnate ideas; and it is only by
expressing some material situation that an idea is selected out of the
infinity of not impossible ideas and promoted to the temporal dignity of
actual thought.

[Sidenote: It is necessarily relevant to earth.]

Moreover, even if the faculty of intelligence were disembodied and could
exist in a vacuum, it would still be a vain possession if no data were
given for it to operate upon and if no particular natural structure,
animal, social, or artistic, were at hand for intelligence to ally
itself to and defend. Reason would in that case die of inanition; it
would have no subject-matter and no sanction, as well as no seat.
Intelligence is not a substance; it is a principle of order and of art;
it requires a given situation and some particular natural interest to
bring it into play. In fact, it is nothing but a name for the empire
which conscious, but at bottom irrational, interests attain over the
field in which they operate; it is the fruition of life, the token of
successful operation.

Every theme or motive in the Life of Reason expresses some instinct
rooted in the body and incidental to natural organisation. The intent by
which memory refers to past or absent experience, or the intent by which
perception becomes recognition, is a transcript of relations in which
events actually stand to one another. Such intent represents
modifications of structure and action important to life, modifications
that have responded to forces on which life is dependent. Both desire
and meaning translate into cognitive or ideal energy, into intent,
mechanical relations subsisting in nature. These mechanical relations
give practical force to the thought that expresses them, and the
thought in turn gives significance and value to the forces that subserve
it. Fulfilment is mutual, in one direction bringing material
potentialities to the light and making them actual and conscious, and in
the other direction embodying intent in the actual forms of things and
manifesting reason. Nothing could be more ill-considered than the desire
to disembody reason. Reason cries aloud for reunion with the material
world which she needs not only for a basis but, what concerns her even
more, for a theme.

In private and silent discourse, when words and grammar are swathed in
reverie, the material basis and reference of thought may be forgotten.
Desire and intent may then seem to disport themselves in a purely ideal
realm; moral or logical tensions alone may seem to determine the whole
process. Meditative persons are even inclined to regard the disembodied
life which they think they enjoy at such times as the true and native
form of experience; all organs, applications, and expressions of thought
they deprecate and call accidental. As some pious souls reject dogma to
reach pure faith and suspend prayer to enjoy union, so some mystical
logicians drop the world in order to grasp reality. It is an exquisite
suicide; but the energy and ideal that sustain such a flight are
annihilated by its issue, and the soul drops like a paper balloon
consumed by the very flame that wafted it. No thought is found without
an organ; none is conceivable without an expression which is that
organ’s visible emanation; and none would be significant without a
subject-matter lying in the world of which that organ is a part.

[Sidenote: The basis of intent becomes appreciable in language.]

The natural structure underlying intent is latent in silent thought, and
its existence might be denied by a sceptical thinker over whose mind the
analogies and spirit of physics exercised little influence. This
hypothetical structure is not, however, without obvious extensions which
imply its existence even where we do not perceive it directly. A smile
or a blush makes visible to the observer movements which must have been
at work in the body while thought occupied the mind—even if, as more
often happens, the blush or smile did not precede and introduce the
feeling they suggest, the feeling which in our verbal mythology is said
to cause them. No one would be so simple as to suppose that such
involuntary signs of feeling spring directly and by miracle out of
feeling. They surely continue some previous bodily commotion which
determines their material character, so that laughter, for instance,
becomes a sign of amusement rather than of rage, which it might just as
well have represented, so far as the abstract feeling itself is
concerned.

In the same way a sigh, a breath, a word are but the last stage and
superficial explosion of nervous tensions, tensions which from the point
of view of their other eventual expressions we might call interplaying
impulses or potential memories. As these material seethings underlay the
budding thought, so the uttered word, when it comes, underlies the
perfect conception. The word, in so far as it is material, undeniably
continues an internal material process, for aphasia and garrulity have
known physical causes. In the vibrations which we call words the hidden
complexities of cerebral action fly out, so to speak, into the air; they
become recognisable sounds emitted by lips and tongue and received by
the ear. The uttered word produces an obvious commotion in nature;
through it thought, being expressed in that its material basis is
extended outward, becomes at the same moment rational and practical; for
its expression enters into the chain of its future conditions and
becomes an omen of that thought’s continuance, repetition, and
improvement. Thought’s rational function consists, as we then perceive,
in expressing a natural situation and improving that situation by
expressing it, until such expression becomes a perfect and adequate
state of knowledge, which justifies both itself and its conditions.
Expression makes thought a power in the very world from which thought
drew its being, and renders it in some measure self-sustaining and
self-assured.

A thirsty man, let us say, begs for drink. Had his petition been a
wordless desire it might have been supposed, though falsely, to be a
disembodied and quite immaterial event, a transcendental attitude of
will, without conditions or consequences, but somehow with an absolute
moral dignity. But when the petition became articulate and audible to a
fellow-mortal, who thereupon proceeded to fetch a cup of water, the
desire, through the cry that expressed it, obviously asserted itself in
the mechanical world, to which it already secretly belonged by virtue of
its cause, a parched body. This material background for moral energy,
which even an inarticulate yearning would not have lacked, becomes in
language an overt phenomenon, linked observably with all other objects
and processes.

Language is accordingly an overflow of the physical basis of thought. It
is an audible gesture, more refined than the visible, but in the same
sense an automatic extension of nervous and muscular processes. Words
underlie the thought they are said to express—in truth it is the
thought that is the flower and expression of the language—much as the
body underlies the mind.

[Sidenote: Intent starts from a datum.]

Language contains, side by side two distinct elements. One is the
meaning or sense of the words—a logical projection given to sensuous
terms. The other is the sensuous vehicle of that meaning—the sound,
sign, or gesture. This sensuous term is a fulcrum for the lever of
signification, a _point d’appui_ which may be indefinitely attenuated in
rapid discourse, but not altogether discarded. Intent though it vaults
high must have something to spring from, or it would lend meaning to
nothing. The minimal sensuous term that subsists serves as a clue to a
whole system of possible assertions radiating from it. It becomes the
sign for an essence or idea, a logical hypostasis corresponding in
discourse to that material hypostasis of perceptions which is called an
external thing.

The hypostasised total of rational and just discourse is the truth. Like
the physical world, the truth is external and in the main potential. Its
ideal consistency and permanence serve to make it a standard and
background for fleeting assertions, just as the material hypostasis
called nature is the standard and background for all momentary
perceptions. What exists of truth in direct experience is at any moment
infinitesimal, as what exists of nature is, but all that either contains
might be represented in experience at one time or another.[G]

[Sidenote: and is carried by a feeling.]

The tensions and relations of words which make grammar or make poetry
are immediate in essence, the force of language being just as empirical
as the reality of things. To ask a thinker what he means by meaning is
as futile as to ask a carpenter what he means by wood; to discover it
you must emulate them and repeat their experience—which indeed you will
hardly be able to do if some sophist has so entangled your reason that
you can neither understand what you see nor assert what you mean. But as
the carpenter’s acquaintance with wood might be considerably refined if
he became a naturalist or liberalised if he became a carver, so a casual
speaker’s sense of what he means might be better focussed by dialectic
and more delicately shaded by literary training. Meantime the vital act
called intent, by which consciousness becomes cognitive and practical,
would remain at heart an indescribable experience, a sense of spiritual
life as radical and specific as the sense of heat.

[Sidenote: It demands conventional expression.]

Significant language forms a great system of ideal tensions, contained
in the mutual relations of parts of speech, and of clauses in
propositions. Of these tensions the intent in a man’s mind at any moment
is a living specimen. Experience at that moment may have a significance,
a transitive force, that asks to be enshrined in some permanent
expression; the more acute and irrevocable the crisis is, the more
urgent the need of transmitting to other moments some cognisance of what
was once so great. But were this experience to exhale its spirit in a
vacuum, using no conventional and transmissible medium of expression, it
would be foiled in its intent. It would leave no monument and achieve no
immortality in the world of representation; for the experience and its
expression would remain identical and perish together, just as a
perception and its object would remain identical and perish together if
there were no intelligence to discover the material world, to which the
perplexing shifts of sensation may be habitually referred. Spontaneous
expression, if it is to be recognisable and therefore in effect
expressive, labours under the necessity of subordinating itself to an
ideal system of expressions, a permanent language in which its
spontaneous utterances may be embedded. By virtue of such adoption into
a common medium expression becomes interpretable; a later moment may
then reconstruct the past out of its surviving memorial.

Intent, beside the form it has in language, where it makes the soul of
grammar, has many other modes of expression, in mathematical and logical
reasoning, in action, and in those contemplated and suspended acts which
we call estimation, policy, or morals. Moral philosophy, the wisdom of
Socrates, is merely a consideration of intent. In intent we pass over
from existence to ideality, the nexus lying in the propulsive nature of
life which could not have been capped by any form of knowledge which was
not itself in some way transitive and ambitious. Intent, though it looks
away from existence and the actual, is the most natural and pervasive of
things. Physics and dialectic meet in this: that the second brings to
fruition what the first describes, namely, existence, and that both have
their transcendental root in the flux of being. Matter cannot exist
without some form, much as by shedding every form in succession it may
proclaim its aversion to fixity and its radical formlessness or
infinitude. Nor can form, without the treacherous aid of matter, pass
from its ideal potentiality into selected and instant being.

[Sidenote: A fable about matter and form.]

In order to live—if such a myth may be allowed—the Titan Matter was
eager to disguise his incorrigible vagueness and pretend to be
something. He accordingly addressed himself to the beautiful company of
Forms, sisters whom he thought all equally beautiful, though their
number was endless, and equally fit to satisfy his heart. He wooed them
hypocritically, with no intention of wedding them; yet he uttered their
names in such seductive accents (called by mortals intelligence and
toil) that the virgin goddesses offered no resistance—at least such of
them as happened to be near or of a facile disposition. They were
presently deserted by their unworthy lover; yet they, too, in that
moment’s union, had tasted the sweetness of life. The heaven to which
they returned was no longer an infinite mathematical paradise. It was
crossed by memories of earth, and a warmer breath lingered in some of
its lanes and grottoes. Henceforth its nymphs could not forget that they
had awakened a passion, and that, unmoved themselves, they had moved a
strange indomitable giant to art and love.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote F: Cf. the motto on the title-page.]

[Footnote G: Not, of course, in human experience, which is incapable of
containing the heart of a flea, much less what may be endured in remoter
spheres. But if an intelligence were constructed _ad hoc_ there is
nothing real that might not fall within the scope of experience. The
difference between existence and truth on the one side and knowledge or
representation on the other may be reduced to this: that knowledge
brings what exists or what is true under apperception, while being
diffuses what is understood into an impartial subsistence. As truth is
indistinguishable from an absolute motionless intellect, which should no
longer be a function of life but merely a static order, so existence is
indistinguishable from an absolute motionless experience, which should
no longer be a foreshortening or representation of anything. This
existence would be motionless in the sense that it would “mark time,”
for of course every fact in it might be a fact of transition. The whole
system, however, would have a static ideal constitution, since the fact
that things change in a certain way or stand in a certain order is as
much a fact as any other; and it is not a logical necessity, either, but
a brute matter of fact that might well have been otherwise.]




CHAPTER VII

DIALECTIC


[Sidenote: Dialectic elaborates given forms.]

The advantage which the mechanical sciences have over history is drawn
from their mathematical form. Mathematics has somewhat the same place in
physics that conscience has in action; it seems to be a directive
principle in natural operations where it is only a formal harmony. The
formalistic school, which treats grammar in all departments as if it
were the ground of import rather than a means of expressing it, takes
mathematics also for an oracular deliverance, springing full-armed out
of the brain, and setting up a canon which all concrete things must
conform to. Thus mathematical science has become a mystery which a myth
must be constructed to solve. For how can it happen, people ask, that
pure intuition, retreating into its cell, can evolve there a prodigious
system of relations which it carries like a measuring-rod into the world
and lo! everything in experience submits to be measured by it? What
pre-established harmony is this between the spinning cerebral silkworm
and nature’s satins and brocades?

If we but knew, so the myth runs, that experience can show no patterns
but those which the prolific Mind has woven, we should not wonder at
this necessary correspondence. The Mind having decreed of its own
motion, while it sat alone before the creation of the world, that it
would take to dreaming mathematically, it evoked out of nothing all
formal necessities; and later, when it felt some solicitation to play
with things, it imposed those forms upon all its toys, admitting none of
any other sort into the nursery. In other words, perception perfected
its grammar before perceiving any of its objects, and having imputed
that grammar to the materials of sense, it was able to perceive objects
for the first time and to legislate further about their relations.

The most obvious artifices of language are often the most deceptive and
bring on epidemic prejudices. What is this Mind, this machine existing
prior to existence? The mind that exists is only a particular department
or focus of existence; its principles cannot be its own source, much
less the source of anything in other beings. Mathematical principles in
particular are not imposed on existence or on nature _ab extra_, but are
found in and abstracted from the subject-matter and march of experience.
To exist things have to wear some form, and the form they happen to wear
is largely mathematical. This being the case, the mind in shaping its
barbarous prosody somewhat more closely to the nature of things, learns
to note and to abstract the form that so strikingly defines them. Once
abstracted and focussed in the mind, these forms, like all forms, reveal
their dialectic; but that things conform to that dialectic (when they
do) is not wonderful, seeing that it is the obvious form of things that
the mind has singled out, not without practical shrewdness, for more
intensive study.

[Sidenote: Forms are abstracted from existence by intent.]

The difference between ideal and material knowledge does not lie in the
ungenerated oracular character of one of them in opposition to the
other; in both the data are inexplicable and irrational, and in both
investigation is tentative, observant, and subject to control by the
subject-matter. The difference lies, rather, in the direction of
speculation. In physics, which is at bottom historical, we study what
happens; we make inventories and records of events, of phenomena, of
juxtapositions. In dialectic, which is wholly intensive, we study what
is; we strive to clarify and develop the essence of what we find,
bringing into focus the inner harmonies and implications of forms—forms
which our attention or purpose has defined initially. The intuitions
from which mathematical deduction starts are highly generic notions
drawn from observation. The lines and angles of geometers are ideals,
and their ideal context is entirely independent of what may be their
context in the world; but they are found in the world, and their ideals
are suggested by very common sensations. Had they been invented, by
some inexplicable parthenogenesis in thought, it would indeed have been
a marvel had they found application. Philosophy has enough notions of
this inapplicable sort—usually, however, not very recondite in their
origin—to show that dialectic, when it seems to control existence, must
have taken more than one hint from the subject world, and that in the
realm of logic, too, nothing submits to be governed without
representation.

[Sidenote: Confusion comes of imperfect abstraction, or ambiguous
intent.]

When dialectic is employed, as in ethics and metaphysics, upon highly
complex ideas—concretions in discourse which cover large blocks of
existence—the dialectician in defining and in deducing often reaches
notions which cease to apply in some important respect to the object
originally intended. Thus Socrates, taking “courage” for his theme,
treats it dialectically and expresses the intent of the word by saying
that courage must be good, and then develops the meaning of good,
showing that it means the choice 01 the greater benefit; and finally
turns about and ends by saying that courage is consequently the choice
of the greater benefit and identical with wisdom. Here we have a process
of thought ending in a paradox which, frankly, misrepresents the
original meaning. For “courage” meant not merely something desirable but
something having a certain animal and psychological aspect. The emotion
and gesture of it had not been excluded from the idea. So that while
the argument proves to perfection that unwise courage is a bad thing, it
does not end with an affirmation really true of the original concept.
The instinct which we call courage, with an eye to its psychic and
bodily quality, is not always virtuous or wise. Dialectic, when it
starts with confused and deep-dyed feelings, like those which ethical
and metaphysical terms generally stand for, is thus in great danger of
proving unsatisfactory and being or seeming sophistical.

The mathematical dialectician has no such serious dangers to face. When,
having observed the sun and sundry other objects, he frames the idea of
a circle and tracing out its intent shows that the circle meant cannot
be squared, there is no difficulty in reverting to nature and saying
that the sun’s circle cannot be squared. For there is no difference in
intent between the circularity noted in the sun and that which is the
subject of the demonstration. The geometer has made in his first
reflection so clear and violent an abstraction from the sun’s actual
bulk and qualities that he will never imagine himself to be speaking of
anything but a concretion in discourse. The concretion in nature is
never legislated about nor so much as thought of except possibly when,
under warrant of sense, it is chosen to illustrate the concept
investigated dialectically. It does not even occur to a man to ask if
the sun’s circle can be squared, for every one understands that the sun
is circular only in so far as it conforms to the circle’s ideal nature;
which is as if Socrates and his interlocutors had clearly understood
that the _virtue_ of courage in an intemperate villain meant only
whatever in his mood or action was rational and truly desirable, and had
then said that courage, so understood, was identical with wisdom or with
the truly rational and desirable rule of life.

[Sidenote: The fact that mathematics applies to existence is empirical.]

The applicability of mathematics is not vouched for by mathematics but
by sense, and its application in some distant part of nature is not
vouched for by mathematics but by inductive arguments about nature’s
uniformity, or by the character which the notion, “a distant part of
nature,” already possesses. Inapplicable mathematics, we are told, is
perfectly thinkable, and systematic deductions, in themselves valid, may
be made from concepts which contravene the facts of perception. We may
suspect, perhaps, that even these concepts are framed by analogy out of
suggestions found in sense, so that some symbolic relevance or
proportion is kept, even in these dislocated speculations, to the matter
of experience. It is like a new mythology; the purely fictitious idea
has a certain parallelism and affinity to nature and moves in a human
and familiar way. Both data and method are drawn from applicable
science, elements of which even myth, whether poetic or mathematical,
may illustrate by a sort of variant or fantastic reduplication.

The great glory of mathematics, like that of virtue, is to be useful
while remaining free. Number and measure furnish an inexhaustible
subject-matter which the mind can dominate and develop dialectically as
it is the mind’s inherent office to develop ideas. At the same time
number and measure are the grammar of sense; and the more this inner
logic is cultivated and refined the greater subtlety and sweep can be
given to human perception. Astronomy on the one hand and mechanical arts
on the other are fruits of mathematics by which its worth is made known
even to the layman, although the born mathematician would not need the
sanction of such an extraneous utility to attach him to a subject that
has an inherent cogency and charm. Ideas, like other things, have
pleasure in propagation, and even when allowance is made for birth-pangs
and an occasional miscarriage, their native fertility will always
continue to assert itself. The more ideal and frictionless the movement
of thought is, the more perfect must be the physiological engine that
sustains it. The momentum of that silent and secluded growth carries the
mind, with a sense of pure disembodied vision, through the logical
labyrinth; but the momentum is vital, for the truth itself does not
move.

[Sidenote: Its moral value is therefore contingent.]

Whether the airy phantoms thus brought into being are valued and
preserved by the world is an ulterior point of policy which the pregnant
mathematician does not need to consider in bringing to light the
legitimate burden of his thoughts. But were mathematics incapable of
application, did nature and experience, for instance, illustrate nothing
but Parmenides’ Being or Hegel’s Logic, the dialectical cogency which
mathematics would of course retain would not give this science a very
high place in the Life of Reason. Mathematics would be an amusement, and
though apparently innocent, like a game of patience, it might even turn
out to be a wasteful and foolish exercise for the mind; because to
deepen habits and cultivate pleasures irrelevant to other interests is a
way of alienating ourselves from our general happiness. Distinction and
a curious charm there may well be in such a pursuit, but this quality is
perhaps traceable to affinities and associations with other more
substantial interests, or is due to the ingenious temper it denotes,
which touches that of the wit or magician. Mathematics, if it were
nothing more than a pleasure, might conceivably become a vice. Those
addicted to it might be indulging an atavistic taste at the expense of
their humanity. It would then be in the position now occupied by
mythology and mysticism. Even as it is, mathematicians share with
musicians a certain partiality in their characters and mental
development. Masters in one abstract subject, they may remain children
in the world; exquisite manipulators of the ideal, they may be erratic
and clumsy in their earthly ways. Immense as are the uses and wide the
applications of mathematics, its texture is too thin and inhuman to
employ the whole mind or render it harmonious. It is a science which
Socrates rejected for its supposed want of utility; but perhaps he had
another ground in reserve to justify his humorous prejudice. He may have
felt that such a science, if admitted, would endanger his thesis about
the identity of virtue and knowledge.

[Sidenote: Quantity submits easily to dialectical treatment.]

Mathematical method has been the envy of philosophers, perplexed and
encumbered as they are with the whole mystery of existence, and they
have attempted at times to emulate mathematical cogency. Now the
lucidity and certainty found in mathematics are not inherent in its
specific character as the science of number or dimension; they belong to
dialectic as a whole which is essentially elucidation. The effort to
explain meanings is in most cases abortive because these meanings melt
in our hands—a defeat which Hegel would fain have consecrated, together
with all other evils, into necessity and law. But the merit of
mathematics is that it is so much less Hegelian than life; that it holds
its own while it advances, and never allows itself to misrepresent its
original intent. In all it finds to say about the triangle it never
comes to maintain that the triangle is really a square. The privilege of
mathematics is simply to have offered the mind, for dialectical
treatment, a material to which dialectical treatment could be honestly
applied. This material consists in certain general aspects of
sensation—its extensity, its pulsation, its distribution into related
parts. The wakefulness that originally makes these abstractions is able
to keep them clear, and to elaborate them infinitely without
contradicting their essence.

For this reason it is always a false step in mathematical science, a
step over its brink into the abyss beyond, when we try to reduce its
elements to anything not essentially sensible. Intuition must continue
to furnish the subject of discourse, the axioms, and the ultimate
criteria and sanctions. Calculation and transmutation can never make
their own counters or the medium in which they move. So that space,
number, continuity, and every other elementary intuition remains at
bottom opaque—opaque, that is, to mathematical science; for it is no
paradox, but an obvious necessity, that the data of a logical operation
should not be producible by its workings. Reason would have nothing to
do if it had no irrational materials. Saint Augustine’s rhetoric
accordingly covered—as so often with him—a profound truth when he said
of time that he knew what it was when no one asked him, but if any one
asked him he did not know; which may be restated by saying that time is
an intuition, an aspect of crude experience, which science may work with
but which it can never arrive at.

[Sidenote: Constancy and progress in intent.]

When a concretion is formed in discourse and an intent is attained in
consciousness, predicates accrue to the subject in a way which is
perfectly empirical. Dialectic is not retrospective; it does not consist
in recovering ground previously surveyed. The accretion of new
predicates comes in answer to chance questions, questions raised, to be
sure, about a given theme. The subject is fixed by the mind’s intent and
it suffices to compare any tentative assertion made about it with that
intent itself to see whether the expression suggested for it is truly
dialectical and thoroughly honest. Dialectic verifies by
reconsideration, by equation of tentative results with fixed intentions.
It does not verify, like the sciences of existence, by comparing a
hypothesis with a new perception. In dialectic no new _perception_ is
wanted; the goal is to understand the old fact, to give it an aureole
and not a progeny. It is a transubstantiation of matter, a passage from
existence to eternity. In this sense dialectic is “synthetic _a
priori_”; it analyses an intent which demanded further elucidation and
had fixed the direction and principle of its expansion. If this intent
is abandoned and a new subject is introduced surreptitiously, a fallacy
is committed; yet the correct elucidation of ideas is a true progress,
nor could there be any progress unless the original idea were better
expressed and elicited as we proceeded; so that constancy in intent and
advance in explication are the two requisites of a cogent deduction.

The question in dialectic is always what is true, what can be said,
about _this_; and the demonstrative pronoun, indicating an act of
selective attention, raises the object it selects to a concretion in
discourse, the relations of which in the universe of discourse it then
proceeds to formulate. At the same time this dialectical investigation
may be full of surprises. Knowledge may be so truly enriched by it that
_knowledge_, in an ideal sense, only begins when dialectic has given
some articulation to being. Without dialectic an animal might follow
instinct, he might have vivid emotions, expectations, and dreams, but he
could hardly be said to know anything or to guide his life with
conscious intent. The accretions that might come empirically into any
field of vision would not be new predicates to be added to a known
thing, unless the logical and functional mantle of that thing fell upon
them and covered them. While the right of particulars to existence is
their own, granted them by the free grace of heaven, their ability to
enlarge our knowledge on any particular subject—their relevance or
incidence in discourse—hangs on their fulfilling the requirements which
that subject’s dialectical nature imposes on all its expressions.

[Sidenote: Intent determines the functional essence of objects.]

It is on this ground, for instance, that the image of a loaf of bread is
so far from being the loaf of bread itself. External resemblance is
nothing; even psychological derivation or superposition is nothing; the
intent, rather, which picks out what that object’s function and meaning
shall be, alone defines its idea; and this function involves a locus and
a status which the image does not possess. Such admirable iridescence as
the image might occasionally put on—in the fine arts, for
instance—would not constitute any iridescence or transformation in the
thing; nor would identity of aspect preserve the thing if its soul, if
its utility, had disappeared. Herein lies the ground for the essential
or functional distinction between primary and secondary qualities in
things, a distinction which a psychological scepticism has so hastily
declared to be untenable. If it was discovered, said these logicians,
that space was perceived through reading muscular sensations, space, and
the muscles too, were thereby proved to be unreal. This remarkable
sophism passed muster in the philosophical world for want of attention
to dialectic, which might so easily have shown that what a thing _means_
is spatial distinction and mechanical efficacy, and that the origin of
our perceptions, which are all equally bodily and dependent on material
stimulation, has nothing to do with their respective claims to
hypostasis. It is intent that makes objects objects; and the same
intent, defining the function of things, defines the scope of those
qualities which are essential to them. In the flux substances and
shadows drift down together; it is reason that discerns the difference.

[Sidenote: Also the scope of ideals.]

Purposes need dialectical articulation as much as essences do, and
without an articulate and fixed purpose, without an ideal, action would
collapse into mere motion or conscious change. It is notably in this
region that elucidation constitutes progress; for to understand the
properties of number may be less important than empirically to count;
but to see and feel the values of things in all their distinction and
fulness is the ultimate fruit of efficiency; it is mastery in that art
of life for which all the rest is apprenticeship. Dialectic of this sort
is practised intuitively by spiritual minds; and even when it has to be
carried on argumentatively it may prove very enlightening. That the
excellence of courage is identical with that of wisdom still needs to be
driven home; and that the excellence of poetry is identical with that of
all other things probably sounds like a blind paradox. Yet did not all
excellences conspire to one end and meet in one Life of Reason, how
could their relative value be estimated, or any reflective sanction be
found for them at all? The miscellaneous, captious fancies of the will,
the menagerie of moral prejudices, still call for many a Socrates to
tame them. So long as courage means a grimace of mind or body, the love
of it is another grimace. But if it meant the value, recognisable by
reason and diffused through all life, which that casual attitude or
feeling might have, then we should be launched upon the quest for
wisdom.

The want of integration in moral views is like what want of integration
would be in arithmetic if we declared that it was the part of a man and
a Christian to maintain that _my_ two equals four or that a _green_
fifteen is a hundred. These propositions might have incidental lights
and shades in people’s lives to make them plausible and precious; but
they could not be maintained by one who had clarified his intent in
naming and adding. For then the arithmetical relations would be
abstracted, and their incidental associates would drop out of the
account. So a man who is in pursuit of things for the good that is in
them must recognise and (if reason avails) must pursue what is good in
them all. Strange customs and unheard-of thoughts may then find their
appropriate warrant; just as in higher mathematical calculations very
wonderful and unforeseen results may be arrived at, which a man will not
accept without careful reconsideration of the terms and problem before
him; but if he finds the unexpected conclusion flowing from those
premises, he will have enlarged his knowledge of his art and discovered
a congenial good. He will have made progress in the Socratic science of
knowing his own intent.

[Sidenote: Double status of mathematics.]

Mathematics, for all its applications in nature, is a part of ideal
philosophy. It is logic applied to certain simple intuitions. These
intuitions and many of their developments happen to appear in that
efficacious and self-sustaining moiety of being which we call material;
so that mathematics is _per accidens_ the dialectical study of nature’s
efficacious form. Its use and application in the world rather hide its
dialectical principle. Mathematics owes its public success to the happy
choice of a simple and widely diffused subject-matter; it owes its inner
cogency, however, to its ideality and the merely adventitious
application it has to existence. Mathematics has come to seem the type
of good logic because it is an illustration of logic in a sphere so
highly abstract in idea and so pervasive in sense as to be at once
manageable and useful.

The delights and triumphs of mathematics ought, therefore, to be a great
encouragement to ideal philosophy. If in a comparatively uninteresting
field attention can find so many treasures of harmony and order, what
beauties might it not discover in interpreting faithfully ideas nobler
than extension and number, concretions closer to man’s spiritual life?
But unfortunately the logic of values is subject to voluntary and
involuntary confusions of so discouraging a nature that the flight of
dialectic in that direction has never been long and, even when short,
often disastrous. What is needed, as the example of mathematics shows,
is a steadfast intent and an adventurous inquiry. It would not occur to
a geometer to ask with trepidation what difference it would make to the
Pythagorean proposition if the hypothenuse were said to be wise and
good. Yet metaphysicians, confounding dialectic with physics and
thereby corrupting both, will discuss for ever the difference it makes
to substance whether you call it matter or God. Nevertheless, no
decorative epithets can give substance any other attributes than those
which it has; that is, other than the actual appearances that substance
is needed to support. Similarly, neither mathematicians nor astronomers
are exercised by the question whether [Greek: pi] created the ring of
Saturn; yet naturalists and logicians have not rejected the analogous
problem whether the good did or did not create the animals.

[Sidenote: Practical rôle of dialectic.]

So long as in using terms there is no fixed intent, no concretion in
discourse with discernible predicates, controversy will rage as
conceptions waver and will reach no valid result. But when the force of
intellect, once having arrested an idea amid the flux of perceptions,
avails to hold and examine that idea with perseverance, not only does a
flash of light immediately cross the mind, but deeper and deeper vistas
are opened there into ideal truth. The principle of dialectic is
intelligence itself; and as no part of man’s economy is more vital than
intelligence (since intelligence is what makes life aware of its
destiny), so no part has a more delightful or exhilarating movement. To
understand is pre-eminently to live, moving not by stimulation and
external compulsion, but by inner direction and control. Dialectic is
related to observation as art is to industry; it uses what the other
furnishes; it is the fruition of experience. It is not an alternative to
empirical pursuits but their perfection; for dialectic, like art, has no
special or private subject-matter, nor any obligation to be useless. Its
subject-matter is all things, and its function is to compare them in
form and worth, giving the mind speculative dominion over them. It
profits by the flux to fix its signification. This is precisely what
mathematics does for the abstract form and multitude of sensible things;
it is what dialectic might do everywhere, with the same incidental
utility, if it could settle its own attitude and learn to make the
passions steadfast and calm in the consciousness of their ultimate
objects.

[Sidenote: Hegel’s satire on dialectic.]

The nature of dialectic might be curiously illustrated by reference to
Hegel’s Logic; and though to approach the subject from Hegel’s satirical
angle is not, perhaps, quite honest or fair, the method has a certain
spice. Hegel, who despised mathematics, saw that in other departments
the instability of men’s meanings defeated their desire to understand
themselves. This insecurity in intent he found to be closely connected
with change of situation, with the natural mutability of events and
opinions in the world. Instead of showing, however, what inroads
passion, oblivion, sophistry, and frivolity may make into dialectic, he
bethought himself to represent all these incoherences, which are indeed
significant of natural changes, as the march of dialectic itself, thus
identified with the process of evolution and with natural law. The
romance of an unstable and groping theology, full of warm intentions and
impossible ideas, he took to be typical of all experience and of all
science.

In that impressionable age any effect of _chiaro-oscuro_ caught in the
moonlight of history could find a philosopher to exalt it into the
darkly luminous secret of the world. Hegel accordingly decreed that
men’s habit of self-contradiction constituted their providential
function, both in thought and in morals; and he devoted his Logic to
showing how every idea they embraced (for he never treated an idea
otherwise than as a creed), when pressed a little, turned into its
opposite. This opposite after a while would fall back into something
like the original illusion; whereupon a new change of insight would
occur and a new thought would be accepted until, the landscape changing,
attention would be attracted to a fresh aspect of the matter and
conviction would wander into a new labyrinth of false steps and
half-meanings. The sum total of these wanderings, when viewed from
above, formed an interesting picture. A half-mystical, half-cynical
reflection might take a certain pleasure in contemplating it; especially
if, in memory of Calvin and the Stoics, this situation were called the
expression of Absolute Reason and Divine Will.

We may think for a moment that we have grasped the elusive secret of
this philosophy and that it is simply a Calvinism without Christianity,
in which God’s glory consists in the damnation of quite all his
creatures. Presently, however, the scene changes again, and we recognise
that Creator and creation, ideal and process, are identical, so that the
glory belongs to the very multitude that suffers. But finally, as we rub
our eyes, the whole revelation collapses into a platitude, and we
discover that this glory and this damnation were nothing but unctuous
phrases for the vulgar flux of existence.

That nothing is what we mean by it is perfectly true when we in no case
know what we mean. Thus a man who is a mystic by nature may very well
become one by reflection also. Not knowing what he wants nor what he is,
he may believe that every shift carries him nearer to perfection. A
temperamental and quasi-religious thirst for inconclusiveness and room
to move on lent a certain triumphant note to Hegel’s satire; he was sure
it all culminated in something, and was not sure it did not culminate in
himself. The system, however, as it might strike a less egotistical
reader, is a long demonstration of man’s ineptitude and of nature’s
contemptuous march over a path paved with good intentions. It is an
idealism without respect for ideals; a system of dialectic in which a
psychological flux (not, of course, psychological science, which would
involve terms dialectically fixed and determinate) is made
systematically to obliterate intended meanings.

[Sidenote: Dialectic expresses a given intent.]

This spirited travesty of logic has enough historical truth in it to
show that dialectic must always stand, so to speak, on its apex; for
life is changeful, and the vision and interest of one moment are not
understood in the next. Theological dialectic rings hollow when once
faith is dead; grammar looks artificial when a language is foreign;
mathematics itself seems shallow when, like Hegel, we have no love for
nature’s intelligible mechanism nor for the clear structure and
constancy of eternal things. Ideal philosophy is a flower of the spirit
and varies with the soil. If mathematics suffers so little
contradiction, it is only because the primary aspects of sensation which
it elaborates could not lapse from the world without an utter break in
its continuity. Otherwise though mathematics might not be refuted it
might well be despised, like an obsolete ontology. Its boasted necessity
and universality would not help it at all if experience should change so
much as to present no further mathematical aspect. Those who expect to
pass at death into a non-spatial and super-temporal world, where there
will be no detestable extended and unthinking substances, and nothing
that need be counted, will find their hard-learned mathematics sadly
superfluous there. The memory of earthly geometry and arithmetic will
grow pale amid that floating incense and music, where dialectic, if it
survives at all, will have to busy itself on new intuitions.

So, too, when the landscape changes in the moral world, when new
passions or arts make their appearance, moral philosophy must start
afresh on a new foundation and try to express the ideals involved in the
new pursuits. To this extent experience lends colour to Hegel’s
dialectical physics; but he betrayed, like the sincere pantheist he was,
the finite interests that give actual values to the world, and he wished
to bestow instead a groundless adoration on the law that connected and
defeated every ideal. Such a genius, in spite of incisive wit and a
certain histrionic sympathy with all experience, could not be truly
free; it could not throw off its professional priestcraft, its habit of
ceremonious fraud on the surface, nor, at heart, its inhuman religion.

[Sidenote: Its empire is ideal and autonomous.]

The sincere dialectician, the genuine moralist, must stand upon human,
Socratic ground. Though art be long, it must take a short life for its
basis and an actual interest for its guide. The liberal dialectician has
the gift of conversation; he does not pretend to legislate from the
throne of Jehovah about the course of affairs, but asks the ingenuous
heart to speak for itself, guiding and checking it only in its own
interest. The result is to express a given nature and to cultivate it;
so that whenever any one possessing such a nature is born into the world
he may use this calculation, and more easily understand and justify his
mind. Of course, if experience were no longer the same, and faculties
had entirely varied, the former interpretation could no longer serve.
Where nature shows a new principle of growth the mind must find a new
method of expression, and move toward other goals. Ideals are not forces
stealthily undermining the will; they are possible forms of being that
would frankly express it. These forms are invulnerable, eternal, and
free; and he who finds them divine and congenial and is able to embody
them at least in part and for a season, has to that extent transfigured
life, turning it from a fatal process into a liberal art.




CHAPTER VIII

PRERATIONAL MORALITY


[Sidenote: Empirical alloy in dialectic.]

When a polyglot person is speaking, foreign words sometimes occur to
him, which he at once translates into the language he happens to be
using. Somewhat in the same way, when dialectic develops an idea,
suggestions for this development may come from the empirical field; yet
these suggestions soon shed their externality and their place is taken
by some genuine development of the original notion. In constructing, for
instance, the essence of a circle, I may have started from a hoop. I may
have observed that as the hoop meanders down the path the roundness of
it disappears to the eye, being gradually flattened into a straight
line, such as the hoop presents when it is rolling directly away from
me. I may now frame the idea of a mathematical circle, in which all
diameters are precisely equal, in express contrast to the series of
ellipses, with very unequal diameters, which the floundering hoop has
illustrated in its career. When once, however, the definition of the
circle is attained, no watching of hoops is any longer requisite. The
ellipse can be generated ideally out of the definition, and would have
been generated, like asymptotes and hyperbolas, even if never
illustrated in nature at all. Lemmas from a foreign tongue have only
served to disclose a great fecundity in the native one, and the
legitimate word that the context required has supplanted the casual
stranger that may first have ushered it into the mind.

When the idea which dialectic is to elaborate is a moral idea, a purpose
touching something in the concrete world, lemmas from experience often
play a very large part in the process. Their multitude, with the small
shifts in aspiration and esteem which they may suggest to the mind,
often obscures the dialectical process altogether. In this case the
foreign term is never translated into the native medium; we never make
out what ideal connection our conclusion has with our premises, nor in
what way the conduct we finally decide upon is to fulfil the purpose
with which we began. Reflection merely beats about the bush, and when a
sufficient number of prejudices and impulses have been driven from
cover, we go home satisfied with our day’s ranging, and feeling that we
have left no duty unconsidered; and our last bird is our final
resolution.

[Sidenote: Arrested rationality in morals.]

When morality is in this way non-dialectical, casual, impulsive,
polyglot, it is what we may call prerational morality. There is indeed
reason in it, since every deliberate precept expresses some reflection
by which impulses have been compared and modified. But such chance
reflection amounts to moral perception, not to moral science. Reason has
not begun to educate her children. This morality is like knowing chairs
from tables and things near from distant things, which is hardly what we
mean by natural science. On this stage, in the moral world, are the
judgments of Mrs. Grundy, the aims of political parties and their
maxims, the principles of war, the appreciation of art, the commandments
of religious authorities, special revelations of duty to individuals,
and all systems of intuitive ethics.

[Sidenote: Its emotional and practical power.]

Prerational morality is vigorous because it is sincere. Actual
interests, rooted habits, appreciations the opposite of which is
inconceivable and contrary to the current use of language, are embodied
in special precepts; or they flare up of themselves in impassioned
judgments. It is hardly too much to say, indeed, that prerational
morality is morality proper. Rational ethics, in comparison, seems a
kind of politics or wisdom, while post-rational systems are essentially
religions. If we thus identify morality with prerational standards, we
may agree also that morality is no science in itself, though it may
become, with other matters, a subject for the science of anthropology;
and Hume, who had never come to close quarters with any rational or
post-rational ideal, could say with perfect truth that morality was not
founded on reason. Instinct is of course not founded on reason, but
_vice versa_; and the maxims enforced by tradition or conscience are
unmistakably founded on instinct. They might, it is true, become
materials for reason, if they were intelligently accepted, compared, and
controlled; but such a possibility reverses the partisan and spasmodic
methods which Hume and most other professed moralists associate with
ethics. Hume’s own treatises on morals, it need hardly be said, are pure
psychology. It would have seemed to him conceited, perhaps, to inquire
what ought really to be done. He limited himself to asking what men
tended to think about their doings.

The chief expression of rational ethics which a man in Hume’s world
would have come upon lay in the Platonic and Aristotelian writings; but
these were not then particularly studied nor vitally understood. The
chief illustration of post-rational morality that could have fallen
under his eyes, the Catholic religion, he would never have thought of as
a philosophy of life, but merely as a combination of superstition and
policy, well adapted to the lying and lascivious habits of Mediterranean
peoples. Under such circumstances ethics could not be thought of as a
science; and whatever gradual definition of the ideal, whatever
prescription of what ought to be and to be done, found a place in the
thoughts of such philosophers formed a part of their politics or
religion and not of their reasoned knowledge.

[Sidenote: Moral science is an application of dialectic, not a part of
anthropology.]

There is, however, a dialectic of the will; and that is the science
which, for want of a better name, we must call ethics or moral
philosophy. The interweaving of this logic of practice with various
natural sciences that have man or society for their theme, leads to much
confusion in terminology and in point of view. Is the good, we may ask,
what anybody calls good at any moment, or what anybody calls good on
reflection, or what all men agree to call good, or what God calls good,
no matter what all mankind may think about it? Or is true good something
that perhaps nobody calls good nor knows of, something with no other
characteristic or relation except that it is simply good?

Various questions are involved in such perplexing alternatives; some are
physical questions and others dialectical. Why any one values anything
at all, or anything in particular, is a question of physics; it asks for
the causes of interest, judgment, and desire. To esteem a thing good is
to express certain affinities between that thing and the speaker; and if
this is done with self-knowledge and with knowledge of the thing, so
that the felt affinity is a real one, the judgment is invulnerable and
cannot be asked to rescind itself. Thus if a man said hemlock was good
to drink, we might say he was mistaken; but if he explained that he
meant good to drink in committing suicide, there would be nothing
pertinent left to say: for to adduce that to commit suicide is not good
would be impertinent. To establish that, we should have to go back and
ask him if he valued anything—life, parents, country, knowledge,
reputation; and if he said no, and was sincere, our mouths would be
effectually stopped—that is, unless we took to declamation. But we
might very well turn to the bystanders and explain what sort of blood
and training this man possessed, and what had happened among the cells
and fibres of his brain to make him reason after that fashion. The
causes of morality, good or bad, are physical, seeing that they are
causes.

The science of ethics, however, has nothing to do with causes, not in
that it need deny or ignore them but in that it is their fruit and
begins where they end. Incense rises from burning coals, but it is
itself no conflagration, and will produce none. What ethics asks is not
why a thing is called good, but whether it is good or not, whether it is
right or not so to esteem it. Goodness, in this ideal sense, is not a
matter of opinion, but of nature. For intent is at work, life is in
active operation, and the question is whether the thing or the situation
responds to that intent. So if I ask, Is four really twice two? the
answer is not that most people say so, but that, in saying so, I am not
misunderstanding myself. To judge whether things are _really_ good,
intent must be made to speak; and if this intent may itself be judged
later, that happens by virtue of other intents comparing the first with
their own direction.

Hence good, when once the moral or dialectical attitude has been
assumed, means not what is called good but what is so; that is, what
_ought_ to be called good. For intent, beneath which there is no moral
judgment, sets up its own standard, and ideal science begins on that
basis, and cannot go back of it to ask why the obvious good is good at
all. Naturally, there is a reason, but not a moral one; for it lies in
the physical habit and necessity of things. The reason is simply the
propulsive essence of animals and of the universal flux, which renders
forms possible but unstable, and either helpful or hurtful to one
another. That nature should have this constitution, or intent this
direction, is not a good in itself. It is esteemed good or bad as the
intent that speaks finds in that situation a support or an obstacle to
its ideal. As a matter of fact, nature and the very existence of life
cannot be thought wholly evil, since no intent is wholly at war with
these its conditions; nor can nature and life be sincerely regarded as
wholly good, since no moral intent stops at the facts; nor does the
universal flux, which infinitely overflows any actual synthesis,
altogether support any intent it may generate.

[Sidenote: Estimation the soul of philosophy.]

Philosophers would do a great discourtesy to estimation if they sought
to justify it. It is all other acts that need justification by this one.
The good greets us initially in every experience and in every object.
Remove from anything its share of excellence and you have made it
utterly insignificant, irrelevant to human discourse, and unworthy of
even theoretic consideration. Value is the principle of perspective in
science, no less than of rightness in life. The hierarchy of goods, the
architecture of values, is the subject that concerns man most. Wisdom is
the first philosophy, both in time and in authority; and to collect
facts or to chop logic would be idle and would add no dignity to the
mind, unless that mind possessed a clear humanity and could discern what
facts and logic are good for and what not. The facts would remain facts
and the truths truths; for of course values, accruing on account of
animal souls and their affections, cannot possibly create the universe
those animals inhabit. But both facts and truths would remain trivial,
fit to awaken no pang, no interest, and no rapture. The first
philosophers were accordingly sages. They were statesmen and poets who
knew the world and cast a speculative glance at the heavens, the better
to understand the conditions and limits of human happiness. Before their
day, too, wisdom had spoken in proverbs. _It is better_ every adage
began: _Better this than that_. Images or symbols, mythical or homely
events, of course furnished subjects and provocations for these
judgments; but the residuum of all observation was a settled estimation
of things, a direction chosen in thought and life because it was better.
Such was philosophy in the beginning and such is philosophy still.

[Sidenote: Moral discriminations are natural and inevitable.]

To one brought up in a sophisticated society, or in particular under an
ethical religion morality seems at first an external command, a chilling
and arbitrary set of requirements and prohibitions which the young
heart, if it trusted itself, would not reckon at a penny’s worth. Yet
while this rebellion is brewing in the secret conclave of the passions,
the passions themselves are prescribing a code. They are inventing
gallantry and kindness and honour; they are discovering friendship and
paternity. With maturity comes the recognition that the authorised
precepts of morality were essentially not arbitrary; that they expressed
the genuine aims and interests of a practised will; that their alleged
alien and supernatural basis (which if real would have deprived them of
all moral authority) was but a mythical cover for their forgotten
natural springs. Virtue is then seen to be admirable essentially, and
not merely by conventional imputation. If traditional morality has much
in it that is out of proportion, much that is unintelligent and inert,
nevertheless it represents on the whole the verdict of reason. It speaks
for a typical human will chastened by a typical human experience.

[Sidenote: A choice of proverbs.]

Gnomic wisdom, however, is notoriously polychrome, and proverbs depend
for their truth entirely on the occasion they are applied to. Almost
every wise saying has an opposite one, no less wise, to balance it; so
that a man rich in such lore, like Sancho Panza, can always find a
venerable maxim to fortify the view he happens to be taking. In respect
to foresight, for instance, we are told, Make hay while the sun shines,
A stitch in time saves nine, Honesty is the best policy, Murder will
out, Woe unto you, ye hypocrites, Watch and pray, Seek salvation with
fear and trembling, and _Respice finem_. But on the same authorities
exactly we have opposite maxims, inspired by a feeling that mortal
prudence is fallible, that life is shorter than policy, and that only
the present is real; for we hear, A bird in the hand is worth two in the
bush, _Carpe diem, Ars longa, vita brevis_. Be not righteous overmuch,
Enough for the day is the evil thereof, Behold the lilies of the field,
Judge not, that ye be not judged, Mind your own business, and It takes
all sorts of men to make a world. So when some particularly shocking
thing happens one man says, _Cherchez la femme_, and another says, Great
is Allah.

That these maxims should be so various and partial is quite intelligible
when we consider how they spring up. Every man, in moral reflection, is
animated by his own intent; he has something in view which he prizes, he
knows not why, and which wears to him the essential and unquestionable
character of a good. With this standard before his eyes, he observes
easily—for love and hope are extraordinarily keen-sighted—what in
action or in circumstances forwards his purpose and what thwarts it;
and at once the maxim comes, very likely in the language of the
particular instance before him. Now the interests that speak in a man
are different at different times; and the outer facts or measures which
in one case promote that interest may, where other less obvious
conditions have changed, altogether defeat it. Hence all sorts of
precepts looking to all sorts of results.

[Sidenote: Their various representative value.]

Prescriptions of this nature differ enormously in value; for they differ
enormously in scope. By chance, or through the insensible operation of
experience leading up to some outburst of genius, intuitive maxims may
be so central, so expressive of ultimate aims, so representative, I
mean, of all aims in fusion, that they merely anticipate what moral
science would have come to if it had existed. This happens much as in
physics ultimate truths may be divined by poets long before they are
discovered by investigators; the _vivida vis animi_ taking the place of
much recorded experience, because much unrecorded experience has
secretly fed it. Such, for instance, is the central maxim of
Christianity, Love thy neighbour as thyself. On the other hand, what is
usual in intuitive codes is a mixture of some elementary precepts,
necessary to any society, with others representing local traditions or
ancient rites: so Thou shalt not kill, and Thou shalt keep holy the
Sabbath day, figure side by side in the Decalogue. When Antigone, in
her sublimest exaltation, defies human enactments and appeals to
laws which are not of to-day nor yesterday, no man knowing whence
they have arisen, she mixes various types of obligation in a most
instructive fashion; for a superstitious horror at leaving a body
unburied—something decidedly of yesterday—gives poignancy in her mind
to natural affection for a brother—something indeed universal, yet
having a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of right is here,
in consequence, more dramatic than spiritual; and even its dramatic
force has suffered somewhat by the change in ruling ideals.

[Sidenote: Conflict of partial moralities.]

The disarray of intuitive ethics is made painfully clear in the
conflicts which it involves when it has fostered two incompatible
growths in two centres which lie near enough to each other to come into
physical collision. Such ethics has nothing to offer in the presence of
discord except an appeal to force and to ultimate physical sanctions. It
can instigate, but cannot resolve, the battle of nations and the battle
of religions. Precisely the same zeal, the same patriotism, the same
readiness for martyrdom fires adherents to rival societies, and fires
them especially in view of the fact that the adversary is no less
uncompromising and fierce. It might seem idle, if not cruel and
malicious, to wish to substitute one historical allegiance for another,
when both are equally arbitrary, and the existing one is the more
congenial to those born under it; but to feel this aggression to be
criminal demands some degree of imagination and justice, and sectaries
would not be sectaries if they possessed it.

Truly religious minds, while eager perhaps to extirpate every religion
but their own, often rise above national jealousies; for spirituality is
universal, whatever churches may be. Similarly politicians often
understand very well the religious situation; and of late it has become
again the general practice among prudent governments to do as the Romans
did in their conquests, and to leave people free to exercise what
religion they have, without pestering them with a foreign one. On the
other hand the same politicians are the avowed agents of a quite patent
iniquity; for what is their ideal? To substitute their own language,
commerce, soldiers, and tax-gatherers for the tax-gatherers, soldiers,
commerce, and language of their neighbours; and no means is thought
illegitimate, be it fraud in policy or bloodshed in war, to secure this
absolutely nugatory end. Is not one country as much a country as
another? Is it not as dear to its inhabitants? What then is gained by
oppressing its genius or by seeking to destroy it altogether?

Here are two flagrant instances where prerational morality defeats the
ends of morality. Viewed from within, each religious or national
fanaticism stands for a good; but in its outward operation it produces
and becomes an evil. It is possible, no doubt, that its agents are
really so far apart in nature and ideals that, like men and mosquitoes,
they can stand in physical relations only, and if they meet can meet
only to poison or to crush one another. More probably, however, humanity
in them is no merely nominal essence; it is definable ideally, as
essences are defined, by a partially identical function and intent. In
that case, by studying their own nature, they could rise above their
mutual opposition, and feel that in their fanaticism they were taking
too contracted a view of their own souls and were hardly doing justice
to themselves when they did such great injustice to others.

[Sidenote: The Greek ideal.]

How prerational morality may approach the goal, and miss it, is well
illustrated in the history of Hellenism. Greek morals may be said to
have been inspired by two prerational sentiments, a naturalistic
religion and a local patriotism. Could Plato have succeeded in making
that religion moral, or Alexander in universalising that patriotism,
perhaps Greece might have been saved and we might all be now at a very
different level of civilisation. Both Plato and Alexander failed, in
spite of the immense and lasting influence of their work; for in both
cases the after-effects were spurious, and the new spirit was smothered
in the dull substances it strove to vivify.

Greek myth was an exuberant assertion of the rights of life in the
universe. Existence could not but be joyful and immortal, if it had
once found, in land, sea, or air, a form congruous with that element.
Such congruity would render a being stable, efficient, beautiful. He
would achieve a perfection grounded in skilful practice and in a
thorough rejection of whatever was irrelevant. These things the Greeks
called virtue. The gods were perfect models of this kind of excellence;
for of course the amours of Zeus and Hermes’ trickery were, in their
hearty fashion, splendid manifestations of energy. This natural divine
virtue carried no sense of responsibility with it, but it could not fail
to diffuse benefit because it radiated happiness and beauty. The
worshipper, by invoking those braver inhabitants of the cosmos, felt he
might more easily attain a corresponding beauty and happiness in his
paternal city.

[Sidenote: Imaginative exuberance and political discipline.]

The source of myth had been a genial sympathy with nature. The observer,
at ease himself, multiplied ideally the potentialities of his being; but
he went farther in imagining what life might yield abroad, freed from
every trammel and necessity, than in deepening his sense of what life
was in himself, and of what it ought to be. This moral reflection,
absent from mythology, was supplied by politics. The family and the
state had a soberer antique religion of their own; this hereditary
piety, together with the laws, prescribed education, customs, and
duties. The city drew its walls close about the heart, and while it
fostered friendship and reason within, without it looked to little but
war. A splendid physical and moral discipline was established to serve a
suicidal egoism. The city committed its crimes, and the individual
indulged his vices of conduct and estimation, hardly rebuked by
philosophy and quite unrebuked by religion. Nevertheless, religion and
philosophy existed, together with an incomparable literature and art,
and an unrivalled measure and simplicity in living. A liberal fancy and
a strict civic regimen, starting with different partial motives and
blind purposes, combined by good fortune into an almost rational life.

It was inevitable, however, when only an irrational tradition supported
the state, and kept it so weak amid a world of enemies, that this state
should succumb; not to speak of the mean animosities, the license in
life, and the spirit of mockery that inwardly infested it. The myths,
too, faded; they had expressed a fleeting moment of poetic insight, as
patriotism had expressed a fleeting moment of unanimous effort; but what
force could sustain such accidental harmonies? The patriotism soon lost
its power to inspire sacrifice, and the myth its power to inspire
wonder; so that the relics of that singular civilisation were scattered
almost at once in the general flood of the world.

[Sidenote: Sterility of Greek example.]

The Greek ideal has fascinated many men in all ages, who have sometimes
been in a position to set a fashion, so that the world in general has
pretended also to admire. But the truth is Hellas, in leaving so many
heirlooms to mankind, has left no constitutional benefit; it has taught
the conscience no lesson. We possess a great heritage from Greece, but
it is no natural endowment. An artistic renaissance in the fifteenth
century and a historical one in the nineteenth have only affected the
trappings of society. The movement has come from above. It has not found
any response in the people. While Greek morality, in its contents or in
the type of life it prescribes, comes nearer than any other prerational
experiment to what reason might propose, yet it has been less useful
than many other influences in bringing the Life of Reason about. The
Christian and the Moslem, in refining their more violent inspiration,
have brought us nearer to genuine goodness than the Greek could by his
idle example. Classic perfection is a seedless flower, imitable only by
artifice, not reproducible by generation. It is capable of influencing
character only through the intellect, the means by which character can
be influenced least. It is a detached ideal, responding to no crying and
actual demand in the world at large. It never passed, to win the right
of addressing mankind, through a sufficient novitiate of sorrow.

[Sidenote: Prerational morality among the Jews.]

The Hebrews, on the contrary, who in comparison with the Greeks had a
barbarous idea of happiness, showed far greater moral cohesion under
the pressure of adversity. They integrated their purposes into a
fanaticism, but they integrated them; and the integrity that resulted
became a mighty example. It constituted an ideal of character not the
less awe-inspiring for being merely formal. We need not marvel that
abstract commandments should have impressed the world more than concrete
ideals. To appreciate an ideal, to love and serve it in the full light
of science and reason, would require a high intelligence, and, what is
rarer still, noble affinities and renunciations which are not to be
looked for in an undisciplined people. But to feel the truth and
authority of an abstract maxim (as, for instance, Do right and shame the
devil), a maxim applicable to experience on any plane, nothing is needed
but a sound wit and common honesty. Men know better what is right and
wrong than what is ultimately good or evil; their conscience is more
vividly present to them than the fruits which obedience to conscience
might bear; so that the logical relation of means to ends, of methods to
activities, eludes them altogether. What is a necessary connection
between the given end, happiness, and the normal life naturally
possessing it, appears to them as a miraculous connection between
obedience to God’s commands and enjoyment of his favour. The evidence of
this miracle astonishes them and fills them with zeal. They are
strengthened to persevere in righteousness under any stress of
misfortune, in the assurance that they are being put to a temporary test
and that the reward promised to virtue will eventually be theirs.

[Sidenote: The development of conscience.]

Thus a habit of faithfulness, a trust in general principles, is fostered
and ingrained in generation after generation—a rare and precious
heritage for a race so imperfectly rational as the human. Reason would
of course justify the same constancy in well-doing, since a course of
conduct would not be right, but wrong, if its ultimate issue were human
misery. But as the happiness secured by virtue may be remote and may
demand more virtue to make it appreciable, the mere rationality of a
habit gives it no currency in the world and but little moral glow in the
conscience. We should not, therefore, be too much offended at the
illusions which play a part in moral integration. Imagination is often
more efficacious in reaching the gist and meaning of experience than
intelligence can be, just because imagination is less scrupulous and
more instinctive. Even physical discoveries, when they come, are the
fruit of divination, and Columbus had to believe he might sail westward
to India before he could actually hit upon America. Reason cannot create
itself, and nature, in producing reason, has to feel her way
experimentally. Habits and chance systems of education have to arise
first and exercise upon individuals an irrational suasion favourable to
rational ends. Men long live in substantial harmony with reality before
they recognise its nature. Organs long exist before they reach their
perfect function. The fortunate instincts of a race destined to long
life and rationality express themselves in significant poetry before
they express themselves in science.

The service which Hebraism has rendered to mankind has been
instrumental, as that rendered by Hellenism has been imaginative.
Hebraism has put earnestness and urgency into morality, making it a
matter of duty, at once private and universal, rather than what paganism
had left it, a mass of local allegiances and legal practices. The Jewish
system has, in consequence, a tendency to propaganda and intolerance; a
tendency which would not have proved nefarious had this religion always
remained true to its moral principle; for morality is coercive and no
man, being autonomous, has a right to do wrong. Conscience, thus
reinforced by religious passion, has been able to focus a general
abhorrence on certain great scandals—slavery and sodomy could be
practically suppressed among Christians, and drunkenness among Moslems.
The Christian principle of charity also owed a part of its force to
Hebraic tradition. For the law and the prophets were full of mercy and
loving kindness toward the faithful. What Moses had taught his people
Christ and his Hellenising disciples had the beautiful courage to preach
to all mankind. Yet this virtue of charity, on its subtler and more
metaphysical side, belongs to the spirit of redemption, to that ascetic
and quasi-Buddhistic element in Christianity to which we shall presently
revert. The pure Jews can have no part in such insight, because it
contradicts the positivism of their religion and character and their
ideal of worldly happiness.

[Sidenote: Need of Hebraic devotion to Greek aims.]

As the human body is said to change all its substance every seven years,
and yet is the same body, so the Hebraic conscience might change all its
tenets in seven generations and be the same conscience still. Could this
abstract moral habit, this transferable earnestness, be enlisted in
rational causes, the Life of Reason would have gained a valuable
instrument. Men would possess the “single eye,” and the art, so
difficult to an ape-like creature with loose moral feelings, of acting
on principle. Could the vision of an adequate natural ideal fall into
the Hebraising mind, already aching for action and nerved to practical
enthusiasm, that ideal vision might become efficacious and be largely
realised in practice. The abstract power of self-direction, if
enlightened by a larger experience and a more fertile genius, might give
the Life of Reason a public embodiment such as it has not had since the
best days of classic antiquity. Thus the two prerational moralities out
of which European civilisation has grown, could they be happily
superposed, would make a rational polity.

[Sidenote: Prerational morality marks an acquisition but offers no
programme.]

The objects of human desire, then, until reason has compared and
experience has tested them, are a miscellaneous assortment of goods,
unstable in themselves and incompatible with one another. It is a happy
chance if a tolerable mixture of them recommends itself to a prophet or
finds an adventitious acceptance among a group of men. Intuitive morality
is adequate while it simply enforces those obvious and universal laws
which are indispensable to any society, and which impose themselves
everywhere on men under pain of quick extinction—a penalty which many
an individual and many a nation continually prefers to pay. But when
intuitive morality ventures upon speculative ground and tries to guide
progress, its magic fails. Ideals are tentative and have to be
critically viewed. A moralist who rests in his intuitions may be a good
preacher, but hardly deserves the name of philosopher. He cannot find
any authority for his maxims which opposite maxims may not equally
invoke. To settle the relative merits of rival authorities and of
hostile consciences it is necessary to appeal to the only real
authority, to experience, reason, and human nature in the living man. No
other test is conceivable and no other would be valid; for no good man
would ever consent to regard an authority as divine or binding which
essentially contradicted his own conscience. Yet a conscience which is
irreflective and incorrigible is too hastily satisfied with itself, and
not conscientious enough: it needs cultivation by dialectic. It neglects
to extend to all human interests that principle of synthesis and justice
by which conscience itself has arisen. And so soon as the conscience
summons its own dicta for revision in the light of experience and of
universal sympathy, it is no longer called conscience, but reason. So,
too, when the spirit summons its traditional faiths, to subject them to
a similar examination, that exercise is not called religion, but
philosophy. It is true, in a sense, that philosophy is the purest
religion and reason the ultimate conscience; but so to name them would
be misleading. The things commonly called by those names have seldom
consented to live at peace with sincere reflection. It has been felt
vaguely that reason could not have produced them, and that they might
suffer sad changes by submitting to it; as if reason could be the
_ground_ of anything, or as if everything might not find its
consummation in becoming rational.




CHAPTER IX

RATIONAL ETHICS


[Sidenote: Moral passions represent private interests.]


In moral reprobation there is often a fanatical element, I mean that
hatred which an animal may sometimes feel for other animals on account
of their strange aspect, or because their habits put him to serious
inconvenience, or because these habits, if he himself adopted them,
might be vicious in him. Such aversion, however, is not a rational
sentiment. No fault can be justly found with a creature merely for not
resembling another, or for nourishing in a different physical or moral
environment. It has been an unfortunate consequence of mythical
philosophies that moral emotions have been stretched to objects with
which a man has only physical relations, so that the universe has been
filled with monsters more or less horrible, according as the forces they
represented were more or less formidable to human life. In the same
spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among
those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an
insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material
obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion,
however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough
not to be constituted like the average of his neighbours.

Ethics, if it is to be a science and not a piece of arbitrary
legislation, cannot pronounce it sinful in a serpent to be a serpent; it
cannot even accuse a barbarian of loving a wrong life, except in so far
as the barbarian is supposed capable of accusing himself of barbarism.
If he is a perfect barbarian he will be inwardly, and therefore morally,
justified. The notion of a barbarian will then be accepted by him as
that of a true man, and will form the basis of whatever rational
judgments or policy he attains. It may still seem dreadful to him to be
a serpent, as to be a barbarian might seem dreadful to a man imbued with
liberal interests. But the degree to which moral science, or the
dialectic of will, can condemn any type of life depends on the amount of
disruptive contradiction which, at any reflective moment, that life
brings under the unity of apperception. The discordant impulses therein
confronted will challenge and condemn one another; and the court of
reason in which their quarrel is ventilated will have authority to
pronounce between them.

The physical repulsion, however, which everybody feels to habits and
interests which he is incapable of sharing is no part of rational
estimation, large as its share may be in the fierce prejudices and
superstitions which prerational morality abounds in. The strongest
feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they
express merely physical antipathies.

Toward alien powers a man’s true weapon is not invective, but skill and
strength. An obstacle is an obstacle, not a devil; and even a moral
life, when it actually exists in a being with hostile activities, is
merely a hostile power. It is not hostile, however, in so far as it is
moral, but only in so far as its morality represents a material
organism, physically incompatible with what the thinker has at heart.

[Sidenote: Common ideal interests may supervene.]

Material conflicts cannot be abolished by reason, because reason is
powerful only where they have been removed. Yet where opposing forces
are able mutually to comprehend and respect one another, common ideal
interests at once supervene, and though the material conflict may remain
irrepressible, it will be overlaid by an intellectual life, partly
common and unanimous. In this lies the chivalry of war, that we
acknowledge the right of others to pursue ends contrary to our own.
Competitors who are able to feel this ideal comity, and who leading
different lives in the flesh lead the same life in imagination, are
incited by their mutual understanding to rise above that material
ambition, perhaps gratuitous, that has made them enemies. They may
ultimately wish to renounce that temporal good which deprives them of
spiritual goods in truth infinitely greater and more appealing to the
soul—innocence, justice, and intelligence. They may prefer an enlarged
mind to enlarged frontiers, and the comprehension of things foreign to
the destruction of them. They may even aspire to detachment from those
private interests which, as Plato said,[H] do not deserve to be taken
too seriously; the fact that we must take them seriously being the
ignoble part of our condition.

Of course such renunciations, to be rational, must not extend to the
whole material basis of life, since some physical particularity and
efficiency are requisite for bringing into being that very rationality
which is to turn enemies into friends. The need of a material basis for
spirit is what renders partial war with parts of the world the
inevitable background of charity and justice. The frontiers at which
this warfare is waged may, however, be pushed back indefinitely. Within
the sphere organised about a firm and generous life a Roman peace can be
established. It is not what is assimilated that saps a creative will,
but what remains outside that ultimately invades and disrupts it. In
exact proportion to its vigour, it wins over former enemies, civilises
the barbarian, and even tames the viper, when the eye is masterful and
sympathetic enough to dispel hatred and fear. The more rational an
institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others; for
these concessions, being just, propagate its essence. The ideal
commonwealth can extend to the limit at which such concessions cease to
be just and are thereby detrimental. Beyond or below that limit strife
must continue for physical ascendancy, so that the power and the will to
be reasonable may not be undermined. Reason is an operation in nature,
and has its root there. Saints cannot arise where there have been no
warriors, nor philosophers where a prying beast does not remain hidden
in the depths.

[Sidenote: To this extent there is rational society.]

Perhaps the art of politics, if it were practised scientifically, might
obviate open war, religious enmities, industrial competition, and human
slavery; but it would certainly not leave a free field for all animals
nor for all monstrosities in men. Even while admitting the claims of
monsters to be treated humanely, reason could not suffer them to absorb
those material resources which might be needed to maintain rational
society at its highest efficiency. We cannot, at this immense distance
from a rational social order, judge what concessions individual genius
would be called upon to make in a system of education and government in
which all attainable goods should be pursued scientifically. Concessions
would certainly be demanded, if not from well-trained wills, still from
inevitable instincts, reacting on inevitable accidents. There is tragedy
in perfection, because the universe in which perfection arises is
itself imperfect. Accidents will always continue to harass the most
consummate organism; they will flow in both from the outer world and
from the interstices, so to speak, of its own machinery; for a rational
life touches the irrational at its core as well as at its periphery. In
both directions it meets physical force and can subsist only by
exercising physical force in return. The range of rational ethics is
limited to the intermediate political zone, in which existences have
attained some degree of natural unanimity.

It should be added, perhaps, that the frontiers between moral and
physical action are purely notional. Real existences do not lie wholly
on one or the other side of them. Every man, every material object, has
moral affinities enveloping an indomitable vital nucleus or brute
personal kernel; this moral essence is enveloped in turn by untraceable
relations, radiating to infinity over the natural world. The stars enter
society by the light and knowledge they afford, the time they keep, and
the ornament they lavish; but they are mere dead weights in their
substance and cosmological puzzles in their destiny. You and I possess
manifold ideal bonds in the interests we share; but each of us has his
poor body and his irremediable, incommunicable dreams. Beyond the little
span of his foresight and love, each is merely a physical agency,
preparing the way quite irresponsibly for undreamt-of revolutions and
alien lives.

[Sidenote: A rational morality not attainable,]

A truly rational morality, or social regimen, has never existed in the
world and is hardly to be looked for. What guides men and nations in
their practice is always some partial interest or some partial
disillusion. A rational morality would imply perfect self-knowledge, so
that no congenial good should be needlessly missed—least of all
practical reason or justice itself; so that no good congenial to other
creatures would be needlessly taken from them. The total value which
everything had from the agent’s point of view would need to be
determined and felt efficaciously; and, among other things, the total
value which this point of view, with the conduct it justified, would
have for every foreign interest which it affected. Such knowledge, such
definition of purpose, and such perfection of sympathy are clearly
beyond man’s reach. All that can be hoped for is that the advance of
science and commerce, by fostering peace and a rational development of
character, may bring some part of mankind nearer to that goal; but the
goal lies, as every ultimate ideal should, at the limit of what is
possible, and must serve rather to measure achievements than to prophesy
them.

[Sidenote: but its principle clear.] In lieu of a rational morality,
however, we have rational ethics; and this mere idea of a rational
morality is something valuable. While we wait for the sentiments,
customs, and laws which should embody perfect humanity and perfect
justice, we may observe the germinal principle of these ideal things; we
may sketch the ground-plan of a true commonwealth. This sketch
constitutes rational ethics, as founded by Socrates, glorified by Plato,
and sobered and solidified by Aristotle. It sets forth the method of
judgment and estimation which a rational morality would apply
universally and express in practice. The method, being very simple, can
be discovered and largely illustrated in advance, while the complete
self-knowledge and sympathy are still wanting which might avail to
embody that method in the concrete and to discover unequivocally where
absolute duty and ultimate happiness may lie.

[Sidenote: It is the logic of an autonomous will.]

This method, the Socratic method, consists in accepting any estimation
which any man may sincerely make, and in applying dialectic to it, so as
to let the man see what he really esteems. What he really esteems is
what ought to guide his conduct; for to suggest that a rational being
ought to do what he feels to be wrong, or ought to pursue what he
genuinely thinks is worthless, would be to impugn that man’s rationality
and to discredit one’s own. With what face could any man or god say to
another: Your duty is to do what you cannot know you ought to do; your
function is to suffer what you cannot recognise to be worth suffering?
Such an attitude amounts to imposture and excludes society; it is the
attitude of a detestable tyrant, and any one who mistakes it for moral
authority has not yet felt the first heart-throb of philosophy.

[Sidenote: Socrates’ science.]

More even than natural philosophy, moral philosophy is something Greek:
it is the appanage of freemen. The Socratic method is the soul of
liberal conversation; it is compacted in equal measure of sincerity and
courtesy. Each man is autonomous and all are respected; and nothing is
brought forward except to be submitted to reason and accepted or
rejected by the self-questioning heart. Indeed, when Socrates appeared
in Athens mutual respect had passed into democracy and liberty into
license; but the stalwart virtue of Socrates saved him from being a
sophist, much as his method, when not honestly and sincerely used, might
seem to countenance that moral anarchy which the sophists had expressed
in their irresponsible doctrines. Their sophistry did not consist in the
private _seat_ which they assigned to judgment; for what judgment is
there that is not somebody’s judgment at some moment? The sophism
consisted in ignoring the living moment’s _intent_, and in suggesting
that no judgment could refer to anything ulterior, and therefore that no
judgment could be wrong: in other words that each man at each moment was
the theme and standard, as well as the seat, of his judgment.

Socrates escaped this folly by force of honesty, which is what saves
from folly in dialectic. He built his whole science precisely on that
intent which the sophists ignored; he insisted that people should
declare sincerely what they meant and what they wanted; and on that
living rock he founded the persuasive and ideal sciences of logic and
ethics, the necessity of which lies all in free insight and in actual
will. This will and insight they render deliberate, profound,
unshakable, and consistent. Socrates, by his genial midwifery, helped
men to discover the truth and excellence to which they were naturally
addressed. This circumstance rendered his doctrine at once moral and
scientific; scientific because dialectical, moral because expressive of
personal and living aspirations. His ethics was not like what has since
passed under that name—a spurious physics, accompanied by commandments
and threats. It was a pliant and liberal expression of ideals, inwardly
grounded and spontaneously pursued. It was an exercise in
self-knowledge.

[Sidenote: Its opposition to sophistry and moral anarchy.]

Socrates’ liberality was that of a free man ready to maintain his will
and conscience, if need be, against the whole world. The sophists, on
the contrary, were sycophants in their scepticism, and having inwardly
abandoned the ideals of their race and nation—which Socrates defended
with his homely irony—they dealt out their miscellaneous knowledge, or
their talent in exposition, at the beck and for the convenience of
others. Their theory was that each man having a right to pursue his own
aims, skilful thinkers might, for money, furnish any fellow-mortal with
instruments fitted to his purpose. Socrates, on the contrary, conceived
that each man, to achieve his aims must first learn to distinguish them
clearly; he demanded that rationality, in the form of an examination and
clarification of purposes, should precede any selection of external
instruments. For how should a man recognise anything useful unless he
first had established the end to be subserved and thereby recognised the
good? True science, then, was that which enabled a man to disentangle
and attain his natural good; and such a science is also the art of life
and the whole of virtue.

The autonomous moralist differs from the sophist or ethical sceptic in
this: that he retains his integrity. In vindicating his ideal he does
not recant his human nature. In asserting the initial right of every
impulse in others, he remains the spokesman of his own. Knowledge of the
world, courtesy, and fairness do not neutralise his positive life. He is
thoroughly sincere, as the sophist is not; for every man, while he
lives, embodies and enacts some special interest; and this truth, which
those who confound psychology with ethics may think destructive of all
authority in morals, is in fact what alone renders moral judgment
possible and respectable. If the sophist declares that what his nature
attaches him to is not “really” a good, because it would not be a good,
perhaps, for a different creature, he is a false interpreter of his own
heart, and rather discreditably stultifies his honest feelings and
actions by those theoretical valuations which, in guise of a mystical
ethics, he gives out to the world. Socratic liberality, on the contrary,
is consistent with itself, as Spinozistic naturalism is also; for it
exercises that right of private judgment which it concedes to others,
and avowedly builds up the idea of the good on that natural inner
foundation on which everybody who has it at all must inevitably build
it. This functional good is accordingly always relative and good for
something; it is the ideal which a vital and energising soul carries
with it as it moves. It is identical, as Socrates constantly taught,
with the useful, the helpful, the beneficent. It is the complement
needed to perfect every art and every activity after its own kind.

[Sidenote: Its vitality]

Rational ethics is an embodiment of volition, not a description of it.
It is the expression of living interest, preference, and categorical
choice. It leaves to psychology and history a free field for the
description of moral phenomena. It has no interest in slipping
far-fetched and incredible myths beneath the facts of nature, so as to
lend a non-natural origin to human aspirations. It even recognises, as
an emanation of its own force, that uncompromising truthfulness with
which science assigns all forms of moral life to their place in the
mechanical system of nature. But the rational moralist is not on that
account reduced to a mere spectator, a physicist acknowledging no
interest except the interest in facts and in the laws of change. His own
spirit, small by the material forces which it may stand for and express,
is great by its prerogative of surveying and judging the universe;
surveying it, of course, from a mortal point of view, and judging it
only by its kindliness or cruelty to some actual interest, yet, even so,
determining unequivocally a part of its constitution and excellence. The
rational moralist represents a force energising in the world,
discovering its affinities there and clinging to them to the exclusion
of their hateful opposites. He represents, over against the chance
facts, an ideal embodying the particular demands, possibilities, and
satisfactions of a specific being.

This dogmatic position of reason is not uncritically dogmatic; on the
contrary, it is the sophistical position that is uncritically neutral.
All criticism needs a dogmatic background, else it would lack objects
and criteria for criticism. The sophist himself, without confessing it,
enacts a special interest. He bubbles over with convictions about the
pathological and fatal origin of human beliefs, as if that could prevent
some of them from being more trustworthy and truer than others. He is
doubtless right in his psychology; his own ideas have their natural
causes and their chance of signifying something real. His scepticism
may represent a wider experience than do the fanaticisms it opposes. But
this sceptic also lives. Nature has sent her saps abundantly into him,
and he cannot but nod dogmatically on that philosophical tree on which
he is so pungent a berry. His imagination is unmistakably fascinated by
the pictures it happens to put together. His judgment falls unabashed,
and his discourse splashes on in its dialectical march, every
stepping-stone an unquestioned idea, every stride a categorical
assertion. Does he deny this? Then his very denial, in its promptness
and heat, audibly contradicts him and makes him ridiculous. Honest
criticism consists in being consciously dogmatic, and conscientiously
so, like Descartes when he said, “I am.” It is to sift and harmonise all
assertions so as to make them a faithful expression of actual experience
and inevitable thought.

[Sidenote: Genuine altruism is natural self-expression.]

Now will, no less than that reason which avails to render will
consistent and far-reaching, animates natural bodies and expresses their
functions. It has a radical bias, a foregone, determinate direction,
else it could not be a will nor a principle of preference. The knowledge
of what other people desire does not abolish a man’s own aims. Sympathy
and justice are simply an expansion of the soul’s interests, arising
when we consider other men’s lives so intently that something in us
imitates and re-enacts their experience, so that we move partly in
unison with their movement, recognise the reality and initial legitimacy
of their interests, and consequently regard their aims in our action, in
so far as our own status and purposes have become identical with theirs.
We are not less ourselves, nor less autonomous, for this assimilation,
since we assimilate only what is in itself intelligible and congruous
with our mind and obey only that authority which can impose itself on
our reason.

The case is parallel to that of knowledge. To know all men’s experience
and to comprehend their beliefs would constitute the most cogent and
settled of philosophies. Thought would then be reasonably adjusted to
all the facts of history, and judgment would grow more authoritative and
precise by virtue of that enlightenment. So, too, to understand all the
goods that any man, nay, that any beast or angel, may ever have pursued,
would leave man still necessitous of food, drink, sleep, and shelter; he
would still love; the comic, the loathsome, the beautiful would still
affect him with unmistakable direct emotions. His taste might no doubt
gain in elasticity by those sympathetic excursions into the polyglot
world; the plastic or dramatic quality which had enabled him to feel
other creatures’ joys would grow by exercise and new overtones would be
added to his gamut. But the foundations of his nature would stand; and
his possible happiness, though some new and precious threads might be
woven into it, would not have a texture fundamentally different.

The radical impulses at work in any animal must continue to speak while
he lives, for they are his essence. A true morality does not have to be
adopted; the parts of it best practised are those which are never
preached. To be “converted” would be to pass from one self-betrayal to
another. It would be to found a new morality on a new artifice. The
morality which has genuine authority exists inevitably and speaks
autonomously in every common judgment, self-congratulation, ambition, or
passion that fills the vulgar day. The pursuit of those goods which are
the only possible or fitting crown of a man’s life is predetermined by
his nature; he cannot choose a law-giver, nor accept one, for none who
spoke to the purpose could teach him anything but to know himself.
Rational life is an art, not a slavery; and terrible as may be the
errors and the apathy that impede its successful exercise, the standard
and goal of it are given intrinsically. Any task imposed externally on a
man is imposed by force only, a force he has the right to defy so soon
as he can do so without creating some greater impediment to his natural
vocation.

[Sidenote: Reason expresses impulses.]

Rational ethics, then, resembles prerational precepts and half-systems
in being founded on impulse. It formulates a natural morality. It is a
settled method of achieving ends to which man is drawn by virtue of his
physical and rational constitution. By this circumstance rational ethics
is removed from the bad company of all artificial, verbal, and unjust
systems of morality, which in absolving themselves from relevance to
man’s endowment and experience merely show how completely irrelevant
they are to life. Once, no doubt, each of these arbitrary systems
expressed (like the observance of the Sabbath) some practical interest
or some not unnatural rite; but so narrow a basis of course has to be
disowned when the precepts so originating have been swollen into
universal tyrannical laws. A rational ethics reduces them at once to
their slender representative rôle; and it surrounds and buttresses them
on every side with all other natural ideals.

[Sidenote: but impulses reduced to harmony.]

Rational ethics thus differs from the prerational in being complete.
There is one impulse which intuitive moralists ignore: the impulse to
reflect. Human instincts are ignorant, multitudinous, and contradictory.
To satisfy them as they come is often impossible, and often disastrous,
in that such satisfaction prevents the satisfaction of other instincts
inherently no less fecund and legitimate. When we apply reason to life
we immediately demand that life be consistent, complete, and
satisfactory when reflected upon and viewed as a whole. This view, as it
presents each moment in its relations, extends to all moments affected
by the action or maxim under discussion; it has no more ground for
stopping at the limits of what is called a single life than at the
limits of a single adventure. To stop at selfishness is not particularly
rational. The same principle that creates the ideal of a self creates
the ideal of a family or an institution.

[Sidenote: Self-love artificial.]

The conflict between selfishness and altruism is like that between any
two ideal passions that in some particular may chance to be opposed; but
such a conflict has no obstinate existence for reason. For reason the
person itself has no obstinate existence. The _character_ which a man
achieves at the best moment of his life is indeed something ideal and
significant; it justifies and consecrates all his coherent actions and
preferences. But _the man’s life_, the circle drawn by biographers
around the career of a particular body, from the womb to the
charnel-house, and around the mental flux that accompanies that career,
is no significant unity. All the substances and efficient processes that
figure within it come from elsewhere and continue beyond; while all the
rational objects and interests to which it refers have a trans-personal
status. Self-love itself is concerned with public opinion; and if a man
concentrates his view on private pleasures, these may qualify the
fleeting moments of his life with an intrinsic value, but they leave the
life itself shapeless and infinite, as if sparks should play over a
piece of burnt paper.

The limits assigned to the mass of sentience attributed to each man are
assigned conventionally; his prenatal feelings, his forgotten dreams,
and his unappropriated sensations belong to his body and for that reason
only are said to belong to him. Each impulse included within these
limits may be as directly compared with the represented impulses of
other people as with the represented impulses expected to arise later in
the same body. Reason lives among these represented values, all of which
have their cerebral seat and present efficacy over the passing thought;
and reason teaches this passing thought to believe in and to respect
them equally. Their right is not less clear, nor their influence less
natural, because they may range over the whole universe and may await
their realisation at the farthest boundaries of time. All that is
physically requisite to their operation is that they should be vividly
represented; while all that is requisite rationally, to justify them in
qualifying actual life by their influence, is that the present act
should have some tendency to bring the represented values about. In
other words, a rational mind would consider, in its judgment and action,
every interest which that judgment or action at all affected; and it
would conspire with each represented good in proportion, not to that
good’s intrinsic importance, but to the power which the present act
might have of helping to realise that good.

[Sidenote: The sanction of reason is happiness.]

If pleasure, because it is commonly a result of satisfied instinct, may
by a figure of speech be called the aim of impulse, happiness, by a like
figure, may be called the aim of reason. The direct aim of reason is
harmony; yet harmony, when made to rule in life, gives reason a noble
satisfaction which we call happiness. Happiness is impossible and even
inconceivable to a mind without scope and without pause, a mind driven
by craving, pleasure, and fear. The moralists who speak disparagingly of
happiness are less sublime than they think. In truth their philosophy is
too lightly ballasted, too much fed on prejudice and quibbles, for
happiness to fall within its range. Happiness implies resource and
security; it can be achieved only by discipline. Your intuitive moralist
rejects discipline, at least discipline of the conscience; and he is
punished by having no lien on wisdom. He trusts to the clash of blind
forces in collision, being one of them himself. He demands that virtue
should be partisan and unjust; and he dreams of crushing the adversary
in some physical cataclysm.

Such groping enthusiasm is often innocent and romantic; it captivates us
with its youthful spell. But it has no structure with which to resist
the shocks of fortune, which it goes out so jauntily to meet. It turns
only too often into vulgarity and worldliness. A snow-flake is soon a
smudge, and there is a deeper purity in the diamond. Happiness is hidden
from a free and casual will; it belongs rather to one chastened by a
long education and unfolded in an atmosphere of sacred and perfected
institutions. It is discipline that renders men rational and capable of
happiness, by suppressing without hatred what needs to be suppressed to
attain a beautiful naturalness. Discipline discredits the random
pleasures of illusion, hope, and triumph, and substitutes those which
are self-reproductive, perennial, and serene, because they express an
equilibrium maintained with reality. So long as the result of endeavour
is partly unforeseen and unintentional, so long as the will is partly
blind, the Life of Reason is still swaddled in ignominy and the animal
barks in the midst of human discourse. Wisdom and happiness consist in
having recast natural energies in the furnace of experience. Nor is this
experience merely a repressive force. It enshrines the successful
expressions of spirit as well as the shocks and vetoes of circumstance;
it enables a man to know himself in knowing the world and to discover
his ideal by the very ring, true or false, of fortune’s coin.

[Sidenote: Moral science impeded by its chaotic data.]

With this brief account we may leave the subject of rational ethics. Its
development is impossible save in the concrete, when a legislator,
starting from extant interests, considers what practices serve to render
those interests vital and genuine, and what external alliances might
lend them support and a more glorious expression. The difficulty in
carrying rational policy very far comes partly from the refractory
materials at hand, and partly from the narrow range within which moral
science is usually confined. The materials are individual wills
naturally far from unanimous, lost for the most part in frivolous
pleasures, rivalries, and superstitions, and little inclined to listen
to a law-giver that, like a new Lycurgus, should speak to them of
unanimity, simplicity, discipline, and perfection. Devotion and
singlemindedness, perhaps possible in the cloister, are hard to
establish in the world; yet a rational morality requires that all lay
activities, all sweet temptations, should have their voice in the
conclave. Morality becomes rational precisely by refusing either to
accept human nature, as it sprouts, altogether without harmony, or to
mutilate it in the haste to make it harmonious. The condition,
therefore, of making a beginning in good politics is to find a set of
men with well-knit character and cogent traditions, so that there may be
a firm soil to cultivate and that labour may not be wasted in ploughing
the quicksands.

[Sidenote: and its unrecognised scope.]

When such a starting-point is given, moral values radiate from it to the
very ends of the universe; and a failure to appreciate the range over
which rational estimation spreads is a second obstacle to sound ethics.
Because of this failure the earnest soul is too often intent on escaping
to heaven, while the gross politician is suffered to declaim about the
national honour, and to promise this client an office, this district a
favour, and this class an iniquitous advantage. Politics is expected to
be sophistical; and in the soberest parliaments hardly an argument is
used or an ideal invoked which is not an insult to reason. Majorities
work by a system of bribes offered to the more barren interests of men
and to their more blatant prejudices. The higher direction of their
lives is relegated to religion, which, unhappily, is apt to suffer from
hereditary blindness to natural needs and to possible progress. The idea
that religion, as well as art, industry, nationality, and science,
should exist only for human life’s sake and in order that men may live
better in this world, is an idea not even mooted in politics and perhaps
opposed by an official philosophy. The enterprise of individuals or of
small aristocratic bodies has meantime sown the world which we call
civilised with some seeds and nuclei of order. There are scattered about
a variety of churches, industries, academies, and governments. But the
universal order once dreamt of and nominally almost established, the
empire of universal peace, all-permeating rational art, and
philosophical worship, is mentioned no more. An unformulated conception,
the prerational ethics of private privilege and national unity, fills
the background of men’s minds. It represents feudal traditions rather
than the tendency really involved in contemporary industry, science, or
philanthropy. Those dark ages, from which our political practice is
derived, had a political theory which we should do well to study; for
their theory about a universal empire and a catholic church was in turn
the echo of a former age of reason, when a few men conscious of ruling
the world had for a moment sought to survey it as a whole and to rule it
justly.

Modern rational ethics, however, or what approaches most nearly to such
a thing, has one advantage over the ancient and mediæval; it has
profited by Christian discipline and by the greater gentleness of modern
manners. It has recognised the rights of the dumb majority; it has
revolted against cruelty and preventable suffering and has bent itself
on diffusing well-being—the well-being that people want, and not the
so-called virtues which a supercilious aristocracy may find it
convenient to prescribe for them. It has based ethics on the foundation
on which actual morality rests; on nature, on the necessities of social
life, on the human instincts of sympathy and justice.

[Sidenote: Fallacy in democratic hedonism.]

It is all the more to be regretted that the only modern school of ethics
which is humane and honestly interested in progress should have given a
bad technical expression to its generous principles and should have
substituted a dubious psychology for Socratic dialectic. The mere fact
that somebody somewhere enjoys or dislikes a thing cannot give
direction to a rational will. That fact indicates a moral situation but
does not prescribe a definite action. A partial harmony or maladjustment
is thereby proved to exist, but the method is not revealed by which the
harmony should be sustained or the maladjustment removed. A given
harmony can be sustained by leaving things as they are or by changing
them together. A maladjustment can be removed by altering the
environment or by altering the man. Pleasures may be attached to
anything, and to pursue them in the abstract does not help to define any
particular line of conduct. The particular ideal pre-exists in the
observer; the mathematics of pleasure and pain cannot oblige him, for
instance, to prefer a hundred units of mindless pleasure enjoyed in
dreams to fifty units diffused over labour and discourse. He need not
limit his efforts to spreading needless comforts and silly pleasures
among the million; he need not accept for a goal a child’s caprices
multiplied by infinity. Even these caprices, pleasures, and comforts
doubtless have their claims; but these claims have to be adjudicated by
the agent’s autonomous conscience, and he will give them the place they
fill in his honest ideal of what it would be best to have in the world,
not the place which they might pretend to usurp there by a sort of
physical pressure. A conscience is a living function, expressing a
particular nature; it is not a passive medium where heterogeneous values
can find their balance by virtue of their dead weight and number.

A moralist is called upon, first of all, to decide in what things
pleasure ought to be found. Of course his decision, if he is rational,
will not be arbitrary; it will conscientiously express his own
nature—on which alone honest ideals can rest—without attempting to
speak for the deafening and inconstant convocation of the whole sentient
universe. Duty is a matter of self-knowledge, not of statistics. A
living and particular will therein discovers its affinities, broadens
its basis, acknowledges its obligations, and co-operates with everything
that will co-operate with it; but it continues throughout to unfold a
particular life, finding its supports and extensions in the state, the
arts, and the universe. It cannot for a moment renounce its autonomy
without renouncing reason and perhaps decreeing the extinction both of
its own bodily basis and of its ideal method and policy.

[Sidenote: Sympathy a conditional duty.]

Utilitarianism needs to be transferred to Socratic and dialectical
ground, so that interest in absent interests may take its place in a
concrete ideal. It is a noble thing to be sensitive to others’
hardships, and happy in their happiness; but it is noble because it
refines the natural will without enfeebling it, offering it rather a new
and congenial development, one entirely predetermined by the fundamental
structure of human nature. Were man not gregarious, were he not made to
be child, friend, husband, and father by turns, his morality would not
be social, but, like that of some silk-worm or some seraph, wholly
industrious or wholly contemplative. Parental and sexual instincts,
social life and the gift of co-operation carry sympathy implicitly with
them, as they carry the very faculty to recognise a fellow-being. To
make this sympathy explicit and to find one’s happiness in exercising it
is to lay one’s foundations deeper in nature and to expand the range of
one’s being. Its limits, however, would be broken down and moral
dissolution would set in if, forgetting his humanity, a man should bid
all living creatures lapse with him into a delicious torpor, or run into
a cycle of pleasant dreams, so intense that death would be sure to
precede any awakening out of them. Great as may be the advance in
charity since the days of Socrates, therefore, the advance is within the
lines of his method; to trespass beyond them would be to recede.

This situation is repeated on a broader stage. A statesman entrusted
with power should regard nothing but his country’s interests; to regard
anything else would be treason. He cannot allow foreign sentiment or
private hobbies to make him misapply the resources of his
fellow-countrymen to their own injury. But he may well have an
enlightened view of the interests which he serves; he might indeed be
expected to take a more profound and enlightened view of them than his
countrymen were commonly capable of, else he would have no right to his
eminent station. He should be the first to feel that to inflict injury
or foster hatred among other populations should not be a portion of a
people’s happiness. A nation, like a man, is something ideal.
Indestructible mountains and valleys, crawled over by any sort of race,
do not constitute its identity. Its essence is a certain spirit, and
only what enters into this spirit can bind it morally, or preserve it.

[Sidenote: All life, and hence right life, finite and particular.]

If a drop of water contains a million worlds which I, in swallowing, may
ruin or transform, that is Allah’s business; mine is to clarify my own
intent, to cling to what ideals may lie within the circle of my
experience and practical imagination, so that I may have a natural
ground for my loyalties, and may be constant in them. It would not be a
rational ambition to wish to multiply the population of China by two, or
that of America by twenty, after ascertaining that life there contained
an overplus of pleasure. To weed a garden, however, would be rational,
though the weeds and their interests would have to be sacrificed in the
process. Utilitarianism took up false ground when it made right conduct
terminate in miscellaneous pleasures and pains, as if in their isolation
they constituted all that morality had to consider, and as if respect
offered to them, somehow in proportion to their quantity, were the true
conscience. The true conscience is rather an integrated natural will,
chastened by clear knowledge of what it pursues and may attain. What
morality has to consider is the form of life, not its quantity. In a
world that is perhaps infinite, moral life can spring only from definite
centres and is neither called upon nor able to estimate the whole, nor
to redress its balance. It is the free spirit of a part, finding its
affinities and equilibrium in the material whole which it reacts on, and
which it is in that measure enabled to understand.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote H: Laws. VII. 803. B.]




CHAPTER X

POST-RATIONAL MORALITY


[Sidenote: Socratic ethics retrospective.]

When Socrates and his two great disciples composed a system of rational
ethics they were hardly proposing practical legislation for mankind. One
by his irony, another by his frank idealism, and the third by his
preponderating interest in history and analysis, showed clearly enough
how little they dared to hope. They were merely writing an eloquent
epitaph on their country. They were publishing the principles of what
had been its life, gathering piously its broken ideals, and interpreting
its momentary achievement. The spirit of liberty and co-operation was
already dead. The private citizen, debauched by the largesses and petty
quarrels of his city, had become indolent and mean-spirited. He had
begun to question the utility of religion, of patriotism, and of
justice. Having allowed the organ for the ideal to atrophy in his soul,
he could dream of finding some sullen sort of happiness in unreason. He
felt that the austere glories of his country, as a Spartan regimen might
have preserved them, would not benefit that baser part of him which
alone remained. Political virtue seemed a useless tax on his material
profit and freedom. The tedium and distrust proper to a disintegrated
society began to drive him to artificial excitements and superstitions.
Democracy had learned to regard as enemies the few in whom public
interest was still represented, the few whose nobler temper and
traditions still coincided with the general good. These last patriots
were gradually banished or exterminated, and with them died the spirit
that rational ethics had expressed. Philosophers were no longer suffered
to have illusions about the state. Human activity on the public stage
had shaken off all allegiance to art or reason.

[Sidenote: Rise of disillusioned moralities.]

The biographer of reason might well be tempted to ignore the subsequent
attitudes into which moral life fell in the West, since they all
embodied a more or less complete despair, and, having abandoned the
effort to express the will honestly and dialectically, they could
support no moral science. The point was merely to console or deceive the
soul with some substitute for happiness. Life is older and more
persistent than reason, and the failure of a first experiment in
rationality does not deprive mankind of that mental and moral vegetation
which they possessed for ages in a wild state before the advent of
civilisation. They merely revert to their uncivil condition and espouse
whatever imaginative ideal comes to hand, by which some semblance of
meaning and beauty may be given to existence without the labour of
building this meaning and beauty systematically out of its positive
elements.

Not to study these imaginative ideals, partial and arbitrary as they
are, would be to miss one of the most instructive points of view from
which the Life of Reason may be surveyed: the point of view of its
satirists. For moral ideals may follow upon philosophy, just as they may
precede it. When they follow, at least so long as they are consciously
embraced in view of reason’s failure, they have a quite particular
value. Aversion to rational ideals does not then come, as the
intuitionist’s aversion does, from moral incoherence or religious
prejudice. It does not come from lack of speculative power. On the
contrary, it may come from undue haste in speculation, from a too ready
apprehension of the visible march of things. The obvious irrationality
of nature as a whole, too painfully brought home to a musing mind, may
make it forget or abdicate its own rationality. In a decadent age, the
philosopher who surveys the world and sees that the end of it is even as
the beginning, may not feel that the intervening episode, in which he
and all he values after all figure, is worth consideration; and he may
cry, in his contemplative spleen, that _all_ is vanity.

If you should still confront him with a theory of the ideal, he would
not be reduced, like the pre-rational moralists in a similar case, to
mere inattention and bluster. If you told him that every art and every
activity involves a congruous good, and that the endeavour to realise
the ideal in every direction is an effort of which reason necessarily
approves, since reason is nothing but the method of that endeavour, he
would not need to deny your statements in order to justify himself. He
might admit the naturalness, the spontaneity, the ideal sufficiency of
your conceptions; but he might add, with the smile of the elder and the
sadder man, that he had experience of their futility. “You Hellenisers,”
he might say, “are but children; you have not pondered the little
history you know. If thought were conversant with reality, if virtue
were stable and fruitful, if pains and policy were ultimately justified
by a greater good arising out of them—then, indeed, a life according to
reason might tempt a philosopher. But unfortunately not one of those
fond assumptions is true. Human thought is a meaningless phantasmagoria.
Virtue is a splendid and laborious folly, when it is not a pompous
garment that only looks respectable in the dark, being in truth full of
spots and ridiculous patches. Men’s best laid plans become, in the
casual cross-currents of being, the occasion of their bitterest
calamities. How, then, live? How justify in our eyes, let us not say the
ways of God, but our own ways?”

[Sidenote: The illusion subsisting in them.]

Such a position may be turned dialectically by invoking whatever
positive hopes or convictions the critic may retain, who while he lives
cannot be wholly without them. But the position is specious and does not
collapse, like that of the intuitionist, at the first breath of
criticism. Pessimism, and all the moralities founded on despair, are not
pre-rational but post-rational. They are the work of men who more or
less explicitly have conceived the Life of Reason, tried it at least
imaginatively, and found it wanting. These systems are a refuge from an
intolerable situation: they are experiments in redemption. As a matter
of fact, animal instincts and natural standards of excellence are never
eluded in them, for no moral experience has other terms; but the part of
the natural ideal which remains active appears in opposition to all the
rest and, by an intelligible illusion, seems to be no part of that
natural ideal because, compared with the commoner passions on which it
reacts, it represents some simpler or more attenuated hope—the appeal
to some very humble or very much chastened satisfaction, or to an utter
change in the conditions of life.

Post-rational morality thus constitutes, in intention if not in fact, a
criticism of all experience. It thinks it is not, like pre-rational
morality, an arbitrary selection from among co-ordinate precepts. It is
an effort to subordinate all precepts to one, that points to some single
eventual good. For it occurs to the founders of these systems that by
estranging oneself from the world, or resting in the moment’s pleasure,
or mortifying the passions, or enduring all sufferings in patience, or
studying a perfect conformity with the course of affairs, one may gain
admission to some sort of residual mystical paradise; and this thought,
once conceived, is published as a revelation and accepted as a panacea.
It becomes in consequence (for such is the force of nature) the
foundation of elaborate institutions and elaborate philosophies, into
which the contents of the worldly life are gradually reintroduced.

When human life is in an acute crisis, the sick dreams that visit the
soul are the only evidence of her continued existence. Through them she
still envisages a good; and when the delirium passes and the normal
world gradually re-establishes itself in her regard, she attributes her
regeneration to the ministry of those phantoms, a regeneration due, in
truth, to the restored nutrition and circulation within her. In this way
post-rational systems, though founded originally on despair, in a later
age that has forgotten its disillusions may come to pose as the only
possible basis of morality. The philosophers addicted to each sect, and
brought up under its influence, may exhaust criticism and sophistry to
show that all faith and effort would be vain unless their particular
nostrum was accepted; and so a curious party philosophy arises in which,
after discrediting nature and reason in general, the sectary puts
forward some mythical echo of reason and nature as the one saving and
necessary truth. The positive substance of such a doctrine is
accordingly pre-rational and perhaps crudely superstitious; but it is
introduced and nominally supported by a formidable indictment of
physical and moral science, so that the wretched idol ultimately offered
to our worship acquires a spurious halo and an imputed majesty by being
raised on a pedestal of infinite despair.

[Sidenote: Epicurean refuge in pleasure.]

Socrates was still living when a school of post-rational morality arose
among the Sophists, which after passing quickly through various phases,
settled down into Epicureanism and has remained the source of a certain
consolation to mankind, which if somewhat cheap, is none the less
genuine. The pursuit of pleasure may seem simple selfishness, with a
tendency to debauchery; and in this case the pre-rational and
instinctive character of the maxim retained would be very obvious.
Pleasure, to be sure, is not the direct object of an unspoiled will; but
after some experience and discrimination, a man may actually guide
himself by a foretaste of the pleasures he has found in certain objects
and situations. The criticism required to distinguish what pays from
what does not pay may not often be carried very far; but it may
sometimes be carried to the length of suppressing every natural instinct
and natural hope, and of turning the philosopher, as it turned Hegesias
the Cyrenaic, into a eulogist of death.

The post-rational principle in the system then comes to the fore, and we
see clearly that to sit down and reflect upon human life, picking out
its pleasant moments and condemning all the rest, is to initiate a
course of moral retrenchment. It is to judge what is worth doing, not by
the innate ambition of the soul, but by experience of incidental
feelings, which to a mind without creative ideas may seem the only
objects worthy of pursuit. That life ought to be accompanied by pleasure
and exempt from pain is certain; for this means that what is agreeable
to the whole process of nature would have become agreeable also to the
various partial impulses involved—another way of describing organic
harmony and physical perfection. But such a desirable harmony cannot be
defined or obtained by picking out and isolating from the rest those
occasions and functions in which it may already have been reached. These
partial harmonies may be actual arrests or impediments in the whole
which is to be made harmonious; and even when they are innocent or
helpful they cannot serve to determine the form which the general
harmony might take on. They merely illustrate its principle. The
organism in which this principle of harmony might find pervasive
expression is still potential, and the ideal is something of which, in
its concrete form, no man has had experience. It involves a propitious
material environment, perfect health, perfect arts, perfect government,
a mind enlarged to the knowledge and enjoyment of all its external
conditions and internal functions. Such an ideal is lost sight of when a
man cultivates his garden-plot of private pleasures, leaving it to
chance and barbarian fury to govern the state and quicken the world’s
passions.

Even Aristippus, the first and most delightful of hedonists, who really
enjoyed the pleasures he advocated and was not afraid of the incidental
pains—even Aristippus betrayed the post-rational character of his
philosophy by abandoning politics, mocking science, making his peace
with all abuses that fostered his comfort, and venting his wit on all
ambitions that exceeded his hopes. A great temperament can carry off a
rough philosophy. Rebellion and license may distinguish honourable souls
in an age of polite corruption, and a grain of sincerity is better, in
moral philosophy, than a whole harvest of conventionalities. The
violence and shamelessness of Aristippus were corrected by Epicurus; and
a balance was found between utter despair and utter irresponsibility.
Epicureanism retrenched much: it cut off politics, religion, enterprise,
and passion. These things it convicted of vanity, without stopping to
distinguish in them what might be inordinate from what might be
rational. At the same time it retained friendship, freedom of soul, and
intellectual light. It cultivated unworldliness without superstition
and happiness without illusion. It was tender toward simple and honest
things, scornful and bitter only against pretence and usurpation. It
thus marked a first halting-place in the retreat of reason, a stage
where the soul had thrown off only the higher and more entangling part
of her burden and was willing to live, in somewhat reduced
circumstances, on the remainder. Such a philosophy expresses well the
genuine sentiment of persons, at once mild and emancipated, who find
themselves floating on the ebb-tide of some civilisation, and enjoying
its fruits, without any longer representing the forces that brought that
civilisation about.

[Sidenote: Stoic recourse to conformity.]

The same emancipation, without its mildness, appeared in the Cynics,
whose secret it was to throw off all allegiance and all dependence on
circumstance, and to live entirely on inner strength of mind, on pride
and inflexible humour. The renunciation was far more sweeping than that
of Epicurus, and indeed wellnigh complete; yet the Stoics, in
underpinning the Cynical self-sufficiency with a system of physics,
introduced into the life of the sect a contemplative element which very
much enlarged and ennobled its sympathies. Nature became a sacred
system, the laws of nature being eulogistically called rational laws,
and the necessity of things, because it might be foretold in auguries,
being called providence. There was some intellectual confusion in all
this; but contemplation, even if somewhat idolatrous, has a purifying
effect, and the sad and solemn review of the cosmos to which the Stoic
daily invited his soul, to make it ready to face its destiny, doubtless
liberated it from many an unworthy passion. The impressive spectacle of
things was used to remind the soul of her special and appropriate
function, which was to be rational. This rationality consisted partly in
insight, to perceive the necessary order of things, and partly in
conformity, to perceive that this order, whatever it might be, could
serve the soul to exercise itself upon, and to face with equanimity.

Despair, in this system, flooded a much larger area of human life;
everything, in fact, was surrendered except the will to endure whatever
might come. The concentration was much more marked, since only a formal
power of perception and defiance was retained and made the sphere of
moral life; this rational power, at least in theory, was the one peak
that remained visible above the deluge. But in practice much more was
retained. Some distinction was drawn, however unwarrantably, between
external calamities and human turpitude, so that absolute conformity and
acceptance might not be demanded by the latter; although the chief
occasion which a Stoic could find to practise fortitude and recognise
the omnipresence of law was in noting the universal corruption of the
state and divining its ruin. The obligation to conform to nature
(which, strictly speaking, could not be disregarded in any case) was
interpreted to signify that every one should perform the offices
conventionally attached to his station. In this way a perfunctory
citizenship and humanity were restored to the philosopher. But the
restored life was merely histrionic: the Stoic was a recluse parading
the market-place and a monk disguised in armour. His interest and faith
were centred altogether on his private spiritual condition. He
cultivated the society of those persons who, he thought, might teach him
some virtue. He attended to the affairs of state so as to exercise his
patience. He might even lead an army to battle, if he wished to test his
endurance and make sure that philosophy had rendered him indifferent to
the issue.

[Sidenote: Conformity the core of Islam.]

The strain and artifice of such a discipline, with merely formal goals
and no hope on earth or in heaven, could not long maintain itself; and
doubtless it existed, at a particular juncture, only in a few souls.
Resignation to the will of God, says Bishop Butler, is _the whole of
piety_; yet mere resignation would make a sorry religion and the
negation of all morality, unless the will of God was understood to be
quite different from his operation in nature. To turn Stoicism into a
workable religion we need to qualify it with some pre-rational maxims.
Islam, for instance, which boasts that in its essence it is nothing but
the primitive and natural religion of mankind, consists in abandoning
oneself to the will of God or, in other words, in accepting the
inevitable. This will of God is learned for the most part by observing
the course of nature and history, and remembering the fate meted out
habitually to various sorts of men. Were this all, Islam would be a pure
Stoicism, and Hebraic religion, in its ultimate phase, would be simply
the eloquence of physics. It would not, in that case, be a moral
inspiration at all, except as contemplation and the sense of one’s
nothingness might occasionally silence the passions and for a moment
bewilder the mind. On recovering from this impression, however, men
would find themselves enriched with no self-knowledge, armed with no
precepts, and stimulated by no ideal. They would be reduced to enacting
their incidental impulses, as the animals are, quite as if they had
never perceived that in doing so they were fulfilling a divine decree.
Enlightened Moslems, accordingly, have often been more Epicurean than
Stoical; and if they have felt themselves (not without some reason)
superior to Christians in delicacy, in _savoir vivre_, in kinship with
all natural powers, this sense of superiority has been quite
rationalistic and purely human. Their religion contributed to it only
because it was simpler, freer from superstition, nearer to a clean and
pleasant regimen in life. Resignation to the will of God being granted,
expression of the will of man might more freely begin.

[Sidenote: enveloped in arbitrary doctrines.]

What made Islam, however, a positive and contagious novelty was the
assumption that God’s will might be incidentally revealed to prophets
before the event, so that past experience was not the only source from
which its total operation might be gathered. In its opposition to
grosser idolatries Islam might appeal to experience and challenge those
who trusted in special deities to justify their worship in face of the
facts. The most decisive facts against idolaters, however, were not yet
patent, but were destined to burst upon mankind at the last day—and
most unpleasantly for the majority. Where Mohammed speaks in the name of
the universal natural power he is abundantly scornful toward that fond
paganism which consists in imagining distinct patrons for various
regions of nature or for sundry human activities. In turning to such
patrons the pagan regards something purely ideal or, as the Koran
shrewdly observes, worships his own passions. Allah, on the contrary, is
overwhelmingly external and as far as possible from being ideal. He is
indeed the giver of all good things, as of all evil, and while his
mercies are celebrated on every page of the Koran, these mercies consist
in the indulgence he is expected to show to his favourites, and the
exceeding reward reserved for them after their earthly trials. Allah’s
mercy does not exclude all those senseless and unredeemed cruelties of
which nature is daily guilty; nay, it shines all the more conspicuously
by contrast with his essential irresponsibility and wanton wrath, a part
of his express purpose being to keep hell full of men and demons.

The tendency toward enlightenment which Islam represents, and the limits
of that enlightenment, may be illustrated by the precept about unclean
animals. Allah, we are told, being merciful and gracious, made the world
for man’s use, with all the animals in it. We may therefore justly
slaughter and devour them, in so far as comports with health; but, of
course, we may not eat animals that have died a natural death, nor those
offered in sacrifice to false gods, nor swine; for to do so would be an
abomination.

[Sidenote: The latter alone lend it practical force.]

Unfortunately religious reformers triumph not so much by their rational
insight as by their halting, traditional maxims. Mohammed felt the unity
of God like a philosopher; but people listened to him because he
preached it like a sectary. God, as he often reminds us, did not make
the world for a plaything; he made it in order to establish distinctions
and separate by an immense interval the fate of those who conform to the
truth from the fate of those who ignore it. Human life is indeed beset
with enough imminent evils to justify this urgent tone in the Semitic
moralist and to lend his precepts a stern practical ring, absent from
merely Platonic idealisms. But this stringency, which is called
positivism when the conditions of welfare are understood, becomes
fanaticism when they are misrepresented. Had Mohammed spoken only of the
dynamic unity in things, the omnipresence of destiny, and the actual
conditions of success and failure in the world, he would not have been
called a prophet or have had more than a dozen intelligent followers,
scattered over as many centuries; but the weakness of his intellect, and
his ignorance of nature, made the success of his mission. It is easier
to kindle righteous indignation against abuses when, by abating them, we
further our personal interests; and Mohammed might have been less
zealous in denouncing false gods had his own God been altogether the
true one. But, in the heat of his militancy, he descends so far as to
speak of _God’s interests_ which the faithful embrace, and of fighting
in _God’s cause_. By these notions, so crudely pre-rational, we are
allowed to interpret and discount the pantheistic sublimities with which
in most places we are regaled; and in order that a morality, too weak to
be human, may not wither altogether in the fierce light of the Absolute,
we are led to humanise the Absolute into a finite force, needing our
support against independent enemies. So complete is the bankruptcy of
that Stoic morality which thinks to live on the worship of That which
Is.

[Sidenote: Moral ambiguity in pantheism.]

As extremes are said to meet, so we may say that a radical position is
often the point of departure for opposite systems. Pantheism, or
religion and morality abdicating in favour of physics, may, in practice,
be interpreted in contrary ways. To be in sympathy with the Whole may
seem to require us to outgrow and discard every part; yet, on the other
hand, there is no obvious reason why Being should love its essence in a
fashion that involves hating every possible form of Being. The
worshipper of Being accordingly assumes now one, now the other, of two
opposite attitudes, according as the society in which he lives is in a
prerational or a post-rational state of culture. Pantheism is
interpreted pre-rationally, as by the early Mohammedans, or by the
Hegelians, when people are not yet acquainted, or not yet disgusted,
with worldliness; the Absolute then seems to lend a mystical sanction to
whatever existences or tendencies happen to be afoot. Morality is
reduced to sanctioning reigning conventions, or reigning passions, on
the authority of the universe. Thus the Moslems, by way of serving
Allah, could extend their conquests and cultivate the arts and pleasures
congenial to a self-sufficing soul, at once indolent and fierce; while
the transcendentalists of our times, by way of accepting their part in
the divine business, have merely added a certain speculative loftiness
to the maxims of some sect or the chauvinism of some nation.

[Sidenote: Under stress, it becomes ascetic and requires a mythology.]

To accept everything, however, is not an easy nor a tolerable thing,
unless you are naturally well pleased with what falls to your share.
However the Absolute may feel, a moral creature has to hate some forms
of being; and if the age has thrust these forms before a man’s eyes, and
imposed them upon him, not being suffered by his pantheism to blame the
Absolute he will (by an inconsistency) take to blaming himself. It will
be his finitude, his inordinate claims, his enormous effrontery in
having any will or any preference in particular, that will seem to him
the source of all evil and the single blot on the infinite lucidity of
things. Pantheism, under these circumstances, will issue in a
post-rational morality. It will practise asceticism and look for a
mystical deliverance from finite existence.

Under these circumstances myth is inevitably reintroduced. Without it,
no consolation could be found except in the prospect of death and,
awaiting that, in incidental natural satisfactions; whereby absorption
in the Absolute might come to look not only impossible but distinctly
undesirable. To make retreat out of human nature seem a possible
vocation, this nature itself must, in some myth, be represented as
unnatural; the soul that this life stifles must be said to come from
elsewhere and to be fitted to breathe some element far rarer and finer
than this sublunary fog.

[Sidenote: A supernatural world made by the Platonist out of dialectic.]

A curious foothold for such a myth was furnished by the Socratic
philosophy. Plato, wafted by his poetic vision too far, perhaps, from
the utilitarianism of his master, had eulogised concretions in discourse
at the expense of existences and had even played with cosmological
myths, meant to express the values of things, by speaking as if these
values had brought things into being. The dialectical terms thus
contrasted with natural objects, and pictured as natural powers,
furnished the dogmas needed at this juncture by a post-rational
religion. The spell which dialectic can exercise over an abstracted mind
is itself great; and it may grow into a sacred influence and a positive
revelation when it offers a sanctuary from a weary life in the world.
Out of the play of notions carried on in a prayerful dream wonderful
mysteries can be constructed, to be presently announced to the people
and made the core of sacramental injunctions. When the tide of vulgar
superstition is at the flood and every form of quackery is welcome, we
need not wonder that a theosophy having so respectable a
core—something, indeed, like a true logic misunderstood—should gain
many adherents. Out of the names of things and of virtues a mystic
ladder could be constructed by which to leave the things and the virtues
themselves behind; but the sagacity and exigencies of the school would
not fail to arrange the steps in this progress—the end of which was
unattainable except, perhaps, in a momentary ecstasy—so that the
obvious duties of men would continue, for the nonce, to be imposed upon
them. The chief difference made in morals would be only this: that the
positive occasions and sanctions of good conduct would no longer be
mentioned with respect, but the imagination would be invited to dwell
instead on mystical issues.

[Sidenote: The Herbraic cry for redemption.]

Neo-Platonic morality, through a thousand learned and vulgar channels,
permeated Christianity and entirely transformed it. Original
Christianity was, though in another sense, a religion of redemption. The
Jews, without dreaming of original sin or of any inherent curse in being
finite, had found themselves often in the sorest material straits. They
hoped, like all primitive peoples, that relief might come by
propitiating the deity. They knew that the sins of the fathers were
visited upon the children even to the third and fourth generation. They
had accepted this idea of joint responsibility and vicarious atonement,
turning in their unphilosophical way this law of nature into a principle
of justice. Meantime the failure of all their cherished ambitions had
plunged them into a penitential mood. Though in fact pious and virtuous
to a fault, they still looked for repentance—their own or the
world’s—to save them. This redemption was to be accomplished in the
Hebrew spirit, through long-suffering and devotion to the Law, with the
Hebrew solidarity, by vicarious attribution of merits and demerits
within the household of the faith.

Such a way of conceiving redemption was far more dramatic, poignant, and
individual than the Neo-Platonic; hence it was far more popular and
better fitted to be a nucleus for religious devotion. However much,
therefore, Christianity may have insisted on renouncing the world, the
flesh, and the devil, it always kept in the background this perfectly
Jewish and pre-rational craving for a delectable promised land. The
journey might be long and through a desert, but milk and honey were to
flow in the oasis beyond. Had renunciation been fundamental or revulsion
from nature complete, there would have been no much-trumpeted last
judgment and no material kingdom of heaven. The renunciation was only
temporary and partial; the revulsion was only against incidental evils.
Despair touched nothing but the present order of the world, though at
first it took the extreme form of calling for its immediate destruction.
This was the sort of despair and renunciation that lay at the bottom of
Christian repentance; while hope in a new order of this world, or of one
very like it, lay at the bottom of Christian joy. A temporary sacrifice,
it was thought, and a partial mutilation would bring the spirit
miraculously into a fresh paradise. The pleasures nature had grudged or
punished, grace was to offer as a reward for faith and patience. The
earthly life which was vain as an experience was to be profitable as a
trial. Normal experience, appropriate exercise for the spirit, would
thereafter begin.

[Sidenote: The two factors meet in Christianity.]

Christianity is thus a system of postponed rationalism, a rationalism
intercepted by a supernatural version of the conditions of happiness.
Its moral principle is reason—the only moral principle there is; its
motive power is the impulse and natural hope to be and to be happy.
Christianity merely renews and reinstates these universal principles
after a first disappointment and a first assault of despair, by opening
up new vistas of accomplishment, new qualities and measures of success.
The Christian field of action being a world of grace enveloping the
world of nature, many transitory reversals of acknowledged values may
take place in its code. Poverty, chastity, humility, obedience,
self-sacrifice, ignorance, sickness, and dirt may all acquire a
religious worth which reason, in its direct application, might scarcely
have found in them; yet these reversed appreciations are merely
incidental to a secret rationality, and are justified on the ground that
human nature, as now found, is corrupt and needs to be purged and
transformed before it can safely manifest its congenital instincts and
become again an authoritative criterion of values. In the kingdom of God
men would no longer need to do penance, for life there would be truly
natural and there the soul would be at last in her native sphere.

This submerged optimism exists in Christianity, being a heritage from
the Jews; and those Protestant communities that have rejected the pagan
and Platonic elements that overlaid it have little difficulty in
restoring it to prominence. Not, however, without abandoning the soul of
the gospel; for the soul of the gospel, though expressed in the language
of Messianic hopes, is really post-rational. It was not to marry and be
given in marriage, or to sit on thrones, or to unravel metaphysical
mysteries, or to enjoy any of the natural delights renounced in this
life, that Christ summoned his disciples to abandon all they had and to
follow him. There was surely a deeper peace in his self-surrender. It
was not a new thing even among the Jews to use the worldly promises of
their exoteric religion as symbols for inner spiritual revolutions; and
the change of heart involved in genuine Christianity was not a fresh
excitation of gaudy hopes, nor a new sort of utilitarian, temporary
austerity. It was an emptying of the will, in respect to all human
desires, so that a perfect charity and contemplative justice, falling
like the Father’s gifts ungrudgingly on the whole creation, might take
the place of ambition, petty morality, and earthly desires. It was a
renunciation which, at least in Christ himself and in his more spiritual
disciples, did not spring from disappointed illusion or lead to other
unregenerate illusions even more sure to be dispelled by events. It
sprang rather from a native speculative depth, a natural affinity to
the divine fecundity, serenity, and sadness of the world. It was the
spirit of prayer, the kindliness and insight which a pure soul can fetch
from contemplation.

[Sidenote: Consequent eclecticism.]

This mystical detachment, supervening on the dogged old Jewish optimism,
gave Christianity a double aspect, and had some curious consequence in
later times. Those who were inwardly convinced—as most religious minds
were under the Roman Empire—that all earthly things were vanity, and
that they plunged the soul into an abyss of nothingness if not of
torment, could, in view of brighter possibilities in another world,
carry their asceticism and their cult of suffering farther than a purely
negative system, like the Buddhistic, would have allowed. For a
discipline that is looked upon as merely temporary can contradict nature
more boldly than one intended to take nature’s place. The hope of
unimaginable benefits to ensue could drive religion to greater frenzies
than it could have fallen into if its object had been merely to silence
the will. Christianity persecuted, tortured, and burned. Like a hound it
tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars, and nursed furious
hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified, quite like Mohammedanism,
extermination and tyranny. All this would have been impossible if, like
Buddhism, it had looked only to peace and the liberation of souls. It
looked beyond; it dreamt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be
crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God. These
were rival baits to those which the world fishes with, and were snapped
at, when seen, with no less avidity. Man, far from being freed from his
natural passions, was plunged into artificial ones quite as violent and
much more disappointing. Buddhism had tried to quiet a sick world with
anæsthetics; Christianity sought to purge it with fire.

Another consequence of combining, in the Christian life, post-rational
with pre-rational motives, a sense of exile and renunciation with hopes
of a promised land, was that esoteric piety could choose between the two
factors, even while it gave a verbal assent to the dogmas that included
both. Mystics honoured the post-rational motive and despised the
pre-rational; positivists clung to the second and hated the first. To
the spiritually minded, whose religion was founded on actual insight and
disillusion, the joys of heaven could never be more than a symbol for
the intrinsic worth of sanctity. To the worldling those heavenly joys
were nothing but a continuation of the pleasures and excitements of this
life, serving to choke any reflections which, in spite of himself, might
occasionally visit him about the vanity of human wishes. So that
Christianity, even in its orthodox forms, covers various kinds of
morality, and its philosophical incoherence betrays itself in disruptive
movements, profound schisms, and total alienation on the part of one
Christian from the inward faith of another. Trappist or Calvinist may be
practising a heroic and metaphysical self-surrender while the
busy-bodies of their respective creeds are fostering, in God’s name, all
their hot and miscellaneous passions.

[Sidenote: The negation of naturalism never complete.]

This contradiction, present in the overt morality of Christendom, cannot
be avoided, however, by taking refuge again in pure asceticism. Every
post-rational system is necessarily self-contradictory. Its despair
cannot be universal nor its nihilism complete so long as it remains a
coherent method of action, with particular goals and a steady faith that
their attainment is possible. The renunciation of the will must stop at
the point where the will to be saved makes its appearance: and as this
desire may be no less troublesome and insistent than any other, as it
may even become a tormenting obsession, the mystic is far from the end
of his illusions when he sets about to dispel them. There is one
rational method to which, in post-rational systems, the world is still
thought to be docile, one rational endeavour which nature is sure to
crown with success. This is the method of deliverance from existence,
the effort after salvation. There is, let us say, a law of Karma, by
which merit and demerit accruing in one incarnation pass on to the next
and enable the soul to rise continuously through a series of stages.
Thus the world, though called illusory, is not wholly intractable. It
provides systematically for an exit out of its illusions. On this
rational ordinance of phenomena, which is left standing by an imperfect
nihilism, Buddhist morality is built. Rational endeavour remains
possible because experience is calculable and fruitful in this one
respect, that it dissolves in the presence of goodness and knowledge.

Similarly in Christian ethics, the way of the cross has definite
stations and a definite end. However negative this end may be thought to
be, the assurance that it may be attained is a remnant of natural hope
in the bosom of pessimism. A complete disillusion would have involved
the neglect of such an assurance, the denial that it was possible or at
least that it was to be realised under specific conditions. That
conversion and good works lead to something worth attaining is a new
sort of positivistic hope. A complete scepticism would involve a doubt,
not only concerning the existence of such a method of salvation, but
also (what is more significant) concerning the importance of applying it
if it were found. For to assert that salvation is not only possible but
urgently necessary, that every soul is now in an intolerable condition
and should search for an ultimate solution to all its troubles, a
restoration to a normal and somehow blessed state—what is this but to
assert that the nature of things has a permanent constitution, by
conformity with which man may secure his happiness? Moreover, we assert
in such a faith that this natural constitution of things is discoverable
in a sufficient measure to guide our action to a successful issue.
Belief in Karma, in prayer, in sacraments, in salvation is a remnant of
a natural belief in the possibility of living successfully. The remnant
may be small and “expressed in fancy.” Transmigration or an atonement
may be chimerical ideas. Yet the mere fact of reliance upon something,
the assumption that the world is steady and capable of rational
exploitation, even if in a supernatural interest and by semi-magical
means, amounts to an essential loyalty to postulates of practical
reason, an essential adherence to natural morality.

The pretension to have reached a point of view from which _all_ impulse
may be criticised is accordingly an untenable pretension. It is
abandoned in the very systems in which it was to be most thoroughly
applied. The instrument of criticism must itself be one impulse
surviving the wreck of all the others; the vision of salvation and of
the way thither must be one dream among the rest. A single suggestion of
experience is thus accepted while all others are denied; and although a
certain purification and revision of morality may hence ensue, there is
no real penetration to a deeper principle than spontaneous reason, no
revelation of a higher end than the best possible happiness. One
sporadic growth of human nature may be substituted for its whole
luxuriant vegetation; one negative or formal element of happiness may
be preferred to the full entelechy of life. We may see the Life of
Reason reduced to straits, made to express itself in a niggardly and
fantastic environment; but we have, in principle and essence, the Life
of Reason still, empirical in its basis and rational in its method, its
substance impulse and its end happiness.

[Sidenote: Spontaneous values rehabilitated.]

So much for the umbilical cord that unites every living post-rational
system to the matrix of human hopes. There remains a second point of
contact between these systems and rational morality: the reinstated
natural duties which all religions and philosophies, in order to subsist
among civilised peoples, are at once obliged to sanction and somehow to
deduce from their peculiar principles. The most plausible evidence which
a supernatural doctrine can give of its truth is the beauty and
rationality of its moral corollaries. It is instructive to observe that
a gospel’s congruity with natural reason and common humanity is regarded
as the decisive mark of its supernatural origin. Indeed, were
inspiration not the faithful echo of plain conscience and vulgar
experience there would be no means of distinguishing it from madness.
Whatever poetic idea a prophet starts with, in whatever intuition or
analogy he finds a hint of salvation, it is altogether necessary that he
should hasten to interpret his oracle in such a manner that it may
sanction without disturbing the system of indispensable natural duties,
although these natural duties, by being attached artificially to
supernatural dogmas, may take on a different tone, justify themselves by
a different rhetoric, and possibly suffer real transformation in some
minor particulars. Systems of post-rational morality are not original
works: they are versions of natural morality translated into different
metaphysical languages, each of which adds its peculiar flavour, its own
genius and poetry, to the plain sense of the common original.

[Sidenote: A witness out of India.]

In the doctrine of Karma, for instance, experience of retribution is
ideally extended and made precise. Acts, daily experience teaches us,
form habits; habits constitute character, and each man’s character, as
Heraclitus said, is his guardian deity, the artisan of his fate. We need
but raise this particular observation to a solitary eminence, after the
manner of post-rational thinking; we need but imagine it to underlie and
explain all other empirical observations, so that character may come to
figure as an absolute cause, of which experience itself is an attendant
result. Such arbitrary emphasis laid on some term of experience is the
source of each metaphysical system in turn. In this case the surviving
dogma will have yielded an explanation of our environment no less than
of our state of heart by instituting a deeper spiritual law, a certain
balance of merit and demerit in the soul, accruing to it through a
series of previous incarnations. This fabulous starting-point was
gained by an imaginary extension of the law of moral continuity and
natural retribution; but when, accepting this starting-point, the
believer went on to inquire what he should do to be saved and to cancel
the heavy debts he inherited from his mythical past, he would merely
enumerate the natural duties of man, giving them, however, a new
sanction and conceiving them as if they emanated from his new-born
metaphysical theory. This theory, apart from a natural conscience and
traditional code, would have been perfectly barren. The notion that
every sin must be expiated does not carry with it any information about
what acts are sins.

This indispensable information must still be furnished by common
opinion. Those acts which bring suffering after them, those acts which
arouse the enmity of our fellows and, by a premonition of that enmity,
arouse our own shame—those are assumed and deputed to be sinful; and
the current code of morality being thus borrowed without begging leave,
the law of absolute retribution can be brought in to paint the picture
of moral responsibility in more glaring colours and to extend the vista
of rewards and punishments into a rhetorical infinite. Buddhistic
morality was natural morality intensified by this forced sense of minute
and boundless responsibility. It was coloured also by the negative,
pessimistic justification which this dogma gives to moral endeavour.
Every virtue was to be viewed as merely removing guilt and alleviating
suffering, knowledge itself being precious only as a means to that end.
The ultimate inspiration of right living was to be hope of perfect
peace—a hope generously bestowed by nature on every spirit which, being
linked to the flux of things, is conscious of change and susceptible of
weariness, but a hope which the irresponsible Oriental imagination had
disturbed with bad dreams. A pathetic feminine quality was thereby
imparted to moral feeling; we were to be good for pity’s sake, for the
sake of a great distant deliverance from profound sorrows.

[Sidenote: Dignity of post-rational morality.]

The pathetic idiosyncrasy of this religion has probably enabled it to
touch many a heart and to lift into speculation many a life otherwise
doomed to be quite instinctive animal. It has kept morality pure—free
from that admixture of worldly and partisan precepts with which less
pessimistic systems are encumbered. Restraint can be rationally imposed
on a given will only by virtue of evils which would be involved in its
satisfaction, by virtue, in other words, of some actual demand whose
disappointment would ensue upon inconsiderate action. To save, to cure,
to nourish are duties far less conditional than would be a supposed duty
to acquire or to create. There is no harm in merely not being, and
privation is an evil only when, after we exist, it deprives us of
something naturally requisite, the absence of which would defeat
interests already launched into the world. If there is something in a
purely remedial system of morality which seems one-sided and extreme, we
must call to mind the far less excusable one-sidedness of those
moralities of prejudice to which we are accustomed in the Occident—the
ethics of irrational acquisitiveness, irrational faith, and irrational
honour. Buddhistic morality, so reasonable and beautifully persuasive,
rising so willingly to the ideal of sanctity, merits in comparison the
profoundest respect. It is lifted as far above the crudities of
intuitionism as the whisperings of an angel are above a schoolboy’s
code.

A certain bias and deviation from strict reason seems, indeed,
inseparable from any moral reform, from any doctrine that is to be
practically and immediately influential. Socratic ethics was too perfect
an expression to be much of a force. Philosophers whose hearts are set
on justice and pure truth often hear reproaches addressed to them by the
fanatic, who contrasts the conspicuous change in this or that direction
accomplished by his preaching with the apparent impotence of reason and
thought. Reason’s resources are in fact so limited that it is usually
reduced to guerilla warfare: a general plan of campaign is useless when
only insignificant forces obey our commands. Moral progress is for that
reason often greatest when some nobler passion or more fortunate
prejudice takes the lead and subdues its meaner companions without
needing to rely on the consciousness of ultimate benefits hence accruing
to the whole life. So a pessimistic and merely remedial morality may
accomplish reforms which reason, with its broader and milder suasion,
might have failed in. If certain rare and precious virtues can thus be
inaugurated, under the influence of a zeal exaggerating its own
justification, there will be time later to insist on the complementary
truths and to tack in the other direction after having been carried
forward a certain distance by this oblique advance.

[Sidenote: Absurdities nevertheless involved.]

At the same time neglect of reason is never without its dangers and its
waste. The Buddhistic system itself suffers from a fundamental
contradiction, because its framers did not acknowledge the actual limits
of retribution nor the empirical machinery by which benefits and
injuries are really propagated. It is an onerous condition which
religions must fulfil, if they would prevail in the world, that they
must have their roots in the past. Buddhism had its mission of
salvation; but to express this mission to its proselytes it was obliged
to borrow the language of the fantastic metaphysics which had preceded
it in India. The machinery of transmigration had to serve as a
scaffolding to raise the monument of mercy, purity, and spirituality.
But this fabulous background given to life was really inconsistent with
what was best in the new morality; just as in Christianity the
post-rational evangelical ideals of redemption and regeneration, of the
human will mystically reversed, were radically incompatible with the
pre-rational myths about a creation and a political providence. The
doctrine of Karma was a hypostasis of moral responsibility; but in
making responsibility dynamic and all-explaining, the theory
discountenanced in advance the charitable efforts of Buddhism—the
desire to instruct and save every fellow-creature. For if all my
fortunes depend upon my former conduct, I am the sole artificer of my
destiny. The love, the pity, the science, or the prayers of others can
have no real influence over my salvation. They cannot diminish by one
tittle my necessary sufferings, nor accelerate by one instant the period
which my own action appoints for my deliverance. Perhaps another’s
influence might, in the false world of time and space, change the order
or accidental vesture of my moral experiences; but their quantity and
value, being the exact counterpart of my free merits and demerits, could
not be affected at all by those extraneous doings.

Therefore the empirical fact that we can help one another remains in
Buddhism (as in any retributive scheme) only by a serious inconsistency;
and since this fact is the sanction of whatever moral efficacy can be
attributed to Buddhism, in sobering, teaching, and saving mankind,
anything inconsistent with it is fundamentally repugnant to the whole
system. Yet on that repugnant and destructive dogma of Karma Buddhism
was condemned to base its instruction. This is the heavy price paid for
mythical consolations, that they invalidate the moral values they are
intended to emphasise. Nature has allowed the innocent to suffer for the
guilty, and the guilty, perhaps, to die in some measure unpunished. To
correct this imperfection we feign a closed circle of personal
retributions, exactly proportionate to personal deserts. But thereby,
without perceiving it, we have invalidated all political and social
responsibility, and denied that any man can be benefited or injured by
any other. Our moral ambition has overleaped itself and carried us into
a non-natural world where morality is impotent and unmeaning.

[Sidenote: The soul of positivism in all ideals.]

Post-rational systems accordingly mark no real advance and offer no
genuine solution to spiritual enigmas. The saving force each of them
invokes is merely some remnant of that natural energy which animates the
human animal. Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man
at the lowest ebb of his fortunes; it is as far as possible from being
the source of that normal vitality which subsequently, if his fortunes
mend, he may gradually recover. Under the same religion, with the same
posthumous alternatives and mystic harmonies hanging about them,
different races, or the same race at different periods, will manifest
the most opposite moral characteristics. Belief in a thousand hells and
heavens will not lift the apathetic out of apathy or hold back the
passionate from passion; while a newly planted and ungalled community,
in blessed forgetfulness of rewards or punishments, of cosmic needs or
celestial sanctions, will know how to live cheerily and virtuously for
life’s own sake, putting to shame those thin vaticinations. To hope for
a second life, to be had gratis, merely because this life has lost its
savour, or to dream of a different world, because nature seems too
intricate and unfriendly, is in the end merely to play with words; since
the supernatural has no permanent aspect or charm except in so far as it
expresses man’s natural situation and points to the satisfaction of his
earthly interests. What keeps supernatural morality, in its better
forms, within the limits of sanity is the fact that it reinstates in
practice, under novel associations and for motives ostensibly different,
the very natural virtues and hopes which, when seen to be merely
natural, it had thrown over with contempt. The new dispensation itself,
if treated in the same spirit, would be no less contemptible; and what
makes it genuinely esteemed is the restored authority of those human
ideals which it expresses in a fable.

The extent of this moral restoration, the measure in which nature is
suffered to bloom in the sanctuary, determines the value of
post-rational moralities. They may preside over a good life, personal
or communal, when their symbolism, though cumbrous, is not deceptive;
when the supernatural machinery brings man back to nature through
mystical circumlocutions, and becomes itself a poetic echo of experience
and a dramatic impersonation of reason. The peculiar accent and emphasis
which it will not cease to impose on the obvious lessons of life need
not then repel the wisest intelligence. True sages and true
civilisations can accordingly flourish under a dispensation nominally
supernatural; for that supernaturalism may have become a mere form in
which imagination clothes a rational and humane wisdom.

[Sidenote: Moribund dreams and perennial realities.]

People who speak only one language have some difficulty in conceiving
that things should be expressed just as well in some other; a prejudice
which does not necessarily involve their mistaking words for things or
being practically misled by their inflexible vocabulary. So it
constantly happens that supernatural systems, when they have long
prevailed, are defended by persons who have only natural interests at
heart; because these persons lack that speculative freedom and dramatic
imagination which would allow them to conceive other moulds for morality
and happiness than those to which a respectable tradition has accustomed
them. Sceptical statesmen and academic scholars sometimes suffer from
this kind of numbness; it is intelligible that they should mistake the
forms of culture for its principle, especially when their genius is not
original and their chosen function is to defend and propagate the local
traditions in which their whole training has immersed them. Indeed, in
the political field, such concern for decaying myths may have a pathetic
justification; for however little the life of or dignity of man may he
jeopardised by changes in language, languages themselves are not
indifferent things. They may be closely bound up with the peculiar
history and spirit of nations, and their disappearance, however
necessary and on the whole propitious, may mark the end of some stirring
chapter in the world’s history. Those whose vocation is not philosophy
and whose country is not the world may be pardoned for wishing to retard
the migrations of spirit, and for looking forward with apprehension to a
future in which their private enthusiasms will not be understood.

The value of post-rational morality, then, depends on a double
conformity on its part with the Life of Reason. In the first place some
natural impulse must be retained, some partial ideal must still be
trusted and pursued by the prophet of redemption. In the second place
the intuition thus gained and exclusively put forward must be made the
starting-point for a restored natural morality. Otherwise the faith
appealed to would be worthless in its operation, as well as fanciful in
its basis, and it could never become a mould for thought or action in a
civilised society.




CHAPTER XI

THE VALIDITY OF SCIENCE


The same despair or confusion which, when it overtakes human purposes,
seeks relief in arbitrary schemes of salvation, when it overtakes human
knowledge, may breed arbitrary substitutes for science. There are
post-rational systems of nature as well as of duty. Most of these are
myths hardly worth separating from the post-rational moralities they
adorn, and have been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter; but a few
aspire to be critical revisions of science, themselves scientific. It
may be well, in bringing this book to a close, to review these proposed
revisions. The validity of science is at stake, and with it the validity
of that whole Life of Reason which science crowns, and justifies to
reflection.

[Sidenote: Various modes of revising science.]

There are many degrees and kinds of this critical retractation. Science
may be accepted bodily, while its present results are modified by
suggesting speculatively what its ultimate results might be. This is
natural philosophy or legitimate metaphysics. Or science may be accepted
in part, and in part subjected to control by some other alleged vehicle
of knowledge. This is traditional or intuitive theology. Or science may
be retracted and withdrawn altogether, on the ground that it is but
methodological fiction, its facts appearances merely, and its principles
tendencies to feign. This is transcendentalism; whereupon a dilemma
presents itself. We may be invited to abstain from all hypostasis or
hearty belief in anything, and to dwell only on the consciousness of
imaginative activity in a vacuum—which is radical idealism. Or we may
be assured that, science being a dream, we may awake from it into
another cosmos, built upon principles quite alien to those illustrated
in nature or applicable in practice—which is idealism of the mythical
sort. Finally it may occur to us that the criticism of science is an
integral part of science itself, and that a transcendental method of
survey, which marshals all things in the order of their discovery, far
from invalidating knowledge can only serve to separate it from
incidental errors and to disclose the relative importance of truths.
Science would then be rehabilitated by criticism. The primary movement
of the intellect would not be condemned by that subsequent reflection
which it makes possible, and which collates its results. Science, purged
of all needless realism and seen in its relation to human life, would
continue to offer the only conception of reality which is pertinent or
possible to the practical mind.

We may now proceed to discuss these various attitudes in turn.

[Sidenote: Science its own best critic.]

A first and quite blameless way of criticising science is to point out
that science is incomplete. That it grows fast is indeed its commonest
boast; and no man of science is so pessimistic as to suppose that its
growth is over. To wish to supplement science and to regard its
conclusions as largely provisional is therefore more than legitimate. It
is actually to share the spirit of inquiry and to feel the impulse
toward investigation. When new truths come into view, old truths are
thereby reinterpreted and put in a new light; so that the acquisitions
of science not only admit of revision but loudly call for it, not
wishing for any other authority or vindication than that which they
might find in the context of universal truth.

To revise science in this spirit would be merely to extend it. No new
method, no transverse philosophy, would be requisite or fitted for the
task. Knowledge would be transformed by more similar knowledge, not by
some verbal manipulation. Yet while waiting for experience to grow and
accumulate its lessons, a man of genius, who had drunk deep of
experience himself, might imagine some ultimate synthesis. He might
venture to carry out the suggestions of science and anticipate the
conclusions it would reach when completed. The game is certainly
dangerous, especially if the prophecy is uttered with any air of
authority; yet with good luck and a fine instinct, such speculation may
actually open the way to discovery and may diffuse in advance that
virtual knowledge of physics which is enough for moral and poetic
purposes. Verification in detail is needed, not so much for its own sake
as to check speculative errors; but when speculation is by chance well
directed and hits upon the substantial truth, it does all that a
completed science would do for mankind; since science, if ever
completed, would immediately have to be summed up again and reduced to
generalities. Under the circumstances of human life, ultimate truth must
forego detailed verification and must remain speculative. The curse of
modern philosophy is only that it has not drawn its inspiration from
science; as the misfortune of science is that it has not yet saturated
the mind of philosophers and recast the moral world. The Greek
physicists, puerile as was their notion of natural mechanism, had a more
integral view of things. They understood nature’s uses and man’s
conditions in an honest and noble way. If no single phenomenon had been
explained correctly by any philosopher from Thales to Lucretius, yet by
their frank and studious contemplation of nature they would have
liberated the human soul.

[Sidenote: Obstruction by alien traditions.]

Unfortunately the supplements to science which most philosophers supply
in our day are not conceived in a scientific spirit. Instead of
anticipating the physics of the future they cling to the physics of the
past. They do not stimulate us by a picture, however fanciful, of what
the analogies of nature and politics actually point to; they seek rather
to patch and dislocate current physics with some ancient myth, once the
best physics obtainable, from which they have not learned to extricate
their affections.

Sometimes these survivals are intended to modify scientific conceptions
but slightly, and merely to soften a little the outlines of a cosmic
picture to which religion and literature are not yet accustomed. There
is a school of political conservatives who, with no specific interest in
metaphysics, cannot or dare not break with traditional modes of
expression, with the customs of their nation, or with the clerical
classes. They accordingly append to current knowledge certain
sentimental postulates, alleging that what is established by tradition
and what appeals to the heart must somehow correspond to something which
is needful and true. But their conventional attachment to a religion
which in its original essence was perhaps mystical and revolutionary,
scarcely modifies, in their eyes, the sum of practical assurances or the
aim of human life. As language exercises some functions which science
can hardly assume (as, for instance, in poetry and communication) so
theology and metaphysics, which to such men are nothing but languages,
might provide for inarticulate interests, and unite us to much that lies
in the dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and
mysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be
suffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any
clear fact or natural duty. They might continue to decorate with a
mystical aureole the too prosaic kernel of known truth.

[Sidenote: Needless anxiety for moral interests.]

Mythology and ritual, with the sundry divinations of poets, might in
fact be kept suspended with advantage over human passion and ignorance,
to furnish them with decent expression. But once indulged, divination is
apt to grow arrogant and dogmatic. When its oracles have become
traditional they are almost inevitably mistaken for sober truths. Hence
the second kind of supplement offered to science, so that revelations
with which moral life has been intertwined may find a place beside or
beyond science. The effort is honest, but extraordinarily short-sighted.
Whatever value those revelations may have they draw from actual
experience or inevitable ideals. When the ground of that experience and
those ideals is disclosed by science, nothing of any value is lost; it
only remains to accustom ourselves to a new vocabulary and to shift
somewhat the associations of those values which life contains or
pursues. Revelations are necessarily mythical and subrational; they
express natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before the
advent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest and
explicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainable
welfare or understanding the situation. It is to be stubborn and
negligent under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag on
progress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatism
that fears they may be indispensable is entangled in a pathetic
delusion. It is conservatism in a ship-wreck. It has not the insight to
embrace the fertile principles of life, which are always ready to renew
life after no matter what natural catastrophe. The good laggards have no
courage to strip for the race. Rather than live otherwise, and live
better, they prefer to nurse the memories of youth and to die with a
retrospective smile upon their countenance.

[Sidenote: Science an imaginative and practical art.]

Far graver than the criticism which shows science to be incomplete is
that which shows it to be relative. The fact is undeniable, though the
inferences made from it are often rash and gratuitous. We have seen that
science is nothing but developed perception, interpreted intent,
common-sense rounded out and minutely articulated. It is therefore as
much an instinctive product, as much a stepping forth of human courage
in the dark, as is any inevitable dream or impulsive action. Like life
itself, like any form of determinate existence, it is altogether
autonomous and unjustifiable from the outside. It must lean on its own
vitality; to sanction reason there is only reason, and to corroborate
sense there is nothing but sense. Inferential thought is a venture not
to be approved of, save by a thought no less venturesome and
inferential. This is once for all the fate of a living being—it is the
very essence of spirit—to be ever on the wing, borne by inner forces
toward goals of its own imagining, confined to a passing apprehension of
a represented world. Mind, which calls itself the organ of truth, is a
permanent possibility of error. The encouragement and corroboration
which science is alleged to receive from moment to moment may, for aught
it knows, be simply a more ingenious self-deception, a form of that
cumulative illusion by which madness can confirm itself, creating a
whole world, with an endless series of martyrs, to bear witness to its
sanity.

To insist on this situation may seem idle, since no positive doctrine
can gain thereby in plausibility, and no particular line of action in
reasonableness. Yet this transcendental exercise, this reversion to the
immediate, may be recommended by way of a cathartic, to free the mind
from ancient obstructions and make it hungrier and more agile in its
rational faith. Scepticism is harmless when it is honest and universal;
it clears the air and is a means of reorganising belief on its natural
foundations. Belief is an inevitable accompaniment of practice and
intent, both of which it will cling to all the more closely after a
thorough criticism. When all beliefs are challenged together, the just
and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and to re-establish
themselves alone. The doubt cast on science, when it is an ingenuous and
impartial doubt, will accordingly serve to show what sort of thing
science is, and to establish it on a sure foundation. Science will then
be seen to be tentative, genial, practical, and humane, full of ideality
and pathos, like every great human undertaking.

[Sidenote: Arrière-pensée in transcendentalism.]

Unfortunately a searching disintegration of dogma, a conscientious
reversion to the immediate, is seldom practised for its own sake. So
violent a disturbance of mental habits needs some great social upheaval
or some revolutionary ambition to bring it about. The transcendental
philosophy might never have been put forward at all, had its authors
valued it for what it can really accomplish. The effort would have
seemed too great and the result too nugatory. Their criticism of
knowledge was not freely undertaken, with the pure speculative motive of
understanding and purifying human science. They were driven on by the
malicious psychology of their predecessors, by the perplexities of a
sophistical scepticism, and by the imminent collapse of traditional
metaphysics. They were enticed at the same time by the hope of finding a
new basis for the religious myths associated with that metaphysics. In
consequence their transcendentalism was not a rehearsal of the Life of
Reason, a retrospect criticising and justifying the phases of human
progress. It was rather a post-rational system of theology, the
dangerous cure to a harmless disease, inducing a panic to introduce a
fable. The panic came from the assumption (a wholly gratuitous one) that
a spontaneous constructive intellect cannot be a trustworthy instrument,
that appearances cannot be the properties of reality, and that things
cannot be what science finds that they are. We were forbidden to believe
in anything we might discover or to trust in anything we could see. The
artificial vacuum thus produced in the mind ached to be filled with
something, and of course a flood of rhetorical commonplaces was at hand,
which might rush in to fill it.

[Sidenote: Its romantic sincerity.]

The most heroic transcendentalists were but men, and having imagined
that logic obliged them to abstain from every sort of hypostasis, they
could not long remain true to their logic. For a time, being of a
buoyant disposition, they might feel that nothing could be more
exhilarating than to swim in the void, altogether free from settled
conditions, altogether the ignorant creators of each moment’s vision.
Such a career evidently affords all sorts of possibilities, except
perhaps the possibility of being a career. But when a man has strained
every nerve to maintain an absolute fluidity and a painful fidelity to
the immediate, he can hardly be blamed if he lapses at last into some
flattering myth, and if having satisfied himself that all science is
fiction he proclaims some fairy-tale to be the truth. The episodes of
experience, not being due to any conceivable machinery beneath, might
come of mere willing, or at the waving of a dialectical wand. Yet apart
from this ulterior inconsistency and backsliding into credulity,
transcendentalism would hear nothing of causes or grounds. All phenomena
existed for it on one flat level. We were released from all dogma and
reinstated in the primordial assurance that we were all there was, but
without understanding what we were, and without any means of controlling
our destiny, though cheered by the magnificent feeling that that destiny
was great.

[Sidenote: Its constructive importance.]

It is intelligible that a pure transcendentalism of this sort should not
be either stable or popular. It may be admired for its analytic depth
and its persistency in tracing all supposed existences back to the
experience that vouches for them. Yet a spirit that finds its only
exercise in gloating on the consciousness that it is a spirit, one that
has so little skill in expression that it feels all its embodiments to
be betrayals and all its symbols to be misrepresentations, is a spirit
evidently impotent and confused. It is self-inhibited, and cannot fulfil
its essential vocation by reaching an embodiment at once definitive and
ideal, philosophical and true. We may excuse a school that has done one
original task so thoroughly as transcendentalism has thing could be
said of it, would be simply an integral term in the discourse that
described it. And this discourse, this sad residuum of reality, would
remain an absolute datum without a ground, without a subject-matter,
without a past, and without a future.

[Sidenote: Its futility.]

It suffices, therefore, to take the supposed negative implication in
transcendentalism a little seriously to see that it leaves nothing
standing but negation and imbecility; so that we may safely conclude
that such a negative implication is gratuitous, and also that in taking
the transcendental method for an instrument of reconstruction its
professors were radically false to it. They took the starting-point of
experience, on which they had fallen back, for its ultimate deliverance,
and in reverting to protoplasm they thought they were rising to God. The
transcendental method is merely retrospective; its use is to recover
more systematically conceptions already extant and inevitable. It
invalidates nothing in science; much less does it carry with it any
rival doctrine of its own. Every philosophy, even materialism, may find
a transcendental justification, if experience as it develops will yield
no other terms. What has reason to tremble at a demand for its
credentials is surely not natural science; it is rather those mystical
theologies or romantic philosophies of history which aspire to take its
place. Such lucubrations, even if reputed certain, can scarcely be
really credited or regarded in practice; while scientific tenets are
necessarily respected, even when they are declared to be fictions. This
nemesis is inevitable; for the mind must be inhabited, and the ideas
with which science peoples it are simply its involuntary perceptions
somewhat more clearly arranged.

[Sidenote: Ideal science is self-justified.]

That the relativity of science—its being an emanation of human life—is
nothing against its truth appears best, perhaps, in the case of
dialectic. Dialectic is valid by virtue of an intended meaning and felt
congruity in its terms; but these terms, which intent fixes, are
external and independent in their ideal nature, and the congruity
between them is not created by being felt but, whether incidentally felt
or not, is inherent in their essence. Mathematical thinking is the
closest and most intimate of mental operations, nothing external being
called in to aid; yet mathematical truth is as remote as possible from
being personal or psychic. It is absolutely self-justified and is
necessary before it is discovered to be so. Here, then, is a conspicuous
region of truth, disclosed to the human intellect by its own internal
exercise, which is nevertheless altogether independent, being eternal
and indefeasible, while the thought that utters it is ephemeral.

[Sidenote: Physical science is presupposed in scepticism.]

The validity of material science, not being warranted by pure insight,
cannot be so quickly made out; nevertheless it cannot be denied
systematically, and the misunderstood transcendentalism which belittles
physics contradicts its own basis. For how are we supposed to know that
what call facts are mere appearances and what we call objects mere
creations of thought? We know this by physics. It is physiology, a part
of physics, that assures us that our senses and brains are conditions of
our experience. Were it not for what we know of the outer world and of
our place in it, we should be incapable of attaching any meaning to
subjectivity. The flux of things would then go on in their own medium,
not in our minds; and no suspicion of illusion or of qualification by
mind would attach to any event in nature. So it is in a dream; and it is
our knowledge of physics, our reliance on the world’s material
coherence, that marks our awakening, and that constitutes our discovery
that we exist as minds and are subject to dreaming. It is quite true
that the flux, as it exists in men, is largely psychic; but only because
the events it contains are effects of material causes and the images in
it are flying shadows cast by solid external things. This is the meaning
of psychic existence, and its differentia. Mind is an expression,
weighted with emotion, of mechanical relations among bodies. Suppose the
bodies all removed: at once the images formerly contrasted with those
bodies would resume their inherent characteristics and mutual relation;
they would become existences in their own category, large, moving,
coloured, distributed to right and left; that is, save for their values,
they would become material things.

[Sidenote: It recurs in all understanding of perception.]

Physics is accordingly a science which, though hypothetical and only
verifiable by experiment, is involved in history and psychology and
therefore in any criticism of knowledge. The contradiction would be
curious if a man should declare that his ideas were worthless, being due
to his organs of sense, and that therefore these organs (since he had an
idea of them) did not exist. Yet on this brave argument idealism chiefly
rests. It asserts that bodies are mere ideas, because it is through our
bodies that we perceive them. When physics has discovered the conditions
under which knowledge of physics has arisen, physics is supposed to be
spirited away; whereas, of course, it has only closed its circle and
justified its sovereignty. Were all science retracted and reduced to
symbolic calculation nothing would remain for this calculation to
symbolise. The whole force of calling a theory merely a vehicle or
method of thought, leading us to something different from itself, lies
in having a literal knowledge of this other thing. But such literal
knowledge is the first stage of science, which the other stages merely
extend. So that when, under special circumstances, we really appeal to
algebraic methods of expression and think in symbols, we do so in the
hope of transcribing our terms, when the reckoning is over, into the
language of familiar facts. Were these facts not forthcoming, the
symbolic machinery would itself become the genuine reality—since it is
really given—and we should have to rest in it, as in the ultimate
truth. This is what happens in mythology, when the natural phenomena
expressed by it are forgotten. But natural phenomena themselves are
symbols of nothing, because they are primary data. They are the
constitutive elements of the reality they disclose.

[Sidenote: Science contains all trustworthy knowledge.]

The validity of science in general is accordingly established merely by
establishing the truth of its particular propositions, in dialectic on
the authority of intent and in physics on that of experiment. It is
impossible to base science on a deeper foundation or to override it by a
higher knowledge. What is called metaphysics, if not an anticipation of
natural science, is a confusion of it with dialectic or a mixture of it
with myths. If we have the faculty of being utterly sincere and of
disintegrating the conventions of language and religion, we must confess
that knowledge is only a claim we put forth, a part of that unfathomable
compulsion by force of which we live and hold our painted world together
for a moment. If we have any insight into mind, or any eye for human
history, we must confess at the same time that the oracular substitutes
for knowledge to which, in our perplexities, we might be tempted to
fly, are pathetic popular fables, having no other sanctity than that
which they borrow from the natural impulses they play upon. To live by
science requires intelligence and faith, but not to live by it is folly.

[Sidenote: It suffices for the Life of Reason.]

If science thus contains the sum total of our rational convictions and
gives us the only picture of reality on which we should care to dwell,
we have but to consult the sciences in detail to ascertain, as far as
that is possible, what sort of a universe we live in. The result is as
yet far from satisfactory. The sciences have not joined hands and made
their results coherent, showing nature to be, as it doubtless is, all of
one piece. The moral sciences especially are a mass of confusion.
Negative, I think, must be the attitude of reason, in the present state
of science, upon any hypothesis far outrunning the recorded history and
the visible habitat of the human race. Yet exactly the same habits and
principles that have secured our present knowledge are still active
within us, and promise further discoveries. It is more desirable to
clarify our knowledge within these bounds than to extend it beyond them.
For while the reward of action is contemplation or, in more modern
phrase, experience and consciousness, there is nothing stable or
interesting to contemplate except objects relevant to action—the
natural world and the mind’s ideals.

Both the conditions and the standards of action lie well within the
territory which science, after a fashion, already dominates. But there
remain unexplored jungles and monster-breeding lairs within our nominal
jurisdiction which it is the immediate task of science to clear. The
darkest spots are in man himself, in his fitful, irrational disposition.
Could a better system prevail in our lives a better order would
establish itself in our thinking. It has not been for want of keen
senses, or personal genius, or a constant order in the outer world, that
mankind have fallen back repeatedly into barbarism and superstition. It
has been for want of good character, good example, and good government.
There is a pathetic capacity in men to live nobly, if only they would
give one another the chance. The ideal of political perfection, vague
and remote as it yet seems, is certainly approachable, for it is as
definite and constant as human nature. The knowledge of all relevant
truth would be involved in that ideal, and no intellectual
dissatisfaction would be felt with a system of ideas that should express
and illumine a perfect life.