Recent Developments in European Thought
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Title: Recent Developments in European Thought
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT ***
Produced by Ted Garvin, Garrett Alley, and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
THE UNITY SERIES
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT
_ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED_
BY
F.S. MARVIN
AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST', ETC.
'To hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.'
_Prometheus Unbound._
HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY
1920
PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
PREFACE
This volume, like its two predecessors, arises from a course of lectures
delivered at a Summer School at Woodbrooke, near Birmingham, in August,
1919. The first, in 1915, dealt with 'The Unity of Western Civilization'
generally, the second, in 1916, with 'Progress'. In this book an attempt
has been made to trace the same ideas in the last period of European
history, broadly speaking since 1870.
It was felt at the conclusion of the course that the point of view was
so enlightening and offered so many opportunities of useful further
study that it should, if possible, be resumed in future years. A large
number of subjects were suggested--'The Relations of East and West,'
'The Duty of Advanced to Backward Peoples,' 'The Rôle of Science in
Civilization,' &c.--all containing the same elements of 'progress in
unity' which have inspired the previous volumes. It was thought that
possibly for the next session 'World Reconstructions Past and Present'
might be most appropriate.
If any reader feels moved by interest or sympathy with the general idea
to send suggestions, either as to possible places of meeting, or topics
for treatment or any other kindred matter, they would be welcomed either
by the Editor or by Edwin Gilbert, Woodbrooke, Selly Oak, Birmingham.
F.S.M.
BERKHAMSTED, _December, 1919._
[** Transcriber's Note: This text contains a single instance of a
character with a diacritical mark. The character is a lower-case
'r' with a caron (v-shaped symbol) above it. In the text, that
character is depicted thusly: [vr] **]
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. GENERAL SURVEY 7
By F.S. MARVIN.
II. PHILOSOPHY 25
By Professor A.E. TAYLOR, St. Andrews.
III. RELIGION 65
By Dr. F.B. JEVONS, Hatfield Hall, Durham.
IV. POETRY 91
By Professor C.H. HERFORD, Manchester.
V. HISTORY 140
By G.P. GOOCH.
VI. POLITICAL THEORY 164
By A.D. LINDSAY, Balliol College, Oxford.
VII. ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 181
1. THE INDUSTRIAL SCENE, 1842 181
2. MINING OPERATIONS 195
3. THE SPIRIT OF ASSOCIATION 209
By C.R. FAY, Christ's College, Cambridge.
VIII. ATOMIC THEORIES 216
By Professor W.H. BRAGG, F.R.S.
IX. BIOLOGY SINCE DARWIN 229
By Professor LEONARD DONCASTER, F.R.S.
X. ART 247
By A. CLUTTON BROCK.
XI. A GENERATION OF MUSIC 262
By Dr. ERNEST WALKER, Balliol College, Oxford.
XII. THE MODERN RENASCENCE 293
By F. MELIAN STAWELL.
I
GENERAL SURVEY
F.S. MARVIN
We are trying in this book to give some impression of the principal
changes and developments of Western thought in what might roughly be
called 'the last generation', though this limit of time has been, as it
must be, treated liberally. From the political point of view the two
most impressive milestones, events which will always mark for the
consciousness of the West the beginning and the end of a period, are no
doubt the war of 1870 and the Great War which has just ended. From 1870
to 1914 would therefore be the most obvious delimitation of our study;
and it is a striking illustration of human paradox, that a great stage
in the growth of unity should be marked by two international tragedies
and crowned by the most terrible of all.
Nearly coincident with the political divisions there are important
landmarks in the history of thought. During the 'sixties, while the
power of Prussia was rising to its culmination in the Franco-Prussian
War, the Darwinian theory of development was gaining command in biology.
To many thinkers there has appeared a clear connexion between that
biological doctrine and the 'imperialism', Teutonic and other, which was
so marked a feature of the time. In any case 'post-Darwinian' might well
describe the scientific thought of the age we have in view.
Industrially the epoch is as clearly defined as it is in politics and
science. For in 1871, the year of the Treaty of Frankfort, an act was
passed after a long working-class agitation, assisted by certain eminent
members of the middle class, legalizing strikes and Trade Unions. And
now at the end of the war, all over the world, society is faced by the
problem of reconciling the full rights, and in some cases the extreme
demands, of 'labour', with democratic government and the prosperity and
social union of the whole community. This is the situation discussed in
our seventh and eighth chapters.
In philosophy and literature a similar dividing line appears. In the
'sixties Herbert Spencer was publishing the capital works of his system.
The _Principles of Psychology_ was published in 1872. This 'Synthetic
Philosophy' has proved up to the present the last attempt of its kind,
and with the vast increase of knowledge since Spencer's day it might
well prove the last of all such syntheses carried out by a single mind.
Specialism and criticism have gained the upper hand, and the fresh turn
to harmony, which we shall notice later on, is rather a harmony of
spirit than an encyclopaedic unity such as the great masters of system
from Descartes to Comte and Spencer had attempted before.
In literature also the dates agree. Dickens, most typical of all early
Victorians, died in 1870. George Eliot's last great novel, _Daniel
Deronda_, was published in 1876. Victor Hugo's greatest poem, _La
Légende des Siècles_, the imaginative synthesis of all the ages,
appeared in the 'seventies. There have been many writers since, with
Tolstoi perhaps at their head, in whom the fire of moral enthusiasm has
burnt as keenly, nor have the borders of human sympathy been narrowed.
Yet one cannot fail to note a less pervading and ready confidence in
human nature, a less fervent belief that the good must prevail if good
men will only follow their better leading.
Here then is our period, marked in public affairs by a progress from
one conflict, desperate and tragic, between two of the leading nations
of the West, to another and still more terrible which swept the whole
world into the maelstrom; and marked in thought by a certain dispersion
and depression of mind, a falling in the barometer of temperament and
imagination, but also by a grappling with realities at closer quarters.
No wonder that some have seen here a 'tragedy of hope' and the
'bankruptcy of science'.
But it must be noted at once that these obvious landmarks, though
striking, are in themselves superficial. They require explanation rather
than give it, and in some cases an explanation, much less tragic than
the symptom, is suggested by the symptom itself. We may at least fairly
treat them at starting simply as beacon-hills to mark out the country we
are traversing. We have to go deeper to find out the nature of the soil,
and travel to the end to study the vista beyond.
In making this fuller analysis of man's recent achievement, especially
in the West, the first, and perhaps ultimately the weightiest, element
we have to note is the continued and unexampled growth of science. Was
there ever a more fertile period than the generation which succeeded
Darwin's achievement in biology and Bunsen's and Kirchhoff's with the
spectroscope? Both have created revolutions, one in our view of living
things, the other in our view of matter. In physics the whole realm of
radio-activity has come into our ken within these years, and during the
same time chemistry, both organic and inorganic, has been equally
enlarged. All branches of science in fact show a similar expansion, and
a new school of mathematicians claim that they have recast the
foundations of the fundamental science and assimilated it to the
simplest laws of all thinking. Some discussion of this will be found in
the chapter on philosophy.
It may serve as tonic--an antidote to that depression of spirits of
which we have spoken--to consider that such an output of mental energy,
rewarded by such a harvest of truth, is without precedent in man's
evolution. No single generation before ever learnt so much not only of
the world around it but also of the doings of previous generations. For
since 1870 we have been living in an age as much distinguished for
historical research as for natural science. If mankind is now to go down
in a wrack of war, starvation, bankruptcy, and ruin, the sunset sky at
least is glorious.
And there is tonic in another thought which rises from the very nature
of this recent blossoming of knowledge. It marks the growing
co-operative activity of mankind. The fact that science and research of
every kind have advanced so rapidly is not only, or even primarily, a
proof of the continued vigour of the human intellect, but of the
stability of society, the coherence of social classes and nations, the
readiness of the bulk of men to allow their more immediately productive
work to be used for the support of those whose labours are in a more
remote and ideal sphere. Science did not begin until the ancient
priesthoods were enabled to pursue disinterested inquiries without the
need of earning their daily bread. Civilization, we may be assured, is
not threatened in its most vital part so long as the general will
permits the application of the general resources to the promotion of
learning and research without a claim for immediate marketable results.
Our last generation has not only permitted but has encouraged this in
all Western countries, and in other countries, such as China and Japan,
influenced by the West. The money thus spent is vastly greater than in
any equal period before, and the United States, the land of the fullest
democratic claims, is also the land of the amplest generosity for
scientific and educational purposes.
The growth of knowledge is a symptom not only of the collective capacity
of living man but also of the continuity of the present age with those
which had laid the earlier foundations. One school of vigorous action,
and still more vigorous talk, advises our generation to be done with the
past and make a fresh start on more ideal lines. This is not the voice
of science, which, just in proportion to its growth, has shown more and
more care for its origins and its past: and this is true at every stage
in the history of thought. The Greeks, fighting for freedom and
establishing in the city-state a new form of political organization for
the world, were yet in their scientific evolution true and grateful
successors of the priests who first compiled the observations necessary
for the scientific study of the heavens and founded the art of medicine.
The men of the Renascence, who were burnt and imprisoned for doubting
the verbal inspiration of Aristotle and the Bible, were in fact going
back to an earlier impulse than that of the scholastic philosophy. The
mathematics of Pappus and the mechanics of Archimedes had to be carried
further before the new sciences of which Aristotle had given the first
sketch could be securely founded. The pioneers of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries built therefore on the past, although accused of
impiety and revolution; and it must be so with any intellectual
construction which is to hold its own and form the future. So far from
there being any opposition in nature between history and science, the
two are but different aspects of one continuous enlargement of the human
spirit, which sees and lives more fully at each great moment of its
progress, and, so far as it is alive, is always informed by the real
achievements of the past. We illustrate this advance in the marvellous
record of our fifth chapter, and its spirit is summed up in the great
saying of Benedetto Croce that 'all history is contemporary history'.
But the reader may here begin not unnaturally to feel some impatience
with the argument, and to think that he is being carried into a region
of ideal imaginings quite out of touch with the realities of blood and
hatred and starvation with which we have been actually surrounded at the
end of our period. It is well to be thus sharply reminded of the
contrariety of facts, when we are sailing smoothly along on the current
of any theory, whether of education or politics, religion or art. To get
right with our objector, to set our sail so that the rocks in the stream
may not completely wreck us, we will go back to the point where we were
insisting on the obvious truth that the collective resources and
capacity of mankind have of late enormously increased.
The material fruits of science are among our most familiar wonders--the
motor-car, the aeroplane, wireless telegraphy. But it is not
sufficiently realized how all these things and the like are dependent
upon the co-operation of a multitude of minds, the collective rather
than the individual capacity of man. Men had dreamt for ages of flying,
but it was not until the invention of the internal combustion engine
that bird-like wings and the mechanical skill of man could be brought
together and made effective. It is Humanity that flies, and not the
individual man alone. The German Daimler, the French Levassor, are the
two names which stand out most prominently in this later development of
engineering as our own Watt and Stephenson stand in the history of the
steam-engine. Wireless telegraphy offers a similar story. Faraday,
Maxwell, Hertz, Lodge, Marconi; the names are international. In 1913,
before ever the League of Nations had been planned, Lord Bryce was
telling an International Congress in London that 'the world is becoming
one in an altogether new sense.... More than four centuries ago the
discovery of America marked the first step in the process by which the
European races have gained dominion over nearly the whole earth. As the
earth has been narrowed through the new forces science has placed at our
disposal, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought, in
each of its regions, become more closely interwoven. Whatever happens in
any part of the globe has now a significance for every other part. World
History is tending to become one History.'
The war, tragically as it has shaken this growing oneness of mankind,
has not destroyed it. In some ways it has even stimulated growth.
Against a background of blood and fire the League of Nations has been
forced into actual being, and the long isolation alike of the ancient
East and the youthful West has been broken down at last. Within the
State, again, even allowing for all setbacks, the efforts at social
solidarity have on the whole been strengthened, not weakened. This war
his been an accelerator of, not, as the Napoleonic, a brake upon,
reform. Many reforms, especially in England, which had been long
discussed and partly attempted before the war, were carried out with
dispatch at its close. This was the case with education, with the
franchise and with measures affecting the health, the housing, and the
industrial conditions of the people. And there is now a greater and
stronger demand among us for a further advance, above all for making
every citizen not merely or even primarily a voting unit, but a
consciously active, consciously co-operative, member of the community.
Comte, who died in 1857 just before our period, was perhaps the clearest
voice in Europe to herald both movements: the advance to international
unity, and social reform within the State. It was he who, under the
title of _Western Republic_, proclaimed the existence of a real unity of
nations, whose business it was to strengthen themselves as a moral
force, to act as trustees for the weaker people and lead the world. It
was he who, in the phrase 'incorporation of the proletariate', summed up
all those social reforms in which we are immersed, which aim at making
every citizen a full member of his nation. Like all ideals it was far
easier to conceive and to respect than to foresee or to secure the
necessary means to put it into effect. Perhaps the perfect symmetry of
the plan, the over-sanguine hopes of the man who framed it, have even
proved some hindrance to its rapid spread. It has seemed, like Dante's
polity in the _De Monarchia_, to take its place rather among the utopias
than the practical schemes of reform, and when men saw the infinite
complexity of the problems and met the living lions in the path, they
suffered the comparative depression which we have noticed as a feature
of the age.
Here indeed it would appear that we have reached one of the most serious
cross-currents in recent European thought. In science, in philosophy, in
politics, and in social economics, though we see the goal at least in
outline, we are in some danger of being overwhelmed by the difficulties
of the pursuit. Our vision is somewhat clouded and our steps hampered by
the entangling details of the country between. It is substantially the
same problem which faces us both in the philosophical and the practical
sphere, and the analogy between the two is instructive. Spencer's
synthesis, which we instanced as the last encyclopaedic attempt to
present all knowledge--at least all scientific knowledge--in one system,
has been riddled fore and aft by hostile shot, though in the end more
of it may be found to have survived than is seen at present above water.
The philosopher who in our generation has acquired the European vogue
most comparable to that of Spencer is Bergson. Now Bergson has dealt
some of the shrewdest blows at Spencer's system, but he does not set out
to construct a rival system of his own. He is most careful to say that
he is not doing this, that any such work must be done by later workers,
that he is only making suggestions for a new point of view. It is
interesting to note in general terms what that point of view is, as we
shall have occasion later on to revert to it. It rests on a new
interpretation of the nature and growth of conscious life. He is in
short a _semeur d'idées-force_ rather than an encyclopaedist or a
system-maker. The difference is characteristic of the age and might be
traced in the other contemporary schools, the pragmatists, the new
realists, and the rest. The new Descartes is looked for but not
announced. Perhaps when he arrives he will prove to be a whole army and
not a single man. But if an army, it will need a better co-ordination, a
more clearly defined common spirit, than is at present apparent in the
philosophic hosts.
A similar perplexity in the practical sphere has a similar cause but a
graver urgency. The multiplicity and contrariety of the facts are upon
us as we face in practice the ideals which we have accepted from the
earlier thinkers, from the century of hope. In science and philosophy we
feel that the cause of unity may with some safety be left to look after
itself. If the new Descartes does not appear in person, we may have
confidence that plenty of inferior substitutes will be found, who, if
they work together, will keep alive the great task of unifying thought.
For in this region the nature of things assists our efforts and will
sooner or later get the work done. The stars in their courses are
fighting for us and for unity. But in the world of wills the task is
tenfold more difficult and the dangers imminent. The poor and labouring
millions, the oppressed and dissatisfied nations, are forcing the door,
and though there is fair agreement in theory as to how they should live
and work together in peace, yet the realization is by no means
automatic, and the difficulties thicken as we come nearer to them.
But even here, perhaps most of all here, it is the first word of wisdom
to take stock of the favourable symptoms, to see clearly the forces on
which we can rely in our forward march. And they are not far to seek in
all classes and in every Western land. Read any account of an English
community in the early nineteenth century, say George Eliot's 'Milby' in
the _Scenes of Clerical Life_. How far more humane, more enlightened,
and happier is the state of the succeeding community, the Nuneaton or
Coventry of the present day! No question but the novelist would have
welcomed as a convincing proof of her 'meliorist' doctrine the progress
made in her own homeland in the century since her birth. We know by
personal experience the general kindliness and cheerfulness of our
fellow citizens, their tolerance, their readiness to hope, their
prevalent orderliness and self-restraint. We are thinking perhaps of a
certain tendency to slackness, a dangerous falling-off in the output of
work. If that be so, we need only look at the activities of any
playground, or of a class-room in a well-ordered school, to be sure of
the future. The natural man, at least in our temperate climates, and as
exhibited in the behaviour of his natural progenitor, the child, is all
for vigour and experiment. It is we, the adult community, the trustees
of the child, who are to blame if his maturity fails of the eager
questioning and the untiring labours of his unspoilt youth.
But we are dealing in this volume rather with changes of thought than
with the actual life of the times. Theories affecting the organization
of work, the distribution of the product, and the government of society
have had much to do with our present difficulties. They have arisen from
the conditions of the industrial revolution and the doctrines of the
political revolution which began about the same time, and they have
reacted ever since on the work and wages, the life and government of the
mass of Western men. They are discussed in our eighth chapter. It may be
said broadly that in this sphere, as in philosophy, the old and
_simpliste_ doctrines have been criticized almost to the point of
extinction, but that no new all-embracing practical synthesis has taken
their place. The Marxian theory that social evolution has been due
mainly to economic causes, that these have produced inevitably the
present--or recent--capitalist system, which inevitably must be turned
upside down in the interests of manual labour--this is no longer
dominant in any Western community, though it is fighting a desperate
battle in Eastern Europe. But it is equally true that the capitalist
system, presented in an ideal and moralized form in the Utopias of St.
Simon and Comte, is not generally accepted now as an ideal for industry.
The spirit which Comte desired and believed would animate the moralized
employer, acting as the providence of his workpeople, we look to find
rather in a reconstituted and moralized State. We all share this hope in
our degree, _The Times_ as well as the _Daily News_, and we do not
expect the new spirit to operate simply through the free-will and
private capacity and initiative of individuals. The joint stock company
has settled that.
What we are waiting and hoping for is the time when, under the aegis of
a benevolent State, capital and labour may live together in many
mansions and, like the monks of old, follow many rules of life. In this
region our ideal of unity is more diversified than in the realm of
thought, and there is no demand for a Descartes.
And here it is interesting to note that one of the most telling books on
social reconstruction published since the war is by an international
writer. This is Dr. Walther Rathenau, a German of Jewish descent, whose
ideas have just been popularized by a Frenchman, M. Gaston Raphael[1].
He fits in well with our general argument by virtue of his double
attitude, holding, on the one hand, that under the general supervision
of the State, industry should be organized in various self-governing
groups, 'Social Guilds' or 'professional syndicates' in which both
employers and workmen would be included with representatives of the
Government; while, on the other hand, he is emphatic that progress must
proceed from a changed and widening mentality, and aim in turn at
increasing the depth and capacity of the individual soul.
Our book has no special chapter on the League of Nations itself. The
idea pervades the whole, and the subject was treated in detail in the
first volume of this series (_The Unity of Western Civilization_, 1915).
The history behind the League offers a striking analogy to the other
struggles for unity of which we have spoken. There is the same advance
from the idea of a unity dictated and controlled by one mind to a unity
of spirit arising from the free co-operation of many diverse elements
all aiming at the same general good. Down even to yesterday it seemed to
many minds a necessary condition that one man, gathering in his hands
the resources of one great State, should from that centre dominate the
world. And in the dawn of human history it was no doubt often true, the
only way in which the world could then advance. This was true for
Alexander, the prototype of all the Roman conquerors, and true,
conspicuously, for the Roman empire at its best. But, after the break-up
of the empire, unity of this type became a delusive mirage, misleading
all who, like the Holy Roman emperors, sought to enjoy it again. By the
time of Napoleon it had become an anachronism of the most dangerous and
reactionary kind. The world was then too vast, the freedom of men and
nations too various and deeply rooted. Meanwhile a real unity, stronger
than before, had been forming beneath the surface and needed fresh
institutions to body it forth. This movement for unity has been, as we
have seen, precipitated by the war into visible and decisive action. It
had been simmering for three hundred years in 'Great Designs', 'Projects
of Peace', Treaties of Arbitration, and Hague Conventions.
Among much that is doubtful in the future of the League, one thing
stands out as a capital certainty. Without losing the very spirit of its
being it can never become a satellite system, revolving round one
dominant Power or even a dominant clique. It was formed to contradict
and destroy an oppressive imperialism: it can only thrive by the free
co-operation of the partners, finding their proper end in a prosperity
shared by all.
Such is a short summary of some of the leading topics treated here,
those perhaps in which public interest has been most keenly aroused. But
nothing has been said in this introduction of Art or Music, and of
Religion only a little by implication. It may be well in conclusion to
attempt a still more summary impression of the main drift of the period
on the spiritual side. We may in such a wider view see some common
tendency in all these activities, some inspiration of religion, some
link with art, some impulse to live strongly and to hope.
The present writer would find this leading thread in the increasing
stress laid by recent European thought on the spiritual, or
psychological, side of every problem, in the growing desire to
understand the character of man's own nature and to develop all the
powers of his soul.
One of the latest authorities[2] on anthropology has told us that 'to
develop soul is progress', and he has followed the clue through the
meagre relics of Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. So does the last
science of the nineteenth century throw light on the dim recesses of the
past. For unquestionably psychology is the characteristic science added
to the hierarchy in our period; it has crowned biology and is exercising
a profound influence on philosophy, literature, and even politics. If
Aristotle was its founder, if it was Descartes who first showed its
profound connexion with philosophy, it is to workers in our own day that
we must look for those methods of accurate observation, comparison, and
the study of causes without which it could not advance farther. And
modern psychology has advanced far enough to see that we must include in
its purview the 'soul' of a minnow as well as of a man. Descartes had
stopped too short, for to him animal life, as distinct from human,
showed only the movements of automata. But now, just as the biologist
conceives man as part of one infinite order of living things, so the
psychologist believes that the facts of his consciousness, the crown of
life, must find their place somewhere related to the simplest movements
of the amoeba. Hence the whole of animate evolution, and not only that
part of which Dr. Marett spoke, may be thought of as the growth of soul.
But, the objector will inquire, does this imply the enlargement of every
individual or even of the average or the typical personality? And if
not, what becomes of a 'growth of the soul'?
To this we must admit the impossibility of any complete, or even
approximate, answer with our present knowledge. We can only note one or
two points of certainty or of confident belief. The first, that there
have been individual men, an Aristotle or a Shakespeare, in the past,
with whom later ages never have, and perhaps never may, compare. The
second, that there are good grounds for thinking that the average man
has improved in goodness and in knowledge since we first knew him dimly
in the dawn of history. But more important and more certain is the fact
that the collective soul of man has grown, and all the extensions of
knowledge and of power of which our volume speaks bear witness to it.
They are essentially social in origin and outlook, and rest on a
foundation of common thought immeasurably wider than any in the more
distant past.
The man of science, the statesman, even the poet, now speaks for a
multitude, and out of a multitudinous consciousness, which had not
gathered to support, to inspire, or to weigh down, an Aristotle, a
Pericles, a Cromwell. This is a dominating fact from which it is well to
take our start. Assuredly the soul of mankind has been collectively
enlarged and enriched. How far the individual can share in this
enlargement is still one of the problems of the future. The West has
committed itself to a general policy of education which aims at making
every citizen a full partaker in the advance of the race. But it cannot
be said that this policy has yet been really tried. It is the
acknowledged ideal to which in all Western countries partial steps have
been taken, and the democracy, through their most enlightened leaders,
will continue to press for its fulfilment. As this approaches, the
individual may become more and more in his degree the microcosm which
philosophers have proclaimed him, and the enlargement of the soul, which
we know to be a fact for humanity, will become a fact for every man.
Need we doubt that with the general raising in the level new eminences
will appear? Do not great mountains sometimes rise from the sea and
sometimes from the high plateau? We are now in the very midst of a
struggle for settlement and incorporation, which, as it is accomplished,
should prepare the way for new excellences of every kind. What may not
be hoped of men if once they learn to live with their fellows? And they
can only so learn by studying them. This is felt by all contemporary
writers from Bergson in philosophy to Graham Wallas in politics. Poets
and novelists, above all, have turned more and more to problems of the
inner life.
The novelists who ushered in our age are significant of this, and none
more so than George Eliot, whose work, though somewhat out of fashion
for the moment, is yet marked by the transition from Victorian
complacency to modern unrest and modern hopes. Full of love and
appreciation for the old order in England--the contentment and humours
of the country-side, the difference of classes, the respect for
religion--she was carried by the evolutionary philosophy of her time
into thoughts of an eternal and world-wide order, the growth of
humanity, the kinship of man with the universe, the social nature of
duty. Her contribution was essentially psychological; she enlarged our
knowledge of the soul. She showed us, not certainly more living types
than Scott or Dickens, but more play of motives, more varied interests
in life, more mental crises. The soul, above all the woman's soul, had
widened its horizon between Flora Macdonald and Dorothea Brooke.
Every reader will think of famous novelists who have followed the same
broadening path, and their work is often really great as well as famous.
The history of thought has in fact throughout the last century been a
commentary on those words of Keats to which many of us have turned of
late for comfort and inspiration: 'The world is not a vale of tears, but
a vale of soul-making.' Tears there are in abundance, as the tears of
children. But sorrow is not the leading note of children, nor should it
be of humanity in growth. Soul-making--the practice and the theory--has
become more and more clearly and consciously the object of human thought
and endeavour. We need the greater mind to see the links in the
overwhelming mass of science, in the mazes of human action and history.
We need it still more to grasp and to preserve the unity of our social
life. Most of all for the healing of the world is the greater soul
needed, with a world-consciousness, some knowledge, some sympathy, some
hope for all mankind. Without this, a league of nations would be dead
before its birth.
The recent development of psychology, social as well as individual, its
pursuit on scientific lines, and its alliance with biology, suggest one
thought which applies generally to an age of science and may be found to
throw some illumination even on the future. Which of all types of modern
men is the most habitually hopeful, the man of letters, the politician,
the business man, or the man of science? There can be no question of the
answer. The typical man of science is sure of the greatness and solidity
of the work he shares, and confident that the future will extend and
make still more beneficial its results. His forward glance is more
assured because the backward reveals a course of growing strength and
continuous ascent. The physicist foresees unmeasured sources of energy,
still untapped. He warns us of our dangers, but has no doubt that, with
due foresight, we may overcome them, and make the reign of man upon the
planet wider and firmer than before. The doctor knows no disease which
may not in time yield to scientific treatment. The agricultural expert
foresees, and can produce, new types of grain and fruit which will
surpass the best yet known. And the trainer of youth, the man to whom
the new science of psychology stands most in stead, is the most hopeful
of them all. Dealing with human nature in its growth he puts no limits
to its powers of goodness and activity. He deplores the want of wise
methods in the past, and if he errs at all it is in an excess of
optimism, in believing that with new methods we may make a new man.
On this enlargement of the soul, enlightened by science, we build the
future. It is the crowning vision of the modern world, first sketched by
Descartes, filled out and strengthened by the life and thought of three
hundred years. In the interval we have lived much and learnt much, both
of our own nature and of the world in which we live. In our own age a
powerful stimulus has been given by a transformed biology and a new
science which shows the soul itself in growth from an immemorial past,
moulding the future by its own action, surmounting, while assimilating,
the mechanism which surrounds it. But for this building two things are
needed. One, that our souls, as builders, shall act as one with all our
fellows and strive for unity as well as power. The other, that in the
building the laws of growth shall be followed, which science has already
revealed in part and will reveal more fully. For the spirit of science
is the spirit of hope.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: _Walther Rathenau. Ses Idées et ses Projets d'Organisation
Économique_. By Gaston Raphael (Paris: Payot, 4f. 50 c).]
[Footnote 2: R.R. Marett in _Progress and History_ (Oxford University
Press).]
II
PHILOSOPHY
PROFESSOR A.E. TAYLOR
Between forty and fifty years ago a great European man of science, Emil
du Bois-Reymond, delivered before an audience of the leading scientific
men of Germany a famous discourse on _The Limits of our Knowledge of
Nature_, which he followed up some years later with a second discourse
on the _Seven Riddles of the Universe_. His object was to convince the
materialists of the 'seventies that there were at least seven such
unsound places in _their_ story of everything. Some of the 'riddles', he
admitted, might prove to be soluble as science advances, but the most
important of them will always remain unanswered. Our position as regards
them will always be _ignoramus et ignorabimus_--we do not know the
solutions and we never shall know them. I do not ask now whether du
Bois-Reymond was right in his judgement or not. If he was right, that
means, of course, that the one tale of everything will never be told by
human lips to human ears. There will no more ever be a finally true
Philosophy than there will ever be a finally perfect poem or picture or
symphony. But there is no reason why we should not, at any rate, try to
make our story as nearly perfect as we can, to reduce the number of the
places where we have to break off with 'that is another story', and
perhaps even to hazard a 'wide solution' in matters where absolute
certainty is beyond our reach. This is the work of human Philosophy as I
conceive it, and every man who is disinterestedly trying, without one
eye on wealth or fame or domination over the minds of others, to make
any contribution, however humble, to the telling of this one story or
the removal of loose threads from it, is inspired by the true spirit of
Philosophy. Whoever is doing anything else, no matter under what name or
with what profit or renown to himself, is no true philosopher.
This point of view implies, it will be seen, no sharp dividing line
between Philosophy and Science. The avoidance of this commonly made
distinction may offend two different sets of students--students of
metaphysics who wish to exalt their own pursuit at the expense of the
'special' sciences, and students of natural science who are accustomed
to pride themselves on the contrast between the finality and
definiteness of their own results and the vagueness and dubiousness of
the conclusion of the metaphysicians. But I must avow my own conviction
that the only distinction we can make is one of convenience, and it may
help to make my peace with both parties if I explain where I take this
distinction of convenience to come in. If we are ever to construct an
approximation to the one story of everything, clearly one result will
consist of a relatively few first principles and a great mass of
conclusions which can be inferred from them. And clearly again, since
men differ so widely in their mental aptitudes, some men will be most
successful in the detection of the principles which underlie all our
knowledge, and others most successful in the accumulation of facts and
the detailed working out of the application of the principles to the
facts. For convenience' sake it will be well that some of us shall be
engaged on the discovery of principles which are so very ultimate that
most men take them for granted without reflecting on them at all, and
others on the work of detail. Further, it will be convenient that,
within this second group, various students shall give their attention to
more special masses of detail, according to their several tastes and
aptitudes, some to the behaviour of moving particles, some to the
behaviour of living organisms, some again to the structure and
institutions of human societies, and so on. For convenience we may agree
to call preoccupation with the great ultimate principles Philosophy and
preoccupation with the application of the principles to masses of
special facts Science. If we make the distinction in this way, we shall
be following pretty closely the lines of historical development along
which 'special' sciences have gradually been constituted. When we go
back far enough in the history of human thought, we find that
originally, among the great Greeks who have taught the world to think,
there was no distinction at all between Science and Philosophy. Men like
Plato and Aristotle were busied at once with the discovery of the first
principles on which all our knowledge depends and with the construction
of a satisfactory theory of the planetary motions or of the facts of
growth and reproduction. As the study of special questions was pursued
further, it became advisable to hand over the treatment of first one and
then another group of closely interconnected questions to students who
would pursue them independently of research into ultimate
presuppositions. This is how Geometry, Astronomy, Biology came, in
ancient times, to be successively detached from general Philosophy. The
separation of Psychology--the detailed study of the processes of mental
life--from Philosophy hardly goes back beyond the days of our fathers,
and the separation of such studies as 'sociology' from general
Philosophy may be said to belong quite definitely to our own time. If
our children have leisure for study at all, no doubt they will see the
process carried much further. But it is important to bear in mind that
neither Philosophy in the narrower sense nor Science in the narrower
sense will be fruitfully prosecuted unless the men who are working at
each understand that their own labours are only part of a single
undivided work. Without a genuine grasp of some department of detailed
facts no man is likely to achieve much in the search for principles, for
it is by analysis of facts that principles are to be found, and without
real insight into broad general principles the worker in detail is
likely to achieve nothing but confusion. The antagonism between
'philosophers' and 'men of science' so characteristic of the last half
of the nineteenth century has been productive of nothing but evil. It
has given us 'philosophers' whose knowledge about the facts with which
serious thinking has to deal has been hopelessly inaccurate; it has also
given us 'men of science' who have been 'ageometretes' and have, by
consequence, when forced to offer some account of first principles,
taken refuge in the wildest and weirdest improvisation. For really
fruitful work we need the union in one person of the 'man of science'
and the 'philosopher', or at least the most intimate co-operation
between the two. Our theories of first principles require to be
constantly revised, purified, and quickened by contact with knowledge of
detailed fact; and our representations of fact call for constant
restatement in terms of a system of more and more thoroughly thought-out
postulates or first principles. This is perhaps why the department of
human knowledge in which the last half-century has seen the most
remarkable advances is just that in which unremitting scrutiny of
principles has gone most closely hand-in-hand with the mastery of fresh
masses of detail, pure mathematics, and again why the present state of
what is loosely called 'evolutionary' science is so unsatisfactory to
any one who has a high ideal of what a science ought to be. It exhibits
at once an enormous mass of detailed information and an apparently
hopeless vagueness about the meaning of the 'laws' by which all this
detail is to be co-ordinated, the reasons for thinking these laws true,
and the precise range of their significance. The work of men like
Cantor, Dedekind, Frege, Whitehead, Russell, is providing us with an
almost unexceptional theory of the first principles required for pure
mathematics. We are already in a position to say with almost complete
freedom from uncertainty what undefined simple notions and
undemonstrated postulates we have to employ in the science and to
express these ultimates without ambiguity. 'Evolutionary science,' rich
as is its information about the details of the processes going on in the
organic world, seems still to await its Frege or Russell. It talks, for
example, much of 'hereditary' and non-hereditary peculiarities, and some
of us can remember a time when our friends among the biologists seemed
almost ready to put each other to the sword for differences of opinion
about the inheritability of certain characteristics; but no one seems to
trouble himself much with the question a philosopher would think most
important of all--precisely what is meant by the metaphor of
'inheritance' when it is applied to the facts of biology. (Indeed, it is
still quite fashionable to talk not merely as if a 'character' were,
like a house or an orchard, a _thing_ which can be transferred bodily
from the possession of a parent to the possession of the offspring, but
even as though an 'heir' could 'inherit' himself.)
This last remark leads me to a further consideration. Science and
Philosophy are alike created by the simple determination to be
_thorough_ in our thinking about the problems which all things and
events present to us, to use no terms whose meaning is ambiguous, to
assert no propositions as true until we are satisfied that they are
either directly apprehended as true, or strictly deducible from other
propositions which are thus apprehended. But now that the area of facts
open to our exploration has become far too vast for a modern Francis
Bacon to 'take all knowledge for his province', and convenience has led
to the distinction between the philosopher and the man of science, a
_practical_ distinction between the two makes its appearance. It is
_convenient_ that our knowledge of detail should be steadily extended by
considering the consequences which follow from a given set of postulates
without waiting for the solution of the more strictly philosophical
questions whether our postulates have been reduced to the simplest and
most unambiguous expression, whether the list might not be curtailed by
showing that some of its members which have been accepted on their own
merits can be deduced from the rest, or again enlarged by the express
addition of principles which we have all along been using without any
actual formulation of them. The point may be illustrated by considering
the set of 'postulates' explicitly made in the geometry of Euclid. We
cannot be said to have made geometry thoroughly scientific until we know
whether the traditional list of postulates is complete, whether some of
the traditional postulates might not be capable of demonstration, and
whether geometry as a science would be destroyed by the denial of one or
more of the postulates. But it would be very undesirable to suspend
examination of the consequences which follow from the Euclidean
postulates until we have answered all these questions. Even in pure
mathematics one has, in the first instance, to proceed tentatively, to
venture on the work of drawing inferences from what seem to be plausible
postulates before one can pass a verdict on the merits of the postulates
themselves. The consequence of this tentative character of our
inquiries is that, so far as there is a difference between Philosophy
and Science at all, it is a difference in _thoroughness_. The more
philosophic a man's mind is, the less ready will he be to let an
assertion pass without examination as obviously true. Thus Euclid makes
a famous assumption--the 'parallel-postulate'--which amounts to the
assertion that if three of the angles of a rectilinear quadrilateral are
right angles, the fourth will be a right angle. The mathematicians of
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, again, generally assumed
that if a function is continuous it can always be differentiated. A
comparatively unphilosophical mind may let such plausible assertions
pass unexamined, but a more philosophical mind will say to itself, when
it comes across them, 'You great duffer, aren't you going to ask _Why_?'
Suppose that, by way of experiment, I assume that the fourth angle of my
quadrilateral will be acute, or again obtuse, will the body of
conclusions I can now deduce from my set of postulates be free from
contradictions or not? If I really give my mind to the task, cannot I
define a continuous function which is _not_ differentiable? The raising
of the first question led in fact to the discovery of what is called
'non-Euclidean' geometry, the raising of the second has banished from
the text-books of the Calculus the masses of bad reasoning which long
made that branch of mathematics a scandal to logic and led distinguished
philosophers--Kant among them--to suspect that there are hopeless
contradictions in the very foundations of mathematical science.
Now, the effect of such careful scrutiny of first principles is not, of
course, to upset any conclusions which have been correctly drawn from a
set of premisses. All that happens is that the conclusion is no longer
asserted by itself as a truth; what is asserted is that the conclusion
is true _if_ the premisses are true. Thus we no longer assert the
'theorem of Pythagoras' as a categorical proposition; what we assert is
that the theorem follows as a consequence from the assertion of some
half-dozen ultimate postulates which will be found on analysis to be the
premisses of Euclid's proof of his forty-seventh proposition.
To come back to the point I wish to illustrate. The peculiarity of the
philosopher is simply that he still goes on to 'wonder' and ask _Why_
when other persons are ready to leave off. He is less contented than
other men to take things for granted. Of course, he knows that, in the
end, you cannot get away from the necessity of taking something for
granted, but he is anxious to take for granted as few things as
possible, and when he has to take something for granted, he is
exceptionally anxious to know exactly what that something is. De Morgan
tells a story of a very pertinacious controversialist who, being asked
whether he would not at least admit that 'the whole is greater than the
part', retorted, 'Not I, until I see what use you mean to make of the
admission.' I am not sure whether De Morgan quotes this as an ensample
for our following or as a warning for our avoidance, but to my own mind
it is an excellent specimen of the philosophic temper. Until you know
what use is going to be made of your admission, you do not really know
what it is you have admitted. It is this superior thoroughness of
Philosophy which Plato has in mind when he says of his supreme science
'Dialectic' that its business is to examine and even to 'destroy'
([Greek: anairein]) the assumptions of all the other sciences. It does
not let propositions which they have been content to take for granted
pass without challenge, and it may actually 'destroy' them by showing
that there is no justification for asserting them. Thus Euclid's
assumption about parallels ceased to be included among the indispensable
premisses of geometry, and was 'destroyed' in Plato's sense when
Lobatchevsky, Bolyai, and Riemann showed that complete bodies of
self-consistent geometrical theory can be deduced from sets of
postulates in which Euclid's assumption is explicitly denied. There are
two further points I should like to put before you in this connexion.
One of them has been forcibly argued by Mr. Bertrand Russell in his
admirable little work _The Problems of Philosophy_; the other has not.
Indeed, it is just in his unwillingness to allow the second of these
points to be raised at all that Mr. Russell seems to me to fall
conspicuously and unaccountably short of being what, by his own showing,
a great philosopher ought to be.
To take first the point with which Mr. Russell has dealt. There is one
very important branch of inquiry, if we ought not rather to say that
there are two, which appear to belong wholly to general Philosophy and
not to any of the 'sciences'. We cannot so much as ask the simplest
question without making the implication that there is an ultimate
distinction between true assertions and false ones, and certain definite
principles by which we can infer true conclusions from true premisses.
It is thus a very important part of the true 'story of everything' to
state the principles upon which valid reasoning depends, and to
enunciate the ultimate postulates which have to be taken for granted
whenever we try to reason validly about anything. This is the inquiry
known by the name of logic. We cannot expect men whose time is fully
taken up with the task of reaching true conclusions about some special
class of facts, those which concern the history of living organisms, or
the production and distribution of 'wealth', or the stability of various
forms of government, to burden themselves with this inquiry in addition
to their other tasks. They may fairly be allowed to leave the
construction of logic to others. But the man who makes it the business
of his life to get back to ultimate first principles must plainly be a
logician, though he need not be a specialist in biology or economics or
'sociology'. One great advantage which our children should have over
their parents as students of Philosophy is that the last half-century
has been one of unprecedented advance in the study of logic. In the
'logic of relations', founded by De Morgan, carried out further in the
third volume of Ernst Schröder's _Algebra der Logik_, and made still
more precise in the earliest sections of the _Principia Mathematica_ of
Whitehead and Russell, we now possess the most potent weapon of
intellectual analysis ever yet devised by man.
We must further remark that the serious pursuit of any kind of science
implies not only that there _are_ truths, but that some of them, at
least, can be _known_ by man. Hence there arises a problem which is not
quite the same as that of logic. What _is_ the relation we mean to speak
of when we talk of 'knowing' something, and what conditions must be
fulfilled in order that a proposition may not only be true but be known
by us to be true? The very generality of this problem marks it out as
one which belongs to what I have been all along calling Philosophy. (We
must be careful to note that the problem does not belong to the 'special
science' of psychology. Psychology aims at telling us how particular
thoughts and trains of thought arise in an individual mind, but it has
nothing to say on the question which of our thoughts give us 'knowledge'
and which do not. The 'possibility of knowledge' has to be presupposed
by the psychologist as a pre-condition of his particular investigations
exactly as it is presupposed by the physicist, the botanist, or the
economist.) The study of the problem 'what are the conditions which must
be satisfied whenever anything at all is known' is precisely what Kant
meant by _Criticism_, though the raising of the problem in this
definite form is not due to Kant but goes back to Plato, who made it the
subject of one of his greatest dialogues, the _Theaetetus_. The simplest
way to make the nature and importance of the problem clear is perhaps
the way Mr. Russell adopts in the _Problems of Philosophy_--to give a
very rough statement of Kant's famous solution.
Kant held that careful analysis shows us that any piece of knowledge has
two constituents of very diverse origin. It has a _matter_ or material
constituent consisting, as Kant held, of certain crude data supplied by
sensation, colours, tones of varying pitch and loudness, odours,
savours, and the like. It has also a _form_ or formal constituent. Our
data, when we know anything at all, are arranged on some definite
principle of order. When we recognize an object by the eye or a tune by
the ear, we do not apprehend simply so much colour or sound, but colours
spread out and forming a pattern or notes following one another in a
fixed order. (If you reverse the movement of a gramophone, you get the
same notes as before, but you do not get the same tune.) Further, Kant
thought it could be shown that the data of our knowledge are a
disorderly medley and come to us from without, being supplied by things
which exist and are what they are equally whether any one perceives them
or not, but the element of form, pattern, or order is put into them by
our own minds in the act of knowing them. Our minds are so constructed
that we _can_ only perceive things or think of them as connected by
certain definite principles of orderly arrangement. This, he thought,
explains the indubitable fact that we can sometimes know universal
propositions to be true without needing to examine all the individual
instances. I can know for certain that in every triangle the greater
angle is subtended by the greater side, or that every event has a
definite cause among earlier events, though I cannot examine all
triangles or all events one by one. This is because the postulates of
geometry and the law of causality are types of order which my mind
_puts_ into the data of its knowledge in the very act of attending to
them, and it is therefore certain that I shall never perceive or think
anything which does not conform to these types.
I give Kant's answer to the problem of Criticism not because I believe
it to be the correct one, but to show what important consequences follow
from our acceptance of a solution of this problem. If it is true that
one of the constituent elements of every piece of knowledge is a lump of
crude sensation, it follows that we can have no knowledge about our own
minds or souls, and still less about God, since, if there are such
beings as my soul and God, at any rate neither furnishes me with
sense-data. Hence a great part of Kant's famous _Critique of Pure
Reason_ is taken up by an elaborate attempt to show that psychology and
theology contain no real knowledge. We cannot even know whether there is
any probability for or against the existence of the soul or of God,
though Kant was very anxious to show that it is our duty on moral
grounds to _believe_ very firmly in both. Now if Kant is right about
this, his result is tremendously important. If psychology and theology
are wholly devoid of scientific value, it is most desirable that we
should know this, not only that we may not waste time in studying them,
but because it may reasonably make a very great difference to the
practical ordering of our lives. If Kant can be proved wrong, it is
equally important to be convinced that he is wrong. We may have been led
by belief in his teaching to neglect the acquisition of a great deal of
knowledge of high intrinsic interest, and may even have been betrayed
into basing the conduct of life on wrong principles. If, for example, we
can really know something about the soul, it _may_ be possible to know
whether it is immortal or not, and it is not unreasonable to hold that
certain knowledge, or even probable belief, on such a point ought to
make a great difference to our choice between rival aims in life. There
is clearly much less to be said for the recommendation to 'eat and drink
for to-morrow we die' if we have reason to believe our souls immortal
than if we have not, and some of us do not share Mr. Russell's view that
Philosophy is called upon to abdicate what the Greeks thought her
sovereign function, the regulation of life. It is true that Kant
convinced himself that it is a moral duty to act as if we knew the truth
of doctrines for or against which we cannot detect the slightest balance
of probability. But the logically sound inference from Kant's premisses
would be that, to use Pascal's famous metaphor, a prudent man will do
well to bet neither for nor against immortality. Unfortunately, as
Pascal said, you can't _help_ betting; _il faut parier_. If it makes any
difference to the relative values of different goods whether the soul
dies with the body or not, one _must_ take sides in the matter. In
making one's choices one must prefer either the things it is reasonable
to regard as good for a creature whose days are threescore years and ten
or those which it is reasonable to regard as best for a being who is to
live for ever. The only way to escape having to bet is not to be born.
I come to the second problem, the one which, as I think, Mr. Russell
arbitrarily ignores. A human being is not a mere knowledge-machine. The
relation of knower to known is not the only relation in which he stands
to himself and to other things. The 'world' is not merely something at
which he can look on, it is also an instrument for achieving what he
regards as good and for creating what he judges to be beautiful. To do
good and to make beautiful things are just as much man's business as to
discover truth. A knowledge of the world would be very incomplete if it
did not include knowledge of what ought to be, whether because it is
morally best or because it is beautiful, as well as knowledge of what is
actually there. And it is not immediately evident how the two, knowledge
of what ought to be and knowledge of what merely is, are connected.
There is, to be sure, one way in which it is pretty plain that they are
_not_ related. You cannot learn what ought to be--what is beautiful or
morally good--merely by first finding out what has been or what is
likely to be. This simple consideration of itself deprives many of the
big volumes which have been written about the 'evolution' of art and
morals of most of their value. They may have interest if they are
treated only as contributions to the history of opinion about art and
morals. But unhappily their authors often assume that we can find out
what really _is_ right or beautiful by merely discovering what men have
thought right and beautiful in the remote past or guessing what they
will think right or beautiful in the distant future. The fallacy
underlying this procedure has been happily exposed by Mr. Russell
himself in an occasional essay where he remarks that it is antecedently
just as likely that evolution is going from bad to worse as that it is
going from good to better. _Unless_ it is going from bad to worse it is
obviously absurd to suppose that you can find out what _is_ good by
discovering what our distant ancestors _thought_ good. And _if_ (as may
be the case) it is going from bad to worse, no amount of knowledge about
what our posterity will think good can throw any light on the question
what is good. There is, in fact, no ground whatever for believing that
'evolution' need be the same thing as progress, and this is enough to
knock the bottom out of 'evolutionary ethics'.
On the other hand, it is quite certain that when we call an act right
or a picture beautiful we do not mean to be expressing a mere personal
liking of our own, any more than when we make a statement about the
composition of sulphuric acid or the product of 9 and 7. As Dr. Rashdall
has put it, when we say that a given act is right, we do not pretend to
be infallible. We know that we may fall into mistakes about right and
wrong just as we may make mistakes in working a multiplication sum. But
we do mean to say that _if_ our own verdict 'that act is right' is a
true one, then the verdict of any one who retorts 'that act is wrong' is
false, just as when we state the result of our multiplication we mean to
assert that _if_ we have done the sum correctly any one else who brings
out a different answer has worked it wrongly. Indeed, we might convince
ourselves that these verdicts are not meant to be expressions of private
and personal liking in a still simpler way. All of us must be aware that
the line of action we pronounce 'right' is not always what we like nor
the conduct we call 'wrong' what we dislike. We often like doing what we
fully believe to be wrong and dislike doing what we believe right,
without being in the least confused in our moral verdicts by this
collision of liking and conviction. So again it is a common thing to
like one poem or picture better than another, and yet to be fully
persuaded that the work we like the less is the better work of art.
Indeed, the whole process of moral and aesthetic education may be said
to exist just in learning to like most what is really best.
All this, put into so many words, may seem too simple to call for
statement, but it makes nonsense of a great deal that has been written
about ethics of late years. It disposes once for all of the theory that
moral and aesthetic verdicts are 'subjective', that is, that they mean
no more than that the persons who make them have certain personal likes
and dislikes of which these verdicts are a record. Of course, it might
be urged that all of us do indeed mean to express truths which are
independent of our personal likings when we make moral and aesthetic
judgements, but that we never succeed in doing so. A man might
conceivably hold that there is no real distinction between right and
wrong or between beautiful and ugly, but that it is a universal illusion
of mankind to suppose that there are such distinctions. Or he might hold
that the distinctions are real, but that we do not know where to draw
them. He might suggest that some ways of acting are really right and
others really wrong, but that we do not know which are the right acts
and so regularly confuse what we like doing with what is 'really' right.
Mr. Russell, in some of his later writings, seems to incline to views of
this sort. But the suggestion is really unmotived. It would be just as
reasonable to suggest that all geometrical or astronomical propositions
are only expressions of the personal and private feelings of geometers
and astronomers, and that either there is no distinction between truths
and falsehoods in geometry and astronomy, or that, at any rate, we do
not know which the true propositions are. That there is a real
distinction between true and false propositions and that, with pains and
care, we can discover some truths are assumptions we must make if we are
to recognize the possibility of pursuing knowledge at all, and there is
no reason to suppose that these assumptions do not hold as good in
matters of art and morals as elsewhere. No doubt, in practice men are
prone to mistake what they like for what is right or beautiful, but this
danger, such as it is, is not confined to art and morals. Men do often
call acts right merely because they like doing them or pictures
beautiful merely because they get pleasure from them. But it is also
notorious that many men are prone to believe that a thing is likely to
happen merely because they wish it to happen, or that it is unlikely to
happen merely because they wish it not to happen. Yet no one seriously
makes the reality of these tendencies a ground for denying the
possibility of 'inferring the future from the past'. We must then, I
hold, regard it as an integral part of the whole story of everything to
find an answer to the questions What is good? and What is beautiful? as
well as to the question What is fact? By the side of the so-called
'positive sciences', which deal with the third question, we must
recognize as having an equal right to exist the so-called 'sciences of
value', which deal with the first and the second.
I want now to take a further step in which disciples of Mr. Russell
would perhaps decline to follow me. We have already seen what is meant
by the co-ordination of the sciences into a single body of deductions
from definite ultimate postulates, though in what we have said about the
task we were content to speak provisionally as if the sciences of 'what
is' were all the sciences to be co-ordinated. We talked, in fact, as if
the work of Philosophy were merely to work into a coherent story all
that can be known of 'objects that present themselves to the
contemplation' of a knower. But, of course, if Philosophy is ever to
attack its final problem, we must take into account two things which we
have so far ignored. The 'whole story of everything' includes the
knowing intelligence itself as well as the 'objects' which present
themselves to its gaze. Indeed, it is not even accurate to speak as if
'objects' 'presented themselves' to a merely passive intelligence; to be
apprehended, they have to be actively attended to. If we would see them,
we have to be on the look-out for them. And the knowing intelligence is
not aware merely of these objects. It is also aware of itself, though
it is certainly never a 'presented object'. Also, it is not only a
knower but a doer and a maker. Intelligence is shown as much in the
ordering of life by a rule based on a right valuation of goods and in
the making of things of beauty as in the discovery of propositions about
what is. Hence, we can hardly be content to leave the 'positive'
sciences and the 'sciences of values' simply standing over against one
another. There is that which 'is', and there is that which 'ought to
be', and, at first sight at any rate, the two seem very different. Much
that is--ignorance, sin, misery, ugliness--ought not to be, and much
that ought to be is very far from being fact. We are accustomed to
regard this as a matter of course, but, closely considered, it is
perhaps the supreme wonder of all the wonders. We creatures of
circumstance, as we call ourselves, can take stock of the sum of things
to which we belong, and judge it. It is not simply that we can, and
often do, _wish_ that it were different in various ways; we can judge
that it _ought_ to be different, and you may find a man of science like
Huxley, after a life spent in trying to understand the laws which
prevail in the world, deliberately making it his last word to his
fellows that their duty is to set themselves to reverse the 'cosmic
process', to select for preservation just the human types which, if the
much-abused metaphor may be tolerated, Nature, left to herself, selects
for destruction.
We might, of course, regard this apparently unreconcilable conflict
between the arrangements which do prevail; as is commonly supposed, in
the world, and those which ought to prevail, as a mystery which we must
despair of ever understanding. But, to say the least of it, it is hardly
consistent with the philosophic temper to treat any question as an
insoluble riddle until one has tried all ways of solution and found them
_culs-de-sac_. If we are to be thoroughly loyal to the spirit which
prompts all intelligent inquiry, we are bound at least to ask whether
it is, after all, beyond the power of human intelligence to think of the
world as a system in which somehow, in the end, what ought to be
prescribes what is. It is true that, for reasons already mentioned, we
cannot, like Spinoza or the Sufis, reconcile facts and values by the
simple assumption that what is is shown, by the fact that it is, to be
what ought to be, and that our common conviction that sin and ugliness
are painfully real is only an illusion due to spiritual short sight. We
have just as much reason to believe that some pleasures are good, that
pain which is not a means to good is evil, that justice and purity are
good, lewdness and cruelty bad, that some colours are lovely and others
odious, as we have to believe that between any two points there is
always a third, or that, if _B_ and _C_ are two points there is always a
point _D_ on the straight line _BC_ such that _C_ is between _B_ and
_D_, and a point _A_ on _CB_ such that _B_ is between _C_ and _A_.
Indeed, the most fanatical champion of what Mr. Russell in his
anti-ethical mood calls 'ethical neutrality' cannot well avoid
recognizing the truth of at least one proposition in ethics, the
proposition that knowledge of scientific truth is _better_ than
ignorance of it. The admission of this single truth of value is enough
to raise all the time-honoured problems of ethics and theodicy. If
knowledge of truth is better than ignorance of it, the actual present
state of the world, in which so much truth is yet to seek, is by no
means wholly good, and there really is at least one way in which it is
our duty to make it more like what it ought to be.
If then we cannot get rid of the apparent conflict between Is and Ought
by saying that Ought is an illusion, can we get rid of it, in the only
other possible way, by holding that what ought to be is the lasting and
primary reality and that the 'facts' which are so far from being what
they ought to be are by comparison only half-real, much what shadows are
to the solid things which throw them? This was the doctrine of Plato,
who makes Socrates say in the _Phaedo_ that it is the 'Good' which holds
the Universe together, and that in the end the true reason for each
particular arrangement in the world, whether we can see it or not, is
that it is 'best' that this arrangement, and no other, should exist. It
is also the foundation of Kant's well-known contention that, however
barren speculative theology and psychology may be, the reality of the
moral order and the unconditionality of moral obligation compel us to
make the existence of God, the immortality of our souls, and the moral
government of the world postulates of practical philosophy. More
generally, it is just this conviction that 'what is' has its source and
explanation in what 'ought to be', which is the central thought of all
philosophical Theism. If we can accept such a faith, we shall not, of
course, be enabled to eliminate mystery from things. We shall, for
instance, be still quite in the dark about the way in which evil comes
to be in a world of God's making. We shall neither be able to say _how_
any particular thing comes to be other than it ought to be, nor _how_ in
the end good is 'brought out of evil'. But if we are to have a right to
hold a view of the Platonic or Theistic type, we must be able, not
indeed to say how evil comes about or how it is to be finally got rid
of, but to say, in a general way, what it is 'good for'. Thus, if there
are certain goods of the highest value which could not exist at all
except on the condition of the existence of less important evils, this
consideration will remove, so far as _those_ goods and evils are
concerned, the time-honoured puzzle how evil can exist at all if God is.
To take a specific example. To many of us it appears directly certain
that such qualities of character as fortitude, patience, superiority to
carnal lusts, magnanimity, are goods of the highest value. We think also
that we see that these qualities are not primitive psychological
endowments but require for their development the experience of struggle
and discipline in a world where there is real suffering, real
disappointment, real temptation. To us, therefore, there seems to be no
contradiction between the existence of God and the presence in a world
made by God of the evils needed for the development of these virtues.
And this will include some of the worst of all the evils we know of. Few
things are more ghastly than some of the cruelties which have been
practised in the late War and are still being practised in the
distracted country of Russia. Yet we know how revulsion from these
horrors has made many a man who seemed to be sunk in sloth or greed or
carnality into a Bayard or a Galahad. It may well be that this moral
re-birth would never have been effected if the evils which provoked it
had been less monstrous. Here, then, we seem to discern a principle
which _may_ be adequate to explain what all the ills of human life are
'good for'.
I must not deny that all such explanation, in my judgement, involves the
postulate that the ennoblement of character and deepening of insight
brought about by suffering are permanent--in fact, that it requires the
postulates of the existence of God and the reality of everlasting life.
Mr. Russell, I imagine, would regard this as a confession that I am sunk
in what he airily dismisses as 'theological superstitions'. I should
reply that the 'superstition' is on his side; to dismiss God and the
eternal soul, without serious inquiry, as 'superstitions' is just the
most superficial of all the superstitions. It is, of course, incumbent
on anyone who holds the Platonic view to show that its postulates are
not inconsistent with any known truth, and I would add that he ought
also to show that there are at any rate known facts which seem to demand
just this kind of explanation. Both these points, as I hold, can be
established, but I do not in the least wish to suggest that any
philosopher will ever find it an easy task to 'justify the ways of God
to man'. As Timaeus says in Plato, 'to find the father and fashioner of
the Universe is _not_ easy', and I want rather to lay stress on the
magnitude of the task than to extenuate it. But I am concerned to urge
that the doctrine which accounts for what is by what ought to be is the
_only_ philosophical theory on which it ceases to be an unintelligible
mystery that we should have--as I maintain we certainly have--the same
kind of assurance about values that we have about facts. The chief
complaint I have to make about the mental attitude of Mr. Russell and
some of his friends is that, in their zeal for the unification of
science, they seem inclined to assume that the larger problem of the
co-ordination of Science with Life does not exist, or, at any rate, need
not occupy our minds. This is what I should call mere atheistic
superstition. On this point they might, I believe, learn much which it
imports them to know from the works of some of the notable living
philosophers of Italy, in particular from Professor Varisco of Rome and
Professor Aliotta of Padua, whose labours have been specially directed
to the co-ordination in a consistent system of the principles of the
sciences of fact with those of the sciences of value. Though, after all,
those who have refused to learn the lesson from the noble philosophical
work of Professor James Ward, the illustrious champion of sober thought
in their own University of Cambridge, are perhaps unlikely to master it
in the schools of Rome or Padua.
You will readily see that I am suggesting in effect that if Philosophy
is ever to execute her supreme task, she will need to take into much
more serious account than it has been the fashion to do, not only the
work of the exact sciences but the teachings of the great masters of
life who have founded the religions of the world, and the theologies
which give reasoned expression to what in the great masters is immediate
intuition. For us this means more particularly that it is high time
philosophers ceased to treat the great Christian theologians as
credulous persons whose convictions need not be taken seriously and the
Gospel history as a fable to which the 'enlightened' can no longer pay
any respect. They must be prepared to reckon with the possibility that
the facts recorded in the Gospel happened and that Catholic theology is,
in substance, true. If we are to be philosophers in earnest we cannot
afford to have any path which may lead to the heart of life's mystery
blocked for us by placards bearing the labels 'reactionary', 'unmodern,'
and their likes. That what is most modern must be best is a superstition
which it is strange to find in a really educated man--especially after
the events of the last five years. A philosopher, at any rate, should be
able to endure the charge of being 'unmodern' with fortitude. It is at
least a tenable thesis that many of the qualities which we Western men
have been losing in our craze for industrialism and commercialistic
'Imperialism' are just those which are most necessary to the seeker
after speculative truth. Abelard and St. Thomas would very likely have
failed as advertising agents, company promoters, or editors of
sensational daily papers. But it may well be that both of them were much
better fitted than Lord Northcliffe, Mr. Bottomley, or Mr. A.G. Gardiner
to tell us whether God is and what God is. In fact, one would hardly
suppose habitual and successful composition of effective 'posters' or
alluring prospectuses to be wholly compatible with that candour and
scrupulous veracity which are required of the philosopher. As for
'reaction', no one but a writer in a 'revolutionary' journal would be
fool enough to use the word as, in itself, an epithet of reproach. Most
persons who have a bowing acquaintance with Mechanics know that you
cannot have an engine in which there is all action and no reaction, and
most sane men can see that before you pronounce a given 'reaction' good
or bad you need to know what it is reacting against. If a man who wants
to go east discovers that he is walking west, he is usually reactionary
enough to go back on his steps.
In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that
our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they
happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual 'proletarians'
of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to
go back a long way for it. Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of
the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great
positive advantage in going back a very long way for them. The questions
which deal with first principles, being the simplest--though the
hardest--of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and
Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them. In the
discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles
have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary
details that it is usually very hard indeed 'to see the wood for the
trees'. This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his
main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of
Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst
misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.
I have tried in what I have said so far to explain what I understand by
the philosophical spirit and what I regard as the primary problems with
which Philosophy has to wrestle. If what I have said is not wholly wide
of the mark, it should be clear what is the deadliest enemy of the true
spirit of Philosophy. It is the temper which is too indolent to think
out a question for itself and consequently prefers to accept traditional
ready-made answers to the problems of Science and Life. Traditionalism,
wherever it is found, is the enemy, because Traditionalism is only
another name for indolence. Observe that I say Traditionalism, not
Tradition. Nowhere in life, and least of all in Philosophy, is the
solitary likely to work to much purpose unless he has behind him that
body of organized sound sense which we call Tradition. And I do not mean
that true philosophers are necessarily 'heretics', or that 'orthodoxy'
is less philosophical than 'heterodoxy'. I mean that however true an
'orthodox' proposition may be, it is no living truth for me unless I
have made it my own, as its first discoverer did, by personal labour of
the spirit. The truth is something which each generation must rediscover
for itself. True traditions may be quite as injurious, if they have
become mere traditions, as false ones. It was not so much because the
Aristotelian doctrines were false that the unquestioning acceptance of
Aristotelian formulae all but strangled human thought in the later days
of Scholasticism. Some of these doctrines were false, but many of them
were much truer than anything the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
had to put in their place, and the rediscovery of their real meaning is
perhaps the chief service of the Hegelian school to Philosophy. The
trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle's formulae as
matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the
meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.
We may say, generally, that because Traditionalism is the death of sound
thinking, the ages in which the prospects of advance in Philosophy are
brightest are just those in which a powerful historical tradition has
broken down and men feel themselves compelled to go back on their steps
and raise once more the fundamental questions which their fathers had
supposed to be disposed of once for all by a formula. This has happened
twice since the downfall of the degenerate Scholasticism, Protestant and
Roman, of the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century the result
was the great movement in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics, of which
Descartes and Galileo are the principal figures. Towards the end of the
eighteenth century, when the doctrines of Descartes had themselves been
traditionalized, the same thing happened again, the leading actors in
the drama being David Hume and Immanuel Kant; the result was first the
revival of the 'critical' problem by Kant, and then the great, if
over-hasty, attempt at a positive interpretation of the Universe which
culminated in the philosophical system of Hegel. In our own age, it is
mainly Kant and Hegel who have been traditionalized, and we seem to be
living through the last stages of the discrediting of this third
tradition with every prospect of a great advance if our own time can
only find its Descartes. In what I am going on to say I must naturally
speak of the disintegrating influences chiefly as we have seen them at
work in our own country; but I should like, before I do so, to remark
that on the Continent splendid work has been done in the requickening of
genuine philosophical thought by an influence which has, so far, not
made itself widely felt among ourselves. I mean the revival of Thomism
so earnestly promoted in the academies of the Roman Church by Pope Leo
XIII. Neo-Thomism, I am convinced, if its representatives will only
maintain it at the high level characteristic, for example, of the
Italian _Rivista Neo-Scolastica_, has a very great contribution to make
to the Philosophy of the future, and is much more deserving of the
serious attention of students in our own country than the
much-advertised 'impressionism' of Pragmatists and Bergsonians. Indeed,
I hardly know how much we may not hope from the movement if it should
please Providence to send into the world a Neo-Thomist who is also a
really qualified mathematician.
Of the state of thought in our own country we may fairly say that a
generation ago opinion on the ultimate questions was, in the main,
fairly divided into two camps. There were the professional
metaphysicians, mainly living on a tradition derived from Kant and
Hegel, and there were the men of science whose 'philosophy', such as it
was, is perhaps best represented by two well-known and most instructive
books, Mach's _Science of Mechanics_ and Karl Pearson's _Grammar of
Science_. The men of the Kant-Hegel tradition, whatever their family
dissensions, were generally united by the common view that--as William
James accused them of teaching--the function of sensation in
contributing to knowledge, whatever it is, is something 'contemptible'.
Kant himself, as we have seen, had thought very differently, but he was
supposed to have been 'corrected' on this, as on so many points, by
Hegel. The most distinguished of my own Oxford teachers seemed agreed to
believe that our thought builds up the fabric of knowledge entirely from
within by what Hegel called an 'immanent dialectic'. A rough idea of
what this means may be given in the following way. You take any
experience you please and try to put what you experience into a
proposition. The proposition may, to begin with, be as vague as, e.g. 'I
am now feeling something,' 'I am now aware of something.' On reflection
you find that the statement does not do justice to the experience. You
feel the need to say more precisely _what_ you are feeling or are aware
of, how it is related to what you experience on other occasions, and
what the 'I' is which is said to 'have' the experience. Until you have
done this your thought is a miserable reproduction of your experience,
and if you could ever do it completely, it would turn out that a really
adequate account of the most trivial experience would involve complete
knowledge of the structure and working of everything. Thus, if you once
begin to think about your experience at all, you are irresistibly driven
on to endless further reflection. If you try to stop short anywhere in
the process, the results of your reflection are found to contain
unexplained contradictions, just because you have not yet fitted on the
fact on which you are reflecting to everything else there is to know.
All the assumptions of every-day 'common sense' and all the more
recondite assumptions of the sciences are saturated with these
contradictions, because both 'common sense' and the sciences leave so
much of the whole 'story of everything' untouched. If the whole story
were told, all things would be found to be just one thing, which these
philosophers call the 'Absolute', and the only perfectly true statement
we can make would be a statement about this Absolute in which we
asserted of it all that it is. Since no science ever attempts to say
anything at all about this one sole thing, far less to get all there
might be to be said about it into a single statement, no scientific
proposition can be more than 'partially' true, and unhappily _we_ do not
know what alterations would be required to make our 'partial' truths
quite true. Naturally enough Kant's allegation that mathematical first
principles are so self-contradictory that you can rigidly demonstrate
mathematical propositions which contradict each other was grist to the
Hegelian mill. That our notions of space, time, the infinitely great,
the infinitely little, are all a jumble of contradictions was steadily
repeated by the Hegelian philosophers, and indeed the mathematicians
were accustomed to state their own principles so loosely and confusedly
that there was a great deal of excuse for the suspicion that the fault
lay with Mathematics and not with the mathematicians.
It is clear that such a philosophy ought to end in unqualified
Agnosticism. The Hegelians, to be sure, made merry over the Unknowable
of Mr. Spencer, but their own Absolute is really just the Unknowable in
its 'Sunday best'. Nothing that we can say about anything which is not
the Absolute is really true, because there really _is_ nothing but the
Absolute to speak about, and nothing that we can say about the Absolute
is quite true either, because we can never succeed in saying itself of
it. Mr. Bradley, far the most eminent of the philosophers of the
Absolute, has made persistent and brilliant attempts to show that, in
spite of this, we do know enough to be sure that our own mind is more
like the Absolute than a cray-fish, and a cray-fish more like it than a
crystal. But when all is said, though I owe more to Mr. Bradley than I
can ever acknowledge adequately, I cannot help feeling that there are
two men in Mr. Bradley, a great constructive thinker and a subtle
destructive critic, and that the destructive Hyde is perpetually pulling
to pieces all that the constructive Jekyll has built up. Of course it is
obvious that the truth of mathematics, if mathematics are true, is a
fatal stone of stumbling for this type of philosophy. Mathematics never
attempts to say anything about the 'Absolute'--the only 'Absolute' of
which it knows is only a 'degraded conic'--yet it claims that its
statements, if once they have been correctly expressed, are not
'partial' but complete.
Over against the Hegelianizing philosophers, we had, of course, the men
of science. No one could wish to speak of the scientific men of the
days of Huxley without deep respect for their success in adding to our
positive knowledge of facts. But it may perhaps be said at this distance
of time that it was not precisely the greatest among them who were most
prominent as mystagogues of Science with the big S, and it may certainly
be said that when the mystagogues, the Cliffords, Huxleys, and the rest,
undertook to improvise a theory of first principles, their achievement
was little better than infantile. They took it on trust from Hume that
the whole of knowledge is built up of sensations, actual or 'revived',
and quite missed Kant's point that their empiricism left the formal
constituent in knowledge, the type of order by which data are organized
into an intelligible pattern, wholly out of account. Even when they
deigned to read Kant, they read him without any inkling of the character
of the 'critical' problem. Hence they taught dogmatically as true a
theory of scientific method which Hume himself had elaborately proved
impossible. It was just because Hume had seen so clearly that no
universal scientific truths can be derived from premisses which merely
record particular facts that he professed himself a follower of the
'academic' or 'sceptical' philosophy. He recognized the impossibility of
constructing scientific knowledge out of its material constituent alone,
but did not see where the formal constituent could come from, and so
resigned himself to regarding the actual successes of science as a kind
of standing miracle.
The men of the 'seventies were, after all, in many cases more anxious to
damage theology than to build up Philosophy. They read Hume without any
delicate sense for his urbane ironies, and believed in good faith that
he and John Stuart Mill between them had shown that by a mysterious
process called 'induction' it is possible to prove rigorously universal
conclusions in science without universal premisses. A scientific law,
according to them, is only a convenient short-hand notation in which to
register the 'routine of our perceptions'. Thus we have known of a great
many men who have died, and have never known of any man who lived to
much over a hundred without dying. The universal proposition 'all men
are mortal' is a short expression for this information, and it is
nothing more. It ought to have been obvious that, if this is a true
account of science, all scientific 'generalizations' are infinitely
improbable. The number of men of whom we _know_ that they have died is
insignificant by comparison with the multitude of those who have lived,
are living, or will live, and we have no guarantee that this
insignificant number is a fair average sample. So again, unless there
are true universal propositions which are not 'short-hand' for any
plurality of observed facts whatever, we cannot with any confidence,
however faint, infer that a 'regular sequence' or 'routine' which has
been observed from the dawn of recorded time up to, say, midnight,
August 4, 1919, will continue to be observed on August 5, 1919. How,
except by relying on the truth of some principle which does not depend
itself on the validity of 'generalization', can we tell that it is even
slightly probable that the nature of things will not change suddenly at
the moment of midnight between August 4 and August 5, 1919? What is
called 'inductive' science certainly has 'pulled off' remarkable
successes in the past, but we can have no confidence that these
successes will be repeated unless there are much better reasons for
believing in its methods and initial assumptions than any which the
scientific man who is an amateur 'empiricist' in his philosophy can
offer us. We may note, in particular, that this empiricism, which has
been expounded most carefully by Pearson and Mach, coincides with
Hegelian Absolutism in leading to the denial of the truth of
mathematics. It would be a superfluous task to argue at length that,
e.g., De Moivre's theorem or Taylor's theorem is not a short-hand
formula for recording the 'routine of our perceptions'.
The general state of things at the time of which I am speaking was thus
that relations were decidedly strained between a body of philosophers
and a body of scientific men who ought at least to have met on the
common ground of a complete Agnosticism. The philosophers were, in
general, shy of Science, mainly, no doubt, because they were modest men
who knew their own limitations, but they had a way of being
condescending to Science, which naturally annoyed the scientific men.
These latter professed a theory of the structure of knowledge which the
philosophers could easily show to be grotesque, but the retort was
always ready to hand that at any rate Science seemed somehow to be
getting somewhere while Philosophy appeared to lead nowhere in
particular.
The conditions for mutual understanding have now greatly improved,
thanks mainly to the labour of mathematicians with philosophical minds
on the principles of their own science. If we admit that mathematics is
true--and it seems quite impossible to avoid the admission--we can now
see that neither the traditional Kant-Hegel doctrine nor the traditional
sensationalistic empiricism can be sound. Not to speak of inquiries
which have been actually created within our own life-time, it may fairly
be said that the whole of pure mathematics has been shown, or is on the
verge of being shown, to form a body of conclusions rigidly deduced from
a few unproved postulates which are of a purely logical character.
Descartes has proved to be right in his view that the exceptional
certainty men have always ascribed to mathematical knowledge is not due
to the supposed restriction of the science to relation of number and
magnitude--there is a good deal of pure mathematics which deals with
neither--but to the simplicity of its undefined notions and the high
plausibility of its unproved postulates. Bit by bit the bad logic has
been purged out of the Calculus and the Theory of Functions and these
branches of study have been made into patterns of accurate reasoning on
exactly stated premisses. It has appeared in the process that the
alleged contradictions in mathematics upon which the followers of Kant
and Hegel laid stress do not really exist at all, and only seemed to
exist because mathematicians in the past expressed their meaning so
awkwardly. Further, it has been established that the most fundamental
idea of all in mathematics is not that of number or magnitude but that
of _order_ in a series and that the whole doctrine of series is only a
branch of the logic of Relations. From the logical doctrine of serial
order we seem to be able to deduce the whole arithmetic of integers, and
from this it is easy to deduce further the arithmetic of fractions and
the arithmetic or algebra of the 'real' and 'complex' numbers. As the
logical principles of serial order enable us to deal with infinite as
well as with finite series, it further follows that the Calculus and the
Theory of Functions can now be built up without a single contradiction
or breach of logic. The puzzles about the infinitely great and
infinitely small, which used to throw a cloud of mystery over the
'higher' branches of Mathematics, have been finally dissipated by the
discovery that the 'infinite' is readily definable in purely ordinal
terms and that the 'infinitesimal' does not really enter into the
misnamed 'Infinitesimal Calculus' at all. Arithmetic and the theory of
serial order have been shown to be the sufficient basis of the whole
science which, as Plato long ago remarked, is 'very inappropriately
called geometry'. A résumé of the work which has been thus done may be
found in the stately volumes of the _Principia Mathematica_ of Whitehead
and Russell, or--to a large extent--in the _Formulario Matematico_ of
Professor Peano. Of other works dealing with the subject, the finest
from the strictly philosophical point of view is probably that of
Professor G. Frege on _The Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic_. The general
result of the whole development is that we are now at last definitely
freed from the haunting fear that there is some hidden contradiction in
the principles of the exact sciences which would vitiate all our
knowledge of universal truths. This removes the chief, if not the only
ground for the view that all the truths of Science are only 'partial'.
At the same time, the proof that pure mathematics is a strictly logical
development and that all its conclusions are of the hypothetical form,
'if _a b c_ ..., then _x_' definitely disproves the popular Kantian
doctrine that _sense_-data are a necessary constituent of scientific
knowledge. And with this dogma falls the _main_ ground for the denial
that knowledge about the soul and God is attainable. The recovery of a
sounder philosophical method has, as Mr. Russell himself says, disposed
of what was yesterday the accepted view that the function of Philosophy
is to narrow down the range of possible interpretations of facts until
only one is left. Philosophy rather opens doors than shuts them. It
multiplies the number of logically possible sets of premisses from which
consequences agreeing with empirical facts may be inferred. Mr.
Russell's unreasoned anti-theism seems to me to make him curiously blind
to an obvious application of this principle. On the other side, the
revived attention to the logical methods of the sciences is killing the
crude sensationalism of the days which saw the first publication of
Mach's _Science of Mechanics_ and Pearson's _Grammar of Science_. The
claims of 'induction' to be a method of establishing truths may be
fairly said to have been completely exposed. It is clearer now than it
was when Kant made the observation that each of the 'sciences' contains
just so much science as it contains mathematics, and that the Critical
Philosophy was fully justified in insisting that all science implies
universal _à priori_ postulates, though it went wrong in thinking that
these postulates are laws of the working of the human mind or are 'put
into' things by the human mind. How far Science has moved away from
crude sensationalistic empiricism may be estimated by a comparison of
the successive editions of the _Grammar of Science_. It must always have
been apparent to an attentive reader that the chapters of that
fascinating book which deal directly with the leading principles of
Physics and Biology are of very different quality from the earlier
chapters which expound, with many self-contradictions and much wrath
against metaphysicians and theologians whom the writer seems never to
have tried to understand, the fantastic 'metaphysics of the
telephone-exchange'. But the difference of quality is more marked in the
second edition than in the first, and in the (alas!) unfinished third
edition than in the second. So far, then, as the problem of the
unification of the sciences is concerned, the old prejudices which
divided the rationalist philosopher from the sensationalist scientific
man seem to have been, in the main, dissipated. We can see now that what
used to be called Philosophy and what used to be called Science are both
parts of one task, that they have a common method and presuppose a
common body of principles.
So far it may be said with truth that Philosophy is becoming more
faithful than Kant was himself to the leading ideas of 'Criticism', and
again that it is reverting once more, as it reverted in the days of
Galileo, to the positions of Plato. I do not mean that the whole
programme has been completely executed and that there is nothing for a
successor of Frege or Russell to do. It is instructive to observe that
at the very end of the great work on arithmetic to which I have referred
Frege found himself compelled by difficulties which had been overlooked
until Russell called attention to them to add an appendix confessing
that there was a single important flaw in his elaborate logical
construction of the principles of arithmetic. He had shown that if there
are certain things called 'integers', defined as he had defined them,
the whole of arithmetic follows. But he had not shown that there _is_
any object answering to his definition of an integer, and the logical
researches of Russell had thrown some doubt on the point. This proved
that some restatement of the initial assumptions of the theory was
needed. Since the date of Frege's appendix (1903), Mr. Russell and
others have done something towards the necessary rectification, and the
resulting 'Theory of Types' is pretty certainly one of the most
important contributions ever made to logical doctrine, but it may still
be reasonably doubted whether the 'Theory of Types', as expounded by
Whitehead and Russell in their _Principia Mathematica_, is the last word
required. At any rate, it seems clear that it is a great step on the
right road to the solution of a most difficult problem.
There still remains the greatest problem of all, the harmonization of
Science and Life. I cannot believe that this problem is an illegitimate
one, or that we must sit down content to accept the severance of 'fact'
and 'value' as final for our thought. Even the unification of the
sciences itself remains imperfect so long as we treat it as merely
something which 'happens to be the case' that there are many things and
many kinds of things in the universe and also a number of relations in
which they 'happen' to stand. It is significant that in his later
writings Mr. Russell has been driven to abandon the concept of personal
identity, which is so fundamental for practical life, and to assert that
each of us is not one man but an infinite series of men of whom each
only exists for a mathematical instant. I am sure that such a theory
requires the abandonment of the whole notion of value as an illusion,
and even more sure that it is ruinous to any practical rule of living,
and I cannot believe in the 'philosophy' of any man who is satisfied to
base his practice on what he regards as detected illusion. Hence I find
myself strongly in sympathy with my eminent Italian colleague Professor
Varisco, who has devoted his two chief works (_I Massimi Problemi_ and
_Conosci Te Stesso_) to an exceedingly subtle attempt to show that 'what
ought to be', in Platonic phrase 'the Good', is in the end the single
principle from which all things derive their existence as well as their
value. Mr. Russell's philosophy saves us half Plato, and that is much,
but I am convinced that it is whole and entire Plato whom a profounder
philosophy would preserve for us. I believe personally that such a
philosophy will be led, as Plato was in the end led, to a theistic
interpretation of life, that it is in the living God Who is over all,
blessed for ever, that it will find the common source of fact and value.
And again I believe that it will be led to its result very largely by
what is, after all, perhaps the profoundest thought of Kant, the
conviction that the most illuminating fact of all is the _fact_ of the
absolute and unconditional obligatoriness of the law of right. It is
precisely here that fact and value most obviously meet. For when we ask
ourselves what in fact we are, we shall assuredly find no true answer to
this question about what _is_ if we forget that we are first and
foremost beings who _ought_ to follow a certain way of life, and to
follow it for no other reason than that it is good. But I cannot, of
course, offer reasons here for this conviction, though I am sure that
adequate reasons can be given. Here I must be content to state this
ultimate conviction as a 'theological superstition', or, as I should
prefer to put it with a little more certainty, as a matter of faith. The
alternative is to treat the world as a stupid, and possibly malicious,
bad joke.
_Note_.--It may be thought that something should have been said about
the revolt against authority and tradition which has styled itself
variously 'Pragmatism' and 'Humanism', and also about the recent vogue
of Bergsonianism. I may in part excuse my silence by the plea that both
movements are, in my judgement, already spent forces. If I must say more
than this, I would only remark about Pragmatism that I could speak of it
with more confidence if its representatives themselves were more agreed
as to its precise principles. At present I can discern little agreement
among them about anything except that they all show a great impatience
with the business of thinking things quietly and steadily out, and that
none of them seems to appreciate the importance of the 'critical'
problem. 'Pragmatism' thus seems to me less a definite way of thinking
than a collective name for a series of 'guesses at truth'. Some of the
guesses may be very lucky ones, but I, at least, can hardly take the
claims of unmethodic guessing to be a philosophy very seriously. To
'give and receive argument' appears to me to be of the very essence of
Philosophy. As for M. Bergson, I yield to no one in admiration for his
brilliancy as a stylist and the happiness of many of his illustrations.
But I have always found it difficult to grasp his central idea--if he
really has one--because his whole doctrine has always seemed to me to be
based upon a couple of elementary blunders which will be found in the
opening chapter of his _Données Immédiates de la Conscience_. We are
there called on to reject the intellect in Philosophy on the grounds (1)
that, being originally developed in the services of practical needs, it
can at best tell us how to find our way about among the bodies around
us, and is thus debarred from knowing more than the _outsides_ of
things; (2) that its typical achievement is therefore geometry, and
geometry, _because it can measure only straight lines_, necessarily
misconceives the true character of 'real duration'. Now, as to the first
point, I should have thought it obvious that the establishment of a
_modus vivendi_ with one's fellows has always been as much of a
practical need as the avoidance of stones and pit-falls, and the alleged
conclusion about the defects of the intellect does not therefore seem to
me to follow from M. Bergson's premisses, even if we had any reason, as
I do not see that we have, to accept the premisses. And as to the second
point, I would ask whether M. Bergson possesses a clock or a watch, and
if he has, how he supposes time is measured on them? He seems to me to
have forgotten the elementary fact that angles can be measured as well
as straight lines. (I might add that he makes the further curious
assumption that all geometry is metrical.) It may be that something
would be left of the Bergsonian philosophy if one eliminated the
consequences of these initial blunders, but I do not know what the
remainder would be. At any rate, the anti-intellectualism which M.
Bergson and his disciple, Professor Carr, seem to regard as fundamental
will have to go, unless different and better grounds can be found for
it. I must leave it to others to judge of the adequacy of this apology.
FOR REFERENCE
Varisco, _The Great Problem_ (Macmillan).
Varisco, _Know Thyself_ (Macmillan).
Aliotta, _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_ (Macmillan).
Bertrand Russell, _Our Knowledge of the External World_ (Open Court
Publishing Co.).
Bertrand Russell, _The Problems of Philosophy_ (Home University
Library).
A.N. Whitehead, _The Principles of Natural Knowledge_ (Cambridge Press).
G.E. Moore, _Ethics_ (H.U.L.).
W. McDougall, _Philosophy_ (H.U.L.).
A.N. Whitehead, _Introduction to Mathematics_ (H.U.L.).
III
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
F.B. JEVONS
The living beings that exist or have existed upon the earth are of kinds
innumerable; and, in the opinion of man, the chief of them all is
mankind. Man, for the simple reason that he is man, is anthropomorphic
in all his judgements and not merely in his religious conceptions; he
holds himself to be the standard and measure in all things. If his right
so to regard himself were challenged, if he were called upon to justify
himself for having taken his foot as a unit of measurement, or his
fingers as the basis of his system of numbers, he might reply that
anything will serve as a standard for weights and measures, provided
that it never varies, but is always the same whenever referred to. But
the reply, valid though it is, does not do full justice to man: it
leaves room for the suspicion that a standard is something chosen by man
in a purely arbitrary manner and without reference to the facts of
nature. If that were really the case, then man's conception of himself
as superior to the other animals on earth might be but a prejudice of an
arbitrary kind. When, however, we consider, from the point of view of
evolution, the place of man among the other animals that occupy or have
occupied the earth, it is indubitable that the human organism is in
point of time the latest evolved and the human brain is in point of
complexity and efficiency the most highly developed. Further, the
evidence of embryology goes to show that the organism which has
eventually become human became so only by passing through successive
stages, each of which has its analogue in some of the existing forms of
animal life. Those forms of animal life exist side by side; and if we
conceive them to be represented diagrammatically by vertical lines,
differing in height according to their degree of evolution, the line
representing the human organism will be the tallest, and may be
considered to have become the tallest by successive increments or stages
corresponding to the height of the various other parallel vertical
lines.
When the conception of evolution, which had been employed to explain the
origin of species and the descent of man, and which had been gained by a
consideration of material organisms, came to be applied to the world of
man's thoughts, to the non-material and spiritual domain, and to be used
for the purpose of explaining the growth and the development of
religion, it was natural that the conception which had proved so
valuable in the one case should be applied without modification to the
other--as natural as that the first railway coach should be built on the
model of the stagecoach. The possibility that the theory of evolution
might itself evolve, and in evolving change, was one that was not, and
at that time could hardly be, present to the minds of those who were
extending the theory and in the process of extending it were developing
it. Yet the possibility was there, implicit in the very conception of
evolution, which involves continuous change--change in continuity and
continuity in change.
Any and every attempt to trace the evolution of religion seems at first
necessarily to involve the assumption that from the beginning religion
was there to be evolved. That was the position assumed by Robertson
Smith in _The Religion of the Semites_, which appeared in 1889. At that
date the aborigines of Australia were supposed to represent the human
race in its lowest and its earliest stage of development. In them,
therefore, if anywhere, we might expect to find what would be religion
in its lowest and earliest stage indeed but still religion. Reduced to
its lowest terms, religion, it was felt at first, must imply at least
belief in a god and communion with him. If, therefore, religion was to
be found amongst the representatives of the lowest and earliest stage in
the evolution of humanity, belief in a god and communion with him must
there be found. He who seeks finds. Robertson Smith found amongst the
Australians totem-gods and sacramental rites. Indeed, it was at that
time the belief universally held by students of the science of religion
that in Australia a totem was a god and a god might be a totem. It was
conjectured by Robertson Smith that in Australia the totem animal or
plant was eaten sacramentally. Since, then, the totem in Australia was
held to be both the god and the animal or plant in which the god
manifested himself, it followed that in Australia we had, preserved to
this day, the earliest form of sacrifice--that in which the totem animal
was itself the totem god to whom it was offered as a sacrifice, and was
itself--or rather himself--the sacramental meal furnished to his
worshippers. The totem was eaten, it was conjectured, with the object of
acquiring the qualities of the divine creature, or of absorbing them
into the person of the worshipper. That the totem was eaten
sacramentally rested, as has just been said, on the conjecture made by
Robertson Smith in 1889; but in 1899 Dr. (now Sir James) Frazer declared
that, thanks to the investigations of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, 'here,
in the heart of Australia, among the most primitive savages known to
us, we find the actual observance of that totem sacrament which
Robertson Smith, with the intuition of genius, divined years ago, but of
which positive examples have hitherto been wanting.'
On the foundation thus laid by the intuition of Robertson Smith and
approved in 1899 by Sir James Frazer, a simple and complete theory of
the evolution of religion was possible. In any one tribe there were
several totem-kins. The totem of each kin was divine, but the
personality of a totem was so undeveloped in conception that, though it
might, and on the theory did, develop into a deity, it was originally
more of the nature of a spirit than a god, and totemism proper might
easily pass into polydaemonism, that is a system in which the beings
worshipped were conceived to possess a personality more clearly defined
than that attributed to totems but less developed than that assigned to
deities. From the beginning each tribe had worshipped a plurality of
totems; it was, therefore, readily intelligible that, as these totems
came to be credited with more and more definite and developed
personality, the plurality of totems became not only a polydaemonism,
but afterwards a plurality of deities, and a system of polytheism came
to be established. From polytheism then, amongst the Israelites,
monotheism was conceived to have been gradually developed.
On this theory the evolution of religion was, if we may so describe it,
linear or rectilinear: the process consisted in a series of successive
stages. In some cases, as for instance among the aborigines of
Australia, it never rose higher than its starting-point, totemism; in
others, as for instance in Samoa, it became polytheism without ceasing
to be totemism; in others again, as for instance amongst the Aryan
peoples, it became so completely polytheistic that even conjecture can
discover but few indications or 'survivals' of the totemism from which
it is supposed to have developed; and the polytheism of the Israelites
was so completely superseded by monotheism that the very existence of an
earlier stage of polytheism could be as strenuously denied in their case
as the pre-existence of totemism could be denied amongst the
polytheistic Aryans. Nevertheless the theory was that if we represent
the growth of the various religions of the world diagrammatically by
vertical lines parallel to one another but of various lengths, one line
standing for totemism, a longer line for polydaemonism, a still longer
one for polytheism, and the longest of all for monotheism, we should see
that the line of growth has been the same in all cases, and that it is
in their length, or (shall we say?) in their height alone that the
various lines differ, and that the longest line culminates in monotheism
only because it has been, so to speak, pulled out in the same way that a
telescope when closed, may be extended. The evolution of religion on
this view has been a process literally of 'evolution' or unfolding: the
idea of a god and of communion with him has been present from the
beginning; and, much though religion may have changed, it remains to the
end essentially the same thing. This view of the process of religious
evolution we may fairly term 'the pre-formation theory'; for on this
theory each stage is pre-formed in the stage immediately preceding it,
and in the earliest stage of all were all succeeding stages contained
pre-formed, though it depended on circumstances whether the seed should
spring up, and how many stages of its growth it should accomplish.
Robertson Smith's theory of the evolution of religion is in effect a
form of the pre-formation theory, and is liable to the same difficulties
as dog the theory of pre-formation in all its applications. On the
theory, if we cut open a seed we should find within it the plant
pre-formed; if we analyse totemism, the seed from which, in Robertson
Smith's view, all other forms of religion have grown in orderly
succession one after the other, we find in it religion in all its stages
pre-formed. In fact, however, if we cut open an acorn we do not find a
miniature oak-tree inside. The presumption, therefore, is that neither
in totemism, if we dissect it, shall we find religion pre-formed.
Indeed, there is the possibility that totemism, on dissection, will be
found to have no such content--that the hope or expectation of finding
anything in it is as vain, is as much doomed to disappointment, as is
the expectation of the child who cuts open his drum, thinking to find
inside it something which produces the sound.
It was, however, not on _a priori_ grounds like these that Sir James
Frazer was led eventually to combat and deny the existence, 'in the
heart of Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us' of
'that totem sacrament which', in 1899 he declared, 'Robertson Smith,
with the intuition of genius' had divined years before it was actually
observed. It was by the evidence of new facts, discovered by Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen, that Sir James Frazer was compelled to abandon
Robertson Smith's theory of the evolution of religion. Robertson Smith
had seen, or had thought he saw, amongst the Australians sacramental
rites and the worship of totem gods. Sir James Frazer is now compelled
by the evidence of the facts to hold that in what he calls 'pure
totemism', i.e., in totemism as we find it in Australia, 'there is
nothing that can properly be described as worship of the totems.
Sacrifices are not presented to them, nor prayers offered, nor temples
built, nor priests appointed to minister to them. In a word, totems pure
and simple are never gods, but merely species of natural objects,
united by certain intimate and mystic ties to groups of men.' It seems,
therefore, according to Frazer, that in totemism, when dissected, there
is no religion, just as in the child's drum, when cut open, there
is--nothing. Yet, we may reflect, on the battle-field from a drum
proceeds a great and glorious sound, inspiring men to noble deeds.
Whereas _ex nihilo nil fit_: from nothing naturally nothing comes. If,
however, something does come, it is not from nothing that it comes.
Amongst the most primitive savages known to us, men are united to their
totems, as Frazer admits, by 'certain intimate and mystic ties'.
What then is it in totemism from which, on Sir James Frazer's view,
something comes? We might, perhaps, have expected that it was from the
'mystic' bond uniting man with the world which is not only around him
but of which he is part, and in which he lives and moves and has his
being. To say so, however, would be to admit that in totemism there was
something not only 'mystic' but potentially religious. And Sir James
Frazer does not follow that line of thought, so dangerous in his view.
On the contrary, he maintains that 'the aspect of the totemic system,
which we have hitherto been accustomed to describe as religious,
deserves rather to be called magical'. The totem rites which Robertson
Smith had interpreted as being sacramental and as being intended as a
means of communion with the totem-gods Sir James Frazer regards as
merely magical: 'totemism,' he says, 'is merely an organized system of
magic intended to secure a supply of food.'
We may remark, in passing, that if totemism is 'mere' magic, there is
indeed (as Sir James holds) no worship in totemism, but in that case in
totemism there can be no such 'intimate and mystic ties' between the
totem and the totem-kin as Sir James at first maintained there was. But
be that as it may, according to Sir James Frazer, 'in the heart of
Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us,' we find
totemism; and totemism on examination proves to be 'merely an organized
system of magic'. If now we start by assuming these premisses, or by
granting these postulates for the sake of argument, we can, indeed,
erect on them a theory of the evolution of religion. But if we so start,
we must do as Sir James Frazer did in the first edition of _The Golden
Bough_: we must hold that religion is but a developed form of magic. _En
route_ it may have changed considerably in appearance, but in fact and
fundamentally it remains the same thing. In all the lower forms of
religion, and in most of the higher, there are practices which are by
common consent and beyond doubt magical. This indisputable fact lends
colour to the view that religion was in its origin nothing but magic,
and that religion is, to those who can see the facts as they are,
nothing but magic to this day: the magician was but a priest, and the
priest, claiming superhuman power, is but a magician still. Prayers were
at first but spells, and even now are supposed, by simple repetition, to
produce their effects.
If against this view it be objected that one of the most constant facts
in the history of all religions, from the lowest to the highest, is that
religion has at all times carried on war against sorcery, witchcraft,
and magic, that in the lowest stages of man's evolution witches have
been 'smelt out' by the witch-finder, and that in the higher stages of
civilization witches have been persecuted, tortured, and burnt, the
reply made to the objection is that the war against witchcraft and magic
is due simply to the jealousy and resentment which regular practitioners
of any art, e.g., medicine, have ever displayed and do still display
towards irregular, unprofessional practitioners. This reply, however, is
now generally admitted to be one which it is impossible to accept in
the case of religion for the simple reason that it does not account for
the facts. The plain fact which wrecks this attempted explanation is
that magic is punished and witches are burnt not because witch-finders
or priests are jealous of them, but because the community dreads them
and feels their very existence to be a danger. It is the community which
feels the world of difference there is between magic and religion.
The attraction of the view that religion is but magic under another
name, that prayers are to the end but spells, that 'priest' is but
'magician' written differently, is that it is a simplicist theory. It
simplifies things. It exhibits religion as evolved out of magic and as
containing at the end nothing more or other than was present at the
beginning in magic. It is but a variant of the pre-formation theory of
the evolution of religion. In fine, the notion that in magic we have
religion pre-formed is the counterpart of the idea that we can find
religion pre-formed in totemism. In both cases we secure continuity in
the process of evolution apparently, but the continuity secured is
appearance merely and is gained only at the price of ignoring the facts.
It is not surprising, therefore, that in the later, enlarged editions of
_The Golden Bough_, Sir James Frazer has given up the view that religion
evolved out of magic, being moved thereto by the fact, as he says, that
there is 'a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle
between magic and religion'. There is, in Frazer's present view, no
continuity between the magic which came first and the religion which
came ages later: between them is an absolute breach of continuity, a
fundamental distinction, an opposition of principle. 'The principles of
thought on which magic is based,' Frazer says, 'resolve themselves into
two: first, that like produces like; and, second, that things which
have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each
other.' These beliefs are due to the association of ideas: if two things
are more or less like one another, or if two things have gone together
in our experience of the past, the sight of the one will make us think
of the other and expect to find it. So strong is the expectation which
is thus created that in the savage it amounts to absolute belief; and
magic consists in acting on that belief, in setting like to produce
like, with the firm conviction that thus (by magic) man can obtain all
that he desires. For long ages, according to Frazer, man acted on that
belief, and only eventually did he discover that magic did not always
act. This discovery set him thinking and led him to the inference that
at work in the world there must be supernatural powers or beings, that
the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings
superior to man. And that inference, according to Sir James Frazer's
definition, constitutes religion.
The fundamental distinction, then, and even opposition of principle
between magic and religion, is that in the one case man thinks that he
can gain all that he desires by means of magic, and that in the other he
turns with offerings and supplication to the personal beings superior to
man whom he imagines to control the course of nature and of human life.
Whether the distinction which Sir James Frazer draws between magic and
religion will hold depends partly on whether his definitions of magic
and religion are acceptable. In his account of magic there at least
appears to be some confusion of thought. On the one hand, he says, 'it
must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put
forward by the magician, as such, is false; not one of them can be
maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.' This
pronouncement makes it easy for us to understand that even the savage
would eventually find magic an unsatisfactory method of gratifying his
desires, a deception in fact. On the other hand, Sir James apparently
contradicts himself, that is to say, he denies that every single
profession or claim put forward by the magician is false, and says,
'however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians
and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the
original institution of this class of man has, take it all in all, been
productive of incalculable good to humanity.' The ground for this second
pronouncement, so contradictory of the first, is that magicians, Sir
James tells us, 'were the direct predecessors, not merely of our
physicians and surgeons but of our investigators and discoverers in
every branch of natural science.' Thus, though he no longer regards
priests as transmogrified magicians, he does regard magicians as the
earliest men of science, and does regard science, therefore, as a highly
developed stage of magic. This view logically follows from the premisses
from which it starts; and if it is felt to be unacceptable, we shall
naturally be inclined to scrutinize the premisses once more and more
carefully. When we do so scrutinize them, we see that the principles of
thought on which Sir James Frazer assumes magic to be based are in
effect the principles from which science started: they are the beliefs
that like produces like--the basis of the law of causation--and that
things which our experience shows to have gone together in the past tend
always to go together--which is one way of stating our belief in the
uniformity of nature. If then these principles of thought are the
principles on which magic as well as science is based, then science and
magic are the same thing, and we have only to choose whether we will
say that magic is not magic but undeveloped science, or that science is
not science but merely magic transmogrified. Thus, the pre-formation
theory once more reasserts itself: magic is the seed in which science is
prefigured or pre-formed.
If we wish to escape from this conclusion, if we wish to maintain the
validity of science and yet always to remember 'that every single
profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false--not
one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or
unconscious', we must consider whether Sir James Frazer's account of
magic, according to which the principles of magic are identical with
those of science, is the only account that can be given of magic; and
for that purpose we may contrast it with the view of Wilhelm Wundt. But
before doing so, since Sir James Frazer holds that there is 'a
fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic
and religion', it will be well to try to see not only what he means by
magic, but also whether his description or definition of religion is
acceptable.
Whereas Robertson Smith held that religion, reduced to its very lowest
terms, must imply at least belief in a god and communion with him,
Frazer considers religion to be the belief that the course of nature and
of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man. By the
one view stress is laid on the mystic side of religion, on the communion
which is effected through sacrifice; by the other view stress is laid on
the power which the gods may be induced by prayer and supplication to
exercise for the benefit of man. Our first reflection, therefore, is
that any view of religion, to be comprehensive, cannot confine itself to
either of these aspects singly, but must find room for both--for both
prayer and sacrifice. They cannot be mutually exclusive, nor can they
be simply juxtaposed, as though they were atoms unrelated to one
another, accidental neighbours in the same district. There must be a
higher unity, not created by or subsequent to the coalescence of
elements originally independent of each other, but a higher unity of
which both prayer and sacrifice are manifestations. This higher unity, I
venture to suggest, is the first principle of religion; and, if it is
not explicitly recognized as the first principle of religion either by
Robertson Smith or by Frazer, that may well be because their attention
is concentrated on the earlier stages in the evolution of religion, when
as yet it is not conspicuous and is, therefore, though in fact
operative, liable to be overlooked. As Ferrier has said, 'first
principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate
largely and powerfully long before they come to the surface of human
thought and are articulately expounded.' What then is the first
principle of religion which only after long ages of evolution rose to
the surface of human thought, and which, though it had been operative
largely and powerfully, came only in the slow course of human evolution
to be articulately expounded? The first principle of religion is
love--love of one's neighbour and one's God.
In the light of that first principle it is manifest that prayer and
sacrifice are not fundamentally unrelated and accidentally juxtaposed: a
sacrifice accompanied not even by unspoken prayer, prompted by no
desire, no wish for anything whatever, is a meaningless concept. Equally
unmeaning and unintelligible is the idea of a prayer which involves no
sacrifice--whether by sacrifice we understand the offering of gifts or
the sacrifice of self. But perhaps it may be said that, even though love
alone can lead to sacrifice of self, still it is undeniable that prayers
may be put up and sacrifices be offered by a man for the sake of what he
is going to get by doing so; and that that is what Sir James Frazer
means when he sees in religion the belief that beings superior to man
may be induced by prayer so to order things that man may get his heart's
desire. Then, indeed, we get a continuity of evolution, a continuity
between magic and religion, which Frazer perhaps did not intend wholly
to deny: that is to say the continuous thread running through both magic
and religion and uniting them is desire. Desire is continuous, though
the means of gratifying it change. In one stage of evolution magic is
the means; in another, religion. But throughout we find the process of
evolution to be continuous--change in continuity and continuity in
change.
Now it is indeed undeniable that prayer and sacrifice may be made by a
man for the sake of what he is going to get, and may from the beginning
have been made, partly at least, from that motive. But if evolution in
one of its aspects is change, then one of the changes brought about by
evolution in religion is precisely that prayer and sacrifice come to be
regarded as no longer a means whereby a man can get his desires
accomplished--his will done--but as the indispensable condition for
doing God's will. Prayer then becomes communion with God, and the
sacrifice of self the living exhibition of love--the first principle of
religion, the principle which manifests itself now in prayer and now in
sacrifice.
From this point of view, then, Sir James Frazer's account of religion
will be considered unacceptable: it makes religion and magic alike but
means whereby man has--vainly--sought to satisfy desire. And the
implication is that the day of both alike is over. But if Frazer's
account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open
to criticism. He wavers between two opinions about magic: at one time he
regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from
which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic
fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally
different from religion. When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and
science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like
produces like): magic is based, he says, upon 'the views of natural
causation embraced by the savage magician'. On the other hand, according
to Wilhelm Wundt in his _Völkerpsychologie_, primitive man has no notion
whatever of natural causation: primitive man, Wundt says, has only one
way of accounting for events--if something happens, somebody did it. If
any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents
itself to the savage mind, who did it? How any one could contrive to
make the man fall ill and die is, to the man's relations, thoroughly and
disquietingly mysterious. The one thing clear to them is that somebody
possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power. The
person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or
most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in
some way--in his appearance or habits--from the average member of the
community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this
mysterious and dreadful power. Such a person, according to Wundt, is a
magician. Such an event is a marvel: so long as it is supposed to be
brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as,
according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to
be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.
If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental
distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of
principles. The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be,
as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its
validity. In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any
principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something
happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the
power to do it.
Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at
one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age
of magic. But Wundt's view that marvels are magic when supposed to have
been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god
or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is
found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in
miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that
the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of
religion. This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at
least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to
account for the origin of species: different though reptiles are from
birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common
ancestor, the archaeopteryx. If this instance be taken as typical of the
process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so
to speak, linear or rectilinear, but--to use M. Bergson's
word--'dispersive'. To suppose that religion is descended from magic
would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from
reptiles or man from the monkey. The true view will be that the course
of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same
direction, not a succession of stages, but is 'dispersive', that from a
common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different
directions. The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it
runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from
the same point.
If we apply this conception of evolution in general to the evolution of
religion in particular--and Bergson, I should say, does not--then the
centre of dispersion, common to all religions, is the heart of man. The
forms of religion evolving, emanating and radiating from that common
centre are, let us say, fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. If we
wish to avoid, in the theory of religious evolution, an error analogous
to that of supposing birds to be descended from reptiles, we must
decline to suppose that monotheism is simply polytheism evolved, or that
polytheism is descended from fetishism. We must consider that each of
these three forms of religion is terminal, in the sense that no one of
them leads on to, or passes into, either of the other two. All three
forms of religious life may, and indeed do, exist side by side with one
another, just as the countless forms of physical life may be found
existing side by side. The foraminifera exist now, as they existed
millions of years ago; but the fact that they co-exist with higher forms
of physical life does not show that the higher forms of life are but
foraminifera in a more highly evolved form. Similarly, the fact that
fetishism exists side by side with polytheism, or polytheism with
monotheism, does not show that one is but a higher form of another: we
must consider each to be a terminal form, as incapable of producing
another, as it is impossible to conceive that the serpent develops into
the dove.
The common centre and starting-point of fetishism, polytheism, and
monotheism on this view (the 'dispersive' view) of the evolution of
religion lies in the heart of man, in a consciousness, originally vague
in the extreme, of the personality and superiority to man of the being
or object worshipped. In all these three forms of religion there is
worship, and in all three forms the being worshipped is personal.
Further, a special tie is felt to exist between the worshipper and the
personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and
it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by
its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons,
human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds
expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which
are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep
together, the worshippers and their god. This communion however is not
merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the
conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would
not have had strength to do.
If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre,
the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the
starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though
in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from
the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to
become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy
between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly.
Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference,
which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us,
Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in
practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two
categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild
confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the
dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In
ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle
itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in
throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be,
the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the
lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by
priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from
one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently,
that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The
truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from
magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and
that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of
his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to
control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working
magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God's will, not his own,
that man finds peace at the last.
In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into
account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a
personal relation--a relation between the human personality and some
personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and
groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him.
But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human
heart in which this does not seem to be the case--and that is Buddhism.
The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow
his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was
useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man
can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only
by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and
hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without
the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics
the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and
the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because,
whether there be gods or not, at any rate there is no human personality.
As in a conflagration--and according to the Buddha the whole world,
burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration--the flames leap
from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations
the self, or rather the character, _Karman_, like a flame, leaps from
one form of existence to another. The flame indeed appears to be there
all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is
changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I'
have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as
long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so
long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of
transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for
being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the
extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded
in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death
and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana.
Thus, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is
a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it
radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other
religion. The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion
shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever
Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who
strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of gods, has
himself become a god to whom prayer and worship are addressed. Whether
in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has
been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.
Buddhism, however, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of
religion, is not the only radiation from the common centre, of which we
have to take account, in addition to fetishism, polytheism, and
monotheism. From the human heart also proceeds 'the religion of
humanity', the Positivist Church. Here, as originally in Buddhism, the
conception of a divine personality plays no part; but here the human
personality, the very existence of which is denied by the Buddha, is
raised to a high, indeed to the highest, level. There is no such thing
as an individual, if by 'individual' is meant a man existing solely by
himself, for a man can neither come into existence nor continue in
existence by himself alone. It is an essential part of the conception of
personality that it includes fellowship: a person to be a person must
stand in some relation to other persons. They are presented to him, the
subject, as objects of his awareness; and he, the subject, is also an
object of their awareness. Humanity is thus a complex, in which alone
persons are found and apart from which they have in fact no existence.
Humanity thus plays in Positivism, as a religion, the part of 'the great
Being', _le grand Être_, which in other religions is fulfilled by God,
but with this difference, that humanity is human always and never
divine.
The ruler of a country steers the ship of state, but he is a pilot only
metaphorically. Whether the terms worship and prayer are used more than
metaphorically by the Positivist seems hard to decide. On the one hand,
if it is felt that worship and prayer are indispensable to religion, it
may be argued that in religions other than Positivism they prove not
only on analysis, but in the course of history, to be, as by Positivism
they are recognized to be, of purely subjective import. On the other
hard, it may be that they provide merely a means of transition from the
religions of the past to the religion of the future.
Another matter of interest is the place of morality in Positivism as a
religion. According to M. Alfred Loisy in his book _La Religion_,
morality and religion are bound up together. They cannot exist apart
from one another: they might, he says, 'be dissociated in fact and
thought, were it not that they are inseparable in the life of
humanity.' And in his view morality is summed up in the idea of duty. He
says, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity, and duty was
humanity. Duty was at the beginning in humanity. By it all things were
made, and without it nothing was made.' Thus, where duty is, there also
is religion. Not only, according to Loisy, has that always been so in
every stage through which the evolution of religion has passed, but it
will also be the case with the religion of the future. Thus the
conception of evolution which Loisy holds is the same as that
entertained by Robertson Smith, the difference being that, whereas on
the one view the idea of God and of communion with Him has been present
from the beginning, and, much though it may have changed, it remains to
the end the same thing; on the other view it is the idea of duty--the
duty which is humanity--that was in the beginning and will continue to
the end. Both views are applications of the 'pre-formation' theory of
evolution.
But Positivism perhaps is not necessarily tied to the 'pre-formation'
theory. It seems equally capable of being fitted in to the 'dispersive'
theory, and of being regarded as an emanation or radiation proceeding
direct from the human heart. It may be so regarded, if we consider the
essence of it to be found not in the concept of duty, which seems to
imply the existence of some superior who imposes duties on man, but in
that love of one's fellow-man which, to be love, must be given freely,
and simply because one loves. The sense of obligation, the feeling of
duty, obedience to the commandments of authority and to the prohibitions
which the community both enforces and obeys, are, all of them, various
expressions of the primitive feeling of taboo--a feeling of alarm and
fear. If we confine our attention to this set of facts, we may say,
with M. Loisy, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity'. We
may however hesitate to follow him when he goes on to say, 'by duty all
things were made, and without it nothing was made'. We may hesitate and
the Positivist may hesitate, because, primitive though the feeling of
fear may be, the feeling of love is equally original: on it and in it
the family and society have their base and their origin; and to it they
owe not only their origin but their continuance. Love however is not a
matter of duty and obedience; it is not subject to commandment or
prohibition; nor does it strive by commands or authority to enforce
itself. In the process by which duty--legal and moral
obligation--evolves out of the primitive feeling of taboo, love is not
implicated: love springs from its own source, the human heart, and runs
its own course. Taboo may have existed from the beginning; but to the
end, whatever its form--duty, obligation, obedience to authority--it
remains in character what it was at first, prohibitive, negative. Love
alone is creative: without it 'was not anything made that was made'.
There seems, therefore, no necessity to regard the 'pre-formation'
theory of evolution, rather than the 'dispersive theory, as essential to
Positivism.
Common to all the views about the evolution of religion that have been
mentioned in this paper is the belief that, the more religion changes,
the more it remains the same thing. If identified with duty, then duty
it was in the beginning, and duty it will remain to the end. For those
who conceive it to be merely magic, magic it was and magic it remains.
Those who define it as belief in a god and communion with him find that
belief in the earliest as well as the latest stages. All would agree in
rejecting Bergson's view of evolution--that in evolution there is
change, but nothing which changes. All would agree that in the evolution
of religion there is something which, change though it may, remains the
same thing, and that is religion itself. But on the question what
religion is, there is no agreement: no definition of religion as
yet--and there have been many attempts to define it--has gained general
acceptance. We may even surmise, and admit, that no attempt ever will be
successful. Such admission, indeed, may at first to some seem equivalent
to admitting that religion is a nullity, and the admission may
accordingly be welcomed or rejected. But a moment's reflection will show
that the admission has no such consequence. None of our simple feelings
can be defined: pleasure and pain can neither be defined; nor, when
experienced, doubted. And some of our general terms, those at any rate
which are ultimate, are beyond our power either to define or doubt: no
one imagines that 'life' can be defined, but no one doubts its
existence. And religion both as a term and as a fact of experience is
ultimate, and, because ultimate, incapable of definition. It is not to
be defined but only to be felt. It is an affair not merely of the
intellect, but still more of the heart.
In what sense, then, can we speak of the evolution of religion?
Evolution implies change; and no one doubts that there have been changes
in religion. No one can imagine that it has from the beginning till now
remained identically the same. What seems conceivable is that throughout
there has been, not identity but continuity--change indeed in continuity
but also continuity in change. The child 'learns to speak the words and
think the ideas, to reproduce the mode of thought, as he does the form
of speech' of the community into which he is born. In the speech,
thought, and feelings--even in the religious feelings--of the community,
from generation to generation, there is continuity, but not identity.
From generation to generation they are not identical but are
continuously changing; and they change because each child who takes them
over reproduces them; and, in reproducing them, changes them, not much
in most cases, but very considerably in the case of men of genius and
the great religious reformers. The heart is the treasure-house in which
not only old things are stored, but from which also new things are
brought forth. The process of evolution implies indeed that the old
things, though not everlasting, persist for a time; but it also implies
the manifestation of that which, though continuous with the old, is at
the same time new. It is from the heart of man, of some one man, that
what is new proceeds: the community it is which is conservative of the
old. The heart of man, or man himself, exhibits both change in
continuity and continuity in change.
The acorn, the sapling, and the oak are different stages of one
continuous process. But it is the same tree throughout the whole
process. So, too, perhaps it may be said, religion is a term which
includes or is applicable to all stages in the one process, and not to
the stage of monotheism alone, or of polytheism alone, or even to those
stages alone in which there is a reference to personal beings. Each of
these stages is a stage in the process of religion but no stage is by
itself the whole process. But this view of the evolution of religion
regards religion as though it were an organism, self-subsistent,
existing and evolving as independently of man as the oak-tree does;
whereas in truth religion has no such independent existence or
evolution. It is not from polytheism that monotheism proceeds; nor does
polytheism proceed from fetishism: it is from the heart of man that they
and all other forms of religion emanate and radiate. To conceive
fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism as three successive stages in one
process, to represent the evolution of religion by a straight line
marked off into three parts, or any other number of parts, is to forget
that they do not produce one another but that each emanates from the
heart of man. The fact that they emanate in temporal succession does not
prove that one springs from the other.
Nor can we say that values--religious or aesthetic--are to be determined
on the simple principle that the latest edition is the best. To say that
an _editio princeps_ has value only for the bibliophile is to admit that
all values are personal, as are all thoughts and all feelings, all
goodness and all love.
FOR REFERENCE
Robertson Smith, _The Religion of the Semites_ (A. & C. Black, 1889).
J.G. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_ (Macmillan & Co., 1890-1915).
Grant Allen, _The Evolution of the Idea of God_ (Grant Richards, 1897).
H. Bergson, _L'Évolution créatrice_ (F. Alcan, 1908).
F.B. Jevons, _The Idea of God in Early Religions_ (1910), and
_Comparative Religion_ (1913) (Cambridge University Press).
G.F. Moore, _History of Religions_ (T. & T. Clark, 1914).
A. Loisy, _La Religion_ (E. Nourry, 1917).
IV
RECENT TENDENCIES IN EUROPEAN POETRY
WITH OCCASIONAL REFERENCES TO THE NOVEL, DRAMA, AND CRITICISM
PROFESSOR C.H. HERFORD
When Matthew Arnold declared that every age receives its best
interpretation in its poetry, he was making a remark hardly conceivable
before the century in which it was made. Poetry in the nineteenth
century was, on the whole, more charged with meaning, more rooted in the
stuff of humanity and the heart of nature, less a mere province of
_belles-lettres_ than ever before. Consciously or unconsciously it
reflected the main currents in the mentality of European man, and the
reflection was often most clear where it was least conscious. Two of
these main currents are:
(1) The vast and steady enlargement of our knowledge of the compass, the
history, the potencies, of Man, Nature, the World.
(2) The growth in our sense of the _worth_ of every part of existence.
Certain aspects of these two processes are popularly known as 'the
advance of science', and 'the growth of democracy'. But how far
'science' reaches beyond the laboratory and the philosopher's study, and
'democracy' beyond political freedom and the ballot-box, is precisely
what poetry compels us to understand; and not least the poetry of the
last sixty years with which we are to-day concerned.
How then does the history of poetry in Europe during these sixty years
stand in relation to these underlying processes? On the surface, at
least, it hardly resembles growth at all. In France above all--the
literary focus of Europe, and its sensitive thermometer--the movement of
poetry has been, on the surface, a succession of pronounced and even
fanatical schools, each born in reaction from its precursor, and
succumbing to the triumph of its successor. Yet a deeper scrutiny will
perceive that these warring artists were, in fact, groups of successive
discoverers, who each added something to the resources and the scope of
poetry, and also retained and silently adopted the discoveries of the
past; while the general line of advance is in the direction marked by
the two main currents I have described. Nowhere else is the succession
of phases so sharp and clear as in France. But since France does reflect
more sensitively than any other country the movement of the mind of
Europe, and since her own mind has, more than that of any other country,
radiated ideas and fashions out over the rest of Europe, these phases
are in fact traceable also, with all kinds of local and national
variations, in Italy and Spain, Germany and England, and I propose to
take this fact as the basis of our present very summary and diagrammatic
view. The three phases of the sixty years are roughly divided by the
years 1880 and 1900.
The first, most clearly seen in the French Parnassians, is in close, if
unconscious, sympathy with the temper of science. Poetry, brought to the
limit of expressive power, is used to express, with the utmost veracity,
precision, and impersonal self-suppression, the beauty and the tragedy
of the world. It sought Hellenic lucidity and Hellenic calm--in the
example most familiar to us, the Stoic calm and 'sad lucidity' of
Matthew Arnold.
The second, best seen in the French Symbolists, was directly hostile to
science. But they repelled its confident analysis of material reality in
the name of a part of reality which it ignored or denied, an immaterial
world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct
description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the
magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to
us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.'.
The third, still about us, and too various and incomplete for final
definition, is in closer sympathy with science, but, in great part, only
because science has itself found accommodation between nature and
spirit, a new ideality born of, and growing out of, the real. If the
first found Beauty, the end of art, in the plastic repose of sculpture,
and the second in the mysterious cadences of music, the poetry of the
twentieth century finds its ideal in life, in the creative evolution of
being, even in the mere things, the 'prosaic' pariahs of previous
poetry, on which our shaping wills are wreaked. We know it in poets
unlike one another but yet more unlike their predecessors, from
D'Annunzio and Dehmel and Claudel to our Georgian experimenters in the
poetry of paradox and adventure.
I. POETIC NATURALISM
The third quarter of the nineteenth century opened, in western Europe,
with a decided set-back for those who lived on dreams, and a
corresponding complacency among those who throve on facts. The political
and social revolution which swept the continent in 1848 and 1849, and
found ominous echoes here, was everywhere, for the time, defeated. The
discoveries of science in the third and fourth decades, resting on
calculation and experiment, were investing it with the formidable
prestige which it has never since lost; and both metaphysics and
theology reeled perceptibly under the blows delivered in its name. The
world exhibition of 1851 seemed to announce an age of settled
prosperity, peace, and progress.
In literature the counterpart of these phenomena was the revolt from
_Romanticism_, a movement, in its origins, of poetic liberation and
discovery, which had rejuvenated poetry in Germany and Italy, and yet
more signally in England and in France, but was now petering out in
emotional incoherence, deified impulse, and irresponsible caprice.
The revolt accordingly everywhere sought to bring literature into closer
conformity with reality; with reality as interpreted by science; and to
make art severe and precise. In the novel, Flaubert founded modern
naturalism with his enthralling picture of dull provincials, _Mme
Bovary_ (1857); two years later George Eliot tilted openly in _Adam
Bede_ against the romancers who put you off with marvellous pictures of
dragons, but could not draw the real horses and cattle before their
eyes.[3]
Realism, at once more unflinching and more profoundly poetic, and yet
penetrated, especially in Tolstoy and Dostoievsky, with an intensity of
moral conviction beside which the ethical fervour of George Eliot seems
an ineffectual fire, was one of the roots of the Russian Novel; which
also reached its climax in the third quarter of the century. But though
it concurred with analogous movements in the West, it drew little of
moment from them; even Turgenjev, a greater Maupassant in artistry, drew
his inner inspiration from wholly alien springs of Slavonic passion and
thought. And it was chiefly through them that the Russian novel later
helped to nourish the radically alien movement of Symbolism in France.
In drama, Ibsen broke away from the Romantic tradition of his country
with the iconoclastic energy of one who had spent his own unripe youth
in offering it a half-reluctant homage. The man of actuality in him
denounced the drama built upon the legends of the Scandinavian past--the
mark for him of a people of dreamers oblivious of the calls of the hour.
On the morrow of the disastrous (and for Norway in his view ignominious)
Danish war of 1864, his scorn rang out with prophetic intensity in the
fierce tirade of _Brand_. Happily for his art, revolt against romance in
him was united, more signally than in more than two or three of his
contemporaries, with the power of seizing and presenting contemporary
life. 'Realism' certainly expresses inadequately enough the genius of an
art like his, enormously alive rather than fundamentally like life, and
no less charged with purpose and idea than the work of the great
Russians, though under cover of reticences and irony little known to
them. The great series of prose dramas--from 1867 (_The League of
Youth_) onwards--with their experimental prelude _Love's Comedy_
(1863)--were to be for all Europe the most considerable literary event
of the fourth quarter of the century, and they generated affiliated
schools throughout the West. They did not indeed themselves remain
untouched by the general intellectual currents of the time, and it will
be noticed below that the later plays (from _The Lady of the Sea_
onward) betray affinities, like the Russian novel, with what is here
called the second phase of the European movement.
In Criticism, the showy generalizations of Villemain gave place to
Sainte-Beuve's series of essays towards a 'natural history of minds'[4]
and Taine's more sweeping attempt to explain literature by
environment.[5] Among ourselves, Meredith's _Essay on Comedy_ (1872)
brilliantly restated Molière's dictum that the comic is founded on the
real, and not on a fantastic distortion of it, while Matthew Arnold
applied alike to literature and to theology a critical insight
fertilized by his master Sainte-Beuve's delicate faculty for disengaging
the native quality of minds from the incrustations of tradition and
dogma.
In poetry the French Parnassians created the most brilliant poetry that
has, since Milton, been built upon erudition and impeccable art. Their
leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his _Poèmes antiques_
(1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent,
and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's
stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the
shade of Alfred de Musset--the Oscar Wilde of the later
Romantics[6]--who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled
his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new
poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating
the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci,
too, derisively contrasts the 'moonlight' of Romanticism--cold and
infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards--with the
benignant and fertilizing sunshine he sought to restore; for him, too,
the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant
flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among
us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning
calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of _Prometheus_
appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a
kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in
clear-cut form.
If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider
what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its
positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the
temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater
poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty--_pace_
Hogarth--there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly
limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered
and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the
limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.
Thus:
(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They
pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the
didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and
suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to
be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for
Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from
erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.
When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the
southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate
explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.
The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative
religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and
imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's
heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain's doom, and Erinnyes never, like
those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with
exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's
_Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild
asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.
In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning
becomes no less evidently poetry's honoured and indispensable ally.
Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds
felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation. Man,
too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Shelleyan humanity, and
becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German
musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fashioned in
a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.
Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and
for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia
and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which
focusses in a few lines (_Sophocles_, _Rahel_, _Heine_, _Obermann Once
More_) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.
(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged
sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable
artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are
convertible terms.' The Parnassian precision rested on the postulate
that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can
be adequately expressed, the analogue of the contemporary scientific
conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and
calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an
objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal
emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the
surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the
way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of
undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by
the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are
already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur
without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in
Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he
unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the
form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are
compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like
pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising
abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr.
William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to
the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as
sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does,
to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden
guardian-god recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head
laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying
ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.
In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it
did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the
naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we
should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those
economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the
sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of
Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most
of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in
my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before
all, in aesthetics classical poetry before all, in practice, frankness
and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli,
antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his
inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the
exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the
present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian
reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear
in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.
(3) Finally, the Parnassian poetry, like most contemporary science, was
in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some
of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte
de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times
steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of
silence, the sepulchre of the vanished gods, the human heart, seat of
dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory
universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had anticipated him.
In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for
theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to
Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn
to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the
pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a
fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing
roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles
of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the
unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these
poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the
anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but
the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the
passing of the gods, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.
Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the
anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was
one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor
Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's
genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a
poetry such as the Parnassian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal,
technically consummate--was at least one of the strings of his
many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works--the very crown and flower of
Hugo's production--belong to this decade, 1850-60,--the _Châtiments_,
_Contemplations_, and _Légende des Siècles_. I said advisedly, one
string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of
the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the
greatest qualities of Parnassian poetry were exemplified in many
splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity
which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as
illustration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first
phase the closing stanzas of his famous _Boaz Endormi_ in the _Légende_,
whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable
is substituted for the Alexandrine.[11]
'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite,
Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare,
Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where,
The sudden mystery of wakening light.
Boaz knew not that there a woman lay,
Nor Ruth what God desired of her could tell;
Fresh rose the perfume of the asphodel,
And tender breathed the dusk on Galgala.
Nuptial, august, and solemn was the night,
Angels no doubt were passing on the wing,
For now and then there floated glimmering
As it might be an azure plume in flight.
The low breathing of Boaz mingled there
With the soft murmur of the mossy rills.
It was the month when earth is debonnaire;
The lilies were in flower upon the hills.
Night compassed Boaz' slumber and Ruth's dreams,
The sheep-bells vaguely tinkled far and near;
Infinite love breathed from the starry sphere;
'Twas the still hour when lions seek the streams.
Ur and Jerimedeth were all at rest;
The stars enamelled the blue vault of sky;
Amid those flowers of darkness in the west
The crescent shone; and with half open eye
Ruth wondered, moveless, in her veils concealed,
What heavenly reaper, when the day was done
And harvest gathered in, had idly thrown
That golden sickle on the starry field.'
II. DREAM AND SYMBOL
The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a
symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some
degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the passing of
the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a
vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a
bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was assumed, not so
easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored
and analysed by the most consummate literary art.
Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood
on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of
mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the
workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany
herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first
organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so
near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been
solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.
In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently
going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led
poetry itself to emulate the marble impassivity of the scientific
temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective,
their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly
shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the
history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and
Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the
'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its
cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige
and importance from the outlying circumference of the sciences to their
very centre and core.
But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope
and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the
most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction
against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating
books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the
person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than
provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is
utterly beyond its power to discover.
Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant
literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We
know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the
fiery iconoclast passed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable
doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a
religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century
reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth
reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile
Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'.
And so it might well seem to him, the visionary mystic inhabiting, as
he did, a world of strange beauty and invisible mystery which science
could not unlock. The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but
they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which
language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally
real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the
'respectable' people whom we can measure and reckon with. Sometimes
these potencies are vaguely mysterious, an impalpable spirit speaking
only by hints and tokens; sometimes they are felt as the pulsations of
an intoxicating beauty, breaking forth in every flower, but which can
only be possessed, not described; sometimes they are moods of the soul,
beyond analysis, and yet full of wonder and beauty, visions half
created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been
described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like
the Parnassians. Verlaine and Mallarmé did not discover, but they
applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated
by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour,
their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases.
All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as
both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck!
Nothing but music and the nuance--all the rest is "Literature", mere
writing--futile verbosity!' that was the famous watchword of Verlaine's
creed.[12]
The strength of symbolism lay in this demand for a complete sincerity of
utterance. Its revolt against science was at the same time a vindication
of truth, an effort to get nearer to reality both by shedding off the
incrustations of habitual phrase and by calling into play the obscure
affinities by which it can be magically evoked. In the subtleties of
suggestion latent in sensations the symbolists were real discoverers.
But the way had already been pointed in famous verses by Baudelaire:
'Earth is a Temple, from whose pillared mazes
Murmurs confused of living utterance rise;
Therein Man thro' a forest of symbols paces,
That contemplate him with familiar eyes.
As prolonged echoes, wandering on and on,
At last in one far tenebrous depth unite,
Impalpable as darkness, and as light,
Scents, sounds, and colours meet in unison.'
There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long;
for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union
inspired the music drama of Wagner?--only one of his points of kinship,
as we shall see, with symbolism.
Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the
inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape',
said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false,
but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the
image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet
the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not
without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a
well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres;
or in the language of Samain's sonnet
'Feel flowing through them, like a pouring wave,
The music-tide of universal Soul;
Hear in their heart the beating pulse of heaven.'[13]
In the earlier poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck, the inner life imposes a
more jealous sway. The poet sits not before a transforming mirror, where
the outer world is disguised, but in a closed chamber, where it is only
dreamed of, and it fades into the incoherence and the irrelevance of a
dream. But the chamber is of rare beauty, and in its hushed and perfumed
twilight, dramas of the spirit are being silently and almost
imperceptibly enacted, more tragic than the loud passion and violence of
the stage. He has written an essay on Silence,--silence that, like
humility, holds for him a 'treasure' beyond the reach of eloquence or of
pride; for it is the dwelling of our true self, the spiritual core of
us, 'more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions or
of pure reason.' And so there is less matter for drama in 'a captain who
conquers in battle or a husband who avenges his honour than in an old
man, seated in his arm-chair waiting patiently with his lamp beside him,
giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his
house, interpreting without comprehending, the silence of door and
window, and the quivering voice of the light; submitting with bent head
to the presence of his soul and his destiny.'
It is on this side that symbolism discloses its kinship with the Russian
novel,--with the mystic quietism of Tolstoy and the religion of
self-sacrifice in Dostoievsky; and its sharp antagonism to the
Nietzschean gospel of daemonic will and ruthless self-assertion, just
then being preached in Germany. The two faiths were both alive and both
responded to deep though diverse needs of the time; but the immediate
future, as we shall see, belonged to the second. They had their first
resounding encounter when Nietzsche held up his once venerated master
Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from
the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless passion of
Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the
loveliness of the 'pure fool' Parzifal.
Outside France symbolism found eager response among young poets, but
rather as a literary than as an ethical doctrine. In Germany Dehmel, the
most powerful personality among her recent poets, began as a disciple of
Verlaine; in Italy, D'Annunzio wove esoteric symbols into the texture of
the more than Nietzschean supermanliness of his supermen and superwomen.
More significant than these, however, was the symbolism of what we call
the Celtic school of poets in Ireland. For here both their artistic
impressionism and their mystic spirituality found a congenial soil. The
principal mediating force was Mr. Arthur Symons, friend of Verlaine and
of Yeats, and himself the most penetrating interpreter of Symbolism,
both as critic and as poet.[14] And to the French influence was added
that of Blake, a poet too great to be included in any school, but allied
to symbolism by his scorn for 'intellect' and for rhetoric, and by his
audacities of figured speech. But Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.', the leaders of
the 'Celtic' group, are in no sense derivation voices. They had the
great advantage over the French of a living native folklore and faery
lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in
poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio
fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish
hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical
twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it,
is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever
young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can
touch:
'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Tho' hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill;
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.'
For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism.
The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But
this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary
phase to which I now turn.
III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'
1. _Philosophic Analogies_
Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the
drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or
hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an
eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard
Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national
idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the
least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the
analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become
peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,
and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and
of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with
brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their
thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with
the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope
and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making
_Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in
_Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a
line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a
perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the
mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best
merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important
particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes;
whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very
heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton
framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply
imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said
Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form,
contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative
Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly
congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he
restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the
nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely
suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a
formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital
impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for
existence'.
The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical
thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one
of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of
Schelling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in
his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured
and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the
founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid
clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly
development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old
schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic
reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for
immediate and first-hand experience.
And it did more. Beside and above Apollo, Nietzsche put Dionysus; beside
vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.
And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also
responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His
Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer
saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and
the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a
general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and
in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of
understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of
Wundt and Münsterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing
is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure,
and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create
faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power
which created the German empire and launched her on the career of
industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of
colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of
superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer
moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began
definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has
pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when
agnosticism seemed triumphant.
Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense
divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point
of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the
philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach
their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's
vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was
not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred,
however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as
creation, creation in which we take part--a conception which again, in
the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the
type of faith announced in that last--the Jamesian--'Variety' of
religious experience, which represents us as indispensable
fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.
2. _The New Freedom_
No reader of the poetry of our time can mistake the kinship of its
prevailing temper with that which lies at the root of these
philosophies. Without trying to fit its infinite variety to any finite
formula, we may yet venture to find in it, as Mr. McDowall has found in
our Georgian poetry in particular, a characteristic union of grip and
detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon
us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner
independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and
authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of
tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be
judged by its new mind. 'Youth is knocking at the door,' as it is said
of Hilda in the symbolical _Master Builder_, and doubtless in every
generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion
to make that remark. The difference in our time is rather that youth
comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up
to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary
household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of
the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public
inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting the universe, as
we have seen, precisely in sympathy with its own naïve intuitions. No
wonder that youth at twenty is writing its autobiography or having its
biography written, and that at twenty-five it makes a show of laying
down the pen, like Max Beerbaum, with the gesture of one rising sated
from the feast of life: 'I shall write no more.'
The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the
difference in temper between the new poets of freedom and the old. The
wild or wistful cry of Shelley for an ideal state emancipated from pain
and death is as remote from their poetry as his spiritual anarchy from
their politics; they can dream and see visions, in Scott's phrase, 'like
any one going', but their feet are on the solid ground of actuality and
citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no
less than their vision. When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his 'town
window' he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods;
but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway
ringing and moa
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