Rousseau and Romanticism

Wordsworth lauds in true Rousseauistic fashion a “wise passiveness.” But to be truly contemplative is not to be passive at all, but to be “energetic” in Aristotle’s sense, or strenuous in Buddha’s sense. It is a matter of no small import that the master analyst of the East and the master analyst of the West are at one in their solution of the supreme problem of ethics – the problem of happiness. For there can be no doubt that the energy[282 - See Book IX of the Nicomachean Ethics.] in which the doctrine of Aristotle culminates is the same as the “strenuousness”[283 - “All salutary conditions have their root in strenuousness” (appamāda), says Buddha.] on which Buddha puts his final emphasis. The highest good they both agree is a contemplative working. It is by thus working according to the human law that one rises above the naturalistic level. The scientific rationalists of the nineteenth century left no place for this true human spontaneity when they sought to subject man entirely to the “law for thing.” This scientific determinism was responsible for a great deal of spiritual depression and acedia, especially in France during the second half of the nineteenth century.[284 - See Masters of Modern French Criticism, Essay on Taine, passim. Paul Bourget in his Essais de Psychologie contemporaine (2 vols.) has followed out during this period the survivals of the older romantic melancholy and their reinforcement by scientific determinism.] But even if science is less dogmatic and absolute one needs to consider why it does not deserve to be given the supreme and central place in life, why it cannot in short take the place of humanism and religion, and the working according to the human law that they both enjoin.

A man may indeed effect through science a certain escape from himself, and this is very salutary so far as it goes; he has to discipline himself to an order that is quite independent of his own fancies and emotions. He becomes objective in short, but objective according to the natural and not according to the human law. Objectivity of this kind gives control over natural forces but it does not supply the purpose for which these forces are to be used. It gives the airship, for instance, but does not determine whether the airship is to go on some beneficent errand or is to scatter bombs on women and children. Science does not even set right limits to the faculty that it chiefly exercises – the intellect. In itself it stimulates rather than curbs one of the three main lusts to which human nature is subject – the lust of knowledge. Renan, who makes a religion of science, speaks of “sacred curiosity.” But this is even more dangerous than the opposite excess of the ascetic Christian who denounces all curiosity as vain. The man of science avers indeed that he does subordinate his knowledge to an adequate aim, namely the progress of humanity. But the humanity of the Baconian is only an intellectual abstraction just as the humanity of the Rousseauist is only an emotional dream. George Sand found, as we have seen, that the passage from one’s dream of humanity to humanity in the concrete involved a certain disillusion. The scientific or rationalistic humanitarian is subject to similar disillusions.[285 - “Le pauvre M. Arago, revenant un jour de l’Hôtel de Ville en 1848 après une épouvantable émeute, disait tristement à l’un de ses aides de camp au ministère de la marine: ‘En vérité ces gens-là ne sont pas raisonnables.’” Doudan, Lettres, IV, 338.] Science not only fails to set proper limits to the activity of the intellect, but one must also note a curious paradox in its relation to the second of the main lusts to which man is subject, the lust for emotion (libido sentiendi). The prime virtue of science is to be unemotional and at the same time keenly analytical. Now protracted and unemotional analysis finally creates a desire, as Renan says, for the opposite pole, “the kisses of the naïve being,” and in general for a frank surrender to the emotions. Science thus actually prepares clients for the Rousseauist.[286 - See Preface (pp. viii-ix) to his Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse and my comment in The New Laokoon, 207-08.] The man of science is also flattered by the Rousseauistic notion that conscience and virtue are themselves only forms of emotion. He is thus saved from anything so distasteful as having to subordinate his own scientific discipline to some superior religious or humanistic discipline. He often oscillates between the rationalistic and the emotional pole not only in other things but also in his cult of humanity. But if conscience is merely an emotion there is a cult that makes a more potent appeal to conscience than the cult of humanity itself and that is the cult of country. One is here at the root of the most dangerous of all the sham religions of the modern age – the religion of country, the frenzied nationalism that is now threatening to make an end of civilization itself.

Both emotional nationalism and emotional internationalism go back to Rousseau, but in his final emphasis he is an emotional nationalist;[287 - Most of the political implications of the point of view I am developing I am reserving for a volume I have in preparation to be entitled Democracy and Imperialism. Some of my conclusions will be found in two articles in the (New York) Nation: The Breakdown of Internationalism (June 17 and 24, 1915), and The Political Influence of Rousseau (Jan. 18, 1917).] and that is because he saw that patriotic “virtue” is a more potent intoxicant than the love of humanity. The demonstration came in the French Revolution which began as a great international movement on emotional lines and ended in imperialism and Napoleon Bonaparte. It is here that the terrible peril of a science that is pursued as an end in itself becomes manifest. It disciplines man and makes him efficient on the naturalistic level, but leaves him ethically undisciplined. Now in the absence of ethical discipline the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature – the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac. The final use of a science that has thus become a tool of the lust for power is in Burke’s phrase to “improve the mystery of murder.”

This union of material efficiency and ethical unrestraint, though in a way the upshot of the whole movement we have been studying, is especially marked in the modern German. Goethe as I have pointed out is ready to pardon Faust for grave violations of the moral law because of work which, so far from being ethical, is, in view of the ruin in which it involves the rustic pair, Baucis and Philemon, under suspicion of being positively unethical. Yet Goethe was far from being a pure utilitarian and he had reacted more than most Germans of his time from Rousseauism. Rousseau is glorified by Germans as a chief source of their Kultur, as I have already pointed out. Now Kultur when analyzed breaks up into two very different things – scientific efficiency and emotionalism or what the Germans (and unfortunately not the Germans alone) term “idealism.” There is no question about the relation of this idealism to the stream of tendency of which Rousseau is the chief representative. By his corruption of conscience Rousseau made it possible to identify character with temperament. It was easy for Fichte and others to take the next step and identify national character with national temperament. The Germans according to Fichte are all beautiful souls, the elect of nature. If they have no special word for character it is because to be a German and have character are synonymous. Character is something that gushes up from the primordial depths of the German’s being without any conscious effort on his part.[288 - Reden an die deutsche Nation, XII.] The members of a whole national group may thus flatter one another and inbreed their national “genius” in the romantic sense, and feel all the while that they are ecstatic “idealists”; yet as a result of the failure to refer their genius back to some ethical centre, to work, in other words, according to the human law, they may, so far as the members of other national groups are concerned, remain in a state of moral solitude.

Everything thus hinges on the meaning of the word work. In the abstract and metaphysical sense man can know nothing of unity. He may, however, by working in the human sense, by imposing, that is, due limits on his expansive desires, close up in some measure the gap in his own nature (the “civil war in the cave”) and so tend to become inwardly one. He may hope in the same way to escape from the solitude of his own ego, for the inner unity that he achieves through work is only an entering into possession of his ethical self, the self that he possesses in common with other men. Thus to work ethically is not only to become more unified and happy but also to move away from what is less permanent towards what is more permanent and therefore more peaceful in his total nature; so that the problem of happiness and the problem of peace turn out at last to be inseparable.

Souls, says Emerson, never meet; and it is true that a man never quite escapes from his solitude. That does not make the choice of direction any the less important. An infinite beckons to him on either hand. The one inspires the divine discontent, the other romantic restlessness. If instead of following the romantic lure he heeds the call from the opposite direction, he will not indeed attain to any perfect communion but he will be less solitary. Strictly speaking a man is never happy in the sense of being completely satisfied with the passing moment,[289 - I should perhaps allow for the happiness that may be experienced in moments of supernormal consciousness – something quite distinct from emotional or other intoxication. Fairly consistent testimony as to moments of this kind is found in the records of the past from the early Buddhists down to Tennyson.] or never, Dr. Johnson would add, except when he is drunk. The happiness of the sober and waking man resides, it may be, not in his content with the present moment but in the very effort that marks his passage from a lower to a higher ethical level.

The happiness of which Rousseau dreamed, it has been made plain, was not this active and ethical happiness, but rather the passive enjoyment of the beautiful moment – the moment that he would like to have last forever. After seeking for the beautiful moment in the intoxication of love, he turned as we have seen to pantheistic revery. “As long as it lasts,” he says of a moment of this kind, “one is self-sufficing like God.” Yes, but it does not last, and when he wakes from his dream of communion with nature, he is still solitary, still the prisoner of his ego. The pantheistic dreamer is passive in every sense. He is not working either according to the human or according to the natural law, and so is not gaining either in material or in ethical efficiency. In a world such as that in which we live this seems too much like picnicking on a battlefield. Rousseau could on occasion speak shrewdly on this point. He wrote to a youthful enthusiast who wished to come and live with him at Montmorency: “The first bit of advice I should like to give you is not to indulge in the taste you say you have for the contemplative life and which is only an indolence of the spirit reprehensible at every age and especially at yours. Man is not made to meditate but to act.”

The contemplative life is then, according to Rousseau, the opposite of action. But to contemplate is according to an Aristotle or a Buddha to engage in the most important form of action, the form that leads to happiness. To identify leisure and the contemplative life with pantheistic revery, as Rousseau does, is to fall into one of the most vicious of confusions. Perhaps indeed the most important contrast one can reach in a subject of this kind is that between a wise strenuousness and a more or less wise passiveness, between the spiritual athlete and the cosmic loafer, between a Saint Paul, let us say, and a Walt Whitman.

The spiritual idling and drifting of the Rousseauist would be less sinister if it did not coexist in the world of to-day with an intense material activity. The man who seeks happiness by work according to the natural law is to be rated higher than the man who seeks happiness in some form of emotional intoxication (including pantheistic revery). He is not left unarmed, a helpless dreamer in the battle of life. The type of efficiency he is acquiring also helps him to keep at bay man’s great enemy, ennui. An Edison, we may suppose, who is drawn ever onward by the lure of wonder and curiosity and power, has little time to be bored. It is surely better to escape from the boredom of life after the fashion of Edison than after the fashion of Baudelaire.[290 - I scarcely need say that I am speaking of the man of science only in so far as he is purely naturalistic in his point of view. There may enter into the total personality of Edison or any particular man of science other and very different elements.]

I have already pointed out, however, the peril in a one-sided working of this kind. It makes man efficient without making him ethical. It stimulates rather than corrects a fearless, formless expansion on the human level. This inordinate reaching out beyond bounds is, as the great Greek poets saw with such clearness, an invitation to Nemesis. The misery that results from unrestraint, from failure to work according to the human law, is something different from mere pain and far more to be dreaded; just as the happiness that results from a right working according to the human law is something different from mere pleasure and far more worthy of pursuit.

The present alliance between emotional romanticists and utilitarians[291 - M. René Berthelot has written a book on pragmatism and similar tendencies in contemporary philosophy entitled Un Romantisme utilitaire. I have not read it but the title alone is worth more than most books on the subject I have read.] is a veritable menace to civilization itself. It does not follow, as I said in a previous chapter, because revery or “intuition of the creative flux” cannot take the place of leisure or meditation, that one must therefore condemn it utterly. It may like other forms of romanticism have a place on the recreative side of life. What finally counts is work according to either the human or the natural law, but man cannot always be working. He needs moments of relief from tension and concentration and even, it should seem, of semi-oblivion of his conscious self. As one of the ways of winning such moments of relaxation and partial forgetfulness much may be said for revery. In general one must grant the solace and rich source of poetry that is found in communion with nature even though the final emphasis be put on communion with man. It is no small thing to be, as Arnold says Wordsworth was, a “priest of the wonder and bloom of the world.” One cannot however grant the Wordsworthian that to be a priest of wonder is necessarily to be also a priest of wisdom. Thus to promote to the supreme and central place something that is legitimate in its own degree, but secondary, is to risk starting a sham religion.

Those who have sought to set up a cult of love or beauty or science or humanity or country are open to the same objections as the votaries of nature. However important each of these things may be in its own place, it cannot properly be put in the supreme and central place for the simple reason that it does not involve any adequate conversion or discipline of man’s ordinary self to some ethical centre. I have tried to show that the sense of solitude or forlornness that is so striking a feature of romantic melancholy arises not only from a loss of hold on the traditional centres, but also from the failure of these new attempts at communion to keep their promises. The number of discomfitures of this kind in the period that has elapsed since the late eighteenth century, suggests that this period was even more than most periods an age of sophistry. Every age has had its false teachers, but possibly no age ever had so many dubious moralists as this, an incomparable series of false prophets from Rousseau himself down to Nietzsche and Tolstoy. It remains to sum up in a closing chapter the results of my whole inquiry and at the same time to discuss somewhat more specifically the bearing of my whole point of view, especially the idea of work according to the human law, upon the present situation.

CHAPTER X

THE PRESENT OUTLOOK

It has been my endeavor throughout this book to show that classic and romantic art, though both at their best highly imaginative, differ in the quality of the imagination. I pointed out in my first chapter that in his recoil from the intellectual romanticism of the Renaissance and the mediæval romanticism of actual adventure the neo-classicist came to rest his literary faith on “reason” (by which he meant either ordinary good sense or abstract reasoning), and then opposed this reason or judgment to imagination. This supposed opposition between reason and imagination was accepted by the romantic rebels against neo-classicism and has been an endless source of confusion to the present day. Though both neo-classicists and romanticists achieved much admirable work, work which is likely to have a permanent appeal, it is surely no small matter that they both failed on the whole to deal adequately with the imagination and its rôle whether in literature or life. Thus Dryden attributes the immortality of the Æneid to its being “a well-weighed judicious poem. Whereas poems which are produced by the vigor of imagination only have a gloss upon them at the first which time wears off, the works of judgment are like the diamond; the more they are polished, the more lustre they receive.”[292 - Dedication of the Æneis (1697).] Read on and you will find that Dryden thus stresses judgment by way of protest against the Cavalier Marini and the imaginative unrestraint that he and other intellectual romanticists display. Dryden thus obscures the fact that what gives the immortalizing touch to the Æneid is not mere judgment but imagination – a certain quality of imagination. Even the reader who is to enter properly into the spirit of Virgil needs more than judgment – he needs to possess in some measure the same quality of imagination. The romantic answer to the neo-classic distrust of the imagination was the apotheosis of the imagination, but without sufficient discrimination as to its quality, and this led only too often to an anarchy of the imagination – an anarchy associated, as we have seen, in the case of the Rousseauist, with emotion rather than with thought or action.

The modern world has thus tended to oscillate between extremes in its attitude towards the imagination, so that we still have to turn to ancient Greece for the best examples of works in which the imagination is at once disciplined and supreme. Aristotle, I pointed out, is doing little more than give an account of this Greek practice when he says that the poet ranks higher than the historian because he achieves a more general truth, but that he can achieve this more general truth only by being a master of illusion. Art in which the illusion is not disciplined to the higher reality counts at best on the recreative side of life. “Imagination,” says Poe, “feeling herself for once unshackled, roamed at will among the ever-changing wonders of a shadowy and unstable land.”[293 - Adventure of one Hans Pfaal.] To take seriously the creations of this type of imagination is to be on the way towards madness. Every madhouse, indeed, has inmates who are very imaginative in the fashion Poe here describes. We must not confuse the concentric or ethical with the eccentric imagination if we are to define rightly the terms classic and romantic or indeed to attain to sound criticism at all. My whole aim has been to show that a main stream of emotional sophistry that takes its rise in the eighteenth century and flows down through the nineteenth involves just such a confusion.

The general distinction between the two types of imagination would seem sufficiently clear. To apply the distinction concretely is, it must be admitted, a task infinitely difficult and delicate, a task that calls for the utmost degree of the esprit de finesse. In any particular case there enters an element of vital novelty. The relation of this vital novelty to the ethical or permanent element in life is something that cannot be determined by any process of abstract reasoning or by any rule of thumb; it is a matter of immediate perception. The art of the critic is thus hedged about with peculiar difficulties. It does not follow that Aristotle himself because he has laid down sound principles in his Poetics, would always have been right in applying them. Our evidence on this point is as a matter of fact somewhat scanty.

Having thus admitted the difficulty of the undertaking we may ourselves attempt a few concrete illustrations of how sound critical standards tended to suffer in connection with the romantic movement. Leaving aside for the moment certain larger aspects of the ethical imagination that I am going to discuss presently, let us confine ourselves to poetry. Inasmuch as the ethical imagination does not in itself give poetry but wisdom, various cases may evidently arise: a man may be wise without being poetical; he may be poetical without being wise; he may be both wise and poetical.

We may take as an example of the person who was wise without being poetical Dr. Johnson. Though most persons would grant that Dr. Johnson was not poetical, it is well to remember that this generalization has only the approximate truth that a literary generalization can have. The lines on Levet have been inserted and rightly in anthologies. If not on the whole poetical, Johnson was, as Boswell says, eminently fitted to be a “majestic teacher of moral and religious wisdom.” Few men have had a firmer grasp on the moral law or been freer from the various forms of sophistry that tend to obscure it. Unlike Socrates, however, of whom he reminds us at times by his ethical realism, Johnson rests his insight not on a positive but on a traditional basis. To say that Johnson was truly religious is only another way of saying that he was truly humble, and one of the reasons for his humility was his perception of the ease with which illusion in man passes over into delusion, and even into madness. His chapter on the “Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination” in “Rasselas” not only gives the key to that work but to much else in his writings. What he opposes to this dangerous prevalence of imagination is not a different type of imagination but the usual neo-classical reason or judgment or “sober probability.” His defence of wisdom against the gathering naturalistic sophistries of his time is therefore somewhat lacking in imaginative prestige. He seemed to be opposing innovation on purely formalistic and traditional grounds in an age which was more and more resolutely untraditional and which was determined above all to emancipate the imagination from its strait-jacket of formalism. Keats would not have hesitated to rank Johnson among those who “blasphemed the bright Lyrist to his face.”

Keats himself may serve as a type of the new imaginative spontaneity and of the new fullness and freshness of sensuous perception. If Johnson is wise without being poetical, Keats is poetical without being wise, and here again we need to remember that distinctions of this kind are only approximately true. Keats has written lines that have high seriousness. He has written other lines which without being wise seem to lay claim to wisdom – notably the lines in which, following Shaftesbury and other æsthetes, he identifies truth and beauty; an identification that was disproved for practical purposes at least as far back as the Trojan War. Helen was beautiful, but was neither good nor true. In general, however, Keats’s poetry is not sophistical. It is simply delightfully recreative. There are signs that Keats himself would not have been content in the long run with a purely recreative rôle – to be “the idle singer of an empty day.” Whether he would ever have achieved genuine ethical purpose is a question. In working out a wise view of life he did not, like Dante, have the support of a great and generally accepted tradition. It is not certain again that he would ever have developed the critical keenness that enabled a Sophocles to work out a wise view of life in a less traditional age than that of Dante. The evidence is rather that Keats would have succumbed, to his own poetical detriment, to some of the forms of sham wisdom current in his day, especially the new humanitarian evangel.[294 - His attempt to rewrite Hyperion from a humanitarian point of view is a dismal failure.]

In any case we may contrast Sophocles and Dante with Keats as examples of poets who were not merely poetical but wise – wise in the relative and imperfect sense in which it is vouchsafed to mortals to achieve wisdom. Sophocles and Dante are not perhaps more poetical than Keats – it is not easy to be more poetical than Keats. As Tennyson says, “there is something magic and of the innermost soul of poetry in almost everything he wrote.” Yet Sophocles and Dante are not only superior to Keats, but in virtue of the presence of the ethical imagination in their work, superior not merely in degree but in kind. Not that even Sophocles and Dante maintain themselves uniformly on the level of the ethical imagination. There are passages in Dante which are less imaginative than theological. Passages of this kind are even more numerous in Milton, a poet who on the whole is highly serious.[295 - There is also a strong idyllic element in Paradise Lost as Rousseau (Emile, V) and Schiller (Essay on Naïve and Sentimental Poetry) were among the first to point out. Critics may be found even to-day who, like Tennyson, prefer the passages which show a richly pastoral imagination to the passages where the ethical imagination is required but where it does not seem to prevail sufficiently over theology.] It is in general easy to be didactic, hard to achieve ethical insight.

If Keats is highly imaginative and poetic without on the whole rising to high seriousness or sinking to sophistry, Shelley, on the other hand, illustrates in his imaginative activity the confusion of values that was so fostered by romanticism. Here again I do not wish to be too absolute. Shelley has passages especially in his “Adonais” that are on a high level. Yet nothing is more certain than that the quality of his imagination is on the whole not ethical but Arcadian or pastoral. In the name of his Arcadia conceived as the “ideal” he refuses to face the facts of life. I have already spoken of the flimsiness of his “Prometheus Unbound” as a solution of the problem of evil. What is found in this play is the exact opposite of imaginative concentration on the human law. The imagination wanders irresponsibly in a region quite outside of normal human experience. We are hindered from enjoying the gorgeous iridescences of Shelley’s cloudland by Shelley’s own evident conviction that it is not a cloudland, an “intense inane,” but a true empyrean of the spirit. And our irritation at Shelley’s own confusion is further increased by the long train of his indiscreet admirers. Thus Professor C.H. Herford writes in the “Cambridge History of English Literature” that what Shelley has done in the “Prometheus Unbound,” is to give “magnificent expression to the faith of Plato and of Christ”![296 - XII, 74.] Such a statement in such a place is a veritable danger signal, an indication of some grave spiritual bewilderment in the present age. To show the inanity of these attempts to make a wise man of Shelley it is enough to compare him not with Plato and Christ, but with the poet whom he set out at once to continue and contradict – with Æschylus. The “Prometheus Bound” has the informing ethical imagination that the “Prometheus Unbound” lacks, and so in its total structure belongs to an entirely different order of art. Shelley, indeed, has admirable details. The romanticism of nympholeptic longing may almost be said to culminate, at least in England, in the passage I have already cited (“My soul is an enchanted boat”). There is no reason why in recreative moods one should not imagine one’s soul an enchanted boat and float away in a musical rapture with the ideal dream companion towards Arcady. But to suppose that revery of this kind has anything to do with the faith of Plato and of Christ, is to fall from illusion into dangerous delusion.

We may doubt whether if Shelley had lived longer he would ever have risen above emotional sophistry and become more ethical in the quality of his imagination. Such a progress from emotional sophistry to ethical insight we actually find in Goethe; and this is the last and most complex case we have to consider. Johnson, I have said, is wise without being poetical and Keats poetical without being wise; Sophocles is both poetical and wise, whereas Shelley is poetical, but with a taint of sophistry or sham wisdom. No such clear-cut generalization can be ventured about Goethe. I have already quoted Goethe’s own judgment on his “Werther” as weakness seeking to give itself the prestige of strength, and perhaps it would be possible to instance from his early writings even worse examples of a morbid emotionalism (e.g. “Stella”). How about “Faust” itself? Most Germans will simply dismiss such a question as profane. With Hermann Grimm they are ready to pronounce “Faust” the greatest work of the greatest poet of all times, and of all peoples. Yet it is not easy to overlook the sophistical element in both parts of “Faust.” I have already commented on those passages that would seem especially sophistical: the passage in which the devil is defined as the spirit that always says no strikes at the very root of any proper distinction between good and evil. The passage again in which Faust breaks down all precise discrimination in favor of mere emotional intoxication is an extreme example of the Rousseauistic art of “making madness beautiful.” The very conclusion of the whole poem, with its setting up of work according to the natural law as a substitute for work according to the human law, is an egregious piece of sham wisdom. The result of work according to the human law, of ethical efficiency in short, is an increasing serenity; and it is not clear that Faust is much calmer at the end of the poem than he is at the beginning. According to Dr. Santayana he is ready to carry into heaven itself his romantic restlessness – his desperate and feverish attempts to escape from ennui.[297 - Three Philosophical Poets, 188.] Perhaps this is not the whole truth even in regard to “Faust”; and still less can we follow Dr. Santayana when he seems to discover in the whole work of Goethe only romantic restlessness. At the very time when Goethe was infecting others with the wild expansiveness of the new movement, he himself was beginning to strike out along an entirely different path. He writes in his Journal as early as 1778: “A more definite feeling of limitation and in consequence of true broadening.” Goethe here glimpses the truth that lies at the base of both humanism and religion. He saw that the romantic disease was the imaginative and emotional straining towards the unlimited (Hang zum Unbegrenzten), and in opposition to this unrestraint he was never tired of preaching the need of working within boundaries. It may be objected that Goethe is in somewhat the same case here as Rousseau: that the side of his work which has imaginative and emotional driving power and has therefore moved the world is of an entirely different order. We may reply that Goethe is at times both poetical and wise. Furthermore in his maxims and conversations where he does not rise to the poetical level, he displays a higher quality of wisdom than Rousseau. At his best he shows an ethical realism worthy of Dr. Johnson, though in his attitude towards tradition he is less Johnsonian than Socratic. Like Socrates he saw on what terms a break with the past may be safely attempted. “Anything that emancipates the spirit,” he says, “without a corresponding growth in self-mastery, is pernicious.” We may be sure that if the whole modern experiment fails it will be because of the neglect of the truth contained in this maxim. Goethe also saw that a sound individualism must be rightly imaginative. He has occasional hints on the rôle of illusion in literature and life that go far beneath the surface.

Though the mature Goethe, then, always stands for salvation by work, it is not strictly correct to say that it is work only according to the natural law. In Goethe at his best the imagination accepts the limitations imposed not merely by the natural, but also by the human law. However, we must admit that the humanistic Goethe has had few followers either in Germany or elsewhere, whereas innumerable persons have escaped from the imaginative unrestraint of the emotional romanticist, as Goethe himself likewise did, by the discipline of science.

The examples I have chosen should suffice to show how my distinction between two main types of imagination – the ethical type that gives high seriousness to creative writing and the Arcadian or dalliant type that does not raise it above the recreative level – works out in practice. Some such distinction is necessary if we are to understand the imagination in its relation to the human law. But in order to grasp the present situation firmly we need also to consider the imagination in its relation to the natural law. I have just said that most men have escaped from the imaginative anarchy of the emotional romanticist through science. Now the man of science at his best is like the humanist at his best, at once highly imaginative and highly critical. By this coöperation of imagination and intellect they are both enabled to concentrate effectively on the facts, though on facts of a very different order. The imagination reaches out and perceives likenesses and analogies whereas the power in man that separates and discriminates and traces causes and effects tests in turn these likenesses and analogies as to their reality: for we can scarcely repeat too often that though the imagination gives unity it does not give reality. If we were all Aristotles or even Goethes we might concentrate imaginatively on both laws, and so be both scientific and humanistic: but as a matter of fact the ordinary man’s capacity for concentration is limited. After a spell of concentration on either law he aspires to what Aristotle calls “relief from tension.” Now the very conditions of modern life require an almost tyrannical concentration on the natural law. The problems that have been engaging more and more the attention of the Occident since the rise of the great Baconian movement have been the problems of power and speed and utility. The enormous mass of machinery that has been accumulated in the pursuit of these ends requires the closest attention and concentration if it is to be worked efficiently. At the same time the man of the West is not willing to admit that he is growing in power alone, he likes to think that he is growing also in wisdom. Only by keeping this situation in mind can we hope to understand how emotional romanticism has been able to develop into a vast system of sham spirituality. I have said that the Rousseauist wants unity without reality. If we are to move towards reality, the imagination must be controlled by the power of discrimination and the Rousseauist has repudiated this power as “false and secondary.” But a unity that lacks reality can scarcely be accounted wise. The Baconian, however, accepts this unity gladly. He has spent so much energy in working according to the natural law that he has no energy left for work according to the human law. By turning to the Rousseauist he can get the “relief from tension” that he needs and at the same time enjoy the illusion of receiving a vast spiritual illumination. Neither Rousseauist nor Baconian carry into the realm of the human law the keen analysis that is necessary to distinguish between genuine insight and some mere phantasmagoria of the emotions. I am speaking especially, of course, of the interplay of Rousseauistic and Baconian elements that appear in certain recent philosophies like that of Bergson. According to Bergson one becomes spiritual by throwing overboard both thought and action, and this is a very convenient notion of spirituality for those who wish to devote both thought and action to utilitarian and material ends. It is hard to see in Bergson’s intuition of the creative flux and perception of real duration anything more than the latest form of Rousseau’s transcendental idling. To work with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law and to be idle according to the human law must be accounted a rather one-sided view of life. The price the man of to-day has paid for his increase in power is, it should seem, an appalling superficiality in dealing with the law of his own nature. What brings together Baconian and Rousseauist in spite of their surface differences is that they are both intent on the element of novelty. But if wonder is associated with the Many, wisdom is associated with the One. Wisdom and wonder are moving not in the same but in opposite directions. The nineteenth century may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries. The men of this period – and I am speaking of course of the main drift – were so busy being wonderful that they had no time, apparently, to be wise. Yet their extreme absorption in wonder and the manifoldness of things can scarcely be commended unless it can be shown that happiness also results from all this revelling in the element of change. The Rousseauist is not quite consistent on this point. At times he bids us boldly set our hearts on the transitory. Aimez, says Vigny, ce que jamais on ne verra deux fois. But the Rousseauist strikes perhaps a deeper chord when looking forth on a world of flux he utters the anguished exclamation of Leconte de Lisle: Qu’est-ce que tout cela qui n’est pas éternel? Even as one swallow, says Aristotle, does not make a spring, so no short time is enough to determine whether a man deserves to be called happy. The weakness of the romantic pursuit of novelty and wonder and in general of the philosophy of the beautiful moment – whether the erotic moment[298 - After telling of the days when “il n’y avait pour moi ni passé ni avenir et je goûtais à la fois les délices de mille siècles,” Saint-Preux concludes: “Hélas! vous avez disparu comme un éclair. Cette éternité de bonheur ne fut qu’un instant de ma vie. Le temps a repris sa lenteur dans les moments de mon désespoir, et l’ennui mesure par longues années le reste infortuné de mes jours” (Nouvelle Héloïse, Pt. III, Lettre VI).] or the moment of cosmic revery – is that it does not reckon sufficiently with the something deep down in the human breast that craves the abiding. To pin one’s hope of happiness to the fact that “the world is so full of a number of things” is an appropriate sentiment for a “Child’s Garden of Verse.” For the adult to maintain an exclusive Bergsonian interest in “the perpetual gushing forth of novelties” would seem to betray an inability to mature. The effect on a mature observer of an age so entirely turned from the One to the Many as that in which we are living must be that of a prodigious peripheral richness joined to a great central void.

What leads the man of to-day to work with such energy according to the natural law and to be idle according to the human law is his intoxication with material success. A consideration that should therefore touch him is that in the long run not merely spiritual success or happiness, but material prosperity depend on an entirely different working. Let me revert here for a moment to my previous analysis: to work according to the human law is simply to rein in one’s impulses. Now the strongest of all the impulses is the will to power. The man who does not rein in his will to power and is at the same time very active according to the natural law is in a fair way to become an efficient megalomaniac. Efficient megalomania, whether developed in individuals of the same group or in whole national groups in their relations with one another, must lead sooner or later to war. The efficient megalomaniacs will proceed to destroy one another along with the material wealth to which they have sacrificed everything else; and then the meek, if there are any meek left, will inherit the earth.

“If I am to judge by myself,” said an eighteenth-century Frenchman, “man is a stupid animal.” Man is not only a stupid animal in spite of his conceit of his own cleverness but we are here at the source of his stupidity. The source is the moral indolence that Buddha with his almost infallible sagacity defined long ago. In spite of the fact that his spiritual and in the long run his material success hinge on his ethical effort, man persists in dodging this effort, in seeking to follow the line of least or lesser resistance. An energetic material working does not mend but aggravate the failure to work ethically and is therefore especially stupid. Just this combination has in fact led to the crowning stupidity of the ages – the Great War. No more delirious spectacle has ever been witnessed than that of hundreds of millions of human beings using a vast machinery of scientific efficiency to turn life into a hell for one another. It is hard to avoid concluding that we are living in a world that has gone wrong on first principles, a world that, in spite of all the warnings of the past, has allowed itself to be caught once more in the terrible naturalistic trap. The dissolution of civilization with which we are threatened is likely to be worse in some respects than that of Greece or Rome in view of the success that has been attained in “perfecting the mystery of murder.” Various traditional agencies are indeed still doing much to chain up the beast in man. Of these the chief is no doubt the Church. But the leadership of the Occident is no longer here. The leaders have succumbed in greater or less degree to naturalism[299 - The Church, so far as it has become humanitarian, has itself succumbed to naturalism.] and so have been tampering with the moral law. That the brutal imperialist who brooks no obstacle to his lust for dominion has been tampering with this law goes without saying; but the humanitarian, all adrip with brotherhood and profoundly convinced of the loveliness of his own soul, has been tampering with it also, and in a more dangerous way for the very reason that it is less obvious. This tampering with the moral law, or what amounts to the same thing, this overriding of the veto power in man, has been largely a result, though not a necessary result, of the rupture with the traditional forms of wisdom. The Baconian naturalist repudiated the past because he wished to be more positive and critical, to plant himself upon the facts. Yet the veto power is itself a fact, – the weightiest with which man has to reckon. The Rousseauistic naturalist threw off traditional control because he wished to be more imaginative. Yet without the veto power the imagination falls into sheer anarchy. Both Baconian and Rousseauist were very impatient of any outer authority that seemed to stand between them and their own perceptions. Yet the veto power is nothing abstract, nothing that one needs to take on hearsay, but is very immediate. The naturalistic leaders may be proved wrong without going beyond their own principles, and their wrongness is of a kind to wreck civilization.

I have no quarrel, it is scarcely necessary to add, either with the man of science or the romanticist when they keep in their proper place. As soon however as they try, whether separately or in unison, to set up some substitute for humanism or religion, they should be at once attacked, the man of science for not being sufficiently positive and critical, the romanticist for not being rightly imaginative.

This brings us back to the problem of the ethical imagination – the imagination that has accepted the veto power – which I promised a moment ago to treat in its larger aspects. This problem is indeed in a peculiar sense the problem of civilization itself. A curious circumstance should be noted here: a civilization that rests on dogma and outer authority cannot afford to face the whole truth about the imagination and its rôle. A civilization in which dogma and outer authority have been undermined by the critical spirit, not only can but must do this very thing if it is to continue at all. Man, a being ever changing and living in a world of change, is, as I said at the outset, cut off from immediate access to anything abiding and therefore worthy to be called real, and condemned to live in an element of fiction or illusion. Yet civilization must rest on the recognition of something abiding. It follows that the truths on the survival of which civilization depends cannot be conveyed to man directly but only through imaginative symbols. It seems hard, however, for man to analyze critically this disability under which he labors, and, facing courageously the results of his analysis, to submit his imagination to the necessary control. He consents to limit his expansive desires only when the truths that are symbolically true are presented to him as literally true. The salutary check upon his imagination is thus won at the expense of the critical spirit. The pure gold of faith needs, it should seem, if it is to gain currency, to be alloyed with credulity. But the civilization that results from humanistic or religious control tends to produce the critical spirit. Sooner or later some Voltaire utters his fatal message:

Les prêtres ne sont pas ce qu’un vain peuple pense;
Nôtre crédulité fait toute leur science.

The emancipation from credulous belief leads to an anarchic individualism that tends in turn to destroy civilization. There is some evidence in the past that it is not quite necessary to run through this cycle. Buddha, for example, was very critical; he had a sense of the flux and evanescence of all things and so of universal illusion keener by far than that of Anatole France; at the same time he had ethical standards even sterner than those of Dr. Johnson. This is a combination that the Occident has rarely seen and that it perhaps needs to see. At the very end of his life Buddha uttered words that deserve to be the Magna Charta of the true individualist: “Therefore, O Ananda, be ye lamps unto yourselves. Be ye refuges unto yourselves. Look to no outer refuge. Hold fast as a refuge unto the Law (Dhamma).”[300 - Sutta of the Great Decease.] A man may safely go into himself if what he finds there is not, like Rousseau, his own emotions, but like Buddha, the law of righteousness.

Men were induced to follow Rousseau in his surrender to the emotions, it will be remembered, because that seemed the only alternative to a hard and dry rationalism. The rationalists of the Enlightenment were for the most part Cartesians, but Kant himself is in his main trend a rationalist. The epithet critical usually applied to his philosophy is therefore a misnomer. For to solve the critical problem – the relation between appearance and reality – it is necessary to deal adequately with the rôle of the imagination and this Kant has quite failed to do.[301 - If a man recognizes the supreme rôle of fiction or illusion in life while proceeding in other respects on Kantian principles, he will reach results similar to the “As-if Philosophy” (Philosophie des Als Ob) of Vaihinger, a leading authority on Kant and co-editor of the Kantstudien. This work, though not published until 1911, was composed, the author tells us in his preface, as early as 1875-78. It will be found to anticipate very strikingly pragmatism and various other isms in which philosophy has been proclaiming so loudly of late its own bankruptcy.] Modern philosophy is in general so unsatisfactory because it has raised the critical problem without carrying it through; it is too critical to receive wisdom through the traditional channels and not critical enough to achieve insight, and so has been losing more and more its human relevancy, becoming in the words of one of its recent votaries, a “narrow and unfruitful eccentricity.” The professional philosophers need to mend their ways and that speedily if the great world is not to pass them disdainfully by and leave them to play their mysterious little game among themselves. We see one of the most recent groups, the new realists, flat on their faces before the man of science – surely an undignified attitude for a philosopher. It is possible to look on the kind of knowledge that science gives as alone real only by dodging the critical problem – the problem as to the trustworthiness of the human instrument through which all knowledge is received – and it would be easy to show, if this were the place to go into the more technical aspects of the question, that the new realists have been doing just this – whether through sheer naïveté or metaphysical despair I am unable to say. The truly critical observer is unable to discover anything real in the absolute sense since everything is mixed with illusion. In this absolute sense the man of science must ever be ignorant of the reality behind the shows of nature. The new realist is, however, justified relatively in thinking that the only thing real in the view of life that has prevailed of late has been its working according to the natural law and the fruits of this working. The self-deception begins when he assumes that there can be no other working. What I have myself been opposing to naturalistic excess, such as appears in the new realism, is insight; but insight is in itself only a word, and unless it can be shown to have its own working and its own fruits, entirely different from those of work according to the natural law, the positivist at all events will have none of it.

The positivist will not only insist upon fruits, but will rate these fruits themselves according to their bearing upon his main purpose. Life, says Bergson, can have no purpose in the human sense of the word.[302 - “C’est en vain qu’on voudrait assigner à la vie un but, au sens humain du mot.” L’Evolution créatrice, 55.] The positivist will reply to Bergson and to the Rousseauistic drifter in general, in the words of Aristotle, that the end is the chief thing of all and that the end of ends is happiness. To the Baconian who wants work and purpose but according to the natural law alone, the complete positivist will reply that happiness cannot be shown to result from this one-sided working; that in itself it affords no escape from the misery of moral solitude, that we move towards true communion and so towards peace and happiness only by work according to the human law. Now the more individualistic we are, I have been saying, the more we must depend for the apprehension of this law on the imagination, the imagination, let me hasten to add, supplemented by the intellect. It is not enough to put the brakes on the natural man – and that is what work according to the human law means – we must do it intelligently. Right knowing must here as elsewhere precede right doing. Even a Buddha admitted that at one period in his life he had not been intelligent in his self-discipline. I need only to amplify here what I have said in a previous chapter about the proper use of the “false secondary power” by those who wish to be either religious or humanistic in a positive fashion. They will employ their analytical faculties, not in building up some abstract system, but in discriminating between the actual data of experience with a view to happiness, just as the man of science at his best employs the same faculties in discriminating between the data of experience with a view to power and utility.

I have pointed out another important use of the analytical intellect in its relation to the imagination. Since the imagination by itself gives unity but does not give reality, it is possible to discover whether a unification of life has reality only by subjecting it to the keenest analysis. Otherwise what we take to be wisdom may turn out to be only an empty dream. To take as wise something that is unreal is to fall into sophistry. For a man like Rousseau whose imagination was in its ultimate quality not ethical at all but overwhelmingly idyllic to set up as an inspired teacher was to become an arch-sophist. Whether or not he was sincere in his sophistry is a question which the emotionalist is very fond of discussing, but which the sensible person will dismiss as somewhat secondary. Sophistry of all kinds always has a powerful ally in man’s moral indolence. It is so pleasant to let one’s self go and at the same time deem one’s self on the way to wisdom. We need to keep in mind the special quality of Rousseau’s sophistry if we wish to understand a very extraordinary circumstance during the past century. During this period men were moving steadily towards the naturalistic level, where the law of cunning and the law of force prevail, and at the same time had the illusion – or at least multitudes had the illusion – that they were moving towards peace and brotherhood. The explanation is found in the endless tricks played upon the uncritical and still more upon the half-critical by the Arcadian imagination.

The remedy is not only a more stringent criticism, but, as I have tried to make plain in this whole work, in an age of sophistry, like the present, criticism itself amounts largely to that art of inductive defining which it is the great merit of Socrates, according to Aristotle,[303 - Metaphysics, 1078 b.] to have devised and brought to perfection. Sophistry flourishes, as Socrates saw, on the confused and ambiguous use of general terms; and there is an inexhaustible source of such ambiguities and confusions in the very duality of human nature. The word nature itself may serve as an illustration. We may take as a closely allied example the word progress. Man may progress according to either the human or the natural law. Progress according to the natural law has been so rapid since the rise of the Baconian movement that it has quite captivated man’s imagination and stimulated him to still further concentration and effort along naturalistic lines. The very magic of the word progress seems to blind him to the failure to progress according to the human law. The more a word refers to what is above the strictly material level, the more it is subject to the imagination and therefore to sophistication. It is not easy to sophisticate the word horse, it is only too easy to sophisticate the word justice. One may affirm, indeed, not only that man is governed by his imagination but that in all that belongs to his own special domain the imagination itself is governed by words.[304 - In the beginning was the Word! To seek to substitute, like Faust, the Deed for the Word is to throw discrimination to the winds. The failure to discriminate as to the quality of the deed is responsible for the central sophistry of Faust (see p. 331) and perhaps of our modern life in general.]

We should not therefore surrender our imaginations to a general term until it has been carefully defined, and to define it carefully we need usually to practice upon it what Socrates would call a dichotomy. I have just been dichotomizing or “cutting in two” the word progress. When the two main types of progress, material and moral, have been discriminated in their fruits, the positivist will proceed to rate these fruits according to their relevancy to his main goal – the goal of happiness. The person who is thus fortified by a Socratic dialectic will be less ready to surrender his imagination to the first sophist who urges him to be “progressive.” He will wish to make sure first that he is not progressing towards the edge of a precipice.

Rousseau would have us get rid of analysis in favor of the “heart.” No small part of my endeavor in this work and elsewhere has been to show the different meanings that may attach to the term heart (and the closely allied terms “soul” and “intuition”) – meanings that are a world apart, when tested by their fruits. Heart may refer to outer perception and the emotional self or to inner perception and the ethical self. The heart of Pascal is not the heart of Rousseau. With this distinction once obliterated the way is open for the Rousseauistic corruption of such words as virtue and conscience, and this is to fling wide the door to every manner of confusion. The whole vocabulary that is properly applicable only to the supersensuous realm is then transferred to the region of the subrational. The impulsive self proceeds to cover its nakedness with all these fair phrases as it would with a garment. A recent student of war-time psychology asks: “Is it that the natural man in us has been masquerading as the spiritual man by hiding himself under splendid words – courage, patriotism, justice – and now he rises up and glares at us with blood-red eyes?” That is precisely what has been happening.

But after all the heart in any sense of the word is controlled by the imagination, so that a still more fundamental dichotomy, perhaps the most fundamental of all, is that of the imagination itself. We have seen how often the Arcadian dreaming of the emotional naturalist has been labelled the “ideal.” Our views of this type of imagination will therefore determine our views of much that now passes current as idealism. Now the term idealist may have a sound meaning: it may designate the man who is realistic according to the human law. But to be an idealist in Shelley’s sense or that of innumerable other Rousseauists is to fall into sheer unreality. This type of idealist shrinks from the sharp discriminations of the critic: they are like the descent of a douche of ice-water upon his hot illusions. But it is pleasanter, after all, to be awakened by a douche of ice-water than by an explosion of dynamite under the bed; and that has been the frequent fate of the romantic idealist. It is scarcely safe to neglect any important aspect of reality in favor of one’s private dream, even if this dream be dubbed the ideal. The aspect of reality that one is seeking to exclude finally comes crashing through the walls of the ivory tower and abolishes the dream and at times the dreamer.

The transformation of the Arcadian dreamer into the Utopist is a veritable menace to civilization. The ends that the Utopist proposes are often in themselves desirable and the evils that he denounces are real. But when we come to scrutinize critically his means, what we find is not a firm grip on the ascertained facts of human nature but what Bagehot calls the feeble idealities of the romantic imagination. Moreover various Utopists may come together as to what they wish to destroy, which is likely to include the whole existing social order; but what they wish to erect on the ruins of this order will be found to be not only in dreamland, but in different dreamlands. For with the elimination of the veto power from personality – the only power that can pull men back to some common centre – the ideal will amount to little more than the projection of this or that man’s temperament upon the void. In a purely temperamental world an affirmative reply may be given to the question of Euryalus in Virgil: “Is each man’s God but his own fell desire?” (An sua cuique deus fit dira cupido?)

The task of the Socratic critic at the present time is, then, seen to consist largely in stripping idealistic disguises from egoism, in exposing what I have called sham spirituality. If the word spirituality means anything, it must imply, it should seem, some degree of escape from the ordinary self, an escape that calls in turn for effort according to the human law. Even when he is not an open and avowed advocate of a “wise passiveness,” the Rousseauistic idealist is only too manifestly not making any such effort – it would interfere with his passion for self-expression which is even more deeply rooted in him than his passion for saving society. He inclines like Rousseau to look upon every constraint[305 - “J’adore la liberté; j’abhorre la gêne, la peine, l’assujettissement.” Confessions, Livre I.] whether from within or from without as incompatible with liberty. A right definition of liberty is almost as important as a right definition of imagination and derives from it very directly. Where in our anarchical age will such a definition be found, a definition that is at once modern and in accord with the psychological facts? “A man has only to declare himself free,” says Goethe, “and he will at once feel himself dependent. If he ventures to declare himself dependent, he will feel himself free.” In other words he is not free to do whatever he pleases unless he wishes to enjoy the freedom of the lunatic, but only to adjust himself to the reality of either the natural or the human law. A progressive adjustment to the human law gives ethical efficiency, and this is the proper corrective of material efficiency, and not love alone as the sentimentalist is so fond of preaching. Love is another word that cries aloud for Socratic treatment.

A liberty that means only emancipation from outer control will result, I have tried to show, in the most dangerous form of anarchy – anarchy of the imagination. On the degree of our perception of this fact will hinge the soundness of our use of another general term – democracy. We should beware above all of surrendering our imaginations to this word until it has been hedged about on every side with discriminations that have behind them all the experience of the past with this form of government. Only in this way may the democrat know whether he is aiming at anything real or merely dreaming of the golden age. Here as elsewhere there are pitfalls manifold for the uncritical enthusiast. A democracy that produces in sufficient numbers sound individualists who look up imaginatively to standards set above their ordinary selves, may well deserve enthusiasm. A democracy, on the other hand, that is not rightly imaginative, but is impelled by vague emotional intoxications, may mean all kinds of lovely things in dreamland, but in the real world it will prove an especially unpleasant way of returning to barbarism. It is a bad sign that Rousseau, who is more than any other one person the father of radical democracy, is also the first of the great anti-intellectualists.

Enough has been said to show the proper rôle of the secondary power of analysis that the Rousseauist looks upon with so much disfavor. It is the necessary auxiliary of the art of defining that can alone save us in an untraditional age from receiving some mere phantasmagoria of the intellect or emotions as a radiant idealism. A Socratic dialectic of this kind is needed at such a time not only to dissipate sophistry but as a positive support to wisdom. I have raised the question in my Introduction whether the wisdom that is needed just now should be primarily humanistic or religious. The preference I have expressed for a positive and critical humanism I wish to be regarded as very tentative. In the dark situation that is growing up in the Occident, all genuine humanism and religion, whether on a traditional or a critical basis, should be welcome. I have pointed out that traditional humanism and religion conflict in certain respects, that it is difficult to combine the imitation of Horace with the imitation of Christ. This problem does not disappear entirely when humanism and religion are dealt with critically and is indeed one of the most obscure that the thinker has to face. The honest thinker, whatever his own preference, must begin by admitting that though religion can get along without humanism, humanism cannot get along without religion. The reason has been given by Burke in pointing out the radical defect of Rousseau: the whole ethical life of man has its root in humility. As humility diminishes, conceit or vain imagining rushes in almost automatically to take its place. Under these circumstances decorum, the supreme virtue of the humanist, is in danger of degenerating into some art of going through the motions. Such was only too often the decorum of the French drawing-room, and such we are told, has frequently been the decorum of the Chinese humanist. Yet the decorum of Confucius himself was not only genuine but he has put the case for the humanist with his usual shrewdness. “I venture to ask about death,” one of his disciples said to him. “While you do not know life,” Confucius replied, “how can you know about death?”[306 - Analects, XI, CXI. Cf. ibid., VI, CXX: “To give one’s self earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.” Much that has passed current as religion in all ages has made its chief appeal, not to awe but to wonder; and like many humanists Confucius was somewhat indifferent to the marvellous. “The subjects on which the Master did not talk were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder and spiritual beings” (ibid., VII, CXX).]

The solution of this problem as to the relation between humanism and religion, so far as a solution can be found, lies in looking upon them both as only different stages in the same path. Humanism should have in it an element of religious insight: it is possible to be a humble and meditative humanist. The type of the man of the world who is not a mere worldling is not only attractive in itself but has actually been achieved in the West, though not perhaps very often, from the Greeks down. Chinese who should be in a position to know affirm again that, alongside many corrupt mandarins, a certain number of true Confucians[307 - One of the last Chinese, I am told, to measure up to the Confucian standard was Tsêng Kuo-fan (1811-1872) who issued forth from poverty, trained a peasant soldiery and, more than any other one person, put down the Taiping Rebellion.] have been scattered through the centuries from the time of the sage to the present.

If humanism may be religious, religion may have its humanistic side. I have said, following Aristotle, that the law of measure does not apply to the religious life, but this saying is not to be understood in an absolute sense. Buddha is continually insisting on the middle path in the religious life itself. The resulting urbanity in Buddha and his early followers in India is perhaps the closest approach that that very unhumanistic land has ever made to humanism.

It is right here in this joining of humanism and religion that Aristotle, at least the Aristotle that has come down to us, does not seem altogether adequate. He fails to bring out sufficiently the bond between the meditative or religious life that he describes at the end of his “Ethics” and the humanistic life or life of mediation to which most of this work is devoted. An eminent French authority on Aristotle,[308 - See J. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire’s Introduction to his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, p. cxlix.] complains that this separation of the two lives encouraged the ascetic excess of the Middle Ages, the undue spurning of the world in favor of mystic contemplation. I am struck rather by the danger of leaving the humanistic life without any support in religion. In a celebrated passage,[309 - Eth. Nic., 1122-25.] Aristotle says that the “magnanimous” man or ideal gentleman sees all things including himself proportionately: he puts himself neither too high nor too low. And this is no doubt true so far as other men are concerned. But does the magnanimous man put human nature itself in its proper place? Does he feel sufficiently its nothingness and helplessness, its dependence on a higher power? No one, indeed, who gets beyond words and outer forms would maintain that humility is a Christian monopoly. Pindar is far more humble[310 - I have in mind such passages as P., VIII, 76-78, 92-96; N., VI, 1-4; N., XI, 13-16.] than Aristotle, as humble, one might almost maintain, as the austere Christian.

A humanism sufficiently grounded in humility is not only desirable at all times but there are reasons for thinking that it would be especially desirable to-day. In the first place, it would so far as the emotional naturalist is concerned raise a clear-cut issue. The naturalist of this type denies rather than corrupts humanism. He is the foe of compromise and inclines to identify mediation and mediocrity. On the other hand, he corrupts rather than denies religion, turning meditation into pantheistic revery and in general setting up a subtle parody of what is above the ordinary rational level in terms of the subrational. On their own showing Rousseau and his followers are extremists,[311 - “II n’y eut jamais pour moi d’intermédiaire entre tout et rien.” Confessions, Livre VII.] and even more effective perhaps than to attack them directly for their sham religion would be to maintain against them that thus to violate the law of measure is to cease to be human.

Furthermore, a critical humanism would appear to be the proper corrective of the other main forms of naturalistic excess at the present time – the one-sided devotion to physical science. What keeps the man of science from being himself a humanist is not his science but his pseudo-science, and also the secret push for power and prestige that he shares with other men. The reasons for putting humanistic truth above scientific truth are not metaphysical but very practical: the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature. If scientific discipline is not supplemented by a truly humanistic or religious discipline the result is unethical science, and unethical science is perhaps the worst monster that has yet been turned loose on the race. Man in spite of what I have termed his stupidity, his persistent evasion of the main issue, the issue of his own happiness, will awaken sooner or later to the fearful evil he has already suffered from a science that has arrogated to itself what does not properly belong to it; and then science may be as unduly depreciated as it has, for the past century or two, been unduly magnified; so that in the long run it is in the interest of science itself to keep in its proper place, which is below both humanism and religion.

It would be possible to frame in the name of insight an indictment against science that would make the indictment Rousseau has framed against it in the name of instinct seem mild. The critical humanist, however, will leave it to others to frame such an indictment. Nothing is more foreign to his nature than every form of obscurantism. He is ready indeed to point out that the man of science has in common with him at least one important idea – the idea of habit, though its scientific form seems to him very incomplete. One may illustrate from perhaps the best known recent treatment of the subject, that of James in his “Psychology.” It is equally significant that the humanist can agree with nearly every line of James’s chapter on habit and that he disagrees very gravely with James in his total tendency. That is because James shows himself, as soon as he passes from the naturalistic to the humanistic level, wildly romantic. Even when dealing with the “Varieties of Religious Experience” he is plainly more preoccupied with the intensity than with the centrality of this experience.[312 - Some wag, it will be remembered, suggested as an alternative title for this work: Wild Religions I have known.] He is obsessed with the idea that comes down to him straight from the age of original genius that to be at the centre is to be commonplace. In a letter to C. E. Norton (June 30, 1904) James praises Ruskin’s Letters and adds: “Mere sanity is the most philistine and at bottom unessential of a man’s attributes.” “Mere sanity” is not to be thus dismissed, because to lack sanity is to be headed towards misery and even madness. “Ruskin’s,” says Norton, who was in a position to know, “was essentially one of the saddest of lives.”[313 - Letters, II, 298; cf. ibid., 291: “I have never known a life less wisely controlled or less helped by the wisdom of others than his. The whole retrospect of it is pathetic; waste, confusion, ruin of one of the most gifted and sweetest natures the world ever knew.”] Is a man to live one of the saddest of lives merely to gratify romantic lovers of the vivid and picturesque like James?

However, if the man of science holds fast to the results reached by James and others regarding habit and at the same time avoids James’s romantic fallacies he might perceive the possibility of extending the idea of habit beyond the naturalistic level; and the way would then be open for an important coöperation between him and the humanist. Humanists themselves, it must be admitted, even critical humanists, have diverged somewhat in their attitude towards habit, and that from the time of Socrates and Aristotle. I have been dwelling thus far on the indispensableness of a keen Socratic dialectic and of the right knowledge it brings for those who aspire to be critical humanists. But does right knowing in itself suffice to ensure right doing? Socrates and Plato with their famous identification of knowledge and virtue would seem to reply in the affirmative. Aristotle has the immediate testimony of consciousness on his side when he remarks simply regarding this identification: The facts are otherwise.[314 - Nic. Eth., 1145 b. The opposition between Socrates or Plato and Aristotle, when put thus baldly, is a bit misleading. Socrates emphasized the importance of practice (μελέτη) in the acquisition of virtue, and Plato has made much of habit in the Laws.] No experience is sadder or more universal than that of the failure of right knowledge to secure right performance: so much so that the austere Christian has been able to maintain with some plausibility that all the knowledge in the world is of no avail without a special divine succor. Now the Aristotelian agrees with the Christian that mere knowledge is insufficient: conversion is also necessary. He does not incline, however, like the austere Christian to look for conversion to “thunderclaps and visible upsets of grace.” Without denying necessarily these pistol-shot transformations of human nature he conceives of man’s turning away from his ordinary self – and here he is much nearer in temper to the man of science – as a gradual process. This gradual conversion the Aristotelian hopes to achieve by work according to the human law. Now right knowledge though it supplies the norm, is not in itself this working, which consists in the actual pulling back of impulse. But an act of this kind to be effective must be repeated. A habit is thus formed until at last the new direction given to the natural man becomes automatic and unconscious. The humanistic worker may thus acquire at last the spontaneity in right doing that the beautiful soul professes to have received as a free gift from “nature.” Confucius narrates the various stages of knowledge and moral effort through which he had passed from the age of fifteen and concludes: “At seventy I could follow what my heart desired without transgressing the law of measure.”[315 - Analects, II, CIV.]

The keener the observer the more likely he is to be struck by the empire of habit. Habit, as Wellington said, is ten times nature, and is indeed so obviously a second nature that many of the wise have suspected that nature herself is only a first habit.[316 - This belief the Oriental has embodied in the doctrine of Karma.] Now Aristotle who is open to criticism, it may be, on the side of humility, still remains incomparable among the philosophers of the world for his treatment of habit on the humanistic level. Any one who wishes to learn how to become moderate and sensible and decent can do no better even at this late day than to steep himself in the “Nicomachean Ethics.”