{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/gutenberg_17771/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/gutenberg_17771","id":"gutenberg_17771","license":"Public Domain (US)","rights_basis":"gutenberg_metadata_copyright_false","source":"gutenberg","source_url":"https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17771","summary":null,"tags":["Category: Philosophy & Ethics","Philosophy, Modern"],"text":"Produced by R. Cedron, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online\nDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n                          WINDS OF DOCTRINE\n\n                             STUDIES IN\n                        CONTEMPORARY OPINION\n\n\n\n                                 BY\n\n                            G. SANTAYANA\n\n          LATE PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY\n\n\n\n\n                  NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS\n\n\n\n                        FIRST PRINTED IN 1913\n\n\n\n\nCONTENTS\n\n\n\nI. THE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE\n\nII. MODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY\n\nIII. THE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON\n\nIV. THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL--\n\n     i. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM\n\n     ii. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE\n\n     iii. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM\n\n     iv. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS\n\nV. SHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES\n\nVI. THE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY\n\n\n\n\nWINDS OF DOCTRINE\n\n\n\n\nI\n\nTHE INTELLECTUAL TEMPER OF THE AGE\n\n\nThe present age is a critical one and interesting to live in. The\ncivilisation characteristic of Christendom has not disappeared, yet\nanother civilisation has begun to take its place. We still understand\nthe value of religious faith; we still appreciate the pompous arts of\nour forefathers; we are brought up on academic architecture,\nsculpture, painting, poetry, and music. We still love monarchy and\naristocracy, together with that picturesque and dutiful order which\nrested on local institutions, class privileges, and the authority of\nthe family. We may even feel an organic need for all these things,\ncling to them tenaciously, and dream of rejuvenating them. On the\nother hand the shell of Christendom is broken. The unconquerable mind\nof the East, the pagan past, the industrial socialistic future\nconfront it with their equal authority. Our whole life and mind is\nsaturated with the slow upward filtration of a new spirit--that of an\nemancipated, atheistic, international democracy.\n\nThese epithets may make us shudder; but what they describe is\nsomething positive and self-justified, something deeply rooted in our\nanimal nature and inspiring to our hearts, something which, like every\nvital impulse, is pregnant with a morality of its own. In vain do we\ndeprecate it; it has possession of us already through our\npropensities, fashions, and language. Our very plutocrats and monarchs\nare at ease only when they are vulgar. Even prelates and missionaries\nare hardly sincere or conscious of an honest function, save as they\ndevote themselves to social work; for willy-nilly the new spirit has\nhold of our consciences as well. This spirit is amiable as well as\ndisquieting, liberating as well as barbaric; and a philosopher in our\nday, conscious both of the old life and of the new, might repeat what\nGoethe said of his successive love affairs--that it is sweet to see\nthe moon rise while the sun is still mildly shining.\n\nMeantime our bodies in this generation are generally safe, and often\ncomfortable; and for those who can suspend their irrational labours\nlong enough to look about them, the spectacle of the world, if not\nparticularly beautiful or touching, presents a rapid and crowded drama\nand (what here concerns me most) one unusually intelligible. The\nnations, parties, and movements that divide the scene have a known\nhistory. We are not condemned, as most generations have been, to fight\nand believe without an inkling of the cause. The past lies before us;\nthe history of everything is published. Every one records his opinion,\nand loudly proclaims what he wants. In this Babel of ideals few\ndemands are ever literally satisfied; but many evaporate, merge\ntogether, and reach an unintended issue, with which they are content.\nThe whole drift of things presents a huge, good-natured comedy to the\nobserver. It stirs not unpleasantly a certain sturdy animality and\nhearty self-trust which lie at the base of human nature.\n\nA chief characteristic of the situation is that moral confusion is not\nlimited to the world at large, always the scene of profound conflicts,\nbut that it has penetrated to the mind and heart of the average\nindividual. Never perhaps were men so like one another and so divided\nwithin themselves. In other ages, even more than at present, different\nclasses of men have stood at different levels of culture, with a\nmagnificent readiness to persecute and to be martyred for their\nrespective principles. These militant believers have been keenly\nconscious that they had enemies; but their enemies were strangers to\nthem, whom they could think of merely as such, regarding them as blank\nnegative forces, hateful black devils, whose existence might make life\ndifficult but could not confuse the ideal of life. No one sought to\nunderstand these enemies of his, nor even to conciliate them, unless\nunder compulsion or out of insidious policy, to convert them against\ntheir will; he merely pelted them with blind refutations and clumsy\nblows. Every one sincerely felt that the right was entirely on his\nside, a proof that such intelligence as he had moved freely and\nexclusively within the lines of his faith. The result of this was that\nhis faith was intelligent, I mean, that he understood it, and had a\nclear, almost instinctive perception of what was compatible or\nincompatible with it. He defended his walls and he cultivated his\ngarden. His position and his possessions were unmistakable.\n\nWhen men and minds were so distinct it was possible to describe and to\ncount them. During the Reformation, when external confusion was at\nits height, you might have ascertained almost statistically what\npersons and what regions each side snatched from the other; it was not\ndoubtful which was which. The history of their respective victories\nand defeats could consequently be written. So in the eighteenth\ncentury it was easy to perceive how many people Voltaire and Rousseau\nmight be alienating from Bossuet and Fenelon. But how shall we satisfy\nourselves now whether, for instance, Christianity is holding its own?\nWho can tell what vagary or what compromise may not be calling itself\nChristianity? A bishop may be a modernist, a chemist may be a mystical\ntheologian, a psychologist may be a believer in ghosts. For science,\ntoo, which had promised to supply a new and solid foundation for\nphilosophy, has allowed philosophy rather to undermine its foundation,\nand is seen eating its own words, through the mouths of some of its\naccredited spokesmen, and reducing itself to something utterly\nconventional and insecure. It is characteristic of human nature to be\nas impatient of ignorance regarding what is not known as lazy in\nacquiring such knowledge as is at hand; and even those who have not\nbeen lazy sometimes take it into their heads to disparage their\nscience and to outdo the professional philosophers in psychological\nscepticism, in order to plunge with them into the most vapid\nspeculation. Nor is this insecurity about first principles limited to\nabstract subjects. It reigns in politics as well. Liberalism had been\nsupposed to advocate liberty; but what the advanced parties that still\ncall themselves liberal now advocate is control, control over\nproperty, trade, wages, hours of work, meat and drink, amusements,\nand in a truly advanced country like France control over education and\nreligion; and it is only on the subject of marriage (if we ignore\neugenics) that liberalism is growing more and more liberal. Those who\nspeak most of progress measure it by quantity and not by quality; how\nmany people read and write, or how many people there are, or what is\nthe annual value of their trade; whereas true progress would rather\nlie in reading or writing fewer and better things, and being fewer and\nbetter men, and enjoying life more. But the philanthropists are now\npreparing an absolute subjection of the individual, in soul and body,\nto the instincts of the majority--the most cruel and unprogressive of\nmasters; and I am not sure that the liberal maxim, \"the greatest\nhappiness of the greatest number,\" has not lost whatever was just or\ngenerous in its intent and come to mean the greatest idleness of the\nlargest possible population.\n\nNationality offers another occasion for strange moral confusion. It\nhad seemed that an age that was levelling and connecting all nations,\nan age whose real achievements were of international application, was\ndestined to establish the solidarity of mankind as a sort of axiom.\nThe idea of solidarity is indeed often invoked in speeches, and there\nis an extreme socialistic party that--when a wave of national passion\ndoes not carry it the other way--believes in international\nbrotherhood. But even here, black men and yellow men are generally\nexcluded; and in higher circles, where history, literature, and\npolitical ambition dominate men's minds, nationalism has become of\nlate an omnivorous all-permeating passion. Local parliaments must be\neverywhere established, extinct or provincial dialects must be\ngalvanised into national languages, philosophy must be made racial,\nreligion must be fostered where it emphasises nationality and\ndenounced where it transcends it. Man is certainly an animal that,\nwhen he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to\noccupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and\nhatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and\ndiscomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that\nthe hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part\nis so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal\nbusiness, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honour.\nIt has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion. Illusion, I\nmean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for\nof course nationality is a fact. People speak some particular language\nand are very uncomfortable where another is spoken or where their own\nis spoken differently. They have habits, judgments, assumptions to\nwhich they are wedded, and a society where all this is unheard of\nshocks them and puts them at a galling disadvantage. To ignorant\npeople the foreigner as such is ridiculous, unless he is superior to\nthem in numbers or prestige, when he becomes hateful. It is natural\nfor a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without\na sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to\nfeel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to oneself.\nBut this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental;\nlike age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis\nof specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a\nflag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities.\nYet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol,\nperhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.\n\nAnomalies of this sort will never be properly understood until people\naccustom themselves to a theory to which they have always turned a\ndeaf ear, because, though simple and true, it is materialistic:\nnamely, that mind is not the cause of our actions but an effect,\ncollateral with our actions, of bodily growth and organisation. It may\ntherefore easily come about that the thoughts of men, tested by the\nprinciples that seem to rule their conduct, may be belated, or\nirrelevant, or premonitory; for the living organism has many strata,\non any of which, at a given moment, activities may exist perfect\nenough to involve consciousness, yet too weak and isolated to control\nthe organs of outer expression; so that (to speak geologically) our\npractice may be historic, our manners glacial, and our religion\npalaeozoic. The ideals of the nineteenth century may be said to have\nbeen all belated; the age still yearned with Rousseau or speculated\nwith Kant, while it moved with Darwin, Bismarck, and Nietzsche: and\nto-day, in the half-educated classes, among the religious or\nrevolutionary sects, we may observe quite modern methods of work\nallied with a somewhat antiquated mentality. The whole nineteenth\ncentury might well cry with Faust: \"Two souls, alas, dwell in my\nbosom!\" The revolutions it witnessed filled it with horror and made it\nfall in love romantically with the past and dote on ruins, because\nthey were ruins; and the best learning and fiction of the time were\nhistorical, inspired by an unprecedented effort to understand remote\nforms of life and feeling, to appreciate exotic arts and religions,\nand to rethink the blameless thoughts of savages and criminals. This\nsympathetic labour and retrospect, however, was far from being merely\nsentimental; for the other half of this divided soul was looking\nahead. Those same revolutions, often so destructive, stupid, and\nbloody, filled it with pride, and prompted it to invent several\nincompatible theories concerning a steady and inevitable progress in\nthe world. In the study of the past, side by side with romantic\nsympathy, there was a sort of realistic, scholarly intelligence and an\nadventurous love of truth; kindness too was often mingled with\ndramatic curiosity. The pathologists were usually healers, the\nphilosophers of evolution were inventors or humanitarians or at least\nidealists: the historians of art (though optimism was impossible here)\nwere also guides to taste, quickeners of moral sensibility, like\nRuskin, or enthusiasts for the irresponsibly beautiful, like Pater and\nOscar Wilde. Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double\npreoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know\nwhat all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to\nhasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived\nimmediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The\nimagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was\nintent on reform.\n\nReform! This magic word itself covers a great equivocation. To reform\nmeans to shatter one form and to create another; but the two sides of\nthe act are not always equally intended nor equally successful.\nUsually the movement starts from the mere sense of oppression, and\npeople break down some established form, without any qualms about the\ncapacity of their freed instincts to generate the new forms that may\nbe needed. So the Reformation, in destroying the traditional order,\nintended to secure truth, spontaneity, and profuseness of religious\nforms; the danger of course being that each form might become meagre\nand the sum of them chaotic. If the accent, however, could only be\nlaid on the second phase of the transformation, reform might mean the\ncreation of order where it did not sufficiently appear, so that\ndiffuse life should be concentrated into a congenial form that should\nrender it strong and self-conscious. In this sense, if we may trust\nMr. Gilbert Murray, it was a great wave of reform that created Greece,\nor at least all that was characteristic and admirable in it--an effort\nto organise, train, simplify, purify, and make beautiful the chaos of\nbarbaric customs and passions that had preceded. The clanger here, a\ndanger to which Greece actually succumbed, is that so refined an\norganism may be too fragile, not inclusive enough within, and not\nbuttressed strongly enough without against the flux of the uncivilised\nworld. Christianity also, in the first formative centuries of its\nexistence, was an integrating reform of the same sort, on a different\nscale and in a different sphere; but here too an enslaved rabble\nwithin the soul claiming the suffrage, and better equipped\nintellectual empires rising round about, seem to prove that the\nharmony which the Christian system made for a moment out of nature and\nlife was partial and insecure. It is a terrible dilemma in the life of\nreason whether it will sacrifice natural abundance to moral order, or\nmoral order to natural abundance. Whatever compromise we choose proves\nunstable, and forces us to a new experiment.\n\nPerhaps in the century that has elapsed since the French Revolution\nthe pendulum has had time to swing as far as it will in the direction\nof negative reform, and may now begin to move towards that sort of\nreform which is integrating and creative. The veering of the advanced\npolitical parties from liberalism to socialism would seem to be a\nclear indication of this new tendency. It is manifest also in the love\nof nature, in athletics, in the new woman, and in a friendly medical\nattitude towards all the passions.\n\nIn the fine arts, however, and in religion and philosophy, we are\nstill in full career towards disintegration. It might have been\nthought that a germ of rational order would by this time have\npenetrated into fine art and speculation from the prosperous\nconstructive arts that touch the one, and the prosperous natural and\nmathematical sciences that touch the other. But as yet there is little\nsign of it. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century painting and\nsculpture have passed through several phases, representatives of each\nnaturally surviving after the next had appeared. Romanticism, half\nlurid, half effeminate, yielded to a brutal pursuit of material truth,\nand a pious preference for modern and humble sentiment. This realism\nhad a romantic vein in it, and studied vice and crime, tedium and\ndespair, with a very genuine horrified sympathy. Some went in for a\ndisplay of archaeological lore or for exotic _motifs_; others gave all\ntheir attention to rediscovering and emphasising abstract problems of\nexecution, the highway of technical tradition having long been\nabandoned. Beginners are still supposed to study their art, but they\nhave no masters from whom to learn it. Thus, when there seemed to be\nsome danger that art should be drowned in science and history, the\nartists deftly eluded it by becoming amateurs. One gave himself to\nreligious archaism, another to Japanese composition, a third to\nbarbaric symphonies of colour; sculptors tried to express dramatic\nclimaxes, or inarticulate lyrical passion, such as music might better\nconvey; and the latest whims are apparently to abandon painful\nobservation altogether, to be merely decorative or frankly mystical,\nand to be satisfied with the childishness of hieroglyphics or the\ncrudity of caricature. The arts are like truant children who think\ntheir life will be glorious if they only run away and play for ever;\nno need is felt of a dominant ideal passion and theme, nor of any\nmoral interest in the interpretation of nature. Artists have no less\ntalent than ever; their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often\ninteresting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in\ntheir works.\n\nIn philosophy there are always the professors, as in art there are\nalways the portrait painters and the makers of official sculpture; and\nboth sorts of academicians are often very expert and well-educated.\nYet in philosophy, besides the survival of all the official and\nendowed systems, there has been of late a very interesting fresh\nmovement, largely among the professors themselves, which in its\nvarious hues may be called irrationalism, vitalism, pragmatism, or\npure empiricism. But this movement, far from being a reawakening of\nany organising instinct, is simply an extreme expression of romantic\nanarchy. It is in essence but a franker confession of the principle\nupon which modern philosophy has been building--or unbuilding--for\nthese three hundred years, I mean the principle of subjectivity.\nBerkeley and Hume, the first prophets of the school, taught that\nexperience is not a partial discovery of other things but is itself\nthe only possible object of experience. Therefore, said Kant and the\nsecond generation of prophets, any world we may seem to live in, even\nthose worlds of theology or of history which Berkeley or Hume had\ninadvertently left standing, must be an idea which our present\nexperience suggests to us and which we frame as the principles of our\nmind allow and dictate that we should. But then, say the latest\nprophets--Avenarius, William James, M. Bergson--these mental\nprinciples are no antecedent necessities or duties imposed on our\nimagination; they are simply parts of flying experience itself, and\nthe ideas--say of God or of matter--which they lead us to frame have\nnothing compulsory or fixed about them. Their sole authority lies in\nthe fact that they may be more or less congenial or convenient, by\nenriching the flying moment aesthetically, or helping it to slip\nprosperously into the next moment. Immediate feeling, pure experience,\nis the only reality, the only _fact_: if notions which do not\nreproduce it fully as it flows are still called true (and they\nevidently ought not to be) it is only in a pragmatic sense of the\nword, in that while they present a false and heterogeneous image of\nreality they are not practically misleading; as, for instance, the\nletters on this page are no true image of the sounds they call up, nor\nthe sounds of the thoughts, yet both may be correct enough if they\nlead the reader in the end to the things they symbolise. It is M.\nBergson, the most circumspect and best equipped thinker of this often\nscatter-brained school, who has put this view in a frank and tenable\nform, avoiding the bungling it has sometimes led to about the \"meaning\nof truth.\" Truth, according to M. Bergson, is given only in intuitions\nwhich prolong experience just as it occurs, in its full immediacy; on\nthe other hand, all representation, thought, theory, calculation, or\ndiscourse is so much mutilation of the truth, excusable only because\nimposed upon us by practical exigences. The world, being a feeling,\nmust be felt to be known, and then the world and the knowledge of it\nare identical; but if it is talked about or thought about it is\ndenaturalised, although convention and utility may compel the poor\nhuman being to talk and to think, exiled as he is from reality in his\nBabylon of abstractions. Life, like the porcupine when not ruffled by\npractical alarms, can let its fretful quills subside. The mystic can\nlive happy in the droning consciousness of his own heart-beats and\nthose of the universe.\n\nWith this we seem to have reached the extreme of self-concentration\nand self-expansion, the perfect identity and involution of everything\nin oneself. And such indeed is the inevitable goal of the malicious\ntheory of knowledge, to which this school is committed, remote as that\ngoal may be from the boyish naturalism and innocent intent of many of\nits pupils. If all knowledge is of experience and experience cannot be\nknowledge of anything else, knowledge proper is evidently impossible.\nThere can be only feeling; and the least self-transcendence, even in\nmemory, must be an illusion. You may have the most complex images you\nwill; but nothing pictured there can exist outside, not even past or\nalien experience, if you picture it.[1] Solipsism has always been the\nevident implication of idealism; but the idealists, when confronted\nwith this consequence, which is dialectically inconvenient, have never\nbeen troubled at heart by it, for at heart they accept it. To the\nuninitiated they have merely murmured, with a pitying smile and a wave\nof the hand: What! are you still troubled by that? Or if compelled to\nbe so scholastic as to labour the point they have explained, as usual,\nthat oneself cannot be the absolute because the _idea_ of oneself, to\narise, must be contrasted with other ideas. Therefore, you cannot well\nhave the idea of a world in which nothing appears but the _idea_ of\nyourself.\n\n[Footnote 1: Perhaps some unsophisticated reader may wonder if I am\nnot trying to mislead him, or if any mortal ever really maintained\nanything so absurd. Strictly the idealistic principle does not justify\na denial that independent things, by chance resembling my ideas, may\nactually exist; but it justifies the denial that these things, if they\nexisted, could be those I know. My past would not be my past if I did\nnot appropriate it; my ideas would not refer to their objects unless\nboth were ideas identified in my mind. In practice, therefore,\nidealists feel free to ignore the gratuitous possibility of existences\nlying outside the circle of objects knowable to the thinker, which,\naccording to them, is the circle of his ideas. In this way they turn a\nhuman method of approach into a charter for existence and\nnon-existence, and their point of view becomes the creative power.\nWhen the idealist studies astronomy, does he learn anything about the\nstars that God made? Far from him so naive a thought! His astronomy\nconsists of two activities of his own (and he is very fond of\nactivity): star-gazing and calculation. When he has become quite\nproficient he knows all about star-gazing and calculation; but he\nknows nothing of any stars that God made; for there are no stars\nexcept his visual images of stars, and there is no God but himself. It\nis true that to soften this hard saying a little he would correct me\nand say his _higher_ self; but as his lower self is only the idea of\nhimself which he may have framed, it is his higher self that is\nhimself simply: although whether he or his idea of himself is really\nthe higher might seem doubtful to an outsider.]\n\nThis explanation, in pretending to refute solipsism, of course assumes\nand confirms it; for all these _cans_ and _musts_ touch only your idea\nof yourself, not your actual being, and there is no thinkable world\nthat is not within you, as you exist really. Thus idealists are wedded\nto solipsism irrevocably; and it is a happy marriage, only the name of\nthe lady has to be changed.\n\nNevertheless, lest peace should come (and peace nowadays is neither\npossible nor desired), a counter-current at once overtakes the\nphilosophy of the immediate and carries it violently to the opposite\npole of speculation--from mystic intuition to a commercial cult of\naction and a materialisation of the mind such as no materialist had\never dreamt of. The tenderness which the pragmatists feel for life in\ngeneral, and especially for an accelerated modern life, has doubtless\ncontributed to this revulsion, but the speculative consideration of\nthe immediate might have led to it independently. For in the immediate\nthere is marked expectancy, craving, prayer; nothing absorbs\nconsciousness so much as what is not quite given. Therefore it is a\ngood reading of the immediate, as well as a congenial thing to say to\nthe contemporary world, that reality is change, growth, action,\ncreation. Similarly the sudden materialisation of mind, the\nunlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its\njustification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is\nthe thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the\npassions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new\nsensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and\nwords; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.\nThe passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be\nsaid to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their\nobjects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or\ncross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are\nrolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,\nthings are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,\nby a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that\nare reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of\na fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral\nmaterialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes\npossession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,\nhowever, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of\nblocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are\ncapable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to\ntake possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears\nunder the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and\nevolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason\ncould ever be.\n\nExtremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never\nwholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid\nrespectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left\nbehind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another\ninspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to\nconsciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old\nreligion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like\ntraditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success\nby attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really\ninspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no\ndifficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end\nif whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the\nworship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power\nis attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and\nphilosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb\nreligious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or\nlife are good for it would be unsympathetic to inquire: the stream is\nmighty, and we must swim with the stream. Concern for survival,\nhowever, which seems to be the pragmatic principle in morals, does not\nafford a remedy for moral anarchy. To take firm hold on life,\naccording to Nietzsche, we should be imperious, poetical, atheistic;\nbut according to William James we should be democratic, concrete, and\ncredulous. It is hard to say whether pragmatism is come to emancipate\nthe individual spirit and make it lord over things, or on the contrary\nto declare the spirit a mere instrument for the survival of the flesh.\nIn Italy, the mind seems to be raised deliriously into an absolute\ncreator, evoking at will, at each moment, a new past, a new future, a\nnew earth, and a new God. In America, however, the mind is recommended\nrather as an unpatented device for oiling the engine of the body and\nmaking it do double work.\n\nTrustful faith in evolution and a longing for intense life are\ncharacteristic of contemporary sentiment; but they do not appear to be\nconsistent with that contempt for the intellect which is no less\ncharacteristic of it. Human intelligence is certainly a product, and\na late and highly organised product, of evolution; it ought apparently\nto be as much admired as the eyes of molluscs or the antennae of ants.\nAnd if life is better the more intense and concentrated it is,\nintelligence would seem to be the best form of life. But the degree of\nintelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable\nthat, in this instance, it asks for something less vital, and sighs\nfor what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly\ndistinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as\ntheology it feels _la nostalgie de la boue_. It was only, M. Bergson\ntells us, where dead matter oppressed life that life was forced to\nbecome intelligence; for this reason intelligence kills whatever it\ntouches; it is the tribute that life pays to death. Life would find it\nsweet to throw off that painful subjection to circumstance and bloom\nin some more congenial direction. M. Bergson's own philosophy is an\neffort to realise this revulsion, to disintegrate intelligence and\nstimulate sympathetic experience. Its charm lies in the relief which\nit brings to a stale imagination, an imagination from which religion\nhas vanished and which is kept stretched on the machinery of business\nand society, or on small half-borrowed passions which we clothe in a\nmean rhetoric and dot with vulgar pleasures. Finding their\nintelligence enslaved, our contemporaries suppose that intelligence is\nessentially servile; instead of freeing it, they try to elude it. Not\nfree enough themselves morally, but bound to the world partly by piety\nand partly by industrialism, they cannot think of rising to a detached\ncontemplation of earthly things, and of life itself and evolution;\nthey revert rather to sensibility, and seek some by-path of instinct\nor dramatic sympathy in which to wander. Having no stomach for the\nultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. But the longing\nto be primitive is a disease of culture; it is archaism in morals. To\nbe so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anaemia. When life was\nreally vigorous and young, in Homeric times for instance, no one\nseemed to fear that it might be squeezed out of existence either by\nthe incubus of matter or by the petrifying blight of intelligence.\nLife was like the light of day, something to use, or to waste, or to\nenjoy. It was not a thing to worship; and often the chief luxury of\nliving consisted in dealing death about vigorously. Life indeed was\nloved, and the beauty and pathos of it were felt exquisitely; but its\nbeauty and pathos lay in the divineness of its model and in its own\nfragility. No one paid it the equivocal compliment of thinking it a\nsubstance or a material force. Nobility was not then impossible in\nsentiment, because there were ideals in life higher and more\nindestructible than life itself, which life might illustrate and to\nwhich it might fitly be sacrificed. Nothing can be meaner than the\nanxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape; a spirit with\nany honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit\nwith any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all. In those days men\nrecognised immortal gods and resigned themselves to being mortal. Yet\nthose were the truly vital and instinctive days of the human spirit.\nOnly when vitality is low do people find material things oppressive\nand ideal things unsubstantial. Now there is more motion than life,\nand more haste than force; we are driven to distraction by the ticking\nof the tiresome clocks, material and social, by which we are obliged\nto regulate our existence. We need ministering angels to fly to us\nfrom somewhere, even if it be from the depths of protoplasm. We must\nbathe in the currents of some non-human vital flood, like consumptives\nin their last extremity who must bask in the sunshine and breathe the\nmountain air; and our disease is not without its sophistry to convince\nus that we were never so well before, or so mightily conscious of\nbeing alive.\n\nWhen chaos has penetrated so far into the moral being of nations they\ncan hardly be expected to produce great men. A great man need not be\nvirtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a\ndistinctive, luminous character; if he is to dominate things,\nsomething must be dominant in him. We feel him to be great in that he\nclarifies and brings to expression something which was potential in\nthe rest of us, but which with our burden of flesh and circumstance we\nwere too torpid to utter. The great man is a spontaneous variation in\nhumanity; but not in any direction. A spontaneous variation might be a\nmere madness or mutilation or monstrosity; in finding the variation\nadmirable we evidently invoke some principle of order to which it\nconforms. Perhaps it makes explicit what was preformed in us also; as\nwhen a poet finds the absolutely right phrase for a feeling, or when\nnature suddenly astonishes us with a form of absolute beauty. Or\nperhaps it makes an unprecedented harmony out of things existing\nbefore, but jangled and detached. The first man was a great man for\nthis latter reason; having been an ape perplexed and corrupted by his\nmultiplying instincts, he suddenly found a new way of being decent, by\nharnessing all those instincts together, through memory and\nimagination, and giving each in turn a measure of its due; which is\nwhat we call being rational. It is a new road to happiness, if you\nhave strength enough to castigate a little the various impulses that\nsway you in turn. Why then is the martyr, who sacrifices everything to\none attraction, distinguished from the criminal or the fool, who do\nthe same thing? Evidently because the spirit that in the martyr\ndestroys the body is the very spirit which the body is stifling in the\nrest of us; and although his private inspiration may be irrational,\nthe tendency of it is not, but reduces the public conscience to act\nbefore any one else has had the courage to do so. Greatness is\nspontaneous; simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are\nessential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the\ndirection of some possible sort of order; it must exclude and leave\nbehind what is incapable of being moralised. How, then, should there\nbe any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers, or legislators in\nan age when nobody trusts himself, or feels any confidence in reason,\nin an age when the word _dogmatic_ is a term of reproach? Greatness\nhas character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and\nperfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.\n\nThere is indeed another kind of greatness, or rather largeness of\nmind, which consists in being a synthesis of humanity in its current\nphases, even if without prophetic emphasis or direction: the breadth\nof a Goethe, rather than the fineness of a Shelley or a Leopardi. But\nsuch largeness of mind, not to be vulgar, must be impartial,\ncomprehensive, Olympian; it would not be greatness if its miscellany\nwere not dominated by a clear genius and if before the confusion of\nthings the poet or philosopher were not himself delighted, exalted,\nand by no means confused. Nor does this presume omniscience on his\npart. It is not necessary to fathom the ground or the structure of\neverything in order to know what to make of it. Stones do not\ndisconcert a builder because he may not happen to know what they are\nchemically; and so the unsolved problems of life and nature, and the\nBabel of society, need not disturb the genial observer, though he may\nbe incapable of unravelling them. He may set these dark spots down in\ntheir places, like so many caves or wells in a landscape, without\nfeeling bound to scrutinise their depths simply because their depths\nare obscure. Unexplored they may have a sort of lustre, explored they\nmight merely make him blind, and it may be a sufficient understanding\nof them to know that they are not worth investigating. In this way the\nmost chaotic age and the most motley horrors might be mirrored\nlimpidly in a great mind, as the Renaissance was mirrored in the works\nof Raphael and Shakespeare; but the master's eye itself must be\nsingle, his style unmistakable, his visionary interest in what he\ndepicts frank and supreme. Hence this comprehensive sort of greatness\ntoo is impossible in an age when moral confusion is pervasive, when\ncharacters are complex, undecided, troubled by the mere existence of\nwhat is not congenial to them, eager to be not themselves; when, in a\nword, thought is weak and the flux of things overwhelms it.\n\nWithout great men and without clear convictions this age is\nnevertheless very active intellectually; it is studious, empirical,\ninventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite\nopenness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has\ngained a sense of possible depths in all directions. Under these\ncircumstances, some triviality and great confusion in its positive\nachievements are not unpromising things, nor even unamiable. These are\nthe _Wanderjahre_ of faith; it looks smilingly at every new face,\nwhich might perhaps be that of a predestined friend; it chases after\nany engaging stranger; it even turns up again from time to time at\nhome, full of a new tenderness for all it had abandoned there. But to\nsettle down would be impossible now. The intellect, the judgment are\nin abeyance. Life is running turbid and full; and it is no marvel that\nreason, after vainly supposing that it ruled the world, should\nabdicate as gracefully as possible, when the world is so obviously the\nsport of cruder powers--vested interests, tribal passions, stock\nsentiments, and chance majorities. Having no responsibility laid upon\nit, reason has become irresponsible. Many critics and philosophers\nseem to conceive that thinking aloud is itself literature. Sometimes\nreason tries to lend some moral authority to its present masters, by\nproving how superior they are to itself; it worships evolution,\ninstinct, novelty, action, as it does in modernism, pragmatism, and\nthe philosophy of M. Bergson. At other times it retires into the\nfreehold of those temperaments whom this world has ostracised, the\nregion of the non-existent, and comforts itself with its indubitable\nconquests there. This happened earlier to the romanticists (in a way\nwhich I have tried to describe in the subjoined paper on Shelley)\nalthough their poetic and political illusions did not suffer them to\nperceive it. It is happening now, after disillusion, to some radicals\nand mathematicians like Mr. Bertrand Russell, and to others of us who,\nperhaps without being mathematicians or even radicals, feel that the\nsphere of what happens to exist is too alien and accidental to absorb\nall the play of a free mind, whose function, after it has come to\nclearness and made its peace with things, is to touch them with its\nown moral and intellectual light, and to exist for its own sake.\n\nThese are but gusts of doctrine; yet they prove that the spirit is not\ndead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows\nwhich of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the\ncoming age steadily before it?\n\n\n\n\nII\n\nMODERNISM AND CHRISTIANITY\n\n\nPrevalent winds of doctrine must needs penetrate at last into the\ncloister. Social instability and moral confusion, reconstructions of\nhistory and efforts after reform, are things characteristic of the\npresent age; and under the name of modernism they have made their\nappearance even in that institution which is constitutionally the most\nstable, of most explicit mind, least inclined to revise its collective\nmemory or established usages--I mean the Catholic church. Even after\nthis church was constituted by the fusion of many influences and by\nthe gradual exclusion of those heresies--some of them older than\nexplicit orthodoxy--which seemed to misrepresent its implications or\nspirit, there still remained an inevitable propensity among Catholics\nto share the moods of their respective ages and countries, and to\nreconcile them if possible with their professed faith. Often these\ncross influences were so strong that the profession of faith was\nchanged frankly to suit them, and Catholicism was openly abandoned;\nbut even where this did not occur we may detect in the Catholic minds\nof each age some strange conjunctions and compromises with the\n_Zeitgeist_. Thus the morality of chivalry and war, the ideals of\nfoppishness and honour, have been long maintained side by side with\nthe maxims of the gospel, which they entirely contradict. Later the\nsystem of Copernicus, incompatible at heart with the anthropocentric\nand moralistic view of the world which Christianity implies, was\naccepted by the church with some lame attempt to render it innocuous;\nbut it remains an alien and hostile element, like a spent bullet\nlodged in the flesh. In more recent times we have heard of liberal\nCatholicism, the attitude assumed by some generous but divided minds,\ntoo much attached to their traditional religion to abandon it, but too\nweak and too hopeful not to glow also with enthusiasm for modern\nliberty and progress. Had those minds been, I will not say\nintelligently Catholic but radically Christian, they would have felt\nthat this liberty was simply liberty to be damned, and this progress\nnot an advance towards the true good of man, but a lapse into endless\nand heathen wanderings. For Christianity, in its essence and origin,\nwas an urgent summons to repent and come out of just such a worldly\nlife as modern liberty and progress hold up as an ideal to the\nnations. In the Roman empire, as in the promised land of liberalism,\neach man sought to get and to enjoy as much as he could, and supported\na ponderous government neutral as to religion and moral traditions,\nbut favourable to the accumulation of riches; so that a certain\nenlightenment and cosmopolitanism were made possible, and private\npassions and tastes could be gratified without encountering\npersecution or public obloquy, though not without a general relaxation\nof society and a vulgarising of arts and manners. That something so\nself-indulgent and worldly as this ideal of liberalism could have been\nthought compatible with Christianity, the first initiation into which,\nin baptism, involves renouncing the world, might well astonish us,\nhad we not been rendered deaf to moral discords by the very din which\nfrom our birth they have been making in our ears.\n\nBut this is not all. Primitive Christianity was not only a summons to\nturn one's heart and mind away from a corrupt world; it was a summons\nto do so under pain of instant and terrible punishment. It was the\nconviction of pious Jews since the days of the Prophets that\nmercilessness, avarice, and disobedience to revealed law were the\ndirect path to ruin; a world so wicked as the liberal world against\nwhich St. John the Baptist thundered was necessarily on the verge of\ndestruction. Sin, although we moderns may not think so, seemed to the\nancient Jews a fearful imprudence. The hand of the Lord would descend\non it heavily, and very soon. The whole Roman civilisation was to be\noverthrown in the twinkling of an eye. Those who hoped to be of the\nremnant and to be saved, so as to lead a clarified and heavenly life\nin the New Jerusalem, must hasten to put on sackcloth and ashes, to\nfast and to pray, to watch with girded loins for the coming of the\nkingdom; it was superfluous for them to study the dead past or to take\nthought for the morrow. The cataclysm was at hand; a new heaven and a\nnew earth--far more worthy of study--would be unrolled before that\nvery generation.\n\nThere was indeed something terribly levelling, revolutionary, serious,\nand expectant about that primitive gospel; and in so far as liberalism\npossessed similar qualities, in so far as it was moved by indignation,\npity, and fervent hope, it could well preach on early Christian texts.\nBut the liberal Catholics were liberals of the polite and\ngovernmental sort; they were shocked at suffering rather than at sin,\nand they feared not the Lord but the movement of public opinion. Some\nof them were vaguely pious men, whose conservativism in social and\nmoral matters forbade them to acquiesce in the disappearance of the\nchurch altogether, and they thought it might be preserved, as the\nEnglish church is, by making opportune concessions. Others were simply\naristocrats, desirous that the pacifying influence of religion should\nremain strong over the masses. The clergy was not, in any considerable\nmeasure, tossed by these opposing currents; the few priests who were\nliberals were themselves men of the world, patriots, and orators. Such\npersons could not look forward to a fierce sifting of the wheat from\nthe tares, or to any burning of whole bundles of nations, for they\nwere nothing if not romantic nationalists, and the idea of faggots of\nany sort was most painful to their minds. They longed rather for a\nsweet cohabitation with everybody, and a mild tolerance of almost\neverything. A war for religion seemed to them a crime, but a war for\nnationality glorious and holy. No wonder that their work in\nnation-building has endured, while their sentiments in religion are\nscattered to the winds. The liberalism for the sake of which they were\nwilling to eviscerate their Christianity has already lost its\nvitality; it survives as a pale parliamentary tradition, impotent\nbefore the tide of socialism rising behind its back. The Catholicism\nwhich they wished to see gently lingering is being driven out of\nnational life by official spoliations and popular mockeries. It is\nfast becoming what it was in the beginning, a sect with more or less\npower to alienate the few who genuinely adhere to it from the pagan\nsociety in which they are forced to live.\n\nThe question what is true or essential Christianity is a thorny one,\nbecause each party gives the name of genuine Christianity to what it\nhappens to believe. Thus Professor Harnack, not to mention less\ndistinguished historians, makes the original essence of Christianity\ncoincide--what a miracle!--with his own Lutheran and Kantian\nsentiments. But the essence of Christianity, as of everything else, is\nthe whole of it; and the genuine nature of a seed is at least as well\nexpressed by what it becomes in contact with the earth and air as by\nwhat it seems in its primitive minuteness. It is quite true, as the\nmodernists tell us, that in the beginning Christian faith was not a\nmatter of scholastic definitions, nor even of intellectual dogmas.\nReligions seldom begin in that form, and paganism was even less\nintellectual and less dogmatic than early Christianity. The most\nprimitive Christian faith consisted in a conversion of the whole\nman--intellect, habits, and affections--from the life of the world to\na new mystical life, in answer to a moral summons and a prophecy about\ndestiny. The moral summons was to renounce home, kindred, possessions,\nthe respect of men, the hypocrisies of the synagogue, and to devote\noneself to a wandering and begging life, healing, praying, and\npreaching. And preaching what? Preaching the prophecy about destiny\nwhich justified that conversion and renunciation; preaching that the\nworld, in its present constitution, was about to be destroyed on\naccount of its wickedness, and that the ignorant, the poor, and the\ndown-trodden, if they trusted this prophecy, and turned their backs at\nonce on all the world pursues, would be saved in the new deluge, and\nwould form a new society, of a more or less supernatural kind, to be\nraised on the ruins of all present institutions. The poor were called,\nbut the rich were called also, and perhaps even the heathen; for there\nwas in all men, even in all nature (this is the one touch of\nspeculative feeling in the gospel), a precious potentiality of\ngoodness. All were essentially amiable, though accidentally wretched\nand depraved; and by the magic of a new faith and hope this soul of\ngoodness in all living things might be freed from the hideous incubus\nof circumstance that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly\nas the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could\nbloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and\ndiseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice\nof healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the\ninterests of political society, and a confident expectation of a\ncataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world--such was\nChristian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled\nwith the sense of a special election and responsibility, and of a\nspecial hope. He was serene, abstracted, incorruptible, his inward eye\nfixed on a wonderful revelation. He was as incapable of attacking as\nof serving the state; he despised or ignored everything for which the\nstate exists, labour, wealth, power, felicity, splendour, and\nlearning. With Christ the natural man in him had been crucified, and\nin Christ he had risen again a spiritual man, to walk the earth, as a\nmessenger from heaven, for a few more years. His whole life was an\nexperience of perpetual graces and miracles.\n\nThe prophecy about the speedy end of this wicked world was not\nfulfilled as the early Christians expected; but this fact is less\ndisconcerting to the Christian than one would suppose. The spontaneous\nor instinctive Christian--and there is such a type of mind, quite\napart from any affiliation to historic Christianity--takes a personal\nand dramatic view of the world; its values and even its reality are\nthe values and reality which it may have for him. It would profit him\nnothing to win it, if he lost his own soul. That prophecy about the\ndestruction of nature springs from this attitude; nature must be\nsubservient to the human conscience; it must satisfy the hopes of the\nprophet and vindicate the saints. That the years should pass and\nnothing should seem to happen need not shatter the force of this\nprophecy for those whose imagination it excites. This world must\nactually vanish very soon for each of us; and this is the point of\nview that counts with the Christian mind. Even if we consider\nposterity, the kingdoms and arts and philosophies of this world are\nshort lived; they shift their aims continually and shift their\nsubstance. The prophecy of their destruction is therefore being\nfulfilled continually; the need of repentance, if one would be saved,\nis truly urgent; and the means of that salvation cannot be an\noperation upon this world, but faith in another world that, in the\nexperience of each soul, is to follow upon it. Thus the summons to\nrepent and the prophecy about destiny which were the root of\nChristianity, can fully retain their spirit when for \"this wicked\nworld\" we read \"this transitory life\" and for \"the coming of the\nKingdom\" we read \"life everlasting.\" The change is important, but it\naffects the application rather than the nature of the gospel. Morally\nthere is a loss, because men will never take so hotly what concerns\nanother life as what affects this one; speculatively, on the other\nhand, there is a gain, for the expectation of total transformations\nand millenniums on earth is a very crude illusion, while the relation\nof the soul to nature is an open question in philosophy, and there\nwill always be a great loftiness and poetic sincerity in the feeling\nthat the soul is a stranger in this world and has other destinies in\nstore.\n\nWhat would make the preaching of the gospel utterly impossible would\nbe the admission that it had no authority to proclaim what has\nhappened or what is going to happen, either in this world or in\nanother. A prophecy about destiny is an account, however vague, of\nevents to be actually experienced, and of their causes. The whole\ninspiration of Hebraic religion lies in that. It was not\nmetaphorically that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. The promised\nland was a piece of earth. The kingdom was an historical fact. It was\nnot symbolically that Israel was led into captivity, or that it\nreturned and restored the Temple. It was not ideally that a Messiah\nwas to come. Memory of such events is in the same field as history;\nprophecy is in the same field as natural science. Natural science too\nis an account of what will happen, and under what conditions. It too\nis a prophecy about destiny. Accordingly, while it is quite true that\nspeculations about nature and history are not contained explicitly in\nthe religion of the gospel, yet the message of this religion is one\nwhich speculations about nature and reconstructions of history may\nextend congruously, or may contradict and totally annul. If physical\nscience should remove those threats of destruction to follow upon sin\nwhich Christian prophecy contains, or if it should prove that what\nbrings destruction is just that unworldly, prayerful, all-forgiving,\nidle, and revolutionary attitude which the gospel enjoins, then\nphysical science would be incompatible with Christianity; not with\nthis or that text of the Bible merely, about the sun standing still or\nthe dead rising again, but with the whole foundation of what Christ\nhimself, with John the Baptist, St. Paul, St. James, and St. John,\npreached to the world.\n\nEven the pagan poets, when they devised a myth, half believed in it\nfor a fact. What really lent some truth--moral truth only--to their\nimaginations was indeed the beauty of nature, the comedy of life, or\nthe groans of mankind, crushed between the upper and the nether\nmillstones; but being scientifically ignorant they allowed their\npictorial wisdom to pass for a revealed science, for a physics of the\nunseen. If even among the pagans the poetic expression of human\nexperience could be mistaken in this way for knowledge of occult\nexistences, how much more must this have been the case among a more\nignorant and a more intense nation like the Jews? Indeed, _events_ are\nwhat the Jews have always remembered and hoped for; if their religion\nwas not a guide to events, an assured means towards a positive and\nexperimental salvation, it was nothing. Their theology was meagre in\nthe description of the Lord's nature, but rich in the description of\nhis ways. Indeed, their belief in the existence and power of the Lord,\nif we take it pragmatically and not imaginatively, was simply the\nbelief in certain moral harmonies in destiny, in the sufficiency of\nconduct of a certain sort to secure success and good fortune, both\nnational and personal. This faith was partly an experience and partly\na demand; it turned on history and prophecy. History was interpreted\nby a prophetic insight into the moral principle, believed to govern\nit; and prophecy was a passionate demonstration of the same\nprinciples, at work in the catastrophes of the day or of the morrow.\n\nThere is no doubt a Platonic sort of religion, a worship of the ideal\napart from its power to realise itself, which has entered largely into\nthe life of Christians; and the more mystical and disinterested they\nwere, the more it has tended to take the place of Hebraism. But the\nPlatonists, too, when left to their instincts, follow their master in\nattributing power and existence, by a sort of cumulative worship and\nimaginative hyperbole, to what in the first place they worship because\nit is good. To divorce, then, as the modernists do, the history of the\nworld from the story of salvation, and God's government and the\nsanctions of religion from the operation of matter, is a _fundamental\napostasy_ from Christianity. Christianity, being a practical and\nliving faith in a possible eventual redemption from sin, from the\npunishment for sin, from the thousand circumstances that make the most\nbrilliant worldly life a sham and a failure, essentially involves a\nfaith in a supernatural physics, in such an economy of forces, behind,\nwithin, and around the discoverable forces of nature, that the\ndestiny which nature seems to prepare for us may be reversed, that\nfailures may be turned into successes, ignominy into glory, and humble\nfaith into triumphant vision: and this not merely by a change in our\npoint of view or estimation of things, but by an actual historical,\nphysical transformation in the things themselves. To believe this in\nour day may require courage, even a certain childish simplicity; but\nwere not courage and a certain childish simplicity always requisite\nfor Christian faith? It never was a religion for the rationalist and\nthe worldling; it was based on alienation from the world, from the\nintellectual world no less than from the economic and political. It\nflourished in the Oriental imagination that is able to treat all\nexistence with disdain and to hold it superbly at arm's length, and at\nthe same time is subject to visions and false memories, is swayed by\nthe eloquence of private passion, and raises confidently to heaven the\ncry of the poor, the bereaved, and the distressed. Its daily bread,\nfrom the beginning, was hope for a miraculous change of scene, for\nprison-walls falling to the ground about it, for a heart inwardly\ncomforted, and a shower of good things from the sky.\n\nIt is clear that a supernaturalistic faith of this sort, which might\nwholly inspire some revolutionary sect, can never wholly inspire human\nsociety. Whenever a nation is converted to Christianity, its\nChristianity, in practice, must be largely converted into paganism.\nThe true Christian is in all countries a pilgrim and a stranger; not\nhis kinsmen, but whoever does the will of his Father who is in heaven\nis his brother and sister and mother and his real compatriot. In a\nnation that calls itself Christian every child may be pledged, at\nbaptism, to renounce the world, the flesh, and the devil; but the\nflesh will assert itself notwithstanding, the devil will have his due,\nand the nominal Christian, become a man of business and the head of a\nfamily, will form an integral part of that very world which he will\npledge his children to renounce in turn as he holds them over the\nfont. The lips, even the intellect, may continue to profess the\nChristian ideal; but public and social life will be guided by quite\nanother. The ages of faith, the ages of Christian unity, were such\nonly superficially. When all men are Christians only a small element\ncan be Christian in the average man. The thirteenth century, for\ninstance, is supposed to be the golden age of Catholicism; but what\nseems to have filled it, if we may judge by the witness of Dante?\nLittle but bitter conflicts, racial and religious; faithless\nrebellions, both in states and in individuals, against the Christian\nregimen; worldliness in the church, barbarism in the people, and a\ndawning of all sorts of scientific and aesthetic passions, in\nthemselves quite pagan and contrary to the spirit of the gospel.\nChristendom at that time was by no means a kingdom of God on earth; it\nwas a conglomeration of incorrigible rascals, intellectually more or\nless Christian. We may see the same thing under different\ncircumstances in the Spain of Philip II. Here was a government\nconsciously labouring in the service of the church, to resist Turks,\nconvert pagans, banish Moslems, and crush Protestants. Yet the very\nforces engaged in defending the church, the army and the Inquisition,\nwere alien to the Christian life; they were fit embodiments rather of\nchivalry and greed, or of policy and jealous dominion. The\necclesiastical forces also, theology, ritual, and hierarchy, employed\nin spreading the gospel were themselves alien to the gospel. An\nanti-worldly religion finds itself in fact in this dilemma: if it\nremains merely spiritual, developing no material organs, it cannot\naffect the world; while if it develops organs with which to operate on\nthe world, these organs become a part of the world from which it is\ntrying to wean the individual spirit, so that the moment it is armed\nfor conflict such a religion has two enemies on its hands. It is\nstifled by its necessary armour, and adds treason in its members to\nhostility in its foes. The passions and arts it uses against its\nopponents are as fatal to itself as those which its opponents array\nagainst it.\n\nIn every age in which a supernaturalistic system is preached we must\naccordingly expect to find the world standing up stubbornly against\nit, essentially unconverted and hostile, whatever name it may have\nbeen christened with; and we may expect the spirit of the world to\nfind expression, not only in overt opposition to the supernaturalistic\nsystem, but also in the surviving or supervening worldliness of the\nfaithful. Such an insidious revulsion of the natural man against a\nreligion he does not openly discard is what, in modern Christendom, we\ncall the Renaissance. No less than the Revolution (which is the later\nopen rebellion against the same traditions) the Renaissance is\nradically inimical to Christianity. To say that Christianity survives,\neven if weakened or disestablished, is to say that the Renaissance and\nthe Revolution are still incomplete, Far from being past events they\nare living programmes. The ideal of the Renaissance is to restore\npagan standards in polite learning, in philosophy, in sentiment, and\nin morals. It is to abandon and exactly reverse one's baptismal vows.\nInstead of forsaking this wicked world, the men of the Renaissance\naccept, love, and cultivate the world, with all its pomp and vanities;\nthey believe in the blamelessness of natural life and in its\nperfectibility; or they cling at least to a noble ambition to perfect\nit and a glorious ability to enjoy it. Instead of renouncing the\nflesh, they feed, refine, and adorn it; their arts glorify its beauty\nand its passions. And far from renouncing the devil--if we understand\nby the devil the proud assertion on the part of the finite of its\nautonomy, autonomy of the intellect in science, autonomy of the heart\nand will in morals--the men of the Renaissance are possessed by the\ndevil altogether. They worship nothing and acknowledge authority in\nnothing save in their own spirit. No opposition could be more radical\nand complete than that between the Renaissance and the anti-worldly\nreligion of the gospel.\n\n\"I see a vision,\" Nietzsche says somewhere, \"so full of meaning, yet\nso wonderfully strange--Caesar Borgia become pope! Do you understand?\nAh, that would verily have been the triumph for which I am longing\nto-day. Then Christianity would have been done for.\" And Nietzsche\ngoes on to accuse Luther of having spoiled this lovely possibility,\nwhich was about to be realised, by frightening the papacy out of its\nmellow paganism into something like a restoration of the old acrid\nChristianity. A dream of this sort, even if less melodramatic than\nNietzsche's, has visited the mind of many a neo-Catholic or\nneo-pagan. If the humanistic tendencies of the Renaissance could have\nworked on unimpeded, might not a revolution from above, a gradual\nrationalisation, have transformed the church? Its dogma might have\nbeen insensibly understood to be nothing but myth, its miracles\nnothing but legend, its sacraments mere symbols, its Bible pure\nliterature, its liturgy just poetry, its hierarchy an administrative\nconvenience, its ethics an historical accident, and its whole function\nsimply to lend a warm mystical aureole to human culture and ignorance.\nThe Reformation prevented this euthanasia of Christianity. It\nre-expressed the unenlightened absolutism of the old religion; it\ninsisted that dogma was scientifically true, that salvation was urgent\nand fearfully doubtful, that the world, and the worldly paganised\nchurch, were as Sodom and Gomorrah, and that sin, though natural to\nman, was to God an abomination. In fighting this movement, which soon\nbecame heretical, the Catholic church had to fight it with its own\nweapons, and thereby reawakened in its own bosom the same sinister\nconvictions. It did not have to dig deep to find them. Even without\nLuther, convinced Catholics would have appeared in plenty to prevent\nCaesar Borgia, had he secured the tiara, from being pope in any novel\nfashion or with any revolutionary result. The supernaturalism, the\nliteral realism, the other-worldliness of the Catholic church are too\nmuch the soul of it to depart without causing its dissolution. While\nthe church lives at all, it must live on the strength which these\nprinciples can lend it. And they are not altogether weak. Persons who\nfeel themselves to be exiles in this world--and what noble mind, from\nEmpedocles down, has not had that feeling?--are mightily inclined to\nbelieve themselves citizens of another. There will always be\nspontaneous, instinctive Christians; and when, under the oppression of\nsin, salvation is looked for and miracles are expected, the\nsupernatural scheme of salvation which historical Christianity offers\nwill not always be despised. The modernists think the church is doomed\nif it turns a deaf ear to the higher criticism or ignores the\nphilosophy of M. Bergson. But it has outlived greater storms. A moment\nwhen any exotic superstition can find excitable minds to welcome it,\nwhen new and grotesque forms of faith can spread among the people,\nwhen the ultimate impotence of science is the theme of every cheap\nphilosopher, when constructive philology is reefing its sails, when\nthe judicious grieve at the portentous metaphysical shams of yesterday\nand smile at those of to-day--such a moment is rather ill chosen for\nprophesying the extinction of a deep-rooted system of religion because\nyour own studies make it seem to you incredible; especially if you\nhold a theory of knowledge that regards all opinions as arbitrary\npostulates, which it may become convenient to abandon at any moment.\n\nModernism is the infiltration into minds that begin by being Catholic\nand wish to remain so of two contemporary influences: one the\nrationalistic study of the Bible and of church history, the other\nmodern philosophy, especially in its mystical and idealistic forms.\nThe sensitiveness of the modernists to these two influences is\ncreditable to them as men, however perturbing it may be to them as\nCatholics; for what makes them adopt the views of rationalistic\nhistorians is simply the fact that those views seem, in substance,\nconvincingly true; and what makes them wander into transcendental\nspeculations is the warmth of their souls, needing to express their\nfaith anew, and to follow their inmost inspiration, wherever it may\nlead them. A scrupulous honesty in admitting the probable facts of\nhistory, and a fresh upwelling of mystical experience, these are the\nmotives, creditable to any spiritual man, that have made modernists of\nso many. But these excellent things appear in the modernists under\nrather unfortunate circumstances. For the modernists to begin with are\nCatholics, and usually priests; they are pledged to a fixed creed,\ntouching matters both of history and of philosophy; and it would be a\nmarvel if rationalistic criticism of the Bible and rationalistic\nchurch history confirmed that creed on its historical side, or if\nirresponsible personal speculations, in the manner of Ritschl or of M.\nBergson, confirmed its metaphysics.\n\nI am far from wishing to suggest that an orthodox Christian cannot be\nscrupulously honest in admitting the probable facts, or cannot have a\nfresh spiritual experience, or frame an original philosophy. But what\nwe think probable hangs on our standard of probability and of\nevidence; the spiritual experiences that come to us are according to\nour disposition and affections; and any new philosophy we frame will\nbe an answer to the particular problems that beset us, and an\nexpression of the solutions we hope for. Now this standard of\nprobability, this disposition, and these problems and hopes may be\nthose of a Christian or they may not. The true Christian, for\ninstance, will begin by regarding miracles as probable; he will either\nbelieve he has experienced them in his own person, or hope for them\nearnestly; nothing will seem to him more natural, more in consonance\nwith the actual texture of life, than that they should have occurred\nabundantly and continuously in the past. When he finds the record of\none he will not inquire, like the rationalist, how that false record\ncould have been concocted; but rather he will ask how the rationalist,\nin spite of so many witnesses to the contrary, has acquired his fixed\nassurance of the universality of the commonplace. An answer perhaps\ncould be offered of which the rationalist need not be ashamed. We\nmight say that faith in the universality of the commonplace (in its\norigin, no doubt, simply an imaginative presumption) is justified by\nour systematic mastery of matter in the arts. The rejection of\nmiracles _a priori_ expresses a conviction that the laws by which we\ncan always control or predict the movement of matter govern that\nmovement universally; and evidently, if the material course of history\nis fixed mechanically, the mental and moral course of it is thereby\nfixed on the same plan; for a mind not expressed somehow in matter\ncannot be revealed to the historian. This may be good philosophy, but\nwe could not think so if we were good Christians. We should then\nexpect to move matter by prayer. Rationalistic history and criticism\nare therefore based, as Pius X. most accurately observed in his\nEncyclical on modernism, on rationalistic philosophy; and we might add\nthat rationalistic philosophy is based on practical art, and that\npractical art, by which we help ourselves, like Prometheus, and make\ninstruments of what religion worships, when this art is carried beyond\nthe narrowest bounds, is the essence of pride and irreligion. Miners,\nmachinists, and artisans are irreligious by trade. Religion is the\nlove of life in the consciousness of impotence.\n\nSimilarly, the spontaneous insight of Christians and their new\nphilosophies will express a Christian disposition. The chief problems\nin them will be sin and redemption; the conclusion will be some fresh\nintuition of divine love and heavenly beatitude. It would be no sign\nof originality in a Christian to begin discoursing on love like Ovid\nor on heaven like Mohammed, or stop discoursing on them at all; it\nwould be a sign of apostasy.\n\nNow the modernists' criterion of probability in history or of\nworthiness in philosophy is not the Christian criterion. It is that of\ntheir contemporaries outside the church, who are rationalists in\nhistory and egotists or voluntarists in philosophy. The biblical\ncriticism and mystical speculations of the modernists call for no\nspecial remark; they are such as any studious or spiritual person,\nwith no inherited religion, might compose in our day. But what is\nremarkable and well-nigh incredible is that even for a moment they\nshould have supposed this non-Christian criterion in history and this\nnon-Christian direction in metaphysics compatible with adherence to\nthe Catholic church. That seems to presuppose, in men who in fact are\nparticularly thoughtful and learned, an inexplicable ignorance of\nhistory, of theology, and of the world.\n\nEverything, however, has its explanation. In a Catholic seminary, as\nthe modernists bitterly complain, very little is heard of the views\nheld in the learned world outside. It is not taught there that the\nChristian religion is only one of many, some of them older and\nsuperior to it in certain respects; that it itself is eclectic and\ncontains inward contradictions; that it is and always has been divided\ninto rancorous sects; that its position in the world is precarious and\nits future hopeless. On the contrary, everything is so presented as to\npersuade the innocent student that all that is good or true anywhere\nis founded on the faith he is preparing to preach, that the historical\nevidences of its truth are irrefragable, that it is logically perfect\nand spiritually all-sufficing. These convictions, which no breath from\nthe outside is allowed to ruffle, are deepened in the case of pensive\nand studious minds, like those of the leading modernists, by their own\nreligious experience. They understand in what they are taught more,\nperhaps, than their teachers intend. They understand how those ideas\noriginated, they can trace a similar revelation in their own lives.\nThis (which a cynic might expect would be the beginning of\ndisillusion) only deepens their religious faith and gives it a wider\nbasis; report and experience seem to conspire. But trouble is brewing\nhere; for a report that can be confirmed by experience can also be\nenlarged by it, and it is easy to see in traditional revelation itself\nmany diverse sources; different temperaments and different types of\nthought have left their impress upon it. Yet other temperaments and\nother types of thought might continue the task. Revelation seems to be\nprogressive; a part may fall to us also to furnish.\n\nThis insight, for a Christian, has its dangers. No doubt it gives him\na key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the\nacceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton\ninformation fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views,\nexpressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national\nhopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy\nof the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself,\nrender these dogmas necessarily mythical. They might be ideal\nexpressions of human experience and yet be literally true as well,\nprovided we assume (what is assumed throughout in Christianity) that\nthe world is made for man, and that even God is just such a God as man\nwould have wished him to be, the existent ideal of human nature and\nthe foregone solution to all human problems. Nevertheless, Christian\ndogmas are definite,[2] while human inspirations are potentially\nlimitless; and if the object of the two is identical either the dogmas\nmust be stretched and ultimately abandoned, or inspiration which does\nnot conform to them must be denounced as illusory or diabolical.\n\n[Footnote 2: At least in their devotional and moral import. I suggest\nthis qualification in deference to M. Le Roy's interesting theory of\ndogma, viz., that the verbal or intellectual definition of a dogma may\nbe changed without changing the dogma itself (as a sentence might be\ntranslated into a new language without altering the meaning) provided\nthe suggested conduct and feeling in the presence of the mystery\nremained the same. Thus the definition of transubstantiation might be\nmodified to suit an idealistic philosophy, but the new definition\nwould be no less orthodox than the old if it did not discourage the\nworship of the consecrated elements or the sense of mystical union\nwith Christ in the sacrament.]\n\nAt this point the modernist first chooses the path which must lead him\naway, steadily and for ever, from the church which he did not think to\ndesert. He chooses a personal, psychological, variable standard of\ninspiration; he becomes, in principle, a Protestant. Why does he not\nbecome one in name also? Because, as one of the most distinguished\nmodernists has said, the age of partial heresy is past. It is suicidal\nto make one part of an organic system the instrument for attacking\nanother part; and it is also comic. What you appeal to and stand\nfirmly rooted in is no more credible, no more authoritative, than what\nyou challenge in its name. In vain will you pit the church against the\npope; at once you will have to pit the Bible against the church, and\nthen the New Testament against the Old, or the genuine Jesus against\nthe New Testament, or God revealed in nature against God revealed in\nthe Bible, or God revealed in your own conscience or transcendental\nself against God revealed in nature; and you will be lucky if your\nconscience and transcendental self can long hold their own against the\nflux of immediate experience. Religion, the modernists feel, must be\ntaken broadly and sympathetically, as a great human historical symbol\nfor the truth. At least in Christianity you should aspire to embrace\nand express the whole; to seize it in its deep inward sources and\nfollow it on all sides in its vital development. But if the age of\npartial heresy is past, has not the age of total heresy succeeded?\nWhat is this whole phenomenon of religion but human experience\ninterpreted by human imagination? And what is the modernist, who would\nembrace it all, but a freethinker, with a sympathetic interest in\nreligious illusions? Of course, that is just what he is; but it takes\nhim a strangely long time to discover it. He fondly supposes (such is\nthe prejudice imbibed by him in the cradle and in the seminary) that\nall human inspirations are necessarily similar and concurrent, that by\ntrusting an inward light he cannot be led away from his particular\nreligion, but on the contrary can only find confirmation for it,\ntogether with fresh spiritual energies. He has been reared in profound\nignorance of other religions, which were presented to him, if at all,\nonly in grotesque caricature; or if anything good had to be admitted\nin them, it was set down to a premonition of his own system or a\nderivation from it--a curious conceit, which seems somehow not to have\nwholly disappeared from the minds of Protestants, or even of\nprofessors of philosophy. I need not observe how completely the secret\nof each alien religion is thereby missed and its native accent\noutraged: the most serious consequence, for the modernist, of this\nunconsciousness of whatever is not Christian is an unconsciousness of\nwhat, in contrast to other religions, Christianity itself is. He feels\nhimself full of love--except for the pope--of mysticism, and of a sort\nof archaeological piety. He is learned and eloquent and wistful. Why\nshould he not remain in the church? Why should he not bring all its\ncold and recalcitrant members up to his own level of insight?\n\nThe modernist, like the Protestants before him, is certainly justified\nin contrasting a certain essence or true life of religion with the\nformulas and practices, not all equally well-chosen, which have\ncrystallised round it. In the routine of Catholic teaching and worship\nthere is notoriously a deal of mummery: phrases and ceremonies abound\nthat have lost their meaning, and that people run through without even\nthat general devout attitude and unction which, after all, is all that\ncan be asked for in the presence of mysteries. Not only is all sense\nof the historical or moral basis of dogma wanting, but the dogma\nitself is hardly conceived explicitly; all is despatched with a stock\nphrase, or a quotation from some theological compendium.\nEcclesiastical authority acts as if it felt that more profundity would\nbe confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is\nthat \"Scholasticism\" and \"Mediaevalism\" against which the modernists\ninveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness\nmay be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice\nwhich their more critical minds may discern in many an act and\npronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for\nhistorical truth and their spontaneous mysticism drive the modernists\nto contrast with the official religion what was pure and vital in the\nreligion of their fathers. Like the early Protestants, they wish to\nrevert to a more genuine Christianity; but while their historical\nimagination is much more accurate and well-fed than that of any one in\nthe sixteenth century could be, they have no hold on the Protestant\nprinciple of faith. The Protestants, taking the Bible as an oracle\nwhich personal inspiration was to interpret, could reform tradition in\nany way and to any extent which their reason or feeling happened to\nprompt. But so long as their Christianity was a positive faith, the\nresidue, when all the dross had been criticised and burned away, was\nof divine authority. The Bible never became for them merely an\nancient Jewish encyclopaedia, often eloquent, often curious, and often\nbarbarous. God never became a literary symbol, covering some\nproblematical cosmic force, or some ideal of the conscience. But for\nthe modernist this total transformation takes place at once. He keeps\nthe whole Catholic system, but he believes in no part of it as it\ndemands to be believed. He understands and shares the moral experience\nthat it enshrines; but the bubble has been pricked, the painted world\nhas been discovered to be but painted. He has ceased to be a Christian\nto become an amateur, or if you will a connoisseur, of Christianity.\nHe believes--and this unquestioningly, for he is a child of his\nage--in history, in philology, in evolution, perhaps in German\nidealism; he does not believe in sin, nor in salvation, nor in\nrevelation. His study of history has disclosed Christianity to him in\nits evolution and in its character of a myth; he wishes to keep it in\nits entirety precisely because he regards it as a convention, like a\nlanguage or a school of art; whereas the Protestants wished, on the\ncontrary, to reduce it to its original substance, because they fondly\nsupposed that that original substance was so much literal truth.\nModernism is accordingly an ambiguous and unstable thing. It is the\nlove of all Christianity in those who perceive that it is all a fable.\nIt is the historic attachment to his church of a Catholic who has\ndiscovered that he is a pagan.\n\nWhen the modernists are pressed to explain their apparently double\nallegiance, they end by saying that what historical and philological\ncriticism conjectures to be the facts must be accepted as such; while\nthe Christian dogmas touching these things--the incarnation and\nresurrection of Christ, for instance--must be taken in a purely\nsymbolic or moral sense. In saying this they may be entirely right; it\nseems to many of us that Christianity is indeed a fable, yet full of\nmeaning if you take it as such; for what scraps of historical truth\nthere may be in the Bible or of metaphysical truth in theology are of\nlittle importance; whilst the true greatness and beauty of this, as of\nall religions, is to be found in its _moral idealism_, I mean, in the\nexpression it gives, under cover of legends, prophecies, or mysteries,\nof the effort, the tragedy, and the consolations of human life. Such a\nmoral fable is what Christianity is in fact; but it is far from what\nit is in intention. The modernist view, the view of a sympathetic\nrationalism, revokes the whole Jewish tradition on which Christianity\nis grafted; it takes the seriousness out of religion; it sweetens the\npang of sin, which becomes misfortune; it removes the urgency of\nsalvation; it steals empirical reality away from the last judgment,\nfrom hell, and from heaven; it steals historical reality away from the\nChrist of religious tradition and personal devotion. The moral summons\nand the prophecy about destiny which were the soul of the gospel have\nlost all force for it and become fables.\n\nThe modernist, then, starts with the orthodox but untenable persuasion\nthat Catholicism comprehends all that is good; he adds the heterodox\nthough amiable sentiment that any well-meaning ambition of the mind,\nany hope, any illumination, any science, must be good, and therefore\ncompatible with Catholicism. He bathes himself in idealistic\nphilosophy, he dabbles in liberal politics, he accepts and emulates\nrationalistic exegesis and anti-clerical church history. Soon he finds\nhimself, on every particular point, out of sympathy with the acts and\ntendencies of the church to which he belongs; and then he yields to\nthe most pathetic of his many illusions--he sets about to purge this\nchurch, so as not to be compelled to abandon it; to purge it of its\nfirst principles, of its whole history, and of its sublime if\nchimerical ideal.\n\nThe modernist wishes to reconcile the church and the world. Therein he\nforgets what Christianity came into the world to announce and why its\nmessage was believed. It came to announce salvation from the world;\nthere should be no more need of just those things which the modernist\nso deeply loves and respects and blushes that his church should not be\nadorned with--emancipated science, free poetic religion, optimistic\npolitics, and dissolute art. These things, according to the Christian\nconscience, were all vanity and vexation of spirit, and the pagan\nworld itself almost confessed as much. They were vexatious and vain\nbecause they were bred out of sin, out of ignoring the inward and the\nrevealed law of God; and they would lead surely and quickly to\ndestruction. The needful salvation from these follies, Christianity\nwent on to announce, had come through the cross of Christ; whose\ngrace, together with admission to his future heavenly kingdom, was\noffered freely to such as believed in him, separated themselves from\nthe world, and lived in charity, humility, and innocence, waiting lamp\nin hand for the celestial bridegroom. These abstracted and elected\nspirits were the true disciples of Christ and the church itself.\n\nHaving no ears for this essential message of Christianity, the\nmodernist also has no eyes for its history. The church converted the\nworld only partially and inessentially; yet Christianity was outwardly\nestablished as the traditional religion of many nations. And why?\nBecause, although the prophecies it relied on were strained and its\nmiracles dubious, it furnished a needful sanctuary from the shames,\nsorrows, injustices, violence, and gathering darkness of earth; and\nnot only a sanctuary one might fly to, but a holy precinct where one\nmight live, where there was sacred learning, based on revelation and\ntradition, to occupy the inquisitive, and sacred philosophy to occupy\nthe speculative; where there might be religious art, ministering to\nthe faith, and a new life in the family or in the cloister,\ntransformed by a permeating spirit of charity, sacrifice, soberness,\nand prayer. These principles by their very nature could not become\nthose of the world, but they could remain in it as a leaven and an\nideal. As such they remain to this day, and very efficaciously, in the\nCatholic church. The modernists talk a great deal of development, and\nthey do not see that what they detest in the church is a perfect\ndevelopment of its original essence; that monachism, scholasticism,\nJesuitism, ultramontanism, and Vaticanism are all thoroughly\napostolic; beneath the overtones imposed by a series of ages they give\nout the full and exact note of the New Testament. Much has been added,\nbut nothing has been lost. Development (though those who talk most of\nit seem to forget it) is not the same as flux and dissolution. It is\nnot a continuity through changes of any sort, but the evolution of\nsomething latent and preformed, or else the creation of new\ninstruments of defence for the same original life. In this sense there\nwas an immense development of Christianity during the first three\ncenturies, and this development has continued, more slowly, ever\nsince, but only in the Roman church; for the Eastern churches have\nrefused themselves all new expressions, while the Protestant churches\nhave eaten more and more into the core. It is a striking proof of the\npreservative power of readjustment that the Roman church, in the midst\nof so many external transformations as it has undergone, still demands\nthe same kind of faith that John the Baptist demanded, I mean faith in\nanother world. The _mise-en-scene_ has changed immensely. The gospel\nhas been encased in theology, in ritual, in ecclesiastical authority,\nin conventional forms of charity, like some small bone of a saint in a\ngilded reliquary; but the relic for once is genuine, and the gospel\nhas been preserved by those thick incrustations. Many an isolated\nfanatic or evangelical missionary in the slums shows a greater\nresemblance to the apostles in his outer situation than the pope does;\nbut what mind-healer or revivalist nowadays preaches the doom of the\nnatural world and its vanity, or the reversal of animal values, or the\nblessedness of poverty and chastity, or the inferiority of natural\nhuman bonds, or a contempt for lay philosophy? Yet in his palace full\nof pagan marbles the pope actually preaches all this. It is here, and\ncertainly not among the modernists, that the gospel is still believed.\n\nOf course, it is open to any one to say that there is a nobler\nreligion possible without these trammels and this officialdom, that\nthere is a deeper philosophy than this supernaturalistic rationalism,\nthat there is a sweeter life than this legal piety. Perhaps: I think\nthe pagan Greeks, the Buddhists, the Mohammedans would have much to\nsay for themselves before the impartial tribunal of human nature and\nreason. But they are not Christians and do not wish to be. No more, in\ntheir hearts, are the modernists, and they should feel it beneath\ntheir dignity to pose as such; indeed the more sensitive of them\nalready feel it. To say they are not Christians at heart, but\ndiametrically opposed to the fundamental faith and purpose of\nChristianity, is not to say they may not be profound mystics (as many\nHindus, Jews, and pagan Greeks have been), or excellent scholars, or\ngenerous philanthropists. But the very motive that attaches them to\nChristianity is worldly and un-Christian. They wish to preserve the\ncontinuity of moral traditions; they wish the poetry of life to flow\ndown to them uninterruptedly and copiously from all the ages. It is an\namiable and wise desire; but it shows that they are men of the\nRenaissance, pagan and pantheistic in their profounder sentiment, to\nwhom the hard and narrow realism of official Christianity is offensive\njust because it presupposes that Christianity is true.\n\nYet even in this historical and poetical allegiance to Christianity I\nsuspect the modernists suffer from a serious illusion. They think the\nweakness of the church lies in its not following the inspirations of\nthe age. But when this age is past, might not that weakness be a\nsource of strength again? For an idea ever to be fashionable is\nominous, since it must afterwards be always old-fashioned. No doubt it\nwould be dishonest in any of us now, who see clearly that Noah surely\ndid not lead all the animals two by two into the Ark, to say that we\nbelieve he did so, on the ground that stories of that kind are rather\nfavourable to the spread of religion. No doubt such a story, and even\nthe fables essential to Christian theology, are now incredible to most\nof us. But on the other hand it would be stupid to assume that what is\nincredible to you or me now must always be incredible to mankind. What\nwas foolishness to the Greeks of St. Paul's day spread mightily among\nthem one or two hundred years later; and what is foolishness to the\nmodernist of to-day may edify future generations. The imagination is\nsuggestible and there is nothing men will not believe in matters of\nreligion. These rational persuasions by which we are swayed, the\nconventions of unbelieving science and unbelieving history, are\nsuperficial growths; yesterday they did not exist, to-morrow they may\nhave disappeared. This is a doctrine which the modernist philosophers\nthemselves emphasise, as does M. Bergson, whom some of them follow,\nand say the Catholic church itself ought to follow in order to be\nsaved--for prophets are constitutionally without a sense of humour.\nThese philosophers maintain that intelligence is merely a convenient\nmethod of picking one's way through the world of matter, that it is a\nfalsification of life, and wholly unfit to grasp the roots of it. We\nmay well be of another opinion, if we think the roots of life are not\nin consciousness but in nature, which intelligence alone can reveal;\nbut we must agree that in life itself intelligence is a superficial\ngrowth, and easily blighted, and that the experience of the vanity of\nthe world, of sin, of salvation, of miracles, of strange revelations,\nand of mystic loves is a far deeper, more primitive, and therefore\nprobably more lasting human possession than is that of clear\nhistorical or scientific ideas.\n\nNow religious experience, as I have said, may take other forms than\nthe Christian, and within Christianity it may take other forms than\nthe Catholic; but the Catholic form is as good as any intrinsically\nfor the devotee himself, and it has immense advantages over its\nprobable rivals in charm, in comprehensiveness, in maturity, in\ninternal rationality, in external adaptability; so much so that a\nstrong anti-clerical government, like the French, cannot safely leave\nthe church to be overwhelmed by the forces of science, good sense,\nridicule, frivolity, and avarice (all strong forces in France), but\nmust use violence as well to do it. In the English church, too, it is\nnot those who accept the deluge, the resurrection, and the sacraments\nonly as symbols that are the vital party, but those who accept them\nliterally; for only these have anything to say to the poor, or to the\nrich, that can refresh them. In a frank supernaturalism, in a tight\nclericalism, not in a pleasant secularisation, lies the sole hope of\nthe church. Its sole dignity also lies there. It will not convert the\nworld; it never did and it never could. It will remain a voice crying\nin the wilderness; but it will believe what it cries, and there will\nbe some to listen to it in the future, as there have been many in the\npast. As to modernism, it is suicide. It is the last of those\nconcessions to the spirit of the world which half-believers and\ndouble-minded prophets have always been found making; but it is a\nmortal concession. It concedes everything; for it concedes that\neverything in Christianity, as Christians hold it, is an illusion.\n\n\n\n\nIII\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHY OF M. HENRI BERGSON\n\n\nThe most representative and remarkable of living philosophers is M.\nHenri Bergson. Both the form and the substance of his works attract\nuniversal attention. His ideas are pleasing and bold, and at least in\nform wonderfully original; he is persuasive without argument and\nmystical without conventionality; he moves in the atmosphere of\nscience and free thought, yet seems to transcend them and to be\nsecretly religious. An undercurrent of zeal and even of prophecy seems\nto animate his subtle analyses and his surprising fancies. He is\neloquent, and to a public rather sick of the half-education it has\nreceived and eager for some inspiriting novelty he seems more eloquent\nthan he is. He uses the French language (and little else is French\nabout him) in the manner of the more recent artists in words,\nretaining the precision of phrase and the measured judgments which are\ntraditional in French literature, yet managing to envelop everything\nin a penumbra of emotional suggestion. Each expression of an idea is\ncomplete in itself; yet these expressions are often varied and\nconstantly metaphorical, so that we are led to feel that much in that\nidea has remained unexpressed and is indeed inexpressible.\n\nStudied and insinuating as M. Bergson is in his style, he is no less\nelaborate in his learning. In the history of philosophy, in\nmathematics and physics, and especially in natural history he has\ntaken great pains to survey the ground and to assimilate the views and\nspirit of the most recent scholars. He might be called outright an\nexpert in all these subjects, were it not for a certain externality\nand want of radical sympathy in his way of conceiving them. A genuine\nhistorian of philosophy, for instance, would love to rehearse the\nviews of great thinkers, would feel their eternal plausibility, and in\ninterpreting them would think of himself as little as they ever\nthought of him. But M. Bergson evidently regards Plato or Kant as\npersons who did or did not prepare the way for some Bergsonian\ninsight. The theory of evolution, taken enthusiastically, is apt to\nexercise an evil influence on the moral estimation of things. First\nthe evolutionist asserts that later things grow out of earlier, which\nis true of things in their causes and basis, but not in their values;\nas modern Greece proceeds out of ancient Greece materially but does\nnot exactly crown it. The evolutionist, however, proceeds to assume\nthat later things are necessarily better than what they have grown out\nof: and this is false altogether. This fallacy reinforces very\nunfortunately that inevitable esteem which people have for their own\nopinions, and which must always vitiate the history of philosophy when\nit is a philosopher that writes it. A false subordination comes to be\nestablished among systems, as if they moved in single file and all had\nthe last, the author's system, for their secret goal. In Hegel, for\ninstance, this conceit is conspicuous, in spite of his mastery in the\ndramatic presentation of points of view, for his way of\nreconstructing history was, on the surface, very sympathetic. He too,\nlike M. Bergson, proceeded from learning to intuition, and feigned at\nevery turn to identify himself with what he was describing, especially\nif this was a philosophical attitude or temper. Yet in reality his\nhistorical judgments were forced and brutal: Greece was but a\nstepping-stone to Prussia, Plato and Spinoza found their higher\nsynthesis in himself, and (though he may not say so frankly) Jesus\nChrist and St. Francis realised their better selves in Luther. Actual\nspiritual life, the thoughts, affections, and pleasures of\nindividuals, passed with Hegel for so much moonshine; the true spirit\nwas \"objective,\" it was simply the movement of those circumstances in\nwhich actual spirit arose. He was accordingly contemptuous of\neverything intrinsically good, and his idealism consisted in forcing\nthe natural world into a formula of evolution and then worshipping it\nas the embodiment of the living God. But under the guise of optimism\nand belief in a cosmic reason this is mere idolatry of success--a\nmalign superstition, by which all moral independence is crushed out\nand conscience enslaved to chronology; and it is no marvel if,\nsomewhat to relieve this subjection, history in turn was expurgated,\nmarshalled, and distorted, that it might pass muster for the work of\nthe Holy Ghost.\n\nIn truth the value of spiritual life is intrinsic and centred at every\npoint. It is never wholly recoverable. To recover it at all, an\nhistorian must have a certain detachment and ingenuousness; knowing\nthe dignity and simplicity of his own mind, he must courteously\nattribute the same dignity and simplicity to others, unless their\navowed attitude prevents; this is to be an intelligent critic and to\nwrite history like a gentleman. The truth, which all philosophers\nalike are seeking, is eternal. It lies as near to one age as to\nanother; the means of discovery alone change, and not always for the\nbetter. The course of evolution is no test of what is true or good;\nelse nothing could be good intrinsically nor true simply and\nultimately; on the contrary, it is the approach to truth and\nexcellence anywhere, like the approach of tree tops to the sky, that\ntests the value of evolution, and determines whether it is moving\nupward or downward or in a circle.\n\nM. Bergson accordingly misses fire when, for instance, in order\nutterly to damn a view which he has been criticising, and which may be\nopen to objection on other grounds, he cries that those who hold it\n\"_retardent sur Kant;_\" as if a clock were the compass of the mind,\nand he who was one minute late was one point off the course. Kant was\na hard honest thinker, more sinned against than sinning, from whom a\ngreat many people in the nineteenth century have taken their point of\ndeparture, departing as far as they chose; but if a straight line of\nprogress could be traced at all through the labyrinth of philosophy,\nKant would not lie in that line. His thought is essentially excentric\nand sophisticated, being largely based on two inherited blunders,\nwhich a truly progressive philosophy would have to begin by avoiding,\nthus leaving Kant on one side, and weathering his philosophy, as one\nmight Scylla or Charybdis. The one blunder was that of the English\nmalicious psychology which had maintained since the time of Locke that\nthe ideas in the mind are the only objects of knowledge, instead of\nbeing the knowledge of objects. The other blunder was that of\nProtestantism that, in groping after that moral freedom which is so\nineradicable a need of a pure spirit, thought to find it in a revision\nof revelation, tradition, and prejudice, so as to be able to cling to\nthese a little longer. How should a system so local, so accidental,\nand so unstable as Kant's be prescribed as a sort of catechism for all\nhumanity? The tree of knowledge has many branches, and all its fruits\nare not condemned to hang for ever from that one gnarled and contorted\nbough. M. Bergson himself \"lags behind\" Kant on those points on which\nhis better insight requires it, as, for instance, on the reality of\ntime; but with regard to his own philosophy I am afraid he thinks that\nall previous systems empty into it, which is hardly true, and that all\nfuture systems must flow out of it, which is hardly necessary.\n\nThe embarrassment that qualifies M. Bergson's attainments in\nmathematics and physics has another and more personal source. He\nunderstands, but he trembles. Non-human immensities frighten him, as\nthey did Pascal. He suffers from cosmic agoraphobia. We\nmight think empty space an innocent harmless thing, a mere opportunity\nto move, which ought to be highly prized by all devotees of motion.\nBut M. Bergson is instinctively a mystic, and his philosophy\ndeliberately discredits the existence of anything except in immediacy,\nthat is, as an experience of the heart. What he dreads in space is\nthat the heart should be possessed by it, and transformed into it. He\ndreads that the imagination should be fascinated by the homogeneous\nand static, hypnotised by geometry, and actually lost in\n_Auseinandersein_. This would be a real death and petrifaction of\nconsciousness, frozen into contemplation of a monotonous infinite\nvoid. What is warm and desirable is rather the sense of variety and\nsuccession, as if all visions radiated from the occupied focus or\nhearth of the self. The more concentration at this habitable point,\nwith the more mental perspectives opening backwards and forwards\nthrough time, in a word, the more personal and historical the\napparition, the better it would be. Things must be reduced again to\nwhat they seem; it is vain and terrible to take them for what we find\nthey are. M. Bergson is at bottom an apologist for very old human\nprejudices, an apologist for animal illusion. His whole labour is a\nplea for some vague but comfortable faith which he dreads to have\nstolen from him by the progress of art and knowledge. There is a\ncertain trepidation, a certain suppressed instinct to snap at and\nsting the hated oppressor, as if some desperate small being were at\nbay before a horrible monster. M. Bergson is afraid of space, of\nmathematics, of necessity, and of eternity; he is afraid of the\nintellect and the possible discoveries of science; he is afraid of\nnothingness and death. These fears may prevent him from being a\nphilosopher in the old and noble sense of the word; but they sharpen\nhis sense for many a psychological problem, and make him the spokesman\nof many an inarticulate soul. Animal timidity and animal illusion are\ndeep in the heart of all of us. Practice may compel us to bow to the\nconventions of the intellect, as to those of polite society; but\nsecretly, in our moments of immersion in ourselves, we may find them\na great nuisance, even a vain nightmare. Could we only listen\nundisturbed to the beat of protoplasm in our hearts, would not that\noracle solve all the riddles of the universe, or at least avoid them?\n\nTo protect this inner conviction, however, it is necessary for the\nmystic to sally forth and attack the enemy on his own ground. If he\nrefuted physics and mathematics simply out of his own faith, he might\nbe accused of ignorance of the subject. He will therefore study it\nconscientiously, yet with a certain irritation and haste to be done\nwith it, somewhat as a Jesuit might study Protestant theology. Such a\nstudent, however, is apt to lose his pains; for in retracing a free\ninquiry in his servile spirit, he remains deeply ignorant, not indeed\nof its form, but of its nature and value. Why, for instance, has M.\nBergson such a horror of mechanical physics? He seems to think it a\nblack art, dealing in unholy abstractions, and rather dangerous to\nsalvation, and he keeps his metaphysical exorcisms and antidotes\nalways at hand, to render it innocuous, at least to his own soul. But\nphysical science never solicited of anybody that he should be wholly\nabsorbed in the contemplation of atoms, and worship them; that we must\nworship and lose ourselves in reality, whatever reality may be, is a\nmystic aberration, which physical science does nothing to foster. Nor\ndoes any critical physicist suppose that what he describes is the\nwhole of the object; he merely notes the occasions on which its\nsensible qualities appear, and calculates events. Because the\ncalculable side of nature is his province, he does not deny that\nevents have other aspects--the psychic and the moral, for\ninstance--no less real in their way, in terms of which calculation\nwould indeed be impossible. If he chances to call the calculable\nelements of nature her substance, as it is proper to do, that name is\ngiven without passion; he may perfectly well proclaim with Goethe that\nit is in the accidents, in the _farbiger Abglanz_, that we have our\nlife. And if it be for his freedom that the mystic trembles, I imagine\nany man of science would be content with M. Bergson's assertion that\ntrue freedom is the sense of freedom, and that in any intelligible\nstatement of the situation, even the most indeterministic, this\nfreedom disappears; for it is an immediate experience, not any scheme\nof relation between events.\n\nThe horror of mechanical physics arises, then, from attributing to\nthat science pretensions and extensions which it does not have; it\narises from the habits of theology and metaphysics being imported\ninopportunely into science. Similarly when M. Bergson mentions\nmathematics, he seems to be thinking of the supposed authority it\nexercises--one of Kant's confusions--over the empirical world, and\ntrying to limit and subordinate that authority, lest movement should\nsomehow be removed from nature, and vagueness from human thought. But\nnature and human thought are what they are; they have enough affinity\nto mathematics, as it happens, to suggest that study to our minds, and\nto give those who go deep into it a great, though partial, mastery\nover things. Nevertheless a true mathematician is satisfied with the\nhypothetical and ideal cogency of his science, and puts its dignity in\nthat. Moreover, M. Bergson has the too pragmatic notion that the use\nof mathematics is to keep our accounts straight in this business\nworld; whereas its inherent use is emancipating and Platonic, in that\nit shows us the possibility of other worlds, less contingent and\nperturbed than this one. If he allows himself any excursus from his\nbeloved immediacy, it is only in the interests of practice; he little\nknows the pleasures of a liberal mind, ranging over the congenial\nrealm of internal accuracy and ideal truth, where it can possess\nitself of what treasures it likes in perfect security and freedom. An\nartist in his workmanship, M. Bergson is not an artist in his\nallegiance; he has no respect for what is merely ideal.\n\nFor this very reason, perhaps, he is more at home in natural history\nthan in the exact sciences. He has the gift of observation, and can\nsuggest vividly the actual appearance of natural processes, in\ncontrast to the verbal paraphrase of these processes which is\nsometimes taken to explain them. He is content to stop at habit\nwithout formulating laws; he refuses to assume that the large obvious\ncycles of change in things can be reduced to mechanism, that is, to\nminute included cycles repeated _ad libitum_. He may sometimes defend\nthis refusal by sophistical arguments, as when he says that mechanism\nwould require the last stage of the universe to be simultaneous with\nthe first, forgetting that the unit of mechanism is not a mathematical\nequation but some observed typical event. The refusal itself, however,\nwould be honest scepticism enough were it made with no _arriere\npensee_, but simply in view of the immense complexity of the facts and\nthe extreme simplicity of the mechanical hypothesis. In such a\nsituation, to halt at appearances might seem the mark of a true\nnaturalist and a true empiricist not misled by speculative haste and\nthe human passion for system and simplification. At the first reading,\nM. Bergson's _Evolution Creatrice_ may well dazzle the professional\nnaturalist and seem to him an illuminating confession of the nature\nand limits of his science; yet a second reading, I have good authority\nfor saying, may as easily reverse that impression. M. Bergson never\nreviews his facts in order to understand them, but only if possible to\ndiscredit others who may have fancied they understood. He raises\ndifficulties, he marks the problems that confront the naturalist, and\nthe inadequacy of explanations that may have been suggested. Such\ncriticism would be a valuable beginning if it were followed by the\nsuggestion of some new solution; but the suggestion only is that no\nsolution is possible, that the phenomena of life are simply\nmiraculous, and that it is in the tendency or vocation of the animal,\nnot in its body or its past, that we must see the ground of what goes\non before us.\n\nWith such a philosophy of science, it is evident that all progress in\nthe understanding of nature would cease, as it ceased after Aristotle.\nThe attempt would again be abandoned to reduce gross and obvious\ncycles of change, such as generation, growth, and death, to minute\nlatent cycles, so that natural history should offer a picturesque\napproach to universal physics. If for the magic power of types,\ninvoked by Aristotle, we substituted with M. Bergson the magic power\nof the _elan vital_, that is, of evolution in general, we should be\nreferring events not to finer, more familiar, more pervasive\nprocesses, but to one all-embracing process, unique and always\nincomplete. Our understanding would end in something far vaguer and\nlooser than what our observation began with. Aristotle at least could\nrefer particulars to their specific types, as medicine and social\nscience are still glad enough to do, to help them in guessing and in\nmaking a learned show before the public. But if divination and\neloquence--for science is out of the question--were to invoke nothing\nbut a fluid tendency to grow, we should be left with a flat history of\nphenomena and no means of prediction or even classification. All\nknowledge would be reduced to gossip, infinitely diffuse, perhaps\nenlisting our dramatic feelings, but yielding no intellectual mastery\nof experience, no practical competence, and no moral lesson. The world\nwould be a serial novel, to be continued for ever, and all men mere\nnovel-readers.\n\nNothing is more familiar to philosophers nowadays than that criticism\nof knowledge by which we are thrown back upon the appearances from\nwhich science starts, upon what is known to children and savages,\nwhilst all that which long experience and reason may infer from those\nappearances is set down as so much hypothesis; and indeed it is\nthrough hypothesis that latent being, if such there be, comes before\nthe mind at all. Now such criticism of knowledge might have been\nstraightforward and ingenuous. It might have simply disclosed the\nfact, very salutary to meditate upon, that the whole frame of nature,\nwith the minds that animate it, is disclosed to us by intelligence;\nthat if we were not intelligent our sensations would exist for us\nwithout meaning anything, as they exist for idiots. The criticism of\nknowledge, however, has usually been taken maliciously, in the sense\nthat it is the idiots only that are not deceived; for any\ninterpretation of sensation is a mental figment, and while experience\nmay have any extent it will it cannot possibly, they say, have\nexpressive value; it cannot reveal anything going on beneath.\nIntelligence and science are accordingly declared to have no\npenetration, no power to disclose what is latent, for nothing latent\nexists; they can at best furnish symbols for past or future sensations\nand the order in which they arise; they can be seven-league boots for\nstriding over the surface of sentience.\n\nThis negative dogmatism as to knowledge was rendered harmless and\nfutile by the English philosophers, in that they maintained at the\nsame time that everything happens exactly _as if_ the intellect were a\ntrue instrument of discovery, and _as if_ a material world underlay\nour experience and furnished all its occasions. Hume, Mill, and Huxley\nwere scientific at heart, and full of the intelligence they dissected;\nthey seemed to cry to nature: Though thou dost not exist, yet will I\ntrust in thee. Their idealism was a theoretical scruple rather than a\npassionate superstition. Not so M. Bergson; he is not so simple as to\ninvoke the malicious criticism of knowledge in order to go on thinking\nrationalistically. Reason and science make him deeply uncomfortable.\nHis point accordingly is not merely that mechanism is a hypothesis,\nbut that it is a wrong hypothesis. Events do not come as if mechanism\nbrought them about; they come, at least in the organic world, as if a\nmagic destiny, and inscrutable ungovernable effort, were driving them\non.\n\nThus M. Bergson introduces metaphysics into natural history; he\ninvokes, in what is supposed to be science, the agency of a power,\ncalled the _elan vital,_ on a level with the \"Will\" of Schopenhauer or\nthe \"Unknowable Force\" of Herbert Spencer. But there is a scientific\nvitalism also, which it is well to distinguish from the metaphysical\nsort. The point at issue between vitalism and mechanism in biology is\nwhether the living processes in nature can be resolved into a\ncombination of the material. The material processes will always remain\nvital, if we take this word in a descriptive and poetic sense; for\nthey will contain a movement having a certain idiosyncrasy and taking\na certain time, like the fall of an apple. The movement of nature is\nnever dialectical; the first part of any event does not logically\nimply the last part of it. Physics is descriptive, historical,\nreporting after the fact what are found to be the habits of matter.\nBut if these habits are constant and calculable we call the vitality\nof them mechanical. Thus the larger processes of nature, no matter how\nvital they may be and whatever consciousness may accompany them, will\nalways be mechanical if they can be calculated and predicted, being a\ncombination of the more minute and widespread processes which they\ncontain. The only question therefore is: Do processes such as\nnutrition and reproduction arise by a combination of such events as\nthe fall of apples? Or are they irreducible events, and units of\nmechanism by themselves? That is the dilemma as it appears in science.\nBoth possibilities will always remain open, because however far\nmechanical analysis may go, many phenomena, as human apprehension\npresents them, will always remain irreducible to any common\ndenominator with the rest; and on the other hand, wherever the actual\nreduction of the habits of animals to those of matter may have\nstopped, we can never know that a further reduction is impossible.\n\nThe balance of reasonable presumption, however, is not even. The most\ninclusive movements known to us in nature, the astronomical, are\ncalculable, and so are the most minute and pervasive processes, the\nchemical. These are also, if evolution is to be accepted, the earliest\nprocesses upon which all others have supervened and out of which, as\nit were, they have grown. Apart from miraculous intervention,\ntherefore, the assumption seems to be inevitable that the intermediate\nprocesses are calculable too, and compounded out of the others. The\nappearance to the contrary presented in animal and social life is\neasily explicable on psychological grounds. We read inevitably in\nterms of our passions those things which affect them or are analogous\nto what involves passion in ourselves; and when the mechanism of them\nis hidden from us, as is that of our bodies, we suppose that these\npassions which we find on the surface in ourselves, or read into other\ncreatures, are the substantial and only forces that carry on our part\nof the world. Penetrating this illusion, dispassionate observers in\nall ages have received the general impression that nature is one and\nmechanical. This was, and still remains, a general impression only;\nbut I suspect no one who walks the earth with his eyes open would be\nconcerned to resist it, were it not for certain fond human conceits\nwhich such a view would rebuke and, if accepted, would tend to\nobliterate. The psychological illusion that our ideas and purposes are\noriginal facts and forces (instead of expressions in consciousness of\nfacts and forces which are material) and the practical and optical\nillusion that everything wheels about us in this world--these are the\nprimitive persuasions which the enemies of naturalism have always been\nconcerned to protect.\n\nOne might indeed be a vitalist in biology, out of pure caution and\nconscientiousness, without sharing those prejudices; and many a\nspeculative philosopher has been free from them who has been a\nvitalist in metaphysics. Schopenhauer, for instance, observed that the\ncannon-ball which, if self-conscious, would think it moved freely,\nwould be quite right in thinking so. The \"Will\" was as evident to him\nin mechanism as in animal life. M. Bergson, in the more hidden reaches\nof his thought, seems to be a universal vitalist; apparently an _elan\nvital_ must have existed once to deposit in inorganic matter the\nenergy stored there, and to set mechanism going. But he relies on\nbiology alone to prove the present existence of an independent effort\nto live; this is needed to do what mechanism, as he thinks, could\nnever do; it is not needed to do, as in Schopenhauer, what mechanism\ndoes. M. Bergson thus introduces his metaphysical force as a peculiar\nrequirement of biology; he breaks the continuity of nature; he loses\nthe poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to\nbelieve that life is not a natural expression of material being, but\nan alien and ghostly madness descending into it--I say a ghostly\nmadness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should\nlive? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal\nthan the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far\nless legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough\nmythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe might suggest\nto an imaginative genius. It is rather a popular animism, insisting on\na sympathetic interpretation of nature where human sympathy is quick\nand easy, and turning this sympathy into a revelation of the absolute,\nbut leaving the rest of nature cold, because to sympathise with its\nmovement there is harder for anxious, self-centred mortals, and\nrequires a disinterested mind. M. Bergson would have us believe that\nmankind is what nature has set her heart on and the best she can do,\nfor whose sake she has been long making very special efforts. We are\nfortunate that at least her darling is all mankind and not merely\nIsrael.\n\nIn spite, then, of M. Bergson's learning as a naturalist and his eye\nfor the facts--things Aristotle also possessed--he is like Aristotle\nprofoundly out of sympathy with nature. Aristotle was alienated from\nnature and any penetrating study of it by the fact that he was a\ndisciple of Socrates, and therefore essentially a moralist and a\nlogician. M. Bergson is alienated from nature by something quite\ndifferent; he is the adept of a very modern, very subtle, and very\narbitrary art, that of literary psychology. In this art the\nimagination is invited to conceive things as if they were all centres\nof passion and sensation. Literary psychology is not a science; it is\npractised by novelists and poets; yet if it is to be brilliantly\nexecuted it demands a minute and extended observation of life. Unless\nyour psychological novelist had crammed his memory with pictures of\nthe ways and aspects of men he would have no starting-point for his\npsychological fictions; he would not be able to render them\ncircumstantial and convincing. Just so M. Bergson's achievements in\npsychological fiction, to be so brilliantly executed as they are,\nrequired all his learning. The history of philosophy, mathematics, and\nphysics, and above all natural history, had to supply him first with\nsuggestions; and if he is not really a master in any of those fields,\nthat is not to be wondered at. His heart is elsewhere. To write a\nuniversal biological romance, such as he has sketched for us in his\nsystem, he would ideally have required all scientific knowledge, but\nonly as Homer required the knowledge of seamanship, generalship,\nstatecraft, augury, and charioteering, in order to turn the aspects of\nthem into poetry, and not with that technical solidity which Plato\nunjustly blames him for not possessing. Just so M. Bergson's proper\nachievement begins where his science ends, and his philosophy lies\nentirely beyond the horizon of possible discoveries or empirical\nprobabilities. In essence, it is myth or fable; but in the texture and\ndegree of its fabulousness it differs notably from the performances of\nprevious metaphysicians. Primitive poets, even ancient philosophers,\nwere not psychologists; their fables were compacted out of elements\nfound in practical life, and they reckoned in the units in which\nlanguage and passion reckon--wooing, feasting, fighting, vice, virtue,\nhappiness, justice. Above all, they talked about persons or about\nideals; this man, this woman, this typical thought or sentiment was\nwhat fixed their attention and seemed to them the ultimate thing. Not\nso M. Bergson: he is a microscopic psychologist, and even in man what\nhe studies by preference is not some integrated passion or idea, but\nsomething far more recondite; the minute texture of sensation, memory,\nor impulse. Sharp analysis is required to distinguish or arrest these\nelements, yet these are the predestined elements of his fable; and so\nhis anthropomorphism is far less obvious than that of most poets and\ntheologians, though no less real.\n\nThis peculiarity in the terms of the myth carries with it a notable\nextension in its propriety. The social and moral phenomena of human\nlife cannot be used in interpreting life elsewhere without a certain\nconscious humour. This makes the charm of avowed writers of fable;\ntheir playful travesty and dislocation of things human, which would be\npuerile if they meant to be naturalists, render them piquant\nmoralists; for they are not really interpreting animals, but under the\nmask of animals maliciously painting men. Such fables are morally\ninteresting and plausible just because they are psychologically false.\nIf AEsop could have reported what lions and lambs, ants and donkeys,\nreally feel and think, his poems would have been perfect riddles to\nthe public; and they would have had no human value except that of\nillustrating, to the truly speculative philosopher, the irresponsible\nvariety of animal consciousness and its incommensurable types. Now M.\nBergson's psychological fictions, being drawn from what is rudimentary\nin man, have a better chance of being literally true beyond man.\nIndeed what he asks us to do, and wishes to do himself, is simply to\nabsorb so completely the aspect and habit of things that the soul of\nthem may take possession of us: that we may know by intuition the\n_elan vital_ which the world expresses, just as Paolo, in Dante, knew\nby intuition the _elan vital_ that the smile of Francesca expressed.\n\nThe correctness of such an intuition, however, rests on a circumstance\nwhich M. Bergson does not notice, because his psychology is literary\nand not scientific. It rests on the possibility of imitation. When the\norganism observed and that of the observer have a similar structure\nand can imitate one another, the idea produced in the observer by\nintent contemplation is like the experience present to the person\ncontemplated. But where this contagion of attitude, and therefore of\nfeeling, is impossible, our intuition of our neighbours' souls remains\nsubjective and has no value as a revelation. Psychological novelists,\nwhen they describe people such as they themselves are or might have\nbeen, may describe them truly; but beyond that limit their personages\nare merely plausible, that is, such as might be conceived by an\nequally ignorant reader in the presence of the same external\nindications. So, for instance, the judgment which a superficial\ntraveller passes on foreign manners or religions is plausible to him\nand to his compatriots just because it represents the feeling that\nsuch manifestations awaken in strangers and does not attempt to convey\nthe very different feeling really involved for the natives; had the\nlatter been discovered and expressed the traveller's book would have\nfound little understanding and no sale in his own country. This\nplausibility to the ignorant is present in all spontaneous myth.\nNothing more need be demanded of irresponsible fiction, which makes no\npretensions to be a human document, but is merely a human\nentertainment.\n\nNow, a human psychology, even of the finest grain, when it is applied\nto the interpretation of the soul of matter, or of the soul of the\nwhole universe, obviously yields a view of the irresponsible and\nsubjective sort; for it is not based on any close similarity between\nthe observed and the observer: man and the ether, man and cosmic\nevolution, cannot mimic one another, to discover mutually how they\nfeel. But just because merely human, such an interpretation may remain\nalways plausible to man; and it would be an admirable entertainment if\nthere were no danger that it should be taken seriously. The idea Paul\nhas of Peter, Spinoza observes, expresses the nature of Peter less\nthan it betrays that of Paul; and so an idea framed by a man of the\nconsciousness of things in general reveals the mind of that man rather\nthan the mind of the universe; but the mind of the man too may be\nworth knowing, and the illusive hope of discovering everything may\nlead him truly to disclose himself. Such a disclosure of the lower\ndepths of man by himself is M. Bergson's psychology; and the\npsychological romance, purporting to describe the inward nature of the\nuniverse, which he has built out of that introspection, is his\nmetaphysics.\n\nMany a point in this metaphysics may seem strange, fantastic, and\nobscure; and so it really is, when dislocated and projected\nmetaphysically; but not one will be found to be arbitrary; not one\nbut is based on attentive introspection and perception of the\nimmediate. Take, for example, what is M. Bergson's starting-point, his\nsomewhat dazzling doctrine that to be is to last, or rather to feel\noneself endure. This is a hypostasis of \"true\" (_i.e._ immediately\nfelt) duration. In a sensuous day-dream past feelings survive in the\npresent, images of the long ago are shuffled together with present\nsensations, the roving imagination leaves a bright wake behind it like\na comet, and pushes a rising wave before it, like the bow of a ship;\nall is fluidity, continuity without identity, novelty without\nsurprise. Hence, too, the doctrine of freedom: the images that appear\nin such a day-dream are often congruous in character with those that\npreceded, and mere prolongations of them; but this prolongation itself\nmodifies them, and what develops is in no way deducible or predictable\nout of what exists. This situation is perfectly explicable\nscientifically. The movement of consciousness will be self-congruous\nand sustained when it rests on continuous processes in the same\ntissues, and yet quite unpredictable from within, because the direct\nsensuous report of bodily processes (in nausea, for instance, or in\nhunger) contains no picture of their actual mechanism. Even wholly new\nfeatures, due to little crises in bodily life, may appear in a dream\nto flow out of what already exists, yet freely develop it; because in\ndreams comparison, the attempt to be consistent, is wholly in\nabeyance, and also because the new feature will come imbedded in\nothers which are not new, but have dramatic relevance in the story. So\nimmediate consciousness yields the two factors of Bergsonian freedom,\ncontinuity and indetermination.\n\nAgain, take the somewhat disconcerting assertion that movement exists\nwhen there is nothing that moves, and no space that it moves through.\nIn vision, perhaps, it is not easy to imagine a consciousness of\nmotion without some presentation of a field, and of a distinguishable\nsomething in it; but if we descend to somatic feelings (and the more\nwe descend, with M. Bergson, the closer we are to reality), in\nshooting pains or the sense of intestinal movements, the feeling of a\nchange and of a motion is certainly given in the absence of all idea\nof a _mobile_ or of distinct points (or even of a separate field)\nthrough which it moves; consciousness begins with the sense of change,\nand the terms of the felt process are only qualitative limits, bred\nout of the felt process itself. Even a more paradoxical tenet of our\nphilosopher's finds it justification here. He says that the units of\nmotion are indivisible, that they are acts; so that to solve the\nriddle about Achilles and the tortoise we need no mathematics of the\ninfinitesimal, but only to ask Achilles how he accomplishes the feat.\nAchilles would reply that in so many strides he would do it; and we\nmay be surprised to learn that these strides are indivisible, so that,\napparently, Achilles could not have stumbled in the middle of one, and\ntaken only half of it. Of course, in nature, in what non-Bergsonians\ncall reality, he could: but not in his immediate feeling, for if he\nhad stumbled, the real stride, that which he was aware of taking,\nwould have been complete at the stumbling-point. It is certain that\nconsciousness comes in stretches, in breaths: all its data are\naesthetic wholes, like visions or snatches of melody; and we should\nnever be aware of anything were we not aware of something all at once.\n\nWhen a man has taught himself--and it is a difficult art--to revert in\nthis way to rudimentary consciousness and to watch himself live, he\nwill be able, if he likes, to add a plausible chapter to speculative\npsychology. He has unearthed in himself the animal sensibility which\nhas thickened, budded, and crystallised into his present somewhat\nintellectual image of the world. He has touched again the vegetative\nstupor, the multiple disconnected landscapes, the \"blooming buzzing\nconfusion\" which his reason has partly set in order. May he not have\nin all this a key to the consciousness of other creatures? Animal\npsychology, and sympathy with the general life of nature, are vitiated\nboth for naturalists and for poets by the human terms they must use,\nterms which presuppose distinctions which non-human beings probably\nhave not made. These distinctions correct the illusions of immediate\nappearance in ways which only a long and special experience has\nimposed upon us, and they should not be imported into other souls. We\nare old men trying to sing the loves of children; we are wingless\nbipeds trying to understand the gods. But the data of the immediate\nare hardly human; it is probable that at that level all sentience is\nmuch alike. From that common ground our imagination can perhaps start\nsafely, and follow such hints as observation furnishes, until we learn\nto live and feel as other living things do, or as nature may live and\nfeel as a whole. Instinct, for instance, need not be, as our human\nprejudice suggests, a rudimentary intelligence; it may be a parallel\nsort of sensibility, an imageless awareness of the presence and\ncharacter of other things, with a superhuman ability to change oneself\nso as to meet them. Do we not feel something of this sort ourselves in\nlove, in art, in religion? M. Bergson is a most delicate and charming\npoet on this theme, and a plausible psychologist; his method of\naccumulating and varying his metaphors, and leaving our intuition to\nitself under that artful stimulus, is the only judicious and\npersuasive method he could have employed, and his knack at it is\nwonderful. We recover, as we read, the innocence of the mind. It seems\nno longer impossible that we might, like the wise men in the\nstory-books, learn the language of birds; we share for the moment the\nsiestas of plants; and we catch the quick consciousness of the waves\nof light, vibrating at inconceivable rates, each throb forgotten as\nthe next follows upon it; and we may be tempted to play on Shakespeare\nand say:\n\n    \"Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,\n     So do _their spirits_ hasten to their end.\"\n\nSome reader of M. Bergson might say to himself: All this is ingenious\nintrospection and divination; grant that it is true, and how does that\nlead to a new theory of the universe? You have been studying surface\nappearances and the texture of primitive consciousness; that is a part\nof the internal rumble of this great engine of the world. How should\nit loosen or dissolve that engine, as your philosophy evidently\nprofesses that it must? That nature exists we perceive whenever we\nresume our intellectual and practical life, interrupted for a moment\nby this interesting reversion to the immediate. The consciousness\nwhich in introspection we treat as an object is, in operation, a\ncognitive activity: it demonstrates the world. You would never\nyourself have conceived the minds of ethereal vibrations, or of birds,\nor of ants, or of men suspending their intelligence, if you had known\nof no men, ants, birds, or ether. It is the material objects that\nsuggest to you their souls, and teach you how to conceive them. How\nthen should the souls be substituted for the bodies, and abolish them?\n\nPoor guileless reader! If philosophers were straightforward men of\nscience, adding each his mite to the general store of knowledge, they\nwould all substantially agree, and while they might make interesting\ndiscoveries, they would not herald each his new transformation of the\nwhole universe. But philosophers are either revolutionists or\napologists, and some of them, like M. Bergson, are revolutionists in the\ninterests of apologetics. Their art is to create some surprising\ninversion of things, some system of the universe contrary to common\napprehension, or to defend some such inverted system, propounded by\npoets long ago, and perhaps consecrated by religion. It would not\nrequire a great man to say calmly: Men, birds, even ether-waves, if you\nwill, feel after this and this fashion. The greatness and the excitement\nbegin when he says: Your common sense, your practical intellect, your\nboasted science have entirely deceived you; see what the real truth is\ninstead! So M. Bergson is bent on telling us that the immediate, as he\ndescribes it, is the sole reality; all else is unreal, artificial, and a\nmore or less convenient symbol in discourse--discourse itself being\ntaken, of course, for a movement in immediate sensibility, which is what\nit is existentially, but never for an excursion into an independent\nlogical realm, which is what it is spiritually and in intent. So we must\nrevise all our psychological observations, and turn them into\nmetaphysical dogmas. It would be nothing to say simply: _For immediate\nfeeling_ the past is contained in the present, movement is prior to that\nwhich moves, spaces are many, disconnected, and incommensurable, events\nare indivisible wholes, perception is in its object and identical with\nit, the future is unpredictable, the complex is bred out of the simple,\nand evolution is creative, its course being obedient to a general\ntendency or groping impulse, not to any exact law. No, we must say\ninstead: _In the universe at large_ the whole past is preserved bodily\nin the present; duration is real and space is only imagined; all is\nmotion, and there is nothing substantial that moves; times are\nincommensurable; men, birds, and waves are nothing but the images of\nthem (our perceptions, like their spirits, being some compendium of\nthese images); chance intervenes in the flux, but evolution is due to an\nabsolute Effort which exists _in vacuo_ and is simplicity itself; and\nthis Effort, without having an idea of what it pursues, nevertheless\nproduces it out of nothing.\n\nThe accuracy or the hollowness of M. Bergson's doctrine, according as\nwe take it for literary psychology or for natural philosophy, will\nappear clearly in the following instance. \"Any one,\" he writes,[3]\n\"who has ever practised literary composition knows very well that,\nafter he has devoted long study to the subject, collected all the\ndocuments, and taken all his notes, one thing more is needful before\nhe can actually embark on the work of composition; namely, an effort,\noften a very painful one, to plant himself all at once in the very\nheart of the subject, and to fetch from as profound a depth as\npossible the momentum by which he need simply let himself be borne\nalong in the sequel. This momentum, as soon as it is acquired, carries\nthe mind forward along a path where it recovers all the facts it had\ngathered together, and a thousand other details besides. The momentum\ndevelops and breaks up of itself into particulars that might be\nretailed _ad infinitum._ The more he advances the more he finds; he\nwill never have exhausted the subject; and nevertheless if he turns\nround suddenly to face the momentum he feels at his back and see what\nit is, it eludes him; for it is not a thing but a direction of\nmovement, and though capable of being extended indefinitely, it is\nsimplicity itself.\"\n\n[Footnote 3: \"Introduction a la Metaphysique.\" _Revue de Metaphysique\net de Morale_, Janvier, 1903.]\n\nThis is evidently well observed: heighten the tone a little, and you\nmight have a poem on those joyful pangs of gestation and parturition\nwhich are not denied to a male animal. It is a description of the\n_sensation_ of literary composition, of the _immediate experience_ of\na writer as words and images rise into his mind. He cannot summon his\nmemories explicitly, for he would first have to remember them to do\nso; his consciousness of inspiration, of literary creation, is nothing\nbut a consciousness of pregnancy and of a certain \"direction of\nmovement,\" as if he were being wafted in a balloon; and just in its\nmoments of highest tension his mind is filled with mere expectancy and\nmere excitement, without images, plans, or motives; and what guides it\nis inwardly, as M. Bergson says, simplicity itself. Yet excellent as\nsuch a description is psychologically, it is a literary confession\nrather than a piece of science; for scientific psychology is a part of\nnatural history, and when in nature we come upon such a notable\nphenomenon as this, that some men write and write eloquently, we\nshould at once study the antecedents and the conditions under which\nthis occurs; we should try, by experiment if possible, to see what\nvariations in the result follow upon variations in the situation. At\nonce we should begin to perceive how casual and superficial are those\ndata of introspection which M. Bergson's account reproduces. Does that\npainful effort, for instance, occur always? Is it the moral source, as\nhe seems to suggest, of the good and miraculous fruits that follow?\nNot at all: such an effort is required only when the writer is\noverworked, or driven to express himself under pressure; in the\nspontaneous talker or singer, in the orator surpassing himself and\noverflowing with eloquence, there is no effort at all; only facility,\nand joyous undirected abundance. We should further ask whether _all_\nthe facts previously gathered are recovered, and all correctly, and\nwhat relation the \"thousand other details\" have to them; and we should\nfind that everything was controlled and supplied by the sensuous\nendowment of the literary man, his moral complexion, and his general\ncircumstances. And we should perceive at the same time that the\nmomentum which to introspection was so mysterious was in fact the\ndischarge of many automatisms long imprinted on the system, a system\n(as growth and disease show) that has its internal vegetation and\ncrises of maturity, to which facility and error in the recovery of the\npast, and creation also, are closely attached. Thus we should utterly\nrefuse to say that this momentum was capable of being extended\nindefinitely or was simplicity itself. It may be a good piece of\nliterary psychology to say that simplicity precedes complexity, for it\nprecedes complexity in consciousness. Consciousness dwindles and\nflares up most irresponsibly, so long as its own flow alone is\nregarded, and it continually arises out of nothing, which indeed is\nsimplicity itself. But it does not arise without real conditions\noutside, which cannot be discovered by introspection, nor divined by\nthat literary psychology which proceeds by imagining what\nintrospection might yield in others.\n\nThere is a deeper mystification still in this passage, where a writer\nis said to \"plant himself in the very heart of the subject.\" The\ngeneral tenor of M. Bergson's philosophy warrants us in taking this\nquite literally to mean that the field from which inspiration draws\nits materials is not the man's present memory nor even his past\nexperience, but the subject itself which that experience and this\nmemory regard: in other words, what we write about and our latent\nknowledge are the same thing. When Shakespeare was composing his\n_Antony and Cleopatra,_ for instance, he planted himself in the very\nheart of Rome and of Egypt, and in the very heart of the Queen of\nEgypt herself; what he had gathered from Plutarch and from elsewhere\nwas, according to M. Bergson's view, a sort of glimpse of the remote\nreality itself, as if by telepathy he had been made to witness some\npart of it; or rather as if the scope of his consciousness had been\nsuddenly extended in one direction, so as to embrace and contain\nbodily a bit of that outlying experience. Thus when the poet sifts his\nfacts and sets his imagination to work at unifying and completing\nthem, what he does is to pierce to Egypt, Rome, and the inner\nconsciousness of Cleopatra, to fetch _thence_ the profound momentum\nwhich is to guide him in composition; and it is there, not in the\nadventitious later parts of his own mind, that he should find the\nthousand other details which he may add to the picture.\n\nHere again, in an exaggerated form, we have a transcript of the\nimmediate, a piece of really wonderful introspection, spoiled by being\nprojected into a theory of nature, which it spoils in its turn.\nDoubtless Shakespeare, in the heat of dramatic vision, lived his\ncharacters, transported himself to their environment, and felt the\npassion of each, as we do in a dream, dictating their unpremeditated\nwords. But all this is in imagination; it is true only within the\nframework of our dream. In reality, of course, Shakespeare never\npierced to Rome nor to Egypt; his elaborations of his data are drawn\nfrom his own feelings and circumstances, not from those of Cleopatra.\nThis transporting oneself into the heart of a subject is a loose\nmetaphor: the best one can do is to transplant the subject into one's\nown heart and draw _from oneself_ impulses as profound as possible\nwith which to vivify tradition and make it over in one's own image.\nYet I fear that to speak so is rationalism, and would be found to\ninvolve, to the horror of our philosopher, that life is cognitive and\nspiritual, but dependent, discontinuous, and unsubstantial. What he\nconceives instead is that consciousness is a stuff out of which things\nare made, and has all the attributes, even the most material, of its\nseveral objects; and that there is no possibility of knowing, save by\nbecoming what one is trying to know. So perception, for him, lies\nwhere its object does, and is some part of it; memory is the past\nexperience itself, somehow shining through into the present; and\nShakespeare's Cleopatra, I should infer, would have to be some part of\nCleopatra herself--in those moments when she spoke English.\n\nIt is hard to be a just critic of mysticism because mysticism can\nnever do itself justice in words. To conceive of an external actual\nCleopatra and an external actual mind of Shakespeare is to betray the\ncause of pure immediacy; and I suspect that if M. Bergson heard of\nsuch criticisms as I am making, he would brush them aside as utterly\nblind and scholastic. As the mystics have always said that God was not\nfar from them, but dwelt in their hearts, meaning this pretty\nliterally: so this mystical philosophy of the immediate, which talks\nsometimes so scientifically of things and with such intimacy of\nknowledge, feels that these things are not far from it, but dwell\nliterally in its heart. The revelation and the sentiment of them, if\nit be thorough, is just what the things are. The total aspects to be\ndiscerned in a body _are_ that body; and the movement of those\naspects, when you enact it, _is_ the spirit of that body, and at the\nsame time a part of your own spirit. To suppose that a man's\nconsciousness (either one's own or other people's) is a separate fact\nover and above the shuffling of the things he feels, or that these\nthings are anything over and above the feeling of them which exists\nmore or less everywhere in diffusion--that, for the mystic, is to be\nonce for all hopelessly intellectual, dualistic, and diabolical. If\nyou cannot shed the husk of those dead categories--space, matter,\nmind, truth, person--life is shut out of your heart. And the mystic,\nwho always speaks out of experience, is certainly right in this, that\na certain sort of life is shut out by reason, the sort that reason\ncalls dreaming or madness; but he forgets that reason too is a kind of\nlife, and that of all the kinds--mystical, passionate, practical,\naesthetic, intellectual--with their various degrees of light and heat,\nthe life of reason is that which some people may prefer. I confess I\nam one of these, and I am not inclined, even if I were able, to\nreproduce M. Bergson's sentiments as he feels them. He is his own\nperfect expositor. All a critic can aim at is to understand these\nsentiments as existing facts, and to give them the place that belongs\nto them in the moral world. To understand, in most cases, is intimacy\nenough.\n\nHerbert Spencer says somewhere that the yolk of an egg is homogeneous,\nthe highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of\nevolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in\nthe egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might\nseem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary,\nmaintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every\npart consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we\nmay observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea\nof Leibnitz is speculative and far outruns the evidence, but it is\nspeculative in a well-advised, penetrating, humble, and noble fashion;\nwhile the idea of Spencer is foolishly dogmatic, it is a piece of\nignorant self-sufficiency, like that insular empiricism that would\ndeny that Chinamen were real until it had actually seen them. Nature\nis richer than experience and wider than divination; and it is far\nrasher and more arrogant to declare that any part of nature is simple\nthan to suggest the sort of complexity that perhaps it might have. M.\nBergson, however, is on the side of Spencer. After studiously\nexamining the egg on every side--for he would do more than taste\nit--and considering the source and destiny of it, he would summon his\nintuition to penetrate to the very heart of it, to its spirit, and\nthen he would declare that this spirit was a vital momentum without\nparts and without ideas, and was simplicity itself. He would add that\nit was the free and original creator of the bird, because it is of the\nessence of spirit to bestow more than it possesses and to build better\nthan it knows. Undoubtedly actual spirit is simple and does not know\nhow it builds; but for that very reason actual spirit does not really\ncreate or build anything, but merely watches, now with sympathetic,\nnow with shocked attention, what is being created and built for it.\nDoubtless new things are always arising, new islands, new persons, new\nphilosophies; but that the real cause of them should be simpler than\nthey, that their Creator, if I may use this language, should be\nignorant and give more than he has, who can stomach that?\n\nLet us grant, however, since the thing is not abstractly\ninconceivable, that eggs really have no structure. To what, then,\nshall we attribute the formation of birds? Will it follow that\nevolution, or differentiation, or the law of the passage from the\nhomogeneous to the heterogeneous, or the dialectic of the concept of\npure being, or the impulse towards life, or the vocation of spirit is\nwhat actually hatches them? Alas, these words are but pedantic and\nrhetorical cloaks for our ignorance, and to project them behind the\nfacts and regard them as presiding from thence over the course of\nnature is a piece of the most deplorable scholasticism. If eggs are\nreally without structure, the true causes of the formation of birds\nare the last conditions, whatever they may be, that introduce that\nphenomenon and determine its character--the type of the parents, the\nact of fertilisation, the temperature, or whatever else observation\nmight find regularly to precede and qualify that new birth in nature.\nThese facts, if they were the ultimate and deepest facts in the case,\nwould be the ultimate and only possible terms in which to explain it.\nThey would constitute the mechanism of reproduction; and if nature\nwere no finer than that in its structure, science could not go deeper\nthan that in its discoveries. And although it is frivolous to suppose\nthat nature ends in this way at the limits of our casual apprehension,\nand has no hidden roots, yet philosophically that would be as good a\nstopping place as any other. Ultimately we should have to be satisfied\nwith some factual conjunction and method in events. If atoms and their\ncollisions, by any chance, were the ultimate and inmost facts\ndiscoverable, they would supply the explanation of everything, in the\nonly sense in which anything existent can be explained at all. If\nsomebody then came to us enthusiastically and added that the Will of\nthe atoms so to be and move was the true cause, or the Will of God\nthat they should move so, he would not be reputed, I suppose, to have\nthrown a bright light on the subject.\n\nYet this is what M. Bergson does in his whole defence of metaphysical\nvitalism, and especially in the instance of the evolution of eyes by\ntwo different methods, which is his palmary argument. Since in some\nmolluscs and in vertebrates organs that coincide in being organs of\nvision are reached by distinct paths, it cannot have been the\npropulsion of mechanism in each case, he says, that guided the\ndevelopments, which, being divergent, would never have led to\ncoincident results, but the double development must have been guided\nby a common _tendency towards vision_. Suppose (what some young man in\na laboratory may by this time have shown to be false) that M.\nBergson's observations have sounded the facts to the bottom; it would\nthen be of the ultimate nature of things that, given light and the\nother conditions, the two methods of development will end in eyes;\njust as, for a peasant, it is of the ultimate nature of things that\npuddles can be formed in two quite opposite ways, by rain falling from\nheaven and by springs issuing from the earth; but as the peasant would\nnot have reached a profound insight into nature if he had proclaimed\nthe presence in her of a _tendency to puddles_, to be formed in\ninexplicably different ways; so the philosopher attains to no profound\ninsight when he proclaims in her a _tendency to vision._ If those\nwords express more than ignorance, they express the love of it. Even\nif the vitalists were right in despairing of further scientific\ndiscoveries, they would be wrong in offering their verbiage as a\nsubstitute. Nature may possibly have only a very loose hazy\nconstitution, to be watched and understood as sailors watch and\nunderstand the weather; but Neptune and AEolus are not thereby proved\nto be the authors of storms. Yet M. Bergson thinks if life could only\nbe safely shown to arise unaccountably, that would prove the invisible\nefficacy of a mighty tendency to life. But would the ultimate\ncontexture and miracle of things be made less arbitrary, and less a\nmatter of brute fact, by the presence behind them of an actual and\narbitrary effort that such should be their nature? If this word\n\"effort\" is not a mere figure of rhetoric, a name for a movement in\nthings of which the end happens to interest us more than the\nbeginning, if it is meant to be an effort actually and consciously\nexisting, then we must proceed to ask: Why did this effort exist? Why\ndid it choose that particular end to strive for? How did it reach the\nconception of that end, which had never been realised before, and\nwhich no existent nature demanded for its fulfilment? How did the\neffort, once made specific, select the particular matter it was to\ntransform? Why did this matter respond to the disembodied effort that\nit should change its habits? Not one of these questions is easier to\nanswer than the question why nature is living or animals have eyes.\nYet without seeking to solve the only real problem, namely, how nature\nis actually constituted, this introduction of metaphysical powers\nraises all the others, artificially and without occasion. This side\nof M. Bergson's philosophy illustrates the worst and most familiar\nvices of metaphysics. It marvels at some appearance, not to\ninvestigate it, but to give it an unctuous name. Then it turns this\nname into a power, that by its operation creates the appearance. This\nis simply verbal mythology or the hypostasis of words, and there would\nbe some excuse for a rude person who should call it rubbish.\n\nThe metaphysical abuse of psychology is as extraordinary in modern\nEurope as that of fancy ever was in India or of rhetoric in Greece. We\nfind, for instance, Mr. Bradley murmuring, as a matter almost too\nobvious to mention, that the existence of anything not sentience is\nunmeaning to him; or, if I may put this evident principle in other\nwords, that nothing is able to exist unless something else is able to\ndiscover it. Yet even if discovered the poor candidate for existence\nwould be foiled, for it would turn out to be nothing but a\nmodification of the mind falsely said to discover it. Existence and\ndiscovery are conceptions which the malicious criticism of knowledge\n(which is the psychology of knowledge abused) pretends to have\ndiscarded and outgrown altogether; the conception of immediacy has\ntaken their place. This malicious criticism of knowledge is based on\nthe silent assumption that knowledge is impossible. Whenever you\nmention anything, it baffles you by talking instead about your idea of\nwhat you mention; and if ever you describe the origin of anything it\nsubstitutes, as a counter-theory, its theory of the origin of your\ndescription. This, however, would not be a counter-theory at all if\nthe criticism of knowledge had not been corrupted into a negative\ndogma, maintaining that ideas of things are the only things possible\nand that therefore only ideas and not things can have an origin.\nNothing could better illustrate how deep this cognitive impotence has\ngot into people's bones than the manner in which, in the latest\nschools of philosophy, it is being disavowed; for unblushing idealism\nis distinctly out of fashion. M. Bergson tells us he has solved a\ndifficulty that seemed hopeless by avoiding a fallacy common to\nidealism and realism. The difficulty was that if you started with\nself-existent matter you could never arrive at mind, and if you\nstarted with self-existent mind you could never arrive at matter. The\nfallacy was that both schools innocently supposed there was an\nexisting world to discover, and each thought it possible that its view\nshould describe that world as it really was. What now is M. Bergson's\nsolution? That no articulated world, either material or psychical,\nexists at all, but only a tendency or enduring effort to evolve images\nof both sorts; or rather to evolve images which in their finer texture\nand vibration are images of matter, but which grouped and\nforeshortened in various ways are images of minds. The idea of nature\nand the idea of consciousness are two apperceptions or syntheses of\nthe same stuff of experience. The two worlds thus become substantially\nidentical, continuous, and superposable; each can merge insensibly\ninto the other. \"To perceive all the influences of all the points of\nall bodies would be to sink to the condition of a material object.\"[4]\nTo perceive some of these influences, by having created organs that\nshut out the others, is to be a mind.\n\n[Footnote 4: _Matiere et Memoire_, p. 38.]\n\nThis solution is obtained by substituting, as usual, the ideas of\nthings for the things themselves and cheating the honest man who was\ntalking about objects by answering him as if he were talking about\nhimself. Certainly, if we could limit ourselves to feeling life flow\nand the whole world vibrate, we should not raise the question debated\nbetween realists and idealists; but not to raise a question is one\nthing and to have solved it is another. What has really been done is\nto offer us a history, _on the assumption of idealism,_ of the idea of\nmind and the idea of matter. This history may be correct enough\npsychologically, and such as a student of the life of reason might\npossibly come to; but it is a mere evasion of the original question\nconcerning the relation of this mental evolution to the world it\noccurs in. In truth, an enveloping world is assumed by these\nhereditary idealists not to exist; they rule it out _a priori,_ and\nthe life of reason is supposed by them to constitute the whole\nuniverse. To be sure, they say they transcend idealism no less than\nrealism, because they mark the point where, by contrast or selection\nfrom other objects, the mind has come to be distinguished: but the\nsubterfuge is vain, because by \"mind\" they mean simply the idea of\nmind, and they give no name, except perhaps experience, to the mind\nthat forms that idea. Matter and mind, for these transcendentalists\nposing as realists, merge and flow so easily together only because\nboth are images or groups of images in an original mind presupposed\nbut never honestly posited. It is in this forgotten mind, also, as\nthe professed idealists urge, that the relations of proximity and\nsimultaneity between various lives can alone subsist, if to subsist is\nto be experienced.\n\nThere is, however, one point of real difference, at least initially,\nbetween the idealism of M. Bergson and that of his predecessors. The\nuniversal mind, for M. Bergson, is in process of actual\ntransformation. It is not an omniscient God but a cosmic sensibility.\nIn this sensibility matter, with all its vibrations felt in detail,\nforms one moving panorama together with all minds, which are patterns\nvisible at will from various points of view in that same woof of\nmatter; and so the great experiment crawls and shoots on, the dream of\na giant without a body, mindful of the past, uncertain of the future,\nshuffling his images, and threading his painful way through a\nlabyrinth of cross-purposes.\n\nSuch at least is the notion which the reader gathers from the\nprevailing character of M. Bergson's words; but I am not sure that it\nwould be his ultimate conclusion. Perhaps it is to be out of sympathy\nwith his spirit to speak of an ultimate conclusion at all; nothing\ncomes to a conclusion and nothing is ultimate. Many dilemmas, however,\nare inevitable, and if the master does not make a choice himself, his\npupils will divide and trace the alternative consequences for\nthemselves in each direction. If they care most for a real fluidity,\nas William James did, they will stick to something like what I have\njust described; but if they care most for immediacy, as we may suspect\nthat M. Bergson does, they will transform that view into something far\nmore orthodox. For a real fluidity and an absolute immediacy are not\ncompatible. To believe in real change you must put some trust in\nrepresentation, and if you posit a real past and a real future you\nposit independent objects. In absolute immediacy, on the contrary,\ninstead of change taken realistically, you can have only a feeling of\nchange. The flux becomes an idea in the absolute, like the image of a\nmoving spiral, always flowing outwards or inwards, but with its centre\nand its circumference always immovable. Duration, we must remember, is\nsimply the sense of lasting; no time is real that is not lived\nthrough. Therefore various lives cannot be dated in a common time, but\nhave no temporal relations to one another. Thus, if we insist on\nimmediacy, the vaunted novelty of the future and the inestimable\nfreedom of life threaten to become (like all else) the given _feeling_\nof novelty or freedom, in passing from a given image of the past to a\ngiven image of the future--all these terms being contained in the\npresent; and we have reverted to the familiar conception of absolute\nimmutability in absolute life. M. Bergson has studied Plotinus and\nSpinoza; I suspect he has not studied them in vain.\n\nNor is this the only point at which this philosophy, when we live a\nwhile with it, suddenly drops its mask of novelty and shows us a\nfamiliar face. It would seem, for instance, that beneath the drama of\ncreative evolution there was a deeper nature of things. For apparently\ncreative evolution (apart from the obstacle of matter, which may be\nexplained away idealistically) has to submit to the following\nconditions: first, to create in sequence, not all at once; second, to\ncreate some particular sequence only, not all possible sequences side\nby side; and third, to continue the one sequence chosen, since if the\nadditions of every new moment were irrelevant to the past, no\nsequence, no vital persistence or progress would be secured, and all\neffort would be wasted. These are compulsions; but it may also, I\nsuppose, be thought a _duty_ on the part of the vital impulse to be\ntrue to its initial direction and not to halt, as it well might, like\nthe self-reversing Will of Schopenhauer, on perceiving the result of\nits spontaneous efforts. Necessity would thus appear behind liberty\nand duty before it. This summons to life to go on, and these\nconditions imposed upon it, might then very plausibly be attributed to\na Deity existing beyond the world, as is done in religious tradition;\nand such a doctrine, if M. Bergson should happen to be holding it in\nreserve, would perhaps help to explain some obscurities in his system,\nsuch, for instance, as the power of potentiality to actualise itself,\nof equipoise to become suddenly emphasis on one particular part, and\nof spirit to pursue an end chosen before it is conceived, and when\nthere is no nature to predetermine it.\n\nIt has been said that M. Bergson's system precludes ethics: I cannot\nthink that observation just. Apart from the moral inspiration which\nappears throughout his philosophy, which is indeed a passionate\nattempt to exalt (or debase) values into powers, it offers, I should\nsay, two starting-points for ethics. In the first place, the _elan\nvital_ ought not to falter, although it can do so: therefore to\npersevere, labour, experiment, propagate, must be duties, and the\nopposite must be sins. In the second place, freedom, in adding\nuncaused increments to life, ought to do so in continuation of the\nwhole past, though it might do so frivolously: therefore it is a duty\nto be studious, consecutive, loyal; you may move in any direction but\nyou must carry the whole past with you. I will not say this suggests a\nsound system of ethics, because it would be extracted from dogmas\nwhich are physical and incidentally incredible; nor would it represent\na mature and disillusioned morality, because it would look to the\nfuture and not to the eternal; nevertheless it would be deeply\nethical, expressing the feelings that have always inspired Hebraic\nmorality.\n\nA good way of testing the calibre of a philosophy is to ask what it\nthinks of death. Philosophy, said Plato, is a meditation on death, or\nrather, if we would do justice to his thought, an aspiration to live\ndisembodied; and Schopenhauer said that the spectacle of death was the\nfirst provocation to philosophy. M. Bergson has not yet treated of\nthis subject; but we may perhaps perceive for ourselves the place that\nit might occupy in his system.[5] Life, according to him, is the\noriginal and absolute force. In the beginning, however, it was only a\npotentiality or tendency. To become specific lives, life had to\nemphasise and bring exclusively to consciousness, here and there,\nspecial possibilities of living; and where these special lives have\ntheir chosen boundary (if this way of putting it is not too Fichtean)\nthey posit or create a material environment. Matter is the view each\nlife takes of what for it are rejected or abandoned possibilities of\nliving. This might show how the absolute will to live, if it was to be\ncarried out, would have to begin by evoking a sense of dead or\nmaterial things about it; it would not show how death could ever\novertake the will itself. If matter were merely the periphery which\nlife has to draw round itself, in order to be a definite life, matter\ncould never abolish any life; as the ring of a circus or the sand of\nthe arena can never abolish the show for which they have been\nprepared. Life would then be fed and defined by matter, as an artist\nis served by the matter he needs to carry on his art.\n\n[Footnote 5: M. Bergson has shown at considerable length that the idea\nof non-existence is more complex, psychologically, than the idea of\nexistence, and posterior to it. He evidently thinks this disposes of\nthe reality of non-existence also: for it is the reality that he\nwishes to exorcise by his words. If, however, non-existence and the\nidea of non-existence were identical, it would have been impossible\nfor me not to exist before I was born: my non-existence then would be\nmore complex than my existence now, and posterior to it. The initiated\nwould not recoil from this consequence, but it might open the eyes of\nsome catechumens. It is a good test of the malicious theory of\nknowledge.]\n\nYet in actual life there is undeniably such a thing as danger and\nfailure. M. Bergson even thinks that the facing of increased dangers\nis one proof that vital force is an absolute thing; for if life were\nan equilibrium, it would not displace itself and run new risks of\ndeath, by making itself more complex and ticklish, as it does in the\nhigher organisms and the finer arts.[6] Yet if life is the only\nsubstance, how is such a risk of death possible at all? I suppose the\nspecial life that arises about a given nucleus of feeling, by\nemphasising some of the relations which that feeling has in the\nworld, might be abolished if a greater emphasis were laid on another\nset of its relations, starting from some other nucleus. We must\nremember that these selections, according to M. Bergson, are not\napperceptions merely. They are creative efforts. The future\nconstitution of the flux will vary in response to them. Each mind\nsucks the world, so far as it can, into its own vortex. A cross\napperception will then amount to a contrary force. Two souls will not\nbe able to dominate the same matter in peace and friendship. Being\nforces, they will pull that matter in different ways. Each soul will\ntend to devour and to direct exclusively the movement influenced by\nthe other soul. The one that succeeds in ruling that movement will\nlive on; the other, I suppose, will die, although M. Bergson may not\nlike that painful word. He says the lower organisms store energy for\nthe higher organisms to use; but when a sheep appropriates the energy\nstored up in grass, or a man that stored up in mutton, it looks as if\nthe grass and the sheep had perished. Their _elan vital_ is no longer\ntheirs, for in this rough world to live is to kill. Nothing arises in\nnature, Lucretius says, save helped by the death of some other thing.\nOf course, this is no defeat for the _elan vital_ in general; for\naccording to our philosopher the whole universe from the beginning has\nbeen making for just that supreme sort of consciousness which man, who\neats the mutton, now possesses. The sheep and the grass were only\nthings by the way and scaffolding for our precious humanity. But would\nit not be better if some being should arise nobler than man, not\nrequiring abstract intellect nor artificial weapons, but endowed with\ninstinct and intuition and, let us say, the power of killing by\nradiating electricity? And might not men then turn out to have been\nmere explosives, in which energy was stored for convenient digestion\nby that superior creature? A shocking thought, no doubt, like the\nthought of death, and more distressing to our vital feelings than is\nthe pleasing assimilation of grass and mutton in our bellies. Yet I\ncan see no ground, except a desire to flatter oneself, for not\ncrediting the _elan vital_ with some such digestive intention. M.\nBergson's system would hardly be more speculative if it entertained\nthis possibility, and it would seem more honest.\n\n[Footnote 6: This argument against mechanism is a good instance of the\ndifficulties which mythological habits of mind import unnecessarily\ninto science. An equilibrium would not displace itself! But an\nequilibrium is a natural result, not a magical entity. It is\ncontinually displaced, as its constituents are modified by internal\nmovements or external agencies; and while many a time the equilibrium\nis thereby destroyed altogether, sometimes it is replaced by a more\nelaborate and perilous equilibrium; as glaciers carry many rocks down,\nbut leave some, here and there, piled in the most unlikely pinnacles\nand pagodas.]\n\nThe vital impulse is certainly immortal; for if we take it in the\nnaturalistic exoteric sense, for a force discovered in biology, it is\nan independent agent coming down into matter, organising it against\nits will, and stirring it like the angel the pool of Bethesda. Though\nthe ripples die down, the angel is not affected. He has merely flown\naway. And if we take the vital impulse mystically and esoterically, as\nthe _only_ primal force, creating matter in order to play with it, the\nimmortality of life is even more obvious; for there is then nothing\nelse in being that could possibly abolish it. But when we come to\nimmortality for the individual, all grows obscure and ambiguous. The\noriginal tendency of life was certainly cosmic and not distinguished\ninto persons: we are told it was like a wireless message sent at the\ncreation which is being read off at last by the humanity of to-day. In\nthe naturalistic view, the diversity of persons would seem to be due\nto the different material conditions under which one and the same\nspiritual purpose must fight its way towards realisation in different\ntimes and places. It is quite conceivable, however, that in the\nmystical view the very sense of the original message should comport\nthis variety of interpretations, and that the purpose should always\nhave been to produce diverse individuals.\n\nThe first view, as usual, is the one which M. Bergson has prevailingly\nin mind, and communicates most plausibly; while he holds to it he is\nstill talking about the natural world, and so we still know what he is\ntalking about. On this view, however, personal immortality would be\nimpossible; it would be, if it were aimed at, a self-contradiction in\nthe aim of life; for the diversity of persons would be due to\nimpediments only, and souls would differ simply in so far as they\nmutilated the message which they were all alike trying to repeat. They\nwould necessarily, when the spirit was victorious, be reabsorbed and\nidentified in the universal spirit. This view also seems most\nconsonant with M. Bergson's theory of primitive reality, as a flux of\nfused images, or a mind lost in matter; to this view, too, is\nattributable his hostility to intelligence, in that it arrests the\nflux, divides the fused images, and thereby murders and devitalises\nreality. Of course the destiny of spirit would not be to revert to\nthat diffused materiality; for the original mind lost in matter had a\nvery short memory; it was a sort of cosmic trepidation only, whereas\nthe ultimate mind would remember all that, in its efforts after\nfreedom, it had ever super added to that trepidation or made it turn\ninto. Even the abstract views of things taken by the practical\nintellect would, I fear, have to burden the universal memory to the\nend. We should be remembered, even if we could no longer exist.\n\nOn the other more profound view, however, might not personal\nimmortality be secured? Suppose the original message said: Translate\nme into a thousand tongues! In fulfilling its duty, the universe would\nthen continue to divide its dream into phantom individuals; as it had\nto insulate its parts in the beginning in order to dominate and\ntransform them freely, so it would always continue to insulate them,\nso as not to lose its cross-vistas and its mobility. There is no\nreason, then, why individuals should not live for ever. But a\ncondition seems to be involved which may well make belief stagger. It\nwould be impossible for the universe to divide its images into\nparticular minds unless it preserved the images of their particular\nbodies also. Particular minds arise, according to this philosophy, in\nthe interests of practice: which means, biologically, to secure a\nbetter adjustment of the body to its environment, so that it may\nsurvive. Mystically, too, the fundamental force is a half-conscious\npurpose that practice, or freedom, should come to be; or rather, that\nan apparition or experience of practice and freedom should arise; for\nin this philosophy appearance is all. To secure this desirable\napparition of practice special tasks are set to various nuclei in felt\nspace (such, for instance, as the task to see), and the image of a\nbody (in this case that of an eye) is gradually formed, in order to\nexecute that task; for evidently the Absolute can see only if it\nlooks, and to look it must first choose a point of view and an optical\nmethod. This point of view and this method posit the individual; they\nfix him in time and space, and determine the quality and range of his\npassive experience: they are his body. If the Absolute, then, wishes\nto retain the individual not merely as one of its memories but as one\nof its organs of practical life, it must begin by retaining the image\nof his body. His body must continue to figure in that landscape of\nnature which the absolute life, as it pulses, keeps always composing\nand recomposing. Otherwise a personal mind, a sketch of things made\nfrom the point of view and in the interests of that body, cannot be\npreserved.\n\nM. Bergson, accordingly, should either tell us that our bodies are\ngoing to rise again, or he should not tell us, or give us to\nunderstand, that our minds are going to endure. I suppose he cannot\nventure to preach the resurrection of the body to this weak-kneed\ngeneration; he is too modern and plausible for that. Yet he is too\namiable to deny to our dilated nostrils some voluptuous whiffs of\nimmortality. He asks if we are not \"led to suppose\" that consciousness\npasses through matter to be tempered like steel, to constitute\ndistinct personalities, and prepare them for a higher existence. Other\nanimal minds are but human minds arrested; men at last (what men, I\nwonder?) are \"capable of remembering all and willing all and\ncontrolling their past and their future,\" so that \"we shall have no\nrepugnance in admitting that in man, though perhaps in man alone,\nconsciousness pursues its path beyond this earthly life.\" Elsewhere he\nsays, in a phrase already much quoted and perhaps destined to be\nfamous, that in man the spirit can \"spurn every kind of resistance and\nbreak through many an obstacle, perhaps even death.\" Here the tenor\nhas ended on the inevitable high note, and the gallery is delighted.\nBut was that the note set down for him in the music? And has he not\nsung it in falsetto?\n\nThe immediate knows nothing about death; it takes intelligence to\nconceive it; and that perhaps is why M. Bergson says so little about\nit, and that little so far from serious. But he talks a great deal\nabout life, he feels he has penetrated deeply into its nature; and yet\ndeath, together with birth, is the natural analysis of what life is.\nWhat is this creative purpose, that must wait for sun and rain to set\nit in motion? What is this life, that in any individual can be\nsuddenly extinguished by a bullet? What is this _elan-vital_, that a\nlittle fall in temperature would banish altogether from the universe?\nThe study of death may be out of fashion, but it is never out of\nseason. The omission of this, which is almost the omission of wisdom\nfrom philosophy, warns us that in M. Bergson's thought we have\nsomething occasional and partial, the work of an astute apologist, a\nparty man, driven to desperate speculation by a timid attachment to\nprejudice. Like other terrified idealisms, the system of M. Bergson\nhas neither good sense, nor rigour, nor candour, nor solidity. It is a\nbrilliant attempt to confuse the lessons of experience by refining\nupon its texture, an attempt to make us halt, for the love of\nprimitive illusions, in the path of discipline and reason. It is\nlikely to prove a successful attempt, because it flatters the\nweaknesses of the moment, expresses them with emotion, and covers\nthem with a feint at scientific speculation. It is not, however, a\npowerful system, like that of Hegel, capable of bewildering and\nobsessing many who have no natural love for shams. M. Bergson will\nhardly bewilder; his style is too clear, the field where his just\nobservations lie--the immediate--is too well defined, and the\nmythology which results from projecting the terms of the immediate\ninto the absolute, and turning them into powers, is too obviously\nverbal. He will not long impose on any save those who enjoy being\nimposed upon; but for a long time he may increase their number. His\ndoctrine is indeed alluring. Instead of telling us, as a stern and\ncontrite philosophy would, that the truth is remote, difficult, and\nalmost undiscoverable by human efforts, that the universe is vast and\nunfathomable, yet that the knowledge of its ways is precious to our\nbetter selves, if we would not live befooled, this philosophy rather\ntells us that nothing is truer or more precious than our rudimentary\nconsciousness, with its vague instincts and premonitions, that\neverything ideal is fictitious, and that the universe, at heart, is as\npalpitating and irrational as ourselves. Why then strain the inquiry?\nWhy seek to dominate passion by understanding it? Rather live on;\nwork, it matters little at what, and grow, it matters nothing in what\ndirection. Exert your instinctive powers of vegetation and emotion;\nlet your philosophy itself be a frank expression of this flux, the\nroar of the ocean in your little sea-shell, a momentary posture of\nyour living soul, not a stark adoration of things reputed eternal.\n\nSo the intellectual faithlessness and the material servility of the\nage are flattered together and taught to justify themselves\ntheoretically. They cry joyfully, _non peccavi_, which is the modern\nformula for confession. M. Bergson's philosophy itself is a confession\nof a certain mystical rebellion and atavism in the contemporary mind.\nIt will remain a beautiful monument to the passing moment, a capital\nfilm for the cinematography of history, full of psychological truth\nand of a kind of restrained sentimental piety. His thought has all the\ncharm that can go without strength and all the competence that can go\nwithout mastery. This is not an age of mastery; it is confused with\ntoo much business; it has no brave simplicity. The mind has forgotten\nits proper function, which is to crown life by quickening it into\nintelligence, and thinks if it could only prove that it accelerated\nlife, that might perhaps justify its existence; like a philosopher at\nsea who, to make himself useful, should blow into the sail.\n\n\n\n\nIV\n\nTHE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. BERTRAND RUSSELL\n\nI. A NEW SCHOLASTICISM\n\n\nIn its chase after idols this age has not wholly forgotten the gods,\nand reason and faith in reason are not left without advocates. Some\nyears ago, at Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. G.E. Moore began to\nproduce a very deep impression amongst the younger spirits by his\npowerful and luminous dialectic. Like Socrates, he used all the sharp\narts of a disputant in the interests of common sense and of an almost\narchaic dogmatism. Those who heard him felt how superior his position\nwas, both in rigour and in force, to the prevailing inversions and\nidealisms. The abuse of psychology, rampant for two hundred years,\nseemed at last to be detected and challenged; and the impressionistic\nrhetoric that philosophy was saturated with began to be squeezed out\nby clear questions, and by a disconcerting demand for literal\nsincerity. German idealism, when we study it as a product of its own\nage and country, is a most engaging phenomenon; it is full of\nafflatus, sweep, and deep searchings of heart; but it is essentially\nromantic and egotistical, and all in it that is not soliloquy is mere\nsystem-making and sophistry. Therefore when it is taught by unromantic\npeople _ex cathedra,_ in stentorian tones, and represented as the\nrational foundation of science and religion, with neither of which it\nhas any honest sympathy, it becomes positively odious--one of the\nworst imposture and blights to which a youthful imagination could be\nsubjected. It is chiefly against the incubus of this celestial monster\nthat Mr. Moore dared to lift up his eyes; and many a less courageous\nor less clear-sighted person was thankful to him for it. But a man\nwith such a mission requires a certain narrowness and concentration of\nmind; he has to be intolerant and to pound a good deal on the same\nnotes. We need not wonder if Mr. Moore has written rather meagerly,\nand with a certain vehemence and want of imagination.\n\nAll this, however, was more than made up by the powerful ally who soon\ncame to his aid. Mr. Bertrand Russell began by adopting Mr. Moore's\nmetaphysics, but he has given as much as he has received. Apart from\nhis well-known mathematical attainments, he possesses by inheritance\nthe political and historical mind, and an intrepid determination to\npierce convention and look to ultimate things. He has written\nabundantly and, where the subject permits, with a singular lucidity,\ncandour, and charm. Especially his _Philosophical Essays_ and his\nlittle book on _The Problems of Philosophy_ can be read with pleasure\nby any intelligent person, and give a tolerably rounded picture of the\ntenets of the school. Yet it must be remembered that Mr. Russell, like\nMr. Moore, is still young and his thoughts have not assumed their\nultimate form. Moreover, he lives in an atmosphere of academic\ndisputation which makes one technical point after another acquire a\npreponderating influence in his thoughts. His book on _The Problems\nof Philosophy_ is admirable in style, temper, and insight, but it\nhardly deserves its title; it treats principally, in a somewhat\npersonal and partial way, of the relation of knowledge to its objects,\nand it might rather have been called \"The problems which Moore and I\nhave been agitating lately.\" Indeed, his philosophy is so little\nsettled as yet that every new article and every fresh conversation\nrevokes some of his former opinions, and places the crux of\nphilosophical controversy at a new point. We are soon made aware that\nexact thinking and true thinking are not synonymous, but that one\nexact thought, in the same mind, may be the exact opposite of the\nnext. This inconstancy, which after all does not go very deep, is a\nsign of sincerity and pure love of truth; it marks the freshness, the\nvivacity, the self-forgetfulness, the logical ardour belonging to this\ndelightful reformer. It may seem a paradox, but at bottom it is not,\nthat the vitalists should be oppressed, womanish, and mystical, and\nonly the intellectualists keen, argumentative, fearless, and full of\nlife. I mention this casualness and inconstancy in Mr. Russell's\nutterances not to deride them, but to show the reader how impossible\nit is, at this juncture, to give a comprehensive account of his\nphilosophy, much less a final judgment upon it.\n\nThe principles most fundamental and dominant in his thought are\nperhaps the following: That the objects the mind deals with, whether\nmaterial or ideal, are what and where the mind says they are, and\nindependent of it; that some general principles and ideas have to be\nassumed to be valid not merely for thought but for things; that\nrelations may subsist, arise, and disappear between things without at\nall affecting these things internally; and that the nature of\neverything is just what it is, and not to be confused either with its\norigin or with any opinion about it. These principles, joined with an\nobvious predilection for Plato and Leibnitz among philosophers, lead\nto the following doctrines, among others: that the mind or soul is an\nentity separate from its thoughts and pre-existent; that a material\nworld exists in space and time; that its substantial elements may be\ninfinite in number, having position and quality, but no extension, so\nthat each mind or soul might well be one of them; that both the\nexistent and the ideal worlds may be infinite, while the ideal world\ncontains an infinity of things not realised in the actual world; and\nthat this ideal world is knowable by a separate mental consideration,\na consideration which is, however, empirical in spirit, since the\nideal world of ethics, logic, and mathematics has a special and\nsurprising constitution, which we do not make but must attentively\ndiscover.\n\nThe reader will perceive, perhaps, that if the function of philosophy\nis really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom,\nand immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact,\nits author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about\nthis world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of\nexistence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights,\nand Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded\nthan his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy what\nhe himself has said of that of Leibnitz, that it is at its best in\nthose subjects which are most remote from human life. It needs to be\nvery largely supplemented and much ripened and humanised before it can\nbe called satisfactory or wise; but time may bring these fulfilments,\nand meantime I cannot help thinking it auspicious in the highest\ndegree that, in a time of such impressionistic haste and plebeian\nlooseness of thought, scholastic rigour should suddenly raise its head\nagain, aspiring to seriousness, solidity, and perfection of doctrine:\nand this not in the interests of religious orthodoxy, but precisely in\nthe most emancipated and unflinchingly radical quarter. It is\nrefreshing and reassuring, after the confused, melodramatic ways of\nphilosophising to which the idealists and the pragmatists have\naccustomed us, to breathe again the crisp air of scholastic common\nsense. It is good for us to be held down, as the Platonic Socrates\nwould have held us, to saying what we really believe, and sticking to\nwhat we say. We seem to regain our intellectual birthright when we are\nallowed to declare our genuine intent, even in philosophy, instead of\nbegging some kind psychologist to investigate our \"meaning\" for us, or\neven waiting for the flux of events to endow us with what \"meaning\" it\nwill. It is also instructive to have the ethical attitude purified of\nall that is not ethical and turned explicitly into what, in its moral\ncapacity, it essentially is: a groundless pronouncement upon the\nbetter and the worse.\n\nHere a certain one-sidedness begins to make itself felt in Mr.\nRussell's views. The ethical attitude doubtless has no _ethical_\nground, but that fact does not prevent it from having a _natural_\nground; and the observer of the animate creation need not have much\ndifficulty in seeing what that natural ground is. Mr. Russell,\nhowever, refuses to look also in that direction. He insists, rightly\nenough, that good is predicated categorically by the conscience; he\nwill not remember that all life is not moral bias merely, and that, in\nthe very act of recognising excellence and pursuing it, we may glance\nback over our shoulder and perceive how our moral bias is conditioned,\nand what basis it has in the physical order of things. This backward\nlook, when the hand is on the plough, may indeed confuse our ethical\nself-expression, both in theory and in practice; and I am the last to\ndeny the need of insisting, in ethics, on ethical judgments in all\ntheir purity and dogmatic sincerity. Such insistence, if we had heard\nmore of it in our youth, might have saved many of us from chronic\nentanglements; and there is nothing, next to Plato, which ought to be\nmore recommended to the young philosopher than the teachings of\nMessrs. Russell and Moore, if he wishes to be a moralist and a\nlogician, and not merely to seem one. Yet this salutary doctrine,\nthough correct, is inadequate. It is a monocular philosophy, seeing\noutlines clear, but missing the solid bulk and perspective of things.\nWe need binocular vision to quicken the whole mind and yield a full\nimage of reality. Ethics should be controlled by a physics that\nperceives the material ground and the relative status of whatever is\nmoral. Otherwise ethics itself tends to grow narrow, strident, and\nfanatical; as may be observed in asceticism and puritanism, or, for\nthe matter of that, in Mr. Moore's uncivilised leaning towards the\ndoctrine of retributive punishment, or in Mr. Russell's intolerance\nof selfishness and patriotism, and in his refusal to entertain any\npious reverence for the nature of things. The quality of wisdom, like\nthat of mercy, is not strained. To choose, to love and hate, to have a\nmoral life, is inevitable and legitimate in the part; but it is the\nfunction of the part as part, and we must keep it in its place if we\nwish to view the whole in its true proportions. Even to express justly\nthe aim of our own life we need to retain a constant sympathy with\nwhat is animal and fundamental in it, else we shall give a false\nplace, and too loud an emphasis, to our definitions of the ideal.\nHowever, it would be much worse not to reach the ideal at all, or to\nconfuse it for want of courage and sincerity in uttering our true\nmind; and it is in uttering our true mind that Mr. Russell can help\nus, even if our true mind should not always coincide with his.\n\nIn the following pages I do not attempt to cover all Mr. Russell's\ndoctrine (the deeper mathematical purls of it being beyond my\ncomprehension), and the reader will find some speculations of my own\ninterspersed in what I report of his. I merely traverse after him\nthree subjects that seem of imaginative interest, to indicate the\ninspiration and the imprudence, as I think them, of this young\nphilosophy.\n\n\nII. THE STUDY OF ESSENCE\n\n\n\"The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the\nmathematical infinite is probably,\" says Mr. Russell, \"the greatest\nachievement of which our own age has to boast.... It was assumed as\nself-evident, until Cantor and Dedekind established the opposite,\nthat if, from any collection of things, some were taken away, the\nnumber of things left must always be less than the original number of\nthings. This assumption, as a matter of fact, holds only of finite\ncollections; and the rejection of it, where the infinite is concerned,\nhas been shown to remove all the difficulties that hitherto baffled\nhuman reason in this matter.\" And he adds in another place: \"To\nreconcile us, by the exhibition of its awful beauty, to the reign of\nFate ... is the task of tragedy. But mathematics takes us still\nfurther from what is human, into the region of absolute necessity, to\nwhich not only the actual world, but every possible world, must\nconform; and even here it builds a habitation, or rather finds a\nhabitation eternally standing, where our ideals are fully satisfied\nand our best hopes are not thwarted. It is only when we thoroughly\nunderstand the entire independence of ourselves, which belongs to this\nworld that reason finds, that we can adequately realise the profound\nimportance of its beauty.\"\n\nMathematics seems to have a value for Mr. Russell akin to that of\nreligion. It affords a sanctuary to which to flee from the world, a\nheaven suffused with a serene radiance and full of a peculiar\nsweetness and consolation. \"Real life,\" he writes, \"is to most men a\nlong second-best, a perpetual compromise between the ideal and the\npossible; but the world of pure reason knows no compromise, no\npractical limitations, no barrier to the creative activity embodying\nin splendid edifices the passionate aspiration after the perfect from\nwhich all great work springs. Remote from human passions, remote even\nfrom the pitiful laws of nature, the generations have gradually\ncreated an ordered cosmos where pure thought can dwell as in its\nnatural home, and where one, at least, of our nobler impulses can\nescape from the dreary exile of the actual world.\" This study is one\nof \"those elements in human life which merit a place in heaven.\" \"The\ntrue spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than\nman, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found\nin mathematics as surely as in poetry.\"\n\nThis enthusiastic language might have, I should think, an opposite\neffect upon some readers to that which Mr. Russell desires. It might\nmake them suspect that the claim to know an absolute ideal necessity,\nso satisfying to one of our passionate impulses, might be prompted by\nthe same conceit, and subject to the same illusion, as the claim to\nknow absolute truth in religion. Beauty, when attributed to necessary\nrelations between logical entities, casts a net of subjectivity over\nthem; and at this net the omnivorous empiricist might be tempted to\nhaul, until he fancied he had landed the whole miraculous draught of\nfishes. The fish, however, would have slipped through the meshes; and\nit would be only his own vital emotion, projected for a moment into\nthe mathematical world, that he would be able to draw back and hug to\nhis bosom. Eternal truth is as disconsolate as it is consoling, and as\ndreary as it is interesting: these moral values are, in fact, values\nwhich the activity of contemplating that sort of truth has for\ndifferent minds; and it is no congruous homage offered to ideal\nnecessity, but merely a private endearment, to call it beautiful or\ngood. The case is not such as if we were dealing with existence.\nExistence is arbitrary; it is a questionable thing needing\njustification; and we, at least, cannot justify it otherwise than by\ntaking note of some affinity which it may show to human aspirations.\nTherefore our private endearments, when we call some existing thing\ngood or beautiful, are not impertinent; they assign to this chance\nthing its only assignable excuse for being, namely, the service it may\nchance to render to the spirit. But ideal necessity or, what is the\nsame thing, essential possibility has its excuse for being in itself,\nsince it is not contingent or questionable at all. The affinity which\nthe human mind may develop to certain provinces of essence is\nadventitious to those essences, and hardly to be mentioned in their\npresence. It is something the mind has acquired, and may lose. It is\nan incident in the life of reason, and no inherent characteristic of\neternal necessity.\n\nThe realm of essence contains the infinite multitude of Leibnitz's\npossible worlds, many of these worlds being very small and simple, and\nconsisting merely of what might be presented in some isolated moment\nof feeling. If any such feeling, however, or its object, never in fact\noccurs, the essence that it would have presented if it had occurred\nremains possible merely; so that nothing can ever exist in nature or\nfor consciousness which has not a prior and independent locus in the\nrealm of essence. When a man lights upon a thought or is interested in\ntracing a relation, he does not introduce those objects into the realm\nof essence, but merely selects them from the plenitude of what lies\nthere eternally. The ground of this selection lies, of course, in his\nhuman nature and circumstances; and the satisfaction he may find in\nso exercising his mind will be a consequence of his mental disposition\nand of the animal instincts beneath. Two and two would still make four\nif I were incapable of counting, or if I found it extremely painful to\ndo so, or if I thought it naive and pre-Kantian of these numbers not\nto combine in a more vital fashion, and make five. So also, if I\nhappen to enjoy counting, or to find the constancy of numbers sublime,\nand the reversibility of the processes connecting them consoling, in\ncontrast to the irrevocable flux of living things, all this is due to\nmy idiosyncrasy. It is no part of the essence of numbers to be\ncongenial to me; but it has perhaps become a part of my genius to have\naffinity to them.\n\nAnd how, may I ask, has it become a part of my genius? Simply because\nnature, of which I am a part, and to which all my ideas must refer if\nthey are to be relevant to my destiny, happens to have mathematical\nform. Nature had to have some form or other, if it was to exist at\nall; and whatever form it had happened to take would have had its\nprior place in the realm of essence, and its essential and logical\nrelations there. That particular part of the realm of essence which\nnature chances to exemplify or to suggest is the part that may be\nrevealed to me, and that is the predestined focus of all my\nadmirations. Essence as such has no power to reveal itself, or to take\non existence; and the human mind has no power or interest to trace all\nessence. Even the few essences which it has come to know, it cannot\nundertake to examine exhaustively; for there are many features\nnestling in them, and many relations radiating from them, which no\none needs or cares to attend to. The implications which logicians and\nmathematicians actually observe in the terms they use are a small\nselection from all those that really obtain, even in their chosen\nfield; so that, for instance, as Mr. Russell was telling us, it was\nonly the other day that Cantor and Dedekind observed that although\ntime continually eats up the days and years, the possible future\nalways remains as long as it was before. This happens to be a fact\ninteresting to mankind. Apart from the mathematical puzzles it may\nhelp to solve, it opens before existence a vista of perpetual youth,\nand the vital stress in us leaps up in recognition of its inmost\nambition. Many other things are doubtless implied in infinity which,\nif we noticed them, would leave us quite cold; and still others, no\ndoubt, are inapprehensible with our sort and degree of intellect.\nThere is of course nothing in essence which an intellect postulated\n_ad hoc_ would not be able to apprehend; but the kind of intellect we\nknow of and possess is an expression of vital adjustments, and is\ntethered to nature.\n\nThat a few eternal essences, then, with a few of their necessary\nrelations to one another, do actually appear to us, and do fascinate\nour attention and excite our wonder, is nothing paradoxical. This is\nmerely what was bound to happen, if we became aware of anything at\nall; for the essence embodied in anything is eternal and has necessary\nrelations to some other essences. The air of presumption which there\nmight seem to be in proclaiming that mathematics reveals what has to\nbe true always and everywhere, vanishes when we remember that\neverything that is true of any essence is true of it always and\neverywhere. The most trivial truths of logic are as necessary and\neternal as the most important; so that it is less of an achievement\nthan it sounds when we say we have grasped a truth that is eternal and\nnecessary.\n\nThis fact will be more clearly recognised, perhaps, if we remember\nthat the cogency of our ideal knowledge follows upon our intent in\nfixing its object. It hangs on a virtual definition, and explicates\nit. We cannot oblige anybody or anything to reproduce the idea which\nwe have chosen; but that idea will remain the idea it is whether\nforgotten or remembered, exemplified or not exemplified in things. To\npenetrate to the foundation of being is possible for us only because\nthe foundation of being is distinguishable quality; were there no set\nof differing characteristics, one or more of which an existing thing\nmight appropriate, existence would be altogether impossible. The realm\nof essence is merely the system or chaos of these fundamental\npossibilities, the catalogue of all exemplifiable natures; so that any\nexperience whatsoever must tap the realm of essence, and throw the\nlight of attention on one of its constituent forms. This is, if you\nwill, a trivial achievement; what would be really a surprising feat,\nand hardly to be credited, would be that the human mind should grasp\nthe _constitution of nature_; that is, should discover which is the\nparticular essence, or the particular system of essences, which actual\nexistence illustrates. In the matter of physics, truly, we are reduced\nto skimming the surface, since we have to start from our casual\nexperiences, which form the most superficial stratum of nature, and\nthe most unstable. Yet these casual experiences, while they leave us\nso much in the dark as to their natural basis and environment,\nnecessarily reveal each its ideal object, its specific essence; and we\nneed only arrest our attention upon it, and define it to ourselves,\nfor an eternal possibility, and some of its intrinsic characters, to\nhave been revealed to our thought.\n\nWhatever, then, a man's mental and moral habit might be, it would\nperforce have affinity to some essence or other; his life would\nrevolve about some congenial ideal object; he would find some sorts of\nform, some types of relation, more visible, beautiful, and satisfying\nthan others. Mr. Russell happens to have a mathematical genius, and to\nfind comfort in laying up his treasures in the mathematical heaven. It\nwould be highly desirable that this temperament should be more common;\nbut even if it were universal it would not reduce mathematical essence\nto a product of human attention, nor raise the \"beauty\" of mathematics\nto part of its essence. I do not mean to suggest that Mr. Russell\nattempts to do the latter; he speaks explicitly of the _value_ of\nmathematical study, a point in ethics and not directly in logic; yet\nhis moral philosophy is itself so much assimilated to logic that the\ndistinction between the two becomes somewhat dubious; and as Mr.\nRussell will never succeed in convincing us that moral values are\nindependent of life, he may, quite against his will, lead us to\nquestion the independence of essence, with that blind gregarious drift\nof all ideas, in this direction or in that, which is characteristic of\nhuman philosophising.\n\n\nIII. THE CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM\n\n\nThe time has not yet come when a just and synthetic account of what is\ncalled pragmatism can be expected of any man. The movement is still in\na nebulous state, a state from which, perhaps, it is never destined to\nissue. The various tendencies that compose it may soon cease to appear\ntogether; each may detach itself and be lost in the earlier system\nwith which it has most affinity. A good critic has enumerated\n\"Thirteen Pragmatisms;\" and besides such distinguishable tenets, there\nare in pragmatism echoes of various popular moral forces, like\ndemocracy, impressionism, love of the concrete, respect for success,\ntrust in will and action, and the habit of relying on the future,\nrather than on the past, to justify one's methods and opinions. Most\nof these things are characteristically American; and Mr. Russell\ntouches on some of them with more wit than sympathy. Thus he writes:\n\"The influence of democracy in promoting pragmatism is visible in\nalmost every page of William James's writing. There is an impatience\nof authority, an unwillingness to condemn widespread prejudices, a\ntendency to decide philosophical questions by putting them to a vote,\nwhich contrast curiously with the usual dictatorial tone of\nphilosophic writings.... A thing which simply is true, whether you\nlike it or not, is to him as hateful as a Russian autocracy; he feels\nthat he is escaping from a prison, made not by stone walls but by\n'hard facts,' when he has humanised truth, and made it, like the\npolice force in a democracy, the servant of the people instead of\ntheir master. The democratic temper pervades even the religion of the\npragmatists; they have the religion they have chosen, and the\ntraditional reverence is changed into satisfaction with their own\nhandiwork. 'The prince of darkness,' James says, 'may be a gentleman,\nas we are told he is, but whatever the God of earth and heaven is, he\ncan surely be no gentleman,' He is rather, we should say, conceived by\npragmatists as an elected president, to whom we give a respect which\nis really a tribute to the wisdom of our own choice. A government in\nwhich we have no voice is repugnant to the democratic temper. William\nJames carries up to heaven the revolt of his New England ancestors:\nthe Power to which we can yield respect must be a George Washington\nrather than a George III.\"\n\nA point of fundamental importance, about which pragmatists have been\nfar from clear, and perhaps not in agreement with one another, is the\nsense in which their psychology is to be taken. \"The facts that fill\nthe imaginations of pragmatists,\" Mr. Russell writes, \"are psychical\nfacts; where others might think of the starry heavens, pragmatists\nthink of the perception of the starry heavens; where others think of\nGod, pragmatists think of the belief in God, and so on. In discussing\nthe sciences, they never think, like scientific specialists, about the\nfacts upon which scientific theories are based; they think about the\ntheories themselves. Thus their initial question and their habitual\nimaginative background are both psychological.\" This is so true that\nunless we make the substitution into psychic terms instinctively, the\nwhole pragmatic view of things will seem paradoxical, if not actually\nunthinkable. For instance, pragmatists might protest against the\naccusation that \"they never think about the facts upon which\nscientific theories are based,\" for they lay a great emphasis on\nfacts. Facts are the cash which the credit of theories hangs upon. Yet\nthis protest, though sincere, would be inconclusive, and in the end it\nwould illustrate Mr. Russell's observation, rather than refute it. For\nwe should presently learn that these facts can be made by thinking,\nthat our faith in them may contribute to their reality, and may modify\ntheir nature; in other words, these facts are our immediate\napprehensions of fact, which it is indeed conceivable that our\ntemperaments, expectations, and opinions should modify. Thus the\npragmatist's reliance on facts does not carry him beyond the psychic\nsphere; his facts are only his personal experiences. Personal\nexperiences may well be the basis for no less personal myths; but the\neffort of intelligence and of science is rather to find the basis of\nthe personal experiences themselves; and this non-psychic basis of\nexperience is what common sense calls the facts, and what practice is\nconcerned with. Yet these are not the _pragmata_ of the pragmatist,\nfor it is only the despicable intellectualist that can arrive at them;\nand the bed-rock of facts that the pragmatist builds upon is avowedly\ndrifting sand. Hence the odd expressions, new to literature and even\nto grammar, which bubble up continually in pragmatist writings. \"For\nillustration take the former fact that the earth is flat,\" says one,\nquite innocently; and another observes that \"two centuries later,\nnominalism was evidently true, because it alone would legitimise the\nlocal independence of cities.\" Lest we should suppose that the\nhistorical sequence of these \"truths\" or illusions is, at least, fixed\nand irreversible, we are soon informed that the past is always\nchanging, too; that is (if I may rationalise this mystical dictum),\nthat history is always being rewritten, and that the growing present\nadds new relations to the past, which lead us to conceive or to\ndescribe it in some new fashion. Even if the ultimate inference is not\ndrawn, and we are not told that this changing idea of the past is the\nonly past that exists--the real past being unattainable and therefore,\nfor personal idealism, non-existent--it is abundantly clear that the\neffort to distinguish fact from theory cannot be successful, so long\nas the psychological way of thinking prevails; for a theory,\npsychologically considered, is a bare fact in the experience of the\ntheorist, and the other facts of his experience are so many other\nmomentary views, so many scant theories, to be immediately superseded\nby other \"truths in the plural.\" Sensations and ideas are really\ndistinguishable only by reference to what is assumed to lie without;\nof which external reality experience is always an effect (and in that\ncapacity is called sensation) and often at the same time an\napprehension (and in that capacity is called idea).\n\nIt is a crucial question, then, in the interpretation of pragmatism,\nwhether the psychological point of view, undoubtedly prevalent in that\nschool, is the only or the ultimate point of view which it admits. The\nhabit of studying ideas rather than their objects might be simply a\nmatter of emphasis or predilection. It might merely indicate a special\ninterest in the life of reason, and be an effort, legitimate under\nany system of philosophy, to recount the stages by which human\nthought, developing in the bosom of nature, may have reached its\npresent degree of articulation. I myself, for instance, like to look\nat things from this angle: not that I have ever doubted the reality of\nthe natural world, or been able to take very seriously any philosophy\nthat denied it, but precisely because, when we take the natural world\nfor granted, it becomes a possible and enlightening inquiry to ask how\nthe human animal has come to discover his real environment, in so far\nas he has done so, and what dreams have intervened or supervened in\nthe course of his rational awakening. On the other hand, a\npsychological point of view might be equivalent to the idealistic\ndoctrine that the articulation of human thought constitutes the only\nstructure of the universe, and its whole history. According to this\nview, pragmatism would seem to be a revised version of the\ntranscendental logic, leaving logic still transcendental, that is,\nstill concerned with the evolution of the categories. The revision\nwould consist chiefly in this, that empirical verification, utility,\nand survival would take the place of dialectical irony as the force\ngoverning the evolution. It would still remain possible for other\nmethods of approach than this transcendental pragmatism, for instinct,\nperhaps, or for revelation, to bring us into contact with\nthings-in-themselves. A junction might thus be effected with the\nsystem of M. Bergson, which would lead to this curious result: that\npragmatic logic would be the method of intelligence, because\nintelligence is merely a method, useful in practice, for the symbolic\nand improper representation of reality; while another non-pragmatic\nmethod--sympathy and dream--would alone be able to put us in\npossession of direct knowledge and genuine truth. So that, after all,\nthe pragmatic \"truth\" of working ideas would turn out to be what it\nhas seemed hitherto to mankind, namely, no real truth, but rather a\nconvenient sort of fiction, which ceases to deceive when once its\nmerely pragmatic value is discounted by criticism. I remember once\nputting a question on this subject to Professor James; and his answer\nwas one which I am glad to be able to record. In relation to his\nhaving said that \"as far as the past facts go, there is no difference\n... be the atoms or be the God their cause,\"[7] I asked whether, if\nGod had been the cause, apart from the value of the idea of him in our\ncalculations, his existence would not have made a difference to him,\nas he would be presumably self-conscious. \"Of course,\" said Professor\nJames, \"but I wasn't considering that side of the matter; I was\nthinking of our idea.\" The choice of the subjective point of view,\nthen, was deliberate here, and frankly arbitrary; it was not intended\nto exclude the possibility or legitimacy of the objective attitude.\nAnd the original reason for deliberately ignoring, in this way, the\nrealistic way of thinking, even while admitting that it represents the\nreal state of affairs, would have been, I suppose, that what could be\nverified was always some further effect of the real objects, and never\nthose real objects themselves; so that for interpreting and predicting\nour personal experience only the hypothesis of objects was pertinent,\nwhile the objects themselves, except as so represented, were useless\nand unattainable. The case, if I may adapt a comparison of Mr.\nRussell's, was as if we possessed a catalogue of the library at\nAlexandria, all the books being lost for ever; it would be only in the\ncatalogue that we could practically verify their existence or\ncharacter, though doubtless, by some idle flight of imagination, we\nmight continue to think of the books, as well as of those titles in\nthe catalogue which alone could appear to us in experience.\nPragmatism, approached from this side, would then seem to express an\nacute critical conscience, a sort of will not to believe; not to\nbelieve, I mean, more than is absolutely necessary for solipsistic\npractice.\n\n[Footnote 7: _Pragmatism_, p. 101.]\n\nSuch economical faith, enabling one to dissolve the hard materialistic\nworld into a work of mind, which mind might outflank, was traditional\nin the radical Emersonian circles in which pragmatism sprang up. It is\none of the approaches to the movement; yet we may safely regard the\nancestral transcendentalism of the pragmatists as something which they\nhave turned their back upon, and mean to disown. It is destined to\nplay no part in the ultimate result of pragmatism. This ultimate\nresult promises to be, on the contrary, a direct materialistic sort of\nrealism. This alone is congruous with the scientific affinities of the\nschool and its young-American temper. Nor is the transformation very\nhard to effect. The world of solipsistic practice, if you remove the\nromantic self that was supposed to evoke it, becomes at once the\nsensible world; and the problem is only to find a place in the mosaic\nof objects of sensation for those cognitive and moral functions which\nthe soul was once supposed to exercise in the presence of an\nindependent reality. But this problem is precisely the one that\npragmatists boast they have already solved; for they have declared\nthat consciousness does not exist, and that objects of sensation\n(which at first were called feelings, experiences, or \"truths\") know\nor mean one another when they lead to one another, when they are\npoles, so to speak, in the same vital circuit. The spiritual act which\nwas supposed to take things for its object is to be turned into\n\"objective spirit,\" that is, into dynamic relations between things.\nThe philosopher will deny that he has any other sort of mind himself,\nlest he should be shut up in it again, like a sceptical and\ndisconsolate child; while if there threatens to be any covert or\nsuperfluous reality in the self-consciousness of God, nothing will be\neasier than to deny that God is self-conscious; for indeed, if there\nis no consciousness on earth, why should we imagine that there is any\nin heaven? The psychologism with which the pragmatists started seems\nto be passing in this way, in the very effort to formulate it\npragmatically, into something which, whatever it may be, is certainly\nnot psychologism. But the bewildered public may well ask whether it is\npragmatism either.\n\nThere is another crucial point in pragmatism which the defenders of\nthe system are apt to pass over lightly, but which Mr. Russell regards\n(justly, I think) as of decisive importance. Is, namely, the pragmatic\naccount of truth intended to cover all knowledge, or one kind of\nknowledge only? Apparently the most authoritative pragmatists admit\nthat it covers one kind only; for there are two sorts of self-evidence\nin which, they say, it is not concerned: first, the dialectical\nrelation between essences; and second, the known occurrence or\nexperience of facts. There are obvious reasons why these two kinds of\ncognitions, so interesting to Mr. Russell, are not felt by pragmatists\nto constitute exceptions worth considering. Dialectical relations,\nthey will say, are verbal only; that is, they define ideal objects,\nand certainty in these cases does not coerce existence, or touch\ncontingent fact at all. On the other hand, such apprehension as seizes\non some matter of fact, as, for instance, \"I feel pain,\" or \"I\nexpected to feel this pain, and it is now verifying my expectation,\"\nthough often true propositions, are not _theoretical_ truths; they are\nnot, it is supposed, questionable beliefs but rather immediate\nobservations. Yet many of these apprehensions of fact (or all,\nperhaps, if we examine them scrupulously) involve the veracity of\nmemory, surely a highly questionable sort of truth; and, moreover,\nverification, the pragmatic test of truth, would be obviously\nimpossible to apply, if the prophecy supposed to be verified were not\nassumed to be truly remembered. How shall we know that our expectation\nis fulfilled, if we do not know directly that we had such an\nexpectation? But if we know our past experience directly--not merely\nknew it when present, but know now what it was, and how it has led\ndown to the present--this amounts to enough knowledge to make up a\ntolerable system of the universe, without invoking pragmatic\nverification or \"truth\" at all. I have never been able to discover\nwhether, by that perception of fact which is not \"truth\" but fact\nitself, pragmatists meant each human apprehension taken singly, or the\nwhole series of these apprehensions. In the latter case, as in the\nphilosophy of M. Bergson, all past reality might constantly lie open\nto retentive intuition, a form of knowledge soaring quite over the\nhead of any pragmatic method or pragmatic \"truth.\" It looks, indeed,\nas if the history of at least personal experience were commonly taken\nfor granted by pragmatists, as a basis on which to rear their method.\nTheir readiness to make so capital an assumption is a part of their\nheritage from romantic idealism. To the romantic idealist science and\ntheology are tales which ought to be reduced to an empirical\nequivalent in his personal experience; but the tale of his personal\nexperience itself is a sacred figment, the one precious conviction of\nthe romantic heart, which it would be heartless to question. Yet here\nis a kind of assumed truth which cannot be reduced to its pragmatic\nmeaning, because it must be true literally in order that the pragmatic\nmeaning of other beliefs may be conceived or tested at all.\n\nNow, if it be admitted that the pragmatic theory of truth does not\ntouch our knowledge either of matters of fact or of the necessary\nimplications of ideas, the question arises: What sort of knowledge\nremains for pragmatic theory to apply to? Simply, Mr. Russell answers,\nthose \"working hypotheses\" to which \"prudent people give only a low\ndegree of belief.\" For \"we hold different beliefs with very different\ndegrees of conviction. Some--such as the belief that I am sitting in a\nchair, or that 2+2=4--can be doubted by few except those who have had\na long training in philosophy. Such beliefs are held so firmly that\nnon-philosophers who deny them are put into lunatic asylums. Other\nbeliefs, such as the facts of history, are held rather less firmly....\nBeliefs about the future, as that the sun will rise to-morrow and\nthat the trains will run approximately as in Bradshaw, may be held\nwith almost as great conviction as beliefs about the past. Scientific\nlaws are generally believed less firmly.... Philosophical beliefs,\nfinally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the\nopposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,\ntherefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,\ndoubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,\nfrom the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood\nheat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only\ntemperatures.\" Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future\nexperience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only\npresumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical\nlogic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.\nPresumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and\nyet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as\nthe confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood\nheat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in\nanything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,\nwhatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they\nare to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to\nlead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what\npresumptions refer to explicitly.\n\nIt sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on\nvoluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated\nobservations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,\nas when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really\nregards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the\nemotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils\nthe pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called\nluck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular\ncareer that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a\nmere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be\ntransferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck\nmust be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not\nneedful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working\nhypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some\nconfusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an\nanticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be\nclear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers\nentertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they\ndo not seriously believe that there are atoms, but in their ignorance\nof the precise composition of matter, they find it convenient to speak\nof it as if it were composed of indestructible particles. But for\nDemocritus and for many modern men of science the atomic theory is not\na working hypothesis merely; they do not regard it as a provisional\nmakeshift; they regard it as a probable, if not a certain,\nanticipation of what inspection would discover to be the fact, could\ninspection be carried so far; in other words, they believe the atomic\ntheory is true. If they are right, the validity of this theory would\nnot be that of pragmatic \"truth\" but of pragmatic \"fact\"; for it would\nbe a view, such as memory or intuition or sensation might give us, of\nexperienced objects in their experienced relations; it would be the\ncommunication to us, in a momentary dream, of what would be the\nexperience of a universal observer. It would be knowledge of reality\nin M. Bergson's sense. Pragmatic \"truth,\" on the contrary, is the\nrelative and provisional justification of fiction; and pragmatism is\nnot a theory of truth at all, but a theory of theory, when theory is\ninstrumental.\n\nFor theory too has more than one signification. It may mean such a\nsymbolic or foreshortened view, such a working hypothesis, as true and\nfull knowledge might supersede; or it may mean this true and full\nknowledge itself, a synthetic survey of objects of experience in their\nexperimental character. Algebra and language are theoretical in the\nfirst sense, as when a man believes in his luck; historical and\nscientific imagination are theoretical in the second sense, when they\ngather objects of experience together without distorting them. But it\nis only to the first sort of theory that pragmatism can be reasonably\napplied; to apply it also to the second would be to retire into that\nextreme subjectivism which the leading pragmatists have so hotly\ndisclaimed. We find, accordingly, that it is only when a theory is\navowedly unreal, and does not ask to be believed, that the value of it\nis pragmatic; since in that case belief passes consciously from the\nsymbols used to the eventual facts in which the symbolism terminates,\nand for which it stands.\n\nIt may seem strange that a definition of truth should have been based\non the consideration of those ideas exclusively for which truth is not\nclaimed by any critical person, such ideas, namely, as religious myths\nor the graphic and verbal machinery of science. Yet the fact is\npatent, and if we considered the matter historically it might not\nprove inexplicable. Theology has long applied the name truth\npre-eminently to fiction. When the conviction first dawned upon\npragmatists that there was no absolute or eternal truth, what they\nevidently were thinking of was that it is folly, in this changing\nworld, to pledge oneself to any final and inflexible creed. The\npursuit of truth, since nothing better was possible, was to be\naccepted instead of the possession of it. But it is characteristic of\nProtestantism that, when it gives up anything, it transfers to what\nremains the unction, and often the name, proper to what it has\nabandoned. So, if truth was no longer to be claimed or even hoped for,\nthe value and the name of truth could be instinctively transferred to\nwhat was to take its place--spontaneous, honest, variable conviction.\nAnd the sanctions of this conviction were to be looked for, not in the\nobjective reality, since it was an idle illusion to fancy we could get\nat that, but in the growth of this conviction itself, and in the\nprosperous adventure of the whole soul, so courageous in its\nself-trust, and so modest in its dogmas.\n\nScience, too, has often been identified, not with the knowledge men of\nscience possess, but with the language they use. If science meant\nknowledge, the science of Darwin, for instance, would lie in his\nobservations of plants and animals, and in his thoughts about the\nprobable ancestors of the human race--all knowledge of actual or\npossible facts. It would not be knowledge of selection or of\nspontaneous variation, terms which are mere verbal bridges over the\ngaps in that knowledge, and mark the _lacunae_ and unsolved problems\nof the science. Yet it is just such terms that seem to clothe\n\"Science\" in its pontifical garb; the cowl is taken for the monk; and\nwhen a penetrating critic, like M. Henri Poincare, turned his subtle\nirony upon them, the public cried that he had announced the\n\"bankruptcy of science,\" whereas it is merely the language of science\nthat he had reduced to its pragmatic value--to convenience and economy\nin the registering of facts--and had by no means questioned that\npositive and cumulative knowledge of facts which science is attaining.\nIt is an incident in the same general confusion that a critical\nepistemology, like pragmatism, analysing these figments of scientific\nor theological theory, should innocently suppose that it was analysing\ntruth; while the only view to which it really attributes truth is its\nview of the system of facts open to possible experience, a system\nwhich those figments presuppose and which they may help us in part to\ndivine, where it is accidentally hidden from human inspection.\n\n\nIV. HYPOSTATIC ETHICS\n\n\nIf Mr. Russell, in his essay on \"The Elements of Ethics,\" had wished\nto propitiate the unregenerate naturalist, before trying to convert\nhim, he could not have chosen a more skilful procedure; for he begins\nby telling us that \"what is called good conduct is conduct which is a\nmeans to other things which are good on their own account; and hence\n... the study of what is good or bad on its own account must be\nincluded in ethics.\" Two consequences are involved in this: first,\nthat ethics is concerned with the economy of all values, and not with\n\"moral\" goods only, or with duty; and second, that values may and do\ninhere in a great variety of things and relations, all of which it is\nthe part of wisdom to respect, and if possible to establish. In this\nmatter, according to our author, the general philosopher is prone to\none error and the professed moralist to another. \"The philosopher,\nbent on the construction of a system, is inclined to simplify the\nfacts unduly ... and to twist them into a form in which they can all\nbe deduced from one or two general principles. The moralist, on the\nother hand, being primarily concerned with conduct, tends to become\nabsorbed in means, to value the actions men ought to perform more than\nthe ends which such actions serve.... Hence most of what they value in\nthis world would have to be omitted by many moralists from any\nimagined heaven, because there such things as self-denial and effort\nand courage and pity could find no place.... Kant has the bad eminence\nof combining both errors in the highest possible degree, since he\nholds that there is nothing good except the virtuous will--a view\nwhich simplifies the good as much as any philosopher could wish, and\nmistakes means for ends as completely as any moralist could enjoin.\"\n\nThose of us who are what Mr. Russell would call ethical sceptics will\nbe delighted at this way of clearing the ground; it opens before us\nthe prospect of a moral philosophy that should estimate the various\nvalues of things known and of things imaginable, showing what\ncombinations of goods are possible in any one rational system, and\n(if fancy could stretch so far) what different rational systems would\nbe possible in places and times remote enough from one another not to\ncome into physical conflict. Such ethics, since it would express in\nreflection the dumb but actual interests of men, might have both\ninfluence and authority over them; two things which an alien and\ndogmatic ethics necessarily lacks. The joy of the ethical sceptic in\nMr. Russell is destined, however, to be short-lived. Before proceeding\nto the expression of concrete ideals, he thinks it necessary to ask a\npreliminary and quite abstract question, to which his essay is chiefly\ndevoted; namely, what is the right definition of the predicate \"good,\"\nwhich we hope to apply in the sequel to such a variety of things? And\nhe answers at once: The predicate \"good\" is indefinable. This answer\nhe shows to be unavoidable, and so evidently unavoidable that we might\nperhaps have been absolved from asking the question; for, as he says,\nthe so-called definitions of \"good\"--that it is pleasure, the desired,\nand so forth--are not definitions of the predicate \"good,\" but\ndesignations of the things to which this predicate is applied by\ndifferent persons. Pleasure, and its rivals, are not synonyms for the\nabstract quality \"good,\" but names for classes of concrete facts that\nare supposed to possess that quality. From this correct, if somewhat\ntrifling, observation, however, Mr. Russell, like Mr. Moore before\nhim, evokes a portentous dogma. Not being able to define good, he\nhypostasises it. \"Good and bad,\" he says, \"are qualities which belong\nto objects independently of our opinions, just as much as round and\nsquare do; and when two people differ as to whether a thing is good,\nonly one of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know\nwhich is right.\" \"We cannot maintain that for me a thing ought to\nexist on its own account, while for you it ought not; that would\nmerely mean that one of us is mistaken, since in fact everything\neither ought to exist, or ought not.\" Thus we are asked to believe\nthat good attaches to things for no reason or cause, and according to\nno principles of distribution; that it must be found there by a sort\nof receptive exploration in each separate case; in other words, that\nit is an absolute, not a relative thing, a primary and not a secondary\nquality.\n\nThat the quality \"good\" is indefinable is one assertion, and obvious;\nbut that the presence of this quality is unconditioned is another, and\nastonishing. My logic, I am well aware, is not very accurate or\nsubtle; and I wish Mr. Russell had not left it to me to discover the\nconnection between these two propositions. Green is an indefinable\npredicate, and the specific quality of it can be given only in\nintuition; but it is a quality that things acquire under certain\nconditions, so much so that the same bit of grass, at the same moment,\nmay have it from one point of view and not from another. Right and\nleft are indefinable; the difference could not be explained without\nbeing invoked in the explanation; yet everything that is to the right\nis not to the right on no condition, but obviously on the condition\nthat some one is looking in a certain direction; and if some one else\nat the same time is looking in the opposite direction, what is truly\nto the right will be truly to the left also. If Mr. Russell thinks\nthis is a contradiction, I understand why the universe does not\nplease him. The contradiction would be real, undoubtedly, if we\nsuggested that the idea of good was at any time or in any relation the\nidea of evil, or the intuition of right that of left, or the quality\nof green that of yellow; these disembodied essences are fixed by the\nintent that selects them, and in that ideal realm they can never have\nany relations except the dialectical ones implied in their nature, and\nthese relations they must always retain. But the contradiction\ndisappears when, instead of considering the qualities in themselves,\nwe consider the things of which those qualities are aspects; for the\nqualities of things are not compacted by implication, but are\nconjoined irrationally by nature, as she will; and the same thing may\nbe, and is, at once yellow and green, to the left and to the right,\ngood and evil, many and one, large and small; and whatever verbal\nparadox there may be in this way of speaking (for from the point of\nview of nature it is natural enough) had been thoroughly explained and\ntalked out by the time of Plato, who complained that people should\nstill raise a difficulty so trite and exploded.[8] Indeed, while\nsquare is always square, and round round, a thing that is round may\nactually be square also, if we allow it to have a little body, and to\nbe a cylinder.\n\n[Footnote 8: Plato, _Philebus_, 14, D. The dialectical element in this\ndialogue is evidently the basis of Mr. Russell's, as of Mr. Moore's,\nethics; but they have not adopted the other elements in it, I mean the\npolitical and the theological. As to the political element, Plato\neverywhere conceives the good as the eligible in life, and refers it\nto human nature and to the pursuit of happiness--that happiness which\nMr. Russell, in a rash moment, says is but a name which some people\nprefer to give to pleasure. Thus in the _Philebus_ (11, D) the good\nlooked for is declared to be \"some state and disposition of the soul\nwhich has the property of making all men happy\"; and later (66, D) the\nconclusion is that insight is better than pleasure \"as an element in\nhuman life.\" As to the theological element, Plato, in hypostasising\nthe good, does not hypostasise it as good, but as cause or power,\nwhich is, it seems to me, the sole category that justifies hypostasis,\nand logically involves it; for if things have a ground at all, that\nground must exist before them and beyond them. Hence the whole\nPlatonic and Christian scheme, in making the good independent of\nprivate will and opinion, by no means makes it independent of the\ndirection of nature in general and of human nature in particular; for\nall things have been created with an innate predisposition towards the\ncreative good, and are capable of finding happiness in nothing else.\nObligation, in this system, remains internal and vital. Plato\nattributes a single vital direction and a single moral source to the\ncosmos. This is what determines and narrows the scope of the true\ngood; for the true good is that relevant to nature. Plato would not\nhave been a dogmatic moralist, had he not been a theist.]\n\nBut perhaps what suggests this hypostasis of good is rather the fact\nthat what others find good, or what we ourselves have found good in\nmoods with which we retain no sympathy, is sometimes pronounced by us\nto be bad; and far from inferring from this diversity of experience\nthat the present good, like the others, corresponds to a particular\nattitude or interest of ours, and is dependent upon it, Mr. Russell\nand Mr. Moore infer instead that the presence of the good must be\nindependent of all interests, attitudes, and opinions. They imagine\nthat the truth of a proposition attributing a certain relative quality\nto an object contradicts the truth of another proposition, attributing\nto the same object an opposite relative quality. Thus if a man here\nand another man at the antipodes call opposite directions up, \"only\none of them can be right, though it may be very hard to know which is\nright.\"\n\nTo protect the belated innocence of this state of mind, Mr. Russell,\nso far as I can see, has only one argument, and one analogy. The\nargument is that \"if this were not the case, we could not reason with\na man as to what is right.\" \"We do in fact hold that when one man\napproves of a certain act, while another disapproves, one of them is\nmistaken, which would not be the case with a mere emotion. If one man\nlikes oysters and another dislikes them, we do not say that either of\nthem is mistaken.\" In other words, we are to maintain our prejudices,\nhowever absurd, lest it should become unnecessary to quarrel about\nthem! Truly the debating society has its idols, no less than the cave\nand the theatre. The analogy that comes to buttress somewhat this\nsingular argument is the analogy between ethical propriety and\nphysical or logical truth. An ethical proposition may be correct or\nincorrect, in a sense justifying argument, when it touches what is\ngood as a means, that is, when it is not intrinsically ethical, but\ndeals with causes and effects, or with matters of fact or necessity.\nBut to speak of the truth of an ultimate good would be a false\ncollocation of terms; an ultimate good is chosen, found, or aimed at;\nit is not opined. The ultimate intuitions on which ethics rests are\nnot debatable, for they are not opinions we hazard but preferences we\nfeel; and it can be neither correct nor incorrect to feel them. We may\nassert these preferences fiercely or with sweet reasonableness, and we\nmay be more or less incapable of sympathising with the different\npreferences of others; about oysters we may be tolerant, like Mr.\nRussell, and about character intolerant; but that is already a great\nadvance in enlightenment, since the majority of mankind have regarded\nas hateful in the highest degree any one who indulged in pork, or\nbeans, or frogs' legs, or who had a weakness for anything called\n\"unnatural\"; for it is the things that offend their animal instincts\nthat intense natures have always found to be, intrinsically and _par\nexcellence_, abominations.\n\nI am not sure whether Mr. Russell thinks he has disposed of this view\nwhere he discusses the proposition that the good is the desired and\nrefutes it on the ground that \"it is commonly admitted that there are\nbad desires; and when people speak of bad desires, they seem to mean\ndesires for what is bad.\" Most people undoubtedly call desires bad\nwhen they are generically contrary to their own desires, and call\nobjects that disgust them bad, even when other people covet them. This\nhuman weakness is not, however, a very high authority for a logician\nto appeal to, being too like the attitude of the German lady who said\nthat Englishmen called a certain object _bread_, and Frenchmen called\nit _pain_, but that it really was _Brod_. Scholastic philosophy is\ninclined to this way of asserting itself; and Mr. Russell, though he\ncandidly admits that there are ultimate differences of opinion about\ngood and evil, would gladly minimise these differences, and thinks he\ntriumphs when he feels that the prejudices of his readers will agree\nwith his own; as if the constitutional unanimity of all human animals,\nsupposing it existed, could tend to show that the good they agreed to\nrecognise was independent of their constitution.\n\nIn a somewhat worthier sense, however, we may admit that there are\ndesires for what is bad, since desire and will, in the proper\npsychological sense of these words, are incidental phases of\nconsciousness, expressing but not constituting those natural relations\nthat make one thing good for another. At the same time the words\ndesire and will are often used, in a mythical or transcendental sense,\nfor those material dispositions and instincts by which vital and moral\nunits are constituted. It is in reference to such constitutional\ninterests that things are \"really\" good or bad; interests which may\nnot be fairly represented by any incidental conscious desire. No doubt\nany desire, however capricious, represents some momentary and partial\ninterest, which lends to its objects a certain real and inalienable\nvalue; yet when we consider, as we do in human society, the interests\nof men, whom reflection and settled purposes have raised more or less\nto the ideal dignity of individuals, then passing fancies and passions\nmay indeed have bad objects, and be bad themselves, in that they\nthwart the more comprehensive interests of the soul that entertains\nthem. Food and poison are such only relatively, and in view of\nparticular bodies, and the same material thing may be food and poison\nat once; the child, and even the doctor, may easily mistake one for\nthe other. For the human system whiskey is truly more intoxicating\nthan coffee, and the contrary opinion would be an error; but what a\nstrange way of vindicating this real, though relative, distinction, to\ninsist that whiskey is more intoxicating in itself, without reference\nto any animal; that it is pervaded, as it were, by an inherent\nintoxication, and stands dead drunk in its bottle! Yet just in this\nway Mr. Russell and Mr. Moore conceive things to be dead good and dead\nbad. It is such a view, rather than the naturalistic one, that renders\nreasoning and self-criticism impossible in morals; for wrong desires,\nand false opinions as to value, are conceivable only because a point\nof reference or criterion is available to prove them such. If no point\nof reference and no criterion were admitted to be relevant, nothing\nbut physical stress could give to one assertion of value greater force\nthan to another. The shouting moralist no doubt has his place, but not\nin philosophy.\n\nThat good is not an intrinsic or primary quality, but relative and\nadventitious, is clearly betrayed by Mr. Russell's own way of arguing,\nwhenever he approaches some concrete ethical question. For instance,\nto show that the good is not pleasure, he can avowedly do nothing but\nappeal \"to ethical judgments with which almost every one would agree.\"\nHe repeats, in effect, Plato's argument about the life of the oyster,\nhaving pleasure with no knowledge. Imagine such mindless pleasure, as\nintense and prolonged as you please, and would you choose it? Is it\nyour good? Here the British reader, like the blushing Greek youth, is\nexpected to answer instinctively, No! It is an _argumentum ad hominem_\n(and there can be no other kind of argument in ethics); but the man\nwho gives the required answer does so not because the answer is\nself-evident, which it is not, but because he is the required sort of\nman. He is shocked at the idea of resembling an oyster. Yet changeless\npleasure, without memory or reflection, without the wearisome\nintermixture of arbitrary images, is just what the mystic, the\nvoluptuary, and perhaps the oyster find to be good. Ideas, in their\norigin, are probably signals of alarm; and the distress which they\nmarked in the beginning always clings to them in some measure, and\ncauses many a soul, far more profound than that of the young\nProtarchus or of the British reader, to long for them to cease\naltogether. Such a radical hedonism is indeed inhuman; it undermines\nall conventional ambitions, and is not a possible foundation for\npolitical or artistic life. But that is all we can say against it. Our\nhumanity cannot annul the incommensurable sorts of good that may be\npursued in the world, though it cannot itself pursue them. The\nimpossibility which people labour under of being satisfied with pure\npleasure as a goal is due to their want of imagination, or rather to\ntheir being dominated by an imagination which is exclusively human.\n\nThe author's estrangement from reality reappears in his treatment of\negoism, and most of all in his \"Free Man's Religion.\" Egoism, he\nthinks, is untenable because \"if I am right in thinking that my good\nis the only good, then every one else is mistaken unless he admits\nthat my good, not his, is the only good.\" \"Most people ... would admit\nthat it is better two people's desires should be satisfied than only\none person's.... Then what is good is not good _for me_ or _for you_,\nbut is simply good.\" \"It is, indeed, so evident that it is better to\nsecure a greater good for _A_ than a lesser good for _B_, that it is\nhard to find any still more evident principle by which to prove this.\nAnd if _A_ happens to be some one else, and _B_ to be myself, that\ncannot affect the question, since it is irrelevant to the general\nquestion who _A_ and _B_ may be.\" To the question, as the logician\nstates it after transforming men into letters, it is certainly\nirrelevant; but it is not irrelevant to the case as it arises in\nnature. If two goods are somehow rightly pronounced to be equally\ngood, no circumstance can render one better than the other. And if the\nlocus in which the good is to arise is somehow pronounced to be\nindifferent, it will certainly be indifferent whether that good arises\nin me or in you. But how shall these two pronouncements be made? In\npractice, values cannot be compared save as represented or enacted in\nthe private imagination of somebody: for we could not conceive that an\nalien good _was_ a good (as Mr. Russell cannot conceive that the life\nof an ecstatic oyster is a good) unless we could sympathise with it in\nsome way in our own persons; and on the warmth which we felt in so\nrepresenting the alien good would hang our conviction that it was\ntruly valuable, and had worth in comparison with our own good. The\nvoice of reason, bidding us prefer the greater good, no matter who is\nto enjoy it, is also nothing but the force of sympathy, bringing a\nremote existence before us vividly _sub specie boni_. Capacity for\nsuch sympathy measures the capacity to recognise duty and therefore,\nin a moral sense, to have it. Doubtless it is conceivable that all\nwills should become co-operative, and that nature should be ruled\nmagically by an exact and universal sympathy; but this situation must\nbe actually attained in part, before it can be conceived or judged to\nbe an authoritative ideal. The tigers cannot regard it as such, for it\nwould suppress the tragic good called ferocity, which makes, in their\neyes, the chief glory of the universe. Therefore the inertia of\nnature, the ferocity of beasts, the optimism of mystics, and the\nselfishness of men and nations must all be accepted as conditions for\nthe peculiar goods, essentially incommensurable, which they can\ngenerate severally. It is misplaced vehemence to call them\nintrinsically detestable, because they do not (as they cannot)\ngenerate or recognise the goods we prize.\n\nIn the real world, persons are not abstract egos, like _A_ and _B_, so\nthat to benefit one is clearly as good as to benefit another. Indeed,\nabstract egos could not be benefited, for they could not be modified\nat all, even if somehow they could be distinguished. It would be the\nqualities or objects distributed among them that would carry, wherever\nthey went, each its inalienable cargo of value, like ships sailing\nfrom sea to sea. But it is quite vain and artificial to imagine\ndifferent goods charged with such absolute and comparable weights; and\nactual egoism is not the thin and refutable thing that Mr. Russell\nmakes of it. What it really holds is that a given man, oneself, and\nthose akin to him, are qualitatively better than other beings; that\nthe things they prize are intrinsically better than the things prized\nby others; and that therefore there is no injustice in treating these\nchosen interests as supreme. The injustice, it is felt, would lie\nrather in not treating things so unequal unequally. This feeling may,\nin many cases, amuse the impartial observer, or make him indignant;\nyet it may, in every case, according to Mr. Russell, be absolutely\njust. The refutation he gives of egoism would not dissuade any fanatic\nfrom exterminating all his enemies with a good conscience; it would\nmerely encourage him to assert that what he was ruthlessly\nestablishing was the absolute good. Doubtless such conscientious\ntyrants would be wretched themselves, and compelled to make sacrifices\nwhich would cost them dear; but that would only extend, as it were,\nthe pernicious egoism of that part of their being which they had\nallowed to usurp a universal empire. The twang of intolerance and of\nself-mutilation is not absent from the ethics of Mr. Russell and Mr.\nMoore, even as it stands; and one trembles to think what it may become\nin the mouths of their disciples. Intolerance itself is a form of\negoism, and to condemn egoism intolerantly is to share it. I cannot\nhelp thinking that a consciousness of the relativity of values, if it\nbecame prevalent, would tend to render people more truly social than\nwould a belief that things have intrinsic and unchangeable values, no\nmatter what the attitude of any one to them may be. If we said that\ngoods, including the right distribution of goods, are relative to\nspecific natures, moral warfare would continue, but not with poisoned\narrows. Our private sense of justice itself would be acknowledged to\nhave but a relative authority, and while we could not have a higher\nduty than to follow it, we should seek to meet those whose aims were\nincompatible with it as we meet things physically inconvenient,\nwithout insulting them as if they were morally vile or logically\ncontemptible. Real unselfishness consists in sharing the interests of\nothers. Beyond the pale of actual unanimity the only possible\nunselfishness is chivalry--a recognition of the inward right and\njustification of our enemies fighting against us. This chivalry has\nlong been practised in the battle-field without abolishing the causes\nof war; and it might conceivably be extended to all the conflicts of\nmen with one another, and of the warring elements within each breast.\nPolicy, hypnotisation, and even surgery may be practised without\nexorcisms or anathemas. When a man has decided on a course of action,\nit is a vain indulgence in expletives to declare that he is sure that\ncourse is absolutely right. His moral dogma expresses its natural\norigin all the more clearly the more hotly it is proclaimed; and\nethical absolutism, being a mental grimace of passion, refutes what it\nsays by what it is. Sweeter and more profound, to my sense, is the\nphilosophy of Homer, whose every line seems to breathe the conviction\nthat what is beautiful or precious has not thereby any right to\nexistence; nothing has such a right; nor is it given us to condemn\nabsolutely any force--god or man--that destroys what is beautiful or\nprecious, for it has doubtless something beautiful or precious of its\nown to achieve.\n\nThe consequences of a hypostasis of the good are no less interesting\nthan its causes. If the good were independent of nature, it might\nstill be conceived as relevant to nature, by being its creator or\nmover; but Mr. Russell is not a theist after the manner of Socrates;\nhis good is not a power. Nor would representing it to be such long\nhelp his case; for an ideal hypostasised into a cause achieves only a\nmythical independence. The least criticism discloses that it is\nnatural laws, zoological species, and human ideals, that have been\nprojected into the empyrean; and it is no marvel that the good should\nattract the world where the good, by definition, is whatever the world\nis aiming at. The hypostasis accomplished by Mr. Russell is more\nserious, and therefore more paradoxical. If I understand it, it may be\nexpressed as follows: In the realm of eternal essences, before\nanything exists, there are certain essences that have this remarkable\nproperty, that they ought to exist, or at least that, if anything\nexists, it ought to conform to them. What exists, however, is deaf to\nthis moral emphasis in the eternal; nature exists for no reason; and,\nindeed, why should she have subordinated her own arbitrariness to a\ngood that is no less arbitrary? This good, however, is somehow good\nnotwithstanding; so that there is an abysmal wrong in its not being\nobeyed. The world is, in principle, totally depraved; but as the good\nis not a power, there is no one to redeem the world. The saints are\nthose who, imitating the impotent dogmatism on high, and despising\ntheir sinful natural propensities, keep asserting that certain things\nare in themselves good and others bad, and declaring to be detestable\nany other saint who dogmatises differently. In this system the\nCalvinistic God has lost his creative and punitive functions, but\ncontinues to decree groundlessly what is good and what evil, and to\nlove the one and hate the other with an infinite love or hatred.\nMeanwhile the reprobate need not fear hell in the next world, but the\nelect are sure to find it here.\n\nWhat shall we say of this strangely unreal and strangely personal\nreligion? Is it a ghost of Calvinism, returned with none of its old\nforce but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in\nlosing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric,\nthis religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in\nretaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic;\nfor it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit--in this\ncase a most pure and heroic spirit--which it strives so hard to\ndethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an\nunfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the\ndiscernment of the good. I have dwelt chiefly on this incident,\nbecause in academic circles it is the abuses incidental to true\nphilosophy that create controversy and form schools. Artificial\nsystems, even when they prevail, after a while fatigue their\nadherents, without ever having convinced or refuted their opponents,\nand they fade out of existence not by being refuted in their turn, but\nsimply by a tacit agreement to ignore their claims: so that the true\ninsight they were based on is too often buried under them. The\nhypostasis of philosophical terms is an abuse incidental to the\nforthright, unchecked use of the intellect; it substitutes for things\nthe limits and distinctions that divide them. So physics is corrupted\nby logic; but the logic that corrupts physics is perhaps correct, and\nwhen it is moral dialectic, it is more important than physics itself.\nMr. Russell's ethics _is_ ethics. When we mortals have once assumed\nthe moral attitude, it is certain that an indefinable value accrues to\nsome things as opposed to others, that these things are many, that\ncombinations of them have values not belonging to their parts, and\nthat these valuable things are far more specific than abstract\npleasure, and far more diffused than one's personal life. What a pity\nif this pure morality, in detaching itself impetuously from the earth,\nwhose bright satellite it might be, should fly into the abyss at a\ntangent, and leave us as much in the dark as before!\n\n\n\n\nV\n\nSHELLEY: OR THE POETIC VALUE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES\n\n\nIt is possible to advocate anarchy in criticism as in politics, and\nthere is perhaps nothing coercive to urge against a man who maintains\nthat any work of art is good enough, intrinsically and incommensurably,\nif it pleased anybody at any time for any reason. In practice, however,\nthe ideal of anarchy is unstable. Irrefutable by argument, it is readily\novercome by nature. It melts away before the dogmatic operation of the\nanarchist's own will, as soon as he allows himself the least creative\nendeavour. In spite of the infinite variety of what is merely possible,\nhuman nature and will have a somewhat definite constitution, and only\nwhat is harmonious with their actual constitution can long maintain\nitself in the moral world. Hence it is a safe principle in the criticism\nof art that technical proficiency, and brilliancy of fancy or execution,\ncannot avail to establish a great reputation. They may dazzle for a\nmoment, but they cannot absolve an artist from the need of having an\nimportant subject-matter and a sane humanity.\n\nIf this principle is accepted, however, it might seem that certain\nartists, and perhaps the greatest, might not fare well at our hands.\nHow would Shelley, for instance, stand such a test? Every one knows\nthe judgment passed on Shelley by Matthew Arnold, a critic who\nevidently relied on this principle, even if he preferred to speak only\nin the name of his personal tact and literary experience. Shelley,\nMatthew Arnold said, was \"a beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating\nhis wings in a luminous void in vain.\" In consequence he declared that\nShelley was not a classic, especially as his private circle had had an\nunsavoury morality, to be expressed only by the French word _sale_,\nand as moreover Shelley himself occasionally showed a distressing want\nof the sense of humour, which could only be called _bete_. These\nstrictures, if a bit incoherent, are separately remarkably just. They\nunmask essential weaknesses not only in Shelley, but in all\nrevolutionary people. The life of reason is a heritage and exists only\nthrough tradition. Half of it is an art, an adjustment to an alien\nreality, which only a long experience can teach: and even the other\nhalf, the inward inspiration and ideal of reason, must be also a\ncommon inheritance in the race, if people are to work together or so\nmuch as to understand one another. Now the misfortune of\nrevolutionists is that they are disinherited, and their folly is that\nthey wish to be disinherited even more than they are. Hence, in the\nmidst of their passionate and even heroic idealisms, there is commonly\na strange poverty in their minds, many an ugly turn in their lives,\nand an ostentatious vileness in their manners. They wish to be the\nleaders of mankind, but they are wretched representatives of humanity.\nIn the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if\none is out of tune with everything. We should not then be yielding to\nany private bias, but simply noting the conditions under which art may\nexist and may be appreciated, if we accepted the classical principle\nof criticism and asserted that substance, sanity, and even a sort of\npervasive wisdom are requisite for supreme works of art. On the other\nhand--who can honestly doubt it?--the rebels and individualists are\nthe men of direct insight and vital hope. The poetry of Shelley in\nparticular is typically poetical. It is poetry divinely inspired; and\nShelley himself is perhaps no more ineffectual or more lacking in\nhumour than an angel properly should be. Nor is his greatness all a\nmatter of aesthetic abstraction and wild music. It is a fact of\ncapital importance in the development of human genius that the great\nrevolution in Christendom against Christianity, a revolution that\nbegan with the Renaissance and is not yet completed, should have found\nangels to herald it, no less than that other revolution did which\nbegan at Bethlehem; and that among these new angels there should have\nbeen one so winsome, pure, and rapturous as Shelley. How shall we\nreconcile these conflicting impressions? Shall we force ourselves to\ncall the genius of Shelley second rate because it was revolutionary,\nand shall we attribute all enthusiasm for him to literary affectation\nor political prejudice? Or shall we rather abandon the orthodox\nprinciple that an important subject-matter and a sane spirit are\nessential to great works? Or shall we look for a different issue out\nof our perplexity, by asking if the analysis and comprehension are not\nperhaps at fault which declare that these things are not present in\nShelley's poetry? This last is the direction in which I conceive the\ntruth to lie. A little consideration will show us that Shelley really\nhas a great subject-matter--what ought to be; and that he has a real\nhumanity--though it is humanity in the seed, humanity in its internal\nprinciple, rather than in those deformed expressions of it which can\nflourish in the world.\n\nShelley seems hardly to have been brought up; he grew up in the\nnursery among his young sisters, at school among the rude boys,\nwithout any affectionate guidance, without imbibing any religious or\nsocial tradition. If he received any formal training or correction, he\ninstantly rejected it inwardly, set it down as unjust and absurd, and\nturned instead to sailing paper boats, to reading romances or to\nwriting them, or to watching with delight the magic of chemical\nexperiments. Thus the mind of Shelley was thoroughly disinherited; but\nnot, like the minds of most revolutionists, by accident and through\nthe niggardliness of fortune, for few revolutionists would be such if\nthey were heirs to a baronetcy. Shelley's mind disinherited itself out\nof allegiance to itself, because it was too sensitive and too highly\nendowed for the world into which it had descended. It rejected\nordinary education, because it was incapable of assimilating it.\nEducation is suitable to those few animals whose faculties are not\ncompletely innate, animals that, like most men, may be perfected by\nexperience because they are born with various imperfect alternative\ninstincts rooted equally in their system. But most animals, and a few\nmen, are not of this sort. They cannot be educated, because they are\nborn complete. Full of predeterminate intuitions, they are without\nintelligence, which is the power of seeing things as they are. Endowed\nwith a specific, unshakable faith, they are impervious to experience:\nand as they burst the womb they bring ready-made with them their final\nand only possible system of philosophy.\n\nShelley was one of these spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of these\nnurslings of the womb, like a bee or a butterfly; a dogmatic,\ninspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature. He was innocent and\ncruel, swift and wayward, illuminated and blind. Being a finished\nchild of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature,\nhistory, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense,\nbut was obtuse to the droll, miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The\ncannonade of hard, inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what\nlittle wisdom we have left Shelley dazed and sore, perhaps, but\nuninstructed. When the storm was over, he began chirping again his own\nnatural note. If the world continued to confine and obsess him, he\nhated the world, and gasped for freedom. Being incapable of\nunderstanding reality, he revelled in creating world after world in\nidea. For his nature was not merely predetermined and obdurate, it\nwas also sensitive, vehement, and fertile. With the soul of a bird, he\nhad the senses of a man-child; the instinct of the butterfly was\nunited in him with the instinct of the brooding fowl and of the\npelican. This winged spirit had a heart. It darted swiftly on its\nappointed course, neither expecting nor understanding opposition; but\nwhen it met opposition it did not merely flutter and collapse; it was\ninwardly outraged, it protested proudly against fate, it cried aloud\nfor liberty and justice.\n\nThe consequence was that Shelley, having a nature preformed but at the\nsame time tender, passionate, and moral, was exposed to early and\ncontinual suffering. When the world violated the ideal which lay so\nclear before his eyes, that violation filled him with horror. If to\nthe irrepressible gushing of life from within we add the suffering and\nhorror that continually checked it, we shall have in hand, I think,\nthe chief elements of his genius.\n\nLove of the ideal, passionate apprehension of what ought to be, has\nfor its necessary counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the\nactual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul\nof the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution\nfails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral\nlife and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they\nventure to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and\nomnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of\nuntasted and ideal perfection. These, like Plato, excel in elevation,\nand they are apt to despise rather than to reform the world. Other\nmoralists begin by a revolt against the actual, at some point where\nthey find the actual particularly galling. These excel in sincerity;\ntheir purblind conscience is urgent, and they are reformers in intent\nand sometimes even in action. But the ideals they frame are\nfragmentary and shallow, often mere provisional vague watchwords, like\nliberty, equality, and fraternity; they possess no positive visions or\nplans for moral life as a whole, like Plato's _Republic_. The Utopian\nor visionary moralists are often rather dazed by this wicked world;\nbeing well-intentioned but impotent, they often take comfort in\nfancying that the ideal they pine for is already actually embodied on\nearth, or is about to be embodied on earth in a decade or two, or at\nleast is embodied eternally in a sphere immediately above the earth,\nto which we shall presently climb, and be happy for ever.\n\nLovers of the ideal who thus hastily believe in its reality are called\nidealists, and Shelley was an idealist in almost every sense of that\nhard-used word. He early became an idealist after Berkeley's fashion,\nin that he discredited the existence of matter and embraced a\npsychological or (as it was called) intellectual system of the\nuniverse. In his drama _Hellas_ he puts this view with evident\napproval into the mouth of Ahasuerus:\n\n                    \"This whole\n    Of suns and worlds and men and beasts and flowers,\n    With all the silent or tempestuous workings\n    By which they have been, are, or cease to be,\n    Is but a vision;--all that it inherits\n    Are motes of a sick eye, bubbles and dreams.\n    Thought is its cradle and its grave; nor less\n    The future and the past are idle shadows\n    Of thought's eternal flight--they have no being:\n    Nought is but that which feels itself to be.\"\n\nBut Shelley was even more deeply and constantly an idealist after the\nmanner of Plato; for he regarded the good as a magnet (inexplicably\nnot working for the moment) that draws all life and motion after it;\nand he looked on the types and ideals of things as on eternal\nrealities that subsist, beautiful and untarnished, when the\nglimmerings that reveal them to our senses have died away. From the\ninfinite potentialities of beauty in the abstract, articulate mind\ndraws certain bright forms--the Platonic ideas--\"the gathered rays\nwhich are reality,\" as Shelley called them: and it is the light of\nthese ideals cast on objects of sense that lends to these objects some\ndegree of reality and value, making out of them \"lovely apparitions,\ndim at first, then radiant ... the progeny immortal of painting,\nsculpture, and rapt poesy.\"\n\nThe only kind of idealism that Shelley had nothing to do with is the\nkind that prevails in some universities, that Hegelian idealism which\nteaches that perfect good is a vicious abstraction, and maintains that\nall the evil that has been, is, and ever shall be is indispensable to\nmake the universe as good as it possibly could be. In this form,\nidealism is simply contempt for all ideals, and a hearty adoration of\nthings as they are; and as such it appeals mightily to the powers that\nbe, in church and in state; but in that capacity it would have been as\nhateful to Shelley as the powers that be always were, and as the\nphilosophy was that flattered them. For his moral feeling was based on\nsuffering and horror at what is actual, no less than on love of a\nvisioned good. His conscience was, to a most unusual degree, at once\nelevated and sincere. It was inspired in equal measure by prophecy and\nby indignation. He was carried away in turn by enthusiasm for what his\nethereal and fertile fancy pictured as possible, and by detestation of\nthe reality forced upon him instead. Hence that extraordinary moral\nfervour which is the soul of his poetry. His imagination is no playful\nundirected kaleidoscope; the images, often so tenuous and\nmetaphysical, that crowd upon him, are all sparks thrown off at white\nheat, embodiments of a fervent, definite, unswerving inspiration. If\nwe think that the _Cloud_ or the _West Wind_ or the _Witch of the\nAtlas_ are mere fireworks, poetic dust, a sort of _bataille des\nfleurs_ in which we are pelted by a shower of images--we have not\nunderstood the passion that overflows in them, as any long-nursed\npassion may, in any of us, suddenly overflow in an unwonted profusion\nof words. This is a point at which Francis Thompson's understanding of\nShelley, generally so perfect, seems to me to go astray. The universe,\nThompson tells us, was Shelley's box of toys. \"He gets between the\nfeet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature,\nand twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to\nsee how she will look nicest in his song.\" This last is not, I think,\nShelley's motive; it is not the truth about the spring of his genius.\nHe undoubtedly shatters the world to bits, but only to build it nearer\nto the heart's desire, only to make out of its coloured fragments some\nmore Elysian home for love, or some more dazzling symbol for that\ninfinite beauty which is the need--the profound, aching, imperative\nneed--of the human soul. This recreative impulse of the poet's is not\nwilful, as Thompson calls it: it is moral. Like the _Sensitive Plant_\n\n    \"It loves even like Love,--its deep heart is full;\n     It desires what it has not, the beautiful.\"\n\nThe question for Shelley is not at all what will look nicest in his\nsong; that is the preoccupation of mincing rhymesters, whose well is\nsoon dry. Shelley's abundance has a more generous source; it springs\nfrom his passion for picturing what would be best, not in the picture,\nbut in the world. Hence, when he feels he has pictured or divined it,\nhe can exclaim:\n\n    \"The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness,\n     The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,\n     The vaporous exultation, not to be confined!\n     Ha! Ha! the animation of delight,\n     Which wraps me like an atmosphere of light,\n     And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind!\"\n\nTo match this gift of bodying forth the ideal Shelley had his vehement\nsense of wrong; and as he seized upon and recast all images of beauty,\nto make them more perfectly beautiful, so, to vent his infinite horror\nof evil, he seized on all the worst images of crime or torture that he\ncould find, and recast them so as to reach the quintessence of\ndistilled badness. His pictures of war, famine, lust, and cruelty are,\nor seem, forced, although perhaps, as in the _Cenci_, he might urge\nthat he had historical warrant for his descriptions, far better\nhistorical warrant, no doubt, than the beauty and happiness actually\nto be found in the world could give him for his _Skylark_, his\n_Epipsychidion_, or his _Prometheus_. But to exaggerate good is to\nvivify, to enhance our sense of moral coherence and beautiful\nnaturalness; it is to render things more graceful, intelligible, and\ncongenial to the spirit which they ought to serve. To aggravate evil,\non the contrary, is to darken counsel--already dark enough--and the\nwant of truth to nature in this pessimistic sort of exaggeration is\nnot compensated for by any advantage. The violence and, to my feeling,\nthe wantonness of these invectives--for they are invectives in\nintention and in effect--may have seemed justified to Shelley by his\npolitical purpose. He was thirsting to destroy kings, priests,\nsoldiers, parents, and heads of colleges--to destroy them, I mean, in\ntheir official capacity; and the exhibition of their vileness in all\nits diabolical purity might serve to remove scruples in the\nhalf-hearted. We, whom the nineteenth century has left so tender to\nhistorical rights and historical beauties, may wonder that a poet, an\nimpassioned lover of the beautiful, could have been such a leveller,\nand such a vandal in his theoretical destructiveness. But here the\nlegacy of the eighteenth century was speaking in Shelley, as that of\nthe nineteenth is speaking in us: and moreover, in his own person, the\nvery fertility of imagination could be a cause of blindness to the\npast and its contingent sanctities. Shelley was not left standing\naghast, like a Philistine, before the threatened destruction of all\ntraditional order. He had, and knew he had, the seeds of a far\nlovelier order in his own soul; there he found the plan or memory of a\nperfect commonwealth of nature ready to rise at once on the ruins of\nthis sad world, and to make regret for it impossible.\n\nSo much for what I take to be the double foundation of Shelley's\ngenius, a vivid love of ideal good on the one hand, and on the other,\nwhat is complementary to that vivid love, much suffering and horror at\nthe touch of actual evils. On this double foundation he based an\nopinion which had the greatest influence on his poetry, not merely on\nthe subject-matter of it, but also on the exuberance and urgency of\nemotion which suffuses it. This opinion was that all that caused\nsuffering and horror in the world could be readily destroyed: it was\nthe belief in perfectibility. An animal that has rigid instincts and\nan _a priori_ mind is probably very imperfectly adapted to the world\nhe comes into: his organs cannot be moulded by experience and use;\nunless they are fitted by some miraculous pre-established harmony, or\nby natural selection, to things as they are, they will never be\nreconciled with them, and an eternal war will ensue between what the\nanimal needs, loves, and can understand and what the outer reality\noffers. So long as such a creature lives--and his life will be\ndifficult and short--events will continually disconcert and puzzle\nhim; everything will seem to him unaccountable, inexplicable,\nunnatural. He will not be able to conceive the real order and\nconnection of things sympathetically, by assimilating his habits of\nthought to their habits of evolution. His faculties being innate and\nunadaptable will not allow him to correct his presumptions and axioms;\nhe will never be able to make nature the standard of naturalness. What\ncontradicts his private impulses will seem to him to contradict\nreason, beauty, and necessity. In this paradoxical situation he will\nprobably take refuge in the conviction that what he finds to exist is\nan illusion, or at least not a fair sample of reality. Being so\nperverse, absurd, and repugnant, the given state of things must be, he\nwill say, only accidental and temporary. He will be sure that his own\n_a priori_ imagination is the mirror of all the eternal proprieties,\nand that as his mind can move only in one predetermined way, things\ncannot be prevented from moving in that same way save by some strange\nviolence done to their nature. It would be easy, therefore, to set\neverything right again: nay, everything must be on the point of\nrighting itself spontaneously. Wrong, of its very essence, must be in\nunstable equilibrium. The conflict between what such a man feels ought\nto exist and what he finds actually existing must, he will feel sure,\nend by a speedy revolution in things, and by the removal of all\nscandals; that it should end by the speedy removal of his own person,\nor by such a revolution in his demands as might reconcile him to\nexistence, will never occur to him; or, if the thought occurs to him,\nit will seem too horrible to be true.\n\nSuch a creature cannot adapt himself to things by education, and\nconsequently he cannot adapt things to himself by industry. His choice\nlies absolutely between victory and martyrdom. But at the very moment\nof martyrdom, martyrs, as is well known, usually feel assured of\nvictory. The _a priori_ spirit will therefore be always a prophet of\nvictory, so long as it subsists at all. The vision of a better world\nat hand absorbed the Israelites in exile, St. John the Baptist in the\ndesert, and Christ on the cross. The martyred spirit always says to\nthe world it leaves, \"This day thou shall be with me in paradise.\"\n\nIn just this way, Shelley believed in perfectibility. In his latest\npoems--in _Hellas_, in _Adonais_--he was perhaps a little inclined to\nremove the scene of perfectibility to a metaphysical region, as the\nChristian church soon removed it to the other world. Indeed, an earth\nreally made perfect is hardly distinguishable from a posthumous\nheaven: so profoundly must everything in it be changed, and so\nangel-like must every one in it become. Shelley's earthly paradise, as\ndescribed in _Prometheus_ and in _Epipsychidion_, is too\nfestival-like> too much of a mere culmination, not to be fugitive: it\ncries aloud to be translated into a changeless and metaphysical\nheaven, which to Shelley's mind could be nothing but the realm of\nPlatonic ideas, where \"life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,\" no\nlonger \"stains the white radiance of eternity.\" But the age had been\nan age of revolution and, in spite of disappointments, retained its\nfaith in revolution; and the young Shelley was not satisfied with a\nparadise removed to the intangible realms of poetry or of religion; he\nhoped, like the old Hebrews, for a paradise on earth. His notion was\nthat eloquence could change the heart of man, and that love, kindled\nthere by the force of reason and of example, would transform society.\nHe believed, Mrs. Shelley tells us, \"that mankind had only to will\nthat there should be no evil, and there would be none.\" And she adds:\n\"That man could be so perfectionised as to be able to expel evil from\nhis own nature, and from the greater part of creation, was the\ncardinal point of his system.\" This cosmic extension of the conversion\nof men reminds one of the cosmic extension of the Fall conceived by\nSt. Augustine; and in the _Prometheus_ Shelley has allowed his fancy,\nhalf in symbol, half in glorious physical hyperbole, to carry the warm\ncontagion of love into the very bowels of the earth, and even the\nmoon, by reflection, to catch the light of love, and be alive again.\n\nShelley, we may safely say, did not understand the real constitution\nof nature. It was hidden from him by a cloud, all woven of shifting\nrainbows and bright tears. Only his emotional haste made it possible\nfor him to entertain such, opinions as he did entertain; or rather,\nit was inevitable that the mechanism of nature, as it is in its\ndepths, should remain in his pictures only the shadowiest of\nbackgrounds. His poetry is accordingly a part of the poetry of\nillusion; the poetry of truth, if we have the courage to hope for such\na thing, is reserved for far different and yet unborn poets. But it is\nonly fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as\nyet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they\ntouch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each\nsuccessive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing,\nor to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a\ngentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once\nout of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and\nsentimental. None has done better than to spangle a confused sensuous\npageant with some sparks of truth, or to give it some symbolic\nrelation to moral experience. And this Shelley has done as well as\nanybody: all other poets also have been poets of illusion. The\ndistinction of Shelley is that his illusions are so wonderfully fine,\nsubtle, and palpitating; that they betray passions and mental habits\nso singularly generous and pure. And why? Because he did not believe\nin the necessity of what is vulgar, and did not pay that demoralising\nrespect to it, under the title of fact or of custom, which it exacts\nfrom most of us. The past seemed to him no valid precedent, the\npresent no final instance. As he believed in the imminence of an\noverturn that should make all things new, he was not checked by any\ndivided allegiance, by any sense that he was straying into the vapid\nor fanciful, when he created what he justly calls \"Beautiful idealisms\nof moral excellence.\"\n\nThat is what his poems are fundamentally--the _Skylark_, and the\n_Witch of the Atlas_, and the _Sensitive Plant_ no less than the\ngrander pieces. He infused into his gossamer world the strength of his\nheroic conscience. He felt that what his imagination pictured was a\ntrue symbol of what human experience should and might pass into.\nOtherwise he would have been aware of playing with idle images; his\npoetry would have been mere millinery and his politics mere business;\nhe would have been a worldling in art and in morals. The clear fire,\nthe sustained breath, the fervent accent of his poetry are due to his\nfaith in his philosophy. As Mrs. Shelley expressed it, he \"had no care\nfor any of his poems that did not emanate from the depths of his mind,\nand develop some high and abstruse truth.\" Had his poetry not dealt\nwith what was supreme in his own eyes, and dearest to his heart, it\ncould never have been the exquisite and entrancing poetry that it is.\nIt would not have had an adequate subject-matter, as, in spite of\nMatthew Arnold, I think it had; for nothing can be empty that contains\nsuch a soul. An angel cannot be ineffectual if the standard of\nefficiency is moral; he is what all other things bring about, when\nthey are effectual. And a void that is alive with the beating of\nluminous wings, and of a luminous heart, is quite sufficiently\npeopled. Shelley's mind was angelic not merely in its purity and\nfervour, but also in its moral authority, in its prophetic strain.\nWhat was conscience in his generation was life in him.\n\nThe mind of man is not merely a sensorium. His intelligence is not\nmerely an instrument for adaptation. There is a germ within, a nucleus\nof force and organisation, which can be unfolded, under favourable\ncircumstances, into a perfection inwardly determined. Man's\nconstitution is a fountain from which to draw an infinity of gushing\nmusic, not representing anything external, yet not unmeaning on that\naccount, since it represents the capacities and passions latent in him\nfrom the beginning. These potentialities, however, are no oracles of\ntruth. Being innate they are arbitrary; being _a priori_ they are\nsubjective; but they are good principles for fiction, for poetry, for\nmorals, for religion. They are principles for the true expression of\nman, but not for the true description of the universe. When they are\ntaken for the latter, fiction becomes deception, poetry illusion,\nmorals fanaticism, and religion bad science. The orgy of delusion into\nwhich we are then plunged comes from supposing the _a priori_ to be\ncapable of controlling the actual, and the innate to be a standard for\nthe true. That rich and definite endowment which might have made the\ndistinction of the poet, then makes the narrowness of the philosopher.\nSo Shelley, with a sort of tyranny of which he does not suspect the\npossible cruelty, would impose his ideal of love and equality upon all\ncreatures; he would make enthusiasts of clowns and doves of vultures.\nIn him, as in many people, too intense a need of loving excludes the\ncapacity for intelligent sympathy. His feeling cannot accommodate\nitself to the inequalities of human nature: his good will is a geyser,\nand will not consent to grow cool, and to water the flat and vulgar\nreaches of life. Shelley is blind to the excellences of what he\ndespises, as he is blind to the impossibility of realising what he\nwants. His sympathies are narrow as his politics are visionary, so\nthat there is a certain moral incompetence in his moral intensity. Yet\nhis abstraction from half of life, or from nine-tenths of it, was\nperhaps necessary if silence and space were to be won in his mind for\nits own upwelling, ecstatic harmonies. The world we have always with\nus, but such spirits we have not always. And the spirit has fire\nenough within to make a second stellar universe.\n\nAn instance of Shelley's moral incompetence in moral intensity is to\nbe found in his view of selfishness and evil. From the point of view\nof pure spirit, selfishness is quite absurd. As a contemporary of ours\nhas put it: \"It is so evident that it is better to secure a greater\ngood for A than a lesser good for B that it is hard to find any still\nmore evident principle by which to prove this. And if A happens to be\nsome one else, and B to be myself, that cannot affect the question.\"\nIt is very foolish not to love your neighbour as yourself, since his\ngood is no less good than yours. Convince people of this--and who can\nresist such perfect logic?--and _presto_ all property in things has\ndisappeared, all jealousy in love, and all rivalry in honour. How\nhappy and secure every one will suddenly be, and how much richer than\nin our mean, blind, competitive society! The single word love--and we\nhave just seen that love is a logical necessity--offers an easy and\nfinal solution to all moral and political problems. Shelley cannot\nimagine why this solution is not accepted, and why logic does not\nproduce love. He can only wonder and grieve that it does not; and\nsince selfishness and ill-will seem to him quite gratuitous, his ire\nis aroused; he thinks them unnatural and monstrous. He could not in\nthe least understand evil, even when he did it himself; all villainy\nseemed to him wanton, all lust frigid, all hatred insane. All was an\nabomination alike that was not the lovely spirit of love.\n\nNow this is a very unintelligent view of evil; and if Shelley had had\ntime to read Spinoza--an author with whom he would have found himself\nlargely in sympathy--he might have learned that nothing is evil in\nitself, and that what is evil in things is not due to any accident in\ncreation, nor to groundless malice in man. Evil is an inevitable\naspect which things put on when they are struggling to preserve\nthemselves in the same habitat, in which there is not room or matter\nenough for them to prosper equally side by side. Under these\ncircumstances the partial success of any creature--say, the\ncancer-microbe--is an evil from the point of view of those other\ncreatures--say, men--to whom that success is a defeat. Shelley\nsometimes half perceived this inevitable tragedy. So he says of the\nfair lady in the _Sensitive Plant_:\n\n    \"All killing insects and gnawing worms,\n     And things of obscene and unlovely forms,\n     She bore in a basket of Indian woof,\n     Into the rough woods far aloof--\n     In a basket of grasses and wild flowers full,\n     The freshest her gentle hands could pull\n     For the poor banished insects, whose intent,\n     Although they did ill, was innocent.\"\n\nNow it is all very well to ask cancer-microbes to be reasonable, and\ngo feed on oak-leaves, if the oak-leaves do not object; oak-leaves\nmight be poison for them, and in any case cancer-microbes cannot\nlisten to reason; they must go on propagating where they are, unless\nthey are quickly and utterly exterminated. And fundamentally men are\nsubject to the same fatality exactly; they cannot listen to reason\nunless they are reasonable; and it is unreasonable to expect that,\nbeing animals, they should be reasonable exclusively. Imagination is\nindeed at work in them, and makes them capable of sacrificing\nthemselves for any idea that appeals to them, for their children,\nperhaps, or for their religion. But they are not more capable of\nsacrificing themselves to what does not interest them than the\ncancer-microbes are of sacrificing themselves to men.\n\nWhen Shelley marvels at the perversity of the world, he shows his\nignorance of the world. The illusion he suffers from is\nconstitutional, and such as larks and sensitive plants are possibly\nsubject to in their way: what he is marvelling at is really that\nanything should exist at all not a creature of his own moral\ndisposition. Consequently the more he misunderstands the world and\nbids it change its nature, the more he expresses his own nature: so\nthat all is not vanity in his illusion, nor night in his blindness.\nThe poet sees most clearly what his ideal is; he suffers no illusion\nin the expression of his own soul. His political utopias, his belief\nin the power of love, and his cryingly subjective and inconstant way\nof judging people are one side of the picture; the other is his\nlyrical power, wealth, and ecstasy. If he had understood universal\nnature, he would not have so glorified in his own. And his own nature\nwas worth glorifying; it was, I think, the purest, tenderest,\nrichest, most rational nature ever poured forth in verse. I have not\nread in any language such a full expression of the unadulterated\ninstincts of the mind. The world of Shelley is that which the vital\nmonad within many of us--I will not say within all, for who shall set\nbounds to the variations of human nature?--the world which the vital\nmonad within many of us, I say, would gladly live in if it could have\nits way.\n\nMatthew Arnold said that Shelley was not quite sane; and certainly he\nwas not quite sane, if we place sanity in justness of external\nperception, adaptation to matter, and docility to the facts; but his\nlack of sanity was not due to any internal corruption; it was not even\nan internal eccentricity. He was like a child, like a Platonic soul\njust fallen from the Empyrean; and the child may be dazed, credulous,\nand fanciful; but he is not mad. On the contrary, his earnest\nplayfulness, the constant distraction of his attention from\nobservation to daydreams, is the sign of an inward order and fecundity\nappropriate to his age. If children did not see visions, good men\nwould have nothing to work for. It is the soul of observant persons,\nlike Matthew Arnold, that is apt not to be quite sane and whole\ninwardly, but somewhat warped by familiarity with the perversities of\nreal things, and forced to misrepresent its true ideal, like a tree\nbent by too prevalent a wind. Half the fertility of such a soul is\nlost, and the other half is denaturalised. No doubt, in its sturdy\ndeformity, the practical mind is an instructive and not unpleasing\nobject, an excellent, if somewhat pathetic, expression of the climate\nin which it is condemned to grow, and of its dogged clinging to an\ningrate soil; but it is a wretched expression of its innate\npossibilities. Shelley, on the contrary, is like a palm-tree in the\ndesert or a star in the sky; he is perfect in the midst of the void.\nHis obtuseness to things dynamic--to the material order--leaves his\nwhole mind free to develop things aesthetic after their own kind; his\nabstraction permits purity, his playfulness makes room for creative\nfreedom, his ethereal quality is only humanity having its way.\n\nWe perhaps do ourselves an injustice when we think that the heart of\nus is sordid; what is sordid is rather the situation that cramps or\nstifles the heart. In itself our generative principle is surely no\nless fertile and generous than the generative principle of crystals or\nflowers. As it can produce a more complex body, it is capable of\nproducing a more complex mind; and the beauty and life of this mind,\nlike that of the body, is all predetermined in the seed. Circumstances\nmay suffer the organism to develop, or prevent it from doing so; they\ncannot change its plan without making it ugly and deformed. What\nShelley's mind draws from the outside, its fund of images, is like\nwhat the germ of the body draws from the outside, its food--a mass of\nmere materials to transform and reorganise. With these images Shelley\nconstructs a world determined by his native genius, as the seed\norganises out of its food a predetermined system of nerves and\nmuscles. Shelley's poetry shows us the perfect but naked body of human\nhappiness. What clothes circumstances may compel most of us to add may\nbe a necessary concession to climate, to custom, or to shame; they\ncan hardly add a new vitality or any beauty comparable to that which\nthey hide.\n\nWhen the soul, as in Shelley's case, is all goodness, and when the\nworld seems all illegitimacy and obstruction, we need not wonder that\n_freedom_ should be regarded as a panacea. Even if freedom had not\nbeen the idol of Shelley's times, he would have made an idol of it for\nhimself. \"I never could discern in him,\" says his friend Hogg, \"any\nmore than two principles. The first was a strong, irrepressible love\nof liberty.... The second was an equally ardent love of toleration ...\nand ... an intense abhorrence of persecution.\" We all fancy nowadays\nthat we believe in liberty and abhor persecution; but the liberty we\napprove of is usually only a variation in social compulsions, to make\nthem less galling to our latest sentiments than the old compulsions\nwould be if we retained them. Liberty of the press and liberty to vote\ndo not greatly help us in living after our own mind, which is, I\nsuppose, the only positive sort of liberty. From the point of view of\na poet, there can be little essential freedom so long as he is\nforbidden to live with the people he likes, and compelled to live with\nthe people he does not like. This, to Shelley, seemed the most galling\nof tyrannies; and free love was, to his feeling, the essence and test\nof freedom. Love must be spontaneous to be a spiritual bond in the\nbeginning and it must remain spontaneous if it is to remain spiritual.\nTo be bound by one's past is as great a tyranny to pure spirit as to\nbe bound by the sin of Adam, or by the laws of Artaxerxes; and those\nof us who do not believe in the possibility of free love ought to\ndeclare frankly that we do not, at bottom, believe in the possibility\nof freedom.\n\n    \"I never was attached to that great sect\n     Whose doctrine is that each one should select,\n     Out of the crowd, a mistress or a friend\n     And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend\n     To cold oblivion; though it is the code\n     Of modern morals, and the beaten road\n     Which those poor slaves with weary footsteps tread\n     Who travel to their home among the dead\n     By the broad highway of the world, and so\n     With one chained friend, perhaps a jealous foe,\n     The dreariest and the longest journey go.\n     True love in this differs from gold and clay,\n     That to divide is not to take away.\n     Love is like understanding that grows bright\n     Gazing on many truths.... Narrow\n     The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates,\n     The life that wears, the spirit that creates\n     One object and one form, and builds thereby\n     A sepulchre for its eternity!\"\n\nThe difficulties in reducing this charming theory of love to practice\nare well exemplified in Shelley's own life. He ran away with his first\nwife not because she inspired any uncontrollable passion, but because\nshe declared she was a victim of domestic oppression and threw herself\nupon him for protection. Nevertheless, when he discovered that his\nbest friend was making love to her, in spite of his free-love\nprinciples, he was very seriously annoyed. When he presently abandoned\nher, feeling a spiritual affinity in another direction, she drowned\nherself in the Serpentine: and his second wife needed all her natural\nsweetness and all her inherited philosophy to reconcile her to the\nwaves of Platonic enthusiasm for other ladies which periodically swept\nthe too sensitive heart of her husband. Free love would not, then,\nsecure freedom from complications; it would not remove the present\noccasion for jealousy, reproaches, tragedies, and the dragging of a\nlengthening chain. Freedom of spirit cannot be translated into freedom\nof action; you may amend laws, and customs, and social entanglements,\nbut you will still have them; for this world is a lumbering mechanism\nand not, like love, a plastic dream. Wisdom is very old and therefore\noften ironical, and it has long taught that it is well for those who\nwould live in the spirit to keep as clear as possible of the world:\nand that marriage, especially a free-love marriage, is a snare for\npoets. Let them endure to love freely, hopelessly, and infinitely,\nafter the manner of Plato and Dante, and even of Goethe, when Goethe\nreally loved: that exquisite sacrifice will improve their verse, and\nit will not kill them. Let them follow in the traces of Shelley when\nhe wrote in his youth: \"I have been most of the night pacing a\nchurch-yard. I must now engage in scenes of strong interest.... I\nexpect to gratify some of this insatiable feeling in poetry.... I\nslept with a loaded pistol and some poison last night, but did not\ndie,\" Happy man if he had been able to add, \"And did not marry!\"\n\nLast among the elements of Shelley's thought I may perhaps mention his\natheism. Shelley called himself an atheist in his youth; his\nbiographers and critics usually say that he was, or that he became, a\npantheist. He was an atheist in the sense that he denied the orthodox\nconception of a deity who is a voluntary creator, a legislator, and a\njudge; but his aversion to Christianity was not founded on any\nsympathetic or imaginative knowledge of it; and a man who preferred\nthe _Paradiso_ of Dante to almost any other poem, and preferred it to\nthe popular _Inferno_ itself, could evidently be attracted by\nChristian ideas and sentiment the moment they were presented to him as\nexpressions of moral truth rather than as gratuitous dogmas. A\npantheist he was in the sense that he felt how fluid and vital this\nwhole world is; but he seems to have had no tendency to conceive any\nconscious plan or logical necessity connecting the different parts of\nthe whole; so that rather than a pantheist he might be called a\npanpsychist; especially as he did not subordinate morally the\nindividual to the cosmos. He did not surrender the authority of moral\nideals in the face of physical necessity, which is properly the\nessence of pantheism. He did the exact opposite; so much so that the\nchief characteristic of his philosophy is its Promethean spirit. He\nmaintained that the basis of moral authority was internal, diffused\namong all individuals; that it was the natural love of the beautiful\nand the good wherever it might spring, and however fate might oppose\nit.\n\n    \"To suffer ...\n     To forgive ...\n     To defy Power ...\n     To love and bear; to hope, till hope creates\n     From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;\n     Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;\n     This ... is to be\n     Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free.\"\n\nShelley was also removed from any ordinary atheism by his truly\nspeculative sense for eternity. He was a thorough Platonist All\nmetaphysics perhaps is poetry, but Platonic metaphysics is good\npoetry, and to this class Shelley's belongs. For instance:\n\n         \"The pure spirit shall flow\n    Back to the burning fountain whence it came,\n    A portion of the eternal, which must glow\n    Through time and change, unquenchably the same.\n    Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep!\n    He hath awakened from the dream of life.\n    'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep\n    With phantoms an unprofitable strife.\n\n    \"He is made one with Nature. There is heard\n    His voice in all her music, from the moan\n    Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird.\n\n    \"He is a portion of the loveliness\n    Which once he made more lovely.\n\n    \"The splendours of the firmament of time\n    May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not:\n    Like stars to their appointed height they climb,\n    And death is a low mist which cannot blot\n    The brightness it may veil. When lofty thought\n    Lifts a young heart above its mortal lair,\n    ... the dead live there.\"\n\nAtheism or pantheism of this stamp cannot be taxed with being gross or\nmaterialistic; the trouble is rather that it is too hazy in its\nsublimity. The poet has not perceived the natural relation between\nfacts and ideals so clearly or correctly as he has felt the moral\nrelation between them. But his allegiance to the intuition which\ndefies, for the sake of felt excellence, every form of idolatry or\ncowardice wearing the mask of religion--this allegiance is itself the\npurest religion; and it is capable of inspiring the sweetest and most\nabsolute poetry. In daring to lay bare the truths of fate, the poet\ncreates for himself the subtlest and most heroic harmonies; and he is\ncomforted for the illusions he has lost by being made incapable of\ndesiring them.\n\nWe have seen that Shelley, being unteachable, could never put together\nany just idea of the world: he merely collected images and emotions,\nand out of them made worlds of his own. His poetry accordingly does\nnot well express history, nor human character, nor the constitution of\nnature. What he unrolls before us instead is, in a sense, fantastic;\nit is a series of landscapes, passions, and cataclysms such as never\nwere on earth, and never will be. If you are seriously interested only\nin what belongs to earth you will not be seriously interested in\nShelley. Literature, according to Matthew Arnold, should be criticism\nof life, and Shelley did not criticise life; so that his poetry had no\nsolidity. But is life, we may ask, the same thing as the circumstances\nof life on earth? Is the spirit of life, that marks and judges those\ncircumstances, itself nothing? Music is surely no description of the\ncircumstances of life; yet it is relevant to life unmistakably, for it\nstimulates by means of a torrent of abstract movements and images the\nformal and emotional possibilities of living which lie in the spirit.\nBy so doing music becomes a part of life, a congruous addition, a\nparallel life, as it were, to the vulgar one. I see no reason, in the\nanalogies of the natural world, for supposing that the circumstances\nof human life are the only circumstances in which the spirit of life\ncan disport itself. Even on this planet, there are sea-animals and\nair-animals, ephemeral beings and self-centred beings, as well as\npersons who can grow as old as Matthew Arnold, and be as fond as he\nwas of classifying other people. And beyond this planet, and in the\ninterstices of what our limited senses can perceive, there are\nprobably many forms of life not criticised in any of the books which\nMatthew Arnold said we should read in order to know the best that has\nbeen thought and said in the world. The future, too, even among men,\nmay contain, as Shelley puts it, many \"arts, though unimagined, yet to\nbe.\" The divination of poets cannot, of course, be expected to reveal\nany of these hidden regions as they actually exist or will exist; but\nwhat would be the advantage of revealing them? It could only be what\nthe advantage of criticising human life would be also, to improve\nsubsequent life indirectly by turning it towards attainable goods, and\nis it not as important a thing to improve life directly and in the\npresent, if one has the gift, by enriching rather than criticising it?\nBesides, there is need of fixing the ideal by which criticism is to be\nguided. If you have no image of happiness or beauty or perfect\ngoodness before you, how are you to judge what portions of life are\nimportant, and what rendering of them is appropriate?\n\nBeing a singer inwardly inspired, Shelley could picture the ideal\ngoals of life, the ultimate joys of experience, better than a\ndiscursive critic or observer could have done. The circumstances of\nlife are only the bases or instruments of life: the fruition of life\nis not in retrospect, not in description of the instruments, but in\nexpression of the spirit itself, to which those instruments may prove\nuseful; as music is not a criticism of violins, but a playing upon\nthem. This expression need not resemble its ground. Experience is\ndiversified by colours that are not produced by colours, sounds that\nare not conditioned by sounds, names that are not symbols for other\nnames, fixed ideal objects that stand for ever-changing material\nprocesses. The mind is fundamentally lyrical, inventive, redundant.\nIts visions are its own offspring, hatched in the warmth of some\nfavourable cosmic gale. The ambient weather may vary, and these\nvisions be scattered; but the ideal world they pictured may some day\nbe revealed again to some other poet similarly inspired; the\npossibility of restoring it, or something like it, is perpetual. It is\nprecisely because Shelley's sense for things is so fluid, so illusive,\nthat it opens to us emotionally what is a serious scientific\nprobability; namely, that human life is not all life, nor the\nlandscape of earth the only admired landscape in the universe; that\nthe ancients who believed in gods and spirits were nearer the virtual\ntruth (however anthropomorphically they may have expressed themselves)\nthan any philosophy or religion that makes human affairs the centre\nand aim of the world. Such moral imagination is to be gained by\nsinking into oneself, rather than by observing remote happenings,\nbecause it is at its heart, not at its fingertips, that the human soul\ntouches matter, and is akin to whatever other centres of life may\npeople the infinite.\n\nFor this reason the masters of spontaneity, the prophets, the inspired\npoets, the saints, the mystics, the musicians are welcome and most\nappealing companions. In their simplicity and abstraction from the\nworld they come very near the heart. They say little and help much.\nThey do not picture life, but have life, and give it. So we may say, I\nthink, of Shelley's magic universe what he said of Greece; if it\n\n                  \"Must be\n    A wreck, yet shall its fragments re-assemble,\n    And build themselves again impregnably\n          In a diviner clime,\n    To Amphionic music, on some cape sublime\n    Which frowns above the idle foam of time.\"\n\n\"Frowns,\" says Shelley rhetorically, as if he thought that something\ntimeless, something merely ideal, could be formidable, or could\nthreaten existing things with any but an ideal defeat. Tremendous\nerror! Eternal possibilities may indeed beckon; they may attract those\nwho instinctively pursue them as a star may guide those who wish to\nreach the place over which it happens to shine. But an eternal\npossibility has no material power. It is only one of an infinity of\nother things equally possible intrinsically, yet most of them quite\nunrealisable in this world of blood and mire. The realm of eternal\nessences rains down no Jovian thunderbolts, but only a ghostly Uranian\ncalm. There is no frown there; rather, a passive and universal welcome\nto any who may have in them the will and the power to climb. Whether\nany one has the will depends on his material constitution, and whether\nhe has the power depends on the firm texture of that constitution and\non circumstances happening to be favourable to its operation.\nOtherwise what the rebel or the visionary hails as his ideal will be\nno picture of his destiny or of that of the world. It will be, and\nwill always remain, merely a picture of his heart. This picture,\nindestructible in its ideal essence, will mirror also the hearts of\nthose who may share, or may have shared, the nature of the poet who\ndrew it. So purely ideal and so deeply human are the visions of\nShelley. So truly does he deserve the epitaph which a clear-sighted\nfriend wrote upon his tomb: _cor cordium_, the heart of hearts.\n\n\n\n\nVI\n\nTHE GENTEEL TRADITION IN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY\n\n_Address delivered before the Philosophical Union of the University of\nCalifornia, August_ 25, 1911.\n\n\nLADIES AND GENTLEMEN,--The privilege of addressing you to-day\nis very welcome to me, not merely for the honour of it, which is\ngreat, nor for the pleasures of travel, which are many, when it is\nCalifornia that one is visiting for the first time, but also because\nthere is something I have long wanted to say which this occasion seems\nparticularly favourable for saying. America is still a young country,\nand this part of it is especially so; and it would have been nothing\nextraordinary if, in this young country, material preoccupations had\naltogether absorbed people's minds, and they had been too much\nengrossed in living to reflect upon life, or to have any philosophy.\nThe opposite, however, is the case. Not only have you already found\ntime to philosophise in California, as your society proves, but the\neastern colonists from the very beginning were a sophisticated race.\nAs much as in clearing the land and fighting the Indians they were\noccupied, as they expressed it, in wrestling with the Lord. The\ncountry was new, but the race was tried, chastened, and full of solemn\nmemories. It was an old wine in new bottles; and America did not have\nto wait for its present universities, with their departments of\nacademic philosophy, in order to possess a living philosophy--to have\na distinct vision of the universe and definite convictions about human\ndestiny.\n\nNow this situation is a singular and remarkable one, and has many\nconsequences, not all of which are equally fortunate. America is a\nyoung country with an old mentality: it has enjoyed the advantages of\na child carefully brought up and thoroughly indoctrinated; it has been\na wise child. But a wise child, an old head on young shoulders, always\nhas a comic and an unpromising side. The wisdom is a little thin and\nverbal, not aware of its full meaning and grounds; and physical and\nemotional growth may be stunted by it, or even deranged. Or when the\nchild is too vigorous for that, he will develop a fresh mentality of\nhis own, out of his observations and actual instincts; and this fresh\nmentality will interfere with the traditional mentality, and tend to\nreduce it to something perfunctory, conventional, and perhaps secretly\ndespised. A philosophy is not genuine unless it inspires and expresses\nthe life of those who cherish it. I do not think the hereditary\nphilosophy of America has done much to atrophy the natural activities\nof the inhabitants; the wise child has not missed the joys of youth or\nof manhood; but what has happened is that the hereditary philosophy\nhas grown stale, and that the academic philosophy afterwards developed\nhas caught the stale odour from it. America is not simply, as I said a\nmoment ago, a young country with an old mentality: it is a country\nwith two mentalities, one a survival of the beliefs and standards of\nthe fathers, the other an expression of the instincts, practice, and\ndiscoveries of the younger generations. In all the higher things of\nthe mind--in religion, in literature, in the moral emotions--it is the\nhereditary spirit that still prevails, so much so that Mr. Bernard\nShaw finds that America is a hundred years behind the times. The truth\nis that one-half of the American mind, that not occupied intensely in\npractical affairs, has remained, I will not say high-and-dry, but\nslightly becalmed; it has floated gently in the back-water, while,\nalongside, in invention and industry and social organisation, the\nother half of the mind was leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids. This\ndivision may be found symbolised in American architecture: a neat\nreproduction of the colonial mansion--with some modern comforts\nintroduced surreptitiously--stands beside the sky-scraper. The\nAmerican Will inhabits the sky-scraper; the American Intellect\ninhabits the colonial mansion. The one is the sphere of the American\nman; the other, at least predominantly, of the American woman. The one\nis all aggressive enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition.\n\nNow, with your permission, I should like to analyse more fully how\nthis interesting situation has arisen, how it is qualified, and\nwhither it tends. And in the first place we should remember what,\nprecisely, that philosophy was which the first settlers brought with\nthem into the country. In strictness there was more than one; but we\nmay confine our attention to what I will call Calvinism, since it is\non this that the current academic philosophy has been grafted. I do\nnot mean exactly the Calvinism of Calvin, or even of Jonathan Edwards;\nfor in their systems there was much that was not pure philosophy, but\nrather faith in the externals and history of revelation. Jewish and\nChristian revelation was interpreted by these men, however, in the\nspirit of a particular philosophy, which might have arisen under any\nsky, and been associated with any other religion as well as with\nProtestant Christianity. In fact, the philosophical principle of\nCalvinism appears also in the Koran, in Spinoza, and in Cardinal\nNewman; and persons with no very distinctive Christian belief, like\nCarlyle or like Professor Royce, may be nevertheless, philosophically,\nperfect Calvinists. Calvinism, taken in this sense, is an expression\nof the agonised conscience. It is a view of the world which an\nagonised conscience readily embraces, if it takes itself seriously,\nas, being agonised, of course it must. Calvinism, essentially, asserts\nthree things: that sin exists, that sin is punished, and that it is\nbeautiful that sin should exist to be punished. The heart of the\nCalvinist is therefore divided between tragic concern at his own\nmiserable condition, and tragic exultation about the universe at\nlarge. He oscillates between a profound abasement and a paradoxical\nelation of the spirit. To be a Calvinist philosophically is to feel a\nfierce pleasure in the existence of misery, especially of one's own,\nin that this misery seems to manifest the fact that the Absolute is\nirresponsible or infinite or holy. Human nature, it feels, is totally\ndepraved: to have the instincts and motives that we necessarily have\nis a great scandal, and we must suffer for it; but that scandal is\nrequisite, since otherwise the serious importance of being as we ought\nto be would not have been vindicated.\n\nTo those of us who have not an agonised conscience this system may\nseem fantastic and even unintelligible; yet it is logically and\nintently thought out from its emotional premises. It can take\npermanent possession of a deep mind here and there, and under certain\nconditions it can become epidemic. Imagine, for instance, a small\nnation with an intense vitality, but on the verge of ruin, ecstatic\nand distressful, having a strict and minute code of laws, that paints\nlife in sharp and violent chiaroscuro, all pure righteousness and\nblack abominations, and exaggerating the consequences of both perhaps\nto infinity. Such a people were the Jews after the exile, and again\nthe early Protestants. If such a people is philosophical at all, it\nwill not improbably be Calvinistic. Even in the early American\ncommunities many of these conditions were fulfilled. The nation was\nsmall and isolated; it lived under pressure and constant trial; it was\nacquainted with but a small range of goods and evils. Vigilance over\nconduct and an absolute demand for personal integrity were not merely\ntraditional things, but things that practical sages, like Franklin and\nWashington, recommended to their countrymen, because they were virtues\nthat justified themselves visibly by their fruits. But soon these\nhappy results themselves helped to relax the pressure of external\ncircumstances, and indirectly the pressure of the agonised conscience\nwithin. The nation became numerous; it ceased to be either ecstatic or\ndistressful; the high social morality which on the whole it preserved\ntook another colour; people remained honest and helpful out of good\nsense and good will rather than out of scrupulous adherence to any\nfixed principles. They retained their instinct for order, and often\ncreated order with surprising quickness; but the sanctity of law, to\nbe obeyed for its own sake, began to escape them; it seemed too\nunpractical a notion, and not quite serious. In fact, the second and\nnative-born American mentality began to take shape. The sense of sin\ntotally evaporated. Nature, in the words of Emerson, was all beauty\nand commodity; and while operating on it laboriously, and drawing\nquick returns, the American began to drink in inspiration from it\naesthetically. At the same time, in so broad a continent, he had\nelbow-room. His neighbours helped more than they hindered him; he\nwished their number to increase. Good will became the great American\nvirtue; and a passion arose for counting heads, and square miles, and\ncubic feet, and minutes saved--as if there had been anything to save\nthem for. How strange to the American now that saying of Jonathan\nEdwards, that men are naturally God's enemies! Yet that is an axiom to\nany intelligent Calvinist, though the words he uses may be different.\nIf you told the modern American that he is totally depraved, he would\nthink you were joking, as he himself usually is. He is convinced that\nhe always has been, and always will be, victorious and blameless.\n\nCalvinism thus lost its basis in American life. Some emotional\nnatures, indeed, reverted in their religious revivals or private\nsearchings of heart to the sources of the tradition; for any of the\nradical points of view in philosophy may cease to be prevalent, but\nnone can cease to be possible. Other natures, more sensitive to the\nmoral and literary influences of the world, preferred to abandon\nparts of their philosophy, hoping thus to reduce the distance which\nshould separate the remainder from real life.\n\nMeantime, if anybody arose with a special sensibility or a technical\ngenius, he was in great straits; not being fed sufficiently by the\nworld, he was driven in upon his own resources. The three American\nwriters whose personal endowment was perhaps the finest--Poe,\nHawthorne, and Emerson--had all a certain starved and abstract\nquality. They could not retail the genteel tradition; they were too\nkeen, too perceptive, and too independent for that. But life offered\nthem little digestible material, nor were they naturally voracious.\nThey were fastidious, and under the circumstances they were starved.\nEmerson, to be sure, fed on books. There was a great catholicity in\nhis reading; and he showed a fine tact in his comments, and in his way\nof appropriating what he read. But he read transcendentally, not\nhistorically, to learn what he himself felt, not what others might\nhave felt before him. And to feed on books, for a philosopher or a\npoet, is still to starve. Books can help him to acquire form, or to\navoid pitfalls; they cannot supply him with substance, if he is to\nhave any. Therefore the genius of Poe and Hawthorne, and even of\nEmerson, was employed on a sort of inner play, or digestion of\nvacancy. It was a refined labour, but it was in danger of being\nmorbid, or tinkling, or self-indulgent. It was a play of intra-mental\nrhymes. Their mind was like an old music-box, full of tender echoes\nand quaint fancies. These fancies expressed their personal genius\nsincerely, as dreams may; but they were arbitrary fancies in\ncomparison with what a real observer would have said in the premises.\nTheir manner, in a word, was subjective. In their own persons they\nescaped the mediocrity of the genteel tradition, but they supplied\nnothing to supplant it in other minds.\n\nThe churches, likewise, although they modified their spirit, had no\nphilosophy to offer save a new emphasis on parts of what Calvinism\ncontained. The theology of Calvin, we must remember, had much in it\nbesides philosophical Calvinism. A Christian tenderness, and a hope of\ngrace for the individual, came to mitigate its sardonic optimism; and\nit was these evangelical elements that the Calvinistic churches now\nemphasised, seldom and with blushes referring to hell-fire or infant\ndamnation. Yet philosophic Calvinism, with a theory of life that would\nperfectly justify hell-fire and infant damnation if they happened to\nexist, still dominates the traditional metaphysics. It is an\ningredient, and the decisive ingredient, in what calls itself\nidealism. But in order to see just what part Calvinism plays in\ncurrent idealism, it will be necessary to distinguish the other chief\nelement in that complex system, namely, transcendentalism.\n\nTranscendentalism is the philosophy which the romantic era produced in\nGermany, and independently, I believe, in America also.\nTranscendentalism proper, like romanticism, is not any particular set\nof dogmas about what things exist; it is not a system of the universe\nregarded as a fact, or as a collection of facts. It is a method, a\npoint of view, from which any world, no matter what it might contain,\ncould be approached by a self-conscious observer. Transcendentalism is\nsystematic subjectivism. It studies the perspectives of knowledge as\nthey radiate from the self; it is a plan of those avenues of inference\nby which our ideas of things must be reached, if they are to afford\nany systematic or distant vistas. In other words, transcendentalism is\nthe critical logic of science. Knowledge, it says, has a station, as\nin a watch-tower; it is always seated here and now, in the self of the\nmoment. The past and the future, things inferred and things conceived,\nlie around it, painted as upon a panorama. They cannot be lighted up\nsave by some centrifugal ray of attention and present interest, by\nsome active operation of the mind.\n\nThis is hardly the occasion for developing or explaining this delicate\ninsight; suffice it to say, lest you should think later that I\ndisparage transcendentalism, that as a method I regard it as correct\nand, when once suggested, unforgettable. I regard it as the chief\ncontribution made in modern times to speculation. But it is a method\nonly, an attitude we may always assume if we like and that will always\nbe legitimate. It is no answer, and involves no particular answer, to\nthe question: What exists; in what order is what exists produced; what\nis to exist in the future? This question must be answered by observing\nthe object, and tracing humbly the movement of the object. It cannot\nbe answered at all by harping on the fact that this object, if\ndiscovered, must be discovered by somebody, and by somebody who has an\ninterest in discovering it. Yet the Germans who first gained the full\ntranscendental insight were romantic people; they were more or less\nfrankly poets; they were colossal egotists, and wished to make not\nonly their own knowledge but the whole universe centre about\nthemselves. And full as they were of their romantic isolation and\nromantic liberty, it occurred to them to imagine that all reality\nmight be a transcendental self and a romantic dreamer like themselves;\nnay, that it might be just their own transcendental self and their own\nromantic dreams extended indefinitely. Transcendental logic, the\nmethod of discovery for the mind, was to become also the method of\nevolution in nature and history. Transcendental method, so abused,\nproduced transcendental myth. A conscientious critique of knowledge\nwas turned into a sham system of nature. We must therefore distinguish\nsharply the transcendental grammar of the intellect, which is\nsignificant and potentially correct, from the various transcendental\nsystems of the universe, which are chimeras.\n\nIn both its parts, however, transcendentalism had much to recommend it\nto American philosophers, for the transcendental method appealed to\nthe individualistic and revolutionary temper of their youth, while\ntranscendental myths enabled them to find a new status for their\ninherited theology, and to give what parts of it they cared to\npreserve some semblance of philosophical backing. This last was the\nuse to which the transcendental method was put by Kant himself, who\nfirst brought it into vogue, before the terrible weapon had got out of\nhand, and become the instrument of pure romanticism. Kant came, he\nhimself said, to remove knowledge in order to make room for faith,\nwhich in his case meant faith in Calvinism. In other words, he applied\nthe transcendental method to matters of fact, reducing them thereby\nto human ideas, in order to give to the Calvinistic postulates of\nconscience a metaphysical validity. For Kant had a genteel tradition\nof his own, which he wished to remove to a place of safety, feeling\nthat the empirical world had become too hot for it; and this place of\nsafety was the region of transcendental myth. I need hardly say how\nperfectly this expedient suited the needs of philosophers in America,\nand it is no accident if the influence of Kant soon became dominant\nhere. To embrace this philosophy was regarded as a sign of profound\nmetaphysical insight, although the most mediocre minds found no\ndifficulty in embracing it. In truth it was a sign of having been\nbrought up in the genteel tradition, of feeling it weak, and of\nwishing to save it.\n\nBut the transcendental method, in its way, was also sympathetic to the\nAmerican mind. It embodied, in a radical form, the spirit of\nProtestantism as distinguished from its inherited doctrines; it was\nautonomous, undismayed, calmly revolutionary; it felt that Will was\ndeeper than Intellect; it focussed everything here and now, and asked\nall things to show their credentials at the bar of the young self, and\nto prove their value for this latest born moment. These things are\ntruly American; they would be characteristic of any young society with\na keen and discursive intelligence, and they are strikingly\nexemplified in the thought and in the person of Emerson. They\nconstitute what he called self-trust. Self-trust, like other\ntranscendental attitudes, may be expressed in metaphysical fables. The\nromantic spirit may imagine itself to be an absolute force, evoking\nand moulding the plastic world to express its varying moods. But for\na pioneer who is actually a world-builder this metaphysical illusion\nhas a partial warrant in historical fact; far more warrant than it\ncould boast of in the fixed and articulated society of Europe, among\nthe moonstruck rebels and sulking poets of the romantic era. Emerson\nwas a shrewd Yankee, by instinct on the winning side; he was a cheery,\nchild-like soul, impervious to the evidence of evil, as of everything\nthat it did not suit his transcendental individuality to appreciate or\nto notice. More, perhaps, than anybody that has ever lived, he\npractised the transcendental method in all its purity. He had no\nsystem. He opened his eyes on the world every morning with a fresh\nsincerity, marking how things seemed to him then, or what they\nsuggested to his spontaneous fancy. This fancy, for being spontaneous,\nwas not always novel; it was guided by the habits and training of his\nmind, which were those of a preacher. Yet he never insisted on his\nnotions so as to turn them into settled dogmas; he felt in his bones\nthat they were myths. Sometimes, indeed, the bad example of other\ntranscendentalists, less true than he to their method, or the pressing\nquestions of unintelligent people, or the instinct we all have to\nthink our ideas final, led him to the very verge of system-making; but\nhe stopped short. Had he made a system out of his notion of\ncompensation, or the over-soul, or spiritual laws, the result would\nhave been as thin and forced as it is in other transcendental systems.\nBut he coveted truth; and he returned to experience, to history, to\npoetry, to the natural science of his day, for new starting-points and\nhints toward fresh transcendental musings.\n\nTo covet truth is a very distinguished passion. Every philosopher\nsays he is pursuing the truth, but this is seldom the case. As Mr.\nBertrand Russell has observed, one reason why philosophers often fail\nto reach the truth is that often they do not desire to reach it. Those\nwho are genuinely concerned in discovering what happens to be true are\nrather the men of science, the naturalists, the historians; and\nordinarily they discover it, according to their lights. The truths\nthey find are never complete, and are not always important; but they\nare integral parts of the truth, facts and circumstances that help to\nfill in the picture, and that no later interpretation can invalidate\nor afford to contradict. But professional philosophers are usually\nonly apologists: that is, they are absorbed in defending some vested\nillusion or some eloquent idea. Like lawyers or detectives, they study\nthe case for which they are retained, to see how much evidence or\nsemblance of evidence they can gather for the defence, and how much\nprejudice they can raise against the witnesses for the prosecution;\nfor they know they are defending prisoners suspected by the world, and\nperhaps by their own good sense, of falsification. They do not covet\ntruth, but victory and the dispelling of their own doubts. What they\ndefend is some system, that is, some view about the totality of\nthings, of which men are actually ignorant. No system would have ever\nbeen framed if people had been simply interested in knowing what is\ntrue, whatever it may be. What produces systems is the interest in\nmaintaining against all comers that some favourite or inherited idea\nof ours is sufficient and right. A system may contain an account of\nmany things which, in detail, are true enough; but as a system,\ncovering infinite possibilities that neither our experience nor our\nlogic can prejudge, it must be a work of imagination and a piece of\nhuman soliloquy. It may be expressive of human experience, it may be\npoetical; but how should anyone who really coveted truth suppose that\nit was true?\n\nEmerson had no system; and his coveting truth had another exceptional\nconsequence: he was detached, unworldly, contemplative. When he came\nout of the conventicle or the reform meeting, or out of the rapturous\nclose atmosphere of the lecture-room, he heard Nature whispering to\nhim: \"Why so hot, little sir?\" No doubt the spirit or energy of the\nworld is what is acting in us, as the sea is what rises in every\nlittle wave; but it passes through us, and cry out as we may, it will\nmove on. Our privilege is to have perceived it as it moves. Our\ndignity is not in what we do, but in what we understand. The whole\nworld is doing things. We are turning in that vortex; yet within us is\nsilent observation, the speculative eye before which all passes, which\nbridges the distances and compares the combatants. On this side of his\ngenius Emerson broke away from all conditions of age or country and\nrepresented nothing except intelligence itself.\n\nThere was another element in Emerson, curiously combined with\ntranscendentalism, namely, his love and respect for Nature. Nature,\nfor the transcendentalist, is precious because it is his own work, a\nmirror in which he looks at himself and says (like a poet relishing\nhis own verses), \"What a genius I am! Who would have thought there was\nsuch stuff in me?\" And the philosophical egotist finds in his doctrine\na ready explanation of whatever beauty and commodity nature actually\nhas. No wonder, he says to himself, that nature is sympathetic, since\nI made it. And such a view, one-sided and even fatuous as it may be,\nundoubtedly sharpens the vision of a poet and a moralist to all that\nis inspiriting and symbolic in the natural world. Emerson was\nparticularly ingenious and clear-sighted in feeling the spiritual uses\nof fellowship with the elements. This is something in which all\nTeutonic poetry is rich and which forms, I think, the most genuine and\nspontaneous part of modern taste, and especially of American taste.\nJust as some people are naturally enthralled and refreshed by music,\nso others are by landscape. Music and landscape make up the spiritual\nresources of those who cannot or dare not express their unfulfilled\nideals in words. Serious poetry, profound religion (Calvinism, for\ninstance), are the joys of an unhappiness that confesses itself; but\nwhen a genteel tradition forbids people to confess that they are\nunhappy, serious poetry and profound religion are closed to them by\nthat; and since human life, in its depths, cannot then express itself\nopenly, imagination is driven for comfort into abstract arts, where\nhuman circumstances are lost sight of, and human problems dissolve in\na purer medium. The pressure of care is thus relieved, without its\nquietus being found in intelligence. To understand oneself is the\nclassic form of consolation; to elude oneself is the romantic. In the\npresence of music or landscape human experience eludes itself; and\nthus romanticism is the bond between transcendental and naturalistic\nsentiment. The winds and clouds come to minister to the solitary ego.\nHave there been, we may ask, any successful efforts to escape from the\ngenteel tradition, and to express something worth expressing behind\nits back? This might well not have occurred as yet; but America is so\nprecocious, it has been trained by the genteel tradition to be so wise\nfor its years, that some indications of a truly native philosophy and\npoetry are already to be found. I might mention the humorists, of whom\nyou here in California have had your share. The humorists, however,\nonly half escape the genteel tradition; their humour would lose its\nsavour if they had wholly escaped it. They point to what contradicts\nit in the facts; but not in order to abandon the genteel tradition,\nfor they have nothing solid to put in its place. When they point out\nhow ill many facts fit into it, they do not clearly conceive that this\nmilitates against the standard, but think it a funny perversity in the\nfacts. Of course, did they earnestly respect the genteel tradition,\nsuch an incongruity would seem to them sad, rather than ludicrous.\nPerhaps the prevalence of humour in America, in and out of season, may\nbe taken as one more evidence that the genteel tradition is present\npervasively, but everywhere weak. Similarly in Italy, during the\nRenaissance, the Catholic tradition could not be banished from the\nintellect, since there was nothing articulate to take its place; yet\nits hold on the heart was singularly relaxed. The consequence was that\nhumorists could regale themselves with the foibles of monks and of\ncardinals, with the credulity of fools, and the bogus miracles of the\nsaints; not intending to deny the theory of the church, but caring for\nit so little at heart that they could find it infinitely amusing that\nit should be contradicted in men's lives and that no harm should come\nof it. So when Mark Twain says, \"I was born of poor but dishonest\nparents,\" the humour depends on the parody of the genteel Anglo-Saxon\nconvention that it is disreputable to be poor; but to hint at the\nhollowness of it would not be amusing if it did not remain at bottom\none's habitual conviction.\n\nThe one American writer who has left the genteel tradition entirely\nbehind is perhaps Walt Whitman. For this reason educated Americans\nfind him rather an unpalatable person, who they sincerely protest\nought not to be taken for a representative of their culture; and he\ncertainly should not, because their culture is so genteel and\ntraditional. But the foreigner may sometimes think otherwise, since he\nis looking for what may have arisen in America to express, not the\npolite and conventional American mind, but the spirit and the\ninarticulate principles that animate the community, on which its own\ngenteel mentality seems to sit rather lightly. When the foreigner\nopens the pages of Walt Whitman, he thinks that he has come at last\nupon something representative and original. In Walt Whitman democracy\nis carried into psychology and morals. The various sights, moods, and\nemotions are given each one vote; they are declared to be all free and\nequal, and the innumerable commonplace moments of life are suffered to\nspeak like the others. Those moments formerly reputed great are not\nexcluded, but they are made to march in the ranks with their\ncompanions--plain foot-soldiers and servants of the hour. Nor does the\nrefusal to discriminate stop there; we must carry our principle\nfurther down, to the animals, to inanimate nature, to the cosmos as a\nwhole. Whitman became a pantheist; but his pantheism, unlike that of\nthe Stoics and of Spinoza, was unintellectual, lazy, and\nself-indulgent; for he simply felt jovially that everything real was\ngood enough, and that he was good enough himself. In him Bohemia\nrebelled against the genteel tradition; but the reconstruction that\nalone can justify revolution did not ensue. His attitude, in\nprinciple, was utterly disintegrating; his poetic genius fell back to\nthe lowest level, perhaps, to which it is possible for poetic genius\nto fall. He reduced his imagination to a passive sensorium for the\nregistering of impressions. No element of construction remained in it,\nand therefore no element of penetration. But his scope was wide; and\nhis lazy, desultory apprehension was poetical. His work, for the very\nreason that it is so rudimentary, contains a beginning, or rather many\nbeginnings, that might possibly grow into a noble moral imagination, a\nworthy filling for the human mind. An American in the nineteenth\ncentury who completely disregarded the genteel tradition could hardly\nhave done more.\n\nBut there is another distinguished man, lately lost to this country,\nwho has given some rude shocks to this tradition and who, as much as\nWhitman, may be regarded as representing the genuine, the long silent\nAmerican mind--I mean William James. He and his brother Henry were as\ntightly swaddled in the genteel tradition as any infant geniuses could\nbe, for they were born before 1850, and in a Swedenborgian household.\nYet they burst those bands almost entirely. The ways in which the two\nbrothers freed themselves, however, are interestingly different. Mr.\nHenry James has done it by adopting the point of view of the outer\nworld, and by turning the genteel American tradition, as he turns\neverything else, into a subject-matter for analysis. For him it is a\ncurious habit of mind, intimately comprehended, to be compared with\nother habits of mind, also well known to him. Thus he has overcome the\ngenteel tradition in the classic way, by understanding it. With\nWilliam James too this infusion of worldly insight and European\nsympathies was a potent influence, especially in his earlier days; but\nthe chief source of his liberty was another. It was his personal\nspontaneity, similar to that of Emerson, and his personal vitality,\nsimilar to that of nobody else. Convictions and ideas came to him, so\nto speak, from the subsoil. He had a prophetic sympathy with the\ndawning sentiments of the age, with the moods of the dumb majority.\nHis scattered words caught fire in many parts of the world. His way of\nthinking and feeling represented the true America, and represented in\na measure the whole ultra-modern, radical world. Thus he eluded the\ngenteel tradition in the romantic way, by continuing it into its\nopposite. The romantic mind, glorified in Hegel's dialectic (which is\nnot dialectic at all, but a sort of tragi-comic history of\nexperience), is always rendering its thoughts unrecognisable through\nthe infusion of new insights, and through the insensible\ntransformation of the moral feeling that accompanies them, till at\nlast it has completely reversed its old judgments under cover of\nexpanding them. Thus the genteel tradition was led a merry dance when\nit fell again into the hands of a genuine and vigorous romanticist\nlike William James. He restored their revolutionary force to its\nneutralised elements, by picking them out afresh, and emphasising them\nseparately, according to his personal predilections.\n\nFor one thing, William James kept his mind and heart wide open to all\nthat might seem, to polite minds, odd, personal, or visionary in\nreligion and philosophy. He gave a sincerely respectful hearing to\nsentimentalists, mystics, spiritualists, wizards, cranks, quacks, and\nimpostors--for it is hard to draw the line, and James was not willing\nto draw it prematurely. He thought, with his usual modesty, that any\nof these might have something to teach him. The lame, the halt, the\nblind, and those speaking with tongues could come to him with the\ncertainty of finding sympathy; and if they were not healed, at least\nthey were comforted, that a famous professor should take them so\nseriously; and they began to feel that after all to have only one leg,\nor one hand, or one eye, or to have three, might be in itself no less\nbeauteous than to have just two, like the stolid majority. Thus\nWilliam James became the friend and helper of those groping, nervous,\nhalf-educated, spiritually disinherited, passionately hungry\nindividuals of which America is full. He became, at the same time,\ntheir spokesman and representative before the learned world; and he\nmade it a chief part of his vocation to recast what the learned world\nhas to offer, so that as far as possible it might serve the needs and\ninterests of these people.\n\nYet the normal practical masculine American, too, had a friend in\nWilliam James. There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and\nDarwinism lend some colour, that theory is simply an instrument for\npractice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival.\nBears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned\nto be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James\nembodied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called\npragmatism. Intelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty,\nby which we mirror passively any or everything that happens to be\ntrue, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelligence has its\nroots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of\npractical adjustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It\ndoes not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to\nconnect them. This view was not worked out by William James in its\npsychological and historical details; unfortunately he developed it\nchiefly in controversy against its opposite, which he called\nintellectualism, and which he hated with all the hatred of which his\nkind heart was capable. Intellectualism, as he conceived it, was pure\npedantry; it impoverished and verbalised everything, and tied up\nnature in red tape. Ideas and rules that may have been occasionally\nuseful it put in the place of the full-blooded irrational movement of\nlife which had called them into being; and these abstractions, so soon\nobsolete, it strove to fix and to worship for ever. Thus all creeds\nand theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the\npragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that\nmust be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius.\nTo know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is\nanything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would\nprove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not\nmirrors, they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet\nevents, as future experience may unroll them. Those ideas that\ndisappoint us are false ideas; those to which events are true are true\nthemselves.\n\nThis may seem a very utilitarian view of the mind; and I confess I\nthink it a partial one, since the logical force of beliefs and ideas,\ntheir truth or falsehood as assertions, has been overlooked\naltogether, or confused with the vital force of the material processes\nwhich these ideas express. It is an external view only, which marks\nthe place and conditions of the mind in nature, but neglects its\nspecific essence; as if a jewel were defined as a round hole in a\nring. Nevertheless, the more materialistic the pragmatist's theory of\nthe mind is, the more vitalistic his theory of nature will have to\nbecome. If the intellect is a device produced in organic bodies to\nexpedite their processes, these organic bodies must have interests and\na chosen direction in their life; otherwise their life could not be\nexpedited, nor could anything be useful to it. In other words--and\nthis is a third point at which the philosophy of William James has\nplayed havoc with the genteel tradition, while ostensibly defending\nit--nature must be conceived anthropomorphically and in psychological\nterms. Its purposes are not to be static harmonies, self-unfolding\ndestinies, the logic of spirit, the spirit of logic, or any other\nformal method and abstract law; its purposes are to be concrete\nendeavours, finite efforts of souls living in an environment which\nthey transform and by which they, too, are affected. A spirit, the\ndivine spirit as much as the human, as this new animism conceives it,\nis a romantic adventurer. Its future is undetermined. Its scope, its\nduration, and the quality of its life are all contingent. This spirit\ngrows; it buds and sends forth feelers, sounding the depths around for\nsuch other centres of force or life as may exist there. It has a vital\nmomentum, but no predetermined goal. It uses its past as a\nstepping-stone, or rather as a diving-board, but has an absolutely\nfresh will at each moment to plunge this way or that into the unknown.\nThe universe is an experiment; it is unfinished. It has no ultimate or\ntotal nature, because it has no end. It embodies no formula or\nstatable law; any formula is at best a poor abstraction, describing\nwhat, in some region and for some time, may be the most striking\ncharacteristic of existence; the law is a description _a posteriori_\nof the habit things have chosen to acquire, and which they may\npossibly throw off altogether. What a day may bring forth is\nuncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is\nreal; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more\nto-day. \"There shall be news,\" William James was fond of saying with\nrapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,\n\"there shall be news in heaven!\" There is almost certainly, he\nthought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist\ntogether, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring\nsympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;\nwe survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our\ncareer and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,\nalthough we may help to determine them by our daily choices.\nObservation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal\nvigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual\nexperiment keep quick the edge of life.\n\nThis is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a\nconception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in\nvarious quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision\nradically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James\nhimself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a\nphilosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.\nWilliam James, rather too generously, attributed this vision to M.\nBergson, and regarded him in consequence as a philosopher of the first\nrank, whose thought was to be one of the turning-points in history. M.\nBergson had killed intellectualism. It was his book on creative\nevolution, said James with humorous emphasis, that had come at last to\n\"_ecraser l'infame_.\" We may suspect, notwithstanding, that\nintellectualism, infamous and crushed, will survive the blow; and if\nthe author of the Book of Ecclesiastes were now alive, and heard that\nthere shall be news in heaven, he would doubtless say that there may\npossibly be news there, but that under the sun there is nothing\nnew--not even radical empiricism or radical romanticism, which from\nthe beginning of the world has been the philosophy of those who as yet\nhad had little experience; for to the blinking little child it is not\nmerely something in the world that is new daily, but everything is new\nall day. I am not concerned with the rights and wrongs of that\ncontroversy; my point is only that William James, in this genial\nevolutionary view of the world, has given a rude shock to the genteel\ntradition. What! The world a gradual improvisation? Creation\nunpremeditated? God a sort of young poet or struggling artist? William\nJames is an advocate of theism; pragmatism adds one to the evidences\nof religion; that is excellent. But is not the cool abstract piety of\nthe genteel getting more than it asks for? This empirical naturalistic\nGod is too crude and positive a force; he will work miracles, he will\nanswer prayers, he may inhabit distinct places, and have distinct\nconditions under which alone he can operate; he is a neighbouring\nbeing, whom we can act upon, and rely upon for specific aids, as upon\na personal friend, or a physician, or an insurance company. How\ndisconcerting! Is not this new theology a little like superstition?\nAnd yet how interesting, how exciting, if it should happen to be true!\nI am far from wishing to suggest that such a view seems to me more\nprobable than conventional idealism or than Christian orthodoxy. All\nthree are in the region of dramatic system-making and myth to which\nprobabilities are irrelevant. If one man says the moon is sister to\nthe sun, and another that she is his daughter, the question is not\nwhich notion is more probable, but whether either of them is at all\nexpressive. The so-called evidences are devised afterwards, when faith\nand imagination have prejudged the issue. The force of William James's\nnew theology, or romantic cosmology, lies only in this: that it has\nbroken the spell of the genteel tradition, and enticed faith in a new\ndirection, which on second thoughts may prove no less alluring than\nthe old. The important fact is not that the new fancy might possibly\nbe true--who shall know that?--but that it has entered the heart of a\nleading American to conceive and to cherish it. The genteel tradition\ncannot be dislodged by these insurrections; there are circles to which\nit is still congenial, and where it will be preserved. But it has been\nchallenged and (what is perhaps more insidious) it has been\ndiscovered. No one need be browbeaten any longer into accepting it. No\none need be afraid, for instance, that his fate is sealed because some\nyoung prig may call him a dualist; the pint would call the quart a\ndualist, if you tried to pour the quart into him. We need not be\nafraid of being less profound, for being direct and sincere. The\nintellectual world may be traversed in many directions; the whole has\nnot been surveyed; there is a great career in it open to talent. That\nis a sort of knell, that tolls the passing of the genteel tradition.\nSomething else is now in the field; something else can appeal to the\nimagination, and be a thousand times more idealistic than academic\nidealism, which is often simply a way of white-washing and adoring\nthings as they are. The illegitimate monopoly which the genteel\ntradition had established over what ought to be assumed and what ought\nto be hoped for has been broken down by the first-born of the family,\nby the genius of the race. Henceforth there can hardly be the same\npeace and the same pleasure in hugging the old proprieties. Hegel will\nbe to the next generation what Sir William Hamilton was to the last.\nNothing will have been disproved, but everything will have been\nabandoned. An honest man has spoken, and the cant of the genteel\ntradition has become harder for young lips to repeat.\n\nWith this I have finished such a sketch as I am here able to offer you\nof the genteel tradition in American philosophy. The subject is\ncomplex, and calls for many an excursus and qualifying footnote; yet I\nthink the main outlines are clear enough. The chief fountains of this\ntradition were Calvinism and transcendentalism. Both were living\nfountains; but to keep them alive they required, one an agonised\nconscience, and the other a radical subjective criticism of knowledge.\nWhen these rare metaphysical preoccupations disappeared--and the\nAmerican atmosphere is not favourable to either of them--the two\nsystems ceased to be inwardly understood; they subsisted as sacred\nmysteries only; and the combination of the two in some transcendental\nsystem of the universe (a contradiction in principle) was doubly\nartificial. Besides, it could hardly be held with a single mind.\nNatural science, history, the beliefs implied in labour and invention,\ncould not be disregarded altogether; so that the transcendental\nphilosopher was condemned to a double allegiance, and to not letting\nhis left hand know the bluff that his right hand was making.\nNevertheless, the difficulty in bringing practical inarticulate\nconvictions to expression is very great, and the genteel tradition has\nsubsisted in the academic mind for want of anything equally academic\nto take its place.\n\nThe academic mind, however, has had its flanks turned. On the one side\ncame the revolt of the Bohemian temperament, with its poetry of crude\nnaturalism; on the other side came an impassioned empiricism,\nwelcoming popular religious witnesses to the unseen, reducing science\nto an instrument of success in action, and declaring the universe to\nbe wild and young, and not to be harnessed by the logic of any school.\n\nThis revolution, I should think, might well find an echo among you,\nwho live in a thriving society, and in the presence of a virgin and\nprodigious world. When you transform nature to your uses, when you\nexperiment with her forces, and reduce them to industrial agents, you\ncannot feel that nature was made by you or for you, for then these\nadjustments would have been pre-established. Much less can you feel it\nwhen she destroys your labour of years in a momentary spasm. You must\nfeel, rather, that you are an offshoot of her life; one brave little\nforce among her immense forces. When you escape, as you love to do, to\nyour forests and your sierras, I am sure again that you do not feel\nyou made them, or that they were made for you. They have grown, as you\nhave grown, only more massively and more slowly. In their non-human\nbeauty and peace they stir the sub-human depths and the superhuman\npossibilities of your own spirit. It is no transcendental logic that\nthey teach; and they give no sign of any deliberate morality seated in\nthe world. It is rather the vanity and superficiality of all logic,\nthe needlessness of argument, the relativity of morals, the strength\nof time, the fertility of matter, the variety, the unspeakable\nvariety, of possible life. Everything is measurable and conditioned,\nindefinitely repeated, yet, in repetition, twisted somewhat from its\nold form. Everywhere is beauty and nowhere permanence, everywhere an\nincipient harmony, nowhere an intention, nor a responsibility, nor a\nplan. It is the irresistible suasion of this daily spectacle, it is\nthe daily discipline of contact with things, so different from the\nverbal discipline of the schools, that will, I trust, inspire the\nphilosophy of your children. A Californian whom I had recently the\npleasure of meeting observed that, if the philosophers had lived among\nyour mountains their systems would have been different from what they\nare. Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems\nare which the European genteel tradition has handed down since\nSocrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly\nthey are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that\nman, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil,\nis the centre and pivot of the universe. That is what the mountains\nand the woods should make you at last ashamed to assert. From what,\nindeed, does the society of nature liberate you, that you find it so\nsweet? It is hardly (is it?) that you wish to forget your past, or\nyour friends, or that you have any secret contempt for your present\nambitions. You respect these, you respect them perhaps too much; you\nare not suffered by the genteel tradition to criticise or to reform\nthem at all radically. No; it is the yoke of this genteel tradition\nitself that these primeval solitudes lift from your shoulders. They\nsuspend your forced sense of your own importance not merely as\nindividuals, but even as men. They allow you, in one happy moment, at\nonce to play and to worship, to take yourselves simply, humbly, for\nwhat you are, and to salute the wild, indifferent, non-censorious\ninfinity of nature. You are admonished that what you can do avails\nlittle materially, and in the end nothing. At the same time, through\nwonder and pleasure, you are taught speculation. You learn what you\nare really fitted to do, and where lie your natural dignity and joy,\nnamely, in representing many things, without being them, and in\nletting your imagination, through sympathy, celebrate and echo their\nlife. Because the peculiarity of man is that his machinery for\nreaction on external things has involved an imaginative transcript of\nthese things, which is preserved and suspended in his fancy; and the\ninterest and beauty of this inward landscape, rather than any fortunes\nthat may await his body in the outer world, constitute his proper\nhappiness. By their mind, its scope, quality, and temper, we estimate\nmen, for by the mind only do we exist as men, and are more than so\nmany storage-batteries for material energy. Let us therefore be\nfrankly human. Let us be content to live in the mind.\n\n       *       *       *       *       *","title":"Winds Of Doctrine: Studies in Contemporary Opinion","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":61053}