*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 79374 ***




                           THE DILEMMA OF THE
                                LIBERATED

            _An Interpretation of Twentieth Century Humanism_

                            By GORHAM MUNSON


                 _“It is a commonplace of the schools
                   that man is a little world, in which
                   we may discern a body mingled
                   of earthly elements, and ethereal
                   breath, and the vegetable life of
                   plants, and the senses of lower animals,
                   and reason, and the intelligence
                   of angels, and a likeness to God.”_

                                      PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA.


                        PUBLISHED IN NEW YORK BY
                          _Coward-McCann, Inc._
                            IN THE YEAR 1930




                           Copyright, 1930, by
                           Coward-McCann, Inc.
                           All Rights Reserved

                         Printed in the U. S. A.




                           TABLE OF CONTENTS


          BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION                              vii

       I. THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM                                 3

      II. A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE                                19

     III. THE MAN OF POISE                                     39

      IV. THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS                          53

       V. THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD                         79

      VI. A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN                        107

     VII. THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM                          130

    VIII. SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN                          167

      IX. EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP                            190

       X. HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS                       208

      XI. THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED                        252

     XII. THE END OF THE TETHER                               284

          ACKNOWLEDGMENTS                                     302




                         BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION

          A LETTER OF DEDICATION TO SEWARD B. COLLINS, ESQ’RE.


My dear Seward:

For two years I have cherished the wish to offer you, out of gratitude
and friendship, some product of my pen. But I did not dream two years
ago, or even one year ago, that I should write a book on a subject
so near your heart as American Humanism. Lately, however, there has
been a great acceleration of events in our country’s intellectual
life; unexpectedly soon the moment has ripened for a full-length study
of the creative possibilities of the New Humanism. Now it is doubly
appropriate to dedicate this study to you: I gratify a private desire,
and I give a public recognition of the large part you yourself, as
editor of the _Bookman_, have performed in bringing the ideas of P. E.
More and Irving Babbitt and their colleagues before the eyes of the
general reading public.

This work of yours I say is a very important service to American
literature in its present condition. At no time myself an orthodox
Humanist, I nonetheless felt six or seven years ago, when I first read
the _Shelburne Essays_ and Professor Babbitt’s massive works, that here
was criticism our literary world could not ignore without grave loss,
and I set myself to do what I could to bring this criticism out of the
academic shadows to which it had been consigned by the main romantic
movement of post-war America and to advance it to the very center of
our literary stage. In this effort I was of course merely a symptom
of a change in temper and direction and ideals that was gradually
taking place in many young Americans who came to feel that there was
something disastrously ill-informed and disappointingly shallow in the
revolt-literature of the ’Twenties. At any rate, there has finally
occurred in literary criticism a reaction toward “style and order,”
not alone in letters but in life, and we can now say that the doctrine
of the New Humanists is decidedly under scrutiny by every one who
professes to be seriously interested in the welfare of our literature.

Let the literary battles over Humanism go on and may they wax
hotter! Strength of opposition is good for all parties concerned,
and the development in our literary world of a strong orthodox
classical party like the New Humanists is sure to call forth from our
naturalistic thinkers and artists greater efforts, and efforts on a
more difficult level of thought, than those they have felt inclined to
make in the last fifteen years. But--as you tell your readers in the
_Bookman_--American Humanism is not essentially or solely a literary
school. It offers a comprehensive critique of modern civilization: it
has studied our problems of education, politics, manners, morals, and
science, as well as literary tendencies: it is preëminently concerned
with the question, _how to live_, and it believes that it has the
commencement of a sound program for the intelligent conduct of life.

How to live? That undying question has always given rise to hornèd
problems. Walter Lippmann, not long ago, showed ably how the
traditional controls of our lives have been abolished or appear to
have been abolished; with the same ability he outlined the quandaries
of the modern man who has been born into the Kingdom of Whirl after
the joy of breaking images has gone out of the land and no new goal
for existence has shiningly presented itself. “What is there in the
back of our heads,” Lippmann asked, “which keeps telling us that
life as we find it is not what it ought to be?” This is his reply:
“It is a deep conviction that happiness is possible, and all inquiry
into the foundations of morals turns ultimately upon whether man can
achieve this happiness by pursuing his desires, or whether he must
first learn to desire the kind of happiness which is possible.” There
you have what may be termed the dilemma of the emancipated man. The
intelligent modern man feels liberated from petty social conventions,
narrow theological views, discredited authorities, the grosser popular
superstitions, but liberated for what? Only, it seems, to face a
darkened problem of choices, with many strong reasons for distrusting
every alternative offered. Shall he follow some most recent form of
naturalism such as D. H. Lawrence preached? He is impressed by its
passionateness, but it also has a fanatic sound to him; it appears
to delimit man, to deny too much in man’s constitution that seems
to promise more abundant life to him who develops it. Shall he, on
the other hand, seek out some surviving moral discipline or some
new asceticism? But which one and how well founded on science and
commonsense are these preserved or refurbished disciplines?

Well, the New Humanism has much to say on such a dilemma as this, much
to say on the great central moral question, how to live as a being
bearing the proud-sounding name of Man ought to live; and for this
reason it is proper to call contemporary Humanism a modern morality
and to say that it commends itself to persons who, besides reading for
pleasure or information, read to live.

It is such persons, men and women of the world who resort to books
with the real intention of clarifying their lives by reading, that I
wish to address. They are free from that malady to which the “literary
person” so frequently succumbs, namely, living for reading and writing.
This person’s mind then becomes merely a great heap of literary
associations, all very useful, if only he had obtained a few central
ideas, if only he had kept a grip on life as the foremost thing and
resolutely kept his reading in its proper place as “the great stimulus
to life.” The man of the world, on the other hand, has other faults,
but he is sensible in what he demands of books. He wants the essentials
of a doctrine and he wants them purged of special terminology: he wants
to see the doctrine’s practical implications lighted up: he wants to
see the cardinal teachings properly groomed to appear before the bar of
commonsense. That is why in the following pages I have avoided as much
as possible the debates and wrangles of scholarship and have tried for
compactness, clearness, simplicity, and practicality in the exposition
of the master-ideas of Babbitt and More.

Truly, they are pregnant ideas. My first aim in this book has been to
show their remarkable specific gravity and how they sink to the bottom
of one’s mind. There, it seems to me, they give birth to questions
of the utmost importance to the individual. They raise questions
relating to his world-view, to his psychology, and to his aspirations
in character. The mind is agitated in a new way and so led to take new
approaches to old problems: the experience of past mankind and our
contemporary experience operate on each other with profit in the way
of self-understanding and the understanding of modern society. Many of
the questions thus aroused are of a religious character, and my second
object has been to discuss them and in so doing naturally to pass from
the field of morals to the field of religion. Religion, “that deepest
voice of human experience,” according to Matthew Arnold--what has it to
say of the ideals of the New Humanism and the humanistic way of life?
What has religion even now to say to the skeptical modern man disposed
to give ear to new moral doctrines?

In what we would reply here, my respected dedicatee, I foresee a wide
divergence in our future paths. Possibly not however. But on that part
of the journey which we have traveled together I wish to say I have
known no other companion so gay in mind, so unswerving and unafraid in
practice, so ardent in understanding of the tenets of American Humanism
as you to whom this book is tendered.

In the language beloved by the Humanists of the Renascence,

                   _Sum ut semper, tui studiossimus_,

                                                          Gorham Munson.

  _March 17, 1930,
  New York, N.Y._




                                   I

                         THE BIRTH OF HUMANISM

  _“As is well known, the word humanist was applied, first in the
  Italy of the fifteenth century, and later in other European
  countries, to the type of scholar who was not only proficient in
  Greek and Latin, but who at the same time inclined to prefer the
  humanity of the great classical writers to what seemed to him the
  excess of divinity in the mediævals. This contrast between humanity
  and divinity was often conceived very superficially. However, the
  best of the humanists were not content with opposing a somewhat
  external imitation of the Ciceronian or Virgilian elegance to the
  scholastic carelessness of form. They actually caught a glimpse
  of the fine proportionateness of the ancients at their best. They
  were thus encouraged to aim at a harmonious development of their
  faculties in this world rather than at an otherworldly felicity.
  Each faculty, they held, should be cultivated in due measure
  without one-sidedness or over-emphasis, whether that of the ascetic
  or that of the specialist.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Humanism and
  America_.


It requires an unusual effort for us to admit that there was something
mysterious operating in the deeps of the Middle Ages, and again that
well below the surface of the Renascence there seem to have been
strange forces. We look with wonderment at the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries in Europe--at that uncompleted Cathedral of the Intellect
designed by St. Thomas Aquinas, at the ordering and altitude of emotion
in Dante, at that philosophy of action called Chivalry; but few of
us can refrain from ready interpretations. Very few can sit in the
Cathedral of Chartres and sincerely arrive at the conclusion which
Henry Adams reached after long saturation beneath its influences.
That conclusion, highly remarkable as coming from a modern man
and therefore worthy of italic print, was given by Adams all the
advantages of emphatic position. It was couched in the surprising final
clause of a lengthy sentence at the end of one of his chapters in
_Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres_, his elaborate homage to the splendor
of mediæval times. I shall let Adams lead up to it.

“Sitting here any Sunday afternoon, while the voices of the children of
the maîtrise are chanting in the choir,--your mind held in the grasp
of the strong lines and shadows of the architecture; your eyes flooded
with the autumn tones of the glass; your ears drowned with the purity
of the voices; one sense reacting upon another until sensation reaches
the limit of its range,--you, or any other lost soul, could, if you
cared to look and listen, feel a sense beyond the human ready to reveal
a sense divine that would make that world once more intelligible, and
would bring the Virgin to life again, in all the depths of feeling
which she shows here,--in lines, vaults, chapels, colours, legends,
chants,--more eloquent than the prayer-book, and more beautiful than
the autumn sunlight; and any one willing to try could feel it like the
child, reading new thought without end into the art he has studied a
hundred times; _but what is still more convincing, he could, at will,
in an instant, shatter the whole art by calling into it a single motive
of his own_.”

But, as though in obedience to some undivined law, the marvellous
unity of the Middle Ages, sustained in Adams’s judgment by motives so
foreign and incomprehensible to us, began to crumble. The spirit began
to withdraw and the forms to change into formalism. There was less
inwardness. Corruption and decline set in, and then fairly suddenly the
disintegration of culture was arrested and a new growth took place to
make resplendent the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Renascence
was in part a great revolt against _decayed_ scholasticism and the
views of man and the world it upheld, and in part the fulfilment of
fresh impulses generated by the apostles of the New Learning, the study
of classical literature. This period too baffles us: we meet with so
many enigmatic figures! To take a famous instance, who has ever made a
plausible business of explaining the character of Francis Bacon? Enigma
he was and enigma he remains, a man whose range of motivation outspans
our most inspired conjectures.

But this strangeness is not all that defies our efforts at
understanding. We need to suspend judgment, but the difficulties of
remaining in suspended judgment are magnified in a way that has been
set forth by an English amateur of philosophy, the late T. E. Hulme,
whose reputation in America incidentally has never matched his deserts.
Authentically, Hulme was a young intellectual giant, and his death in
the Great War was a grievous casualty for contemporary philosophy. But
fragmentary as his writings are, one essay in his posthumous book,
_Speculations_, is said to have done more to clarify the mind of
his generation in England than any other essay in recent years. This
influential paper is called _Humanism and the Religious Attitude_, and
some of its striking ideas are very much to our present purpose. Hulme
opened by boldly declaring that the modern emancipated and instructed
man shrinks from the idea of discontinuities. Such a man, he said, is
wedded to the theory of evolution and the doctrine of progress, two
sisters, and so he abhors the notion of a gap, a real chasm, existing
in the scheme of life. In fine, the modern man takes a principle
of continuity to be, not just a convenience in certain fields of
thought, but an absolute fact. He therefore very frequently denies a
discontinuity between Nature and Man and invariably between Man and the
Absolute.

But the Middle Ages believed in a discontinuity between Man and
absolute values in religion and ethics. They believed, that is to say,
in Original Sin and in placing perfection far above the human plane.
That is what makes those ages so hard for us to comprehend. But in the
Renascence, according to Hulme, this discontinuity was denied: man was
declared not radically bad, but worthy, and things perfect were brought
down and mingled with things on the human plane. Where there had been
the mediæval religious spirit, now appeared the modern humanistic
temper--and the two were utterly different! In its later manifestations
we can understand the latter, but in the Renascence, in men like Manuel
Chrysoloras, Pico della Mirandola, and Leonardo da Vinci, we are
haunted by the enigmatic.

What secrets they had, we cannot probe after now, even if we had
fresh clues. What is incontrovertible is that we inherit that part of
the Renascence which was a revolt against mediævalism. The fifteenth
century founders of Humanism gave the Western World nothing less than
a new _weltanschauung_. What that world-view is and what the Romantic
world-conception is which has sprung up in the last one hundred and
fifty years to challenge it, I shall try to expose in the following
pages. Then in the concluding chapters, after discussing Romanticism
and Humanism, I wish to return to Religion and to consider the radical
difference Hulme alleged to exist between the humanistic temper and the
religious spirit.

                   *       *       *       *       *

When we have a single name to cover related but highly variegated
phenomena, we tend after a time to think of the phenomena as being
uniform because the one name covers them all. So today when an
editorial writer mentions the Humanists of the Renascence, he often
sounds as if he considered all of them to have been turned out on
very much the same pattern. There is some excuse then for a brief
collection of data showing that such was not the case any more than a
rigid uniformity characterizes the Humanists of the twentieth century.
Humanism now and formerly is essentially broad and flexible, and the
reader must divest himself of narrow preconceptions if he hopes to
encompass the subject. For dispelling a contemporary prejudice in favor
of uniformity, a mere glance at the variety of fifteenth and sixteenth
century Humanism will be enough, even though we take in only the best
known facts.

The earliest Humanists appeared in Italy, and principally in Florence
under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. Scholars like Manuel
Chrysoloras and Poggio Bracciolini had delved into the treasures of
ancient Greece and Rome and had risen ecstatically. In 1453 the fall
of Constantinople released the old manuscripts in greater profusion:
the new springs of life welled up gloriously. Men in the most powerful
places like Pope Nicholas V became supporters of the new cult of
_literae humaniores_. But as the New Learning spread, its secular
spirit became more evident, and the Church found itself assaulted
by some Humanists, Lorenzo Valla, for example, who stood boldly for
paganism and asserted the chief good to be pleasure. Others--the
most celebrated is Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494)--sought to blend
Christianity with Platonism. Generally speaking, Italian Humanism
had a pronounced æsthetic character, but we must not therefore think
of these seminal figures in the dreamy fashion of Walter Pater. His
languid essay on Pico is the least fitted thing to do justice to this
man’s power of inspiring others to love the New Learning. You would
never guess from Pater that Pico della Mirandola was reputed to have
had such a powerful mind and memory that he retained perfectly on a
single reading the entire language and meaning of any text he read.
Pico was only thirty-one when he died on the day the French king,
Charles the Eighth, entered Florence, but he had done the work of a
giant. Enthusiasts had carried his influence throughout Europe: he had
fertilized an age.

In every country where it took root, Humanism assumed national
characteristics and applied itself to differing tasks. In Spain, in
France, in England and in Germany each movement was _sui generis_--a
point to remember today when we observe the classical revivals going
on in France, England and the United States. The Action Française,
the work of Belloc and Chesterton, American Humanism have all, in
spite of many important differences, a family resemblance which will
concern us later. But now glancing back at Spain in the Renascence,
it is Cardinal Ximenes (1436?-1517) whom most readers will recall and
his establishment of the University of Alcalá, that university from
which in 1514 was to come the first Greek text of the New Testament
ever printed. A little afterwards came the renowned Polyglot Bible,
made under the direction of the Cardinal and published at his personal
expense.

In France from the beginning Humanism was tinged with Catholic heresy.
There was Jacques Lefevre of Etaples (1455-1537), whose _Commentary on
the Epistles of St. Paul_ in 1512 is regarded as a distinct enunciation
of the doctrine of justification by faith alone. There was Guillaume
Budé (1467-1540), whose studies were almost entirely secular; he was
excelled by no one in his time for scholarship in Greek and Latin.
There was finally François Rabelais (1495?-1555?), the colossal
laughing incarnation of the French humanistic spirit.

In Germany and England the Humanists appear to have struck graver
notes and to have been more concerned with social reform. American
Humanism today bears at least this external resemblance to the
Humanism of William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and Sir Thomas More:
namely, it is greatly concerned with public education. Perhaps
the most typical English Humanist was John Colet (1467?-1519) who
founded St. Paul’s School in London. And American Humanism has an
external resemblance to the Renascence form of Humanism in Germany in
that the contemporary form is likewise primarily a movement inside
the universities. The famous names in Germany are Johann Reuchlin
(1455-1522), Ulrich Von Hutten (1488-1523), and the artist Albrecht
Dürer (1471-1528). Reuchlin, around whom, provoked by his defence of
the Jews, a storm broke that swept him for trial to Rome itself, is
especially noteworthy, for he indicates by his study of Hebrew and
the _Kabbalah_ (a wonderful text to Pico, too) the variety of the
sources of inspiration the Humanists discovered. Ulrich Von Hutten,
militant pamphleteer, sided with the Protestant Reformation, whereas
as is well known many Humanists liked Calvin no better than they liked
obscurantist monks.

With that fact let us close what is clearly not intended to be a
comprehensive survey of Renascence Humanism or an evaluation of it,
but only the presentment of enough data to recall the great complexity
of the early Humanists. All that is designed is to direct attention to
their heterogeneity, to remember that some were against Aristotle and
others favored him, some were for paganism, others for Catholicism, and
others for the Reformation, some were of singular purity, others were
gay worldlings in personal morals. National traits altered the colors
of Humanism, and the places of emphasis, as we have seen, shifted
from country to country, here being found in the arts, there in
education, and there in religious reform. It is a warning to us--this
complexity in historical Humanism--not to expect a sameness, or an
exceedingly close approximation to each other, in the manifestations of
contemporary Humanists. Historically, the humanistic temper was broad:
we shall come to see the wide latitude of a similar temper today.

And yet historians are right in applying one name to all these diverse
men from Petrarch in Italy to Luis Vives in Spain, for all felt
powerfully the attraction of one leading idea. That idea the modern
world has agreed to call “the dignity of man,” and it is customary
to go to the _Oration on the Dignity of Man_ composed by Pico della
Mirandola for the most eloquent phrasing of it. “Then the Supreme Being
decreed that unto Man, on whom He could bestow nought singular, should
belong in common whatsoever had been given to His other creatures.
Therefore He took man, made in His own individual image, and having
placed him in the center of the world, spake to him thus: ‘Neither a
fixed abode, nor a form in thine own likeness, nor any gift peculiar to
thyself alone, have we given thee, O Adam, in order that what abode,
what likeness, what gifts thou shalt choose, may be thine to have and
to possess. The nature allotted to all other creatures, within laws
appointed by ourselves, restrains them. Thou, restrained by no narrow
bonds, according to thy own free will, in whose power I have placed
thee, shalt define thy nature for thyself. I have set thee midmost the
world, that thence thou mightest the more conveniently survey whatever
is in the world. Nor have we made thee, either heavenly or earthly,
mortal or immortal, to the end that thou, being, as it were, thy own
free maker and moulder, shouldst fashion thyself in what form may like
thee best. Thou shalt have power to decline unto the lower or brute
creatures. Thou shalt have power to be reborn unto the higher, or
divine, according to the sentence of thy intellect.’ Thus to Man, at
his birth, the Father gave seeds of all variety and germs of every form
of life.”

Closely observed, this passage yields the following statements. Man
is a being of extraordinary elasticity, for he subsumes the various
kingdoms of nature, animal, vegetable and inorganic. Man is not _given_
stability or a center within himself, but he may acquire them. He can
do so because he has will and potentialities to develop. His dignity
consists in the fact that whereas other creatures must obey their
destiny, he can have an active part in forming his. His way lies
between the brute and the divine: he can sink into the former or he can
be reborn into the latter. To be human is to be midmost. Pico has thus
written--it may be noted here--an epigraph for the New Humanism.

In passing, however, some questions should be raised. Do the New
Humanists, who proclaim afresh the dignity of man, distribute the
weight of their thought and emotion quite as evenly as did Pico? On the
idea of rebirth, for instance, and all that it implies of revolution
in personal psychology, do they not walk lightly or step carefully
away from it? “The higher, or divine”--did it not tend to drop out of
Renascence Humanism in its later stages, and today does it not fail
to attract the best thought or the most passionate endeavors of our
Humanists? Yet all, new and old, stand for man’s dignity and would
agree that Pico della Mirandola has given the _poetic_ formulation of
their faith.

How would their faith be phrased intellectually? Happily, we may
resort to T. E. Hulme for that. “It seems as if,” he says, “no sooner
had Copernicus shown that man was not the center of the universe,
than the philosophers commenced for the first time to prove that he
was. You get expressed explicitly, for the first time (in Pico della
Mirandola for example), this idea of the sufficiency of natural man,
and it has generally been assumed by all philosophers since. It may be
expressed in very different languages and with very different degrees
of profundity, but even Hegel and Condorcet are one from this point of
view.” The self-sufficiency of the natural man--there is a key idea
we must grasp. I object to a precise equating of Hulme’s phrase with
Pico’s eloquence on the dignity of man, but, leaving out the references
to divine order and rebirth, the phrase is fairly close to an
intellectual equivalent. Self-sufficiency is the central idea _we_ have
inherited from the Renascence, and for millions of men it has effaced
the mediæval idea of the insufficiency of the natural man and the need
for Grace to visit him as a basically bad creature. The dignity of man
understood as the self-sufficiency of the natural man, _and by natural
man is meant one not reborn_, is the foundation idea for all modern
Humanism.

In the foregoing sketch I did not mention the man who is inevitably
associated by every one with Renascence Humanism--Desiderius Erasmus.
That was because I wish the reader to observe him now in a particular
connection. Let us look briefly at the crisis in Christendom produced
by the emotional revolt of Martin Luther. Up to 1521 when Luther
shouted, “I should go to Worms were there as many devils there as tiles
upon the roofs,” Erasmus had held a commanding position in Europe.
Europe was then, intellectually and morally, a single community. Latin
was the common language binding together all intellectual contributions
and there was one Church for all the peoples. Erasmus had risen from
his illegitimate birth in Rotterdam, his convent education, and his
straitness of means, to be a friendly counsellor of King and Pope, a
master of Latin style, an illuminated traveler throughout Europe to
exchange light with its best minds. As every one knows, he addressed
himself to the emancipation of the individual, expecting that from the
increase of enlightened individuals would eventually issue religious as
well as social reform. The evil of the time he ascribed to ignorance:
he combated it with genial raillery and suave satire, making always an
appeal for truth, temperate procedure, and tolerance.

Now think of the man who was described by Erasmus in a letter “as a
necessary evil in the corruption of the Church; a medicine, bitter
and drastic, from which sounder health would follow.” Martin Luther’s
career is familiar to every one; how he was severely beaten at
home and at school during his childhood, how he sang for alms at
the University of Erfurt, how his friend was slain at his side by
lightning and the young student’s subsequent terrified flight into an
Augustine monastery, how there he was distinguished by zeal, how he was
disenchanted in his pilgrimage to Rome, how afterwards he was made a
professor of philosophy at the University of Wittenberg, how finally
he opposed Tetzel on the latter’s mission of selling indulgences
and dispensations and wrote out against such practices the famous
ninety-five propositions which led eventually to excommunication; all
these circumstances have been rehearsed hundreds of times in tones of
admiration or detestation for the man who experienced them. Certainly
in contrast to Erasmus’s, Luther’s life seems lurid. And undoubtedly
the conventional Protestant account of the Reformer can stand much
correction, but we need only note what unmistakably stands out in the
characters of the Reformer and the great Humanist.

Carlyle had excellent reason to call Luther the Christian Odin, the
right Thor: the man is impressive by his power in action, by his
great and often harsh energy, by the force and sometimes violence
of his feelings. He is _not_ impressive because of his mind. Let us
hear Luther himself denounce the reason which he grants is indeed of
utility in practical affairs but refuses to call good beyond that
realm. “Reason,” he thundered in his last sermon at Wittenberg near
the close of his life, “is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and
manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the
devil’s appointed whore; a whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought
to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom.” And on
another occasion he said: “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and
one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”
This clearly is not the accent of the Renascence Humanist who objected
to pseudo-intellectualism but never to the idea that there is a right
employment of reason in the highest matters. Nor did the Humanist throw
his weight so vehemently upon the emotions and in particular upon
faith as did Luther. “We can say,” remarks Jacques Maritain, one of
the best Catholic philosophers today, “that Luther is the first great
Romantic”--and despite Luther’s strong religious disposition, Maritain
makes this remark seem plausible.

Erasmus is the antithesis to Luther. He was an active practical man,
but we never think of him as an exponent of energetics; he was mature
and full in his feelings, but not violent or overflowing in turbulence;
he was an able reasoner but not gone mad on metaphysical refinements.
What strikes us about Erasmus is not the greatness or intensity of any
one of his faculties, but the fair degree of harmony in the development
and operations of all of them. He is the typical Humanist because of
his proportionateness. He had the supreme humanist virtue, and that is
mellow commonsense.

The crisis came, and a large part of Europe followed the impassioned
Luther into the Reformation. Erasmus, observing the defects of Luther,
his lack of balance, his lack of reason in the best sense, could not
join his forces, nor could he fight blindly and hotly on the Catholic
side. Neither was the way of mellow commonsense, and he who had been
the prince of the European mind retired helplessly to Basle while the
struggle worked up its violence. He had his major defect too. Not a
weakling in feeling, he yet had not the tremendous force of emotion
required to play an effective part in the great proceedings of history.
He was even able to say in a letter to Archbishop Warham: “As for me, I
have no inclination to risk my life for truth. We have not all strength
for martyrdom; and if trouble come, I shall imitate St. Peter. Popes
and emperors must settle the creeds. If they settle them well, so much
the better; if ill, I shall keep on the safe side.” But no place was
safe for a champion of moderation. “Every goose,” he wrote from Basle,
“now hisses at Erasmus; and it is worse than being stoned, once for
all, like Stephen, or shot with arrows like Sebastian.”

Did Europe take the wrong turning when it ignored the pleas of
Erasmus,--then past sixty, suffering with the stone, grieving over the
execution of his friends, More and Fisher, a beclouded luminary,--and
plunged recklessly into the work of breaking up its moral and
intellectual unity? In retrospective wisdom Goethe thought so. Goethe
regretted that Erasmus and men like him could not have retained the
direction of the mind of Europe: he thought that Luther had thrown back
the intellectual progress of mankind for centuries by appealing to the
passions of the multitude to decide on subjects which ought to have
been left to the learned. That question we do not have to debate here.
Luther for worse or better is one of the makers of our modern world,
and our pressing question is, what is the rôle of mellow commonsense,
the great humanistic virtue, amid the confusions of our age? Should we,
the heirs of those who went with Luther, now turn for light and example
to Erasmus?

Fixing in our minds the several considerations dwelt on in this opening
up of our subject--the absolute distinction between Religion and
Humanism, the intricacy of historical Humanism, the conception of man
as self-sufficient for the unifying of himself, and ripened commonsense
as the prime virtue of Humanism--let us now leap to the present and
examine what sort of society we belong to and how we conceive of the
world and of ourselves.




                                   II

                         A PORTRAIT OF OUR AGE

  _“A highly unified age may offer examples of highly unified
  personalities; but there is likely to exist in the individual of
  today the same confused conflict of tendencies that we see in the
  larger world.”_--Irving Babbitt in _Literature and the American
  College_.


Some Humanist yet to be, inspired by the model of Erasmus’s _In Praise
of Folly_, will write successfully a rival piece on our follies for
the delectation of later ages. The future Erasmus will likely call his
genial dissolvent _In Praise of Modernity_: in it he will conjure up
the Spirit of Progress and constrain her to deliver a panegyric of all
our modern excesses. But the loquacious Spirit of Progress could never
accomplish that task in less space than a book, and a single chapter
is our limit for a broad sketch of our age. It is not for us then to
be indirect and ironical, but to find without loss of time some simple
clear mirror for the reflection of the plain facts of our period. Where
shall such a mirror be found? Nowhere better, it seems to me, than in
the outlook on life of the typical general reader, in the outlook of
such a person as G. R., whom I shall briefly describe.

G. R. in his forties is a respected and successful lawyer. In
his college days he wrote verse: in fact, he was Class Poet at
Commencement, but soon afterwards he lost interest in his courtship of
the Muse. He continued, however, to read rather widely and with the
object of keeping abreast of new developments in thought and art. You
will find his name among the subscribers to the Theatre Guild and on
the mailing lists of our best liberal weeklies.

As I have indicated, G. R. is successful. His comfortable duplex
apartment in the east Seventies of New York city bears witness to his
rise in the world, and out on Long Island he has acquired a remodelled
farmhouse for weekends and summertime. His three sons attend a private
school inspired by the educational ideas of John Dewey. Their father to
a casual acquaintance is not very different from some tens of thousands
of other substantial well-educated American men. Like them he gets a
little bored by the baiting tactics of H. L. Mencken: like them he
enjoys driving a car and playing golf regularly. He still awaits being
put into American fiction with the same distinctness that certain types
he despises, such as the George F. Babbitts, have been limned.

G. R., now that much of his youthful idealism has been found
inappropriate to the facts of his existence, has the strong impression
that we are all floundering about in the present era. And this
impression of his is certainly a generally diffused opinion. In a time
of floundering our first consideration must be to get at the plain
realities of our condition, and that is why I have recourse to G. R.,
on whose mind and feelings they seem most clearly imprinted. He is
susceptible to the main currents of modern life, but not being unduly
specialized, he does not show traces of these currents that are highly
peculiar to himself.

Singularity is the fault of many explanations that are being offered
of why we are floundering and how we may take arms against our sea
of troubles. These explanations come from economists, sociologists,
psychiatrists, political students and other specialists. They often
apply correctly to aspects of our confusion, but, coming from
specialists, they necessarily tend to be recondite. And what they seek
to explain and remedy, namely the easily recognized and very widespread
state of mind and feeling which G. R. epitomizes, is not recondite at
all. Why not then, as I have suggested, make a direct report, involving
no detailed knowledge of economics or social theory, of what G. R.
and the rest of us can all be aware of in terms of daily personal
experience? Surely it seems best when we are floundering to imitate the
Socratic example, to turn to the common mind, to trust in sound sense,
before we repeat as our own the views of some specialized pleader.

What gives us all, G. R. has often inquired, this persistent feeling
of blindly living along without a compass? The first part of the reply
is easy. Involuntarily, we have looked to Society for a compass and
it is patent that Society offers none. It has moulded us, directed
us, tossed us about in its channels: that we know, and we continue to
feel its multitudinous pressures every day. But Society does not show
us, nor has it shown us, any central ideal for its collective self and
for its individual members. Ideals there are in abundance, the ideals
of professions and institutions, but a master ideal ruling over them
there is not. There is competition of ideals, but no sovereign aim
subordinating all other aims in life to itself. “Whirl is king, having
driven out Zeus”--we need not wonder that this has become for us a
meaningful quotation.

If you are a lawyer like G. R., you live up to a code of legal ethics;
if you are a physician, you encounter a standard of good medical
practice; if you are a scientist, you know what the scientific ideal
is: yet you do not in those professions or in other occupations or in
the churches find an intelligent standard of living for all men to
which common assent is given. That implies a great deal more than most
people realize. It is saying that there is no central significance in
the lives we are living. Society tells us of none, and there is only
conflict and confusion on our most important concerns as human beings.
Let G. R. ask of Society: what is the meaning of my existence? what
is the true aim of my existence? Society can only reply: I am not
at present organized about any answers to these questions. You must
fulfil obligations to me, but I acknowledge no obligation to you as an
individual in the matter of spiritual guidance. That, my dear sir, is
your personal outlook. Take your choice, if you like, among a variety
of conflicting opinions, but none of them have my ultimate sanction.

Of course, as G. R. often fails to remember, such a state of affairs
has not always been. It was not so in ancient Palestine, not so in
ancient Egypt, not so in the Middle Ages in Europe. Many times in
history has Society returned to its members a full coherent reply,
right or wrong, to the prime question of the individual, what is the
significance and aim of my existence? It has, first of all, defined the
social duties of the individual, but afterwards it has admitted that
it in turn existed to further the primary aim of the individual. Not
today.

This, the complete failure of contemporary Society to declare Truth
and found itself on it, is clearly the first cause of our sense
of confusion. It is not that we are out of harmony with Society’s
declaration of Truth: it is that we know that Society is rather
helplessly established on Pilate’s question and certainly it washes its
hands of the business. Whether it is possible or desirable for Society
now to give a single answer to the question, why are we alive, is an
entirely different consideration. In bringing out the fact that our
Society does not hold up a standard of Truth, I would not wish to be
understood as meaning that Tibet is superior to America because it is
unified in a religious way we are not. Far from that! What is being
driven at now is simply the ineluctable fact that American Society
does not promote an authoritative conception of spiritual life, and
the result of this, be it good or bad, is competition and confusion of
ideals.

Bad it may be, for if man cannot have the real thing, it is notorious
he will take substitutes. We are held together not by a grand
ideal which is both social and individualistic, but by a number of
pseudo-ideals winning mass-acceptance. What are they? Study our
national behavior, and because it is obviously standardized you will
have no trouble discerning what our brazen images are.

G. R.’s mind, for example, is typical of most of us in that it is
soaked in the dogma of social progress. A very compact statement of
this dogma was once given in the process of criticizing it by Robert
Shafer, one of the New Humanists. “Social progress has become,” he
said, “a species of popular religion of which the chief articles of
belief are: that earthly life is in and for itself a good thing, that
terrestrial happiness is possible for all men, that applied science and
industry have given us the means for abundant enjoyment, and that it is
now the task of social science and government so to order our common
life that toil shall not rest heavily upon any of us and that the means
of enjoyment shall be equally open to all. It is, moreover, generally
believed not only that terrestrial happiness is possible for all men,
but that it is infallibly coming to pass--that is, that social science
and government are bound to succeed in their task.”

That this is really our credo, our actions as well as our words
testify. We say nowadays that we “accept life.” Why we accepted it and
for what we accept it, we do not clearly know; so we say that life in
itself is good. Our actions furthermore make us all out to be believers
in the attainment of widespread terrestrial happiness. Our forefathers
may have dreamed about laying up treasure in heaven, but not we. For we
can point with great faith to a means for abundant enjoyment here and
now: we point to applied science and industry. They are to reduce toil
for us, toil, we are quite sure, being a main cause of unhappiness.
With more leisure we shall be happier, for then we shall be able to
amuse ourselves, as we say, and to enjoy comfort.

But how external all this is! Precisely. For some reason we feel that
the way to improve man is to improve the environment by means of
applied science and the better organization of industry. This, we
think, will increase the sum of happiness. It does not matter whether
we are captains of industry or social rebels: we are both thinking in
terms of changing the environment, and neither of us has even a faint
perception of a simultaneous need to improve man directly by an inward
transformation. That is why I call the doctrine of social progress,
whether it is framed by a member of the Republican party or of the
Socialist, a pseudo-ideal, for it promises only more leisure, not a
use of leisure conducive to human happiness. It does not implant a new
motive in us but inspires the belief that our old motives will receive
fuller scope for action, and by so receiving this larger scope, we
shall be made happy.

So the environment is the focus of our energies. We aim to complete
our conquest of Nature, as we say. But in the process of subduing the
natural world, we have, many people believe, got ourselves organized
into an intolerable plutocracy. This scheme of social organization must
be revised or transformed to give better opportunities for material
enjoyment to all members of society. Then, and only then, so the
meliorists of environment and society assure us, will it be possible
for the individual to work directly at self-improvement.

It is worth repeating the question of the individual under any and
all conditions of human existence. I will do so in the words of
the late Stuart P. Sherman, who as a thoughtful young man went to
Society and books with the question that comes to all thoughtful
young men, “Is life worth living, and for what purpose?” He found,
as we all have found, no grandly framed answer by Society to this
question, no consensus of all intelligent men today, no reply that
appealed at the same time powerfully to the mind and the heart and
was furthermore associated with a practical way of life. Sherman then
gave up the question and, as if under hypnotic suggestion, put forth
another, “Assuming that life is worth living, what are its durable
satisfactions?” Under hypnotic suggestion, I said, for in truth our
relation as individuals to Society should not be described as a
reasonable one but as that of subject to hypnotist. An answer to the
first question, is life worth living, and for what purpose, is not to
be plucked down from our social atmosphere, but our air swarms with the
assumptions that life _is_ worth living, that it is good in and for
itself, that terrestrial happiness is possible. We have not to question
the basis of life but only to discover durable satisfactions.

But Society as hypnotist rules us in this search too. We all become
members, it appears, of the cult of distractions and comfort. No? Look
again at what we actually do, observe our national behavior. Sherman
did just this: he said, in pursuit of his second question, let us
see what Americans spend their money for, since we spend for what we
believe in, since our expenditure is an act of faith. Well, he found
that we as a nation spend heavily for plumbing, for bodily health, for
university education, for automobiles, for organized athletics, and for
advertising and publicity purposes. He put, it is true, an optimistic
and sentimental interpretation on these facts. What his list shows,
however, is that our center of gravity is in the practical life, and
that we are addicts to the pursuit of comfort and pastimes. “I can’t
think,” said Sherman, referring to college sports stadia-building,
“of any more significant architectural phenomenon since the cathedral
building of the Middle Ages”--nor can I, but I am thinking of the
differences in purpose, worship and appeal. We idolize baseball players
and boxers, not saints and artists and sages.

Are not these pithy words of Frank Jewett Mather true? “What is in
America our accepted vision of the good life? For upon it must rest our
art. What do we all agree to (saving always negligible minorities of
‘knockers’)? I fear it would come to these few articles of faith:--to
make a lot of money by fair means; to spend it generously; to be
friendly; to move fast; to die with one’s boots on. This is a credo
which has within its limitations positive merits, and it is by no
means lightly to be decried, but it palpably offers little spiritual
nourishment to the ‘art-artist,’ to quote a recent mayor of New York. A
certain kind of art it feeds admirably. And it naturally gets the art
it feeds--the immaculate bank clerk in campus clothes, the sylph-like
apparition in the porcelain tub, the beach party in the classy car--the
art of the advertisement generally. And this ideal also finds its
authentic expression in the cheap heroics and shallow idealisms of the
moving picture, and the potpourri of dubious music and eloquence over
the radio. These are our representative arts, as sculpture was the
representative art of Greece, or painting of Florence.”

Thus far our search for the plain facts of our present floundering
condition has led us to a paradox: we lack any standard of a good, a
noble life, yet we are amazingly standardized in our lives. Finding
no common vision of what life ought to be conducted for, we fall prey
to exceedingly powerful social suggestions. We behave, first of all,
as if the machinery of existence, the getting of a living, were an
all-important end in itself. And on the margin left free by practical
affairs we look for a good time, we try to be neighborly, we increase
our comfort.

G. R. is entangled in this paradox: at the same time he falls into the
conventional modes of American behavior, he protests against them: he
decries the lack of a common luminous standard for life and yet does
not set himself to search for one. He continues to flounder unhappily.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Some of G. R.’s psychological biography is now relevant. At one time
a large part of his mind was under the control of a certain view of
the world which I shall personify as “the Sunday School boy.” Later
“the Sunday School pupil” at the back of his brain was supplanted by
“the village atheist,” the personification of the world-view G. R. now
holds. Both these characters in his brain are elusive, capable of many
disguises, and below the surface. One must go stealthily to capture
them.

Every human being, even the least philosophic man, is compounded of two
attitudes, an attitude toward the world and an attitude toward himself.
The latter seems more native, less educable, than the former. Of our
picture of ourselves we are almost never aware, and even when in rare
instances we come to realize what the picture is, it seems impossible
to change it. We can only sometimes correct its influence on our
actions and feelings, but we go on habitually conceiving of ourselves
as before. Our attitude toward the world, on the other hand, seems to
derive from education and to be susceptible of change. A world-view
of some sort we must have, but the particular one we receive, often
unconsciously, is, as people say, “wished on us,” usually when we were
children. G. R. illustrates a change in world-conceptions, passing as
he did from the dominance of “the Sunday School pupil” planted early
in his mind to the later dominance of “the village atheist,” installed
there in his twenties. But let us ask some general questions first.

What attitudes toward the world are characteristic of ourselves and our
contemporaries? That is, what are our chief emotional states in regard
to that immense given object, the world? What are our imaginations of
life? An interesting enumeration of some of them was given a few years
ago by a practical psychologist. “There is,” he said, “the ‘Puritan’
picture which represents life as a hard and narrow school. This evokes
the attitude of the nervous schoolboy in the constant presence of the
stern dominie. There is the ‘Pagan’ picture of life as an orgy of Greek
gods inviting men to drink and feast with them. There is the ‘Serious’
view of life which imagines ‘God’ to be struggling against almost
hopeless odds for the redemption of matter. The emotion or attitude
evoked is one of ‘helping poor father.’ There is the ‘Scientific’
view that sees life as an orderly insignificance, all dressed up but
with nowhere to go. There is the ‘Æsthetic’ view in which life is an
artist making and exhibiting works of art, with man as the appreciative
witness. And so on.”

But which of these and other unlisted world-conceptions are most
conspicuous in intelligent American society today? I think they are
the two that G. R. has been victimized by; one asserts the universe to
be purposive and meaningful to man, the other declares the contrary.
The first for convenience we can call the Victorian world-view, and
the second the “Scientific” view. Both when stripped bare seem pretty
absurd, yet who will say that we, even when we recognize the puerile
character of our governing conceptions, do not go on being dominated
by or at least being considerably influenced by absurdities? It is
not easy, any one who has tried will testify, to overcome our early
education.

Consider the Victorian world-view which is implanted in most people
brought up like G. R. in one of the Protestant churches. H. G. Wells
has sought for thirty-five years to shatter it. His procedure has been
to delineate its formation time and again in his novels and then show
how impotent it is to face a really hard blow from circumstance. From
_Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_, for instance, I can quote a very
neat description of the present-day Protestant _Weltanschauung_ as it
is popularly held, but in this form who but a very honest man will see
that something very like it underlies much of his opinions about life?

“God began afresh with me in England,” says Mr. Blettsworthy in
reference to his boyhood, “as the confederated shadow of my uncle, a
dear English gentleman of a God, a super-Blettsworthy in control,
a God of dew and bright frosty mornings, hopeful and unresentful,
whose peculiar festivals were Easter and Christmas and the Harvest
Thanksgiving. He was the God of a world that was right way up, stern
only to smile again, and even through the solemnity and restraint of
Good Friday peeped out my uncle’s assurance that the young gentleman
would come back safe and sound on Sunday. A serious time, of course,
occasion for grave reflections, but meanwhile we had our hot cross
buns....

“He was awfully decent, was God, as his uncle displayed him, and he and
my uncle made me want to be decent too. In a world of ‘All right’ and
‘Right O’ and ‘Right you are, Sir.’...

“My uncle shook back the sleeves of his surplice and leant smiling
and persuasive over the pulpit, making everything clear and mild like
English air, and I felt that if I were given a vision sufficiently
penetrating I should see high above the blue ether another such kindly
Father, instructing his fortunate world.”

Considering the results of the recent research by Dr. Angus Hector
MacLean of Columbia University into the ideas about God of Protestant
children, Mr. Blettsworthy’s account is more than fair toward what
we learn in Sunday School. Furthermore, since most of us never give
any serious thought in later years to Religion, we never learn very
thoroughly what a travesty of the religion of Christ our instruction
has been. We take it naïvely for something like the genuine thing. We
may vary or subtilize the picture, trying to make its anthropomorphism
less crude, but in essentials it remains the same. A fatherly
personage rules the universe and we are his darling concern. At the
back of our minds there is still a “little Sunday School pupil” piping
up in adult’s language that the world runs on a benevolent principle
and that we should therefore be altruistic toward our neighbors in
imitation of the divine principle.

But it is possible for many people by an extension of their reading to
exorcise this “little Sunday School pupil” and to install in his place
what I can only designate as “the village atheist.” Once this oddity
is established there, we react to life according to the dictates of
the “Scientific” imagination of it. In this view there is only one
kind of real knowledge, and that is modern science: there is only one
sanction for knowledge and that is bestowed by the scientist. All
art, all religion, all morals, all philosophy must bow before the
final authority of science. They do not yield us other and different
knowledge of the world, valid in its own way, but they are purely
fictive unless backed up by the arch-critic of all contemporary
culture, the scientist. “This is a scientific age,” says G. R. to his
friends who still continue to speculate about religious matters.

This point, our exclusive reliance on scientific investigation and
thought for the truth about things, needs no stressing. It is one of
the preëminent signs of the modern mind. We do not take seriously the
kind of knowledge offered by art, for instance, and in fact we do not
call it knowledge at all. But it needs to be repeated again, for we
continually forget it, that modern science is carried on by intensely
specialized men whose activities are understandable to only a few
hundreds and who do not popularize their doctrines. In many cases
indeed, the various theories of quantum for one, these activities are
extraordinarily hard to render into the idiom of the world. So it comes
about that the many intelligent men who have adopted the “Scientific”
view are actually just as Victorian as those who retain a sentimental
“religious” life-picture. For their “Scientific” view is forty or
fifty years old, going back to such famous and gifted popularizers
as Huxley and Tyndall. By it they believe that the world is a vast
mechanical concern, thoroughly materialistic, orderly and eventually
knowable, but without purpose, and in this world man is an accidental
form of life. He is alien to the world, and it is indifferent to him.
How old-fashioned this is! Does it not bring to mind the discussions
of some provincial group of tight-minded atheists set on combating
the conventional propaganda of latter-day Christians? Yet, though the
advanced physicist has forsaken this world-conception, it persists in
many persons today who fancy themselves as intellectually “free.”

G. R., for instance, picks up the latest _Nation_ the postman has
brought to his door and there in a feature article of one of our most
intelligent weeklies, he reads: “It (the natural world) is a system if
not with any purpose at least with an order.... Man is a half happy
but, historically considered, quite explicable accident.” Now what is
that but saying over again to G. R. what the Victorian scientist said
in effect to G. R.’s father--the universe is all dressed up but has
no place to go? Yet these sentences are by a professor of philosophy
in a large university who is regarded as _au courant_ with the latest
developments in thought. By this you may see how beneath a considerable
surface complexity in the modern mind there may lie major assumptions
of an astonishing naïveté. There is indeed a “village atheist” in many
of us who controls our emotional state toward the world, and we shall
have a great deal of trouble to dislodge him.

The truth is that neither the Victorian world-outlook, nor the
“Scientific,” nor the “Pagan,” nor the “Æsthetic,” nor any other of
the world-outlooks subscribed to in the present time by minorities
inspires a creative emotion toward life. But of that, a creative
world-conception and its corresponding attitude, more is to be said in
a later chapter.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps we shall make a better case for ourselves if we examine our
chief current conceptions of man. After all, nothing obviously is
closer to us than our organisms: we may find that the world at large
is a receding object for speculation, but who can be oblivious of
the intimate bonds existing between what we call our “ego” and the
manifestations of our personality? It is a truism (which we are always
trying to forget) that we are attached by self-love to the strange
being that bears our name, and it is furthermore known that self-love
falls into a certain number of stock forms or attitudes toward oneself.
Into these we need not go now: they fall more logically into the
psychologist’s province. But it is pertinent for us to take up certain
large conceptions of man which have a great hold on us, and deeply
color our self-attitudes.

To begin with, a very large party, probably the most numerous in fact,
thinks of man as existing wholly within Nature. By this its members
mean that man contains naught of the supernatural: on the contrary, his
psychology belongs as much to Nature as does his physiology. He rises
out of Nature, but does not transcend it. There is no special law for
man as distinct from law for thing: man is utterly material: the old
doctrine of the soul’s immortality is a delusion. Browning has sung for
them:

  Let us not always say,
  “Spite of this flesh today
  I strove, made head, gained ground, upon the whole!”
  As the bird wings and sings,
  Let us cry, “All good things
  Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul!”

But this party which as a whole denies the existence of any radical
discontinuity between Nature and Man is itself divided into a
sentimental and a scientific faction, and both have representatives
in the schools of psychology. The Freudian psycho-analyst will do
very well as a spokesman for the sentimental naturalists, and for the
scientific naturalists the Behaviorist is perfectly ready to offer his
conclusions.

It happens that G. R. belongs to the former persuasion: he has been
twice psycho-analysed and the stock he takes in the process can be
gauged by the considerable expense he has put himself to. He is
convinced that we have a kind of bastard soul, the “unconscious” or
as most people prefer to call it, the subconscious, which is a basic
conception in the teachings of the Freudians. This bastard soul is
dynamic, not merely the residue of the impressions which we have
either forgotten or received unawares, and it works its will deviously
upon us. The important thing is to become aware of its modes of
operating and to keep them from being perverted by false education
and false social notions. Repressions and suppressions are, on the
whole, mischievous, though sometimes necessary. The mind furthermore
is suspect. It fools us by rationalizations: it oftentimes aids in
unhealthy sublimations.

G. R. therefore seeks to free his impulses and to follow them
spontaneously. He has turned anti-intellectual and tries to establish
himself upon his instincts and his feelings without interference from
his mind. He trusts in his “unconscious” which he believes to be
innocent and naturally good in the old sense of Rousseau. That is why
we may term G. R. a sentimental naturalist, for the mark of the breed
is its faith in the essential goodness of man and its contention that
the environment alone is to blame for the spoiling of man.

At the present time, G. R. is hostile to the scientific naturalist,
not on the fundamental ground that man is entirely within Nature,
but because the Behaviorist drives out sentiment about the inherent
goodness of man. To the Behaviorist man is a doomed creature. He is
the product solely of biology and sociology, will-less, an automaton,
purely a response-mechanism. His consciousness is doubted, though his
complexity is granted. But it is the complexity of a machine. G. R.
finds it difficult to refute the Behaviorist’s laboratory experiments,
but his “mystic” faith in the “unconscious” insulates him against the
terrible conclusions of Dr. Watson and his co-workers.

Nor does he like the phrase, “the indignity of man,” which the New
Humanists use for the conceptions of psycho-analyst and Behaviorist
alike.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It may seem to some readers that I have overdrawn this portrait of
a typical child of our age. But we must not mistake complexity of
thinking for thought itself. An elaborate superstructure may rest upon
a few naïve assumptions. I have tried to get below the superstructure
and there I find a man who leads a standardized life due to the
manipulations of Society, who either returns to his mother’s knee when
he looks at the world or else regurgitates the stale conclusions of
Victorian materialism, who conceives of himself as being naturally good
if only he can return to the state of Nature or else he conceives of
himself as purely mechanical--and it is impossible to exaggerate either
this man’s ignorance of what life may mean or his lack of creative
emotion toward the world and himself. His leaders, for all I can see,
only subtilize his blindness, but they are stricken in the same way.
It is true, one can confidently affirm of our epoch at least, that as
A. N. Whitehead observes, “The mentality of an epoch springs from the
view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections
of the communities in question.” Our leaders and this poor stock figure
G. R. live in the same climate of opinion: they have shaped him, it is
obvious, but what is not so immediately clear is that they have also
sprung from him.

This at any rate is incontestable. Our age is not rich in individuality
as the Renascence was. The Renascence type--the master of many arts,
the all-round or universal man--does not flourish with us. And the
reason? Once we peer well inside our psychology, it is apparent that
we are aimless and uncreative, and that, I think, is sufficient
explanation.

The New Humanist is against the psychology of modernity. He stands for
another kind of man which I shall try to portray in the next chapter.




                                  III

                            THE MAN OF POISE

  _“The virtue that results from a right cultivation of one’s
  humanity, in other words from moderate and decorous living, is
  poise. Perfect poise is no doubt impossible: not even Sophocles
  succeeded in seeing life steadily and seeing it whole. The
  difference is none the less marked between the man who is moving
  toward poise and the man who is moving away from it.”_--Irving
  Babbitt in _Humanism and America_.


One turns to dictionaries sometimes to find out what sense certain
terms have had for large bodies of men. There are always several
definitions of Humanism that have been widely accepted, including one
that covers the meaning of the word as used by American Humanists.
No follower of Irving Babbitt could take exception, for example, to
the definition in _Webster’s New International Dictionary_, where it
is stated that Humanism is “a system, mode, or attitude of thought
or action centering upon distinctively human interests or ideals,
especially as contrasted with naturalistic or religious interests.”
A more interesting definition occurs in the _Century Dictionary_: “A
system of thinking in which man, his interests and development, are
made central and dominant. Its tendency is to exalt the cultural and
practical rather than the scientific and speculative, and to encourage
a spirit of revolt against existing opinions.” In the preceding
chapter we glanced at some of the nowadays deeply entrenched opinions
supporting the “indignity of man” conception which American Humanism
seeks to oust, and we may add here that the New Humanist is fighting
against the raising of the scientific discipline above the literary
discipline. All of us for many years have read such sentences as these:
“The field of literature is notoriously the home of lost causes.
Almost any antique idea, no matter how rusty and fly-blown, can pass
as legitimate currency in literary circles.... Literary men, as a
class, are surprisingly ill-informed about anything but literature....
The exclusively literary discipline is one of the most narrowing
and least productive of all intellectual disciplines”: and we have
wondered under the spell of their confidence if we too should not be a
little contemptuous of the offerings of literature to the modern man,
rejoicing in them perhaps with a kind of secret shame, while we reserve
our serious attention for the latest researches in anthropology and
Gestalt psychology. Only, sotto voce, have we observed this alleged
reluctance on the part of literary men today to embrace new scientific
speculations? On the contrary, they seem, most of them, to be much
more prone than genuine scientists to accept the latest guesses as
“discoveries.” The New Humanist like the genuine scientist has not much
applauded the “guess-sciences,” such as psycho-analysis, for from his
training he has formed the stubborn conviction that the great literary
masters were _not_ naïve men but quite the opposite, and divined more
about the essential constitution of human nature than modern science
has yet been able to disentangle. The New Humanist is even prepared
to maintain in the teeth of the multitude shouting of “progress” that
perhaps modern culture is a retrogression, and we need not think that
the growth of a scientific mentality is a compensation for the decline
of commonsense, the weakening of feeling, the decay of action as an
art. In fact, the contention of numerous scientific apologists for the
inferiority of the literary discipline to the discipline of science
is a comparatively old story to the New Humanist, reminding him of
Arnold’s reply to Huxley. I have it in mind soon to introduce Arnold
as a model Humanist, one whose life and works may show us better than
any abstract discourse what contemporary Humanism aspires to be, but
it will be interesting first to look at his address on _Literature and
Science_.

In that discourse Arnold marked his agreement with Huxley up to a
certain point. “There is, therefore, really no question,” he said,
“between Professor Huxley and me as to whether knowing the great
results of the modern scientific study of nature is not required as
a part of our culture, as well as knowing the products of literature
and art.” But it is such a statement which the rabid scientific
propagandist ignores when he informs his audience that Humanism is
anti-science in its tendency. It is not so. The New Humanist objects
not to science, but to the exaggerated prestige science has acquired
in modern civilization. “Interesting, indeed, these results of science
are,” he will say with Arnold, “important they are, and we should all
be acquainted with them. But what I now wish you to mark is, that we
are still, when they are propounded to us and we receive them, we
are still in the sphere of intellect and knowledge.” Science is taken
by the New Humanist as a great arm of the human spirit, a magnificent
intellectual weapon forged for ascertaining the _what-ness_ of things,
but still only as one of the great arms of the spirit along with
philosophy and art and religion; and now we can bring forward Arnold’s
justification for the literary discipline, the reason for his claim
that “letters will call out their (mankind’s) being at more points,
will make them live more” than an education carried on mainly in the
natural sciences.

It is because literature is not confined to the sphere of intellect
and knowledge, but is concerned with the relationship between that
sphere and the other spheres of a man’s life, the sphere of beauty,
the sphere of conduct. It is like dancing which has a regard to the
total harmonious action of the body as contrasted with exercises like
weight-lifting designed solely to increase strength. The scientific
discipline is concerned with knowing, the literary with connecting
knowing with feeling and doing. Truth is the prize of the scientist;
truth, beauty and goodness the prizes of the man of letters. Thus, it
may be said that the function of the literary culture is to sum up all
other existent cultures, to gather them in and sweeten their language,
and finally to relate their findings to the total being of man.

Arnold beautifully exemplified this relating power gained from the
study of letters when he declared that “we shall find, as a matter of
experience, if we know the best that has been thought and uttered in
the world, we shall find that the art and poetry and eloquence of
men who lived, perhaps, long ago, who had the most limited natural
knowledge, who had the most erroneous conceptions about many important
matters, we shall find that this art, and poetry, and eloquence, have
in fact not only the power of refreshing and delighting us, they
have also the power,--such is the strength and worth, in essentials,
of their author’s criticism of life,--they have a fortifying, and
elevating, and quickening, and suggestive power, capable of wonderfully
helping us to relate the results of modern science to our need for
conduct, our need for beauty. Homer’s conceptions of the physical
universe were, I imagine, grotesque; but really, under the shock of
hearing from modern science that ‘the world is not subordinated to
man’s use, and that man is not the cynosure of things terrestrial,’
I could, for my own part, desire no better comfort than Homer’s line
which I quoted just now, ‘for an enduring heart have the destinies
appointed to the children of men.’”

Let that stand as all the defence required for the _utility_ of the
literary classics in a scientific age. But it is a temptation to add
further words of explanation, especially when one has at one’s elbow
persuasive quotations from Arnold on other aspects of the discussion.
Who has ever better stated the social office of literature than Arnold
in _Culture and Anarchy_ when he says: “The great men of culture are
those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for
carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge,
the best ideas of their time; who have labored to divest knowledge
of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional,
exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of
the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the _best_ knowledge
and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and
light.”

Literary culture then relates one power of our being to another, and it
humanizes knowledge by putting it into the clear, supple and beautiful
idiom of the world. By doing the second, it makes our knowledge ready
for a third operation: it makes it ready for trial by the commonsense
of mankind. What errors are revealed when an imposing jargon is at
last made over into transparent writing, and what truths recommend
themselves with overwhelming authority when at last they are spoken in
the world’s tongue! To be passed by the commonsense of mankind is the
highest seal of truth we can know. The friends of literary culture are
right in their main contentions for literature’s great value. But let
me here repeat there is naught in American Humanism _as a doctrine and
an attitude_ that denies the restricted utility of modern science to
the modern man in his struggle for firm ground on which to plant his
feet in this rocking age. At another place we shall have to examine
the conclusions of individual American Humanists concerning scientific
doctrines. But now, in the endeavor to visualize Humanism in practice,
let us look more closely at the figure of Matthew Arnold, who was so
eminent an exponent of the literary life.

The first point I wish to make about Arnold is an unfashionable one
just now, and therefore not easy for many people to appreciate.
Arnold’s life, externally considered, was typically middle-class
and ordinary. The son of the famous Dr. Thomas Arnold of Rugby, he
went up to Oxford, where he distinguished himself by his verse, and
afterwards faced the common problem of making a living. This problem
was complicated, as is the common case, by his desire to marry, and
he solved it in the ordinary way by taking a position that was not
altogether congenial, was in fact irksome, but did enable him to wed
Miss Lucy Wightman. Thereafter, he raised a family, and became a
member, though a critical one, of the great political and religious
institutions of his country. He traveled, he lectured, and he meditated
and wrote on matters of wide public interest. There were no exciting
physical adventures in his life, no grand crimes of passion, no
flaunting colors, no great upheavals of circumstance: in short, his was
a representative life and, to an unsympathetic eye, a commonplace one.
It was at the other pole from _la vie bohême_.

There are certain advantages not often reckoned in leading a life of
conformity, such as Arnold’s outwardly appears to be. But to forestall
misunderstanding of my point, I must say that I personally see no
virtue in conformity itself, nor in non-conformity by itself. The
first is worthless when set up as an ideal, and since the second is
only a turning inside out of something worthless (the old illustration
of the resemblance between the hollow and the bump comes to mind), it
too is of no value: non-conformity for the sake of non-conformity is
stupid. No; virtue resides all in the aim and spirit with which one
conforms or rebels: the important question is _how_ one lives within
the conventions or outside the pale. It is purpose, not pattern, that
is radical.

But it so happens--and this is among the certain advantages referred
to--that a man who leads a life typical of the millions of middle
class mankind is automatically insured of a greater breadth of normal
experience than is the bohemian flouter of institutions. The former
experiences the common lot of man: a sense of family responsibility,
touch with the main life of his community, actions within institutions
greater than himself, and so on. The latter often becomes a kind
of specialist in eccentric experience. He may be, and often is, of
extraordinary gifts, but subtraction must be made for limitation of his
experience, for specialization in certain directions, for eccentric
psychology. Dazzled by what is unique in him, we often fail to count
the price he has paid, his missing the broadening and steadying effects
of ordinary experience.

Breadth and steadiness--these are essential for the attainment of
poise, and these requisites to a certain extent are mechanically
conferred on one who lives in accord with the large customs of his
society. In looking at Arnold then, let us forget that he was a
Victorian, since that label is a flag to arouse our prejudices and stop
our thinking, but let us concentrate on these qualities of breadth and
steadiness and see how his life in its very regularity and typicality
fed his purpose and attitude, for in them we shall find his genius. It
is not conventionality or unconventionality, I repeat, that is worth
a tuppence, but that counts which one can extract from living. Arnold
wished for proportionateness in character and in following the middle
class pattern of life, he was intelligently using it for his purpose. I
do not advance this as a general proposition but in his case it was so.

_How_ did Arnold conduct his life? We may view him successively as a
thinker, a man of sentiment, and a man of practice, and in each aspect
we shall see him hold himself with an admirable poise. First, his
mind. Every one grants that it was an exceptionally balanced mind, and
the reasons for its fine state of balance are chiefly two: the scope
of Arnold’s reading and the purposiveness of his studies. For what
makes for an unsteady mind? Insufficient knowledge which permits one
to go off half-cocked, as people say; insufficient knowledge, or as
Arnold liked to put it, provincialism. Arnold was constantly on guard
against provincialism both of time and place. In a famous passage he
opposed them both: “Let us conceive of the whole group of civilized
nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great
confederation, bound to a joint action and working towards a common
result; a confederation whose members have a due knowledge both of
the past, out of which they all proceed, and of one another.” But he
not only immersed himself in the Occidental mind: he also, as is not
common with Western thinkers, absorbed a great deal of the learning of
the Orient. In other words, by a diligence that is extraordinary when
it is remembered that Arnold by occupation was not a man of letters
but an inspector of schools, he carried in his head a knowledge
of world literature written over a period of twenty-five hundred
years that served him as a marvellous balancing pole in dealing with
the transitional problems of his day as they presented themselves
in politics, religion, education, social morphology and the art of
literature. Breadth of reading was the first aid for him in winning
intellectual balance: the second was purposiveness. For there have
been many omnivorous readers who have merely, after all, passed the
time because of their aimlessness. James Russell Lowell is a pathetic
instance. But Arnold’s duties shortened his hours for reading, and he
felt he had to read, when he was free to do so, to some purpose. There
is a Latin maxim--“_Semper aliquid certi proponendum est_” (always some
certain end must be kept in view)--which we know he impressed upon
himself. His essays are evidence that he was successful in working the
maxim into his blood.

Still the mind is only the third part of a man, and mental poise
can exist alongside of emotional debility and incompetence in daily
affairs. Not so with Arnold, however, who impresses one almost as
much by his emotional poise and his practical level-headedness as by
the stability of his mind. He was a poet and is secure of a place
in the history of English poetry, and this is proof positive of his
strength of feeling, for time permits no man weak in feeling to stay
long in the halls of Poesy. More than that, his sentiments, beginning
with the personal and lyric, tended to pass into reflective emotion:
that is, they broadened, became generalized, impersonal, universal,
linked with reflections on the common destiny of mankind. This
represents a maturing of his emotional life. Now just as provincialism
and aimlessness destroy one’s mental balance, so immaturity and the
inability to feel beyond one’s intimate concerns upset one’s emotional
balance. But Arnold ripened, leaving the petty and childish behind
him. He learned emotionally to stand on his own, to practice a sturdy
independence. His sentiments were adult. Mark too his efforts to
round out his emotional life. By disposition addicted to melancholy
meditativeness, he sought--many times with success--to cultivate
gaiety, to support a deeply serious view with as much charm and
lightness as were fitting.

Now regard him in his practical aspect. We have seen that Arnold
did not evade what the middle class man regards as his duties and
responsibilities. He was a man among men, asking for no petting from
society, meeting honestly by his own efforts the obligations of his
lot. He never underestimated as do many modern artists the importance
of conduct. Conduct, he said, was three-quarters of life, and as such
man’s most serious concern. “As for living, our servants can do that
for us,” said Villiers de l’Isle Adam, but Arnold never echoed such
a sentiment. On the contrary, he not only faced daily affairs with
dignity and courage, observing all varieties of men, bearing his own
part, but he stressed the practical side of his writing. He wished
for the best ideas to _prevail_ and he took infinite pains to make
them persuasive and lucid and graceful so that they would irresistibly
invade men’s minds and prevail. In this he is in extreme contrast with
the “ivory tower” attitude which isolates art and thought from events.
The practical man wishes to make a mark in the world’s business, and
this decidedly Arnold aimed to do. The aim saved him from æsthetic
trifling and metaphysical toying. It filled out the third side of his
being.

Now perhaps we may see what is involved in the ideal of
proportionateness: a threefold activity to clear the mind, to ripen and
extend the feelings, to develop a practical attitude. The man of poise
cannot neglect any one of these on peril of remaining lop-sided. Bias
is his enemy, and against it he needs the full operation of a strong
centralizing spirit in himself. Such a spirit, pervading his conduct,
pervading his poetry, pervading his mind, Arnold possessed, and it is
conveyed in his remark that “we are not here to have facilities found
us for doing the work we like, but to make them.” It is the spirit of
a man who faces the natural difficulties of life with a strong will to
overcome them.

                   *       *       *       *       *

We are trying to arrive at a life-like picture of the man of poise as
American Humanism conceives him. I have chosen Arnold as a working
model of the quality, and an imitable one as well. Naturally American
Humanists vary in their estimates of Arnold, and one or two--notably
G. R. Elliott--are rather harsh in their strictures, but the majority
appear to find in him the prime humanistic virtues, and so it seems
fair to make the use I have of his example. It is obvious, I hope, that
I do not imagine I am passing all of Arnold in review, and furthermore
I confess that were I not looking for a man of poise in the recent
Humanist tradition, I should never have summed Arnold up under that
phrase. Poise to my mind is not the capital thing about him. Beyond
the degree of most men, Arnold was a truth-seeker; and poise was to
him auxiliary to the pursuit of truth. Auxiliary but necessary. For
without moderating one’s powerful prejudices, without attaining a fine
balance and tact, without tempering one virtue by its opposite virtue,
Arnold was positive that one could not see things as they are. Things,
reality, are many-sided, and without the cultivation of many-sidedness
in ourselves, how can we hope to approach them fairly? These words
from the preface to _Essays in Criticism: First Series_ set forth the
right employment of poise in the great endeavor to see life steadily
and whole. “To try and approach truth on one side after another, not
to strive or cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side,
with violence and self-will,--it is only thus, it seems to me, that
mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we
shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline. He
who will do nothing but fight impetuously towards her on his own, one,
favorite, particular line, is inevitably destined to run his head into
the folds of the black robe in which she is wrapped.”

A singular fact ought to be patent from all that has been said: the
man of poise is not a type, but an ideal toward which all types of men
may strive. Nature makes types, but she does not make human beings of
poise. She makes will-less Hamlets who, faced by a necessity to act,
simply speculate and speculate, until events force them at last to
act; she makes Byrons who, on the other hand, try to force events:
they act impetuously, but they reflect like children, as Goethe said
of Byron. But Nature does not make the balanced, well-proportioned
individual. Arnold worked on himself: he worked to perfect himself
beyond the maternal care of Nature.

Thus we see that the man of poise, the Humanist ideal, is in reality
a spiritual athlete. His balance and proportionateness are not gifts,
such as a vein of poetic emotion or a capacity for intellectual
analysis may be, but they are deliberately sought and maintained. It
requires constant effort, constant activity, for him to be what he
is. Modernity accepts no such ideal as the New Humanist upholds. It
wants greater Hamlets, greater Byrons, greater Calibans: it wants the
accentuation of types and the growth of specialism: in short, it wishes
to go with the grain of Nature. But the New Humanist proclaims that
the truly man-like part is to work against the grain of Nature. “It is
this backward motion toward the source,” says Robert Frost, the poet,
“against the stream, that most we see ourselves in.”




                                   IV

                      THE NEW BATTLE OF THE BOOKS

  _“Our ‘intellectual atmosphere,’ however, is now rapidly changing,
  is becoming charged with new interests. More and more persons,
  oppressed with the stale skepticism of the post-war period, are
  beginning to grow skeptical of that skepticism, and are looking
  for a new set of controlling ideas capable of restoring value to
  human existence. Certain forces are making for order and for new
  objectives.... One of these forces is known as ‘humanism,’ which
  is rapidly becoming a word to conjure with.”_--Norman Foerster in
  _Humanism and America_.


Before I can treat the grounds of the New Humanist doctrine, I must
turn historian and present, briefly at least, correct information about
the origin and course of the movement which acknowledges Irving Babbitt
and Paul Elmer More as masters. I am forced to this by the amount of
misinformation and crude misrepresentation already widely disseminated
concerning More and Babbitt and their colleagues. How this spreading
of erroneous information, which now stands in our view, has come about
is easily explained. American Humanism has had a quiet development for
thirty-five years, making its way chiefly in academic channels and in
scholarly books. Not until very recently, and then principally because
of the spirited campaign waged in behalf of Babbitt and More by the
_Bookman_, has this body of thought made any strong infiltration into
popular literary journalism.

Now the roving eye of the literary journalist-at-large seldom glances
at anything growing up in the universities, and it missed altogether
the New Humanist movement until it emerged in force in the winter
of 1929-1930. Then, to his surprise, the literary journalist found
himself expected by his public to say something about Humanism. He was
totally unprepared to do so, but experience has given him a cynical
attitude toward his public. He is the lazy tutor who does not study
one lesson in advance of his pupil, but he has learned how to divert
the mind of his charge, should he be asked an inconvenient question.
He then makes a great play on non-essentials, he bluffs it out until
the hour is over, knowing well that his pupil will soon forget both the
question and the mystifying answer. To send the public off on false
scents was the shift, not always adopted dishonestly, of the unprepared
literary journalist when Humanism became no longer an avoidable
topic. For literary journalists, it seems, are never pen-tied because
of ignorance: no difficulty was experienced in promptly delivering
opinions having no bearing on the facts, lacking logic, missing the
real issues,--wrong opinions, in short. Myths about the New Humanism
were quickly generated, giving delight to connoisseurs in the absurd,
but decidedly misleading to gentleman-readers wishing simply for plain
light on the new trend. However, to dispel these myths, which obstruct
thought, nothing more is needed than some bald information.

It is dramatic contrast, in view of the international attention his
teachings have won, to begin with a picture of Irving Babbitt[1] in his
classroom, working obscurely, as befits an underminer of an age’s basic
assumptions, at his task of moulding the mind of a generation. Among
the many professional writers and brilliant teachers who have come out
from his courses--one may mention as a catholic selection T. S. Eliot,
Van Wyck Brooks, Walter Lippmann, Norman Foerster, Gilbert Seldes,
Newton Arvin--was the late Stuart P. Sherman, who has left us a roughly
drawn description of his early master’s wealth of mind and strength for
destruction and construction.

“I knew Professor Babbitt as a graduate teacher in the History of
Literary Criticism and in his Rousseau and His Influence. At that time
he had very small classes--meeting around a table. He came in with a
bag bursting full of books, and took out a handful of notes which he
arranged around him. Began to sway in his chair, then leaped out upon
one of them, and poured a barrage of criticism upon some doctrine or
some line of poetry,--‘to cast o’er erring words and deeds a heavenly
show’--Buddha, Aristotle, Plato, Horace, Dante, Montaigne, Pascal,
Milton, etc.--etc.

“He deluged you with wisdom of the world; his thoughts were unpacked
and poured out so fast you couldn’t keep up with them. You didn’t
know what he was talking about, but you felt that he was extremely in
earnest, that it was tremendously important, that some time it would
count; that he was uttering dogmatically things that cut into your
beliefs, disposed derisively of what you adored, driving you into a
reconstruction of your entire intellectual system. He was at you day
after day like a battering ram, knocking down your illusions. He was
building up a system of ideas.

“You never felt for a moment that he was a pedagogue, teaching pupils.
You felt that he was a Coleridge, a Carlyle, a Buddha, pouring out the
full-stuffed cornucopia of the world upon your head. You were no longer
in the elementary class. You were with a man who was seeking through
literature for illustrations of his philosophy of life. You were
dealing with questions on the answer to which the welfare of nations
and civilization depended. He himself seemed to know the right answer
and was building a thoroughfare of ideas from the Greeks to our own day.

“You went out of the room laden down with general ideas that he had
made seem tremendously important.... He related for you a multitude of
separate and apparently disconnected tendencies to the great central
currents of thought. You carried away also a sense of the need for
immense reading. He had given you theses about literature, about life,
which you would spend a lifetime in verifying.”

A battering ram knocking down illusions ... myself, I like to think
of Irving Babbitt as a dogmatist of the Dr. Johnson type, burly in
his judgments, masculine in his sentiments, downright in manner, an
unyielding hater of sophistry, a stalwart upholder of commonsense.
What is remarkable, in view of the extent of his system, is that he
should have laid out at the age of thirty the ground-plan for his whole
impressive structure of ideas. “The characteristic thought of Irving
Babbitt,” as Norman Foerster observes, “was already adumbrated in 1895
in an address at the University of Wisconsin on ‘The Rational Study of
the Classics,’ published two years later in the _Atlantic Monthly_ and
in 1908 included in his book on _Literature and the American College_.”
Since then he has steadily developed his original thesis: confident
of his foundations, he has put up a heavy, many-fronted, turreted
fortress for the modern mind to retire into and survey across a moat of
commonsense the giddy wheelings of the “modernists,” those, that is,
who make a cult of change and take change to be “progress.”

But what were Babbitt’s sources? His mind is powerfully assimilative
and very muscular in its operations. He has applied it to world
literature, east and west, ancient and modern, and naturally therefore
his sources are varied. He is more Aristotelian than Platonic, however,
and he takes more from Confucius than from Buddha. He feels himself
at home with the rugged conservatism of Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke,
and he stands with Matthew Arnold as an urger of more Hellenism in
Anglo-Saxon culture.

His more immediate stimulators in American literature seem to be
Emerson and Charles Eliot Norton. Emerson as a volatile literary force
arose from many elements, one of them assuredly humanistic, and from
this fortifying element in Emerson Babbitt has drawn much aid to his
own spirit. It was the element which Emerson expressed in the didactic
poem quoted on the flyleaf of Babbitt’s first book, _Literature and the
American College_, and which no American Humanist since has apparently
been able to refrain from quoting some place or other in his writings.
I also succumb to the poem’s epigrammatic appeal and concision.

  There are two laws discrete
  Not reconciled,--
  Law for man, and law for thing;
  The last builds town and fleet,
  But it runs wild,
  And doth the man unking.

In respect to that man of truly mellow culture, Charles Eliot Norton,
friend of Carlyle, co-editor with Lowell of the _North American
Review_, professor of fine arts at Harvard, and celebrated Dantean
scholar and translator, to him Babbitt acknowledged his indebtedness in
the preface to _Literature and the American College_, written in 1907
shortly before Norton’s death.[2] “Those who,” Babbitt wrote, “during
the past generation have felt the need of a more humane scholarship are
indebted to him, many for direct aid and encouragement, and all for an
example.”

By 1910 Babbitt had found strong fellowship in the direction his mind
was working, notably the fellowship of Paul Elmer More. More had
been born in St. Louis, Missouri, a year earlier than Babbitt: he
graduated from Washington University in 1887 and took his master’s
degree from Harvard in 1893, the same date as Babbitt. In the college
year of 1894-1895 the two men were thrown together again, More as an
instructor in Sanskrit at Harvard and Babbitt as an instructor in the
French department. In the intervening year Babbitt had taught in the
Romance Languages department of Williams College and there he had met
a young instructor, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., who was destined to
figure importantly in the growth of American Humanism. But not for
long were Babbitt and More to work together as university colleagues,
for from Harvard More went to Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed two
years teaching Sanskrit and classical literature. Then in 1901, after
his retreat to Shelburne, New Hampshire, for meditation, he joined
the staff of the _Independent_ as literary editor. Mather too gave
up academic work at this time and entered journalism as an editorial
writer for the New York _Evening Post_: he was for various terms in
the future to be its art critic as well as assistant editor of the
_Nation_ and American editor for the _Burlington Magazine_. More’s
future included the literary editorship of the New York _Evening Post_
from 1903 to 1909, and the editorship of the _Nation_, then the supreme
organ of American scholarship, from 1909 to 1914. In the meantime he
had begun to write his well known series of literary studies, the
_Shelburne Essays_.

More and Babbitt complement each other extraordinarily. If Babbitt
inclines to Aristotle, More inclines to Plato. If Babbitt writes on
literary trends, using particular authors only in so far as they
illustrate trends, More studies the individual genius, somewhat in
the sinuous fashion of Sainte-Beuve, and then points out the trend.
Babbitt, speaking roughly, is a critic of culture, More a critic of
authors. Their area of agreement is very wide: they unite against
Romanticism, agree substantially on Humanism, and diverge only when it
comes to the kind of interest and the warmth of interest they feel in
Religion. In short, More is more religious by temperament than Babbitt.

                   *       *       *       *       *

After his retirement from the _Nation_ in 1914, More devoted himself
to an enterprise of scholarship and criticism which well deserves
an adjective to be used with care, an adjective which has several
times been applied to it by men who do not write lightly, I mean
the adjective, monumental; and for the wonderful completion of this
enterprise he has occasionally been mentioned as a candidate for the
Nobel Prize in literature. The undertaking was _The Greek Tradition_
in five volumes, an impressive and inspiring account of the relation
of Platonic and Hellenistic thought to early Christian thought; it is
a work, incidentally, that has not yet even begun to be digested by
American criticism.

There are those who believe More to be the best literary critic in
the history of American literature. I think that is so: he appears to
me an American counterpart to Cardinal Newman in his grasp at once of
the ways of men, the subtle arguments of materialism, and reasoned
belief in the spiritual life. But be that as it may, he is today the
_doyen_ of American critics, and as such a cause for national pride.
Agree or not with their teachings, we must all feel pride that America
presents to Europe as, respectively, her _doyen_ of critics and as
her master-spokesman for classical literary ideas two men of the
resolution, deep scholarship, elevated thought, ripeness of judgment
and wide sweep of purpose which characterize Paul Elmer More and Irving
Babbitt.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Possibly the future of American Humanism will be dramatic. Already
it has enough adherents of a polemical turn of mind, sharp
controversialists like Robert Shafer and Seward Collins, to make things
hot for their natural opponents, the Liberals, and the Liberals are
certainly not going to relinquish their leadership of present-day
American literature and thought before resorting to every device of
literary dispute. Perhaps in the next decade Humanist and Liberal will
pamphleteer against each other with all the zest and pungency and
fierceness of the verbal warfare waged between Tories and Whigs in
eighteenth century England. But up till now the New Humanists have been
mainly perfecting their viewpoint, gathering strength, and preparing
for action.

I distinguish three generations of New Humanists and divide, very
arbitrarily, the rise of American Humanism thus far into three brief
periods, the first from 1900 to 1917, when Stuart P. Sherman’s _On
Contemporary Literature_ appeared, the second from 1917 to the
publication of Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_ in 1924, and the
third from 1924 to the present.

From 1900 to 1917 the first generation of New Humanists was teaching
and writing out of its maturity. Babbitt was publishing his views on
educational reform, on modern confusion in the arts, and on literary
criticism. More was brilliantly editing the _Nation_ and composing
volume after volume of carefully thought out and gracefully written
studies of literature. Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., was making a name as
an exacting but sympathetic critic of the fine arts, a calling of which
in America he is now the dean. In passing, it may be noted that Mather
was a pioneer in the work of advancing the books of Herman Melville
to a front place in our literature. At the University of Nebraska,
Prosser Hall Frye and Sherlock Bronson Gass were teaching, thinking and
writing. Perhaps most prominent of all was the late W. C. Brownell, of
whom more than mere mention is required.

Brownell, More and Babbitt--the names often formed a triad, and yet
Brownell never held explicitly the general ideas worked out by More
and Babbitt. The bond was sympathetic, but intellectually not clearly
established. I once ventured to call Brownell a Victorian standpatter.
Perhaps this was too harsh. Objection was taken by a critic who
nevertheless declared that Brownell’s “senses never felt a concrete
situation freshly, unmediated by the anticipation of habit. His mind,
acute in distinguishing things, rarely attained any ideas and never
a general philosophy. And his feeling for life seldom drove him to
remove the blinkers of convention.” It will be seen that these defects
lead to standpattism, however, and Brownell resisted change and stood
in general for the Mid-Victorian temper and standards. His mind and
tastes were typically nineteenth century: he did not have the freedom
of the centuries so arduously won by Babbitt and More. But he was
loosely united to them in the low opinion he entertained of many forms
of modernism and in his insistence on critical standards.

Knowledge of the work these men--Brownell, Gass, Frye, Mather, More and
Babbitt--were performing in the early years of this century relieves
a little the oppressive feeling of dearth we have in regarding that
time in America. In _Their Day in Court_, an out-of-print book by a
forgotten impressionistic critic, Percival Pollard, we may get an
excellent picture of this brief period of literary dearth. Pollard
fought against the dry rot of the professors, the genteelness of
editors like Hamilton Wright Mabie, the commercialism of most that
passed for criticism, and the overwhelming mediocrity of the period’s
books. Rather sadly he said in 1908: “It does not seem to me as if
there were, on our side of the Atlantic, any longer such a thing as the
art of letters; it is merely a trade.” In that same year a gifted young
poet, Ezra Pound, fled our country, and later in his poem, _L’Homme
Moyen Sensuel_, expressed his disgust for the quietism of the times
more violently than even Pollard did.

  Still I’d respect you if you could bury
  Mabie, and Lyman Abbott and George Woodberry,
  For minds so wholly founded upon quotations
  Are not the best of pulse for infant nations.

So it was up to about 1912. There were certain giants looming over
the scene--Howells and Henry James and Mark Twain--but they had no
great animating effect upon it. James seemed too remote, Howells too
selective and genteel in his realism, and Mark Twain too given to
compromises. According to Pollard, the one American of literary genius
then alive was almost completely neglected. He meant Ambrose Bierce.

Pollard and Pound were right. The period in spite of James, Howells
and Mark Twain and, if you will, Bierce, was low in creative vitality,
and the bulk of its criticism was feeble,--Huneker flashing the cheap
jewelry of his style, Mabie composing his “White Lists” of books:
both extremists can without a second’s reluctance be dispensed with.
But looking back, now that the transient criticism of 1900-1912 has
been swept away, we see that there were more independent critics
at work than Pollard recognized and that they were doing extremely
hard thinking amidst the plague of mediocre books. They continued to
elaborate their thought as American literature entered upon a new and
more fertile phase between 1912 and 1915.

Some of the multiplying signs of the coming of a new order were the
founding of _Poetry_ magazine in Chicago, the establishment of the _New
Republic_, the beginnings of the _Little Review_ and _Others_, the
blooming of Greenwich Village, and the generative center for fresh art
impulses set up at “291,” the art gallery of Alfred Stieglitz. Soon a
new group of authors began winning laurels: Masters, Dreiser, Mencken,
Brooks, Bourne, were on the rise. The ferment worked faster ... little
theatres ... the _Masses_ and the _Liberator_ ... Coady’s _Soil_
magazine ... the _Seven Arts_ ... the _Nation_ under Villard ... the
_Dial_ as a libertarian fortnightly. American participation in the war
only made the new ventures bubble more furiously: they flourished, when
not strangled by official censorship, on dissent. Finally, in 1919 came
Waldo Frank’s _Our America_, the distillation of this time of ferment
from 1912.

Frank in this book took no cognisance, as his confrère Van Wyck Brooks
did, of the critical activities of the first generation of the New
Humanists. Nor did he pause to examine the work of Stuart P. Sherman,
the forerunner of the second generation of American Humanists. But
Sherman in 1917 had brought about the first spectacular duel between
the New Humanists and the naturalists represented by H. L. Mencken.
Sherman had been trained at Harvard under Babbitt: as a contributor
to the _Nation_, he had been groomed by Paul Elmer More. In 1917 he
published a book, _On Contemporary Literature_, in which he played the
part of the younger spokesman for classicism.

It is the best of Sherman’s books. Nine-tenths of his work is mediocre,
but in _On Contemporary Literature_ he surpassed himself. His insights
into such authors as Synge, George Moore, Anatole France, H. G. Wells,
Theodore Dreiser were sharp, deep and excruciating to those who admired
them. Of George Moore, he wrote: “Purely intellectual initiative he
had none: but he has been swiftly responsive to every new influence
in art and literature. All his life he has lurked in the purlieus of
schools and insinuated himself into movements, solicitating, like
the barren Calpurnia, the fructifying touch of some fleet clear eyed
runner ... Mr. Moore does not think: he muses.” Of Anatole France, he
observed: “He loves above all else the luxury of philosophic despair
... The skepticism of M. France is largely a literary pose. It is his
justification for unlimited intellectual self-indulgence.” And here
is an excellent working distinction between realism and naturalism in
fiction: “Both are representations of the life of man in contemporary
or nearly contemporary society, and both are presumably composed of
materials within the experience and observation of the author. But
the realistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of human
conduct. If the theory of human conduct is adequate, the representation
constitutes an addition to literature and to social history. A
naturalistic novel is a representation based upon a theory of animal
behavior. Since a theory of animal behavior can never be an adequate
basis for a representation of the life of man in contemporary society,
such a representation is an artistic blunder.”

Little wonder such thrusts as these produced an outcry, and there is
now no doubt that Sherman was vilified on the strength of this acute
book. We may look forward to the sober correction of the partisan
denunciations he called forth. In the meantime let us hear a Humanist
version of Sherman’s duel with Mencken, as an offset to the much better
known story given out by the sympathizers with Mencken. I quote from
Seward Collins writing in the _Bookman_:

“Until after the war the main force of his (Sherman’s) work lay in
the brilliant application of the point of view he had learned from
Irving Babbitt and Paul E. More, carrying into the enemy’s camp
their warfare against naturalism and deliquescent romanticism. With
the publication of _On Contemporary Literature_ at the end of 1917 he
became the recognized spokesman for tradition and authority against the
‘liberating’ and ‘innovating’ efforts of the latest generation. The
effectiveness of his campaign may be judged from the shrieks, hoots and
curses which greeted his book in the radical magazines and in some of
the newspapers, notably in Chicago, where the new men occupied most of
the reviewing media. The Chicago outburst, characterized by unanimous,
simultaneous and extreme virulence, makes very amusing reading in
retrospect. Several records in this kind of criticism must have been
hung up during the onslaught, which went on for weeks.

“Participants in the Chicago attack have explained that factors aside
from the book itself entered into the reception of _On Contemporary
Literature_. The cause most frequently given is the review of Mencken’s
_A Book of Prejudices_ which Sherman published in the _Nation_ of
November 29, 1917--just a month before his own book appeared--under the
title _Beautifying American Literature_. The review might well explain
any amount of rage among Mencken’s friends and disciples: it was one of
the most completely devastating slatings of a book and of a man ever
penned....

“This encounter was really an historic occasion in American letters
and thought. On the one side, for a number of years Irving Babbitt and
Paul E. More had brought supreme qualities of intellect, scholarship,
and literary skill to the perennial task of restating the case for
tradition in literature, morals, politics and philosophy. The result
was a series of powerful books providing almost a new basis for the
traditionalist cause, but one related at every point to the earlier
American traditionalists, to the main stream of European culture, and
to the great classical traditions of both the West and the East. In
Stuart Sherman these men had found a young disciple and champion whose
gifts, while not qualifying him to advance their work along all of the
extremely broad front on which they were engaged, yet enabled him to
make immediate and effective application of their views in their own
country and among the writers of the day.

“On the other side, the disruptive, anti-authoritarian,
anti-traditional tendencies, which America had for the most part
resisted even when in the ’nineties they took England by storm, after
their successful tour of the continent, had from the beginning of the
century been gathering strength. As the century got into its teens, the
new forces found a vigorous, infectious spokesman in H. L. Mencken,
who had spent his youth soaking up all the prevalent forms of the
heretical doctrines--Huxleyan agnosticism and science-worship, Pater’s
æstheticism with trimmings by Wilde, the hedonism and routine mockery
of Anatole France, the inverted sentimentality of Nietzsche, Ibsen, and
the other shrunken giants of fifty years ago, and so on. To all this
Mencken had added a Bohemian individualism from various sources (given
aristocratic airs by talk of Federalism, the civilized minorities,
etc.), a smart up-to-dateness, and a talent for the violent buffoonery
of American provincial journalism. To many this rich mixture proved
irresistible.

“These two antagonistic tendencies developed side by side for years
without clashing: the new men were restricted to shady magazines,
fleeting-tendency journals, and infrequent books which remained outside
channels of discussion. But in Mencken had arrived a personality
who could not be overlooked. And in Sherman the traditionalists had
a representative so sensitive to the forceful figures of his day
that he must have his say on them. The two men, who had been born a
few months apart, had entered upon literary criticism within a few
weeks of each other in 1908, and now at the end of 1917 published
almost simultaneously their first significant books. The result was
the episode which we have recounted. The old had met the new in open
conflict, and the fight was on.”

I take this episode which Collins has described so vividly to mark the
end of the first period of American Humanism. This, as stated before,
is quite arbitrary, but it is a temporary convenience. For in this
first brush Sherman and his friends suffered defeat. Not defeat on
intellectual grounds, but defeat when it came to making their ideas
and standards prevail. _On Contemporary Literature_ was given a black
name as a puritan castigation of modern writers which even today
keeps it out of the hands of young people. Sherman himself underwent
a metamorphosis. He coarsened his style and vulgarized his thought
and within a few years was on the side of the very Liberals he had
once scorned. From the Liberal point of view, Sherman had advanced,
escaping from a rigid system of ideas, to a more genial play of his
sympathies and a greater openness of mind. From the Humanist viewpoint,
he disintegrated. Losing him, the New Humanists lost their one champion
who at this time was willing to employ his energies cutting off the
latest heads sprouted by the hydra of naturalism. The Naturalists, the
Liberals, the Romanticists, were to have things their own way for the
next few years.

1920 was their year of jubilation, for in this year their spirit of
revolt, hitherto nourished in the intelligentsia and among the artists,
suddenly became popular. It was spread abroad by the success of such
realistic novels as Sinclair Lewis’s _Main Street_, Floyd Dell’s _Moon
Calf_, and Zona Gale’s _Miss Lulu Bett_. Eugene O’Neill conquered
Broadway at last with _Beyond the Horizon_, and in the same season
_Emperor Jones_ was produced in Greenwich Village. The _Dial_ became
an advanced monthly of the arts, the _Freeman_ launched itself on a
four years’ voyage of philosophic anarchism, Art Young conducted his
short-lived _Good Morning_, contributing his laughter to dissolve the
capitalist régime. Such books as _The American Credo_ by Mencken and
Nathan, _Poor White_ by Sherwood Anderson, _The Brass Check_ by Upton
Sinclair, _The Ordeal of Mark Twain_ by Van Wyck Brooks, and _The Dark
Mother_ by Waldo Frank made the year seem splendid with revolt, with
energy, with novelty. The Red ’Twenties had dawned. In this tumult the
New Humanists were lost from sight, and mouse-valiant book reviewers in
droves echoed the words of J. E. Spingarn without bothering to read
the men they were condemning. “These men,” said Spingarn of Babbitt
and More in the Freeman Pamphlet entitled _On American Books_, “have
the learning and culture of the best academic critics of France; but
what avails their petulant erudition if it serves no other purpose than
to whine over the irrevocable past and to sneer at the aspirations of
modern men?” Spingarn was floating with the new current and it seemed
to carry all the old barriers before it.

Practically every one in the new movement agreed that the objects
of attack were Puritanism and industrialism. In fiction, realism
and naturalism came in as the fashion. Psycho-analysis attained its
greatest vogue. Lyricism, emotionalism, were valued chiefly, and
intellectualism suffered a decline in esteem. The star of the new
America was heralded rising out of the Middle West. An American
renascence has begun, the prophets declared, and now we shall create
an indigenous culture. Expansion was in the air. Who would pay heed in
all this excitement to Babbitt and More who stressed the opposite mood,
concentration?

They, however, continued to swim against the swirling current
of Romanticism. More was at work on his magnum opus, _The Greek
Tradition_, and in 1918, the year after Sherman’s _On Contemporary
Literature_ had been blackened, Babbitt published his remarkable study
of the use and misuse of the imagination, _Rousseau and Romanticism_.
They were putting the last touches on their system of ideas, and
had the satisfaction while so engaged of beholding a small second
generation of New Humanists begin to come forward: Stanley P. Chase
at Bowdoin College, G. R. Elliott at Amherst, Robert Shafer at the
University of Cincinnati, and Norman Foerster at the University of
North Carolina. In 1924 appeared Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_,
a study of modern political thought which conducted the author at its
conclusion back in a great circle to his starting point in his first
book, the need for collegiate reform in our study of the humanities. We
may say, for convenience’ sake, that _Democracy and Leadership_ closed
the second period of American Humanism. The New Humanism’s edifice of
ideas was now virtually complete.

In the next period, from 1924 to the present, the humanistic party
gathered adherents and momentum as a distinct counter-movement to the
still triumphant naturalistic movement. T. S. Eliot, who has made no
secret of his partial indebtedness to Babbitt, was instrumental in
interesting various young critics in the ideas of More and Babbitt.
Two brief notes in _The Sacred Wood_ had the effect, even early in
the Red ’Twenties, of raising a doubt about the correctness of the
current adverse judgments on Babbitt and More delivered by men like
Spingarn, Mencken and Brooks. Later articles by Eliot and the opening
of the pages of his review, _The Criterion_, to discussions of the
New Humanism did much to make Humanism a chief topic of distinguished
conversation. The _Forum_ also undertook in a series of articles pro
and con to advance Humanism to the forefront of the intellectual world.
A third generation of New Humanists--prominent among them being Alan
Reynolds Thompson and Harry Hayden Clark--was formed: the _Hound and
Horn_, an organ of _les jeunes_ edited by a former student of Babbitt,
for a time flirted with the ideas of the counter-movement. Finally, in
1929 under the slashing leadership of Seward Collins the _Bookman_ took
up arms for the cause of More and Babbitt.

Meantime, the main naturalistic movement in American letters was
slackening. In increasing numbers people were growing weary of
Menckenism. Two popular books in 1929 showed the hour was striking
for fresh ideas: one, Krutch’s _The Modern Temper_, was a confession
of impotence and gloom over the loss of the romantic hopes that had
been so dazzling in 1920, the other, Lippmann’s _A Preface to Morals_,
recognized the need for a new discipline in living and made effort
towards a formulation of one. Two prominent magazines of artistic
revolt suspended and each gave a curiously significant reason. The
_Dial_ said that “although a magazine can get along somehow without
readers it cannot exist without contributors.” And Margaret Anderson
said in the farewell number of the _Little Review_: “As this number
will show, even the artist doesn’t know what he is talking about. And I
can no longer go on publishing a magazine in which no one really knows
what he is talking about.” Verily, times were changing! We come to
1930, and hand-to-hand fighting at last between the New Humanists and
the Liberals or Naturalists or Romantics, as you choose to call them.

The occasion was the publication of the symposium, _Humanism and
America_, edited by Norman Foerster with the assistance of P.
H. Houston, G. R. Elliott and Robert Shafer. It provoked a new
“battle of the books” but thus far no Swift has arisen to lash the
gross stupidities committed by the majority of the modernists. The
controversy in general was a repetition on a much wider scale of the
unscrupulous Chicago onslaught on Sherman’s book in 1917. Issues
were obscured, prejudice appealed to, meanings distorted: literary
careerists rushed in, trying to outshout each other, and the low
estate of criticism in America became painfully clear. I need only
cite the testimony of an observer not on the Humanist side who was
finally driven to write: “I confess to impatience with the row about
Humanism, because in the course of it, in the past half year or so, I
have seen the powerful principles laid down by Irving Babbitt, being
confused and cheapened.” The words are by Gilbert Seldes. Finally, an
opposition symposium, _The Critique of Humanism_, was hastily organized
and hurriedly despatched to the book shops three months after _Humanism
and America_ saw the light on the counters. With what seem to me the
cogent objections to the standpoint of Babbitt and More advanced in
_The Critique of Humanism_, I shall deal by and by.

But shall we let the unsavoury episode just narrated pass without
recording the full harshness of judgment it deserves? I conceive it
the strict duty of a historian and lover of letters to say that the
cause of Romanticism is not so poor that it needs to be defended by
poor reasons and mob-appeals and that there is in fact a high standard
of argument already set in this controversy by the writings of the
English critics, Hugh l’Anson Fausset and J. Middleton Murry, _against_
the classicists’ position. One’s first desire is to see, regardless
of one’s party sympathies, the steady advancement, the heightening of
literary excellence, of all schools--let us have everything at its
highest point--and it is just this desire for _quality_ of controversy
that was ungratified by the outpourings of the American modernists.
Really, they should have done better! I can only say that if we imagine
that criticism has a deity, as love was once fabled to have, then we
shall have to invent two forms of it, even as the Greeks conceived of
Aphrodite Uranus and Aphrodite Pandemos. We shall have to say that
there is presiding over the labors of critics Polite Criticism and
Vulgar Criticism, and that it was Vulgar Criticism which ruled most of
the pens attempting to deface the New Humanism in the spring of 1930.
No fierce Tory with the genius of Swift arose, it is true, to wither
the present-day worshippers of Vulgar Criticism, but we can turn back
to Swift himself for the necessary scathing words.

“Meanwhile, Momus, fearing the worst, and calling to mind an ancient
prophecy, which bore no very good face to his children the Moderns
bent his flight to the region of a malignant deity, called criticism.
She dwelt on the top of a snowy mountain in Nova Zembla; there Momus
found her extended in her den, upon the spoils of numberless volumes,
half devoured. At her right hand sat Ignorance, her father and husband,
blind with age; at her left, Pride, her mother, dressing her up in
the scraps of paper herself had torn. There was Opinion, her sister,
light of foot, hoodwinked, and headstrong, yet giddy, and perpetually
turning. About her played her children, Noise and Impudence, Dulness
and Vanity, Positiveness, Pedantry, and Ill-manners. The goddess
herself had claws like a cat; her head, and ears, and voice, resembled
those of an ass; her teeth fallen out before, her eyes turned inward,
as if she looked only upon herself; her diet was the overflowing of her
own gall; her spleen was so large, as to stand prominent, like a dug
of the first rate; nor wanted excrescencies in form of teats, at which
a crew of ugly monsters were greedily sucking; and, what is wonderful
to conceive, the bulk of spleen increased faster than the sucking
could diminish it. ‘Goddess,’ said Momus, ‘can you sit idly here while
our devout worshippers, the Moderns, are this minute entering into a
cruel battle, and perhaps now lying under the swords of their enemies?
Who, then, hereafter will ever sacrifice, or build altars, to our
divinities?’”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Unlike the quarrels that were the occasion for Swift’s writing _The
Battle of the Books_, the new “battle of the books” caused by the
advent of American Humanism involves issues that far transcend the
ordinary interests of scholars and professional literary men. So far as
the present controversy is literary, it is pretty much the case of the
warm dispute in Æsop’s Fable between the Bee and the Spider as to which
was the better artist. This fable Swift rewrote in _The Battle of the
Books_ and then made Æsop draw out its application in words that cover
almost equally well the respective arguments of the Modernists and the
New Humanist today, for it will be seen that the modernistic spider
makes a cult of originality and tends toward science-worship while the
humanistic bee objects to the kind and impermanency of the modernist’s
materials and extols wide ranging and “sweetness and light.”

“The disputants,” Swift has Æsop say, “have admirably managed the
dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to
be said on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument
_pro_ and _con_. It is but to adjust the reasonings of both to the
present quarrel, then to compare and apply the labors and fruits of
each, as the bee has learnedly deduced them, and we shall find the
conclusion fall plain and close upon the Moderns and us. For, pray,
gentlemen, was ever anything so modern as the spider in his air, his
turns, and his paradoxes? He argues in behalf of you his brethren and
himself, with many boastings of his native stock and great genius;
that he spins and spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any
obligation or assistance from without. Then he displays to you his
great skill in architecture, and improvement in the mathematics. To all
this the bee, as an advocate, retained by us the Ancients, thinks fit
to answer--that, if one may judge of the great genius or inventions
of the Moderns by what they have produced, you will hardly have
countenance to bear you out, in boasting of either. Erect your schemes
with as much method and skill as you please; yet if the materials be
nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern
brains) the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb, the duration
of which, like that of other spiders’ webs, may be imputed to their
being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner. For anything else of
genuine that the Moderns may pretend to, I cannot recollect; unless it
be a large vein of wrangling and satire, much of a nature and substance
with the spider’s poison; which, however they pretend to spit wholly
out of themselves, is improved by the same arts, by feeding upon the
insects and vermin of the age. As for us the Ancients, we are content,
with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own beyond our wings and
our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language. For the
rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite labor and search,
and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is, that,
instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives
with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of
things, which are sweetness and light.”

More quickly than anything else, and that is why I have invoked it, the
potent breath of Swift ought to lift the battle-smoke that now obscures
the literary quarrel between the New Humanist and the ultra-modernist
and permit us to see the essentials of the doctrine of More and
Babbitt. What are they? What importance and meaning and utility have
they for the lay reader not afraid to look _everywhere_ for guidance in
facing the alternatives that life is so ingenious in forcing constantly
upon man? I propose now to consider the very center of humanist
teaching, the duality of human consciousness so uncompromisingly
affirmed by the two leaders.




                                   V

                      THE CLASSICAL REVIVAL ABROAD

  _“People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy
  as something heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so
  perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. It was sanity: and to be sane
  is more dramatic than to be mad. It was the equilibrium of a man
  behind madly rushing horses, seeming to stoop this way and to sway
  that, yet in every attitude having the grace of statuary and the
  accuracy of arithmetic.... It is easy to be a madman: it is easy
  to be a heretic. It is always easy to let the age have its head;
  the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be
  a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob.”_--G. K. Chesterton in
  _Orthodoxy_.


However, before fulfilling the promise made at the close of the
preceding chapter, it seems well to take a cursory view of the
classical revival in England and France. Recent experience has shown
that American critics with only two or three exceptions cannot be
trusted to situate a comprehensive movement like the New Humanism in
its proper climate of sentiment, opinion and idea. On the contrary,
many of them regarded or affected to regard the New Humanist group as
a quaint local phenomenon sprung up miraculously without atmosphere
and totally unrelated to similar groups anywhere else. This delusion
embraced by the majority of the opponents of American Humanism
badly distorted their sense of perspective: to the broad challenge
of the followers of More and Babbitt they replied with singularly
inappropriate defiances. The plain truth is that a stiff parochial
frame of mind simply cannot make much sense of the application of
Babbitt’s criticism to current American literature and life. The
obvious remedy is wider travel in the countries of the mind.

More and Babbitt are spokesmen for classicism on the ground that
it contains a wisdom superior to modernism. They uphold the longer
traditions of the human race against the newly formed traditions of
the last fifty, seventy-five or one hundred years. They believe in a
profound vital conservatism, not in the contemporaneous versions of
radicalism. They are, when one reviews European history in a large
way, orthodox, not heterodox. In England and France we shall find
distinguished writers who like Babbitt and More are classicists,
traditionalists, conservative, orthodox, men who oppose with all
their might and intellect the drift of modern civilization and seek
to renew our sense of time-tested standards. In this chapter I intend
merely to point out some of these men, to quote from each of those
designated only a few characteristic words on the modern crisis: that
will be enough to show on the one hand the many sides and the diversity
that living classicists everywhere manifest, and on the other hand
their unanimity on the errors of modernity and the need for standards
and discipline will be enough to destroy the silly notion that the
classical party in America is engaged in a unique reaction. I cannot
here attempt rounded estimates, however brief, of the individuals
mentioned, but I shall try to transfer to the intellectual situation
in America, which is our center of interest, several useful hints they
offer. We must expect to find conservative force in England to be _sui
generis_, and likewise in France, but for that and many other reasons
an acquaintance with them, even though but a bowing one, makes for
that suppleness of mind necessary to comprehend the home movement. We
may even rid ourselves of senseless fears of certain words: the reader
whose object is the freeing of his mind must soon overcome any horror
he feels for the word, “revolutionary,” or for the word, “reactionary.”
The free mind goes everywhere and tries to judge without prejudice the
thing itself and not the name.

One thing we shall be immediately struck by is that it is purely an
accident that in America the conservative attitude should temporarily
be expressing itself almost entirely in the form of ideas and
criticism, for this is, of course, by no means an inevitable outlet
for the conservative temper. Tories, as witness Swift, can be great
artists: art was never the monopoly of the Whigs, but has always been
common to men of all hues of conviction. American Humanism therefore
does not inculcate an uncreative attitude. It cannot, it is true,
make creative ability in the arts where such ability does not exist,
but neither, for that matter, can such a theory as self-expression
produce creative ability. The Humanist attitude is a check on bad
art: self-expression, unfortunately, is a release of bad art. On this
score, which is to be preferred? No; it is a mere happenstance that
at present Humanism’s representatives are of a critical turn, men of
ideas rather than men of pronounced sensibility. Hence, their relative
unpopularity. They advocate ideas, and ideas--it is a truism--always
must fight against more inertia than emotions. An initial prejudice
exists against ideas as such, whereas some one’s strong feelings
directly affect us either to sympathy or to resistance: emotions convey
themselves almost as swiftly as actions do, but ideas, being quite
the weakest element in psychology, have a much harder time travelling
from person to person. Nor does one need to enlarge on the enmity felt
toward criticism itself, the disparagement constantly cast on this
necessary function of literary life, a habit of dispraise which, it
should be noted, grew up in the romantic period. The New Humanists are
mostly critics, and because of that many people conclude that their
doctrine, their conservatism, is sterile in the practice of the arts.
It does not follow, for it is the person who is or is not an artist,
not the doctrine which is responsible. Look abroad and you will see how
fertile in the arts of fiction and verse a classical reaction may be,
and no doubt yet will be in our own country.

Here is a gallery of brief portraits of anti-romantic writers in
England.

Philip S. Richards:--

One of the youngest English critics and probably the closest in spirit
and theory to American Humanism. In the pages of the famous review,
_The Nineteenth Century and After_, he has expounded very faithfully
to the English reader the ideas of Babbitt and More. No one has better
described the precise effect of Babbitt’s main principle on those who
come to accept it. “Only by following it up in all its ramifications,
as Babbitt works it out in his books with a wealth of illustrative
evidence, is it possible to realize its amazing fruitfulness, and its
universal applicability to the intellectual and moral problems which
we have inherited from the nineteenth century. _When once its import
is fairly grasped, its influence is like that of a new principle of
classification in one of the descriptive sciences. New and natural
lines of cleavage or affiliation at once appear, introducing order
and interdependence into a mass of chaotic or misrelated facts._ A
simple criterion is put into the reader’s hands, which he cannot help
using, even though it mean the abandonment of secret loyalties and the
dethronement of long-cherished ideals.... We may regard him (Babbitt)
as a pathologist who traces the romantic malady from its origin in
Rousseau, through its mild and chronic stage in Wordsworth, to its
acute and delirious phases in Tolstoy or the expressionist drama.” (The
italics are mine.)

T. S. Eliot:--

The prestige of this erstwhile American citizen among the younger
generation has caused the same generation to be particularly attentive
to his views on American Humanism. Eliot’s poems, so exquisite in
workmanship, subtle in perception, almost Dantean in the clarity and
power of the individual image, contain the poignant suffering of a
sensibility tortured by the ugliness, crassness and lowness of modern
civilization. His earlier criticism dealt accurately with the effects
of literary masterpieces upon his sensibility. In recent years he has
broadened his basis as a critic and introduced a religious note into
his poetry. His general point of view he now describes “as classicist
in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion,”
and wisely adds, “I am quite aware that the first term is completely
vague, and easily lends itself to clap-trap; I am aware that the second
term is at present without definition, and easily lends itself to what
is almost worse than clap-trap, I mean temperate conservatism; the
third term does not rest with me to define.”

Eliot holds that we should come “to the conclusion that the humanistic
point of view is auxiliary to and dependent upon the religious point
of view. For us, religion is of course Christianity; and Christianity
implies, I think, the conception of the Church. It would be not only
interesting but invaluable if Professor Babbitt, with his learning, his
great ability, his influence, and his interest in the most important
questions of the time, could reach this point.” But on the other
hand Eliot has written an essay “to call attention to the danger of
the other extreme: the danger, a very real one, of _religion without
humanism_.”

Herbert Read:--

A close co-worker with T. S. Eliot in the field of literary criticism,
this author is severe in his condemnation of the flatness of modern
life. “For Froissart,” Read declares, “glory was the measure of all
things, the crown of all virtues. For us it has become something remote
and elusive; even something romantic and literary. We have lost the
sense of glory because we have lost the habit of faith. We neither
love deeply enough, nor feel deeply enough, nor think deeply enough,
to enjoy life’s most impressive sanction.” Read follows the path of
T. E. Hulme, whose _Speculations_ he edited, back to pre-Renascence
philosophy: he has disciplined himself on the pages of the _Summa
Theologica_ and has caught fire from the complex splendor of the Middle
Ages.

A champion of orthodoxy, he is critical of any particular form of
orthodoxy, such as American Humanism, as his essay in the _Criterion_
on _Humanism and the Absolute_ reveals. This paper discussing the
views of Norman Foerster and Julien Benda was sub-titled _The Texts
of a Debate_, and I hope it is not lost ink to refer again to the
higher standard of controversy observed in England by writers who deal
with the New Humanists and to regret that our critics of Foerster’s
_American Criticism_ were, as a rule, unable to reach up to the mark
set by Read. In the essay mentioned, Read maintains that unlike Julien
Benda, “Mr. Foerster, on behalf of the New Humanists, nowhere makes
it clear that he accepts this absolute severance of things divine and
things human. He admits that ‘the ethical will’ is ‘a power above
the ordinary self, an impersonal reality in which all men may share
despite the diversity of personal temperament, and toward which their
attitude must be one of subjection.’ But he also says that ‘the value
of supernatural intuition must be tested by the intellect,’ and
rejects any formal theology on these grounds. But the greatest of all
formal theologies, that of St. Thomas Aquinas, was precisely such a
‘testing’ of supernatural intuition by the intellect or reason. If
religious intuitions must be submitted to rational inspection, then
surely the result is a theology. Mr. Foerster cannot have it both ways:
to _hesitate_ ‘to pass beyond’ experimental knowledge to dogmatic
affirmation is merely to sit on the fence: once admit the mediation of
reason and you are involved in the necessity of dogma.”

This point, the reader will recognize, is connected with Hulme’s
argument for radical discontinuities in the universe, which was
injected into our first chapter and to which I pledged myself to return.

Wyndham Lewis:--

He has dramatized himself as an Ishmaelite in Occidental culture, the
sworn and ferocious enemy of “Time-cults” and “Time-philosophies,”
of which Bergsonism is a typical specimen. Before the Great War, he
was a radical painter and associated with Ezra Pound to propagate an
artistic cult baptized Vorticism. Since the War he has turned social
philosopher, and possibly may be a first rate Tory mind in the making.
I say in the making, for up to the present Lewis is still a chaotic
personality, given to extravagances, and not yet sufficiently trained
in metaphysics to cope with A. N. Whitehead, S. Alexander, and some
of his other _bêtes noires_. But the New Humanist can second him in
many of his theses. He and Lewis are at one in their scorn for the
contemporary cult of the child and the primitive and in their hostility
to the modern feminization of man.

In his book, _The Art of Being Ruled_, Lewis maintains--I cannot better
Montgomery Belgion’s succinct restatement in the _Bookman_--that
“what happens in a ‘liberal democracy’ is that rule by the few is not
banished, but concealed. And it is this concealment which is, Mr.
Lewis holds, responsible for so many of our contemporary ills, the
greatest of these being, perhaps, mass suggestion. In a democracy the
actual rulers are not the best rulers, but those who are most cunning
in obtaining power, and, furthermore, since their rule has to be
secret, it becomes necessary for these rulers to hypnotize the ruled
into acquiescence, to discredit the old standards of existence through
the agency of Science, and to organize the populace, to mechanize it,
to pump it full of a destructive fatalism while it is kept imagining
itself its own master.” Therefore let us have again an authority that
is an open authority. On Lewis’s analysis of pseudo-liberty the New
Humanist will agree even more heartily. “The present decay of Europe,”
I quote from Belgion again, “Mr. Lewis ascribes directly to the notion
of freedom. Since people cannot be free and in any case do not want to
be free, but only to be irresponsible, the notion of freedom has been
thought to be the notion of irresponsibility, and, thus misunderstood,
has been steadily weakening Europe. To this wasteful and disorganizing
notion of irresponsibility he opposes the notion of ‘working together’
under a central control, which, he points out, gives the comfort and
strength of solidarity.”

Hilaire Belloc:--

As a Catholic, this versatile man--politician, poet, storyteller,
essayist, historian, biographer--can naturally not regard American
Humanism as more than a half-way house. This would be in general the
Catholic position: however, both the New Humanist and the Catholic
intellectual are anti-naturalistic and pro-classical and this sets
vibrating a certain bond of sympathy for each other’s efforts to infuse
into modern literature something of what Belloc calls “the poise, the
fulness, the solemnity, the disdain of sharp effect, the glory in
control, the magic of proportion” which marked the productions of the
great classical periods.

“The classical spirit,” observes Belloc, “has not fallen into disrepute
among us: it has been forgotten. It has become alien and strange, so
that men coming across it today, in our society, are like rustics
coming across some marble of the ancients. It does not repel them, but
it hardly attracts them at all--they can make nothing of it.... It is
said that men who drink spirits lose their taste for wine and certainly
men who use violent sauces lose their taste in cooking. Under the
effect of the romantic extravagance, the general sense of the classic
died. But the last extravagances of that extravagance were left for our
time to suffer.”

I pass now from Belloc, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and
anti-puritan, to the brilliant debater he has so greatly influenced
and to whom I shall give more space than has been devoted to the other
members of this little gallery of English champions of high tradition.

Gilbert K. Chesterton:--

First, I will show at once his views on the New Humanism because
they pour light on the subject matter of this book, the dilemmas of
liberated people today. Granted, says Chesterton: “we need a rally
of the really _human_ things; will which is morals, memory which is
tradition, culture which is the mental thrift of our fathers.” But for
him “the question really is whether Humanism can perform the functions
of religion.” His reply is unequivocal. “I do not believe that Humanism
can be a complete substitute for Superhumanism.” Why? Well, “the fact
is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on
its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain
to it out of the old treasury of Christendom.” The New Humanism in
Chesterton’s judgment draws on Catholic capital, but it “has one very
wise and worthy character. It is trying to pick up the pieces; that is,
to pick up all the pieces.” Only “can it stick them together? Where
is the _cement_ which made religion corporate and popular, which can
prevent it falling to pieces in a débris of individualistic tastes and
degrees?” Chesterton makes clear his doubt that the New Humanists “have
the secret of continuity; certainly not of corporate continuity.”

Next, I should like the reader to join me in regretting that we in
America have had no G. K. Chesterton to work as an antidote to such
a popular “philosopher” as H. L. Mencken. Admit all the faults of
Chesterton, the occasional specious arguments, now and then the
patch of tawdry rhetoric, the lapses in taste and the falls into
mechanicality of style: call him, if you desire, no more than a
super-journalist. These flaws, however, are no great handicap in coping
with a popular propounder of belated nineteenth century rationalism
of the type of Mencken, when one is as playful, as pyrotechnical, as
hearty as Chesterton. By his buffooning Mencken hopes to attract the
populace to the banners of heresy: by his humor and the dazzlement
of paradoxes Chesterton aims to draw the public to orthodoxy. Thus,
the two men by their methods neutralize each other and leave the
reader free to examine coolly what it is that in all seriousness they
maintain. And in that respect Chesterton is immeasurably the larger man.

Thirdly, the history of Chesterton presents a couple of features
of special interest for the person who is reacting against the
contemporary welter of half-truths. How came Chesterton to his present
strength of conviction on so many topics toward which his foes preserve
an attitude of squeamish indecision? The startling answer is, because
his early education, like that of Cardinal Newman and of Coleridge,
consisted of fairy tales. Startling to us, that is, for many of us have
been led to conclude that there should be no place for fairy tales in
the training of the young, that the less of “fantasy” and the more of
“fact” we incorporate into education, the better developed will be the
sense of reality of our children. But this is one of the crimes against
children, the most abominable class of crimes. No one has more forcibly
stated the case for fairy tales than Coleridge. “Should children be
permitted to read romances and relations of giants and magicians and
genii? I know all that has been said against it; but I have formed my
faith in the affirmative. I know no other way of giving the mind a
love of the Great and the Whole. Those who have been led to the same
truths step by step, through the constant testimony of their senses,
seem to me to want a sense which I possess. They contemplate nothing
but _parts_, and all _parts_ are necessarily little. And the universe
to them is but a mass of _little things_.” Chesterton argues somewhat
differently, but it is apparent that he was stimulated by fairy tales
to love the inclusive, to desire to reach the center, to devote himself
to the transcendent conception. It is in the centrality and breadth of
his mind that he exceeds Mencken and the smaller fry of rationalists.

Another thing to take into account is Chesterton’s reaction to the
Yellow Nineties in England. In his youth he was immersed in Huxleyan
agnosticism and Wildean æstheticism, and he revolted vigorously from
these excesses. He found young men proud of their boredom; ennui was
taken to be a symptom of personal distinction. And he was informed
that art was divorced from morals. He replied curtly that “there is no
such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that
can exist is an uninterested person.... The bored has certainly proved
himself prosaic”--which places the blame where it should go. And to the
_l’art pour l’art_ people, he said: “A small artist is content with
art; a great artist with nothing except everything.”

Fourthly, Chesterton delighted himself as every one knows with the
pleasures of a modern heresy-hunt. The hunting ground was certainly
happy, for, as he pointed out, we are living in the decadence of the
great revolutionary period, and nowadays “we are more and more to
discuss details in art, politics, literature,” but “general theories
are everywhere contemned ... we will have no generalizations.” “When
the old Liberals removed the gags from all the heresies,” Chesterton
goes on to say, “their idea was that religious and philosophical
discoveries might thus be made. Their view was that cosmic truth was
so important that every one ought to bear independent testimony. The
modern idea is that cosmic truth is so unimportant that it cannot
matter what any one says.”

Vague relativism was the enemy and Chesterton went slashing after it
in the essays on Shaw, George Moore, Wells, G. Lowes Dickinson, Joseph
McCabe, Whistler and other moderns included in _Heretics_. Of them
all it seems to me that Wells best typifies what Chesterton stands
against, Wells in whom is fused sentimental naturalism and scientific
naturalism, Wells the prophet of humanitarianism. Chesterton put his
finger unhesitatingly on the soft spot in Wells’s whole program when
he noticed that “in his new Utopia he says, for instance, that a chief
point of the Utopia will be a disbelief in original sin. If he had
begun with the human soul--that is, if he had begun on himself--he
would have found original sin almost the first thing to be believed
in. He would have found, to put the matter shortly, that a permanent
possibility of selfishness arises from the mere fact of having a self,
and not from any accidents of education or ill-treatment. And the
weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty
of man and assume it to be overcome, and then give an elaborate account
of the overcoming of the smaller ones.”

Finally, I wish the reader to note that the “paradoxes of Christianity”
which Chesterton defends with so much gusto in _Orthodoxy_ were not
imposed on him, were not slavishly accepted by him because of their
attributed authority, but were personally rediscovered. It is often
thought, sometimes with cause, many times unjustifiably, that the
exponent of tradition is simply a timid and unoriginal man: he flees,
so it is said, to tradition for safety; he does not return to it
because his experience has taught him that a given tradition is right.
But do all men adopt traditional teachings out of fear? Chesterton sets
us right. Classicism is properly a life, and not a mere subscribing to
inherited doctrines, and Chesterton has described the spirit and result
of that life when he said: “I am the man who with the utmost daring
discovered what had been discovered before.... When I fancied that I
stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up
by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be
original, but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior
copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion.... I did try to
found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I
discovered that it was orthodoxy.”

The vivacity of commonsense! That, in a phrase, describes the appeal
of Chesterton, and nothing, it seems to me, is more often lacking from
American literary journalism than commonsense in the first place and in
the second place commonsense sparkling at its vivacious best.

                   *       *       *       *       *

To many American critics any stick is good enough to beat Humanism
with. But it has happened several times in our literary history that
the French have been more quickly appreciative than we of a genuine
new power appearing amongst our writers: it seems almost to be a law
that an unpopular spiritual force in America should first receive its
full due in France. It is a Frenchman, Louis J. A. Mercier, who has
written the first book treating the New Humanism as a movement. _Le
Mouvement humaniste aux Etats-Unis_, which makes a study of Babbitt,
More and the late W. C. Brownell, was crowned when it appeared in 1928
by the French Academy, and it drew forth sympathetic comment from the
spokesmen for a variety of groups, from the Catholic papers to the
Action Française, from the Abbé Bremond to Baron Seillière. We can
easily understand the warmth of this reception by French critics. “Here
were American authors,” says Mercier, “who spoke their own language,
who were fully alive to all the traditions, who faced squarely the
problem of man, in the light of all these traditions, and who brought a
formula for a twentieth-century approach to a common reëxamination of
all the data involved.”

Why have we not more examples in translation of the work of the
French classical reactionaries? We have a few--Benda’s _Belphégor_
and _The Treason of the Intellectuals_, Maritain’s _Three Reformers_
and _Art and Scholasticism_, Leon Daudet’s _The Stupid Nineteenth
Century_, Henri Massis’s _The Defence of the West_--but these are
barely suggestive of the resources remaining to be exploited by our
publishers. We have--to name names--no translations of such important
works as Pierre Lasserre’s _Le Romantisme français_ and _Cinquante
Ans de Pensée française_ by which we may trace the evolution of this
former pupil of Charles Maurras, nor have we a translation of Ernest
Seillière’s _Le Mal romantique_ or of his studies of Rousseau or of his
_Philosophie de l’Impérialisme_, all efforts to “de-Rousseauize” France
by large European perspectives. Above all, we have no books in English
from the energetic pen of Charles Maurras. This is odd, since no less
discerning a critic than T. S. Eliot classes Maurras as a philosopher
of rank equal to Irving Babbitt and declares that he “has written as
fine prose as any French author living.” Moreover, he says, referring
to England, “if anything, in another generation or so, is to preserve
us from a sentimental Anglo-Fascism, it will be some system of ideas
which will have gained much from the study of Maurras.”

But perhaps before speaking of Maurras further I should give a very
general classification of the French affirmers of the classic order in
life and literature. We can divide them into three groupings: (1) those
associated with the Action Française and committed to its program of
“integral nationalism” which involves a return to royalism; (2) the
Neo-Thomists, such as Henri Massis with his bogey of Orientalism and
Jacques Maritain, “the most conspicuous figure and probably the most
powerful force in contemporary French philosophy,” according to T. S.
Eliot; (3) certain critics independent of organized groups like Julien
Benda whose recent book, _The Treason of the Intellectuals_, attacks
with great force the fomenting of political passions indulged in by
some of the French classicists, notably those of the Action Française.

Charles Maurras is the outstanding man in the Action Française. He
began as an enthusiast for Auguste Comte and Positivism. In 1890 he
joined Jean Moreas in the founding of the Ecole Romane, a literary
return from Symbolism to antiquity. He wrote fiction and verse
expressive of his admiration for Hellenism. But his life’s work has
been in political and social thought and in literary criticism. For
years “Politics first” has been his cry: he establishes his teaching
on the doctrine of Joseph de Maistre who preached a turning back to
monarchism after the French Revolution. The sifting of Maurras’s
career, however, is a rather complicated business. To many he is
an atheist, certainly an agnostic; yet for some years he and his
organization, the Action Française, were Catholic, only to be condemned
in the end by the Pope. T. S. Eliot’s explanation is that Maurras is
“an unbeliever who cannot believe, and who is too honest to pretend
to himself or to others that he does believe; if others can believe,
so much the better not only for them but for the world at large. The
peculiarity of Maurras’s agnosticism (or atheism if you like) is that
he recognizes that he has much more in common, in the temporal sphere,
with Catholics than with Protestants or atheists.”

Today Maurras directs--with the partnership of the truculent Leon
Daudet--the newspaper, _Action Française_, which flies on its mast the
following inscription: “_Chef de la Maison de France, j’en revendique
tous les droits, j’en assume toutes les responsabilités, j’en accepte
tous les devoirs_” over the name of “_Le duc de Guise, héritier des
quarante Rois qui en mille ans firent la France_.” With Maurras’s
bellicosities, his fanning of national and racial hatreds, I am not
now concerned, nor should I like in any case to defend them. It is
more germane to this book to quote from him on tradition. “Not all
traditions,” he says, “are equal.... Amongst all others one tradition
offers itself, of which the conspicuous character is its almost
complete conformity with those principles of taste which express
humanity raised to its highest point. We see it come to birth in Ionia
as from the ashes of Homer; it continues under the olive trees of
Cephisus. Roman sages who adopt it make a new home for it. The middle
ages do not banish it completely either from France or from the towns
of Italy. It reforms itself and occupies the whole of Europe; but it
is Paris now, as Athens once, that preserves it. From the middle of
the sixteenth century to the end of the seventeenth, humanism and the
classical spirit, refined to an Attic point of taste, never lacked
representatives among us, or an élite worthy of understanding and
loving it.” This Græco-Latin classical tradition, which belongs to
France, Maurras goes on to say, “surpasses all others. It reveals, in
fact, a force of life equal in flame, in coloring, in simple brutality
or refined delicacy to whatever the rest of the world can show, from
the steppes of Russia to the shores of Guinea; and as no other popular
tradition can vie with it in sensibility, it defies forever all its
rivals, in the order and luminosity of its writings, in the great
generality of their style. The works of this tradition are rightly
called Humane Letters, in that they interest the whole world.” Finally,
he exclaims: “But the pursuit of the classical tradition includes
other things than gods and goddesses. It authorizes a scrupulous and
passionate criticism. Far from freezing the senses, it excites, begets
creation. Even among ourselves, above all among ourselves, there is
much to be done. We can dream of tragedies nearer to nature, more
direct and simple than those of Racine. The heroic vein of Corneille
leaves room for a poet who should be wiser than he. The reader will
be surprised if I add that what we lack especially is lyric poetry!
Consider how little can be preserved from the romantic lumber-room.
We must bring things back to Malherbe. There was once a literary
criticism, there can be again, yet finer, and lead our literature to
its renascence.”

Turning to the Neo-Thomists, it seems to me that Jacques Maritain is
the dominant figure. He began as a student of Bergson but shortly
afterwards joined the Catholic Church and today holds the position of
professor of modern history and philosophy at the Institut Catholique
of Paris. He grounds himself entirely on the doctrine of St. Thomas
Aquinas and his whole effort is to translate it into terms of modern
life, to make it serviceable and illuminating to the man of the
twentieth century. For a few years Maritain associated himself with
the Action Française but withdrew when in 1927 the Pope proscribed the
journal of Maurras, Daudet and Pujo.

Maritain writes with an austere clarity. A fiery faith burns in the
depths of his thought and makes his most abstract pages strangely
intense. He is an utterly ruthless opponent of what he conceives to
be modern errors, and, like the American Humanists, he considers
Romanticism as the source of many of these illusions. “The word
romanticism,” he notes and I recommend his definition to the reader,
“may give rise to many confusions. I am aware that there have been
all kinds of things, even very good things, in the complex movement
classed under this name. But nothing is so idle as to argue about
words and recast their definition to suit your subject; and in spite
of everything usage has adequately settled the meaning of this one. In
so far as it signifies a religious eviction of reason and its works,
the sacred unbridling of sensation, the holy parade of self and the
adoration of primitive natural instinct, pantheism as theology, and
emotional stimulus as the rule of life, it must be confessed that
Rousseau, by his mystical naturalism, is at the direct source of such a
spiritual evil.”

Again, like the New Humanists, Maritain attacks the ubiquitous sway of
modern science on the ground that science, unconfined to its proper
rôle, dehumanizes man. In his essay on Descartes, who to Maritain
founded the principle of the deep inhumanity of modern science, we may
read: “In the higher order of Cognition the Cartesian reformation gave
the irretrievable stability of the things of the spirit to the moral
attitude of turning towards perishable goods. See what the great name
of Science has become. It is today hardly applied to anything but the
knowledge of matter, and science, _par excellence_, is regarded by
most modern thinkers as belonging to a museum. In the modern world,
reason turns its back on eternal things and is ordered to the creature.
It rates the mathematics of phenomena above wisdom. From the mountain
of its excellence it has descried all the kingdoms of the material
universe and the glory of them, and it goes down to possess them.”

And now we come to the freelances of the classical revival, to proud
polemicists like Julien Benda who never tire in the exposure of
romantic follies. Benda, novelist and essayist, tenacious opponent of
Bergson, has invented a name for the disease of pan-lyricism which
rages in America as well as in France. He calls it “belphégorism,”
for it is in his argument the worship of a false god, Belphégor or
Baal-Peor as it is written in the Bible. Belphégorism briefly is the
requirement of modern society that works of art should be _exclusively_
productive of emotions and sensations, that history should be written
as a series of heart-throbs, that philosophy and science should give
thrills. Belphégorism is the love of the indistinct, of the novelty
purely for its own sake, of subjectivity carried as far as possible.
Conversely, belphégorism hates the mind, hates discipline, hates
form. Benda makes it clear that he is no objector to the lyrical in
itself, but rather to the invasion by lyricism of all provinces of the
intellectual life. To the softness in taste of modern French society he
opposes the plastic sensibility of the great seventeenth century, the
period of Descartes and Pascal, of Corneille, Molière and Racine, of
Bossuet, of La Fontaine, of Madame de La Fayette.

By a plastic sensibility Benda means a sensibility, whose principal
modes are sight and touch, which organizes itself about the idea
of form. It loves precision and firmness. This sensibility is
localized, perhaps because it involves the more highly specialized and
developed nerves. It is, Benda declares, a centralized and correlated
sensibility, the source of poise. In contrast he places the musical
sensibility whose principal modes are hearing, taste and smell. This
is a disquieting sensibility, for it consists in sensation without
contour, it overflows the whole being with scattered and diffused
sensation. The consciousness is decentralized. The result is the
opposite of poise, being intoxication and vertigo. Modern society tends
toward a musical sensibility, a tendency Benda has become seasoned in
combating.

This distinction between two types of sensibility is very usable, and I
shall come back to it when we take up Nietzsche’s great interpretation
of the Apollo-Dionysus conflict in the final chapter. But now this
exhibit of the friends of order abroad must be closed by a longish
quotation from Benda’s _The Treason of the Intellectuals_ illustrating
the difference between two types of humanitarianism (or more properly
between Humanism and humanitarianism), a difference our New Humanists
constantly insist upon. In addition Benda brings out very well a point
usually overlooked by people who, perceiving the aristocratic leanings
of the New Humanists, accuse them of being too disdainful of their
fellow men.

“In our age the descendants of Erasmus, Montaigne, Voltaire, have
denounced humanitarianism[3] as a moral degeneration, nay, as an
intellectual degeneration, in that it implies ‘a total absence of
practical common sense’; for practical common sense has become the
measure of intellectual values with these strange ‘clerks.’

“I should like to draw a distinction between humanitarianism as I mean
it here--a sensitiveness to the abstract quality of what is human, to
Montaigne’s ‘whole form of human condition’--and the feeling which is
usually called humanitarianism, by which is meant the love for human
beings existing in the concrete. The former impulse (which would more
accurately be called humanism) is the attachment to a concept. It is a
pure passion of the intelligence, implying no terrestrial love. It is
quite easy to conceive of a person plunging into the concept of what
is human without having the least desire even to see a man. This is
the form assumed by love of humanity in the great patricians of the
mind like Erasmus, Malebranche, Spinoza, Goethe, who all were men, it
appears, not very anxious to throw themselves into the arms of their
neighbors. The second humanitarianism is a state of the heart and
therefore the portion of plebeian souls. It occurs among moralists
when lofty intellectual discipline disappears among them and gives way
to sentimental exaltation, I mean in the eighteenth century (chiefly
with Diderot) and above all in the nineteenth century, with Michelet,
Quinet, Proudhon, Romain Rolland, Georges Duhamel. This sentimental
form of humanitarianism and forgetfulness of its conceptual form
explain the unpopularity of this doctrine with so many distinguished
minds, who disavow two equally repulsive commonplaces in the arsenal of
political ideology. One of them is the ‘patriotic bore’ and the other
‘the universal embrace.’

“The humanitarianism[4] which holds in honor the abstract quality of
what is human, is the only one which allows us to love _all_ men.
Obviously, as soon as we look at men in the concrete, we inevitably
find that this quality is distributed in different quantities, and
we have to say with Renan: ‘In reality one is _more or less_ a man,
_more or less_ the son of God ... I see no reason why a Papuan should
be immortal.’ Modern equalitarians, by failing to understand that
there can be no equality except in the abstract and that inequality is
the essence of the concrete, have merely displayed the extraordinary
vulgarity of their minds as well as their amazing political clumsiness.

“Humanism, as I have defined it, has nothing to do with
internationalism. Internationalism is a protest against national
egotism, not on behalf of a spiritual passion, but on behalf of another
egotism, another earthly passion. It is the impulse of a certain
category of men--laborers, bankers, industrialists--who unite across
frontiers in the name of private and practical interests, and who only
oppose the national spirit because it thwarts them in satisfying those
interests.

“In comparison with such impulses, national passion appears an
idealistic and disinterested impulse. In short, humanism is also
something entirely different from cosmopolitanism, which is the simple
desire to enjoy the advantages of all nations and all their cultures,
and is generally exempt from moral dogmatism.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

Such, briefly indicated, is the general field of contemporary thought
in which American Humanism fits. I deem it, however, premature and
over-enthusiastic to perceive in this field the beginnings of a new
renascence, and likewise I do not think the parallel between the living
asserters of classical ideals and the Humanists of the Renascence
should be stressed. True enough, the modern revivalists have entered
into a gigantic battle to overthrow the preëminence of the dogma of
Naturalism, just as the Renascence men assaulted the preëminence of
petrified theological dogma, and true enough the moderns catch their
vision, as did their brothers in the fifteenth century, from the
ancient literatures. But it is yet to be seen whether they can do more
than _defend_ the ancestral treasures, whether they can be more than a
corrective force to the excesses and barbarisms of our era. Have they
the potency to initiate a real transformation of modern society? Can
they even arrest its downward plunge, let alone reverse its direction?
Have they the hidden strength to work a miracle? The questions
discourage all desires to prophesy. The only thing that can be said
is that the traditionalist thinkers are making a supremely important
contribution to the thought of today, that by their contribution they
tend to improve the general intellectual situation, and the first step
is the production of a more favorable situation, in itself a huge task,
for diamond ideas about the “good life.” Meanwhile, the most that can
be said about any notion of a coming renascence is that it may have the
energizing value of a myth: it is perhaps akin in its tonic effect on
the spirit to the conception of the general strike which Georges Sorel
proclaimed should be the heroic myth of the proletariat in its long
struggle.

Now if we compare the theory of American Humanists with the theories
or partly worked out theories of their allies in Europe, we shall see
that we have at home not the least developed and least positive form
of conservatism. The Europeans either come to rest on Catholicism
(Chesterton, Belloc, Massis, Maritain), which for many Americans
seems impossible, involving an act of too much faith, and furthermore
they feel too _psychologically_ distant from Rome; or the Europeans
dedicate themselves to some political movement such as French
royalism (Maurras and his disciples) which to some extent perverts
their classical attitude; or finally they fall back on some personal
philosophy, scarcely more than a strong predisposition in favor of
the disinterested activity of the mind (Benda) or else very much in
the forming and full of idiosyncrasies (Wyndham Lewis). American
Humanism has not complicated itself by theological alliances, nor
subordinated itself to the pursuit of definite political aims. What
is striking is the extent to which it has freed itself from the
personal and idiosyncratic. It exists apart from the personalities
of More and Babbitt. Here is a body of general ideas, substantial
yet pliable, to which all who seize the few underlying principles may
resort and from which all may take a working experimental outlook on
the problems of their own lives. Here is a system for the guidance
of one’s thought, not for its repression and confinement. Here is an
ideology too definite to be treated whimsically, but not so rigid as to
be unadaptable to the taste of the individual. It has a completeness
wanting in the personal philosophies of Lewis and Benda, and it does
not appear to many so arbitrary as the doctrines of the Church. _Its
great recommendation is that it is founded on the positive critical
experimental spirit of modern times._ This in the remainder of the book
I shall try to demonstrate.




                                   VI

                      A CREATIVE CONCEPTION OF MAN

  _“Humanism is the study and practice of the principles of human
  happiness_ uncomplicated _by naturistic dogmas on the one side and
  religious dogmas on the other.”_--G. R. Elliott in _Humanism and
  America_.


Humanism is a term that has been defined, and well defined, many times.
Yet there persists in the public mind the feeling that Humanism is a
portmanteau word and the New Humanists have failed to make it denote
anything precise. The public is not to blame for this feeling, nor
are the New Humanists responsible. Several causes may be alleged,
the first being the romanticizing of the word by writers like Walter
Pater. “For the essence of humanism,” Pater once wrote, “is that belief
of which he (Pico della Mirandola) seems never to have doubted, that
nothing which has ever interested living men and women can wholly
lose its vitality--no language they have spoken, nor oracle beside
which they have hushed their voices, no dream which has once been
entertained by actual human minds, nothing about which they have ever
been passionate, or expended time and zeal.” This is to make Humanism
denote simply an all-embracing curiosity, an insatiable appetite for
everything, no matter how trivial. _Humani nihil a me alienum puto_
(I consider nothing human alien to me)--this widely quoted line is
the motto of those who take Pater’s definition too seriously. But the
line is spoken in Terence’s play as an excuse for meddling, and Babbitt
comments drily that it “might serve appropriately enough as a motto for
the humanitarian busybody with whom we are all so familiar nowadays,
who goes around with schemes for reforming almost everything--except
himself.” No, Humanism means more than a universal curiosity about
one’s fellow creatures, and it does not mean humanitarianism. The
humanitarians, however, have claimed the gracious word, and this is the
second cause of confusion as to definition.

It is essential to see that Humanism and humanitarianism are quite
distinct. “A person who has sympathy for mankind in the lump,” to quote
from Babbitt, “faith in its future progress, and desire to serve the
great cause of this progress, should be called not a humanist, but
a humanitarian.” Such a person--he is legion!--exalts sympathy, and
expects that somehow in the coming years man’s altruistic impulses will
triumph over his egoism. He is an optimist, an ardent believer in the
dogma of progress, and usually a superstitious worshipper of modern
science. _Exempli gratia_: Auguste Comte, Rousseau and Herder have
at one time or another been hailed as “humanists,” whereas, Babbitt
asserted in his first book, they are properly called humanitarian
enthusiasts. So today we sometimes read in our newspapers that certain
former Unitarian preachers are Humanists, despite the fact that their
sermons upon examination prove to be almost pure humanitarianism,
or we hear writers like the American historian, Harry Elmer Barnes,
referred to as a Humanist. But Barnes, we may say in passing, would
have seemed to Matthew Arnold the propagandist for a “spurious and
degenerated sub-form” of Hellenism. Arnold would doubtless have dubbed
this very vocal rationalist simply a Millite, a word he coined from the
name of England’s famous utilitarian philosopher. Humanism, properly
understood, is in fact the stern critic of philanthropic rationalists
like Barnes or sentimental enthusiasts like the Reverend John Haynes
Holmes. _For Humanism is a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic
in temper, selective in practice, which makes its first concern, the
self-perfecting of the individual._

There is still a third cause which must be touched on to explain
the confusion that blankets the public mind. In the literary
campaign staged against the New Humanists in the spring of 1930, the
naturalistic writers employed an old debating trick:--to pretend
bewilderment at the definitions offered and to press for closer and
closer definitions. The aim apparently was to force the New Humanists
at last into some utterly rigid statement of their creed, if not into
some ultimate banality; therefore anything short of a completely rigid
definition was called an inadequate one. But the New Humanist is
too awake to the dangers of Neo-Classicism to yield to this type of
pressure. Humanism lays the stress on the inner life, Neo-Classicism
on the external conventions. The New Humanist maintains the seat
of authority in himself: he studies with zeal the wisdom stored in
tradition, but he insists on his internal corroboration of that
wisdom as the all-important thing. He does not, that is, set up an
authority, as the Neo-Classicist does, which is completely exterior to
himself. Above all, he perceives the folly of an Age of Rules, which
happens whenever Neo-Classicism gains ascendency. In short, if the New
Humanism could be set forth in a perfectly dry detailed code, you may
be certain that it would not be Humanism, but only another recurrence
of Neo-Classicism. A true definition of Humanism must breathe with the
vitality inherent in its subject.

The New Humanist, then, disassociates himself from the impoverishment
of Neo-Classicism, from excessive purism, as consciously as he
separates himself from indiscriminate humanitarianism and the mere
inquisitiveness of the æsthetic type. As was said above, Humanism is
a doctrine and a discipline, aristocratic in temper, selective in
practice, which makes its first concern, the self-perfecting of the
individual. This sense for the term is not new or perverse; it has, in
fact, long been emphasized as the following passage from a late Latin
writer, Aulus Gellius, will show. Gellius was of a somewhat crabbed
and pedantic temper: Babbitt admits this and adds that he was too much
inclined to leave sympathy out altogether; but what is interesting
is that in the decadence of Rome Gellius made complaint about the
corruption of the term _humanitas_ to give it a humanitarian flavor.
Here is his protest--it might have been written yesterday--against the
confusion of humanism with humanitarianism.

“Those who created the Latin language,” the passage occurs in the
_Noctes Atticae_, “and those who spoke it well do not give the word
_humanitas_ the vulgar meaning which is synonymous with the Greek word
_philanthropia_, which means an active kindness, a tender benevolence
for all men. But they give the word the meaning which the Greeks attach
to _paideia_, which we call education, knowledge of the fine arts.
Those who show the most taste and disposition for these studies are
the most worthy to be called _humanissimi_. For man alone among all
living beings is able to devote himself to cultivating a study which
for that reason has been called _humanitas_. Such is the meaning given
to this by the ancients, particularly by Varro and Cicero. Almost all
their works show examples, so I shall content myself with quoting one
only. I have chosen the opening of the first book of Varro ‘Concerning
Human Things’: _Praxiteles, qui propter artificium egregium nemini est
paulum modo humaniori ignotus_ (Praxiteles, whose excellent talent as
an artist has made him known to every man at all skilled in the arts).
Here _humanior_ does not bear the vulgar meaning of easy, tractable,
benevolent, even though lacking in knowledge of letters. That meaning
would not express the author’s thought. It means an educated, a learned
man, one who is acquainted with Praxiteles through books and history.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

What is the doctrine of the New Humanism? The most compact statement
I have found was written by Robert Shafer in the course of a powerful
polemical article in the _Bookman_. It deserves the most careful study
by the reader, for from it can be extracted almost the whole of
Humanism. It is a remarkably comprehensive formulation: despite its
brevity it manages to imply all that a New Humanist has to say about
his conception of man.

“Against romanticism, humanitarian sympathy, mechanistic or vitalistic
determinism, the doctrine of progress and the like, has been opposed a
skeptical criticism of life and letters which rests ultimately on the
proposition that man differs not alone in complexity of organization,
but in kind, from the animal, and that his happiness depends upon his
recognition and cultivation of that element in his being which is
distinctive of him. This is held to be possible; man is held to be,
within limits, capable of responsible choice. This capacity is regarded
as the core of the distinctively human element in man’s constitution,
which is thus dual--‘animal,’ one may roughly say, united inexplicably
with ‘something more,’ or the unlimited chaos of impressions and
spontaneous desires united with the potential capacity of control and
reduction to ordered activity. No conclusion is necessarily implied for
or against the doctrine of grace, but insistence is steady that without
a wisely directed educational discipline and a strict inner discipline
man’s fulfilment of his proper end is certainly impossible. To choose
is to discriminate, and, for this, habituation to self-restraint is
essential; it is, indeed, the foundation on which the whole structure
of distinctively human life rests.

“It is recognized that this general position is not susceptible of
rational proof--reason itself being the organ of discrimination, and
acting, when it acts legitimately, in a purely instrumental capacity.
But none the less his position is, the humanist adds, irrefutable and
soundly based. It concerns a realm of being into which ‘modern science’
simply does not enter. Exact science, so-called, is concerned with
quantity--how much?--but about quality--how good?--it has nothing to
say. The humanist is concerned, not with physical existence taken by
itself, but with distinctively human excellence, or self-fulfilment,
or, in a word, happiness. Here the one possible appeal is to actual
human experience--the recorded experience of past generations and
the inner experience of the individual disciplined and formed in the
light of selective tradition. The strength of humanism lies in its
positive experiential basis, which affords it, not an absolute, but a
sufficient, authority.”

Could the sum and substance of Humanism be put more plainly than the
above? The topic can be expanded, explained, illustrated, but in the
end when it is boiled down again, we shall find that Robert Shafer has
given the candid and accurate summary of its meaning. Greater rigidity
would be inexact--remember that words like “idealism,” “skepticism,”
“deism,” even “pragmatism” offer a similar necessary fluidity to the
definer--for the thing defined has flowing contours and is alive with
movement. What then is the difficulty many inquirers about Humanism
confess to experiencing when it comes to seizing its import? Well,
our difficulties with understanding definitions are not entirely with
words; they are of two kinds: verbal and psychological. The first
is more easily overcome: it requires simply a clear statement and
attentive reading. In view of the fulness with which More and Babbitt,
Foerster and Shafer and many others have written about the meaning of
Humanism, there is no excuse whatever for any failure to grasp verbally
what they are driving at. A college student could write it out on an
examination paper. But the other kind of difficulty, the psychological
obstacle to understanding, is the one that takes real effort to remove.
By understanding a definition psychologically, I mean experiencing
the definition. I mean relating it to one’s own experience or lack
of experience. I mean filling the verbal signs with living personal
content.

I will give one simple illustration of the gap between verbal
understanding and psychological comprehension. A good deal of the
vocabulary of warfare is used by both soldiers and civilians. The
counters are the same, but what the soldier has experienced as the
meaning of these words--“No-man’s Land,” “trenches,” “battle,” etc.--is
radically different from the mere verbal associations the civilian
makes with them. The soldier and the civilian try to converse: it is
well known that the returned soldier quickly gives up and refuses
to talk about his war experiences except to those who have had an
actual taste of battle. The civilian wonders why the soldier is
uncommunicative about the war and never guesses that it is partly
because the soldier has become aware that what to him are signs of
experience are to the civilian simply words, as we say.

Now in the case of Humanism this disparity in experience between
the expounder and the listener does not exist. There is a ground of
human experience common to all that can be appealed to. But how to
reach it? Here the reader must exercise his good will, must be honest
with himself, must make an effort to carry the interpretation over
from words to experience, to take it out of the verbal forest of the
mind and apply it to all his psychology. This means in many cases an
effort against the habits of education we have received, for the latest
reformers in education are correct in telling us that our civilization
is too exclusively verbal, that we trust too much in words cut off
from things. Such a psychological translation of the perfectly clear
verbal answers already given to the question, what is twentieth century
Humanism, I now propose to attempt.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_The final object of the New Humanist is happiness._ If he is asked,
why discipline oneself, why try to live in a certain way, his candid
reply is, to attain happiness. All his system-making is directed toward
that end, and that end, happiness, happens to be one of the very few
values unquestioned by human beings, for who in a state of happiness
could conceivably question his own happiness?

Here there is practically no barrier to what I have called the
psychological understanding or, perhaps better, realization of
humanistic doctrine. For every one knows at first hand the state of
happiness: it has come to him accidentally, it has been fleeting, but
brief and chance as its visitations have been, the impression of them
is indelible. We long all our lives to re-experience happiness, and
we are incredibly ingenious in trying to find it. The cynical are no
exception: their cynicism about happiness arises from repeated failures
to rediscover it, and their real wish is still for that on which they
pour (why so bitter?) ridicule.

Mankind universally hopes for happiness. It flees from the unhappy
state and looks everywhere for the acknowledged good thing, the state
of being happy. The sad platitude is that mankind fails first to find
as much happiness as it wants, second, to maintain the state when it
is experienced, and third, to gain an insight into the secrets of
producing happiness. Not on happiness as the ultimate human value,
but on the way to happiness, the means of procuring it, is there
disagreement.

The majority--a fact that has always struck wise men with
astonishment--have always depended on distractions and pleasures. They
have situated the source of happiness in the world around them. They
have felt that a change in the environment was what was needed. Make
the world an Eden, say the reformers, and man will be happy. But the
Garden of Eden, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is within, has been the
retort of the sage.

The New Humanism commits itself first of all to a serious study of the
principles of happiness. It does not dream of a geographical Paradise,
but says, look to human nature! What is the constitution of human
nature? How ought man to live according to this constitution? For in no
other way but by obeying the laws of his being can he win an enduring
happiness.

But here is where an apparent paradox deludes so many. Man is not
born free, as Rousseau claimed, but born slave to things. Things are
in the saddle and ride mankind, and mankind expects to be happy under
those conditions. To change the conditions, to come out from servitude
to things to a command over them--the aim of the religious and the
humanistic alike--is so arduous and perilous a revolt that it looks
like anything but the way to happiness. Man’s _inclination_ is to
remain enslaved to things the while he hopes they will not ride him
harshly. His _wish_ is to oppose his inclination to servitude, and
to fight his way to psychological freedom. He cannot however imagine
that he can be happy warring against his attachment to things. And yet
Thoreau speaks for all the sagacious reflecters on life when he says:
“But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon
ploughed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called
necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up
treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through
and steal. It is a fool’s life, as they will find when they get to the
end of it, if not before.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

_The New Humanist maintains that human consciousness is dual._ This is
the primary fact to be recognized, he says, in any quest of happiness.
He expresses this fact by speaking of our two selves, which he calls
the natural self and the human self, or the animal and human selves or
the lower and higher self. In respect to this terminology, admittedly
crude, it must be kept in mind that the New Humanist writes as a
practical psychologist, not as a theoretical one who also has to drop
technical language and speak in the world’s tongue when it comes to
practical psychology, and it must be still more kept in mind that no
moral connotations are meant by the terms. If I say that plants are
a lower form of life than animals, I do not imply that plants are
reprehensible for their lesser development--nor does the New Humanist
regard the life of the body as morally inferior to, let us say, the
life of the mind. The grading is made in the scientific spirit: it
is based on measurement of life, not on moral requirements. The
discrimination between lower and higher is psychological, and nothing
else.

Surely, no elaborate documentation is needed to establish the fact that
there is an overwhelming crowd of witnesses from antiquity onwards to
the existence of a practical dualism in human psychology. Two eloquent
writers will stand for the multitude: Cicero in antiquity and Matthew
Arnold in the nineteenth century. They can be combined in a single
quotation from the latter’s _Literature and Dogma_. “Man alone of
living creatures, Cicero says, goes feeling after ‘the discovery of an
_order_, a law of _good taste_, a _measure_ for his words and actions.’
Other creatures submissively follow the law of their nature; man alone
has an impulse leading him to set up some other law to control the bent
of his nature.” That is, a goldfish or a wren or a crocodile or a cat
is always true to its species. Nature looks to it that they obey, as
it were, the conscience of their species. They behave strictly as they
should, being what they are. They are loyal to themselves. But man is
not so completely cared for. He belongs to a very elastic species: his
behavior can vary enormously and fall far away from the norm of the
race. We have words to indicate this drop from what we instinctively
feel man should be, such words as “bestial,” “sub-human,” “inhuman,”
“unmanly,” and the like. Nature apparently is interested in man only
up to a certain point, giving him a human form, the capacity to feel,
the ability to think, but for all Nature cares, he may be as disordered
as he pleases in his emotional and mental life. An idiot, from the
standpoint of Nature, is as good as a genius. From this arises man’s
sense of division in himself. He is a natural creature; true; but add
that in comparison with the beasts and their constant observance of
their laws he appears a crazed natural creature. But, a strange thing,
he has the intuition that he also has the possibility of becoming a
sane creature. Only--he himself must learn what sanity is, what its
laws are and how to follow them.

He has, in Arnold’s words, “the notion of a whole self as opposed
to a partial self, a best self to an inferior, to a momentary self
a permanent self requiring the restraint of impulses a man would
naturally have indulged;--because by _attending_ to his life, man found
it had a scope beyond the wants of the present moment.” I wish to
bring home, if I can, the nature of what is here called our partial,
inferior, momentary self, and to do so I shall call upon the studies of
the Behavioristic psychologists. What the New Humanist terms our lower
natural self is in my opinion best named our mechanical self.

The Behaviorists consider man to be a behaving mechanism. Man has
nothing to say about his heredity, his birth, his early environment,
the language and customs he is taught, and so forth. He comes into the
world with the native disposition to make certain responses (unlearned
responses) and he soon is trained on the basis of these to make
thousands of others (conditioned responses), often of a very arbitrary
character. A response-mechanism set ticking and continued in motion by
the ceaseless impact of stimuli from the environment.

Physiologically, we are, every one admits, best viewed as machines.
Our tissues repair themselves, our blood flows through an elaborate
system whose tracings we know only by hearsay (i.e., by diagram),
our nails and hair grow without our supervision, we are unaware of
the functioning of organs like the liver, unless they get out of
order,--but it is unnecessary to specify details of what every one
grants: namely, that the ceaseless movements of our bodies do not
depend very much on our accurate and intimate knowledge of them, nor
upon our directive powers. We stand toward them in the relation of
mechanician to machine, only we are rather poor mechanicians and in our
ignorance frequently harm what we are supposed merely to tend.

But the Behaviorist enormously extends the reign of mechanics: he
puts our psychology--or what we call our psychology--under mechanical
rule, going so far as to reduce our emotions to visceral tensions and
our thoughts to sub-vocal movements in the larynx. In this he is far
more right than most people think. But we do not need to argue that
out now. I refer to very obvious matters, such as the occurrence of
emotions to us. _They occur to us_: we do not as a rule induce them.
“A peculiar feeling came over me,” we say. It did! “I was seized by
anger.” I was! “I was taken by surprise.” Right! Every day long we are
swept by a succession of emotions, the majority of which clearly we had
nothing to do with. We did not choose to experience them. They came to
us.

Again there is a constant procession--better say jumble--of images,
ideas, associations, words and nonsense in our minds. Our brains
wander most of the time: they are as Arnold Bennett calls them
“gentlemen-at-large” and deucedly unreliable. They go on operating
after a fashion whether we will or not. And what is this but sheer
mechanicality?

But this is our natural self, this is as biology and sociology
have made us. We take stock of ourselves in adulthood and we find
probably that we are a pronounced type--an intellectual, a highly
emotional artist, a sportsman. Did we create our type, our particular
psychological build, any more than we colored our eyes or invented the
shoes we Westerners wear? Our temperament--did we make it or do we find
ourselves with one?

A very great deal of what we call ourselves we have to consign to the
Behaviorist and agree with him that it is determined. But the New
Humanist will not yield all to Dr. John B. Watson and his relentless
observers in the laboratory. He will not deny consciousness, nor the
will, nor higher potentialities than are manifest in the animal self.
He balances against the mechanical the human self which, he maintains,
man can develop. What, more precisely than thus far stated, is meant
by the human self? We can get at the conception if we think of our
potentialities.

Actually, we are turned out by Nature and Society as uneven-sided
human beings, not well-rounded ones. Actually, we are prejudiced and
partial, not unprejudiced and impartial. Actually, our minds are
enslaved, not free. Actually, we are nonsensical, not commonsensible.
But we have the potentiality for all these things we have not,--for
harmonious development of ourselves, for disinterestedness and
impartiality, for the free intelligence and the most esoteric of all
virtues, commonsense. Only none of these things ever comes to man as a
gift. Each must be deliberately and laboriously acquired. Man, then,
humanistically viewed, is born with a lower self but has a margin of
potentiality which he, and only he, can cultivate, and by so doing he
creates a higher self to which it is proper to give the name human.
Acquirements, not gifts--that is the sure mark of the truly human.
(Incidentally, the greatest of these acquirements is will, but of that
later.)

At the risk of seeming unable to let go of the idea of a cleft between
the natural man and self-perfected man, I will cite one illustration
of the difference between our actual psychology and our potential
psychology. Man has the possibility of simultaneous thought on
several different subjects, but this possibility is never actualized
by accident in the ordinary course of events. Ordinarily we think
in succession, following a train of thought, as we say. But we
can, by special training, learn to follow several lines of thought
at once. One begins with very simple exercises (immensely difficult
to the beginner, however), such as focussing on the movement of the
second-hand of a watch, reciting a stanza of poetry, and running
through a multiplication table at the same time, and then works up to
what appear staggering exercises in mental gymnastics. For this sort of
work, at which geniuses fail the first time as completely as the most
ungifted, the natural self is of no avail. Simultaneous thought becomes
an actuality only to those who themselves bring it to birth.

It seems strange that any one should deny on any practical basis the
selves of the New Humanist’s conception: one, largely or altogether
automatic, actual, natural, subject to the “law for thing,” the other
acquired, born out of potentiality by one’s own effort, not natural but
human, subject to the “law for man.” Yet this dualism has been fought
throughout recorded history. Many gifted men have made frenzied efforts
to deny the gap, to coalesce the two selves, to prove that man not
only theoretically but practically must be monistic. One of the latest
epical mass-movements to deny psychological dualism was Romanticism.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Submission to the natural self is the Romantic attitude._ Here, I
believe, we can strike rock bottom. As sketched above, a human being
consists of three related modes of experience (sensations, emotions,
and ideas) and in these three modes everything, according to the
Behaviorist, a very great deal according to everybody, is done not by
our consent and knowledge, but, as it were, by itself. But toward such
a threefold apparatus for experiencing, an attitude may be assumed,
and this attitude is fundamental in our psychology. Given one kind of
attitude, and you get the foundation of Romanticism. Another attitude
toward the selfsame creature, and you have laid the cornerstone of
the humanistic life. Who or what takes the attitude? Whatever we mean
by the word “I.” The Romanticist glories in identifying as closely
as possible whatever the word “I” means with his mechanical self. He
resigns his Ego to his organism. He submits to the riot of his senses,
feelings and thoughts and calls the submission good.

It might be said, I suppose, that earlier in this book I scored an easy
victory by putting in contrast a composite figure, quite lacking in
“personality,” with Matthew Arnold. Of course, it might be retorted to
me, Arnold is superior to any constructed representative of modern men.
Arnold should rather be compared with some great Romantic, not with an
instructive psychological chart. Very well: in the place of that poor
G. R. we unfeelingly exposed, let us put Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the
man of genius who preached so eloquently the surrender to our natural
selves.

Irving Babbitt has often been accused of “Rousseauphobia.” I cannot
find the justice in the accusation, which ignores Babbitt’s reasons
for emphasizing Rousseau’s influence. Babbitt cannot be said to have
slighted the precursors of Rousseau, such as Hutcheson and the Earl of
Shaftesbury, or not to have put a great deal of weight on Francis Bacon
as a founder of the modern world. And it is true, as Babbitt claims,
that though Rousseauistic ideas were in the world long before Rousseau,
it was the Genevan who gave them their great driving power in our era:
it was Rousseau who cast the wonderful glamor over them that made them
irresistible to modern man. Rousseau is the representative Romantic. He
is the symbolic figure, and hence he is bound to appear very large in
any treatment of Romanticism. Furthermore, the extent and depth of his
influence can hardly be minimized, as the enormous literature written
about him shows. Let it be Rousseau then to serve here, as in so many
previous expositions, as the arch-exponent of the Romantic attitude.

He accepted the contradictions in himself, saying that his heart
and his mind did not seem to belong to the same person. He scorned
the intellect, the weakest and least developed of our three modes
of experience, saying that the man who thinks is a depraved animal.
He gave the primacy to feeling, and exalted sensation. He declared
that man was corrupted by Society and that man was naturally good. He
developed on his own account, as Maritain says, “a singular doctrine
of absolute non-resistance to the impulses of sensation, a doctrine of
complete passivity as the condition of full expansion of the primitive
goodness, which is simply a natural quietism.” Yes; the “Father of the
modern world” was an irresponsible. For he loved, nay he worshipped,
that irresponsible creature, the natural self.

The natural self is innocent: that is, it is neither good nor bad.
Good or bad can only appear in the attitude taken toward the natural
self. The Romantic with all his enthusiasm follows the inclinations of
the natural self. He shirks the disciplining of it. He wants unity but
he thinks he can find unity by subsiding into the life of feeling and
sensation, stilling the mind. He goes with Nature, like a child led by
its nurse, and he calls it liberty.

At the end of Romanticism there is the pseudo-necromancer of Vienna
with his complicated method for teaching the proud spirit of Man to
stoop, to chain itself to the blind forces of his temperament, to
forget in slavery to the senses and feelings that man is in essence a
passion for perfection.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_Responsibility for the natural self is the Humanist attitude._ Like
the Romanticist, the Humanist discovers that whatever is signified by
the word “I”--and the determination of the signification of the word
“I” is a poser for the infant science of psychology[5]--is attached
to a surprising creature, unreasonable, expansive, changeable, an
absorbing mystery to study. He finds furthermore that the creature has
the complete upper hand so far as the “I” in it is concerned. But the
Humanist cannot acquiesce in this arrangement. It seems to him that the
creature is not wicked but certainly a fool. There is nothing wrong
with its appetites, only the organism is singularly unintelligent in
gratifying them. It is full of whims, some of them dangerous to the
organism’s life. It loves to waste time in day-dreaming, to waste
emotion in foolish anxieties, to waste energy in muscular fidgets.
Clearly, the creature itself would be happier if it were under
intelligent guidance, if it were taught to obey instead of always being
given the reins and dashing away at random. Thus, the New Humanist
feels that his real, deepest self is somewhat apart from his natural
mechanical self. He wants to be the driver of his machine, not a mere
intoxicated passenger in a runaway vehicle. He wants to be responsible
for the manifestations of his personality. In responsibility for his
natural self lies for him the dignity of man. This for him is the true
liberty.

But how to attain and exercise this liberty? For, to begin with,
the workings of the natural self are not known to the one who
wishes to master it. Hence, the humanistic stress on self-study and
self-knowledge. But further, even granting a fairly complete working
knowledge of oneself, of what one’s biases and characteristic reactions
are, what one’s defects and points of strength are, one may still
be at a total loss, powerless to alter or control the spontaneous
phenomena of the organism. Hence, the humanistic stress on the need for
developing the will.

                   *       *       *       *       *

_The New Humanist upholds a creative conception of man._ The word
“creative” has been so cheapened by Romantic usage in which it is
made synonymous with mere temperamental overflow that one is almost
inclined to drop the word until it loses its present indiscriminate
associations. However, no other word will do to describe the humanistic
conception of man, for in the Humanist’s view man literally creates
his manliness. Man has to find his own center, develop his own
potentialities, create his own order in his psychology.

We can put the matter thus. Every one without exception has felt that
his psychology was organized about a principle of dispersion. His
inclinations have pointed outwards; he wants to let himself go, he
yearns to express himself. “You must be yourself,” said Jean-Jacques
Rousseau over and over, and in his mouth it meant what Maritain says
it did. “You must _be_ your feeling, as God _is_ His being. Does God,
Who is all act, need forming? You must regard as a sin every attempt
to form yourself, or allow yourself to be formed, to right yourself,
to bring your discords to unity again. Every form imposed on the inner
world of the human soul, whether it come from nature or grace, is a
sacrilegious wrong to nature.” This is psychology based on the Many.

But just as there is a metaphysic of the One as well as the Many,
so there is a psychology of the One. Every one without exception,
I daresay, has felt in his psychology a principle of unity. He has
experienced, that is, at various moments a strong wish to integrate
himself, to pull himself together, to become a concentrated unified
individual. It is with this wish the New Humanist identifies the human,
and he pits it against the inclination to accept the discords. The
wish for unity is the creative wish.

What could be more uncreative than the despising of the mind by Luther,
Rousseau and scores of lesser Romantics? The mind, a part of our
resources to be exploited along with the other parts--why should it
be treated puritanically any more than the body should be despised?
Again what can be more uncreative than to transfer the blame for one’s
faults to Society, or to make a cult of inaction as Rousseau did? The
New Humanist replies that the fault after all is not in our stars or
in Society but in ourselves and that we must work upon ourselves--a
genuinely creative attitude.

I direct attention again to human potentialities. Proportionateness--it
must be created. The free intelligence--it must be struggled for.
Disinterestedness--an ideal toward which no step is ever taken without
effort. Commonsense, the fusion of mental, emotional and practical
judgments--it must be striven for. Self-control--impossible without the
use of will. The will--dormant, it must be awaked. Unity--it must be
achieved.

These, according to the New Humanist, are some of our higher
possibilities. He takes the attitude that a man’s work is to bring them
towards fruition, that in so doing lies happiness, that by so doing one
is truly creative, making and strengthening a human self to oppose and
dominate the vagaries and weaknesses of the natural self.




                                  VII

                       THE DISCIPLINE OF HUMANISM

  _“My whole method is experimental, or it might be less ambiguous
  to say if the word were a fortunate one, experiential.”_--Irving
  Babbitt in _Rousseau and Romanticism_.


It is obvious that the New Humanist does not think there is much
insight in Walt Whitman’s line, “And if the body were not the soul,
what is the soul?” We can epitomize the preceding chapter and at the
same time add a new element by extracting two sentences from Babbitt’s
_Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Like all the great Greeks Aristotle
recognizes that man is the creature of two laws: he has an ordinary
or natural self of impulse and desire and a human self that is known
practically as a power of control over impulse and desire. If man
is to become human he must not let impulse and desire run wild, but
must oppose to everything excessive in his ordinary self, whether in
thought or deed or emotion, the law of measure.” The new element, the
law of measure, relates to discipline. I have dealt with the major
conception in the Humanist doctrine: I have shown that the New Humanism
is primarily individualistic and for the sake of individual growth:
I described it as aristocratic in temper. The last is surely evident
from the humanistic stress on the rule of our momentary ordinary selves
by our best selves, and from the Humanist’s search in the inherited
literatures for “the best that has been thought and uttered,” and
finally from his making the question of leadership the paramount
problem for democratic nations to solve. But in the general description
of the New Humanism I noted in addition that it was a discipline and
selective in practise, and these are the matters of this chapter.

Here again we have to combat psychological obtuseness. To repeat: a
logical understanding of a text is one thing, and quite another is a
living warm apprehension, a psychological understanding, of the same
text. The first is an affair of words: the second is more real, related
to feelings and conduct as well as to the formulating intellect. Now
it so happens that it is a peculiarity of our age to be blank-minded
whenever there is question of a psychological method to realize
in practice the ideas and ideals we adopt. We think that the mere
entertaining of the ideas and ideals we are attracted by is sufficient,
we think that we shall naturally grow to embody them completely without
the need of any special discipline or “way of life.” In short, never do
we inquire into “ways of life” at all, never do we exercise the kind of
thought Arnold employed when he sought in the Biblical texts for the
_method_ and _secret_ of Jesus. In dealing with the New Humanism in
its aspect of a technique for living intelligently, we must therefore
make a special and unusual effort to see the theory in terms of actual
practice.

There is no initial difficulty in feeling the spirit of the New
Humanist discipline, for though it derives from Aristotle, it is as
thoroughly modern as the laboratory spirit. No one could in fact be
a stauncher supporter of the modern spirit defined by Irving Babbitt
as “the positive and critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take
things on authority” than Babbitt himself. Only, he adds, you must be
a complete positivist. He then goes on to exhort his readers to be
individualists: “the man who plants himself, not on outer authority but
on experience, is an individualist.” Aristotle, Babbitt takes to be the
arch-type of the positive and critical Humanist, for Aristotle teaches
us “how to have standards and at the same time not to be immured in
dogma.” All this, as I say, is quite in the modern spirit and goes to
explain the appeal Babbitt exercises on many young Americans who cannot
be accused of yearning for some long-gone age and whose defection from
the banners of Menckenism has puzzled some people.

At this point should be brought up the Babbittean distinguishing
of three levels on which life may be experienced: the religious,
the humanistic, and the naturalistic. The naturalistic we have seen
exemplified by a host of Rousseauists and Baconians, of sentimentalists
and utilitarians, of all those who in one way or another submerge Man
into Nature. The religious level is occupied by the great systems of
Buddhism and Christianity. Here the supernatural enters, here the
consuming search is for the Absolute, here there is dying to this world
and here there is the life more abundant that comes through rebirth
into a world of greater consciousness. The _via media_ is alleged to
be the humanistic life, represented in the past by Confucianism in
the Orient and by Aristotelianism in the Occident. The middle way has,
as outlined by Babbitt, its special methodology, its special virtues,
and its special attitudes. For example, we have already noticed its
hostile attitude toward Naturalism, its clash with Naturalism on first
principles. On the other hand, its attitude toward those who work on
the religious plane is sympathetic. Quotations bearing on this could be
accumulated but a recent utterance by Irving Babbitt will do for all.
“For my own part,” he said in _Humanism and America_, “I range myself
unhesitatingly on the side of the supernaturalists. Though I see no
evidence that humanism is necessarily ineffective apart from dogmatic
and revealed religion, there is, it seems to me, evidence that it
gains immensely in effectiveness when it has a background of religious
insight.”

But to the New Humanist the reasons for risking one’s life on the
religious level do not, one judges, seem overwhelming. Here is one of
Babbitt’s statements on that point, a statement on which I reserve
comment for the present. “I have been struck,” he says cannily, “in
my study of the past by the endless self-deception to which man is
subject when he tries to pass too abruptly from the naturalistic to
the religious level. The world, it is hard to avoid concluding, would
have been a better place if more persons had made sure they were human
before setting out to be superhuman; and this consideration would seem
to apply with special force to a generation like the present that is
wallowing in the trough of naturalism. After all to be a good humanist
is merely to be moderate and sensible and decent. It is much easier
for a man to deceive himself and others regarding his supernatural
lights than it is regarding the degree to which he is moderate and
sensible and decent.”

Though Babbitt seems to emphasize here the fear of self-deception as
the main ground for preferring the humanistic plane to the religious,
the New Humanist can actually make out a very strong case based on hard
commonsense. A. R. Orage, the finest living English literary critic,
has suggested what the sensible attitude, in the present state of our
knowledge, should be toward religion. So interesting a point of view
justifies a rather lengthy quotation.

“Suppose that a remote posterity, unversed in mathematics and the
scientific research equipment of our age, should inherit one of our
current science manuals. There they would read or, rather decipher,
such statements as that light travels at the rate of 186,000 miles a
second; that the sun is 92 million miles distant from the earth, and
that the light of the nearest star takes four and a half light years to
reach us. What would they make of it all? Some of them, it is probable,
would hold that their forerunners must have possessed a faculty lost
to themselves and in consequence would attach a mystical significance
to the unverifiable dogmas; they might even repeat these dogmas as
possibly magical formulas. But undoubtedly the best common sense of
the day, in the absence of the means of verification, would dismiss
the statements as being childish guesses or, at best, as barbarous
abracadabra. Only a very few would suspect that perhaps we were not
such fools as we appeared, and give us suspended credit for a method
behind our madness. But our method itself and the instruments we employ
would be still to seek.

“The foregoing picture may serve to illustrate what may possibly--let
us say no more than possibly--be our own situation in regard to
the ancient ‘science’ of religion. We have inherited a few of the
textbooks once circulated among the illuminati of more or less
extinct civilizations, and we find them to contain statements of
equal exactitude and incredibility concerning things of which we have
no verifiable knowledge, as that there is a God Who is a trinity of
Persons, Who created the Universe according to Reason, and Man in
his own image, and Who placed us in the world with potentialities of
consciously becoming like unto Himself. Some of us today are disposed,
like our imagined descendants, to take these traditional statements
mystically; to repeat them as magical formulas; and to assume that
a lost faculty, the so-called religious sense, was possessed by our
ancestors of ancient Egypt, India, Persia and Syria. So relatively
powerful, in fact, are these that their attitude towards the inherited
dogmas of ancient religion is still the standard of respectability.
The weight of common sense, however, is slowly but surely making
itself felt; and the day is not far off when the intelligence of our
civilization will explicitly decline even to be interested in grandiose
statements apparently insusceptible of proof. Only a few, a very few,
will continue to suspect that perhaps the Egyptians, the Buddhists,
the Pythagoreans and the Gnostics were people very like ourselves in
respect of faculty and unlike us only in the same respect in which
we shall differ from a remote posterity without our science, namely,
in the possession, not of a lost faculty, but of a lost method or
technique. And for these few, too, the method or technique is still to
seek--or perhaps only to recognize.”

The foregoing is more than a caution against the easy specification
of what religious experience is; it also reinforces the attitude--a
strictly modern one which most of the New Humanists adopt--of wariness
toward the religious life. But can we find in our ordinary diurnal
living anything that corresponds to the humanistic way and to the
naturalistic way? Nothing is simpler than to exemplify the latter,
for we all live naturalistically most of the time. Most men, Thoreau
observed, lead lives of quiet desperation. Most men must work for
their livelihood, and the work they are driven to do holds little or
no attraction for them. (I do not speak of the increasing number of
intolerable jobs an industrial society creates, but rather of the
monotonous occupations of many members of the middle class.) The
time spent in offices each day is for many men so much time spent in
bondage, cut off from their vivid interests: they repine, but succumb
to a dull routine. Their permanent mood is one of passive endurance.
Like horses they uncomplainingly draw their loads and rejoice when at
five o’clock they are let out to pasture. This is a usual and mild
instance of merely naturalistic living. The humanistic attitude, on
the other hand, is, toward the identical necessity and circumstances,
an active one. A curb is put on futile repining: vain longings
are disciplined: the situation is faced with the minimum useless
feeling. The question for the Humanist is, granting the inescapable
circumstances, how can I make the best use of them to my advantage as
a human being? How may I bend them to suit my design in life, how may
I gather them into focus? How may I extract from my burdens values
that are not accessible to the mere beast of burden? At this point
Arnold’s triumphant converting of his drab job of school inspecting
to the main interests of his life springs to mind as an instance
of working on the humanistic level. In other words, where it is a
case of the disagreeable inevitability, the Naturalist remains under
compulsion from the outside: the Humanist, in contrast, makes an effort
to alter his attitude from mere negative endurance to a search for
positive results in the way of personal discipline and the discovery
of unsuspected values inherent in the day’s work. Is his real business
in life not the cultivation of the distinctively human, and is not
everything grist to that magical mill if one only tries to keep the
mill in operation; that is, if one maintains an active attitude toward
experience?

But, perhaps some readers are saying, you are merely balancing an
act of good sense against the case of unintelligent adjustment:
by what right do you label the former humanistic when many avowed
Naturalists--Charles Darwin in his years of invalidism, for
instance--perform feats of intelligent and heroic overcoming of
difficulties? The answer is that the Naturalist often rises above his
doctrine just as the Humanist often fails in his discipline, but it
still remains true that it is the Humanist who assigns himself the
task of organizing a life based on good sense, while the Naturalist
puts his confidence in following, so far as he is permitted by
events, the grain of his mechanical self. Have we not inherited the
nineteenth century Romantic disparagement of good sense in favor of the
imagination?

                   *       *       *       *       *

The central maxim for practising the humanistic life is a
crystallization in three words of a large part of Greek
wisdom--“Nothing too much.” The New Humanists plan to do not less than
to restore to its pristine attractiveness the law of measure extolled
by Aristotle and called by Horace--so worthy of praise did it seem to
that exquisite poet and epicurean--the Golden Mean.

About this I think there is no difficulty in understanding what the New
Humanist leaders are driving at. The law of measure is not legalistic;
it cannot be codified. Negatively put, it means, avoid excesses.
Positively, it means the rule of temperance, but temperance manifested
in the mental and emotional realms as well as in the physical. The
real difficulty lies in applying measure to our deeds, our thoughts,
our feelings, and it is an immense difficulty, demanding what tact and
delicacy, what perceptiveness and reflection, what resolution and zeal.
In essays by American Humanists we often run upon certain sayings of
Pascal which not only illuminate the import of the law of measure but
should serve here to enhance the reader’s sense of what I have just
said about its difficulty in operation.

“Grandeur is not shown by being at one extremity, but in touching both
at once, and filling the whole space between,” wrote Pascal, and there
could not possibly be a better recognition of the _great scope_ for
the play of human psychology allowed for by the law of measure. “When
we would pursue the virtues to their extremes on either side, vices
present themselves, which insinuate themselves imperceptibly there,
in their insensible course towards the infinitely great, so that we
lose ourselves in vices, and no longer see virtues.” The history of
Romanticism (how often!) testifies to the weight of truth in this
saying. The following _pensée_ might well be called the essence of the
New Humanism. “Excessive or deficient mental powers are alike accused
of madness. Nothing is good save mediocrity. To leave the mean is to
leave humanity. The greatness of the human soul consists in knowing how
to keep the mean. So little is it the case that greatness consists in
leaving it, that it lies in not leaving it.” That is the reply the New
Humanist can make when it is objected that his strictures on eccentric
genius are too harsh. “The greatness of the human soul consists in
knowing how to keep the mean.”

For a genius is often simply an exaggeration of one, and but one, of
the three major aspects of a man. For we may say that man is a compound
of Knowing, Being and Doing. Exaggerate his wish to know into a lust
for knowledge (_libido sciendi_), depress at the same time his wish for
Being and Doing, and you get the Gargantuan hungerer for knowledge, the
monstrous head and the starved heart and impotent faculty for doing,
you get an encyclopædist, a Diderot (whose heart was active, however)
or a Herbert Spencer. Again exaggerate a man’s wish for Being, let him
despise the acquisition of knowledge and the doing of deeds, and you
have the lust for feeling (_libido sentiendi_): you have a genius like
Rousseau or Schiller. There is also an inordinate lust for power, for
doing (_libido dominandi_), which like the lusts for knowledge and
for feeling is all-consuming and warps the development of character,
and this time you get a monstrous man of action like Napoleon or like
some great industrialists of the present era that any one can name.
These incarnations of the three great lusts of human nature excite our
wonder and admiration: they fascinate us by their “divine madness.”
But we remind ourselves that there is also a “divine sanity,” and it
seems in the character of Plato or Buddha a finer touch of divinity.
Babbitt transcribes for us in his argument directed against the _libido
sciendi_, the _libido sentiendi_, and the _libido dominandi_ the
Buddhist proverb: “If one man conquer in battle ten thousand men and
another man conquer his own self, he is the greatest of conquerors,”
and to this he subjoins his own belief that “that man is most human
who can check his faculty, even if it be his master-faculty, and his
passion, even his ruling passion, in its mid-career, and temper it by
its opposite.”

In one phrase, then, the Humanist method is mediation between extremes.
It is the finding of the middle way, and I hasten to add that the
middle way is never found mechanically, never by merely striking an
average between two extremes. It is a strait and narrow way, obvious
when it is recognized, but hard to recognize. Finding it is a call
upon all of one’s experience: effort, thought, observation, a scale of
values, spiritual agility, all are needed to make the discovery of the
Golden Path.

                   *       *       *       *       *

But useless is all writing about the Golden Mean if man has no power
of choice, or potentiality of acquiring a power of choice. As well
exhort a beggar to buy a palace! Nothing could be vainer than the
formulation of a discipline based on selection, selection and again
selection, if there is in man no capability for selecting. According
to the Mechanists there is not. They have much truth on their side.
In the sense that man is self-ignorant and therefore uncontrolled
(for who can control what he does not know?), man _is_ a machine. But
here is something to ponder on: there is a wide uninvestigated region
of man which we may term his potential psychology. Psychology as a
science--described truly by its leaders as an infant science--has not
yet given us a norm for human psychology, which includes both our
actualities and our latencies. An honest worker like Dr. J. B. Watson
speaks frankly for all his profession when he says that we have seen
no norm, and adds that in his opinion it would be infinitely desirable
to find one. The New Humanist, weighing the evidence and testimony of
the past, concludes that man has at least the potentialities of gaining
self-knowledge and self-control. He therefore seeks to actualize
them. He challenges the Mechanists and appeals to our sense of latent
psychology. In his effort to build up a working system of psychology
based upon potentialities (our human self) as well as upon actualities
(our mechanical self), the New Humanist has been more grotesquely
misunderstood than at any other point.

We approach now the meaning of the phrases he uses so often,--“a
principle of restraint,” “a power of vital control,” “_frein vital_”
as against “_élan vital_,” “the inner check.” I have been through the
mass of writings directed against Babbitt’s theory, and these terms
are harped on with so much irritation that I can only conclude the
vocabulary of Babbitt is highly offensive to our age. “Now why the
deuce,” peevishly writes one of the younger critics, speaking for
all of them, “is virtue, with the Humanists, always made to reside
exclusively in what Babbitt calls the ‘will to refrain’?” In the
petulance of that question there is perhaps a clue to the psychology
of our age, a psychology so extraordinarily blind that it fails to see
that a principle of restraint is only another way of saying a principle
of selection, as indeed in Babbitt’s writings the two expressions are
interchangeable from his first book wherein he spoke of “a humane
principle of selection, or what amounts to the same thing, a true
principle of restraint.” But a very vocal part of our age is infuriated
by the very notion of restraint, and we have to interpret this strange
fact. Can it be that, as is sometimes charged, this is really an age
of weaklings in the arts and philosophies? It is noticeable that men
of strength are usually the very men who most feel the need of curbing
themselves, that men of rich and powerful personalities are the ones
who try hardest to purge themselves of the merely gratuitous and
“temperamental,” that men of real passion are the first to acknowledge
need of canalizing it. These men are not afraid that a little
discipline will take away their precious personalities: they have so
much personality that it is precisely discipline they look for. But
what is this outcry on the part of so many of our formative writers
against the negative admonition? What feebleness of energy and passion
is it that is afraid of being strangled by a “power of vital control”?
I am driven to think of the reports of sexologists who say that it is
the poorly sexed man whose erotic life is one of excessive indulgence,
whereas the powerfully sexed are sensible of the need for some
moderation of their desires, and I wonder if many a writer in our day,
determined to let nothing stop the expression of his soul (the size of
an emmet, alas, in so many cases) is not comparable to the unrestrained
man of poor sexual powers.

However that may be, the American intellectuals and artists as a body
have totally failed to perceive what may be fairly termed the gallantry
of the Humanist conception of “a will to refrain.” For if we could, as
it were, put our ordinary selves under a glass and gaze coolly at them,
we should see very numerous and complicated phenomena, a flux subject
to endless change and relativity, which except for an infinitesimal
fraction we are not aware of at all. This world of impressions, and
bodily changes, and variations in feeling goes its own way, and we
are, it seems, at its mercy. Have most of us any more control of our
mental processes than we have of our glandular secretions? But against
this imperious self the Humanist dares to assert his very deepest
self. He dares to say no to its impulsions. He dares to say, though
these phenomena _arise_ in me, I yet shall deal with these arisings,
denying some and permitting others to run their natural course. And
it is this assertion that I call gallant. The odds are all against
the assertion being made good: the attraction of the ordinary self is
almost irresistible; and yet man will struggle to assert his freedom of
the ebb and flow of his ordinary life. In positive language, the “will
to refrain” is an attempt to strike a blow for freedom.

The principle of restraint is dramatized by Babbitt when he calls it
the inner check. It is less metaphorical than many terms appropriated
by, let us say, psycho-analysts who speak of a “censor,” for example,
but still it is only a metaphor. What does it stand for? I find it very
difficult to say, for it seems to be on the outskirts of a tremendous
conception, a conception that is excessively hard to put into words.
Many opponents of American Humanism have thought the inner check to
be merely an inhibition, or some streak of puritanism, or in one case
an equivalent to what the psycho-analyst means by the censor. As if
More and Babbitt were naïve men of limited experience! As if, though
trained in skepticism for a lifetime, they would make an error that any
fledgeling reviewer could see! No; the meaning of the inner check must
be sought in a deeper way if it is to be elicited, and in plumbing for
it we must first of all divest ourselves of our usual notions about
inhibitions.

Both Babbitt and More have, as a matter of fact, clearly indicated
that they held no ordinary conception when they spoke of the inner
check.[6] The phrase is probably Babbitt’s, who derived it from Emerson
in whose writings it appeared as the inward check; the inward check was
referred by Emerson to Hindu scriptures where the meaning was an inward
guide or control. This in itself is sufficient to put us on guard
against a quick assumption that we understand what it is all about.
But there is another reason, equally strong: Babbitt has several times
linked up his sense of an inner check with the dæmon of Socrates, who
is made to say in the _Phædrus_: “My divine monitor’s wonted sign--now
it never occurs save to deter me from something or other I am intending
to do.” This is why I said above that the More-Babbitt conception of
the inner check appears to me to be on the fringe of a tremendous
conception, for I have not the effrontery to regard Socrates as naïve
in matters of his own psychology. At the same time, what was meant by
the ancient idea of a deterring monitor in one’s breast and what is now
meant by the Babbitt-More derivation? The difficulties of an answer are
at once visible.

Something like this may be modestly ventured, however. Neither
ancient nor modern had or has in mind, when speaking of a dæmon or an
inner check, what we may call a sociologically formed conscience. By
education we have all had instilled in us a kind of pseudo-conscience:
in our childhood and youth older people told us definitely what was
right and wrong, they traded on our susceptibility, and now that we
have grown critical, we learn that these deeply stamped notions of
wrong and right are purely relative, often silly, and in some instances
downright harmful. Take anything you please--our sense of sexual
shame, for one--and any intelligent person today can riddle much of it
by simply showing how arbitrarily we have been conditioned. So much
depends on social custom! But the inner check and the Socratic dæmon
are not, I feel confident, the products of respectable training.

For, to continue with the case of sexual shame, is there not a true
shame as well as a pseudo-shame? Is there not a shame so deep, so
primitive, that it seems biological, owing nothing to sociology, a
shame that when it is violated seems to overthrow the whole being?
Pseudo-shame can be almost painlessly removed, but this organic
shame, if corrupted, is corrupted only by a violent wrench to one’s
whole character. It is as though something died in one, whereas when
sociological shame is taken away, one feels liberated and even gay.

By my line of reasoning, the inner check conception is to be taken as
the faint shadow cast down the ages by the Socratic dæmon, and this
dæmon in turn I am half-guessing to be a figure of Conscience. But not
conscience in our sense, the pseudo-function that Society sets going
in us, but--how shall I put it?--some abiding developed sense of how it
is fitting that the being Man should conduct himself in a life that may
be a school of experience, but certainly reveals no easily accessible
master of the school.

For fluid as is the nature of man--and few recent writers have better
displayed man’s fluidity than Joseph Wood Krutch in an essay entitled
_The Paradox of Humanism_--there does yet seem to be buried in the
creature something, almost non-functioning, which we may agree to call
a conscience, since it is independent of social conditioning, and this
something, this conscience, sometimes says no in emphatic command. Who
is there who, on sincere self-examination, does not find there are
a few things he knows with absolute certitude he could never do? No
power on earth, no conceivable circumstances, he declares to himself,
would make me do thus-and-so. And yet why not do them? There may be no
consequences that inspire fear, there may even be strong incentives to
take the detested course of action. But something internal says Veto so
powerfully that there is no possibility of committing the action. _The
action would seem like a betrayal of the species one belongs to!_

The interpretation is here offered then that the inner check works in
the interests of some essential humanity in us. It seeks to counteract
that fluidity of our nature whereby men become beasts or go mad. It
warns us when we are about to desert our adult human standards and
retrogress to the puerile or infantile or sub-human.

And now I think of the life of Socrates as we have it: the simple
dignity, the steadiness of his passion for self-perfection, the
courage of his behavior, and all the multitude of other points of
homage the world has paid him. And I see his life as a drama of the
true conscience: in his illustrious example, a conscience developed,
sensitized, responsive, a marvellous monitor surely directing him as to
how it was fit that a member of the human species should live.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The technique of the New Humanism, to sum it up, is mediation under the
guidance of the vestiges of true conscience still in our psychology.
It is as simple as that, and, I am tempted to add, as tremendous as
that. To repeat Pascal’s profound words: “To leave the mean is to leave
humanity.” The inner check or as I take it the vestige of conscience
in modern man warns us when we veer toward barbarous extremes. The
activity of the inner check is the very heart of the method, but
dependent from the principal technique are several lesser techniques
which may now be taken up rapidly and schematically. The New Humanist
calls them (a) the right use of illusion, (b) the imitation of nature,
and (c) decorum.

(a). The Right Use of Illusion. The quotations are from Babbitt’s
_Rousseau and Romanticism_. “Life does not here give an element of
oneness and there an element of change. It gives a _oneness that is
always changing_. The oneness and the change are inseparable. Now if
what is stable and permanent is felt as real, the side of life that
is always slipping over into something else or vanishing away entirely
is, as every student of psychology knows, associated rather with the
feeling of illusion ... The problem of the One and the Many, the
ultimate problem of thought, can therefore be solved only by a right
use of illusion ... failure (with the problem of the One and the Many)
can be retrieved only by a deeper insight into the imagination and its
all-important rôle in both literature and life.”

In the above I think we may detect the hand of Joubert who reflected
deeply on _illusion et sagesse_. “Joubert,” Paul Elmer More says,
“conceives it to be the rôle of the imagination, mediating as it does
between sense and reason, to lend its magic and glamour to the latter,
to throw as it were a veil of divine illusion over some essential
truth.... The imagination must be really free and spontaneous, and the
truth itself must not be too precisely formulated, if we are to arrive
at that vital fusing of illusion and insight with the accompanying
sense of infinitude that is found in the true symbol.”

In the ideal Humanist then the Imagination coöperates with Reason. Its
rôle is not debased in order to exalt good sense as happened in the
Neo-Classicism of the eighteenth century, nor is it made antagonistic
to good sense as was done in the romantic recoil from Pope and other
eighteenth century men. Something like the play of Imagination in
behalf of Reason as we behold it in Plato is what Babbitt and More
contend is the Imagination’s highest function.

(b). The Imitation of Nature. “The first point to observe,” notes
Babbitt, “is that according to Aristotle one is to get his general
nature not on authority or second hand, but is to disengage it directly
for himself from the jungle of particulars that he has before his eyes.
He is not, says Aristotle, to imitate things as they are, but as they
ought to be. Thus conceived, imitation is a creative act. Through all
the welter of the actual one penetrates to the real and so succeeds
without ceasing to be individual in suggesting the universal.” The
consideration above is not purely literary. The Humanist with his
practical attitude toward the leading of “the good life” tries to form
a model before his eyes of what normal representative human nature is
and to imitate that. Out of human nature as it actually is he tries
to make a general picture of what it ought to be, and to hold that
up as a guide for his efforts to become more representative in his
own person. Since many people apparently find it hard to receive much
meaning from such abstract statements as the preceding, since they
are not at once and vividly conscious of the vast difference between
a standard of human nature and the average of human nature, I may be
pardoned for urgently recommending a close study of Charles Maurras’s
explicit account of how the normal (or perfect) man appears to his mind
and imagination. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of such an
attempt as Maurras’s. Classicism, if it is to be a life, must be more
than a set of ideas and a discipline for actions: it must rally the
emotions and make use of their great driving force. It happens that
our emotions can be appealed to by images, and hence the desirability
of forming as concrete an image as possible of what the classical
man, man _par excellence_, is like. In his _Prologue to an Essay on
Criticism_, Maurras has said: “Good taste is the taste of the perfect
man.” He then goes on:

“There is such a thing as a perfect man. I mean that it is not
difficult to conceive a man who should fulfil exactly the idea of our
common condition and who could serve as a model for all of us. I hope
I shall be excused for not bestowing upon this fictitious creature
(fictitious but true) the nickname of _Beau Idéal_: that name crops up
whenever people want to talk German or abandon a subject in favor of a
vague terminology. People who argue about the ideal do not mean by that
the total of the characteristics that build up and complete a being,
but, as they say in their jargon, something over and above. The perfect
man fulfils the definition of man, the ideal man deforms it here and
there; I hasten to add that in the ideal man excesses are balanced by
defects, and extravagances by omissions.

“By the perfect man I do not mean a mediocre figure in which virtues
and faults are balanced. I am thinking of the limit of human power.
Monsters and prodigies do not exceed that limit, as is commonly said.
They are very well within it, like the mediocrities. Man conceives
nothing beyond that limit, beyond which live the gods.

“In a few words, man is a reasoning animal. This old definition seems
to me the only satisfactory one. Neither morality, nor sociability,
nor, to be sure, feeling is peculiar to man. He is distinguished only
by reason; that is what distinguishes him, without separating him,
from the rest of creation. Created nature is completely represented
in him. In his body which has weight, number and measure as have the
metals, organization like the plants, sensibility and movement like
the animals, and which thus appears as the achievement of our earth.
His reason is incessantly nourished, sharpened, enlivened, illuminated
by the tribute which the world pays him through these three channels.
Reason, thus conditioned by the whole of nature, must develop the
fulness of its energies in the exact measure in which that can work
no ill to the perfect expansion of a flourishing body; reason pushed
to the point of parching the animal would exhaust its own sources of
being; as for the exclusive culture of the body, that would coarsen the
soul and deprive it of reason. So the most subtle of the Athenians used
to drain bowl after bowl of wine without confusing his brain, and would
then reason like a god. His companions admired him all the more.

“To express the natural harmony of these two powers, we commonly use
a very vicious figure of speech: we speak of ‘equilibrium’ as if the
objects on the scale were equivalent! _Order_ is what we should call
this conformity of a being to all the elements of its fate.

“What should be the critical sense of a human being composed in
such a way that his instincts, his impressions, his feelings, his
passions, when brought to the highest point, are guided and ruled by
an intellect more powerful, itself fortified, sustained and nourished
by the abundance of nature? His animal ardors will never usurp the
seat of control which belongs exclusively to judgment and reason; but
will reason abandon a nature which is too robust, in order to follow
vain imaginations? No dessication, no flaccidity either; forms full
and well-nerved; philosopher and on occasion even metaphysician, but
rigorously; a sense of real and true poetry; infused with all human
warmth, but firm and secure against it if need be: such is the general
idea that is possible of the good taste of an accomplished man.”

I do not say I regard the above as the best depiction of the perfect
man to be encountered, but Maurras indubitably proceeds along the
right lines, using his imagination to catch a glimpse of the universal
and at the same time not sacrificing his own individuality. He has
succeeded in visualizing a model with fair claims to normality,
representativeness, soundness, for his own personal imitation or
emulation. Note that the logic by which Maurras has made his conception
is the logic of probability, commended so often in the New Humanist
books, and not simply a flight into the improbable.

(c). Decorum. What a fate has befallen this noble word! It is, in my
opinion, impossible for the New Humanist to raise it from its low
estate. Babbitt has exposed the way in which in the eighteenth century
it came to mean etiquette: as he well says, the Neo-Classical writers
made the bad mistake of confusing the language of the nobility with
the nobility of language. This blunder Wordsworth recoiled from in
his advocacy and use of plain diction: the Romantics hated decorum
because it had become a stiff and formal and external affair. But worse
degradation awaited the word, and at the present time in America it
seems to mean, so far as I can judge from the writers who object to it,
the “genteel” manners, the prudish code of behavior which it is the
fashion to attribute to the past generation. As I think, the word is
beyond rescue: it is drowned in its present debased associations. But
is that an excuse for those whose profession it is to read critically
to charge classical scholars like More and Babbitt with attaching
merely a “genteel” significance to the term?

How could Babbitt, for instance, have made it plainer than he did in
the next passage I shall quote that decorum for him does not mean
empty formalism, or a mere veneer of manners, but is inward and to be
understood in a large way? I resort to italics, for truly they seem
necessary to combat our habitual associations with the word. “Whoever
has succeeded in bridging the gap between the general percept and some
particular emergency has to that extent achieved the fitting and the
decorous. _Decorum is simply the law of measure in its more concrete
aspects._ For every type of humanist decorum is, in Milton’s phrase,
the ‘grand masterpiece to observe.’ _Actually this observation may rest
on deep insight_, as it did in the case of Milton himself, or it may
degenerate into empty formalism. The adjustment of which I have spoken
between the variable and the permanent elements in human experience
requires _spiritual_ effort and most men are spiritually indolent. For
genuine adjustment they tend to substitute outer conformity so that
decorum itself finally comes to seem a mere veneer, something that has
no deep root in things. Moreover the notions of decent behavior to
which men have conformed at any particular period have always been
more or less local and relative. It is easy to take the next step and
assume that they have been _only_ local and relative, an assumption
subversive not merely of decorum but of humanism itself.”

But in spite of Babbitt’s care in expressing his meaning, he has been
constantly defeated by his readers’ different sense of the term, and
not even his using the phrase “a sense of proportion” as equivalent to
decorum has enlightened most of them. Yet all that decorum means is the
activity of our sense of proportion: it means the carrying out of what
it is seemly for a man to do. It is not seemly for a man to whine, we
say: not seemly for him to shirk the offices of the mind: not seemly
to be an utter fool in practical affairs. Notions of fitting behavior
vary from place to place and time to time, as Babbitt observes, but
above all the varying notions there remains a permanent sense of how it
is appropriate for a man to live. He should face the facts: he should
put away childish things: he should deal with the difficulties of
existence intelligently, courageously, forcefully: he should realize
his innermost being. The indecorous is simply the inappropriate, the
disproportioned, whether it occurs in art or in conduct. Bathos is
indecorous: sentimentality, the gush of emotion far in excess of the
fact, is indecorous: the intrusion of the purely private into public
discussion is indecorous. The things named are either inappropriate or
unmeasured.

To close the subject: Decorum, or a sense of proportion, is simply the
law of measure in its more concrete aspects, it is the law of measure
in actual operation in the shifting tangle of daily existence.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In describing the discipline worked out by the New Humanists I have
striven for extreme simplicity of statement. My aim has been to
concretize as much as possible the technical formulations in Humanist
literature. I was moved to do this, because I have sometimes read
that the More-Babbitt doctrine and discipline are academic in the bad
sense of the word. Babbitt and More advocate, it is said, notions that
are narrow and have a freezing effect on the “spirit.” They are, most
damning accusation, puritanical. But what, when correctly understood,
is evilly academic about their conception of man and the means they
advocate for true self-fulfilment? What is narrow about their ideas
when they are distinguished at the source and not “interpreted” by some
overworked journalist? How can the law of measure possibly freeze up
the springs of personality, if one has any personality to begin with?
And are they puritanical? I cite Babbitt’s critical position toward
Puritanism for a sufficient reply.

“The crucial point in any case is one’s attitude toward the principle
of control. Those who stand for this principle in any form or degree
are dismissed by the emancipated as reactionaries or, still graver
reproach, as Puritans. Mr. Mencken would have us believe that the
historical Puritan was not even sincere in his moral rigorism, but
was given to ‘lamentable transactions with loose women and fiery
jugs.’ This may serve as a sample of the assertions, picturesquely
indiscriminate, by which a writer wins immediate notoriety at the
expense of his permanent reputation. The facts about the Puritan happen
to be complex and need to be dealt with very Socratically. It has been
affirmed that the point of view of the Puritan was Stoical rather than
truly Christian, and the affirmation is not wholly false. The present
discussion of the relationship between Puritanism and the rise of
capitalism with its glorification of the acquisitive life also has its
justification. It is likewise a fact that the Puritan was from the
outset unduly concerned with reforming others as well as himself, and
this trait relates him to the humanitarian meddler or ‘wowser’ of the
present day, who is Mr. Mencken’s pet aversion.

“Yet it remains true that awe and reverence and humility are Christian
virtues and that there was some survival of these virtues in the
Puritan. For a representative Puritan like Jonathan Edwards they were
inseparable from the illumination of grace, from what he terms ‘a
divine and supernatural light.’ In the passage from the love and fear
of God of an Edwards to the love and service of man professed by the
humanitarian, something has plainly dropped out, something that is very
near the center. What has tended to disappear is the inner life with
the special type of control it imposes. With the decline of this inner
control there has been an increasing resort to outer control. Instead
of the genuine Puritan we then have the humanitarian legalist who
passes innumerable laws for the control of people who refuse to control
themselves. The activity of our uplifters is scarcely suggestive of
any ‘divine and supernatural light.’ Here is a discrimination of the
first importance that has been obscured by the muddy thinking of our
half-baked intelligentsia. One is thus kept from perceiving the real
problem, which is to retain the inner life, even though one refuse to
accept the theological nightmare with which the Puritan associated it.
More is involved in the failure to solve this problem than the Puritan
tradition. It is the failure of our contemporary life in general. Yet,
unless some solution is reached by a full and free exercise of the
critical spirit, one remains a mere modernist and not a thoroughgoing
and complete modern; for the modern spirit and the critical spirit are
in their essence one.”

To me it is a jest at the expense of the last decade that while so
many of us have been marching behind the drums of Menckenism, round
and round the same old circle of naturalistic ideas, there has issued
forth from the despised quarter of university thought the most truly
modern system of all, a system far more in accord with the spirit of
Goethe, who spoke, says Babbitt, not as a Puritan but as a clear-eyed
man of the world, than all the humanitarian and romantic panaceas that
are so solemnly discussed in our liberal weeklies. Goethe said that
everything that liberates the spirit without a corresponding growth in
self-mastery is pernicious.

                   *       *       *       *       *

As a matter of fact, the New Humanist like the historical Humanist
revolts against Calvinism. But he has hit upon an interesting
substitution for the Christian dogma of Original Sin or Depravity.
Most attempts men have made at an objective critique of the human race
have wound up in the conclusion that there is something radically wrong
with it, that there is a Moby Dick loose in the ocean of humanity which
must be hunted down and captured before the race can achieve peace. It
is as though we all existed under some curse, as though we had been
cheated of some birthright. Take the opening pages of _Walden_. Thoreau
is trying for an objective view of mankind. He finds fault after fault
sweeping through the race. He finds it indeed a very odd race, doing
penance in a thousand singular ways for existence. Why is it thus? He
is led to make one master indictment of human beings:--they are torpid!
The humanistic view almost coincides, it amounts to saying the main
trouble with mankind is torpor. Original Indolence in place of Original
Sin! The criticism is reinforced by Buddhistic teachings. For the
doctrine of original depravity to Babbitt is not thoroughly acceptable:
it rests on rather metaphysical grounds and seems hard to verify
practically. The Buddhist doctrine of the original laziness of human
nature, however, appears to come closer to the ascertainable facts.
“The greatest of vices according to Buddha is the lazy yielding to the
impulses of temperament (_pamāda_); the greatest virtue (_appamāda_)
is the opposite of this, the awakening from the sloth and lethargy of
the senses, the constant exercise of the active will.” By this stroke
Babbitt once again frees his doctrine of theology, and as always makes
his appeal to verifiable experience. The New Humanism, to offer still
another definition, is a warfare on man’s original indolence. We may
be said to be born with a “won’t”: the Humanist tries to oppose a
“will” to this “won’t.”

What the New Humanism has to say about the Will is another borrowing
from Eastern philosophy. The Will is regarded as anterior and superior
to the Intellect: to it and not to the Intellect as in St. Thomas
Aquinas is given the primacy. But you will find all this treated
exhaustively in the works of Babbitt, More and their followers.

What I wish to say is that the problem of the Will is the very
crux-problem of all our civilization. I am convinced that Babbitt
has put the supreme question to our times, and that all debate over
American Humanism is beside the main point until that question is
fully faced. “Here at all events is the issue on which all other
issues finally hinge; for until the question of moral freedom--the
question whether man is a responsible agent or only the plaything of
his impulses and impressions--is decided, nothing is decided; and to
decide the question under existing circumstances calls for the keenest
critical discrimination.”

But how uncritical and impractical we are about this problem! Vague
and futile! If anything is plain, it is that the Will presents first
a psychological problem and only after that a metaphysical question.
But we argue and theorize endlessly about the Will. Hardly ever do
we think of a practical self-demonstration, and if we do it is some
such ineffably silly demonstration as saying, “I _will_ to open this
window.” But did you will to move all the muscles that shifted when you
did so, including the numerous unnecessary movements that accompanied
the action? The truth is that Will can only begin where Behaviorism
leaves off, but very few have digested Behaviorism. Why do we not howl
with laughter when we read in William James: “My first act of free will
shall be to believe in free will”? Or take this piece of naïveté upon
which my eye has fallen while writing this chapter. A young critic
is telling his audience that “the philosophic implications of the
quantum theory, the writings of Whitehead, Eddington, C. J. Herrick
and Millikan, and the spectacle of American artists recovering from
paralysis of the will, had all combined to revive a sense of free will
in certain Americans.” It may be a sense of free will, but if it was
arrived at by these means, by reading, we may be positive that it is an
illusory sense. As if the same critic had listed a number of authors
who had proved to him that he had what he was not previously sure of,
a mind. We say we have minds because they demonstrate themselves to
us beyond any possible doubt. If we indeed have Wills, they also will
be self-demonstrating: no one need prove to us we have what we cannot
doubt we possess. Where there is doubt, there is no Will. Where there
is no doubt, let it be added at once there still may be no Will.

One thing we know: Will is not to be associated, as is often done, with
desire. Our desires come and go and fight among themselves: we commonly
act, not on _a_ desire, but on the resultant of our various contending
desires. But Will, in the very nature of the case, is distinct from and
independent of desire. Not in the region of desires but of efforts
should we look for the roots of Will. On this the New Humanist is
absolutely clear-headed.

And perhaps there we had better leave the discussion for the present.
Making effort is always unmistakable to us. It has a psychological
taste, if I may say so, so strong that we cannot delude ourselves
into thinking we are not engaged in effort. Our desires on the other
hand have quite another taste, and many times as is well known we are
only dimly conscious of them. The use of Will then could never be
unconscious, could never be a mere matter of believing theories. Will
would make itself felt in the psychological realm as indubitably as our
bodies feel kinæsthetic strain in hauling a heavy boat up on shore.

Everything in American Humanism depends ultimately upon the Will as an
undeniable fact, not as an assumption. We may start with the assumption
but unless we can convert it into a fact for ourselves as patent as the
fingers on our hands we are playing with an illusion.

There is a practical problem of the Will: a practical approach to
it: and perhaps a practical solution. The New Humanists project this
key problem to the place where it belongs: in the front of all our
dilemmas and puzzles as to how to lead “the good life.” Should we all
try seriously to work at the key problem, there would occur in American
life a revolution that would be unimaginable.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The New Humanist not only associates Will with effort, but--what is a
great advance over his opponents’ muddled notions about Will--with
a particular type of effort: work on oneself, a work that takes the
form of knowing oneself, harmonizing oneself, disciplining oneself.
And in this lies the secret of the devotees of Humanism. It is,
however, an open secret, older than Aristotle and still advertised
today. It is that happiness comes not from psychological inertia but
from psychological work. Once again I shall quote from Babbitt: “this
sluggishness and slackness of spirit, this mere drifting and abdication
of will, may, as Chaucer’s parson suggests, be the crime against the
Holy Ghost itself.” The agreement is with Aristotle who conceived “of
happiness in terms of work. All types of temperamentalists are from
the human point of view passive. The happiness that they crave is a
passive happiness. A man may pursue power with the energy of a Napoleon
and yet remain ethically passive. He may expand his sympathies until,
like Schiller, he is ready to ‘bestow a kiss upon the whole world,’
and yet remain ethically passive. A man ceases to be ethically passive
only when he begins to work in the Aristotelian sense, that is when he
begins to put the brake on temperament and impulse, and in the same
degree he tends to become ethically efficient.”

And now let one of the ancients, “the subtlest of the Athenians,” the
hero of the Platonic Dialogues, have the final word. “The best man is
he who most tries to perfect himself, and the happiest man is he who
most feels that he _is_ perfecting himself.”

The reader may think it strange that such a doctrine and discipline as
we have been sketching should arouse the violent and oftentimes abusive
antagonism that flared up in the winter and spring of 1930. Whatever
its ultimate deficiencies may be, the New Humanism wears commonsense on
its face, and its thought is both broad and elevated. Nevertheless it
provoked a storm.

It is explicable. In the first place, much random opposition to
American Humanism springs up because of the specific attitudes
Humanists take in respect to art, literature, science, education,
politics, and so forth. Stemming from the parent attitude of
responsibility toward the natural self are a variety of consequential
attitudes when the Humanist looks out upon the world around him. And it
is these consequential (or possibly only contingent) attitudes which
have caused some individuals to hurl their thunderbolts. An admirer
of the cumbersome novels of Theodore Dreiser, let us say, reads some
detached article by a New Humanist in which his hero is held up as an
exemplar of “romanticism going on all fours”: he inquires no further
into the basis of American Humanism but immediately rushes to the
defence of Dreiser and current American literature. And so with the
advocate of Professor John Dewey’s educational ideas. A criticism by
a Humanist of these ideas is sufficient to incur the hostility of the
disciple of Dewey: the system of the attacker on Dewey is of no moment,
for his ideas on education are objectionable and so must be his whole
outlook. There have been many such quarrels over specific opinions,
which have naturally led to a condemnation without examination of
Humanism itself. The New Humanists work out their critique of modern
life on many fronts. They advance a new-old program on the same number
of fronts. It is easy to see then how, being comprehensive, they manage
to stir up so many enemies. In the next three chapters I shall examine
the Humanist attitude toward modern science, educational impressionism,
and politics, and no doubt the reader will then easily comprehend why
the New Humanism has provoked so much heated debate.

But in the second place there is a far more important reason why the
reception of Humanism has been acrimonious beyond any precedent in
American literary history. _It is because American Humanism dares to
question the unconscious assumptions of our age._ It is well known
that if you touch a man in his pocketbook, you frequently get a sudden
dramatic agitated revelation of his psychology. Or touch a person in
his sex life, and again there is the parting of the customary veils
over his behavior: you see vividly the flashing of the person’s
psychological forces. There is a third way: instead of asking for a
loan of money, or tossing a rabelaisian joke at an acquaintance, toss
an idea at him that goes beneath his customary thoughts to strike at
his latent assumptions, the thoughts he was unaware of, upon which,
nevertheless, all his opinions come to rest. _Then_ he will become
active: he jumps as if a hypodermic needle had been applied to his
mind: he bristles with defences against this idea that has irritated
his mind at its very base.

You are attacking the context of things he did not know he believed,
but instinctively he knows now that if they are threatened, all
his opinions are threatened. For it is _through_ these unconscious
assumptions that he has seen everything else. No wonder he rallies to
their defence! No wonder he strikes back! It is the very quick of his
mind you have touched.

American Humanism is a concerted assault not so much on what our age
has assumed knowingly but on what it has unconsciously assumed. That
is why it has been and will be violently opposed, fought with every
weapon, shouted at and shouted down, if possible. The outcome may be
within a decade the complete submergence of the Humanist movement.
In that event so much the worse for an age that cannot be brought to
criticize its unknown postulates once the light has been let in on them.




                                  VIII

                       SCIENCE AND THE MODERN MAN

  _“Science has its legitimate pretensions to power; but false claims
  are now being advanced on all sides under the shelter of its name,
  and it is these false claims which the humanist is concerned to
  expose.”_--Louis Trenchard More in _Humanism and America_.


Do you wish a vivid proof that American Humanism probes through the
crystallized portions of the modern mentality and wounds its quick
nervous base? Then consider the intense annoyance created among so many
modernists by the temperate criticism the classical party makes of the
current prestige of science. The New Humanist attempts only to moderate
the very great esteem of our time for science. Yet pained outcries
on every hand greet this effort at moderation, and this extreme
sensitivity of many holding no stake in the matter to a criticism of
the large claims made in the name of modern science surely calls for
investigation. This conclusion cannot be escaped:--the men of our age
are nowhere near so emancipated from Authority as they like to fancy.

It is true we no longer acknowledge Authority in the theological
quarter. To accept on faith the cosmology of the Bible is to be
mediæval. But are we the self-conscious rebels we picture ourselves?
In revolting from the theological fold, have we not rebelled on
command of another Authority? However we came to revolt, now the
situation is plain. We have merely transferred the seat of Authority,
planting it today in the scientific quarter. Ye have conquered, O
Galileans! To be modernistic is to be as subservient to the oracular
opinions of scientific savants as the ordinary mediæval man was to the
interpretations of his theologians. The boastful modernists are, in
fact, still looking up to something far above: they are still on their
knees before Authority as the bulk of mankind has always knelt.

What we take on authority is by definition what we cannot scrutinize or
have not troubled to scrutinize, and of course we must be uncritical
about the uninspected. Here, in the region of the authoritative, is
where _aberglaube_, extra-belief, has a chance to enter; here is
where we become superstitious. The New Humanist has never attacked
exact science in itself, and in some respects his critique of what
seem to him the mistaken pretensions of science is very mild. But he
does pierce the _aberglaube_ that in the nineteenth century attached
itself to modern science. He is the foe of those who are gullible
about science, who take it altogether on faith, who are, in short,
superstitious. The language is not too strong.

There is a very quick way to test the tenacious hold that scientific
authority exerts on us. (To repeat myself, I mean to test the existence
of what to us are pure assumptions which have been implanted in us
almost without our knowledge by contemporary science.) The quick way
is to read two extraordinary and weird books of recent years, _The
Book of the Damned_ and _New Lands_, both by an investigator of
phenomena which have been excluded by orthodox science, Charles Fort.
The author of these strange documents is acutely aware of the very
human tendency of scientific system-makers to achieve a harmony of
knowledge by excluding the inharmonious data. He has therefore turned
his attention to the “disregards” of the scientists (geographers,
geologists, astronomers, physicists, etc.), and comes forward as the
champion of the damned data--and some of the data is horrendous. A
daring writer, for he is obliged to challenge the correctness of many
elementary things we learned in grammar and secondary schools. He
adduces evidence, that is to say, totally at variance with what we
were taught in school, when we were most submissive, and which we have
_never_ questioned. The result is that in reading Fort we experience
a most peculiar sense of strain. We find that we _hate_ to have any
one argue with a show of good reasons that interstellar distances are
rather small when we have always been told and believed, most of us
without any detailed proof, that they were inconceivably immense. There
are certain things--many items in fact--about the world which we want
to regard as having been settled and learned once for all. The idea of
new learning is attractive, but the idea of re-learning in fields where
we have assumed certain things to have been thoroughly proven is most
repugnant.

Among his provisional theories or “acceptances” as he calls them,
Fort holds “that we do not really think at all; that we correlate
around super-magnets that I call Dominants--a Spiritual Dominant in
one age, and responsively to it up spring monasteries, and the stake
and the cross are its symbols: a Materialist Dominant, and up spring
laboratories, and microscopes and telescopes and crucibles are its
ikons--that we’re nothing but iron filings relatively to a succession
of magnets that displace preceding magnets.”

To use Fort’s terminology, the New Humanist recognizes that science is
the Dominant of our civilization, and that most people, impressed by
its marvels in the field of mechanical inventions, simply correlate
around it. He invites us therefore to _think_ about this super-magnet,
to mark out its true sphere of influence, and to be conscious of
our relation to it. He urges us, in brief, to be as critical of its
magnetism as we are now able to be of the theological Dominant of
former ages.

The first step is to discriminate between real science and what the
French call _petite science_ and we call popular science. The latter is
often out-of-date, frequently over-simplified, and usually boastful.
Yet it is what the average man, and many literary men with him, browses
upon. In contrast, the scientific leaders are as a rule models of
caution and modesty. The next step is to perceive that there is a
hierarchy of sciences. It is to see with A. S. Eddington “that physical
science comes nearest to that complete system of exact knowledge which
all sciences have before them as an ideal. Some fall far short of
it. The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the
indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much
less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also
fail to come up to his standard of methodology.” But it is notorious
that the prestige rightly won by the most perfected sciences diffuses
itself, in the eyes of the layman, over the newer and half-baked
sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, and various schools of
psychology, precisely those branches of science or pseudo-science
which the literary are most attracted by the while they shirk the hard
labor involved in getting a real acquaintance with physics. Thus the
New Humanist turns out to be actually in accord with the strictest
scientific attitude in his refusal to attend with the same degree of
seriousness to, let us say, a “science of history” as that with which
he attends to the science of chemistry.

There is a third step, and once it is really accomplished, one
is released from either sentimentality or superstition about the
scientist. Ridiculously simple, yet it is hard to make. It consists in
realizing the subjectivity of men of science. Just as in a complex way,
the style is the man, so in a complicated way science is also the man.
The scientist has elaborated a method and perfected his instruments
to eliminate the “personal equation,” but it is nevertheless still
present to haunt everything he does, to color his interpretations, to
set the patterns for his theories. Science is not the voice of God but
a distinctly human product with human limitations. Science may today be
on a higher imaginative level, as A. N. Whitehead believes, but mark
that Whitehead says this is “not because we have finer imagination, but
because we have better instruments.”

After a sincere effort to understand sympathetically the anti-Humanist
viewpoint, it is still hard to see why such violent objection by
intelligent liberals should be taken to the general position adopted
by Humanism toward modern science. To sum up that position:--the New
Humanists differentiate between true science and _petite science_, they
draw attention to the differing degrees of development and stability in
the various sciences, they dwell on the imperfection of the man who is
using perfect instruments and a perfect method. It can only be that the
modernists are in no mood whatever for skepticism when it is exercised
toward their Authority.

                   *       *       *       *       *

We would expect, however, American Humanists to touch modern science
far more closely than the foregoing sketch of a general attitude
necessitates, and in fact they do. They take up particular attitudes:
they debate details of the scientific dogmas: they subscribe or
tend to subscribe to a given theory of the world. In their detailed
criticism of science, they suggest a number of questions that so far
as I know have not heretofore been raised about the New Humanism.
The New Humanism, we have seen, is a philosophy of conduct. The New
Humanists--note that I am discriminating between the philosophy of
conduct and the persons who enunciate it--adopt a theory of the world.
In the first place, is the theory of the world usually held by the
New Humanist the direct and necessary outcome of his philosophy of
conduct? Granting the truth of his theory of psychology, does that
theory require a cosmology to go with it, and is the cosmology of
the majority of the New Humanists in strict correspondence? We have
examined the picture of himself which the New Humanist declares is
fundamental to the “good life.” But is the picture of the world he
holds before him also fundamental? What I wish to determine is whether
the series of attitudes toward himself, the world, and the affairs of
the world which we attribute to the New Humanist is seamless or whether
we can with a sharp critical knife shear the attitudes apart where they
join each other and say of any one of the specific attitudes, this is
not essential or an alternative attitude would be just as logical in
place of this one. Can we have Newtonian Humanists and Einsteinian
Humanists?

Basically, the New Humanist endeavors to be an artist of life. He
strives to become acquainted with his medium, the shifting texture
and stuffs of daily experience. He wishes like every other artist to
dominate his material, which means, in the chaotic field he has had
the noble audacity to choose, self-conquest. It is necessary for him
to dramatize his work as the struggle of two selves, the ordinary self
being the recalcitrant material and the human self being the artist.
Finally, like other artists he requires a technique for moulding his
subject matter, and he advocates as the technique the employment
of mediation. All this is practical psychology, and stands secure
against any theoretical psychology now before the general public. For
the New Humanist can say that whatever the ultimate mystery of human
nature is, however the two selves may be attached to each other and
reconciled, whatever the secret unification of man may be, you cannot
get around the fact that he is dualistic in practice. He can develop
himself on one assumption, and one only, and that is the assumption of
dualism. This is a hard stubborn fact of experience against which the
Humanist makes his mind collide, just as Dr. Johnson kicked another
hard stubborn fact of experience, a stone, to terminate a discussion
of Berkeley’s idealism. _Why_ this should be so, _why_ man should
indubitably be in essence a struggle, the Humanist cannot say, but no
more can he doubt that it is so whenever he makes the attempt to win
moral freedom. There it is, in the path of his wish for freedom, and he
must accept it as being _practically_ true.

Undeniably--though it is seldom commented upon--the dualistic picture
of man has great emotive power. Our emotions are swayed by images, a
truism as old as ancient India, as new as Christian Science and Coué.
It is not the whole story, but in a large measure emotions do respond
to pictures. The time-worn illustration is the coil of rope in the
road which one takes to be a snake. One’s emotions form themselves
accordingly, but on discovery that the supposed snake is only a coiled
rope they change at once. So a person with a Rousseauistic image of man
feels according to that image: his emotions drag against any effort to
rouse himself from Arcadian dreams. The Humanist with his picture of a
best self conferring style and order on an impressionistic protean self
rallies his emotions to give their impulsion and sanction to the end in
view: the achievement of normality. A creative conception of man calls
forth creative emotions.

Now is there incorporated in American Humanism a clear-cut creative
conception of the world? Is the world condensed into an image that
is as powerful in its effects as the image of the two selves, as
irrefutable on the practical plane, as inspiring to human effort? I do
not find one, and this I take to be a serious shortcoming in American
Humanism as a philosophy of conduct. But in my judgment the defect
can with relative ease be remedied, and remedied in a manner most
congenial to a philosopher of conduct so Greek as the American Humanist
in his self-attitude. The reader ought to remember what was said in
the chapter, _A Portrait of Our Age_, about the various life-pictures,
the “æsthetic,” the “puritan,” the “serious,” et cetera, current among
us, and to recall the unlucky G. R. who had his imagination of life
altered from the “Victorian” to the “scientific” imagination. None of
those attitudes mentioned will do for the American Humanist, but why
should he not find, being gymnastic in his relations with his ordinary
self, aiming as he does to develop strength of character by exercises
in mediation and selection, that the external world is best figured as
a gymnasium? A vast enlargement of the ancient Lyceum which existed
for the exercise of the mind as well as the body? Why should not the
present-day Humanist revive this Greek symbol as he revives the Greek
law of measure? Let us utilize again the practical psychologist whom we
quoted in the earlier discussion of world-attitudes.

“There can be little doubt that for most of us, in the present epoch,
the image of life as a gymnasium is a greatly needed tonic. Compare
the difference in your attitude (emotional response) on entering
a gymnasium and on entering, let us say, a cabaret or a Y.M.C.A.
lecture-hall or a house of mourning. Try to realize what and how
you actually feel. You are braced up, you have the intention of
strengthening yourself, you delight in the difficulties,--provided you
choose them yourself. In short, you feel at your strongest and getting
stronger.

“The classic Greek conception of life was just that; and everybody
knows that the gymnasium was the most popular institution of
Pythagorean Greece. What is not so well known is that the gymnasium was
for the Greeks a symbol or image of life itself. Their God ran this
planet as a gymnasium for the exercise of men, and all experiences were
to be taken as movements, turns, stretches, exercises, in wrestling,
running, lifting, and so on. Moderns will find what the ancient Greeks
found in the image of life,--the evocation of a creative emotion.

“It is difficult to see in what other direction we moderns can look for
a new image and therefore attitude towards life. We have no longer the
possibility of religion in the traditional sense. Ordinary goodness--in
the sense of doing what others call good--has no intelligent appeal.
And, after the still recent Great War, the belief in world progress
is superstition. But the clean, strong idea of life as a field of
exercise for the development of all our muscles--physical, emotional
and intellectual--has still the unspoiled beauty of manly and
womanly idealism. And life lived in that attitude would certainly be
interesting as well as profitable.”

The above seems eminently fitted to be the humanistic attitude toward
the world. It involves no theology, no metaphysics, no science, being
a matter of personal psychology alone. It presupposes, of course, that
man can act as well as be acted upon, the first contention of the
Humanist, and it reinforces his wish to act. It definitely humanizes
the external world, making it a field for human beings to follow their
end of self-perfecting, but it does not sentimentalize or minimize the
world. It is, in fine, a tenable world-picture coöperating with the
main aim of Humanism. But it is not a theory of the world. That is
still to seek.

It is not far off. The theory of the world that has been joined on
to the humanistic theory of the self is Cartesian: at least so far
as one can determine from the commitments of the majority of the
New Humanists, it is Cartesian. They are not, as a rule, any more
precise than other literary men in what they say about their beliefs
concerning the nature of the physical world, but any one can hear that
they sing in chorus against the “New Physics.” They resist the thought
of A. N. Whitehead, A. S. Eddington, Albert Einstein, and re-affirm
their confidence in something like the following:--“Unless it can be
indisputably proved that man, with his infinite variety of thoughts
and emotions, is but an aggregation of mechanical atoms held together
and moved by physical forces--an hypothesis for which there is not the
slightest proof--there seems to be no necessity to deny the existence
of a spiritual world not subject to the laws of mechanical energy
or circumscribed by the space limitations of material or electrical
substances.” This means that on the one side they as a practically
united body reject deterministic psychology (Behaviorism, for example)
and on the other side they hand over the inorganic world to science,
concentrating on the faith that there are in the living organism
elements not analyzable or accountable by science. The quotation was
from _The Dogma of Evolution_ by Louis Trenchard More, the brother of
Paul Elmer More, and Dean of the Graduate School at the University
of Cincinnati. Here is another from the same source to which the New
Humanists would subscribe.

“It is no casual separation of our ideas into the physical, biological,
and psychological realms. The physical world is a combination of
substances acting according to a certain set of laws of force and
energy, the biological world is composed of the same substances, but
the laws of action are not the same. They have, however, this great
principle in common; they, both, are limited by time and space. Then,
somehow to the biological world an added principle is given that we can
call consciousness which is not material but is associated with matter
and which is not limited by time and space. To the present time, at
least, these three realms are to us incommensurable and we have made no
progress in measuring or explaining one by the other.”

Louis T. More is the scientist among the New Humanists, a thorny fact
to those who are trying to create the legend that the New Humanists
are anti-scientific. The legend is punctured by this physicist, who
has read and thought widely outside his subject; especially he has
browsed in the subject of philosophy, which is generally eschewed by
the rank-and-file scientists. The result of this wandering is that L.
T. More has equipped himself to disassociate scientific evidence from
the faith that twines so tightly around it: he is an able, diligent
critic, for example, of evolution as science and as faith. Considering
him therefore as the most conscious author among the New Humanists
when it comes to formulating a world-theory, let us look at his
essay, _The Pretensions of Science_ in the symposium, _Humanism and
America_. You will find him very restrictive. To begin with, “science
has a legitimate field of its own when investigating the phenomena
of the objective world and attempting to find law and order in the
flux of events.” But there are two classes of false claims made for
science, one by “those men of science who are not content to work in
their limited field, but are really metaphysicians who have created a
fictitious world of the imagination made out of ethers, electrons, and
mathematical symbols, and have confused it in their own and others’
minds with the sensible world of brute fact,” and the other by “those
who are claiming that the phenomena of the subjective world also lie in
the field of science and have imposed on the age the pseudosciences of
psychology and sociology.” This is nakedly Cartesian, for as Whitehead
shows so clearly, the principles of Descartes “lead straight to the
materialistic, mechanistic nature surveyed by cogitating minds. After
the close of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the
materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating
minds.”

Let us pursue along these two lines and learn what further L. T. More
has to say of the objective world and the “cogitating mind.” On the
first track, we read that “the cosmogony of Descartes has long since
crumbled to dust, but the gap he made between the subjective and
objective worlds has never been closed in spite of incessant later
attempts ... we have more and more regarded the universe as a machine,
a combination of inert matter and moving forces, acting not as we may
desire, but according to invariable laws which we have personified as
Nature. Man was left, by the physicists, as a unique outsider who could
interpret this machine in terms of his sensations and mind, but could
neither alter nor avoid its fateful operation ... the scientific method
is limited to experimental observation and the formulation of laws ...
the inevitable tendency of science is to investigate all phenomena
quantitatively, and to view the whole universe as a vast and measurable
machine ... exact science is first of all based on the naïve belief in
an objective and real world whose events are connected in an orderly
and prescribed manner, and occur independently of our thought or will
... the mechanistic world can, at best, only picture an objective world
as it seems to us, and not as it is.”

Now following the second track, we read of “the two equally valid
methods of learning by objective experimentation and by personal
experience.... In a general way, we may say that the scientist should
follow in his investigations the phenomena of the objective world
only until their special forms of energy are absorbed by our nervous
system. It is the province of the humanist to study the phenomena of
the subjective world after these stimuli have been translated into
emotion and thought ... the false pretensions of science must be wholly
abandoned, and the problems of our destiny be examined by a wise
judgment drawn from human experience, before we can hope for a sane and
humanistic philosophy.”

Here we can stop with some assurance that the main position toward
which the New Humanists gravitate has been disclosed. Generally
speaking, it is unfair to set forward any Humanist as an “official
spokesman” and perhaps I should not have assigned L. T. More to that
rôle. But his brother, P. E. More, and Robert Shafer have, I believe,
been fertilized by his reflections on science, and I cannot detect in
the writings of the other New Humanists any radical divergence from
the Cartesian scheme. The question is, is the Cartesian world-picture
integral to American Humanism or is it simply one of the possible views
that might be adopted by American Humanists and held by them in common
with members of various other schools of thought? Also, it is evident
there are a number of difficulties which L. T. More’s statements
immediately raise, and which no doubt the reader feels should be dealt
with. In the next section I shall put forward these difficulties myself
and at the same time try to formulate what I think the modern man’s
attitude should be toward scientific world-building.

                   *       *       *       *       *

It seems to me that the truly modern man will first of all strive to
free himself from the great spell cast by science in our epoch. He
will try to overcome his own suggestibility upon which propagandists
for science from Huxley and Spencer to the present have played, so
that he may answer himself frankly when he wonders if our hopes in
science have not deceived us. Furthermore, as was earlier suggested,
he will try to arrive at some conception of the external world which
is not irrational, not violable by the teachings of science, and is
at the same time dynamic and humanizing in its influence. This demand
the world symbolized as a gymnasium, an immense Academy or Lyceum or
Institute of Crotona, appears to meet perfectly. It makes no difference
whether one adheres to a materialist or an organic or an idealistic
philosophy: the world as a gymnasium for the strengthening of human
fiber is a valid imagination under any of the three types of philosophy
named. The question then becomes: picturing life as a gymnasium for
the development of men, what values can be extracted from science by
the man who does not propose to train himself to be a professional
scientist?

Such a man, aiming at a general coördinated culture, must come to
regard science in the same way he regards art and philosophy--with
respect, but not sentimentally or superstitiously. No divinity
surrounds any of the three: each subject is man-made and therefore
fallible. But each is primarily to be enjoyed for its own sake. We
accept this principle in art, not so fully in philosophy, and still
less in science. Yet science provides a manipulation and stretching of
mental muscles that is highly enjoyable for the sake of exercise alone.
It provides adventures and perils of thought of a kind differing from
philosophy and art. A case should in fact be made out for science as a
humane discipline, though I think of no one in America who is a shining
example of such a discipline. I mean that we do not seem to produce
men of the type of J. W. N. Sullivan in England, who are exquisitely
cultivated both in the arts and sciences, who are supple-minded,
adventurous in thought, thoroughly skeptical, at home with Einstein as
with Beethoven or Dostoyevsky or Plato. We need cryingly more gifted
amateurs among our laymen who study science and fewer intolerant
“gospellers” of the type of Harry Elmer Barnes. I am reminded of some
sagacious things about the _use_ of philosophy for human beings which
T. S. Eliot has recently written, because they apply equally well to
the _use_ of science.

“When we study philosophy as a humane discipline we do not do so merely
in order to pick out one which we shall adopt as ‘true,’ or either
to confect a philosophy of our own out of all philosophies. We do so
largely for the exercise in assumption or entertaining ideas; for the
enlargement and exercise of mind we get by trying to penetrate a man’s
thought and think it after him, and then passing out of that experience
to another. Only by the exercise of understanding without believing,
so far as that is possible, can we come in full consciousness to some
point where we believe _and_ understand.” Eliot adds, “Similarly
with the experience of poetry,” and I would add, similarly with the
experience of science.

The blunt truth is that the grounds of the attack on the New Humanists’
statements about science have been mistaken. They were accused of
hostility to the workings of science. But they should have been
accused of lukewarmness toward science as a humane discipline.
Excepting L. T. More, P. E. More and Robert Shafer, the New Humanists
may be said to lack zeal for that kind of development of their minds
which science is most able to confer. Mildness of interest in a subject
and active hostility to it are so different that not even blind
partizanship would seem to be a sufficient excuse for identifying them.

But let not this argument for science as a humane discipline by
which one flexes and enlarges the mind be construed as advocacy of
dilettantism in the current debased sense of that word. The end in view
is to become an alert critic of world-theories. And here I will say
that I believe there is no essential connection between Humanism as a
philosophy of conduct and the Cartesian materialistic theory of the
universe. They are joined in the minds of the New Humanists, but that
I think is a fortuitous juncture. Nor can I see that Humanism depends
in any way soever upon a defence of Newtonian physics against later
modifications and developments. The Christian cosmogony and cosmology
constitute to most of us a mythology. The mythology may be profoundly
true, more true than modern science, but we are in the position of not
being able to verify its statements by an exact procedure. The means
of individual verification may once have existed, but where are they
now? We may assent to the Christian mythology, but it is assent based
on faith, a very different thing from the _faith based on reason_
of the great doctors of the Middle Ages. Add to this the fact that
the materialistic, mechanistic world-view has been shaken by the
tremendous blows of mathematical physicists like A. N. Whitehead.
It has got into the epicyclic state which presages a breakdown.
Alternative world-schemes, imposing, daring, almost sublimely
intuitive, are now being put forward. In other words, the problem of a
world-theory has been reopened on a scale not dreamed of for centuries.

“The eighteenth century,” observes Whitehead, “opened with the quiet
confidence that at last nonsense had been got rid of. Today we are at
the opposite pole of thought. Heaven knows what seeming nonsense may
not tomorrow be demonstrated truth.”

Now it appears to me that the New Humanists, by and large, retain
something of the eighteenth century attitude in the face of the new
physical problem. But a problem of this kind calls for the suspension
of belief, for all the skepticism one can summon, for the complete
willingness to run down any turning of thought, for the surprise
attack, for an attitude best described as adventurous. The law for
thing and the law for man, as they work out in human experience, do
not depend on Cartesianism. At the present time, in fact, the law for
man may be said to dictate the extrication of one’s self from grooves
of thought about the world: it lays an obligation upon one to be
provisional in one’s acceptances of world-theories: it requires that
the problem be recognized and faced in the spirit appropriate to a
mystery. Not to be a farranging agile critic of theories of the world
is, in the twentieth century, not to be in key with one of its major
trends in thought.

To illustrate the point, compare your feelings while traversing the
familiar way home and while threading your route out of a labyrinth.
The difference is like the difference between our take-it-for-granted
psychology in handling a solved problem and our active searching
psychology in moving about in a new problem. We are the same person
but the intellectual environment has altered. It seems to me that
most of the New Humanists have yet to adapt their psychology to the
labyrinth of modern physics. Note, however, that I do not urge upon
them any recommended way out: I do not ask them to adopt Eddington’s
world-theory but to tackle it in a different spirit.

For it may well be that this intense critical search for a tenable
conscious world-view will not meet with complete success in our
century. But not to make the search is not, in my judgment, to be
humanistic, since the problem is the problem of any one who aspires
toward completeness. The final personal reward of a maximum use of
our critical powers on classical physics and the new physics is that
we at least shall know with the utmost clarity what we believe and
understand, and what we do not believe and find insoluble. That is,
we shall be as conscious as we can possibly be of the nature of the
external world, even if that consciousness consists but of alternative
possibilities, doubts, queries and speculations, and perhaps a few
certitudes.

There is another large fact to be grasped, toward which our psychology
must make adjustment. It is that modern science is stranded on a
“plateau” and its giants are making their greatest efforts to raise
it, to initiate a new curve of development. The analogy is with those
curious graphs of learning processes, which show that one learns
rapidly at first, then comes to a period of little or no progress (“a
plateau”), then mounts again, arriving later at another “plateau,” and
so on. To get off a “plateau” a special effort, produced either by
some external incentive such as the offer of a reward or by a renewed
determination, is required. Now it has for some time been recognized
by advanced minds that modern science was in just such a condition
of arrest. It was able to refine upon what it had already done, but
not able to initiate any great rising movement. There is material for
novel reflections in the description Whitehead gives of the state of
science at the end of the nineteenth century. “Almost suddenly, a pause
occurred; and in its last twenty years the century closed with one of
the dullest stages of thought since the time of the First Crusade.
It was an echo of the eighteenth century, lacking Voltaire and the
reckless grace of the French aristocrats. The period was efficient,
dull and half-hearted.” The cause? We may venture to say that it was
because, as Whitehead elsewhere notes, science for two centuries had
been running on the accumulated capital of ideas of the seventeenth
century, “the century of genius.” A pause, a blocking, was bound to
come. And today science, as Whitehead and Eddington recognize, is at
a crucial turning point. It seeks to discover the elements that will
make for another period of development, and discovery of the necessary
elements Whitehead tells us requires more genius than to exploit them
when found.

Who can fail to be stirred by this tremendous drama of the human mind?
And yet it appears that many are unmoved, anti-Humanists as well as
Humanists. The scientist, going about his business, discovers that his
personal limitations, the usual habits of scientists, are retarding
the progress of science itself. Science properly is concerned with
the what-ness of things. From the why-ness of things (philosophy)
and the æsthetic and other emotional imports of things (values) it
has resolutely cut itself off. It has, every one knows, discounted
the intuitive, discounted other forms of knowledge. But now see: the
scientist is discovering that his exclusive interest in _what_ and his
impatience with _why_ and with value is ultimately stultifying. He
feels the basic need to fertilize himself by considering other reports
on reality than his own, he struggles to escape the bondage of his
traditional habits. It is a situation that should call forth the full
interest and sympathy of the humanistically inclined.

For what it emphasizes is the desperate need for a coördination of all
our knowledges. A knowledge of “porous atoms” does not destroy our
practical knowledge of a table, nor take away the table’s æsthetic
properties. The world exists as a source of ideas, of emotions, of
actions; it is simultaneously a field of practical affairs, an object
of feeling, an intellectual feast. Reality is threefold, but our
reports upon reality seldom harmonize. The rationalist underrated two
of these reports and trusted fully to one only. The scientist now shows
a disposition to admit the validity of all three and to bring about
a _rapprochement_ of the practical, emotional and mental worlds. A
very faint glimmer still comes across the centuries, elusive witness
to the grandeur of the Pythagorean synthesis. Who knows but what the
twentieth century, treasuring the glimmer, may not succeed eventually
in reflecting it back with an unexpected glory?

“Know thyself,” said Pythagoras, and the recollection of that
injunction points to our greatest stumbling-block. To me it is a little
Canute-like of L. T. More to forbid to science the subjective world.
And I say this with full awareness of the inadequacy and faultiness
of introspection as a method. But if introspection is of little use
to psychology as a science, it is equally of little use to Humanism.
Is it impossible, however, that a better method cannot be devised, is
it impossible to put self-study on a scientific basis? The rise of
Behaviorism is too impressive for any fiats to be delivered now against
the further endeavors to found psychology on a really substantial
basis. The Behaviorist has cleared the ground, he has come to the
threshold, but it is a question of the key to the subjective world. I
do not think the New Humanist need dread the search for the key.




                                   IX

                        EDUCATION AND LEADERSHIP

  _“Tradition is the experience of society. It is stored up for use
  by what may be called the objective memory. The chief function of
  education is to transfer the wealth of a selective tradition from
  society to the individual.”_--Paul Elmer More in _The Drift of
  Romanticism: Shelburne Essays, Eighth Series_.


Insufficient attention has been paid by intelligent unacademic people
to the educational ideas and constructive suggestions for academic
reform offered by the New Humanists. Only one commentator in the
flurry of debate that ensued on the issuance of _Humanism and America_
wrote with gratitude of the salutary effect on literary scholarship
produced by the unremitting efforts of American Humanists, and he
was Henry Seidel Canby, who has known at first hand the _literae
inhumaniores_ that flourish rankly in our universities. Nowhere better,
it seems to me, than in their dissertations on the teaching of the
humanities--nowhere better than in such books as Babbitt’s _Literature
and the American College_ and Foerster’s _The American Scholar_--can we
witness the law of measure being applied to current problems. Moreover,
if anything calls for the most tactful mediatory treatment, it is the
tendencies and objectives of our colleges and universities.

It is right, I think, to regard American Humanism, when one refers
to the _movement_ rather than the doctrine and discipline, as being
primarily an educational force. Many of its adherents are actively
engaged in teaching and therefore the problems of education possess a
personal urgency for them. They do not dream at present of marching on
the literary citadels of the country and subduing their garrisons to
standards they have foresworn, but the teacher-classicists definitely
do propose to wrest education from the control of humanitarians. There,
in the field of education, the New Humanist affirms “the battle that
is to determine the fate of American civilization will be fought out
first of all.” For this reason I am giving a chapter to the members of
the movement as educators rather than as literary critics. As literary
critics, they consider the prevalent impressionism to be a low form
of criticism and seek to restore criticism to its former acknowledged
business, judgment by humane standards. But I feel no regret in
neglecting in this book the numerous important ideas for contemporary
literary critics which stud the works of Babbitt and More. With such
writers as T. S. Eliot and F. McEachran in England, Robert Shafer and
Seward Collins in America lifting them up and weighing them, they
are certain of a distinguished attention. So my conscience does not
trouble me because in the present interpretation only incidentally do
I visit the purely literary front of the New Humanist campaign. The
most serious fighting is on the educational front, and the enemy is
educational impressionism.

We can divide the educational front into three sectors,--the lower
schools, the college, and the university with its graduate schools. On
the first the New Humanists are not very active, on the second they
take a very determined stand. If they can hold the college to its
function, as they conceive it, they are willing to make concessions
in the graduate schools. The leading ideas they put at stake in each
sector are very easy to state. In the lower schools, where it is
granted that the humanitarian tinge is not undesirable, the pupil
should be acquisitive and receptive. In college the student should
be assimilative and reflective. In the university the scholar may
be productive, investigatory, original on the basis of his humane
discipline in the college. Reception when young, assimilation in
college years, productive research in graduate school--these are the
functions that should underlie our educational system. But the college
is being ground out between the encroachments of preparatory schools
and the invasion of university ideals of research. And there is where
the situation is most tense and critical. We shall begin, however, with
the lower schools and the theory of John Dewey, arch-foe of American
Humanism in education as well as in philosophy.

                   *       *       *       *       *

No one can be insensible to the value of Dewey’s correction of certain
evils in our public school system. He has perceived the dangers of too
much abstractness in its curriculum, and the need for more education by
doing. It is largely through his influence that the Project Method, as
it is now called, the method of teaching by correlating school subjects
around some social activity of the children, around weaving, for
example, has been given its present vogue. But it is the leading ideas
of Dewey that are at issue, and not any desirable modification of the
elementary school curriculum.

We live in a democratic society: therefore, say the disciples of
Dewey, education should adapt itself to the needs and the condition
of the many children, not of the few exceptional ones. We live in an
industrial society: therefore education should be closely connected
with the major actualities of an industrial society. Going to school
is not “a preparation for life.” It is experience as much as any other
phase of life. The gap between life in school and life in the family
and on the playground should be decreased as much as possible. In a
sentence, education should be socialized. It should be thoroughly
democratic. It should develop the virtue of coöperation to the highest
degree.

To these guiding ideas every one must in some measure give assent,
but many people feel that their limited assent must be combined with
a great deal of criticism. Robert Shafer, for one, looking over the
records of educational experiments along the lines mapped out by Dewey,
has repeated the old proverb: one swallow does not make a summer. The
experiments have been made with picked children and picked teachers.
But, Shafer asks, can conclusions be drawn that will be valid for the
educational system as a whole, since in the whole system the children
are unpicked, the coöperation of the majority of parents cannot be
secured, and the quality of the teachers must inevitably sink far below
the standard of the experimental school enthusiasts. Waiving every
other consideration, are the new lower-school ideas feasible for a
wide application? But presupposing practicality, those other waived
considerations become the very important ones, and the New Humanist
cannot satisfy his strong doubts of the ideals of the Dewey reform.
Others, besides New Humanists, have come to experience like doubts,
and some of these are persons who at one time were wholly convinced
or almost convinced of the soundness of Dewey’s proposals. One of
them is a woman who, to my belief, is the most brilliant of all the
contemporary pioneering spirits in the “new education.” I mean Margaret
Naumburg, the founder and for eight years (1914-1922) the director
of the Walden School in New York city. In 1928 a book from her pen
appeared, _The Child and the World_, a series of dialogues on modern
education, in which she summed up the results of her thinking and
experience in her special field. In spite of the author’s reputation,
the book was not, as a rule, thoroughly reviewed. One surmises that
this was in part due to Miss Naumburg’s having abandoned and criticized
the positions so many other new educators were still clinging to.
However it happened, the central point of the book was overlooked:
very little attention was paid to the clash she staged between Dewey’s
program for socialized education and Whitehead’s views on education
which stress the encouragement of individual development.

Our immediate interest lies, of course, not in Miss Naumburg’s partial
advocacy of Whitehead, but in her critique of Dewey. Naturally, as
who would not, she speaks of Rousseau as the common ancestor of the
new school movement in America, approving of his praise of learning
by doing; to Rousseau she links Dewey as the immediate parent of
present-day experiments. But Rousseau’s general influence on the new
school movement, she emphasizes, has had very unfortunate consequences.
This is due to establishing so many experiments on “Rousseau’s
romantic hope that maladjusted human functions could right themselves
by a return to the simple life of nature ... the belief that we can
right ourselves by simply removing certain limiting trammels of
civilization.” Miss Naumburg, her book makes clear, has shed all her
illusions about so naïve a belief. Her counts against Dewey are four:
(1) he underestimates emotional culture in his educational plans, (2)
he has framed these plans too closely in accord with his own bias as
a psychological type, being particularly unfair to the possibilities
of the training of intuition, (3) he is too chary of the inner, the
subjective life, and (4) his socialized education completely neglects
individual psychology.

She holds up for close scrutiny a quotation from Dewey’s _Democracy and
Education_ which the New Humanist would certainly agree is an amazing
piece of sophistry. It is the concentration of all the arguments for
socialized education. “From a social standpoint, dependence denotes a
power rather than a weakness; it involves interdependence. There is
always a danger that increased personal independence will decrease
the social capacity of an individual. In making him more self-reliant
it may make him more self-sufficient; it may lead to aloofness and
indifference. It often makes an individual so insensitive in his
relations to others as to develop an illusion of being really able to
stand and act alone--an unnamed form of insanity which is responsible
for a large part of the remediable suffering of the world.”

On this strange argument Miss Naumburg’s comment is: “Much of the
present social philosophy that wishes to sacrifice the individual to
the good of the group is nothing but instinctive herd psychology,
translated into modern terms.... I’m sure the world now needs more
complete individuals so that group life can become integrated on a
higher plane. Dewey places emphasis on the individual’s living for the
group rather than for himself and suggests that his failure to do so
is the cause of much of the world’s suffering. But to me it seems that
the failure of the individual to know himself remains the cause of his
ineffectual adaptation to a positive and adequate social existence.”

This is pointed criticism from the inside of a movement whose advanced
minds are now beginning to realize that they have envisaged their
problems far too simply,--that self-expression is not the magic
formula, that psycho-analysis produces as much trouble as it dissolves,
that socialized education too much disregards the individual gifted
pupil, that liberty is a hard concept to understand aright. The New
Humanist on the outside phrases his criticism differently. It is that
Dewey offers no contribution to the urgent problem of producing leaders
of quality in a democratic society. For the New Humanist makes no
fetich of democracy, as does Dewey, nor does he stand for an unmixed
aristocracy either. To him the social problem is the blending of the
two, the securing of an aristocratic and selective democracy, and he
would like to see education from the kindergarten upwards organized for
the furtherance of that aim.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Dewey is a Baconian philosopher with an admixture of Rousseauism. I am
here making use of the Babbittean classification of modern naturalists
into two types, those prefigured by Francis Bacon who are known as
scientific naturalists, and those prefigured by Rousseau and known as
sentimental naturalists. The classification causes so much resentment
among present-day intellectuals, it is so hotly repudiated, that I
am led to wonder if Babbitt has not again probed to the bottom of
our era’s mind and located basic trends we have not known we were
exemplifying. Certainly, his two types, however petty many of the
exemplars today may be, are of epical stature. The drama of the last
three centuries is no mean one, and requires as its leading characters
personages to fit the scale of the action.

Of course, we must discriminate between Babbitt’s estimates of Bacon
and Rousseau as personages and his description of the types of men he
names after them. In the character of Bacon, for instance, he notes
the presence of traditional Christianity and Renascence humanistic
elements. Babbitt does not, to my mind, allow sufficiently for the
enigmatic in Bacon--hardly any one today is cautious enough for
that--and he accounts for the Lord Chancellor’s fall, which is still
inexplicable when all is said, on too general grounds. But, to get his
types, Babbitt does not simplify either Bacon or Rousseau: he merely
extracts from them the large formative elements which released into the
world have created the Baconian and the Rousseauist. It is undeniable
that Bacon was, in Whitehead’s words, “one of the great builders who
constructed the mind of the modern world.” He was the prophet of the
Kingdom of Man, Babbitt declares. He foresaw man’s dominion over the
earth, he made efficient the impulse to unlock Nature with the keys of
Science, he stimulated men to the astounding utilitarian triumphs which
the centuries since Bacon have achieved. It was his genius that made
the idea of progress so potent.

The Baconians have gone forth and conquered the earth. If most of them
lack the slightest touch of Bacon’s dignity as a human being, they
nevertheless partake of the majesty of numbers and are not unworthy of
a mass-part in a planetary drama. But it has been a mass with notable
leaders down to John Dewey in our day. The mass firmly believes in
technological advance, material progress, the pragmatic life. For it
the “law for thing” is supreme. The leaders subtilize and rationalize
these beliefs.

The Baconians and Rousseauists are often superficially hostile to each
other. We all know the contempt the scientific analyst frequently
expresses for the dreamer, and in turn the dreamer’s horror of the
analyst. But Babbitt demonstrates that the two types are in close
accord underneath. Both deny the “law for man.” Both subscribe
fervently to the doctrine of progress. And oftentimes in the same
person you will find prominent strains of both types, happy in each
other’s company.

It scarcely needs saying that the Rousseauist is in a much greater
emotional ferment. The Baconian exalts practical intelligence,
strenuous deeds accompanied by acute if narrow thought: the Rousseauist
exalts sympathy, revery, spontaneity and liberty. His idea of liberty
is summed up in the popular expression, “doing as one likes,” which
means, Matthew Arnold labored to show, doing as one’s ordinary self
likes. “Do what thou wilt,” the injunction over the Abbey of Theleme,
is a far sterner permission and closer to the true idea of liberty.

It is, I think it necessary to repeat, not claimed by the New Humanist
that contemporary Baconians and Rousseauists have been directly
influenced by the remarkable men they are named after. The actual
matter is very complex, as you will see by recourse to Babbitt’s
books, but what is maintained is that unconsciously we breathe in the
widespread gaseous elements of the teachings of Rousseau and Bacon and
are profoundly modified in our entire outlook on civilization by the
fact that they once lived.

In recent years the American college has been overrun by the Baconian
scientific hustlers and by the Rousseauistic relaxed dilettantes--both
menaces to humanistic education.

                   *       *       *       *       *

In college circles the Baconian is usually a specialist eager to
advance learning in his branch of research but applying quantitative
tests to his department and to the college in general. He is strenuous
and imbued with the spirit of change. When he invades the arts,
he is scientific rather than artistic. To give a concrete example,
in the literature department the Baconian is the philologist,
engaged in original and minute research, but usually lacking in
æsthetic appreciation or in general ideas. He is supposed to teach
the humanities: he has prepared for his vocation by composing a
dissertation on the use of the present participle in some minor
Elizabethan.

His colleague in the literature department is often a Rousseauist,
a gelatinous æsthete, incapable of hard mental labor, who utilizes
literature only as an agreeable source of sensations and impressions.
The philologist, taking his cue from Herbert Spencer, is inclined to
think of purely literary studies as a form of play, a relaxation,
after the exacting labors of scientific analysis: the æsthete-teacher
confirms him in the notion.

Against these men in the colleges the New Humanist fights. He opposes
the quantitative and dynamic standards the Baconian would introduce,
and he scorns the shallow impressionism of the dilettante teacher.
His program calls for the continued teaching of the classics and the
intimate relating of the classics to modern life. He insists that
literature in the colleges should be taught as a vital subject bearing
in countless important ways on the formation of character.

Instances abound of the contrary feeling that the classics cannot
hold much import for the forming of modern character, and as one
instance is as good as another, I will take the most recent to come to
my notice. “Shakespeare No Benefit to This Age” is the heading of a
newspaper column written by a former college professor, Harry Elmer
Barnes, in which he declares that much might be said in support of the
argument that “the beauty of Shakespeare’s diction and the shrewdness
of his analysis are more than offset by the influence he exerts in
keeping alive ancient superstitions like witchcraft, ghost-walking,
devil-lore and the like. In short, Shakespeare does more harm than good
to the twentieth century intellect.” It is grotesque narrow views of
literature like this that the contemporary Humanist deplores in the
ranks of teachers.

A succinct way of summing up the American Humanist’s educational
program is to say that he favors the imitation of French scholarship
rather than German. The latter of course reigns in our universities,
and in these octopus-institutions, but not in the colleges, the
Humanist grants it plenty of room, for the university may well exist
for the advancement of learning, even if it is only the digging up
of a trivial fact concerning some Alexandrian grammarian. But on the
whole, “might we not advisedly turn now to France, where, to be sure,
the scientific study of literature has also had a marked influence,
but where other traditions of scholarship have offered a resistance
wholly wanting with us? French reflection, French lucidity, French
finesse, French moderation, the French concern for humane assimilation,
the French devotion to general ideas, the French insistence upon taste
and style, the French interest in criticism--these qualities, all but
absent from our own work, I take to be worthy of emulation.” The words
are from Norman Foerster’s _The American Scholar_, a lucid diagnosis
of the ills of our literary scholarship:--its tendencies to be absorbed
into linguistics, into history, into psychology, to become one of the
lesser and dismal sciences.

By the way, the conditions analyzed by Foerster and the practical
remedies he proposes at the end of his monograph ought to receive
very thoughtful attention from the professional men of letters. The
sufficient reason is contained in the following quotation: “Modern
American scholarship is in a way to becoming a veritable Polyphemus,
choicely nourished on human food yet endowed with one eye only. We
must set about restoring the traditional alliance of scholarship
and criticism, the divorce of which has worked injury to both and
played havoc with education. It has made American scholarship
narrowly mechanical and progressively tangential. It has encouraged
an American criticism that can only be characterized as ignorant and
aimlessly impressionistic, for the lamentable state of our critical
journals is largely the consequence of academic failure to uphold the
past as a school of judgment. And it has played a major rôle in the
disintegration of American education, for it has made the study of
the humanities scientific in an age already blinded with excess of
scientific light, an age that is groping in vain for such other light
as literature could shed if it were rightly studied.”

But my purpose precludes entering upon the details of the New
Humanist’s criticism of college instruction or upon the concrete plans
he presents for honors degrees and doctorate reforms. The broad idea
is that the university may exist for the advancement of learning,
but the college should stand for the assimilation of learning and the
perpetuation of culture. It should train for wisdom and character by
the processes of assimilation and reflection. It needs teachers of
quality--not linguistic Dryas-dusts or quivering dilettanti. What
is wanted, says the Humanist, is the teacher who has expended his
originality (in our age it _is_ originality) in grasping the “constant
mind of man,” who has disciplined himself on the best models of
literature and formed from them a wise appreciation of the normal and
representative, who has approximated to that type almost extinct in a
civilization dominated by the Baconian specialist and the Rousseauistic
thrill-monger, the _honnête homme qui ne se pique de rien_.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The full significance of the educational program of the American
Humanists comes out best in a comparison of the policies advocated by
Charles W. Eliot and Irving Babbitt. Eliot was President of Harvard
University from 1869 to 1909. In that position he became famous as the
father of the free-elective system, and until his death in 1926 ranked
as America’s most ardent crusader for educational reform. He was highly
esteemed for his character, a late flowering of the Puritan tradition,
and he was immensely influential through his theories which were not
Puritan: the theories were derived from Rousseau and therefore at
variance with the Puritan tradition in its most vigorous state.

It is ironical that teaching under President Eliot for fourteen or
fifteen years was his best weaponed and fearless critic, and that today
this critic who condemned Eliot’s theories and influence should be
acknowledged as the greatest mind at Harvard. Yet it is the case that
Babbitt with his great strength for rending fallacies apart matured to
power within the very baliwick of President Eliot.

The first clash was over the free-elective system. Eliot with his trust
in human nature had reasoned that each student had a pronounced bent,
some special aptitude, some absorbing interest which he was eager to
follow, and that this interest or bent or aptitude was thwarted by
a fixed curriculum. He was also impressed by the half-truth which
he took to be a whole truth, namely, every person is unique and the
college should therefore give full play to his uniqueness. To this
Babbitt replied in substance that there is quality in subjects as
well as quality in teaching. The free-elective system tends to deny
quality in subjects and makes higher education miscellaneous. And he
replied further that men have constant elements coexisting with their
variability, and that it was the constant in man, not the diverse and
fluctuating, which education should reckon with.

Facts have refuted President Eliot’s optimism about the free-elective
system. It was found that students followed in choosing their courses
not the line of their aptitudes, of which often they were unaware, but
the line of least resistance. It was found that their uniquenesses
were not so precious after all. The result was a partial retreat from
the free-elective stand in favor of a compromise between the old
restricted curriculum and the new unlimited one.

But the issue comes to a clearer head when the formulæ of the champions
of utilitarian-humanitarian education and of humanistic-religious
education are put side by side. “Training for power and service,”
said President Eliot. Babbitt answered in words I have already used:
“Training for wisdom and character.” Obviously President Eliot’s is a
Bacon-Rousseau formula. How does it work? Power in our society means
material efficiency, and service means, not the traditional service
of God, but the service of man. The assumption is that “the material
efficiency promoted by utilitarian effort will be used altruistically.”
But after the Great War this assumption looks tragically ludicrous.

These are the conventions established by the age President Eliot
represented so faithfully: self-expression as a value (or falling
in the direction one’s character leans, an unfriendly critic
might mutter), strenuousness (the pursuit of happiness by intense
outer activity), the “religion of service” (nowadays satirized by
the _American Mercury_ and Sinclair Lewis as only a veneer for
commercialism), and complete faith in the natural man (in religious
language, the hope of salvation without conversion). These conventions
Babbitt has wrenched to pieces in his analysis and now proposes a
return to the old humanistic-religious conventions.

In so far as the movement called American Humanism has a definite
program of action, this is it. First, that “a considerable number of
persons get at least within hailing distance of one another as to
the definition of the word humanism itself and the nature of the
discipline that this definition entails.” Next, that they then proceed
“in the literal sense of that unjustly discredited term, to work out
a convention.” And next, that they concern themselves with education.
By setting up a convention is meant the thorough agreement among the
members of a considerable group on certain fundamentals, the complete
conviction of truth concerning certain underlying statements about
life. The conventions that the New Humanists wish to reëstablish are:
(1) that “happiness is a kind of working” (inner, not outer, working,
according to Aristotle, who is here quoted), (2) that man needs to be
disciplined in his natural self to some standard (that is, to undergo
conversion or turning away from the natural self, such conversion to
be accomplished in the Aristotelian way by the gradual formation from
childhood of right habits), and (3) that education should culminate
in the idea of leisure (also Aristotelian, since according to the New
Humanist leisure is valuable for supplying a background of meditation
to life).

Now I imagine that when the policy is thus reduced to essentials, many
people will wonder why there is any opposition to American Humanism
in the field of education. Yet the fact is that the principal forces
in education move, blindly most of them, directly counter to the
fundamental views of Humanism. It is an against-the-current struggle
that the New Humanists undertake. They are fighting for quality of
teaching in the humanities, and the current sweeps down upon them a
horde of linguistic specialists. They are fighting for quality of
subjects, and the classical subjects are steadily being submerged.
Finally, they are fighting for quality of students, and the colleges
and universities in their competition for big enrollments flood them
with quantities of the less fit for the intellectual life. For the
New Humanist declares flatly that the college should exist for the
intellectually best of each generation. Humanitarian coddling in the
colleges he denounces as a danger to democracy, pointing out that in
a quantitative age the college must make its great purpose to be the
production of men of quality. In fine, the educational problem is
closely associated with the problem of leadership, and the problem of
leadership leads us straight into the subject of the next chapter--the
political problems of a democracy.




                                   X

                     HUMANISM, ECONOMICS, POLITICS

  _“We have the naked question to answer: How shall a society, newly
  shaking itself free from a disguised plutocratic régime, be guided
  to suffer the persuasion of a natural aristocracy which has none of
  the insignia of an old prescription to impose its authority? Shall
  the true justice prevail, which by a right discrimination would
  confer power and influence in accordance with inner distinction;
  or shall that so-called justice prevail--for no man acknowledges
  open injustice--which recommends itself as equality of opportunity,
  but in practice, by confusing the distinctions of age, sex, and
  character, comes at last to the brutal doctrine that might makes
  right, whether that might be the material strength of money or the
  jealous tyranny of numbers?”_--Paul Elmer More in _Aristocracy and
  Justice: Shelburne Essays, Ninth Series_.


The educational theories of the New Humanists, I think it must be
granted, are thoroughly consonant with the premises of the New
Humanism. Education, at least through the college, ought to be
dominated by the spirit of conservation. In the university and
afterwards, the spirit of change ought to have full opportunity, for
by that time presumably the student is safeguarded against that mere
“passage from nothing to nothing” which Whitehead tells us happens
when there is “change without conservation.” The college is the place
for the assimilation of the traditional wisdom, which acts as a check
on the wisdom of any particular age. It is the place where today it
is most disastrous not to temper liberty with restraint, and it seems
to me that the New Humanist has most admirably mediated between pure
restraint and pure liberty in his educational program. A contempt for
antiquity, Tocqueville sagely remarked, is a chief danger of democracy,
and for that reason the study of the classics has a special value in a
democratic community--the New Humanist goes with Tocqueville and not
with the contemporary poet who has shouted, “The past is a bucket of
ashes.”

But how is it with the excursions of the New Humanists into the
disputed territory of economics and politics? Are their known views on
these subjects the views that must inevitably be adopted if one accepts
their primary teaching of a psychological dualism and a discipline
based on the law of measure? Or are there several views which might
with equal consistency be taken up? Or can we say that they are good
Humanists but bad economists? The question has come up at least once
before. Referring to historical Humanism, Frank Jewett Mather, Jr.,
has written, “We might say that the humanistic attitude was to seek a
fine worldly wisdom through direct study of man in thought and action,
such study being powerfully reënforced from those precedents of great
living contained in the literature of Greece and Rome--a fresh research
balanced and somewhat directed and measured by a great tradition. I
can find no stricter formula that seems to fit the case. The attitude
adumbrated above seems compatible with many other attitudes, indeed
with almost any attitude that is not dogmatic or fanatical, or
life-denying. For example, today one might be an agnostic humanist,
a Catholic humanist; a royalist humanist, a socialist humanist; a
utilitarian humanist, an idealist humanist; conceivably a Mormon
humanist or a liberal hard-shell Baptist humanist. That is, a quest
of a fine worldly wisdom nurtured by tradition might in theory be
compatible with any of these policies, philosophies or faiths. Nor does
this divest the notion of humanism of any real meaning if the main
thing be the attitude, for the humanistic attitude may be after all
simply a leaven which is potent in the most various materials.” In this
statement the attitude of Humanism is pretty dilute for our exposition,
but in any case the question of strictly relating attitude to views is
effectively opened up for discussion. Perhaps Humanism as a creative
conception of man does not dictate any one economic or political theory
as its logical choice? Perhaps it is the _spirit_ with which More and
Babbitt have studied the problems of economics that is criticizable?

The obvious danger of the New Humanist when doubtful matters are
debated is to drop into an acceptance of the status quo just because it
is the status quo. He is proof against the temptation of the “radical”
which is novelty for the sake of novelty, but it is easily possible
that where an obdurate social problem exists, he may justify the status
quo instead of wholeheartedly throwing himself _into_ the problem.
This in effect is what in the chapter on _Science and the Modern Man_
I accused him of doing: it seems to me he adheres to the outmoded
Cartesian world-view when he should instead plunge into the problem
of reconstructing a world-view. And I am inclined to think that Paul
Elmer More, whose views on property and law, aristocracy and justice I
shall glance at before taking up Babbitt’s political theory, has fallen
into this error of identifying the status quo or commonly accepted
position with a truly conservative solution. It is conceivable, I
mean, that both the status quo of social organization and the current
schemes for reforming it might be equally objectionable to a profoundly
conservative mind.

                   *       *       *       *       *

More has not the type of mind that functions happily in economics and
politics. His absorbing interest has been in Man Psychologic and he
has had little traffic with Man Economic or Man Political. But the
rise of Socialism in the United States and the Bull Moose Progressive
movement challenged his mind around 1912, and in _Aristocracy and
Justice_, the ninth volume of the _Shelburne Essays_, he answered, or
rather defied, the new tendencies. By his conclusions in this volume
on man as an economic and political animal, he probably incurred more
hostility than any of his other books has provoked. For _Aristocracy
and Justice_ came out in 1915, the very time that the social revolt
movement in the United States was fairly getting off the ground for
a dizzy if brief flight: the dominant concerns of the generation of
thinkers younger than More were precisely his subordinate concerns,
economics and politics. Naturally, the new generation dropped bombs on
_Aristocracy and Justice_, and with a ferocity partly accounted for by
More’s sharp tone in writing it. The result was that the strongest side
of More, his continuous reflection on Man Psychologic, was avoided or
made light of, and his weakest side, his thought about Man Economic and
Man Political, was bombarded to fragments.

To begin with, More made the mistake of not arguing out economic
questions on the basis of economics, but instead made a direct appeal
to intelligent members of the propertied class to stiffen their morale.
“I am not here concerned,” he declared, “with Utopian visions, nor,
as I have said, am I arguing with those who are honestly persuaded
that a socialistic régime is, in our day, or any day, economically
or psychologically feasible. My desire is rather to confirm in the
dictates of their own reason those who believe that the private
ownership of property, including its production and distribution, is,
with very limited reservation, essential to the material stability and
progress of society. We who have this conviction need very much today
to strengthen ourselves against the insidious charms of a misapplied
idealism; we need to remind ourselves that laws which would render
capital insecure and, by a heavy income tax or other discrimination
in favor of labor, would deprive property of its power of easy
self-perpetuation, though they speak loudly in the name of humanity,
will in the end be subversive of those conditions under which alone
any true value of human life can be realized.” Do you wonder at the
vehement accusations that More was simply rationalizing class prejudice?

We need one more statement to catch the drift of More’s views: it is
likewise an uncompromising one. “In simple truth, property may rightly
be called the cause of civilization, but, strictly speaking, it is only
the occasion of injustice: injustice is inherent in the imperfection
of man, and the development of the means of living merely brings into
greater prominence what is an unavoidable feature of existence, not for
man only but for the whole range of creation, in this puzzling world of
ours.”

What More did then was to commit himself in advance to capitalist
economics, a system which may most briefly be defined as production for
the sake of profits or in one word profiteering. Can it be denied that
the main motive on which it relies is the desire for gain? And this
motivation, as economists admit, introduces an ethical contradiction
into the practices of the State. Nevertheless, many people claim that
there is nothing wrong with the theory of capitalism, and towards the
ethical defect it introduces they adopt two views: one, that the defect
may be remedied by education, the other, that it is inherent in human
nature. More adopts the latter view.

Now if capitalism is supported by a perfect theory, then from the
standpoint of economics there is nothing more to say, no matter how
horribly the thing might work in practice. For economics as the science
of production abstracts from the human as much as possible and regards
our feelings as irrelevant. But _does_ capitalism operate on a sound
theory? This, in a thinker of Paul Elmer More’s eminence, is the first
question we should expect him to answer, the more so as it is often
charged that the theory of capitalism is only improvised. But as we
have seen, he does not. He proceeds almost at once to declare that
“the security of property is the first and all-essential duty of a
civilized community”; shortly afterwards he says, “To the civilized man
_the rights of property are more important than the right to life_.”[7]

These statements pass if capitalism is correct in theory. But, once
again, is it? In the briefest possible space, I shall give the
theoretical objections. It is well understood, of course, that by
capitalist economics there are said to be three factors of production,
Land, Capital and Labor. Land and Capital, however, have become
practically indistinguishable: they are alike tools of production. But
is Labor also a tool of production? It is, according to capitalist
economics; Land, Capital and Labor exhaust the tools of production, and
the user of them is the Capitalist, that is, the owner of the tools of
Land and Capital.

But this theory, as every one knows, has been long and brilliantly
criticized in the realm of pure thought, precisely the realm in
which More should have debated the moot point. For there is a moot
point: is Labor a factor of production? No, say the critics, Labor
is not congruous with the factors of Land and Capital. Labor is a
mere abstraction that hides Laborers. Laborers (i.e., Labor) are the
tool-users, the producers themselves, and at bottom economics reduces
not to three terms but to just two, Laborers and Tools or Workmen and
Stuff. Hence the new industrial synthesis, it is said, must substitute
the Laborer for the Capitalist, the real user of the real tools of
production for the mere owner of them. Therefore, when More speaks of
the rights of property, we need to concretize the word property: what
he speaks of is the rights of property- or tool-owners or capitalists,
and it is precisely those “rights” that now require defence in the
region of pure theory.

Proceed one step further, and we shall run up against More’s argument
for the rights of property-owners as the basis of civilization.
Economics, we must remember, is separated from its soul: what is
more, it legitimately cuts itself off. Where is its soul? “The soul
of economics,” writes A. R. Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_, “is
politics, and it is to politics that economics delegates the control
of questions such as what shall be produced, by whom, and how the
results shall be distributed.... To satisfy all our needs and desires
without work is really the aim of economic man. It is his object, in
fact, to reverse the curse upon Adam.... Instead of requiring the
improvements in economics to be shared equitably, politics insists
upon dividing them inequitably, so that one small class is enabled
practically to lift from itself the curse of Adam (that is, it can live
without working), while the large class of laborers are permitted to
incur a double curse--they work, that is, without living. Economists
of the baser sort or who have no political sense pretend that this
distribution of the product is itself economic in that it enables the
few to secrete Capital (that is to save) and to foster arts and science
requiring a long, leisured, and assumed future. Better knowledge,
however, convinces us that it is not safe to depend upon a social
class for an economic function.” How the author of _Aristocracy and
Justice_ would answer this, I cannot conceive, for no inkling is given.

We have crossed from economics to politics, and in the latter one of
the greatest themes is justice. Naturally, More as a Platonist does not
minimize this theme. Justice “is the act of right distribution,” he
begins by way of definition, “the giving to each man his due.” This,
please note, is a capitalist-political definition, and we may place
beside it for comparison the well-known formula: from each according
to his _means_, to each according to his _needs_. Social justice,
More continues, “is such a distribution of power and privilege, and
of property as the symbol and instrument of these, as at once will
satisfy the distinctions of reason among the superior, and will not
outrage the feelings of the inferior.” But how, one may well ask, can
social justice ever be expected to take place when the principle of
distribution is the principle of--the pig trough? For economic power in
our society precedes and determines the distribution of commodities;
the man with the dollars feeds and sometimes gorges and the man
without dollars does not; and this does not satisfy the reason and it
does outrage the feelings. More himself says we must steel ourselves
to a certain extent when viewing this method of distribution. “The
first and hardest lesson for each right-minded man in these days is
to discipline the heart to accept with equanimity the fatal fact that
social justice must include a considerable amount of that disposition
of Nature in dealing with her own which we, judging by the standard of
the individual soul, are so ready to call injustice. The first step
towards the equipoise of a soul just within itself is to recognize the
necessity of a measure of injustice in the relation of man with man and
with the world.”

I postpone comment on that in order to complete in this place the
outline of More’s political thought. Guided by the reflections of
Edmund Burke, the key idea for him is the formation of “a natural
aristocracy without which there is no nation,” according to Burke. “The
cure of democracy,” says More, “is not _more_ democracy, but _better_
democracy.” And better democracy will come when we develop more men
who might fit into Burke’s celebrated portrait of the men of light and
leading: “Men who are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion
to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites;
in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in
proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above
their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed
to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the
flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist unless a controlling power
upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is
within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal
constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.
Their passions forge their fetters.”

This is assuredly a humanistic ideal of a natural aristocracy, but
under present economic-political conditions have we any chance of
reaching it? We may get the natural aristocrats, but will they be
anywhere near the centers of political power? When we get to the
bottom, we are all likely to accept the definition of the political
power of the individual as being his power of self-direction; but
obviously the individual’s power of self-direction presupposes the
power of keeping himself alive. That is, the condition of political
power is economic power. To continue: voting is a process whereby
individuals empower an executive. They increase their powers of
self-direction by concentrating them upon the executive who acts in
their behalf. But when the voters are of unequal economic power, their
votes are necessarily unequal. In fact, the votes of many of them, who
have no power of keeping themselves alive but are correctly termed
wage-slaves, have no meaning at all: they can guarantee nothing. The
executive therefore quite naturally listens only to those whose votes
do mean economic power, because these are the only votes coming from
individuals who have power of self-direction. It seems to me that this
consideration has a very corrosive effect on any dream of a natural
aristocracy arising in our plutocratic community.

Because the discussion of More’s economics and politics has been
rather compact up to this point, a restatement is offered. More, as
one of the leaders of the New Humanists, has not dealt with the purely
theoretical analyses of capitalism. I do not say he is unable to,
or unfamiliar with the arguments: the fact is that he has omitted a
theoretical justification. To those who believe that the critique of
capitalism has been a devastating one, this is an inexcusable omission.
Secondly, to many people, including a considerable number who are not
humanitarians, capitalism is an inhumane system. They would criticize
More’s sentiment of justice, which seems to me in this particular to
be weak, though it is possible he represses his feelings from dislike
of the humanitarian gushing on the topic of social justice. There is,
all the same, a love of all men which can, which must, in fact, enter
into our sentiment of justice to temper the rigor of it, and this love
of all men to which I refer has nothing of the humanitarian “universal
embrace” about it. Without love there is in truth no justice. But the
difference between humanistic love and humanitarian love I should
define as a difference in what in man is loved. Humanism, I quoted
Julien Benda as saying in an earlier chapter, holds in honor the
abstract quality of what is human, and this permits us to love _all_
men, for there is equality in the abstract. Joseph Proudhon (to whom
Benda objected) does, I think, express the humane sentiment of justice
perfectly without spilling over into humanitarian sentimentality. I
mean he singles out that in all men which is worthy of love and toward
which one is irresistibly drawn to be just if one loves it. “There is
a tendency in every man to develop and force the acceptance of that
which is essentially himself--which is, in fact, his own dignity. It
results from this that the essential in man being identical and one
for all humanity, each of us is aware of himself at the same time as
individual and as species; and that an insult is felt by a third party
and by the offender himself as well as by the injured person, that in
consequence the protest is common. This precisely is what is meant by
Justice.” It is evident that Proudhon has an idea of Justice, which is
crystal-clear and crystal-hard, and that he feels this idea intensely.
The presence of a burning emotion for the idea of Justice I cannot
detect in More as a social thinker: his idea seems a mental skeleton
wired and strung up by class feelings.

In the third place, I tried to point out that a Burkean aristocracy
will have a most difficult time coming into being in a democracy which
Georges Sorel defined as the paradise unscrupulous financiers dream
of. In short, present-day economics in its effect on politics is all
against it.

But if the system of production for profit is untenable intellectually
and is inhumane and therefore untenable emotionally, it may still be
the best that can be put in practice, granting that human nature is
radically imperfect. It may be good enough for man because man is
not good enough for a more perfect system. The one fatal objection
to certain revolutionary schemes in the end may be that they are too
perfect for man as he is, that they will not work in practice as they
work on paper, unless man himself is first transformed. More made that
objection, and it is possibly his soundest argument. But it will be
interesting now to speculate on the possibility that a radical program
of economic reform might conceivably fit in with the basic ideas and
sentiments of the New Humanists. The Soviet Union I shall leave pretty
much out of account, for there you have a _fact_ to study and make
up your mind about. And possibly that fact in its present degree of
unfoldment demands not so much an intellectual and moral decision
as suspended judgment from the individual American. Furthermore, I
agree with T. S. Eliot that Russian communism like Italian fascism
seems to have died as a political theory in becoming a political fact.
Our present purpose which is to determine how flexible the Humanist
attitude may be in economics and politics is better served by reference
to a single extraordinary revolutionary (our example will be Sorel)
than it would be by an attempt in too short a space to analyze a
complicated fact that contains so many peculiarly Russian ingredients
to be subtracted before it is really instructive to us.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Perhaps the most fascinating of all the theorists of the social
revolution (but who reads him in America?) is Georges Sorel
(1847-1922), whose _Reflections on Violence_ was translated into
English by T. E. Hulme. Karl Marx had plotted out the acts of the
Capitalist tragedy, but by planting the idea of a class struggle so
prominently into the minds of men, by making men more conscious of
the opposition of capitalist and proletarian, Marx also introduced
an unforeseen factor working not for class war but for social peace.
Clearly understanding by the aid of Marx that society was in a state
of internal war, the peacemakers arose in mass. There was a general
amelioration of working conditions, there were concessions from the
capitalists, there grew up a pronounced tendency to blur and soften the
issues, to make everything a parliamentarian question. Sorel determined
to combat this movement toward pacifying the proletariat, and the
means he chose to throw into relief again the essential struggle of
the classes was to concentrate on the depiction of the last act of a
tragedy that might conceivably play on for centuries. He concentrated
on the vision of the general strike, the vast social cataclysm that was
to overthrow the capitalist régime. By means of this vision he hoped
to counteract the parliamentarian socialists and the philanthropic
capitalists, and thus preserve the purity of the class struggle.

The results were curious. Mussolini has told of his youthful fervor for
Sorel’s doctrine, and Sorel wrote an apology for Bolshevism. The best
thinker that French syndicalism has had, Sorel was nevertheless saluted
with enthusiasm by Frenchmen of the extreme right: he was hailed by the
Action Française! Pierre Lasserre, the anti-Rousseauist, has written
a book about him, _Georges Sorel: Théoricien de l’Impérialisme_, and
many Marxists have been indignant because Sorel considered himself a
true follower of Marx. Evidently a paradoxical thinker. But he was
not. He was miscomprehended by many for the sole reason that he was a
revolutionary classicist, which is not a paradoxical combination.

What Sorel did was to separate the working class movement from the
democratic or liberal-romantic or humanitarian ideology with which it
is habitually associated. He demonstrated forcefully that there was
no inevitable connection between them. They were not Siamese twins,
not even twins, but strangers who by an accident of history had been
chained together for three score years. Sorel’s intellect filed through
the chains and showed that one could be revolutionary in economics and
classical in ethics--to the astonishment of everybody.

As he has had practically no vogue in American revolutionary circles,
it is excusable to say a few words about his personal development
before singling out some aspects of his classical ethics. Proudhon
had tried to combine the classical ideal with socialism, and Sorel
seems to have taken his first direction from Proudhon. Marx blinded
him with light for a time, but it was characteristic of Sorel that
he always recovered his sight and eventually saw things with his own
eyes. Nietzsche was another master whose teachings he divided into the
valuable ideas and the rubbish. Proudhon, Marx, Nietzsche--there were
lesser masters he carefully sifted: Bergson, Vico. He read widely,
profoundly. In his first book he maintained--a Nietzschean idea--that
Socrates represented the decadence of Athenian life, the charge being
that Socrates introduced expediency and calculation into ethics. He
wrote a study of Renan and a study entitled _Illusions du Progrès_
which the anti-revolutionary Maritain has commended for its thorough
destruction of the middle-class notion of progress. The Dreyfus case
completely disillusioned Sorel with democracy and he plunged into the
anti-patriotic extreme revolutionary movement on whose behalf he fought
Jaurès and the other parliamentarian socialists with all the withering
scorn of a bold thinker and a bold man.

I have said that he severed the ties between the revolutionary workers’
movement and the romantic-humanitarian ideology. He did this by
scathing criticism of the sham religiosity of the romantic movement,
by excoriating the doctrine of progress, by exposing the middle class
conception of science. The last is worth quoting for the benefit of the
numerous Baconians to be found in our own liberal and revolutionary
groups. “The history of scientific superstitions,” Sorel asserts,
“is of the deepest interest to philosophers who wish to understand
Socialism. During the nineteenth century there existed an incredible
scientific ingenuousness which was the direct outcome of the illusions
that had aroused so much excitement towards the end of the eighteenth
century. Because astronomers had managed to calculate the tables of the
moon, it was believed that the aim of all science was to forecast the
future with accuracy; because Le Verrier had been able to indicate the
probable position of the planet Neptune--which had never been seen,
and which accounted for the disturbances of observable planets--it was
believed that science could remedy the defects of society, and indicate
what measures should be taken to bring about the disappearance of
the unpleasant things in the world. It may be said that this was the
_middle-class conception of science_: it certainly corresponds very
closely to the mental attitude of those capitalists, who, ignorant
of the perfected appliances of their workshops, yet direct industry,
and always find ingenious inventors to get them out of difficulties.
For the middle-class science is a mill which produces solutions to
all the problems we are faced with: science is no longer considered
as a perfected means to knowledge, but only as a recipe for procuring
certain advantages.”

There is a great deal, too, in Sorel that might be advantageously
perused by our social reformers. For the benefit of humanitarians, I
shall transcribe Sorel’s deep objection to optimists in the ranks of
reform. “The optimist in politics is an inconstant and even dangerous
man, because he takes no account of the great difficulties presented
by his projects; these projects seem to him to possess a force of
their own, which tends to bring about their realization all the more
easily as they are, in his opinion, destined to produce the happiest
results. He frequently thinks that small reforms in the political
constitution, and, above all, in the personnel of government, will be
sufficient to direct social development in such a way as to mitigate
those evils of the contemporary world which seem so harsh to the
sensitive mind. As soon as his friends come into power, he declares
that it is necessary to let things alone for a little, not to hurry
too much, and to learn how to be content with whatever their own
benevolent intentions prompt them to do. It is not always self-interest
that suggests these expressions of satisfaction, as people have
often believed; self-interest is strongly aided by vanity and by the
illusions of philosophy. The optimist passes with remarkable facility
from revolutionary anger to the most ridiculous social pacificism.

“If he possesses an exalted temperament, and if unhappily he finds
himself armed with a great power, permitting him to realize the ideal
he has fashioned, the optimist may lead his country into the worst
disasters. He is not long in finding out that social transformations
are not brought about with the ease that he had counted on; he then
supposes that this is the fault of his contemporaries, instead of
explaining what actually happens by historical necessities; he is
tempted to get rid of people whose obstinacy seems to him to be so
dangerous to the happiness of all. During the Terror, the men who
spilt most blood were precisely those who had the greatest desire to
let their equals enjoy the golden age they had dreamt of, and who had
the most sympathy with human wretchedness: optimists, idealists, and
sensitive men, the greater desire they had for universal happiness the
more inexorable they showed themselves.”

Obviously this side of Sorel is quite in accord with the reiterations
of More and Babbitt. Humanitarianism, they repeat, is a menace because
in its fatuous hope of a brotherhood of man without a prior discipline
of man’s egoistic impulses, it leads directly to the shambles and the
rise of a bloodstained dictator. Making light of the obstacles in
its path, humanitarianism, when the obstacles will not vanish at the
outflowing of sympathy, loses its head and massacres. But it is not
in the least implied that Sorel, the enemy of Rousseauism, was on his
positive side humanistic. Quite the reverse: he rejected the method of
the golden mean, and for reasons that have some weight. The following
paragraph will serve as his criticism of American Humanism, prepared
years in advance of its full emergence.

“The ideas held by modern ethical writers are drawn mainly from those
of Greece in its time of decadence; Aristotle, living in a period of
transition, combined ancient values with values that, as time went
on, were to prevail; war and production had ceased to occupy the
attention of the most distinguished men of the towns, who sought, on
the contrary, to secure an easy existence for themselves; the most
important thing was the establishment of friendly relations between
the better educated men of the community, and the fundamental maxim
was that of the golden mean. The new morality was to be acquired
principally by means of the habits which the young Greek would pick up
in mixing with cultivated people. It may be said here we are on the
level of an ethic adapted to consumers; it is not astonishing then that
Catholic theologians still find Aristotle’s ethics an excellent one,
for they themselves take the consumer’s point of view.”

Sorel, as a matter of fact, had a vestige of the classical religious
spirit and not the humanistic temper at all. He was an absolutist in
ethics. He was a pessimist, convinced of social determinism, which he
compared to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and convinced of
the wretchedness of man, or one might say, original sin. The march to
deliverance he said was narrowly conditioned by these two: the iron
laws of social determinism and the weakness of man. Yet he believed in
“a _secret virtue_ which assures the continued progress of the world”
and defined it as “this striving towards perfection which manifests
itself, in spite of the absence of any personal, immediate, and
proportional reward.”

Thus, he tried to root the syndicalist movement in a classical
pessimistic conception of man and to identify the growth of the
movement with the regeneration of the world. His finest stroke was
his method for rousing the group of sentiments necessary for the
regeneration: the sentiments of disinterestedness, heroism, glory, and
even sublimity. It was the method of the myth, from which incidentally
the New Humanists might learn something, it seems to me, which
would give a real driving emotional power to their campaign. What
that something is has already been suggested in the chapter on _The
Classical Revival Abroad_.

Sorel advocated the myth of the general strike. Just as the early
Christians had looked forward to an Apocalypse, had prepared themselves
rigorously for it, had shown the most heroic qualities in enduring
persecution, so, Sorel argued, the proletariat should look forward
always to a decisive Napoleonic battle, a social catastrophe for which
every least action was a preparation, and they should understand what
the function of violence is, namely, to keep perfectly clear the
grandiose outline of the class struggle. Into the criticism of this we
need not venture. It should be noted, however, that Sorel explained
carefully that “myths are not descriptions of things, but expressions
of determinations to act.” And finally, mention should be made of his
view that the bourgeoisie must keep up its warlike morale. He felt it
essential for the future success of civilization that the proletariat
should take over a vigorous, and not a decadent, system of capitalist
production. No doubt this idea was one of the factors of his popularity
with the group around Charles Maurras.

My treatment of Sorel, I am aware, is too scanty to serve as an
introduction to his ideas, and at the same time perhaps too long for
the purpose now, which is simply to suggest by referring to Sorel
that the good man of Rousseau and the Marxian revolutionist are not
inseparable companions. Sorel made a new coupling, the Homeric hero and
the social revolutionist, a combination that I happen to think would
bode better for the future.

Reverting to our proper topic, the question is: can Humanism and the
revolutionary movement join hands? Extremely unlikely, of course,
and yet I can conceive of a Humanist revolutionary. He would have
convinced himself that in the clash on first principles of political
economy (between first principles there can be no mediation) the
revolutionaries were right, and he would therefore oppose the forces
of capitalism as strongly as More opposes socialism. But in any
revolutionary party he joined, he would have an Augean stable of
illusions to clear out before he could satisfy himself that the
revolutionists could really fulfil their pledges of a better society.
He would have to persuade his comrades to throw out the accumulated
rubbish of humanitarianism, the naïve notions of the goodness at heart
of the proletarian, the intellectual fallacies, the spilth of feeling
that you will find rampant in a writer like Upton Sinclair. This
clearing away of sloppy sentiment and fuzzy ideas would be of enormous
advantage to the revolutionary movement, but, as I say, it is extremely
unlikely that a Humanist Hercules will rise to perform it. Sooner or
later the technique of mediation would, in all probability, be put to
such a strain that it would be relegated to a secondary place, and our
hypothetical humanistic revolutionist would make foremost the method of
the myth or some other disciplinary conception. When that happened, he
might retain humanistic elements in his life, but he would cease to be
a Humanist in the Babbittean sense.

There is, however, much of a medicinal nature that the best minds among
our social revolutionaries can absorb from their opponents, More and
Babbitt, without undergoing conversion to conservatism. Let us hope
that the bitter taste will not deter them. For they will be better off
in respect to background, values and psychological interpretation of
man than before.

                   *       *       *       *       *

After all, Sorelism in the United States is a matter of academic
interest. Extremists of the left constitute a negligible and senseless
group, and the moderate socialists are pitifully weak. The liberals?
Bankrupt in ideas; seemingly ineffective in political action; decadent
in morale if one may judge by the slackness of the men being groomed to
follow the generation of Croly, Lovett, Villard and Alvin Johnson. As
for the labor movement in general, is it not the despair of Communist,
Socialist and Liberal alike? Inaccessible to ideas, unrebellious,
shortsighted, what can be hoped from the American Federation of Labor
other than a perpetual seesaw battle for higher wages and shorter
hours? The Wandering Jew, Daniel Halévy told Sorel, may be taken as
a symbol of the highest aspirations of mankind, condemned as he is
to march for ever without knowing rest. But there is naught of the
Wandering Jew about the groups just mentioned, and a Sorelist among
them would wear his heart out in the attempt to convey a sublime
vision of future ethics.

For contrast, we may turn to Babbitt’s political theorizing in
_Democracy and Leadership_, which has been called without exaggeration
perhaps the weightiest book in its field written by an American.
“When studied with any degree of thoroughness,” writes Babbitt in his
introduction, “the economic problem will be found to run into the
political problem, the political problem in turn into the philosophical
problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be almost indissolubly
bound up at last with the religious problem.” The order is correct.
But although Babbitt thinks more coolly and, I suspect, with greater
ease on politics and economics than More, he too is least satisfactory
in economics: his treatment of that science is almost incidental and
certainly slighting. In the opinion of many, this will not do.

Let us unearth what there is of Babbitt’s thought on the economic
problem. He rightly criticizes unorthodox political economy for its
purely quantitative view of work. True enough, as he notes, orthodox
political economy prepared the way for this view: Locke practically
identified work with physical effort and made it the sole legitimate
source of property, and Adam Smith tended to a similar conception of
work in relation to property. But the Marxist, according to Babbitt,
fell into the deeper fallacy of identifying work with value. Babbitt
then proceeds to discriminate among physical work, mental working on
the material order, and ethical work on oneself.

The discrimination is valid, but in making it Babbitt seems to accept
the interpretations of orthodox political economy. Value, he appears
to hold, is largely determined by the law of supply and demand and by
competition. He notes that “as a result of the concentrated mental
effort of the gifted few, an effort displayed either in invention or
else in organization and management, the common laborer may today enjoy
comforts that were out of the reach even of the opulent only two or
three generations ago,” and he adds the laborer “should be the first
to recognize that exceptional capacity should receive exceptional
rewards.” Quite a point is made of competition. “Above all, social
justice is likely to be unsound in its partial or total suppression
of competition. Without competition it is impossible that the ends of
true justice should be fulfilled, namely, that every man should receive
according to his works.... The remedy for the evils of competition is
found in the moderation and magnanimity of the strong and successful,
and not in any sickly sentimentalizing over the lot of the under dog.”

But surely Babbitt knows the arguments against each of these points,
and my regret is that he did not, while making his defence of the
established economic order, deal closely with the specific arguments
against it. Let me cite some of these which seem to necessitate
refutation if one is to defend with a good intellectual conscience the
existing system. The Law of Supply and Demand (or L. S. D. for short)
has absolutely no weight outside the market: it is concerned only with
the relations of Sellers and Buyers, Supply being the abstraction of
all the Sellers and Demand the abstraction of all the Buyers. _Outside
the market_ what happens? “In all transactions between friends, between
members of the same family, between Governments and their servants, in
public services, and in all institutions run socially or by gentlemen,
L. S. D. is kicked out of doors and the Rule of Supply and Need takes
its place,” says Orage in _An Alphabet of Economics_. Again, I should
say Babbitt does not separate Capitalists and Management as he ought
to, when he speaks of the gifted minority to whom the workman owes
his increase in comfort (by the way, is increased comfort a relevant
argument?). Laborers are responsible to Management and must always be.
Management today is responsible to the Capitalist, but must it always
be? That is the question of moment to those who speculate about a new
industrial synthesis. As for the competition extolled by Babbitt,
that has to do with the price system which, it is a commonplace, is
superimposed on the productive system. We may profitably hear from
Orage again. “Production concerns values; competition concerns prices.
From production to competition is a transition from value-creating
to price-fixing; and the competitive system is one in which prices
are left to be decided by the play of the market.... Essentially
Competition is sale by auction, and usually without reserve.” A reserve
price being impossible for perishable commodities, “Competition is thus
all in favor of nonperishable commodities (Capital in particular); but
it is all against perishable commodities, and Labor in particular.”
Under those conditions one may have a feeling for the under dog whose
energy and skill are perishable that cannot fairly be described as
sickly sentimentality. That in his plight the under dog should have to
hear so much about the bracing effects of keen competition for him in
industrial society--this is adding mockery to injury.

My own view is that capitalism cannot be whitewashed, and for the
reason that it is founded on only a comparatively narrow portion of
human psychology. It is a function of Practical Man or Instinctive
Man: it enormously stimulates greed and virtually debars the entrance
of any generous motive. It is guaranteed to make men acquisitive but
not magnanimous. For my life, I cannot see how it can admit within
itself any forces of regeneration. Unsound in theory, tending always
to be swindling and ruthless, it manages to work, but only after a
fashion that can satisfy no one but a very small class of profiteers.
There are plenty to make emotional protests against this state of
economic affairs but we ought to supplement them with hard practical
criticism. For that let us go to a quarter not tinged with Bolshevik
or anti-capitalist sentiment: let us resort to the advocates of the
highly interesting Douglas Social Credit Plan in England. They point
out that the purpose of an economic system is to produce as much as
possible and to get the things produced into the hands of consumers.
If we are producing at our maximum, and there is not enough to go
around, that is, if only a proportion of the potential consumers can
be satisfied, then there is nothing more to say from the economic
viewpoint. Suffering from unsatisfied need is irrelevant to the
economist if maximum production can provide for only fifty per
cent, let us say, of our population. But the fact is that we produce
nowhere near our maximum, not even in wartime when production speeds
up enormously. Limited or falling production, say the Douglas people,
is only a specter: nothing more. Hence, it follows that the present
system is criticized in the most damaging way by two undoubted facts:
(1) the presence of poverty on a large scale, that is the presence
of hordes of potential consumers who cannot acquire commodities, and
(2) by unemployment, which as I write is estimated at from three
millions to eight millions in our country, unemployment meaning unused
producing ability. We can produce more, immensely more than we do:
witness the fact of unemployment. We can consume far more: witness the
fact of poverty. Understand this, and you have some idea of the sheer
inefficiency of the established system. One important qualification
must be added: the Social Credit people find the source of the trouble
not in private ownership of the tools of production or in unequal
distribution but in the money industry, in the financial system, which
is what they propose to reform.

I have gone into details of criticism in order to show that the New
Humanists are fairly caught on the capital charge of _failing to
recognize the economic problem_. However sensitive they may be to the
“excesses” of capitalism, they accept it and the financial system
with it as the defensible status quo, and with no great marshalling
of reasons either. I would urge on them, not any one of the proposed
solutions current, but the adoption of the mood and temper appropriate
to a baffling problem whose dimensions cannot be ignored. The case as
I diagnose it is similar to that in which the modern man finds himself
put in respect to science. The case calls for an awakened curiosity,
earnest search for solutions, the keenest criticism of both the status
quo and new theories, the cultivation of impartiality. I should like to
see the New Humanists with their background of ideas, their equipment
for criticism, their breadth of vision, convert themselves into eager,
impartial students of our common economic problems. I find them to
be not free-ranging students in this field, but tied uncritically
to the existing industrial order, an order furthermore that has had
a comparatively brief historical existence. But why should they not
become our best critics of economic questions, uniting general culture
to familiarity with the special science of production?

What we need stands out with absolute clarity: a livelier research into
the alternatives to or revisions of capitalism and a livelier criticism
of these alternatives or revisions. Many American intellectuals at
the present moment, discouraged with democracy, think of only two
alternative possibilities, Bolshevism and Fascism, each, I may say,
being abhorrent to the New Humanist. For the American Humanist appears
to commit himself completely to the democratic experiment, and to have
more respect for the old ideas of democracy than you usually encounter
nowadays in our disillusioned intelligentsia. But what vitiates
democracy so terribly that it becomes a pretended thing? Profiteer
economics. On the other hand, in the case of Bolshevism as in the case
of Fascism, democracy disappears; individualism goes down to defeat
before the dictatorship. If we would retain democracy then, the fact
not the pretence, we must revise the economics associated with it,
and that perhaps is possible. At any rate, we have not exhausted all
the alternatives even in speculating about revision. We have not even
assembled all of them before us for study and discussion.

The proof of this is our ignorance of the dazzling Social Credit
Plan of Major C. H. Douglas, which I mentioned above. Agitated for
in England ever since the Great War, it has yet failed to cross the
Atlantic, or rather one has to use a high-powered microscope to see the
few American students of it. This is easily explainable, however, since
with justice Major Douglas has been called the Einstein of economics,
and a considerable amount of free brain, of unmortgaged intellectual
energy, must be expended to grasp his novel and yet non-revolutionary,
non-confiscatory scheme of reform. Although I know it is impossible
to understand his proposal from the germ, I yet will give the
germ-proposition on the chance that it will pique the curiosity of
those rare readers who can detect even in the germ the presence of a
new principle that promises to be worth study. The gist of his proposal
is simply to regulate prices by productivity, by relation, that is,
to supply. I will add that the Douglas criticism of Marxian economics
is that it confuses ownership with control. We must look, not to
ownership, but to the financial system for the real control that is
exercised today over industry. Has Major Douglas, as it is claimed,
reached the bottom of economics?

I think the New Humanists should be interested in the question, and
if they should, they would certainly steal a march on that portion
of intellectual America which prides itself on its vigilance for new
ideas, but which to some of us often appears a little sluggish in
living up to its boast. Perhaps in the Social Credit Plan the Humanists
would discover not only the key economic theory, but a theory which
when applied would make their politics entirely feasible. For the Plan
alters nothing but the financial system.

We have all seen what one writer calls the degeneration of government
from a plane of democratic idealism and tolerable administration to a
plane of control by political machines, ward-bosses and racketeers, and
seeing it a great many intellectuals have given up hope of democracy,
have ceased to be even interested in it. But this writer, Jean Toomer,
goes on to speak for a larger mass of our citizens when he notes that
“there is still enough idealism left in us, there is still active in us
a sense of decency sufficiently strong to make us feel unhappy about
this trend. We cannot laugh at it or shrug our shoulders and play the
game ... there still exists in most of us a fairly strong wish to see
the American political experiment turn out well; and for this reason
we ask of a political writer that he show a degree of resistance to
political rottenness, a degree of insistence on decency, ability,
and intelligence in politics.” Babbitt’s _Democracy and Leadership_,
the supreme Humanist treatise on American political thought, was
written not for futilitarians or cynics but precisely for the mass of
intelligent citizens described by Toomer who wish to see democracy
turn out well. The baldest of summaries must here suffice for a work
that should have given rise to a whole literature of commentary.

_Democracy and Leadership_ studies types of political thinking from
Aristotle to Woodrow Wilson, with special attention given to the
naturalistic imperialism of Machiavelli, the idyllic imagination of
Rousseau when it dreams on politics, and the moral imagination of
Edmund Burke. Like More, Babbitt leans heavily upon Burke’s ideas
of a natural aristocracy, the power of example, and the imaginative
justification of privileges.

One of the strongest features of the book is its study of the humility
of Asia expressed in Buddhism and Confucianism. The West learned
sufficiently the lesson of self-reliance in the Renascence, but it has
not learned the lesson of humility, and from the Babbittean standpoint
this is essential.

A very brief description of Babbitt as a political thinker would note
first that he is an anti-imperialist as well as an anti-Bolshevist.
He is in fact an old-fashioned democrat who thinks that whatever the
quantitative achievements of the United States have been, qualitatively
we have thus far failed. He opposes the Jeffersonian tradition and
regrets the victory of Andrew Jackson. His tradition is strongly
unionist. Washington, John Marshall, Lincoln, the last viewed as a
unionist rather than an emancipator--these are the principal figures
in his democratic tradition. It is perhaps not too much to say that
Babbitt considers the Declaration of Independence a Rousseauistic
document and the Constitution a humanistic document. At any rate, he
makes much of the Supreme Court as a check on the spontaneous popular
will and stands firmly for constitutional democracy as against direct
democracy.

His program? The formation of a Socratic remnant. We need a movement,
he says, in our political life which will be Socratic, Aristotelian and
Christian, a movement, that is, that will stress definition, habit and
humility. The beginning is to subject our catchwords--the political
terms that sway our imaginations and actions--to a Socratic dichotomy,
and in this book Babbitt himself performs some masterly dichotomizing
of such infectious words as “service,” “liberty” and “imagination.”
The Aristotelian phase of the program is education along the lines we
observed in our last chapter. The Christian phase has to do with the
recovery of humility.

It is evident, I think, even from the bare outline how Babbitt runs
the political problem into the philosophical and religious problems.
Where one boggles is at the very beginning, the economic problem as it
merges into the political. That is, Babbitt’s politics has to compete
with his economics, and at the present time economics in practice is
the determinant. As in the case of More, Babbitt is most convincing
in dealing with Man Psychologic, least convincing in handling Man
Economic. His enemies, I may add, are most persuasive about Man
Economic and least equipped to study Man Psychologic.

The economics of commercial men (the science, that is, of production
for profit, not the science of production for use) puts the whole
question of right relations between man and man far up in the air.
We can theorize about these relations as much as we like but when we
drop to earth again, present economic habits spoil the theories. There
is, for instance, nothing in the least degree Utopian about Babbitt’s
politics. He is thoroughly realistic in his political vein, but all
the time he is working in that vein he presupposes not a reform of the
economics of commercial men but an amenability on the part of this
black economics to his theory of democracy.

In this chapter I have deliberately tried to keep the problem of
relations between men (politics and government) in the air, as in
an earlier chapter I deliberately endeavored to raise man’s concern
with the physical universe up into the air. That is where I think
such topics should be now: they should be open questions toward which
the best attitude is an open attitude. Therefore I used a writer
like Georges Sorel as a wedge to break apart our fixed ideas about
classicism, romanticism and revolution.

To conclude the chapter, I shall now give several social attitudes
which I think are, in our time of dissolving answers and new-formed
questions, compatible with American Humanism as a basis. They are a
policy of detachment, the religious view of Cæsar and his things,
liberalism (yes, liberalism, but a special kind!) and anarchism (also
a special kind). And although in discussing these attitudes, I shall
refer them to the American Humanist, please understand that in this
connection I am identifying the intelligent skeptical modern man with
the Humanist. What, in short, should be the rôle of the civilized man
toward practical affairs? He should adopt a policy of detachment, urges
Julien Benda in his recent widely debated book, _The Treason of the
Intellectuals_.

In this work Benda deplores the entrance into practical life of
European intellectuals. For, he says, there are two moralities, a
worldly practical morality and a disinterested “clerical” morality,
and the two should not mingle to their confusion. They have existed
parallel throughout civilization, the “clerk” or intellectual guiding
himself by one set of values, the layman by a totally different set.
But today, charges Benda, the “clerk” forsakes his disinterestedness,
enters the practical world and promotes the growth of national,
class, race and party passions and hatreds. This is the treason to
the intellectual order committed by such diverse men as Kipling,
D’Annunzio, Sorel, Péguy and Maurras. Fidelity to the intellectual
order is detachment from political and class activities: it is setting
the example of pure devotion to the values of culture and to those
alone. Thus the intellectuals affect life, not by throwing themselves
into its partizanships and justifying them, but by removing from them
and setting up an example whereby men may know their own lay morality
for what it is.

This clearly is not the view of More and Babbitt. Their natural
aristocracy is not conceived as aloof but as exerting pressure directly
on lay affairs, as seeking to control them by its superior wisdom and
morality. But should the New Humanists gain in numbers, I would expect
to see among them before long adherents of Benda’s thesis, for personal
predilections will always lead some men toward such a standpoint.

Benda, it should be observed, does not quite take the religious view
of market and state affairs. “Render unto Cæsar the things that are
Cæsar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” specifies the clear
vision of two orders of things, but is actually the code of a very
paradoxical and rare type of person, the unworldly man of the world.
The things of Cæsar are to be known for what they are and conformed to
for what they are: they are not, however, to be justified. In this way
the religious person is in the world, but it is not his home, he is
not of it because his estimate of it differs from the estimates of the
men around him. Consider Socrates’ outward conformity to the customs
of Athenian life and his inward non-conformity. Why this paradox in
the religious person? Is it that he sees simultaneously the world’s
need for reform and the impossibility of reform? Does he see that
things in the main must be as they are, and only individual salvation
is possible? What makes him render unto Cæsar, but with such perfect
lucidity and no laudation, the things that belong to him?

The nut in these days of remoteness from religious inspiration is too
hard for us to crack. We can only wonder at the early Christian secret
of accommodating oneself to the world and yet placing oneself above
its customs and grandeurs. So though Benda approaches the religious
conception of two moralities to be adjusted to, he actually counsels
withdrawal from the first, the practical world, and a resolute turning
to the world of ideals. More and Babbitt, on the other hand, as I have
tried to show, actually do a little justifying of the economics of
Cæsar. They would have the civilized man do more than put up with a
necessary evil: they would have him defend it. All in all, we are not
likely to see much evidence in our era of a genuinely early Christian
view toward the market place and the legislative hall.

But can we imagine the undogmatic liberal lamb and the dogmatic
humanistic lion lying down together in the breast of one individual?
Not long ago I dismissed the liberals, perhaps too airily, for their
bankruptcy in ideas and their impotence in action. Not to speak of
the betrayal of liberal hopes by the Treaty of Versailles, impotent
the liberals had to confess themselves to be after the failure of
their concerted effort to secure a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Do their best, they could not avert that tragic stain of suspicion
on Massachusetts justice that will never wear off. Again in the
Smith-Hoover presidential election, they were as ineffective as their
enemies could wish. But one does not mock the defeated, one only asks
that such bitter lessons as defeat gives should be patiently conned.
Has American liberalism shown in the last two years any disposition
to revise itself, or to seize on a new idea, or to adopt a new set of
tactics, or to overcome its defects? Apparently only two liberals have
really tried to overhaul their policies and they are Walter Lippmann
and the late Herbert Croly. Of the two, Croly in my estimation went
deeper in his fragmentary writings in the _New Republic_ than did
Lippmann in _A Preface to Morals_. From 1924 until his illness in
1928 Croly appeared to be, in Arnold’s language, “turning a stream of
fresh and free thought” upon his previous stock notions and habits,
and in 1927 and 1928 the results began to be excitingly visible in
his editorials and occasional articles. In particular, the defeat of
the agitation for Sacco and Vanzetti seems to have deepened his sense
that some all-important element was missing from American Liberalism.
Liberalism must transform itself into a discipline of self-liberation
was his conclusion, and he hit on the term, Socratic Liberalism, to
distinguish the new conception from the old faith in legislative
action and environmental improvements. “What liberals need is not a
new concrete political or social program,” he concluded. “They need a
new evaluation of all programs, a new attitude towards them and a new
method of giving reality to them.”

Liberals have always been short on two things: skepticism and a full
realization of the inner life. They have been long on curiosity, on
tolerance, on human kindness, on a sense of the plasticity of man, on
optimism. They have put their faith in what Arnold called _machinery_,
that is, in programs of social and economic engineering, many of which
have turned out to be both available and realistic plans of action.
Generally speaking, the American liberal believes or hopes that the
ethical defect which capitalist economy introduces into the practices
of the State can be overcome by education, a belief that contrasts
with the pessimistic view of More, which we noted, namely, that the
defect is inherent in human nature. Croly’s radical proposal was simply
to marry liberal curiosity and sentiment to skepticism. “Although,” he
wrote in an important editorial entitled _Realistic Liberalism_ (_New
Republic_, November 23, 1927), “liberalism was fundamentally an attempt
to give increasing dignity, enlightenment and fulfilment to human life,
it has moved towards its goal almost entirely by trying to improve
the political and economic environment of modern men and women. Its
program called for the services of expert political or social engineers
and invoked the legislative power of the State to put the program,
which might be either negative or positive, into effect. But in all
its efforts, it assumed that an improvement of the conditions in which
people lived would liberate a corresponding moral and intellectual
energy in the people themselves. From this point of view, liberalism
was a well intentioned but inconsiderate attempt to redeem human nature
without asking human beings to participate in their own redemption,
except by devising social programs, winning elections, passing laws,
inventing more machines and increasing individual and social capital.
They were never asked to revolutionize and reform the inside of their
own minds or to ponder what, if any, the relation might be between
political self-government and individual self-government. They have
rarely asked the question whether a liberated society, in which there
was little or no oppression, no privation and no monopoly of power,
wealth and comfort, might, nevertheless, be composed of extremely
cheap individuals.”

It is commonly thought that skepticism of the machinery of social
reform puts a blight on one’s desires for material improvements. But it
does not necessarily do that, certainly not in Croly’s case. Skepticism
does blight opportunism and the exaggerated faith attached to projects
of external betterment, but the desire to experiment remains: only
the experimenter realizes he must not be cocksure of himself, he
must be humble and admit the need of a rigorous self-culture prior
to social experiment. Skepticism is in fact a great reviver of the
inner life, and Croly became in his last articles a preacher on the
neglected text, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within.” Like Arnold, he
declared in substance that culture is a condition of internal working.
“Liberals are invited, consequently, to repent of their dependence on
mechanism and to practice on themselves the faith in enlightenment
which has always been their stock-in-trade.... The only realistic
policy for liberals is to start methodically to stretch and intensify
their consciousness in the hope that it will become eventually a more
adequate instrument for the watching, the understanding, the unfolding,
the harmonizing and the deliverance of their personal lives.”

To Croly, then, the important thing was that liberalism should be
more than a doctrine or a program: it should be a discipline of
self-liberation, for only the self-liberated are qualified to become
liberators of others. Anybody, of course, can mouth generalities
about self-emancipation, internal development, and so on, and anybody
does. The rare person--the person who really means to do what he
says--goes a step further and inquires and speculates about a method
of self-liberation, about some definite means of converting rhetoric
into facts. This, in such editorials as _Socratic Liberalism_ (_New
Republic_, December 28, 1927) and in such articles as _The Human
Potential in the Pacific_, _Christians, Beware_, and _Consciousness
and the Religious Life_ Croly proceeded to do. He wanted a scientific
method for self-study and self-development, and he actually proposed
one summed up in this sentence: “So the hypothetical separation by
the individual of himself as an observer from the accidents and the
compulsions of his actualized personality, and his systematic effort
to be aware of how this personality behaves, may prove to be the
indispensable route to liberated and reunited consciousness of self.”

This, as you see, sets up a working dualism in human psychology. But
the interesting thing is that Croly’s effort to introduce at the
back of liberal sentiments and liberal intellectual interests the
two elements of skepticism and a practical concern with one’s own
psychology was completely abortive. Not even the editors of Croly’s
own paper have picked up his revolutionary proposals and carried them
forward in the slightest way.[8] The most profound liberal in America
thoroughly failed when it came to lifting liberalism out of its groove.
But unless I am very wrong, some kind of _entente_ could be worked out
between a Socratic Liberal and a Socratic Conservative or Humanist.
They would at least find a ground for basic agreement and differ, when
they differed, on opinions as to the passing trends of the time.

Finally, we come to that special brand of anarchism which I anticipate
will be acceptable to some Humanists in the future. The New Humanists
have been freely upbraided by many people anxious as they say “to
do good to others.” What! these well intentioned persons have said,
bother with self-reform when there are so many ills of the world to
be alleviated! Play with definitions, heed the Inner Check, talk
about discipline when social abuses abound! “And what,” says one of
the epigoni of the _New Republic_, “has Humanism to do with the scene
outside my window: with the jobless men who saunter in the dusk, or the
dying village, or the paper mill abandoned across the river--this mill
whose owners have gone South where labor is cheap?”

A lengthy reply to that has been in print for seventy-six years in the
whole final section of Thoreau’s first chapter in _Walden_. “As for
Doing-Good, that is one of the professions which are full ... Men say,
practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming
to become of more worth and with kindness aforethought go about doing
good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say rather,
Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his
fires up to the splendor of a moon or a star, of the sixth magnitude,
and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage
window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness
visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence
till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face,
and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own
orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered,
the world going about him getting good.... There are a thousand hacking
at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root and it may
be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the
needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery
which he strives in vain to relieve.... Do not stay to be an overseer
of the poor, but endeavor to become one of the worthies of the world.”

This is the twofold defence of the individualist: he confesses his
doubt that men’s knowledge and powers _as they are_ can do more than
merely meddle and muddle in social relations and he insists upon the
regeneration of oneself as being in the long run beneficial to those
around one. It is the very essence of the social criticism of the
American Humanists and conceivably to some temperaments among them it
might lead, as it did in Thoreau’s case, to personal secession from
the United States! The social anarchist like Thoreau is not heartless:
he is convinced of being helpless--like the man who has not learned to
swim and sees some one offshore drowning. The humanitarian plunges to
the rescue, but as he cannot swim, the only result is he drowns too.
The Humanist suffers from the spectacle of drowning souls, but he may
sensibly conclude with Thoreau that nothing can be effected toward
saving them until one has oneself learned to swim.

If American Humanism spreads, my prediction is that we shall eventually
see its adherents manifest as rich a variety stemming from certain
conventions of thought, feeling and discipline as we perceive in
Renascence Humanism. We shall see humanistic disciples of Thoreau
doggedly resisting the pleas of the Doing-Good professors, liberal
Humanists annoying by their socratic tendencies the orthodox liberals,
detached Humanists accused of defeatism and retreating to ivory towers
of thought, Socratic Conservatives like More and Babbitt, and perhaps
even a few Humanists tinged with the religious view of politics and
government. But we shall hardly see any measure of popularity attach
itself to any of the positions I have adumbrated.




                                   XI

                      THE DILEMMA OF THE LIBERATED

  _“Intellectual freedom is earlier and easier than complete
  spiritual freedom.”_--T. S. Eliot in the _Hound and Horn_ magazine.


In the last sixty years isolated individuals of distinction have
told the Western world that it was living in a state of decline.
Nietzsche was probably the most tormented of these prophets and used
the strongest language. Modern man to him was an instrument out
of tune: mankind itself was degenerating. We in America had Henry
Adams charting the change from mediæval unity to twentieth century
multiplicity and theorizing about the degradation of the democratic
dogma. Today Bertrand Russell is quoted as saying that the clock of
Europe has been running down since the Renascence, Chesterton advises
us that we are simply existing on our Catholic capital and using it
up, Whitehead notes that science has lived on the accumulated capital
of the ideas of the seventeenth century and that religion has been
weakening for several centuries. But all these contemporaries manage
nevertheless to keep a cheerful outlook, Whitehead elaborating thoughts
for a new scientific and philosophic synthesis, Chesterton rejoicing
in his personal rediscovery of Catholic truths, and Russell being, as
a wit has expressed it, terribly at ease in hell. The man with the
most complete brief is Oswald Spengler, who studies the morphology
of history. In his philosophy of history synthesized from a survey of
eight cultures (Indian, Mayan, Greek, Egyptian, etc.), it is held that
we in the West have our spring and summer, are now in the autumn and
inevitably must pass to the winter stage of our cultural cycle. Gone is
any possibility of a Renascence: we have had ours, and are now in the
megalopolitan “civilization” phase, committed to technology, destined
for more huge wars, the uprising of untutored hordes, and the coming of
dictators. The arts will perish as important influences.

Spengler has popularized the notion of the decline of the western
world, but after all it remains just a notion to most people. Very
few are really convinced to the marrow that European and American
civilization is on a downward slope. Some say it is, but they merely
say it: some think so, but merely think it. To find a man who is
saturated with pessimism about our present and future state is almost
as rare as to find a Rosicrucian in contemporary intellectual society.
Our general tone is optimistic and conceited with only an occasional
breakdown when we focus on some particular spot and admit that it is
unhealthy now and likely to get worse. But we cannot grant that certain
epochs in the past were greater than our own: we cannot get it out of
our heads that we are an improvement on all previous generations: we
cannot shed our faith in progress and see our whole civilization as a
retrogression.

The chief exceptions are Paul E. More and Irving Babbitt. They differ
from Spengler in being much more cautious generalizers: they talk about
one culture only, and chiefly the last four hundred years of that.
They do not think metaphorically about history or try to construct a
science or philosophy of history. A chief point of difference is that
they repudiate fatalism, admitting that we are biassed to roll down one
groove of the future but not denying that other possibilities still
remain open and asserting that by a great effort we may select one
of these as our future. The nearest they come to writing history by
analogy is to point out the similarity between Alexandrian culture and
many of the phenomena of contemporary learning and to make a tentative
comparison between the decadent imperialism of Rome under Tiberius or
Nero and the present tendencies in the United States toward discarding
standards, increasing luxury, and fomenting factional strife just as
we approach the acme of power. But, generally speaking, Babbitt and
More confine themselves strictly to the portrayal of psychological
decay in one locality, Europe and America taken together as Western
culture, during one definite span of time, the last four centuries
and particularly the last two. I have remarked that they do not think
metaphorically about history, yet their teaching can be concentrated
in a metaphor, and perhaps without loss of subtlety gain in power of
appeal.

We can go about picturing the Fall of Western Man if we adopt the
Platonic truism that society is simply a man writ large, for we are
then free to figure Western society as an Atlas the Endurer who rebels
against being otherworldly, ceases to uphold the heavens, and turns
this-worldly. At first his old habits of thinking and feeling persist:
he has merely ceased to make effort to miraculously sustain his center
of gravity outside himself in the “other world.” But now his center
of gravity shifts to within: he no longer stands perfectly upright,
strained toward the Absolute, but leans a little toward this earth. As
he now thinks, the heavens did not all these centuries really need his
support; he was deceived by a myth, he thinks, and it does not occur
to him that he was the one who benefited by his posture and effort. As
he leans toward the earth, he rejoices in his freedom to lean. This is
the end of the Renascence. Well in the past now is the era of Gothic
cathedral building which showed what incomparable architecture Atlas
was capable of when he held up the heavens. Well past, too, are many
other strangely beautiful things, among them “La Gaya Scienza” of the
Provençal culture. From now on a new order of behavior, and it is at
this turning-point that More and Babbitt begin closely to observe
Atlas. What they see is a gradually shifting and settling of the center
of gravity of his psychology.

For a time he holds himself almost upright. He cultivates
_sprezzatura_. He is the seventeenth century gentleman and scholar
who does not pride himself on anything. He _fears_ specialization and
believes that “perfected good-breeding consists in having no particular
mark of any profession, but a general elegance of manners.” But he
sways a little: a slight turn and he is neo-classical and becomes
stiff, conventional, puristic, the center of his gravity in his mind.
He has begun to totter in the direction he leans--toward the earth.

Then More and Babbitt observe how the giant makes a violent effort
to right himself. It is the romantic recoil from the neo-classical
aridity. It is Rousseau and his followers raving against trying to
put one’s gravity-center outside oneself, or against trying to keep
it established inside oneself in the mind. Slowly the center changes,
then drops suddenly into the emotions. Atlas becomes fiery. He is a
Jacobin. He sets up democracies wherein popular feeling may sweep more
freely. He colors philosophy with subjectivism: henceforward it is not
the drama of the universe but the inward drama of the psyche that he
ruminates upon. He institutes rebellion in the arts, confusing them,
and he chases like a madman after sensation. The phenomena of his new
state--his predilection for idyllic dreams, his praise of spontaneity
and idiosyncrasy, his love of delicious revery, his dislike of
discipline, etc.--grow countless. Atlas is ruled by his feelings, and
they are not counterweighted by his mind. Whole parts and functions of
his psychology are going to rust, most disastrously of all his will. No
wonder he sprawls forward on all fours. With his center of gravity in
his unbridled feelings, he must fall.

But now is his center sinking again? Will Atlas, no longer the Endurer,
be changed into a cunning savage? Will he become simply a creature who
exploits the earth’s resources and alternates his labors in production
with a complete spineless subsidence into physical comforts? Is the
day of Apeneck Sweeney and Molly Bloom dawning on a culture that has
known the sardonic Swift and the charm of Madame de Sévigné? Atlas who
used magnificently to bear up the sky--is he to be stretched prone in
comfort in the twenty-first century, no vulture tearing at his flesh as
at his brother Prometheus, but a radio to lull his mind?

The signs are plentiful of another transition: we have gone from
the dominance of religious values to the dominance of intellectual
ones and then to the primacy of emotional values. The last
stage--barbarism--will occur with the complete triumph of practical and
instinctive values. Then Atlas will indeed be but an economic creature,
cleverly producing what he needs by the least effort, and spending his
increased leisure in the pursuit of cheap distractions from thought and
serious emotion. He will truly have diminished to the ninth part of a
human being.

Such, in a picture, is my reading of the critique of Western
civilization so elaborately and weightily presented by Babbitt and
More. They have traced the movements of our psychological center of
gravity and view with foreboding the future of a society whose members
will not make the almost impossible struggle to elevate its center, to
resume the former standing posture of Atlas. But this simplification
should be followed at once by a warning to the reader who has not
consulted the whole body of works by Babbitt and More. Do not surmise
they have trimmed to a thesis. They have been the patient collectors
of historical evidence, and the thesis emerges from a study of all
the gatherable evidence. “By their fruits ye shall know them,” is
Babbitt’s working rule. Secondly, do not think that the evidence, while
susceptible of simplification in the mass, is in detail simple. Man is
as prolific in ideas as Nature is prolific in insects (unfortunately,
most ideas are of the insect order): he is a being as full of desires
as an egg is full of meat (and his shell has been broken): he is
as active and restless as a monkey (and about as purposeless).
Consequently, his mental, emotional and instinctive manifestations are
variegated in the extreme. Variegated, but not pure chaos, not without
a pattern. Babbitt and More are pattern-perceivers, not imposers of
arbitrary patterns. In the third place, do not think that all value
is denied to romanticism and naturalism. They have in fact many good
elements, which More and Babbitt fully recognize. What is bad about
these schools is their rejection of the more human elements in our
psychology, what is bad is their glorification of a lowered center of
gravity.

The New Humanist, as any one knows who is acquainted with his mind,
does not wish to turn the clock back but to incorporate the gains of
romanticism and naturalism into a broader synthesis with a more stable
center.

                   *       *       *       *       *

A few people can take seriously the question of the degeneration of our
civilization. If you are one of these, prepared to admit seriously the
possibility that the species of mankind may over long periods fall and
rise in quality, then you are likely to reflect seriously on all the
questions that American Humanists find of the first rank and interest.
If you approach these questions with the same intent sobriety with
which they are propounded, then you will find a dilemma confronting
you. At one horn there is Naturalism: at the other--Humanism. The
statement signalizes a change in this book: up to now it has been
an interpretation of American Humanism, from now on it will be a
criticism. It is plain that I find the naturalistic horn no horn to
grasp. Its disadvantages have been too forcibly presented by the
writers grouped around Babbitt and More. On the other hand, we would
have to thank their opponents had they revealed with equal skill and
force the drawbacks and dangers attached to the alternative horn,
but I cannot feel that the anti-Humanists have done their business
satisfactorily to date. They have been rather living examples of the
fallacies and partialities exposed by the New Humanists than the
exposers of the latter’s weaknesses. The reason is that almost to a
man the anti-Humanists were not seriously and fundamentally interested
in the questions put in the foreground by the Humanists. They saw no
dilemma, because in the absence of serious and passionate concern over
the main issues, there is no dilemma.

What is there new that the young chips from the old block of
rationalism can tell us? The limitations of nineteenth century
rationalism have been established for some time: years ago we cashed
all its cheques and its account has not been replenished. Likewise
the humanitarian’s credit since the Great War has been low. He may
tell us now that the problem of the will is unreal and the business
of improving the environment of man will gradually solve the problem
of human happiness, but we are not living in the hopeful spring of
1914. We do not see man any longer in a rosy light. It is the same
with the æsthete: he too is a pre-war creature. Representatives of
all these types were huddled together in the symposium, _The Critique
of Humanism_, and there carried on the old warfare of the allied
Romanticists and Naturalists against the Humanists. But that war has
been fought to a finish, and it is tiresome not to have some new
developments. Also it appears we have come down a long way from the
days of Shelley and Coleridge, of Darwin and Spencer, of Flaubert
and Zola who did indeed make Naturalism and Romanticism _something_
to argue about. We are down now to the intellectual nursery--to the
childish quarrelsomeness of a Burton Rascoe and the peevish complaints
of an Edmund Wilson (whose excursion, by the way, into the criticism of
Sophocles deserves a mirthful place in the memory of the _cognoscenti_).

We wish however to take the anti-Humanist attack at its high point,
not at its feeblest, and the acclamation of reviewers nominates the
piece by Lewis Mumford, _Toward an Organic Humanism_, as the best to be
had. The essay produces a glow in the reader, as Mumford almost always
succeeds in doing, but when the glow fades and the substance is coolly
inspected, the keen reader is bound to feel that he has been cheated
by the author’s cheerfulness. There is no originality of thought. The
usual contention that the American Humanists cut themselves off from
contemporary life. The usual contention that they are too negative.
The usual misinterpretation of “the inner check.” The air of an
enthusiastic master unveiling the secrets of “organic humanism.” And
the secrets? They appear rather banal, vague, inconclusive. Life is a
“multitude of functions”: we must live in a state of tension and grow
and renew ourselves: we must reconcile almost everything in sight.
“The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be
as happy as kings.” At the end the essayist generously offers a big
bed wherein he assures us romanticist and classicist, Humanist and
mechanist, naturalist and idealist, divested of their philosophical
clothes, can lie down happily together. I am not convinced that we
can progress very far by the method of obliterating intellectual
distinctions which discriminating men have labored to erect. If this
piece by Mumford is the best anti-Humanist criticism, it looks as
though there was nothing to do but to set out from here to plough a
fresh furrow. Let me hope it will not be a lonely furrow as well.

It is, from my viewpoint, necessary to make an almost clean discard
of all the current adverse criticism of the New Humanists recently
committed by American writers. I would myself give away all of it to
the needy poor in intellectual circles for the few lines written years
ago by A. R. Orage on Paul Elmer More’s _The Drift of Romanticism_.
“Mr. More,” he said, “has also, it appears to me, the defect of
orthodoxy--he fails to realize the inevitability of heterodoxy and the
consequent necessity of paradoxy. The classic is for him, as it is for
me, the perfect literary form: all form, in fact, is classic. But the
romantic should be recognized, when it arises, as a challenge to form,
as an impulse demanding severer forms to contain it.” This, praise be
given, does take a step towards a new criticism of orthodox classicism.
It does not rest on mere dissatisfaction with the emotional side of
American Humanism, a dissatisfaction that is so widespread there must
be something to it, but it actually points out the defect. What is
more, it suggests a way to overcome the defect, and that not by denying
the distinctions involved but by incorporating them into a paradoxy.
It challenges the student to make an entirely new approach to an old
controversy.

Orage, it should be noted, has always been profoundly interested in
such questions as the American Humanists now raise anew: the quality
of modern society and the quality of the modern individual, the art
of life and a technique for practicing it, the nature of man and his
need for regeneration, moral responsibility and how to attain it, the
contraction of men into specialists and the way unto Renascence fulness
of experience. Without profound interest in questions of this nature,
there is no dilemma to be produced, and no need for a paradoxical
attitude to face it.

With that recognized, let us now press forward to grips with the New
Humanism.

                   *       *       *       *       *

Twentieth century Humanism undeniably has an appeal for the liberated
man or woman. Of course, I do not mean liberated in any absolute
sense, but use the word in its present conversational meaning to
signify those who have freed themselves of popular delusions. I mean
just that civilized minority that do not need the offices of H. L.
Mencken to open their eyes to current cant. They are, to be brief,
total disbelievers in the so-called “American Credo.” It is not easy
to shock them about sex. They have learned to view many of the facts
of life realistically. They are of a questioning turn of mind. They
prefer sophistication to godliness. Generalizing, we can say they have
shed two classes of superstitions, the superstitions that have usurped
the place of ancient religion and the superstitions that flourish in
the neighborhood of modern science. They do not believe, that is,
that either the churches or the scientists “can fix everything up.”
Emancipated from the official Christianity of our day, disillusioned
about the day’s science, they experiment and drift in a middle region,
an amorphous group, curious about the possibilities of life but
skeptical of finding a pansophy.

In the last decade and a half in America they veered toward
naturalism and now know what awaits them in that quarter. Romantic
disillusionment--disheartened optimism--the modern distemper so
eloquently confessed for our generation by Joseph Wood Krutch. Now
apparently a vanguard is veering toward Humanism. And so far one can
distinguish two main types among this advance guard--those who have the
humanistic temper by nature and those who are naturally of a religious
inclination.

What the humanistic temper is this book has sought to make clear.
I will add now one further example and one more description of the
temper. The example is the poet Robert Frost who in all probability
holds no formal views on American Humanism, and perhaps is largely
unacquainted with the ideas of Babbitt and More, but who nevertheless
writes verse highly satisfactory by humanistic criteria. An intimate
understanding of this poet’s psychology _through_ his works will
give you better than reams of exposition what the actual flavor and
humor and clear-cut quality of humanistic experience is like. The
description of the humanistic temper is by Robert Shafer. Writing
in the _Hound and Horn_, Summer Issue, 1930, Shafer said: “The true
humanist has ever been a practical man of the world; avoiding those
tempting chimeras metaphysical speculation and pseudo-science;
suspicious of rigid abstract formulations; preferring to define his
position tentatively, by the methods of critical scrutiny, in close and
fruitful relation to actual but ever-changing circumstances; avoiding
the self-defeating violence of revolution; preferring to work with and
through existing institutions; sacrificing sudden impressiveness to
steady, quiet persistence; not expectant of victory; and content even
with apparent defeat in untoward times if apparent defeat is the reward
of moderation, sane judgment, disciplined taste, and a comely serenity.”

As for the liberated who are religiously inclined, who have, that is,
the religious temperament, they are quite easy to describe. I refer
simply to intelligent civilized men and women who are accessible to
ideas of a religious order, who are prepared to entertain but only
to entertain religious assumptions, who experience a little thrill
from the (to us) occult language of the Sacred Books. I mean no more
than that: it amounts to a kind of sympathetic curiosity in religious
matters.

Now, forsaking the liberated for a while, I have to consider something
very unusual in contemporary experience--_the religious spirit_.

The difficulties in the way of conveying a fresh sense of this spirit
are almost insuperable. I cannot begin as Norman Foerster and other
Humanists do by professing respect and admiration for the great
organized religious bodies in their present condition, for the thing I
attach value to is the religious spirit and that has departed. I agree
with Hulme and other scattered observers that the present age totally
misunderstands religion. Warm ashes of the Christian Faith remain, most
notably in Catholicism, but we moderns are almost hopelessly clogged
with false associations, sentimentalities, stock responses to religion,
and nothing very potent in us can be lit up by the feeble glow cast by
the best surviving elements in the Churches. So thick is the forest
of our associations about religion, so lost and wandering are we in
it, that I shall scrupulously avoid citing any historic examples of
the religious spirit: that would in all likelihood lead simply to
tangential arguments, to treading in the mazes of our associations
about figures. Whereas it is the essence itself, this spirit so
foreign to our ways, that I would suggest. Without a prior common
understanding, examples may in fact be pernicious.

Try then, my reader, as I have tried, to throw out of the mind all
our stale notions about the spirit of the religious man. Realize as
strongly as possible the nonreligious motives that have entered into
modern Christian thought, making the “religious life” what Whitehead
protests it should not be, a research after comfort. Put to a violent
death the democratic feelings that have been allowed to corrupt the
uncompromising character of religions at their source. To go on in the
hortatory way,--shock your preconceptions one by one. Be prepared to
admit that a genuinely religious man would seem monstrous to you.

As I conceive of the religious spirit, neither the religious
inclination nor the humanistic temper approximate to it in the least
degree. There is an absolute difference. They do not grow into the
religious spirit, but must suffer a transformation. My emphatic
judgment is that Humanism can never merge into religion by a mere
extension of itself, but that there exists a chasm between the two
which the New Humanist _qua_ Humanist can never leap. Religious and
humanistic inclinations can make terms with each other, but between the
religious spirit and the humanistic temper there is opposition forever.
I point to the _early_ Christians who insisted, as Babbitt notes, that
there is only a stark supernaturalism and a stark naturalism with no
intermediate territory for the Humanist.

Briefly now I will essay a probably futile task, the adumbration of the
man of religious spirit. Probably futile, because he is incredible to
us. We cannot credit such a passion for perfection as he incarnates.
To us religion is anthropomorphic: to him religion is theomorphic.
In that you have the astounding reversal of our suppositions which
he makes. Consequently when we read, “So God created man in his own
image, in the image of God created he him,” we at once think of God
as being like man: the religious spirit, however, thinks of man as
being like God, an utterly revolutionary difference, for, since man
in his ordinary condition is obviously anything but Godlike, this
theomorphism stimulates in the religious spirit the tremendous ambition
to become like God, a perfect being. Could there be anything more
rash and sublime and impossible? Provided one has shed sentimental
conceptions of deity. “Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is
perfect.” Every resource must be used, every power must be strained,
every second of life must be taken for the impossible task. The mind
is an instrument of perfection: it must accordingly be developed
to the utmost. The body must be strong to undertake the enormous
labors imposed on it. The emotions must be unbelievably enriched.
Consciousness itself must expand! Religion is indefeasibly the study
and pursuit of perfection: it requires not only that no stone but no
grain and no mountain be left unturned which might furnish a clue or
a stimulus to its quest. This, in its desperateness, its consuming
thirst, its impossibilism, is almost as remote, I need not say, from
Humanism as it is from Naturalism. To the religious spirit it is the
absolute or nothing.

Absolute Truth, absolute Beauty, absolute Goodness--these are what he
yearns for, and he is impatient of moderation, decency, good sense _as
ends_. He cannot, as the Humanist can, seek primarily for stability of
character: he seeks for perfection of character with stability coming
as a by-product. Nor is there any known limit to his skepticism: the
very nature of his pursuit of the unattainable enforces skepticism on
him to the last degree. The religious life is a continual destruction
of those elements of imperfection, illusions. “Prove all things; hold
fast that which is good.”

Obviously, such men as I speak of are extremely uncommon. Their
mark, I have tried to suggest, is that they make their life-task the
wholehearted, single-minded pursuit of a perfection whose fulness we
cannot even dream of, and to which we are quite indifferent as an idea.
They have in our era another mark that differentiates them from us as
completely as if they belonged to another race: an agony of bafflement.
In Biblical language, they have “a zeal of God, but not according to
knowledge.” Their zeal leads them everywhere, they stop at nothing, but
the form of their life in modern times is a searching, not a finding.
Zealous searchers, they are blocked by that “middle wall of partition”
spoken of in the Bible which they know not how to break down. They see
in their quest the need for an enlargement of their powers, but how to
increase them, that they do not know. Theirs is the agony of baffled
search for the means to the perfection they crave with all their being.
They would seem to know in terms of the most exasperating personal
experience that there does exist a radical discontinuity, as Hulme
thought, between man and God or the Absolute. The Humanist we have seen
dwelling on the discontinuity between man and nature. The religious
spirit discovers in his efforts toward self-perfecting, toward
expansion and intensification of consciousness, the discontinuity at
the other border, and it is this frontier between man and the absolute
that he emphasizes. Here, he says, is the all-important barrier, and we
cannot rest until we have leaped it.

Thirst for divinizing oneself, agony of frustration before the “middle
partition”--these are at all times the stigmata of a few men on our
planet. We can _recognize_ these stigmata even though what they signify
lies outside our experience, but because we have not experienced, we
cannot _comprehend_. Yet if one is interested in human limits, one has
to make a rude stab at description of this race of men. Have you never
heard that in the original doctrine of no single great religion is it
stated that man by nature has a soul? Then blame religious democracy.
Man in the great religions at their source is exhorted to labor for a
soul, is urged to acquire one, but religion says he begins without one.
Religion begins with stark naturalism, but ends with constructing a
bridge to a new life. Many are called to the work of creating the new
life--in that respect religion is democratic; but few are chosen, few
succeed in “crossing the stream”--an unpalatable saying to religious
democrats. This brings forward an idea that pales the humanistic
notion of a turning away from the natural self, just as the idea of
the divinization of man pales the idea of the humanization of man. The
religious spirit darkens naturalism far beyond the Humanist portrayal,
and at the same time it gives the possibilities of man an effulgence
that drowns with glory the modest conceptions of the Humanists. The
connecting idea brought forward is rebirth by a process as definite but
far more terrific than physical birth. This is an idea still present,
as we noted, in Pico della Mirandola’s _Oration_, but since vanished
from humanistic teaching.

The suffering of the religious spirit today, however, comes not, I
venture to say, from the pangs of rebirth but from non-satisfaction.
He cannot conceive a soul and therefore cannot gestate one. No wonder
a modern religious spirit occasionally shatters itself in madness!
The zeal of God, but not according to knowledge, is fraught with the
utmost danger, for the truth of our human situation we are told is
terror-inspiring, and a sudden glimpse--

We have done with the armchair mysticism prevalent in the West today.
It is devoid of the desperation, the readiness to leave the library
and the round of civilized comforts and take all the risks, the sheer
heroism that mark the genuine religious man. It clearly has naught of
the spirit of these Buddhistic verses.

  Scorched, frozen, and alone,
  In fearsome forest dwelling,
  Naked, no fire to warm,
  Bent on the quest is the Sage.

The distinction is not, please mark however, between comfortable
literary mysticism and self-torturing asceticism. Great religious
teachers have pointed out the fallacy of the latter as the Way. Our
distinction is between the unwillingness to experiment dangerously with
life and the resolute disposition of the genuinely religious to go to
any lengths, if necessary.

And now we may come back to ourselves, the liberated, who have been
illuminated by the steady light thrown on Naturalism by the New
Humanists and have afterwards turned to examine critically Humanism
itself. By the blazing light shafted on it from the religious spirit,
what do we now see there? Holding Humanism up against this searching
sun-like radiance, shall we find ourselves in an unexpected dilemma?

                   *       *       *       *       *

It is patent that a man aflame with the religious spirit would,
when striking on the New Humanism in his investigations, formulate
his requirements of it and the aims he wished it to satisfy in a
language the contemporary Humanist does not speak. But we who call
ourselves the liberated employ, so it happens, a vocabulary keyed a
note above characteristic Humanist speech. The New Humanist’s favorite
words are: decency, moderation, measure, commonsense, the normal and
representative, the centralized, discipline, standards, humility,
self-control, vital restraint, proportionateness, decorum, stability.
His thoughts circulate around these words: they constitute the magnetic
portion of his vocabulary. The magnetic portion of the liberated
man’s vocabulary runs somewhat as follows, and you will note the
higher keying at once: honesty, daring, curiosity, experiment, zeal
for truth, self-knowledge, disinterestedness, harmony, the free mind,
spiritual freedom, integration of experience, art of life, increased
life, greater consciousness. The respective vocabularies are not
mutually exclusive; there is much overlapping in actual usage. But the
point is sound that the New Humanist is apt to employ the second set
of terms in the second place, whereas the liberated man approaching
the study of Humanism uses the Humanist’s favorite words as secondary
to the magnetic words of freedom, increased consciousness, etc. This
difference in emphasis gives us a clue that may conduct to an important
criticism of the New Humanist’s supreme method, the rule of mediation.

In approaching any subject, it is well to formulate in advance where
one stands at present, what motives impel one toward the new subject,
what one expects to find, and what one wants to discover. The liberated
man (common gender) has, in theory at least, been freed from dogma,
either naturalistic or theological. Dogma to him is any statement
offered which may be true but which is unaccompanied by a means of
verifying it. He has grown clever in distinguishing between what is
verifiable by himself and what is not: the latter he calls “dogma.” In
theory also he is freed from hypocrisy: he strives to be completely
honest with himself. His objection to most conventional modes of
thought is that they have hampered him in getting at the truth about
himself. Today he is discovering that truth, and it is, that he is
completely self-ignorant. Hear him confess his ignorance, as he is
doing in increasing numbers.

“I perceive my own ignorance on all essential matters. Why I exist I
do not know. What I am I do not know. I am ignorant of any purpose
in life. My friends and especially my enemies are more aware of my
weaknesses than I am. My economy of life is bad--I do not make the most
of it, or know how to do so. I am subject to unknown laws. Blind to
the future, forgetful of my past, in the present I exist, because of my
ignorance, as the plaything of chance.”

The discovery of the liberated man is that he is not a fallen Angel but
a feeble son of Man. On the basis of his ignorance, however, he can and
does formulate what he wishes to know and what abilities he wishes to
acquire. One word sums up the first:--Self-Knowledge. “I would like to
know what sort of creature I really am. What are my real wishes? Why do
I live and for what end? What are the conditions of happiness? How may
I live with real advantage to myself? What is the true nature of the
world that impinges on me? In short, I would like to know everything
about myself from my puzzling trivial habits to my relation with the
universe.”

As for Ability, he would, in my view, like to be a Reynard the Fox,
the “animal capable.” He wishes to be active, to become valuable and
therefore valued by men, to be devoid of humbug in the use of his skill
and single-minded in what he undertakes, above all to succeed wherever
he is. The power to do what he wishes to do!

But not one word about character. We have a confession of ignorance
followed by the recognition of a need for self-knowledge and the need
for general ability. Perhaps the intuition of the liberated person
tells him that character is a resultant, the product of his knowledge
and his ability interacting. With his needs uppermost in his mind, he
encounters the New Humanism and this system, as we have learned, puts
character foremost. The juxtaposition gives us another critical clue.
For the Humanist replies first to the very last questions--_the still
unformulated questions_--of the liberated, and the first questions of
the liberated are relegated in humanistic thought to a lesser position.
Which order is correct?

Are we close to the nub at last? Several years ago in an essay on
Irving Babbitt I closed by saying that the crux of the whole matter of
Humanism was in the questions: “To what ends in human character does
the technique of Humanism surely lead? Can it by its route attain to
the victory over circumstance announced by religion or can it only
ameliorate a determined scheme of things by the production of such
relatively minor virtues as moderation, decency and good sense?” These
questions seem to me now as then to touch the central issue. The
technique of Humanism is mediation: the law of measure, Nothing Too
Much, is supreme. The validity of this law I do not question. Whether
it is always and everywhere to be observed, that I question. What I
specifically challenge is the supremacy of the technique based on the
law of measure. Is mediation the prime law of life?

My answer must be, No.[9] I cannot set aside the fact that mediation
presupposes two things, the acquisition of self-knowledge and the
acquisition of will. _It is a technique of control._ By trying to
practice it some self-knowledge is picked up incidentally, and a call
is made upon the will to awake. But mediation is primarily concerned
with character, not with knowledge, not with development of will. A
prior method is absolutely required if mediation is to yield any great
results and that prior method is necessarily supreme. To be blunt and
homely, the New Humanist has overlooked the horse which is to pull his
cart: he has overlooked the working out of a trustworthy technique for
learning the exact truth about the individual creature who is to be
disciplined by mediation to a norm of humanity. For me then, and very
possibly for many other liberated men and women, the New Humanism is
too “advanced.” We stand at the beginning: we are pupils who have first
to learn how to attain a better working knowledge of what some day
we may hope to control. We are willing to admit the mediatory method
as one of a group of allied methods, but we cannot isolate it as the
leading and one essential means to self-development.

I have some hopes of making this point clear. It is not a destructive
criticism. I would not myself take the trouble to write a whole
book simply to overthrow something. It is, however, a criticism
of incompleteness and misplaced emphasis, and by no means implies
the discarding of the law of measure. The aim is to advance the
contribution of American Humanism nearer to a _total_ solution of the
modern problem. And I consider that an advance is made by pointing
out the absence in Humanism of a technique for self-knowledge and
will-development that at all compares in precision and plausibility
with its technique for control.

Suppose a man is today converted to the philosophy of Rousseau. He
finds his conversion need not be simply a literary one, so to speak,
for associated with the philosophy there is now a psychological
technique alleged to corroborate the rightness of Rousseauistic
ideas. The new convert can study psycho-analysis, undergo treatment
in an analyst’s office, emerge with a rather elaborate method for
interpreting his own psychology. He has, along with his philosophy, an
apparent means for verifying it, for living up to it. He is possessed
of a technique based on Rousseauistic principles which, it is claimed,
provides a continuous key to self-knowledge. It is hardly necessary for
me to add, however, that psycho-analysis is a discredited technique
for self-knowledge, and that there exists today no advertised, easily
accessible, tested, thoroughly accredited way to carry out the
Pythagorean command, Know Thyself. The illustration serves all the
same to point the fact that the New Humanism is unequipped with a
psychological technique for taking the first step. It has to rely on
introspection which notoriously is unreliable. But it relies too on
traditional knowledge, and this is to a certain degree a corrective
of introspective vagaries. For ancient wisdom--in India, in Egypt, in
Pythagorean Greece, in Palestine--may have been founded on realities
and methods to which we have lost the clue. There are good grounds for
surmising that Pythagoras, for example, was not a fanciful guesser at
all. The New Humanists being in contact with the best knowledge of
the past may therefore be right in their ideas, but we and they need
to remember that the complete technique for validating these ideas in
terms of concrete individual experience is still to find or perhaps
rediscover.

Another difficulty I have always had with the New Humanism arises over
the Will. In theory I concede the Humanists are right, but it is a
question whether in their practice the Will becomes an accomplished
fact. What is the sure test? We make effort--that we know; and
furthermore effort occurs in the prescribed field of working on
oneself. Will is psychological effort distinguished from physical
effort. But is all psychological effort to be called Willing? Remember
that psychological effort appears always to be powerfully motived: by
self-interest, fear, rivalry, desire for fame, intellectual curiosity,
a hundred varying motives. When the motive dies, the effort invariably
dies with it. Now just as I cannot grant that a man with an empty belly
who labors like a Trojan for his next meal is an example of Will, so
I cannot accept the man laboring great hours to satisfy intellectual
hunger as an instance of Willing. Will must occur in the absence of
incentive. Will would persist in working in a given direction _after_
the motive had ceased. Will is that which overcomes indifference.

I hold that we cannot be too skeptical on this topic. Nowhere else does
illusion insinuate itself so much as in regard to responsible choice
and Will. How can we make sure that we are not subtly deluded?

“Freedom is the will to be responsible for oneself”--this is one of
Nietzsche’s profoundest sayings. Certainly we all have a desire to
be responsible for ourselves. But it is equally certain that the
desire is comparatively weak, buried most of the time, intermittent
in appearance, quickly exhausted when it does appear. Clearly, we do
not get very far on our occasional desires for self-responsibility.
Our tendencies flow the other way: we delight in irresponsibility. All
the odds experience demonstrates are against any continuous effort at
being responsible for oneself. My conclusion is that Will is just that
continuous effort carried on against the whole weight of the organism,
an effort that is finally unaided by wishes and unprovoked by external
inducements--nothing less than an _independent_ activity of the psyche.

The practical conclusion I must draw from this is that men are
Will-less. The conclusion that I am not warranted in drawing in the
face of extraordinary past testimony is that men are devoid of the
potentiality of Will. “Thou art not free yet, thou seekest freedom
still”--this is Nietzsche again, and freedom must be sought in human
potentialities and won by the actualization of potentials, since as
we actually are, we are not free. The New Humanist has confused a
potentiality, the Will, with an actuality that can be described as
_conditioned_ psychological effort directed toward self-control. I
attach much weight to that criticism.

It seems to me of great consequence to realize this:--it is “failure
of will” we know, not acts of Will. The testimony of a therapeutist
strikingly confirms what I have just said. Therapeutists often find
that their patients want to get well, know what the trouble is and
what they must do, and yet fail to exert the required will. In an
unusually candid paper read some years ago before the Medical Section
of the British Psychological Society Dr. James Carruthers Young,
formerly a surgeon, now a practitioner of the Jung school of analytic
psychology, made the following remarks which succeed in putting the
problem of the Will on a practical basis. “Every form of occultism
aims at self-development through deepening, or expanding the limits
of, self-consciousness, or however you like to express it. Now it
is obvious that this laudable object cannot be attained merely by
embracing the ideas of a system, however rapturously. The all-important
factor of the exercise and proper application of will must enter, if
anything is to be achieved. If it does not, then the ideas, however
beautiful and intriguing, in the end become merely ‘dope’ ... it seemed
to me that ‘failure of will’ was _the bête noire_ in neuroses. Roughly,
the neurotic symptom from the Freudian standpoint is the disguised
expression of an affect which is too painful to be _faced_. From the
Adlerian standpoint, it is an ‘incomparable arrangement,’ by which
the patient avoids _facing_ a certain aspect of what we call reality.
In the broadest sense in both systems, it is a question of failure to
_face up_ to reality. Now it by no means follows that, when it is made
clear to the patient by analysis what aspects of reality he has been
unconsciously avoiding, that he will at once be able to cope with it.
This is particularly evident in the case of obsessionists, as I have
proved to my own satisfaction again and again. A washing obsessionist,
for example, cheerfully subscribes to the theory of origin of her
washing, but when called upon to make the slightest new adaptation,
always falls back on her washing. In effect she says: ‘I cannot marry,
or do this, that or the other, because, you see, I wash.’ To put
the matter in a nutshell, analytical knowledge is not necessarily
effective knowledge.

“Now I think it will be generally agreed that what I have called
‘failure of will’ is often bound up with an endocrine deficiency or
dyscrasia, sometimes acquired and sometimes apparently so fundamental
as to justify the term ‘primary plasmic insufficiency,’ which
corresponds to Adler’s organic inferiority. Unfortunately, the science
of endocrinology was not, and is not yet, so far advanced as to enable
us to remedy such dyscrasias with anything approaching to certainty
or precision, even granted that our powers of diagnosis may be able
to divine the true nature of such complicated conditions. My problem,
then, was how to overcome the difficulty of ‘failure of will’ by means
of a definite psychological method.”

It seems to me no less important for the Humanists to realize that
_there_ is the problem for the ordinary person as well as for the
pathological, namely, how to reinforce a sound theory of the Will
with a sound method for overcoming ‘failure of will.’ To vanquish the
obstinate difficulties, the theory must become practical.

                   *       *       *       *       *

The dilemma turns out to be like this:--pursue your natural desires
and you find they do not lead to that signal of well-being we call
happiness but reveal instead the need for a re-education of desire,
so that you may train yourself to desire the kind of happiness that
is possible for men; choose Humanism as a system of re-education of
desire and you must wonder if it has the strength to perform the task.
One alternative deceives you by its bright appeal, the other seems
inferior in its call to the imagination, to the hidden latent powers of
psychology. But inferior to what? Inferior to religion at its purest.
Religion says it is a superhuman task to overcome one’s naturalism.
If it is a superhuman undertaking, then one may ask, what chance is
there of effecting a real mastery by anything less than a science for
divinizing man?

For here is man, the prey of innumerable illusions, stunted in
psychological growth, spiritually inert, bewildered by himself,
discordant in behavior, perhaps incurably paralyzed in will--will
anything but the most tremendous means metamorphose him into a falconer
of reality, an experiencer of bliss and ecstasy, a doer of deeds on
the fighting edge of the cosmos? The New Humanism is a morality not
untouched by dignified emotion. But I say that on the whole it is
morals not sufficiently touched with poetry, not endowed with the
tremendous shaking appeal to our whole being that religion has been
known to exercise. Religion is more than Arnold defined it, it includes
morality touched by emotion, but it includes art, science, philosophy
as well. It is insatiable for perfection and so must quicken and
recharge every side of our consciousness. It is, I think, properly
impatient of all half-measures everywhere, impatient of such a reason
as Babbitt gives, the fear of self-delusion, for choosing a more
moderate attack on life’s riddles, impatient of short aims--_because
it realizes the almost hopeless condition of man_. For psychological
freedom everything must be risked. That is what we learn when we study
the religious spirit. By its fiery light, we liberated ones perceive
that we are in truth only pseudo-liberated. We have put the weight
on being free from something, but the real question is, free for
what? I have been writing, quite knowingly, about the dilemma of the
_pseudo-liberated_. If we realize our pseudo-state, then as we approach
the New Humanism, our question becomes a searching one, will it truly
liberate? My suggestion has been to hold this system up against the
blazing background of the religious spirit, and against that background
it seems certain to me two major defects appear in Humanism: the lack
of a science of self-study and a not sufficiently stringent conception
of the Will.

Might we not say that twentieth century Humanism is a system of right
conjectures? “Do you not perceive,” the prophetess Diotima says to
Socrates in _The Banquet_, “that there is something between ignorance
and wisdom?” “What is that?” asked Socrates. “To have a right opinion
or conjecture. Observe, that this kind of opinion, for which no reason
can be rendered, cannot be called knowledge; for how can that be called
knowledge, which is without evidence or reason? Nor ignorance, on the
other hand; for how can that be called ignorance which arrives at the
persuasion of that which it really is? A right opinion is something
between understanding and ignorance.” Humanism to me has the value, and
it is a high value, of wise conjecture about the way to lead a human
life. For undoubtedly it is better, in default of wisdom, to be guided
by true opinions than by demonstrably false ones. But we must not lose
sight of the conjectural basis of Humanism. We must throw ourselves
into the task of validating to the point of indisputability the right
opinions involved. The New Humanist draws upon the Sages: his business
is to become a Sage, to achieve in his own person the sensation of
absolute knowledge, to go beyond the intermediate stage to wisdom.

Can he do so without hitching his wagon to a more remote star? I think
not. There is the effort to be superman, not to be solely identified of
course with the peculiar effort of one man, Nietzsche, and this effort
while failing to reach its end does leave as a by-product a growth in
human-ness. But the less ambitious effort to be human--does it hit the
mark? Superhumanism gives birth to the human, or humanism with the
small h. It is claimed that Humanism gives birth to the human, too, but
must we not qualify that somewhat in our final chapter?




                                  XII

                         THE END OF THE TETHER

  _“It is time for man to mark out his goal, to plant the germ
  of his highest hopes. His soil is still rich enough for that
  purpose.”_--Friedrich Nietzsche.


It is not only in politics that the advice to use large scale maps is
excellent. If one refers daily “crises” to a big map, one is far less
likely to fly into political hysteria over trifling remote events: one
thinks politically in terms commensurate with the planet, not of one
corner of it distant only a few inches on the small map from the other
side of the world. But one requires also, and even more, a large scale
map of life as a preventive of petty thoughts. We need to refer such
questions as closed the preceding chapter to a map of life that will
enlarge our mental activities in trying to reply to them. The main
trouble with the cult of contemporaneity is that it has lost the sense
of greatness and spaciousness. Its map is a crude child’s drawing--a
large out-of-proportion area across which is scrawled, “Here Be the
Moderns,” and outlying this are indeterminate shadowy regions peopled
by lesser beings, dwarfs, and cavemen--our forerunners. History to the
one-sided enthusiasts for the contemporaneous is really Aunt Polly’s
Story of Mankind which I sometimes think Donald Ogden Stewart has
immortalized: it is a series of steps forward from ancient Egypt to the
great and glorious present, a progress culminating in Darwin, Freud,
Joyce and Proust, Ford and Lenin, Stravinsky and Bertrand Russell, and
a host of other recently elected candidates for the New Olympus. It
will not do to use so disproportioned and confined a map in measuring
the work of Babbitt and More who have plotted out their intellectual
campaign on a larger scale than we are accustomed to. We must relate
their work to very extensive perspectives: we must find some scale for
the greatness of the ages. How else can we measure the truly human
and the superhuman? For the superhuman covers all that man may be the
bridge to: the truly human covers the bridge, the whole transition
itself. The American Humanist makes the bridge the end. But can he
build it unless the struggle is to reach the other shore, to cross the
discontinuity, the gulf between Man and the Absolute? The superhumanist
treats the bridge as means for prospective travel. An unsuccessful
traveller, he yet may go further in completing the bridge than the
Humanist who thinks only of bridge-building.

The map of life I shall avail myself of was drawn by a genius at the
age of twenty-eight, a genius of whom the leading New Humanists do not
share my high opinion. But that discrepancy I choose to think arises
from the defect of orthodoxy. To Paul Elmer More, for example, _The
Birth of Tragedy_ by Friedrich Nietzsche merely makes a distinction in
the classical world that “takes the form of a harsh and unreal contrast
between the Dionysian principle of unrest and growth and creation for
which he expresses the highest regard and the Apollonian principle of
rest and renunciation and contraction for which, as Platonism, he has
the deepest aversion.” But for me _The Birth of Tragedy_ is a profound
and terrific document by which we may get the most vivid impression
of the deterioration of modern life, classify the New Humanists as
socratic or theoretical men, and learn what we must try to do with the
new situation in American culture created by the advent of Humanism.
The book had extravagances of judgment and a fatuous hopefulness
for German music which Nietzsche corrected in _Ecce Homo_ but the
central thesis he left unimpaired--and the modern world has left it
uncomprehended.

The interpretation of Greek tragedy has been a field of bitter
contention between romanticists and classicists. The romanticists
see chiefly in Greek tragedy the violence, the melodrama, great
horrors, headlong actions, titanic personages. The classicists see
ethical imports, a background of order, superb control, religious
values. From the standpoint of a student of Nietzsche both parties
are right--and wrong; for Nietzsche divined a third interpretation,
a paradox of understanding, whereby the romantic and the classicist
views are held in solution, but the solution itself is a new conception
of tragedy. Nietzsche saw in Greek tragedy the ever-renewed conflict
and reconciliation of two principles, the Dionysian to which alone
the romanticist is susceptible and the Apollonian which alone wins
the classicist. The tragic view perceives the necessity for the
mutual agonistic struggle: it is based on the realization that Apollo
and Dionysus must war with each other, must continue forever in
that strange paradox, a synthesis founded on struggle. There must
ever exist, if life is to ascend, a turbulent frenzied uprush of
Formability, and there must coexist a constant reduction to Form.

On the one side of the world-stage you have Dionysus with his wildest
music, his ecstasy and poetry, his drunkenness, his sheer states of
Being. On the other side there is Apollo, the soothsayer, the god of
plastic energies, the cool and comely, olympian in his dream-states.
The Formable and the Formed!

There is a suffering attached to actualization, because to actualize a
potentiality is to exclude other potentialities. It is to concentrate
and limit. Dionysus suffers because he must pass into limitations:
his great surges of impulse must eventuate in the actual phenomenal
world. He is the foe of limitation, and his enemy, Apollo, must impose
limits on him. As the Dionysian spirit is strong, it breaks limits and
requires new and wider ones; as the Apollonian spirit is strong, it
accepts the challenge and seeks ever better forms and containers.

The tragic view of Nietzsche and according to him of the Greeks too is
that this struggle must be consciously intensified. The will to surpass
must grapple with the will to maintenance. Liberty battles law; love,
duty; change, custom; intuition, science; and inspiration battles
art. But the antithesis goes deeper than these human aspects reveal,
ultimately reaching energy and matter, Dionysian pure energy and
Apollonian pure form. In the æsthetics of Attic tragedy Nietzsche held
that the chorus was Dionysian and the play an Apollonian projection of
the dithyrambic being-states of the chorus.

But an observer of contemporary civilization in America and Europe who
has had awaked in him a glimmering sense of the ancient Apollonians
and Dionysians would be forced to think that the two types of men are
almost extinct. How many _Moby Dicks_ have there been in the last fifty
years of American literature? Where are the post-Nietzscheans? On
account of the pseudo-Nietzscheans whose grossness and insincerity were
so glaring, no one now dares to call himself a Nietzschean, for we have
learned from the pseudo-Nietzscheans how transparent the pose is, how
fraudulent one is to play Nietzsche without the Dionysian flame in very
truth burning within. So there are no successors to Nietzsche, no line
of initiates of Dionysus. We can appreciate Nietzsche, but we cannot be
Nietzscheans. Our heritage comes from Greece, but not from the Greece
of the Mysteries: we are the heirs of Greek rationalism, of Greek
decadence. Euripides and Socrates have turned out to be the fathers of
the future.

For speaking by and large, our art is devoid of the Æschylean mystical
conception and models itself on Euripides who reasoned with the Gods,
not for them. His principle, says Nietzsche, was this: “To be beautiful
everything must be intelligible.” Accordingly he used the familiar for
his substance, he brought the spectator on the stage, he introduced
realism. “The mirror in which formerly only grand and bold traits
were represented now showed the painful fidelity that conscientiously
reproduces even the abortive outlines of nature.... The spectator
now actually saw and heard his double on the Euripidean stage, and
rejoiced that he could talk so well.” The Euripidean drama, like our
plays and novels today, concerned common matters of which every one
feels he is a competent judge. The audience therefore never comes to
be initiated but to apply without the slightest scruples its criteria
of ordinary experience. This was the betrayal of the Dionysian cause
which Euripides recanted at the end of his life, but the European world
has not recanted, today less than ever when a minuscule Euripides like
Bernard Shaw is loaded with the highest honors.

As for Socrates, although I am utterly unable to decide on the justice
of Nietzsche’s portrait of the historical figure--it is the most
devastating drawing of Socrates ever penned, but is it true?--that
makes no matter here. Nietzsche knew to the core the long line of men
descending from Socrates, and if he imagined a mythical father to fit
the men he knew, we can accept the myth for its truth of portraiture
of a type, if not of the individual it is named after. The Nietzschean
contention is that to Socrates was denied the pleasure of gazing into
the Dionysian abysses. He was therefore no more than Euripides _en
rapport_ with the Apollonian dream-world projected from Dionysian
ecstasy. He was a disintegrating force, withdrawing the Apollonian
tendency into the hard shell of logical schematism as Euripides shrunk
the Dionysian state into naturalistic emotion. He liked art to cling to
the trunk of dialectics, to be overgrown with philosophic thought. He
had the optimism of the dialectician which Nietzsche felt is fatal to
the tragic spirit. And he was most of the time anti-musical. From him
stream the theoretical men, the men of science in the broad sense, the
men who get their enjoyment and satisfaction out of the cast-off veil
rather than out of gazing with rapture at whatever still remains veiled
after the unveiling. They care more for the search after truth than
for truth itself. This Lessing, called by Nietzsche the most honest
of theoretical men, boldly admitted. Finally, they are insensitive
to mystery and attribute to knowledge and perception the power of a
universal panacea, seeing evil itself in error.

_The Birth of Tragedy_ gives us a sense of grand scale by which to
try contemporary literature and culture. It makes it ridiculous to
advance claims for Eugene O’Neill as a Dionysian--to mention an
example of the sort of correction that can immediately be made. It
gives us in Euripides the norm of our literary art, the decadent Greek
justification of the ways of man to God. It replaces Benda’s modest
analysis of the plastic and musical sensibilities, remarked upon in
an earlier chapter, with a majestic view of the highest contrasted
principles in man. Among other things, it throws a piercing light on
the twentieth century Humanists, revealing them to be theoretical or
socratic men as remote from the inspired by Apollo as their romantic
enemies are remote from the inspiration of Dionysus. We modern men do
but whisper inaudibly of the old gods.

In support of my classifying the New Humanists as socratic men, I
will bring forward two or three points. In the Dionysian-Apollonian
opposition, things were reconciled, brought to a dynamic equilibrium,
through struggle. The principle of individuation was in strife with
primordial unity. The most fertile sense of possibilities clashed with
the strictest sense of limitations. But the Humanist does not speak of
struggle as the means of achieving stability: he endorses mediation,
the tempering of liberty by law, the selection of a middle course.
This I hold is the procedure of the logical man with an undeveloped
sense of tragedy. Again, the New Humanist tries to rest on what may
be essentially a transitional phase of man. He concedes that the
highest level of life is religious, but he does not aim to reach it.
The humanistic level attracts him most, but may this attraction not
be translated into a love of the search for truth rather than for
truth itself--the mark of the socratic type? In the last place, it is
significant that several American Humanists confess to a distrust of
the art of music, _the_ Dionysian art. And unlike Socrates no inner
voice reminds them to their consternation, “Humanist, practice music!”
There does not even linger in them as in their monumental predecessor
an uneasy sense that in their philosophizing on the literary tradition
they may through lack of understanding the Dionysian be sinning against
a deity.

                   *       *       *       *       *

But we have to work with the elements of the contemporary situation.
Just as it is idle to sit dreaming of great wealth when one has to work
for bread and butter, so it is idle to sit thinking about becoming
Dionysian or Apollonian when the immediate situation requires buckling
down to the production of humble intellectual and æsthetic fare. I
have totally failed if by shrinking our valuations against a grand
scale of values, I seemed to suggest taking the road to despair of the
modern situation. On the contrary, we want to know where we are at and
how best we may spend our energies on the sound assumption that there
is a zest and a satisfaction in making the most of what we have. Since
I have used Nietzsche to expand our ideas about the state of modern
culture, I shall also give his word of encouragement to us: “A constant
struggle against uniformly unfavorable conditions is what makes a type
stable and hard.” The joy of overcoming is ours to be had for work in
present-day terms on the present-day condition of things: it will be
our rustic fare which notoriously tastes better to those who sweat for
it than to those who live in cushioned ease.

We may use conceptions of Dionysians and Apollonians for measurement,
but the current actualities thus measured are socratic men (Humanists)
and rebellious men (Baconians, Rousseauists--of many sub-varieties, the
Baconians having a touch of socratism, the Rousseauists in their art
converging toward the Euripidean standard). The demigods and satyrs do
not frequent the modern stage, but there is still played across it a
pseudo-Apollonian--pseudo-Dionysian warfare. _Our disaster is that the
participants have lost the sense of being necessary to each other_;
this vitiates all our spiritual economy.

The New Humanists are seeking to vitalize in American life the
principle of concentration and stability: the New Rebels have as their
task the vitalizing of the principle of expansion and flux. The
changed situation brought about by the advent of American Humanism is
that we now have a strong well armed party of conservation to balance
and offset the reigning party of change. A true spiritual economy would
require that each party should intensify its efforts, should surpass
its previous productions, should grow toward greater goals by vigorous
contention with the other. The rôle of the Humanist is to _contain_
the age: the rôle of the rebel is to break out of the containing forms
and to demand new forms for the new enlarged more powerful spirit. But
actually what do we find? The total absence of spiritual economists of
the sort just mentioned. No unconscious sense of a need for passing
from inchoate restlessness into major forms and no need for breaking
out from these forms in turn. Or perhaps I should say scarcely any, for
on a few occasions in the last decade there have been laments that in
American life there was no _resistance_ offered to a school of ideas,
nothing on which a new school could sharpen its mind. Criticism with us
is mostly an affair of acclamation and denunciation, a false state of
excitement in which ideas stagnate.

In the light of the economy sketched above, our recent literary history
reads somewhat as follows. The revolt of the generation now in power,
successfully carried out between 1915 and 1920, was against a _decadent
conservatism_ well named “genteelness.” It savagely broke the forms
of genteel prudish culture, but the forms were weak: it may be said
that genteelness was no enemy at all for strong writers. Well, the now
ruling Middle Generation rested on its easy laurels: there followed
ten years of waxing fat and flabby for the insurgents, to be ended by
the surprising challenge of a virile conservatism that had quietly
grown up in the meantime. _How_ they met the challenge is a matter
of recent history--the jejune thought and rhinestone wit of Carl Van
Doren in the debate with Irving Babbitt at Carnegie Hall, the ignorant
identification of Humanism with the decadent stupid conservatism of
fifteen years ago by Theodore Dreiser, the putting to work again by H.
L. Mencken of his overworked phrases like “vague and witless blather”
left no doubt whatever of the middle-aged rebels’ lack of stuff to meet
the new issues. Most assuredly the containing forms of the New Humanism
can cope with this decadent revolt movement, and have plenty of vacant
space too. It is to the younger generation of literary thinkers that
one must turn in hope of a real resistance, and its performance
likewise was keenly disappointing--the repetition of stale attitudes
for the most part. There was a lack of curiosity, _a pronounced
desire to reject and not the hunger of youth to assimilate and pass
beyond if possible_, that was distinctly discouraging to observe. The
New Humanists may well call out for good enemies: if I judge them
correctly, they have no taste for hollow victories.

To illustrate in the particular field of literature what I have been
contending: the younger generation thought that one of the important
issues involved a defence of contemporary American writing. But the
real issue is how may things work together for the greater glory of
American literature. On that all should unite, and toward it each
should make contribution. The rest is a question of judgment of
contemporary production. There is a Hollywood anecdote that seems to
make clear the differences in judgment involved on this point. A new
motion picture had been given its first showing, and the magnate had
asked his three advisers for opinions. “Stupendous,” said the first.
“Colossal! Unexcelled! Unsurpassable!” the second replied. The third
said in a low tone: “Excuse me, sir, but to me that picture was merely
great.” The New Humanist appears to be that third man judging current
American letters: to him our writing is “merely great.”

The signs of the day should tell the younger literary generation to
beware of forming a new league of mediocrity to succeed the old.

The better path now for the spirit of revolt would seem to be _through_
Humanism. Revolt to be effective must be more than a mere spilling over
weak barriers. You must have worthy forms and trammels to give force to
your new endeavor. You must be contained before you can overflow with
any meaning of importance to the future. To state it another way, the
thorough assimilation of Humanism is the next step.

That there are gaps in Humanism I have pointed out. They are ways of
egress to those who cannot be content within the Humanist doctrine and
discipline. But as they imply in turn the assuming of a more severe
discipline and form, I do not fancy an enthusiastic greeting for them
from an opposition with the naïve faith in man of the present rejecters
of the New Humanism. There is no way out for the addicts of milk
for babes. “The feeble ask for liberty; the strong ask for rule.”
Nietzsche, thou shouldst be living at this hour, when “independence,
free development, and _laisser-aller_ are claimed the most vehemently
precisely by those for whom no restraint _would be too severe_.”

                   *       *       *       *       *

In somewhat mythological language I have been saying that there are
certain possibilities of great development not inherent in the present
state of American culture. To come within reach of other possibilities
we must change to a state that holds them. Matthew Arnold noted that
“in the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare,
the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating
and nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest
measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive. And this
state of things,” he added, “is the true basis for the creative power’s
exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly ready for
its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only valuable as
they are helps to this.” This happy state Arnold had to judge was among
the possibilities excluded by the condition of English culture in the
nineteenth century, and there seems no ground, alas, to believe that it
exists among the possibilities now open to American culture. But Arnold
did consider it possible to initiate an intermediate phase in English
life.

“Even,” he said, “when this (state of things described above) does
not actually exist, books and reading may enable a man to construct
a kind of semblance of it in his own mind, a world of knowledge and
intelligence in which he may live and work. This is by no means an
equivalent to the artist for the nationally diffused life and thought
of the epochs of Sophocles or Shakespeare, but besides that it may be
a means of preparation for such epochs, it does really constitute,
if many share in it, a quickening and sustaining atmosphere of great
value.” Arnold proceeded then to cite an example of this second and
possible state. “Such an atmosphere the many-sided learning and the
long and widely-combined critical effort of Germany formed for Goethe,
when he lived and worked. There was no national glow of life and
thought there as in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth.
That was the poet’s weakness. But there was a sort of equivalent for
it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of
Germans. That was his strength.”

It is plain that America has yet to reach that state, and that
furthermore a great deal of work by all minds will be necessary to
bring her there. No one would argue otherwise. But the sense of urgency
one would expect is not noticeably present. We do not seem to realize
that we must accelerate our pace of work. There is, so to speak,
plenty of slack on the tether of our culture, and we are not running
it out with any admirable rapidity. Else, so I think, we would be
welcoming the contribution of the Humanists with eagerness and not with
resentment.

As it is, we lag and flounder. We are, to take a common instance from
literature, prone to make late importations of European tendencies
which have already been fully worked out abroad. Consider the vogue
of the Dreiserian novel: it is written in America several decades
after the Zolaesque novel has been thoroughly studied in France. We
import the method of naturalistic fiction--late; we do not import
simultaneously the criticism of the method, but go blundering on as
if nothing had been previously learned from the experiment. The New
Humanists ask us not to be so tardy in a detail like this but to learn
more quickly of the past, that is, to _consciously_ create the field
of our present out of the best available past. In my opinion, the
Humanists can more quickly release us from a multitude of opinions now
holding us back than any other American school of thought current. They
should enable us to get to the end of our tether that much sooner.

It was clear some time before this point that I do not regard American
Humanism as a final resting place. So far as I champion the New
Humanists, it is because they can enormously further reaching the end
of our present phase. Let us put that end very high. Let us say it is a
state of culture as high as that ascribed by Arnold to the Germany of
Goethe, or perhaps better, say it is the equal of eighteenth century
culture in England, the century Arnold underestimated. Observe I do not
say identical with, but equal to, in quality. This achievement for me
represents the end of the rope. Because then we shall have thoroughly
digested all the ideas of the Western mind from the Greeks to Bertrand
Russell: we will be familiar with them all, be able brilliantly to
reshuffle them and deal out clever new hands for ourselves. But the
game will be always the same--always a preliminary game. For the
reason that there is not now current in the Western world _a single new
seminiferous principle for human culture_. There may be one accessible,
but if so, it is certainly not current. We know or shall know all the
existing ideas and there is not a comprehensive regenerating idea in
the ensemble. In our present phase we are limited to old ideas and
our understanding or misunderstanding of old ideas. We cannot expect
a revolutionary change--how can we?--when we have nothing to change
ourselves with.

Furthermore, we are not at all ripe for that inward transformation,
the only right way to an outward social transformation, the business
for us and for our age--according to Arnold. The sense of need for it
has not even been born. We have to reach by intense activity the end
of the situation in which we are cast before a new situation can begin
with its fresh group of possibilities. We have to need something before
we can acquire it. The birth of a new need--that alone will profoundly
alter the present drift and provide an unexpected future tense for
things.

I return to the metaphor of the end of the tether. Most people know
now and then the state that it expresses--a compound of well-being,
distress and the greatest alertness. Well-being, because one has
utilized every resource, put forth every ounce of effort, thought of
every possible scheme, done the very best one could to cope with the
circumstances. Distress, because the best one has is insufficient for
the emergency, because one is at one’s wits’ end, because one needs
more power within or help from without to forestall disaster. The
greatest alertness, because in one’s desperation one overlooks nothing,
one is willing to try anything, one racks oneself for a new plan. In
that state one is most realistic, most clear about means and ends,
most determined, most dissatisfied, straining at the leash of one’s
limitations.

The condition of being at the end of the tether, torn between despair
and the highest hopes, preternaturally awake to any means promising
deliverance, marks for me the highest point a Western culture can
now attain. It is both the one truly fertile state and a pure cry
for deliverance from iron restrictions. It goes without saying that
American culture is distant from it. Who will say we experience now
the need born of such a state for whole orders of ideas that appear
in a time of Renascence, when we have not exhausted our present
orders of thought? We are from all appearances so comfortable and
optimistic--shall I add slothful?--that even American Humanism is too
strong a potion at the present time. We have the illusion of being
free while we are in fact tethered at a comparatively short range. Our
progress must consist in finding out the length of our tether, and for
that Humanism is one of the most available means. The Great Revolt will
be the revolt against the limits of Humanism as new vistas of action,
thought and being become discernible beyond the end of the tether. But
just now our energies appear to be all engaged in the lesser warfare
between Naturalism and Humanism.

It is nevertheless certain that what has here been named the dilemma of
the liberated will emerge more and more strikingly as time goes on,
for the pressures of the situation itself will steadily extrude it.
Their own experience and reflection will compel a larger and larger
vanguard of Americans to see at the one extremity the pitfalls of
romantic heterodoxy and at the other the major defects of classical
orthodoxy. Painting psychological serfdom in alluring colors will
not seduce their judgment, nor will they be convinced that the full
secret for making freemen has been entrusted to the New Humanists.
Of the organized religions they will ask, not solace which might be
given, but a hammer to smite man’s shackles, and the hammer will not be
forthcoming.

But disagreeable as such a dilemma is, it is a great awakener. It is a
challenge to find a means of circumvention. To circumvent it, however,
we shall assuredly have to reach the end of our present resources. It
can not be resolved on any terms less exacting.




                            ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I had thought to append a selected bibliography of books bearing
on American Humanism, but there seems little point in duplicating
here--with certain subtractions and a few additions--the bibliography
at the back of _Humanism and America_. That now historic symposium--and
I am greatly indebted to the publishers, Farrar and Rinehart, Inc.,
for their permission to make excerpts from it--will probably aid the
reader hitherto unread in the New Humanism to become acquainted in the
quickest fashion with the leading personalities among the New Humanists
and the extensive ramification of their views. Such a reader should,
however, if he is the man to hoe a long row, press on to the complete
works of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More. Houghton Mifflin and Co.
have kindly allowed me to quote from several of Babbitt’s books and
from the later volumes of More’s _Shelburne Essays_, as well as from
_Mont-St.-Michel and Chartres_ by Henry Adams. I wish to acknowledge
with thanks other favors of the like kind received from the following:

For permission to quote extracts from _The Thing_, _Orthodoxy_,
and _Heretics_ by G. K. Chesterton--Dodd, Mead and Co.; for
permission to use a passage from Julien Benda’s _The Treason of the
Intellectuals_--William Morrow and Co.; for permission to make brief
quotations from A. N. Whitehead’s _Science and the Modern World_, A.
S. Eddington’s _Science and the Unseen World_, Walter Lippmann’s _A
Preface to Morals_, John Dewey’s _Democracy and Education_, and from
the works of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater--the Macmillan Co.; for
permission to use passages from Stuart P. Sherman’s _On Contemporary
Literature_--Henry Holt and Co.; for permission to extract matter
from Stuart P. Sherman’s _Shaping Men and Women_, T. S. Eliot’s _For
Lancelot Andrews_, H. G. Wells’s _Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island_,
and Hilaire Belloc’s preface to Ruth Pitter’s _First and Second
Poems_--Doubleday, Doran and Co.; for permission to quote relevant
passages from Margaret Naumburg’s _The Child and the World_ and
Herbert Read’s _The Sense of Glory_--Harcourt, Brace and Co. Similar
courtesies were extended to me by Charles Scribner and Sons in the
case of excerpts from Jacques Maritain’s _Three Reformers_, the Yale
University Press in the case of Robert Shafer’s _Progress and Science_,
the Princeton University Press in the case of L. T. More’s _The Dogma
of Evolution_, the University of North Carolina Press in the case of
Norman Foerster’s _The American Scholar_, Horace Liveright, Inc., in
the case of Charles Fort’s _The Book of the Damned_, and, lastly, the
Viking Press in the case of Sorel’s _Reflections on Violence_. To all I
am grateful.

I may add that the American reader who enjoys following the progress of
a literary controversy as the French appear to enjoy their polemical
outbreaks will find the pages of the _Bookman_ from month to month
alive with the debating points of the New Humanists. For further
information on the Douglas Proposals spoken of rather hopefully in the
chapter on Humanism and economics, see _Unemployment or War_ by Maurice
Colbourne, published by Coward-McCann, Inc.

Finally, I will name a very few books that have been of great service
to me in forming my own point of view as distinct from the humanistic
viewpoint. They are, in metaphysics, _The Three Conventions_ by
Denis Saurat, published by the Dial Press; in psychology, _Beyond
Behaviorism_ by Robert Courtney, brought out by Grant Publications,
Inc.; in literature, _Readers and Writers_ and _The Art of Reading_,
both by A. R. Orage, the former published by Knopf, and the latter by
Farrar and Rinehart, Inc.

                                                                G. M.




                               FOOTNOTES


[1] Born in 1865 at Dayton, Ohio, graduated from Harvard in 1889,
member of the Harvard faculty since 1894.

[2] For a full appreciation of Norton, the reader should see the essay
on Norton in the eleventh series of the _Shelburne Essays_ by P. E.
More.

[3] In view of what Benda goes on to say, read Humanism here for
humanitarianism.

[4] That is, Humanism.

[5] In a very interesting paper written shortly before his death
G. Stanley Hall recounted his experiences among phrenologists,
anthropologists, “character analysts,” psycho-analysts and intelligence
testers for real light on the nature of “I.” The results were so meagre
that at the end of his life he could still say: “I want to strip before
analyzers who can diagnose not only my abilities, but my character,
disposition, merits, and defects, and tell me, even at the eleventh
hour, _who and what I really am_.” (My italics.)

[6] More, I believe, has more intellectualized his conception of the
inner check than has Babbitt. I myself prefer the hints of Babbitt on
this topic to the explanations of More which seem to me to harden the
conception too much. The two men appear also to differ on the will,
Babbitt regarding it in the Oriental way as anterior and superior to
the reason and the flux of personality, whereas More seems to follow
Christian tradition which usually makes the will a mode of activity
belonging to the flux. I follow Babbitt in the discussion of will
later in my chapter. The reader, however, is advised to consult the
_Definitions of Dualism_ which More appended to the Eighth Series
of the _Shelburne Essays_ for full light on these differences and
especially for the most ambitious attempt to put the doctrine and
discipline of Humanism into a precise philosophic-psychological
framework.

[7] It is fair to say that removed from its context this statement
sounds harsher than it really is.

[8] In the special supplement of the _New Republic_ for July 16,
1930, which was devoted to homage to Herbert Croly, the psychological
conclusions Croly reached were touched obliquely, lightly or haltingly
by some of the contributors, totally ignored by the rest.

[9] It may interest some readers to know that this is why consistently
throughout my writing career I have refused to classify myself as a New
Humanist despite my manifestly strong sympathy for the school.




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